Sue Koch is a Career and Life Design Coach who, after being down-sized from a major corporation, chose to create her life differently. She now works with business professionals who are ready to exit the "rat race" by creating a more balanced and integrated lifestyle. She has coached hundreds of people to pursue their highest and best dreams. For more information about her coaching programs, contact sue at sue@accesstheedge.com or by phone at 949-212-4345

Tell us about your business, Access the Edge, and the services you offer.

At Access the Edge, we believe that we each came to the planet with a purpose to fulfill and that joy is our natural state of being. We also believe that human beings are driven by the desire to learn, play, love and create.

Unfortunately, our upbringing and societal training works against us to squash our desires and creativity in favor of conformity. We're taught by our cultures and by well-meaning care givers to live within the context of what we "should" do to be materially successful rather than what we WANT to do to be happy and fulfilled.

Our coaching and seminars are designed to help people rediscover their passions and bring back their natural states of aliveness, curiosity, creativity and joy. We actually demonstrate how our very physiology changes when we put our energy and attention on what we love. When we understand how to connect joy with what we FEEL in our bodies rather than with the "should" messages from our brains, we reclaim our power to make authentic choices that support our dreams and purposes.

Your tagline, "Designing exit strategies for corporate rats" says it all...tell us about your niche and how you fell into it.

My coaching practice began when unemployment was very high and many people were in career transition. Experienced, highly paid people seemed to be down-sized out of long term jobs at an alarming rate. I knew a lot about that because I was one of those people and I wanted to help myself by helping others in similar situations.

I wondered how I could help corporate employees take back control of their lives amidst such uncertainty. How could I help them generate better choices for how they contribute their valuable time, energy, gifts, skills and abilities to their companies? How could I help them work to live and love it, rather than living to work and hating it? How could I help them create more than one source of income without having to work longer or harder and burning out?

My answer came as I worked with a particular client who was in career transition. She had been down-sized out of her corporate job after ten years of successful advancement. She was exhausted, disillusioned and hurt, and not interested in returning to a corporate job. She was frustrated because all she saw ahead of her was thirty more years of more of the same.

Through coaching and seminars, we identified what she loved, what her purpose is, and ways she could get what she really wanted. We designed a 5-year plan for her to get it. The plan included returning to a corporate job long enough to finance her dream.

Suddenly a corporate job that seemed like a burden became an opportunity and a means to an end as a funding source (with the emphasis on FUN!). Her apathy disappeared and she was energized to take action.

Within four weeks she secured a wonderful position in a great company. She and a friend started a small side business selling a product they love and believe in. She began working with a financial planner who is assisting her to achieve her financial goal.

My light bulb moment came when I felt my excitement grow as my client and I developed a design for her career and life in a way that supports her dreams, goals and personal vision. I realized I had found my passion and I could hardly wait to help other "corporate rats" get out of the rat race. From there, I worked with a wonderful marketing coach to create my tag line.

What kind of person would be your perfect client?

My perfect clients are successful people who recognize they've reached a point in their lives where they want something more than running a rat race every day. They may be ready for an active retirement, they may be bored with their current jobs, or they may know they want to make a change without a clear sense of what they'd really love to do. They don't see themselves as running away from anything. They see themselves running toward a new possibility or dream.

Who have been your inspirations and mentors along your journey?

My clients inspire me the most. When they share their deepest and most heartfelt dreams, I'm profoundly moved by who they truly are as expressions of the Divine. I believe we instinctively and intuitively know when we are in that Presence. For me, it's never more present than when listening to someone share the thing that most expresses their deepest desires, whether it's going to culinary school or painting animals or starting a business.

I'm also inspired by my business partner at Access the Edge. She has an amazing capacity for seeing beyond the facades we create for survival into the true essence of who we are. She is able to stay with that essence no matter how we act out in anger, fear or sadness. She creates a wonderful, safe space for people to let go of the façade and show up as themselves.

There's a report on your web site about how men and women react to stress differently. Can you talk about that a bit?

Until recently, 90% of studies about stress were conducted on men and it was believed that flight or fight was the primary response to stress. A landmark UCLA study found that women release a hormone called oxytocin which encourages us to tend to children and bond with other women during stressful times. The study calls this the "tend and befriend" response. It's believed the women live longer than men partly because of our capacity for tending and befriending.

What's your favorite inspirational quotation and why?

It’s difficult to limit myself to one quote. It depends on what I need to remember on a given day or in a particular circumstance. One of my favorites right now is this one:

"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow." ~ James Dean

This quote is especially meaningful to me because James Dean was so young when he died. To this day, he remains a bigger than life presence. What if he had held back or given up on his dream? We'd have missed out on a great talent.

What are your favorite books?

I love books that inspire me and books that poke fun at our humanity. Some of my favorites include:

"This Time I Dance" by Tama Kieves

"Inspire: What Great Leaders Do" by Lance Secretan

"Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior" by David Hawkins

"Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts" and "Mama Gena's Owner's and Operator's Guide to Men" by Regena Thomashauer

All of the Sweet Potato Queens Books by Jill Connor Browne

What's the most valuable tidbit of advice about work you can offer our Wild WE readers?

Know what your business is for. Have a really powerful "why" for doing what you do, or as Mark Victor Hansen (co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books) says, ""Put a WOW in your "why"!" That knowing will keep you going through the tough times and will keep you humble when you succeed.

Labels: wild we member of the month

Have you ever been reading the newspaper and found a story about a topic you could have been interviewed on? Then lo and behold, there's your competitor being quoted as part of the piece.

Does your competitor have more knowledge about the topic than you do? Probably not. But what your competitor may know is the art of piggybacking.

Piggybacking is a term used to tie in your expertise, product or service into a current event.

When a current event happens, reporters need to cover it - and they are always looking for someone to interview about it. Here are just some of the current events that you can tie into:

Wild Women Entrepreneurs used the piggybacking tactic recently. Knowing that March is Women's History Month, we sent out a pitch letter to newspapers all over the country emphasizing how Wild Women Entrepreneurs are making history every day. The result: an interview in a statewide magazine, and a request from a Steven Covey publication for Wild WE founder and president Ja-Naé Duane to submit an article for publication.

And if you are a gold or platinum member, you also got a chance to piggyback on the Women's History Month theme. Those members received a fill-in-the-blank press release about making their own history to use to publicize themselves to the local media.

The key to piggybacking is to think on your feet. Current events are usually dead within a few days. So once you think of a tie-in, you need to pitch journalists right away. Your best bet when time is of the essence is to call each reporter and say, "I notice that XX is happening, I have some additional information on the topic of XX that may be of interest to your viewers/listeners/readers. And I am available for interview today."

Don't leave that last sentence off. It gives a state of urgency and gets journalists to schedule a time right away. So next time, it'll be your competitor reading about you in the newspaper.

Shannon Cherry, APR, MA helps women-owned businesses & entrepreneurs to be heard. She's a marketing communications and public relations expert with more than 15 years experience and the owner of Be Heard Solutions. She is also the publicist and board member of Wild Women Entrepreneurs. Subscribe today for Be Heard! a FREE biweekly ezine and get the FREE special report: Be the Big Fish: Three No-Cost Publicity Tactics to Help You Be Heard. Go to: http://www.beheardsolutions.com/freestuff_3.htm

Stuck in a beauty quandary? Can't pull yourself out of your fashion rut? Feeling like a Glamour "don't"? E-mail your beauty and fashion questions to our expert beauty consultant, Charlotte Maddox, at ask@thewildwe.com. If we publish your question, we will offer you a free text ad in our newsletter. All questions will be published anonymously.

A Short Cosmetic History!

Cosmetics (substances to enhance looks) have been in use since early man although the materials and ideals of beauty have differed with locations and the times. In the past century, cosmetic industry powerhouses have grown from the efforts of one woman.

This story only goes back four decades to the 1960s when a woman named Mary Kay met with job discrimination, quit her position and set out to write a book about the perfect company. While considering the principles upon which the company should be founded, Mary Kay decided to start a company herself and developed a unique business plan based on the Golden Rule and her belief of "God first, family second, career third."

With the support of her husband and son (and against the advice of her lawyer and accountant), Mary Kay invested her life savings of $5000, acquired the rights to a proprietary skin care formula, set up a place of business and went to work.

Today, the company known as Mary Kay Inc. has evolved into one of the largest direct-sellers of skin care and cosmetics in the world, recently surpassing $2 billion in annual wholesale sales. The original nine consultants have multiplied into over 1.5 million consultants in more than 30 markets worldwide.

Labels: beauty inside and out

You can write great copy for your business with practice and guidance. The Communication Corner, a monthly column from freelance copywriter, Dina Giolitto of Wordfeeder.com, provides answers to all your writing questions. Got a pressing copywriting question? Send it to Dina at ask@thewildwe.com. If we publish your question, we will offer you a free text ad in our newsletter. All questions will be published anonymously.

Are you selling an article marketing information product, e-book or teleclass? Do you use article marketing as a backlinking strategy to advertise your professional services? If so, you may be familiar with the dreaded feeling of "temporary article marketing burnout".

Article burnout goes like this: as you keep tabs on the article marketing industry and watch the power pockets form and mini productivity explosions happen, you may suddenly find yourself exhausted and unable to produce articles. Perhaps you feel like you're being elbowed out of the running -- and that instead of owning your market, you're just another anonymous shareholder placing a little too much faith in your article marketing stock.

So what do you do to get some attention focused on you again and help your article marketing info product instantly go vertical again?

Article marketer to article marketer, I'm going to do something crazy and reveal one of my latest schemes to you. My latest covert strategy:

Work it on the diagonal so that you can go vertical.

Essentially, if you're an article marketer who wants to get noticed, you'll realize that if you continue to show up in the same categories as hordes of other article marketers, it's less likely that folks will stay focused on you for long. That is, unless of course you can write articles that are so controversial that people can't help but gape and stare at you. Now, gaping and staring is fun for sure, but it won't assure you loyal paying customers. A better idea: bypass the article marketing category and instead flash your Article Power directly at targeted niches.

How will you do this? Just show up in new categories and start talking about marketing with articles. It helps to visualize a specific customer who you want to reach and then kick off your "door to door article marketing sales pitch" by going directly to their neighborhoods.

Try this: Write articles about article marketing but gear them toward specific audiences. Submit the articles to NON-ARTICLE MARKETING TOPIC CATEGORIES.

Since you're an article marketer, you're used to tapping out those marketing basics and submitting to the article marketing, home based business and web marketing categories, am I right? But the fact is, major article directories include hundreds of niches where folks submit FACTUAL articles rather than articles that teach a marketing lesson. To stick out in that crowd, write articles on how to market with articles for THEIR AUDIENCE.

Examples:

• How to Market Your Petcare Website with Articles (file under Petcare)


• Gourmet Food Businesses and Article Marketing Tactics that Work (file under Food and Drink)


• Using Articles to Skyrocket Your Work at Home Moms Website (file under WAHM)

These are just a small sample of what you can do with your article marketing effort when you really start to break out of the box. Sometimes we get so caught up in our usual methods that we fail to utilize the powerful strategies that help differentiate us from our competitors. Do you want to be just another article marketer in a suffocatingly crowded category? I don't think so. So get out there and work it on the diagonal - and you may just be pleasantly surprised when your article marketing effort suddenly takes you vertical.

Did you find this article helpful? Have more of the same mailed to your inbox each month. Learn how to write SEO-friendly web copy and market your web based business for free. Sign up for the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine from Dina at Wordfeeder.com today.

Copyright 2006 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina drives mass traffic with article marketing. Follow along at http://Wordfeeder.com during Article Marketing March - we're covering everything from basic to advanced article marketing in our blog, ezine and online network of article marketers. Get on the list - sign up at the bottom of the Wordfeeder.com homepage right now.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dina_Giolitto 

Labels: communication corner