Music, Coffee & Nature

Music, coffee and nature seem to get me through these days. They aren't a complete cure but they help me through. Starting a business is difficult enough without feeling insane and unsuccessful. It makes me question if I'm even supposed to be an entrepreneur. I think I'm an entrepreneur. I act like one, I think like one (do I smell like one?) I have many ideas and most of the time I act on them without asking permission first. That, I think, is the most basic characteristic of an entrepreneur. We don't wait around for someone to tell us there's a need or that something isn't quite right yet.

I started thinking about the concept of Sane & Satisfied when I was going through my coaching phase. I started coaching women who owned their own business and through talking to these women I remembered why I wanted to start my own business in the first place: to be happy and feel successful and hopefully accomplish those two goals in the least stressful way possible.

From that moment, Sane & Satisfied has taken on a life of it's own and it's teachings have popped up in every area of my life. This concept has grown into a disdain and sometimes disgust at self-help gurus. I'm amazed at the success of an industry that pretty much tells you that you are doing everything wrong. Oh, yeah, and you are also too fat, too angry, too selfish, too self-loathing and generally too much.

I can get an honest assessment of myself from my husband at a fraction of the cost!

I think that what these self-help gurus miss and what you miss if you follow their teachings, is that you are human. And humans make mistakes and are flawed. But it's our society that puts the scarlet letter on those faults. It's society that makes you feel like every fault you have should be engineered away.

Of course that's not to say that if you have anger problems that landed you in jail or drinking problems that resulted in an car crash or crashes that you should write it off as "just being human". But let's face it, most of us are not in that boat and only suffer from your basic, garden variety, human ticks.

Another question, and I think the most important question is: what does Sane & Satisfied mean and how to I become those two things? Well, what it doesn't mean is self help. Self help involves pity parties, and looking ourselves in the mirror, repeating, "I am great and people love me."

Sane & Satisfied is an ever growing concept and will be different for everyone but from what I've gathered so far being Sane & Satisfied is about self-education and understanding who you are and not apologizing for it. Then from there it's simply a way of life instead of a destination.

If we only learn 10% of what is taught to us then it stands to reason that we shouldn't focus on only one program or way of thinking. This is especially true in the case of self-help where the guru's message doesn't evolve much over a long period of time. I think that's why so many people are caught in an endless cycle of attending self-help seminars and reading self-help books. We've already learned the 10% there was to learn but something is still missing. Instead of learning more things we hold on to the charisma of the self-help leader and return for yet another dose.

Sometimes I wonder of I'll ever be Sane & Satisfied. Is it even possible? Well I'm going to try. What other choice do I have?