Lately I’ve been a bit of a seminar junkie.

See how I managed to make that sound like a good and bad thing all rolled into one? That’s because it kind of is. If you go to too many seminars you can start to think that real actual life is like a seminar, and you can do / be / have anything that you want in this world.

Which is true. You can.

But it comes at a cost.

And that tricky, sticky second part is the bit that sometimes makes it a lie. Where the person you are lying to is your very own self.

What happens to me when I go to seminars, is that I get all crazy-excited about the possibilities that exist in the world, all of the things that I am going to get done the minute I walk in the door, all of the lives that I am going to change with my MASSIVE VISION of working with every chiropractor I know, (and some that I don’t…yet), to ensure that every Woman, Man and Child on this PLANET is able to have lifetime chiropractic care.

Yessiree Bob, that is what I am going to do. And I shall be doing it Right Now. I’ve waited long enough. In fact, far too long.

On the long, dark drive home I trace the white lines and make voice memos about all of the ways I will expand the coaching business I am part of to get more chiros doing their thing efficiently and effectively. I make plans of working with the other coaching businesses so they will do the same. I plan to extend my own practice working hours, so I can see all of the people I turn away every week. I make plans to extend my own workspace so that it can also house some young chiros who want to enrol in my big vision. It might sound tiring, but I get so completely buzzed on the very idea of it all that I don’t give a shit about tired. “Sleep when you’re dead,” I say to my self out loud. “Sleep is for losers,” I whisper into my brain, just in case it is thinking of betraying the fire in my heart.

My headlights reflect on the white of our garage, and for a moment I sit in the quiet and the still. I roll the last moments of clear thoughts around in my mouth and brain, before my Mumbrain takes over, where everything is filtered through the veil of Everyone Else.

And then I open the front door.

I’m greeted by the sounds and smells of our home. Kids giggling over some silly little trifle that has taken their fancy. The comforting scent of garlic, tomato and herbs from the Spag Bol that Nath has cooked up for our dinner. Perhaps even a chocolatey whiff of a nice bottle of red he has breathing on the bench. The grumble of the waves carried to our balcony with the onshore wind that grabs the door from my hand, slamming it open, and announcing my arrival to my people. Silence for a single beat, and then I’m engulfed with cries of “Mummy” as hot little bodies press against me, furry paws trample on my feet and threaten to knock me off my teetering seminar-heels, a rough scratch on my cheek and a trace of manly aroma, heralds that I am home.

And I am truly home. This is the place where I belong, and am loved and supported for my quirks and my squarks.

And yet a tiny part of my heart stays in my seminar world.

And just like the drug to the junkie who devotes his life to getting his next fix, it is a desire that scratches and worries around the edges of my brain, trying to make purchase and get some serious traction. No matter where am I or what I am doing, it’s there. Teasing and cajoling and trying to have it’s greed met.

To satisfy it, I put inspirational signs up around the house, placating it momentarily, even as I feel it building in intensity, whispering: “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” I scream back at the inside of my head, the words bouncing from cerebellum to frontal lobe and back again, over and over like a superball. “Leave me alone. I need time, time and well, time.”

But I don’t need time, not really. I just need to say what I really, really actually want. And figure out what I am willing to do to make it happen.

As we all do.

What do you really want?

And what are you willing to sacrifice to have it?

…From The Ashers

If you follow many Aussie blogs you’ll probably already know there was a Problogger conference this weekend on the Gold Coast.

Surfers: The view from The QT

There are people more experienced and more savvy than me who can tell you how it all went down, and I don’t suppose you’d be all that interested in what I learned over the weekend anyway, but I do want to tell you two things, both consisting of equal and opposite energy for me, just like Newton told us it would be.

Firstly, at the end of Day One I was completely bereft.

I thought this was the most soul-destroying seminar I’d ever been to.

Problogger is, as I’m sure you’ll have figured out, about monetising your blog.  Being paid to blog.  I’ve been blogging for just over a year, and I had an idea that being paid to do this might be something I could do.  But as the day wore on, it became patently obvious that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing here, with respect to earning buck$ for blogging.  I don’t have a niche, a specific tone, or a message.  I don’t provide anything useful, nor do I solve any of your problems.  I don’t have products or ideas to sell you. I’m a personal blogger, and that means this space is all about me.  Not really the kind of thing that lends itself to paid content or advertising.  Two other things also became obvious: I have no clue what all the techy stuff is about (SEO, what?) and being a paid blogger appears to involve a shit-load of work.  So two things I do.not.like appear to be important.

So I almost ditched the whole remainder of the seminar to quaff Cosmopolitans by the pool.

Some would say this is a pattern of mine, but I’d tell them to shut up and mind their own.

Luckily, I was there with a mate who knows me better than I know myself most times, and she pretty much forbade me to miss a single Saturday session.  Which was a good thing, for redemption was just around the corner, in the guise of Matthew Michalewicz, heralding the second big thing I needed to know.

He reminded me of many things that I needed a nudge with, and most of all, the concept that when we say we can’t do something, what we really mean, is that the motivation isn’t great enough.  Yet.  I may have said I could not learn all the computery things required to run this blog properly, but as Matthew would say; if my whole family would die if I didn’t figure it out, I probably could.  And fast.

And of course, as always, a concept that applies to you in one area of your life, will cross over into others.  This “I can’t” mantra doesn’t only apply to my bloggy life, but to my work, my family, my finances.  I can.  I just need compelling leverage.  Which also involves going back to the original idea, the thing I’m saying I can’t do, and double check that it is something that I really want, and that it isn’t just some notion that I’ve grabbed from the air, or from someone else’s bag of tricks.  The difference between something I should do and something I want to do.

Sometimes it’s good to get a whack of perspective when I’m being a big whining baby.

And a free book.

Thanks Matthew xx

Is there anything you’ve been saying you can’t do (that you claim you want to do)?

What do you do or say to yourself to get your mojo back?

…From The Ashers xx

A little ways down the road from me is a strange and wonderous megalopolous of twelve-karat golden glitter.  It is the home of water slides and movie stars, cocktails, karaoke, neon and flesh.  So much flesh.  Flesh available for viewing.  All day and night, and whether you like it or not.  Or so it seems.

This city hurries and hustles you from the moment you arrive til the moment you leave, and it feels like you never really get off the back foot, never really settle in, never catch up to where-ever it is going, before it’s time to pack up and take your scalded retinas back to your muted life.  Everything on the Gold Coast is bigger and louder and more.  At lease more than what I’m used to.

The first time I landed on the Goldy I had been on a bus for around twenty-four hours, with double that amount of Uni students, who had been drinking and primping and flirting with each other for ninteen of those hours.  I’m pretty sure someone copped a hummer on the back seat, and I’m definitely sure someone spewed in the onboard dunny, between Gundagai and Jugiong.  No amount of LouLou could expunge the odour.

I stumbled down the stairs blinking and sleep drunk, and straight onto the cacophony of fluorescence and 1cent drinks and sex shops and street spruikers that was the early 90s version Surfers Paradise.  There was apparently a beach where you could baste yourself ’til noon, and we did venture down there once, to see if the sand really was golden (it was the same pale beige of my own town) and if the water really was warm (it was, and I was startled by how delicious the lukewarm waves felt on my two day bender tender skin).

We stayed and played on the Goldy for one flimsy week, and we crammed like no exam we had ever had before: Ripley’s and Seaworld and Hire a Bomb to Kirra, and Cocktails and Dreams and Condom Kingdom and Vespas on the Highway, and umbrella hats to save our blowdried hair from the humid wet rain, and flashing signs and drunk and Georges Paragon “Yes Sir! Half price seafood” to finish.

We had a seminar as well, and even that was bigger and bolder, buffing itself up to a shine, as if in step with the ebullient excess.

I’ve been to the Gold Coast many times since, and I’m always struck by the other-ness of the place.  It is nothing like the rest of Australia, nor does it apologise.  The Goldy of the 2000s has grown up a little, but not easily, and not without angst.  The Gold Coast of now is like an excited and troubled adolescent, full of cheeky fun and anger all at once.  When I’m there I’m half excited and half frightened.  I think I’ll have a good time, I think I can wrangle those streets, but I just might be a bit careful, in case I get bitten.

So today, I got my tickets to Problogger, a bloggy seminar being held at the colourful QT and I’m beyond excited.  This cyber-world I inhabit is strange and exciting and very weird, and PB will be a chance for me to see, and possibly talk-with-voices to, some of my internet heroes in the flesh.  So much golden flesh.

Okay, now this is sounding creepy.  Maybe not too much flesh.

Have you ever been to the Gold Coast?

Are you going to Problogger?