The question was ‘how do you change a life?’  As the year progressed and I worked my way through 2011 and my journal I discovered three insights that have helped me to understand the question and it’s possible answer a little more. Before I share the answer with you though I thought I’d share a little story.In 1994 I had major surgery to deal with the severe endometriosis that had plagued me since I was 16.  I had spent years being in and out of hospitals, in pain and talking to anyone that thought they could help, eventually though I had a hysterectomy and my life changed dramatically.  I was no longer ill all the time and in fact my health has changed beyond all expectation and it was without doubt the best decision I have ever made.

A couple of years later I was back at University in Loughborough studying for an MSc in Information Science and I found myself interested in how Patient Health Information could be used as a way of creating ‘informed patients’.

These two, seemingly unrelated events, came together beautifully in my thesis which was titled ‘Hysteria, it’s not funny on HRT’ and which looked at the information women in this group needed to help them recover from a hysterectomy.

I had created a website and a booklet to go along with the thesis, they were to be examples of how information could be disseminated in the future, using this new tool, the web and bearing in mind that this was when Bill Gates was still claiming that the web was never going to amount to much, it was quite an assumption on my part.

That website and booklet have, over the years, become The Hysterectomy Association and the books that we sell.  There was no plan that this should happen as I never started out assuming that my hysterectomy, my Masters degree or my thesis were anything other than this singular events.

This story holds the kernals of the three insights I’ve had and they are:

1. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.  The words of John Lennon have never rung so true.  I never planned to be running something like The Hysterectomy Association; I had always wanted to be a ballerina … or a librarian (imagine that if you can!).  This crept up on my simply because I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
2. Opportunities exist everywhere but we don’t necessarily recognise them as such at the time. After I’d completed the research for my thesis some of the women that had taken part said that they would love to have a support organisation just for them because they had nothing else and nowhere to turn for information and support. I suggested that I leave the site where it was and see what happened – the rest, as they say is history.
3. My life is the sum total of the decisions I’ve made and the actions I’ve taken. Of course other things happen that are outside of our control, but our reaction to them is what is within our gift. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now or be the person I am if I hadn’t done the things I’d done.  No-one can say that something else may have been better but I can say with certainty that I enjoy my life and love what I’m doing.

So, how do you change a life? In my experience, you don’t set out to change it, you simply set to change the sorts of decisions you make and the actions and reactions you have to the world around.  I have no idea what I’ll be doing next year but I do know that whatever it is, it will be all my own work.

Well, it’s because I believe in the value of blogging not only because it exposes me to a wider audience but because it helps me gather and clarify my own thoughts and opinions. There are some actions I could do more frequently and more effectively to make my blogging activities really count.

1. I could write more frequently – I have to admit that I’ve found it difficult over the last couple of years to know what to write about, mainly because I work across so many different areas and I have a huge number of interests too. Deciding at the beginning of December that I would move all work related ‘stuff’ on to my business web site has been a huge step forward and should make it easier to write in the future.

2. Comment on other peoples blogs – I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis but only comment on a few of them.  Often I will think something along the lines of ‘I’ll come back to that and write a comment later’; but I rarely do because I forget, I move on to another task or I forget how I found the post in the first place.  The solution then is to write my comment when I read the post!

3. Use Twitter more effectively to identify the blogs and bloggers that I would like to follow myself – I love Twitter, it’s immediacy when I have something on my mind is brilliant for a butterfly like me who is forever travelling around the web gathering ideas.

4. Work with themes – it’s something I regularly suggest to clients but is clearly a case of ‘do as I say, not do as I do’.  When you have a theme to write about it becomes so much easier to find subjects within the whole that deserve short (or long) blog posts of their own. For instance, I could write about the art of writing, I could write about the speeches I give at Toastmasters, I could write about how I’m doing with my current and my next novels ….. the list is endless, I just need to make it effective.

5. Create a blogging calendar – this is another suggestion I regularly make to clients but have rarely followed on this particular site (I have done it when working with client blogs though which is a defence in my favour y’honour). The calendar will be dependent on your own particular interests but for me it might include writing competitions, NANOWRIMO, toastmasters events, presentations I give, or even the world of women’s health (think Breast Cancer awareness month in October).

This time next year, I will review how well I’ve done against my five tips to help me blog more effectively and I’ll keep you posted as well.

If I’m honest it is the latter group that I find a turn to when I need something that is light enough to read at night but will also make sure I don’t want to put the novel down until I have got to the last page and finally have the whole revealed to me.

I’ve spent many long years wondering why my reading is so eclectic and I put my last group of favourite authors down to the fact that they are, like me, telling tales of women who are on the edge of a reality within their life.  Their characters are all in one sense or another stepping off a precipice that will precipitate change and in the doing will find themselves becoming the people they were always meant to be.

Perhaps that’s the reason that when I was writing the novel that now has the title of this blog for its own, Woman on the Edge of Reality, that I too was drawn to such a character in Rosemary.  We can all identify with the women who present themselves in the novels of Judy, Erica, Joanna and Rebecca because on so many levels our life experiences are not so far removed as to be completely different from theirs, they could easily be us and we could so easily be them too.  In fact, if it weren’t for a few small details, we could even think that these authors knew something about us that we had never shared with anyone else.

I will continue to read widely and pick up new authors that I think will entice me but I will probably always come back to my old stalwarts, those novels that hold a strong woman at it’s heart who is ready to embrace the change that is beginning to happen in her life.

But having said that, I do have a small triumph to announce.  I finished the novel I started writing last year when I trotted off to Cornwall again this September and I have now also finished the editing and now only need to commit those edits to the actual manuscript and I shall be finished.  At least I think I shall because I’ve sent a raw and unchecked copy to my friend Anne and just hope that she will be kind with her critique.

The novel will be called Woman on the Edge of Reality, which is handy really as it means I don’t have to start yet another website to help promote it – I can just use this one.  And it’s about a woman who goes to Cornwall for a week …. and before you ask, no, it’s not a story about me or my experiences, but the main character does have some of my characteristics and those who know me well will spot them with ease.

So, I’m debating.  Do I try to find a publisher or do I self publish?  The question isn’t as strange as it may seem.  I’ve already self published a few books (five in all) and one of them is a best seller here and in the US, another is becoming a best seller; but they are all non-fiction and I wonder if self publishing fiction is wise.  Having said that, the person that this book will appeal to is definitely the sort of woman that uses the hysterectomy association so perhaps it’s not such a daft question after all.  I’ll let you know when I’ve made my decision and, if Anne likes it, I may just make it available.

A by-product of this unseemly variety is that I can find it difficult to find inspiration about the sorts of things that I want to write about and as a result I don’t update my blog as frequently as I think I would like to.   A recent effect of my own confusion is that I’ve been thinking about how to be more structured in everything I do online for many months now and it was only after reading another blog by a fantastic writer based right on my doorstep here in West Dorset that the answer came to me.

The answer, it seems, is to focus.  That focus could be a subject, it could be a theme or it could be journey of some description.  It’s all become suddenly clear; I’ve lacked focus here since I began way back in 2006.

As I have two main areas of interest: Social Media Strategy (for that read LinkedIn mainly) and writing it seems obvious now that I can simply split my online writing off into these two facets.  And with this in mind I shall be re-homing all the social media content that has a business focus and which sits on Woman on the Edge of Reality to a very nice couple who will feed and water them and look after them carefully on a lovely little website called Internet Mentor.

This will leave my blog here free for me to re-focus on writing (and a little of my irregular off-piste commentary) and perhaps I could try out some of the things that I write, like short stories and simple passages of text and dialogue that run through my head in ever decreasing circles out on you, my elusive readers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I can’t believe it’s taken me five years to see what is so blindingly obvious now that I’ve recognised it, but perhaps I should just accept my own advice to others which is that you don’t know something until something, or someone, tells it to you so perhaps I just had to find my inspiration first and for those who are interested, that blogger I was talking about can be found here at: http://worldfrommywindow.blogspot.com/, a perfect insight into the oddities of village life in rural West Dorset.

I’ll be packing up and helping all those, now homeless posts, move to their new home tomorrow! How exciting

We have extended our days into our nights, we no longer live a life governed by the passage of the sun and moon through the heavens.  Our constantly on, 24/7 society means that we can work, play, shop and consume at all hours of the day and night and we frequently do.  At least when there was no such thing as the electric light we would have slept when it was dark and risen with the dawn, at least a good eight hours sleep.  Now the most we can hope for is six or seven simply because the demands of a normal life in the Western world requires that we fit 100 times more into an already packed schedule than we did last year or the year before.

The relentless rise of technology to ‘make life easier’ quicker or more connected means that we may fear missing something important if we aren’t keeping up to date with the news, our friends and connections.

I have to ask myself if it really matters that much though.  I’ve just spent several of the busiest weeks of my life managing various aspects of my life and my businesses.  It has been relentless and I’ve not had much time to just sit at my desk and wade through the amount of post and email that I have, never mind keeping in touch with my contacts and friends on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.  During this time, I’ve had to slot in my work to the late night sessions that have kept things ticking over and I am looking forward to things calming down again next week.

So what have a learnt about what to do when I have too much to do.  Firstly, I learnt that people can wait.  It isn’t essential that you get back to everyone immediately unless they have a life or death crisis to deal with; mostly the world will not end because you took two or three days to reply to an email (or even a week in some cases for me recently) as long as you do reply eventually.

Secondly I found that if I left things long enough they actually removed themselves from my ‘to do’ list which means that they weren’t important in the first place.

And finally, I noticed that if I stopped adding in all the extra jobs I thought I ‘ought’ to do that I could create time to deal with the things that are important; like spending time with the people that matter and having conversations with my friends (wherever they happen to be) and sleeping without worrying.

So, off I went; I joined both groups and over the last four years have met some amazing people along the way.  I can literally say that this was the start of a process of major change, not just for my business but for me personally.  Laura McHarrie stands out particularly – thanks Laura

Over the years I have become an ‘informed’ networker (that is someone that understands networking is more about how you can help others achieve their goals than about yours because what goes round comes round).  I have to admit to having a little help in this process because of the people I came across, who were great at demonstrating the benefits of networking too, so I just followed their lead.

At the same time, I started to pull together the online relationship skills I have been developing through The Hysterectomy Association into something that made sense for me on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and Twitter, and life really started to take off.

Over the years, I was invited to present at many of the networking meetings I was attending, explaining some aspect or nuance of social media for online business. My work led me to being invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts – because I focused on enabling people to use the Internet to build sustainable business.  I started to get larger and bigger contracts because of being recommended by others both in my face to face networking and my online networking.  I was invited to present at larger events and conferences and finally I wrote another book, LinkedIn Made Easy to help me deal with the number of emails I received asking me questions.

Yesterday, I was asked to be the face of Social Media for my region in BNI and next week I’m off to present at the NFP Technology Show at the Business Design Centre in London next week.  I have started to build relationships (albeit at a distance) with some of the most notable networkers in the UK.  Andy Lopata offered my book as a prize in one of his monthly competitions and he also listed it as recommended reading in the latest edition of And Death Came Third; Rob Brown of the Global Networking Council interviewed me and called me a LinkedIn Guru and in October I’ll be doing a guest spot with Ola Agbaimoni on her show Tycoon Women Moments.

But perhaps the biggest achievement that has come about as a result of networking so far and this time with the help of all the lovely ladies on the Hysterectomy Association forums and Facebook page, is that I was selected as a Woman of Achievement for 2011 and will be attending the Women of the Year lunch in October.

Networking has been the single biggest catalyst to change in my business, professional and personal life and it could be in yours too.

So, what exactly do you do in this situation?  I thought I’d have a quick trawl around the web to see if I could come up with a list of suggestions that other people make as well as see if I can add some of my own in addition.  I came up with FOUR key points to bear in mind.

1.  Think carefully about the message – mine was “social media and recruitment survey – win a bottle of champagne” and it went on to say that one could win a bottle of France’s finest champagne just for taking part in the survey.  On reflection, I’m not entirely sure that this was the right way to go about encouraging people to complete what is actually a very serious piece of research in business use of social media for recruitment.

2. Think about where you post it.  I could have chosen to post it as a discussion, but my own feeling was that it could also be a promotion, a bit like a newspaper headline.  At least as a promotion you get the chance to ignore it if you don’t want to read it and it is quite clearly marked as going to another website for more info.  Having said that, it might invite discussions on it’s own account too.

3. Think about the audience.  I’m a member of quite a few groups on LinkedIn and as I worked my way down the list I was surprised to find myself questioning whether a group was the right audience for this particular news item.  As a result I avoided some groups entirely and on others checked the type of news items posted previously, BEFORE I made my own contribution.

4. Think about who YOU are.  As a trainer and business development consultant on social media, it behoves me to act in a way that is consistent with what I tell my clients to do.  It also requires me to analyse my own behaviour fairly frequently simply because things and cultures change in groups.  I am sure that there will be one or two groups where my news item might be seen as spam; I’m equally sure that as a result I will receive a message or two informing me of this.  The problem is that I don’t yet know which groups that might apply to and as a result am flying blind.  What will happen though, is that I will change my behaviour in the future, because that’s the nature of learning I guess.

Almost twelve months ago my cousin Alex died and the choir she belonged to sang this at her funeral.

I wrote about Alex many moons ago in Life, Death and Becoming a Writer and here Diamonds in the Desert of Cancer.

Anyway, I digress.  I’ve been reading (and writing) about how to use the social web to help build awareness of books (and businesses) for a few years now.  Having experienced it since the mid 1990′s I sort of think I may have a handle on at least some of the things that work (or don’t as the case may be) and the trick – I’ve discovered – is to understand that we are all just part of one big, ginormous, conversation.  By taking part, fully and without expectation in that conversation you suddenly have an opportunity to talk about the things you know most about.  And that is the secret to success in this crazy, online and social world.

Of course, because I’m in this world I’m always interested in how other people do things too.  I love hints and tips, and I particularly enjoy hearing about other people’s successes, especially when they seem to be following the same understanding that I have too.   Last month, I received a regular missive from Amazon Kindle which shares news about the platform and also gives some suggestions about other books Kindle authors may be interested in reading.  I don’t normally do anything with these suggestions as they are often around topics and genres I have no interest in, but this time one caught my eye and it was a recommendation to read John Locke’s “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!“

The blurb explained that John Locke was self published and he regularly had novels in the top 100 on Amazon in fact he regularly has novels in the top ten too. How could I resist?

Off I went to Amazon and checked it out and sure enough, he had two novels in the top ten and more in the top 100 on the day I checked.  So I bought it …. and I read it ….. and I read it again and then read it a third time, just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything.

The reason I read it so much was because for the first time I read about someone who does the same things I do.  He likes people and he’s happy to help out and share his knowledge – not just through this book but also through the emails he responds to, the twitter messages he sends and the comments he responds to.

I spend a lot of my time reading emails and responding to them, answering questions in LinkedIn and on Twitter too.  I hope my input helps. I do it because I like people, I genuinely want others to be able to learn how to do the things I do so that they can apply them to their business or book launch as well.

However, this book is not for the fainthearted – it does talk about John’s success (as well it might, he is successful and he is writing about his methodology) but, as I already know it’s not an easy road he recommends because it is all about building relationships – long term relationships.  It isn’t a how to get everyone to buy your book immediately book which clearly, some of the reviewers on Amazon expected, but it does demonstrate and explain just how powerful relationships can be.

If you aren’t a relationship sort of person or a natural networker then this book probably isn’t for you.  If you are though, and you have a book you want to share with the world – I’d recommend it wholeheartedly. “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months!“

John writes at @DonovanCreed on Twitter and you can meet me there too at @LindaPH