Key Business Partners, LLC

I would like to introduce a lady I found out about while reading an issue of WE Magazine for Women, Selena Rezvani. She is the owner of NextGen Women, LLC and has recently wrote a book called The Next Generation of Women Leaders. I called her (during her current book tour) and she graciously agreed to do this interview with me. Enjoy finding out a bit more about her and her experience with writing and publishing her book.

Please share with the readers, a bit of your background?

I can tell you it hasn’t been linear. I graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work and soon after, found that traditional social work was not my right career. I tried out a number of jobs and finally found a home in management consulting. The work allowed me to use psychology and problem-solving skills while applying it to the workplace. I loved it. I did it for the last several years, and then focused my consulting niche on my true passion: women and leadership.

For those whom are beginning writers (or those whom wish to write but are apprehensive, what is your advice?

Crowd out your doubts. Don’t let anyone discourage you. There are two kinds of people: the ones who you’ll share your book concept with and who will support you and encourage you to do it, and those who will think you’re aiming too high or being unrealistic. Don’t engage with the latter group. You really need to believe in your idea to the point that you’re the biggest advocate and champion of the idea. Know exactly what need your book will fill and trust your instincts.

What was your inspiration or motivation for your writing?
Practically speaking, writing a book represented a vehicle for sharing my message. One of my major motivations was that I saw a lack of business guidance directed at women of my generation. I was inspired to do something about it, and write the guidebook I’d always wanted.

What can you say about your writing experience?
It can be tough! Particularly overwhelming is the period at the very beginning. You often have more information than you know what to do with? juxtaposed with days when nothing inspiring strikes you at all. It all comes together though. It helped to organize my thoughts into major buckets and to deduce what logically belonged in each. Those categories ended up becoming the chapters of my book.

It also helps to give yourself an incentive to complete each piece of the book…something that really excites you. Be creative: after you finish each chapter, have a party or get-together, get a massage, or go out to dinner. Writing does not have to be drudgery.

Please share with the readers a few tips from your book,The Next Generation of Women Leaders?
1) Re-evaluate How You See Risk: Women who want to move up must take professional risks before they feel “ready” for them. The day when you can say “Now I feel ready” is usually too late. Others have claimed the opportunity you wanted or the risk you’re taking isn’t really a stretch anymore.
2) Be Entrepreneurial – Companies everywhere need people who are willing to go for it, who are comfortable making decisions with limited information, and who can be decisive in spite of risks. Being entrepreneurial means that you don’t always have the perfect set-up to succeed, but you’ll still need to get the best from a group and deliver.
3) Make Your Needs & Aspirations Known – Those women who make it to the top are comfortable continually asking for what they want at work, rather than waiting to be rewarded/promoted/noticed.

You worked with a traditional publisher with his book. Can you share about your experience as a writer working with this publishing house?

Writing a book today is a self-directed process whether you use a publisher or not. Publishers simply don’t have the marketing budgets that they did in the past, so it’s important to be realistic as a writer about how much you will drive the process. Luckily, social media can help the “lone” author a great deal.

I also found it helpful to view my publisher with the lens that they would edit my manuscript and produce the book. All promotional activities would be up to me. Even if this is not the case, it helps you take ownership over marketing your book.

So, what is on the coming next in 2010 for you? Any more books in your future?

Right now, I’m having a great time on tour promoting the book. I’ll continue doing that through April. Beyond that, I’m excited to sink my teeth into doing more one-on-one coaching with women and consulting with organizations that want to better retain and engage their female workforce. Through these activities and others at my firm, NextGenWomen, LLC, I’m able to get the message out to many groups that we need more women at the top of companies. I’m looking forward to writing future books on this subject as well.

When you are not writing, what other things do you enjoy doing?

All things food-related. I love trying new recipes and restaurants. Lucky for me, I have quite an array of dining spots in the Philadelphia area. The only thing that makes these “foodie” adventures better is experiencing them with my husband, friends, and family.

Here is a question just for fun—what is your favorite color and why?

Definitely purple…Plum actually. At the same time, it’s beautiful, regal, deep, and calming.

How can others get in contact with you and purchase your book, The Next Generation of Women Leaders?

Please visit my website at www.nextgenwomen.com and get in touch! You can also find my book for sale on Amazon or Barnes & Noble online.

With all the noise bombarding you every day about the economy, being upbeat can be tough at times. It is important to surround yourself with positive influences. Rajesh Setty’s book, Upbeat, provides you simple ways to create an right attitude when the noise gets too much.

In his book, Upbeat, Rajesh shares with you how he and his team managed to have a positive attitude during a previous recession. Yes, you know the word. You hear it almost every day at least once on the radio, tv and even on the internet. It is okay to be aware of the world around you however, it doesn’t mean you have to become engrossed in it.

Here are a few things to share from reading Rajesh’s book, Upbeat:

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This book contains many great real time ideas and strategies you can use right now in your business and in life to not allow the rough times around you get you down.

You can follow the rest of the book blog tour for Rajesh’s book, Upbeat here.
You can pick up your own copy of Upbeat by going to Amazon

This morning while I was taking my daughter to school, I happen to look up at the sky and noticed the clouds. Some of them where whimsical looking, dancing in the sky resembling arrows pointing in different directions.

This started me thinking again about directions, paths and goals.

I start reading, Suzy Welch’s new book, 10-10-10 and I am glad I did. Before I read the book, I thought the focus of the book was about achieving and accomplishing goals in 10-10-10 (10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years) however, to my surprise, the focus was about making decisions.

You see the premise of the book is about when you make a decision to think about the consequences in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years. And it doesn’t have to be 10-10-10. The point of the 10-10-10 is really about, immediate future, near distance, and far distance future and how you will feel and what could possibly happen based on the decision.

This was a good time for me to purchase this book, because like many entrepreneurs, I was feeling like I have been pushing so hard to get things done, enjoying what I do, but not feeling fully happy with my life balance. And so I started thinking about decisions to restructure things in my life and how those decisions would feel in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years.

It really did help me too. While I did work on Saturday, I felt happier because I was updating my services to reflect a new sense of purpose and direction in making decisions.

This is one of the things I really enjoy about books, it helps me, reminds me of goals and how I wish to achieve them—what are these based on?

For instance, in the book, Suzy writes about this man who had worked an overnight shift and he didn’t like it much at all. When someone asked him why he did it if he didn’t like it, he mentioned he was doing it because it would provide him with a early retirement, money for his kids to go to college and a nice lake house to reside in when he retired. Well, a year later, he passed away in a car crash. He was basing all his current decisions on his retirement years and not living for the present.

And the book isn’t about just being willy nilly about the present and spending money because you don’t know if there will be a tomorrow for you, however it is about using the 10-10-10 as a tool to help gauge the decisions you make to create a better life you wish to live.

From reading this book (I haven’t totally finished it – about 1/2 way through), I have adjusted my services and realized I want to write more. I have been wanting to write for quite a while, and have started but I want to make it more of a priority. I enjoy writing, it makes me happy. Writing this post feels really great, I will more connected.

I enjoy working with authors and sharing their books with others online. I am going to niche my online visibility services to working with authors whose books are either business based or in the mind-body-spirit genre.

So next time you have a decision to make, think about this, what would the consequences of the decision be in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years?

I would love to hear back from you and let me know if this helped at all in your decision making process. Please feel free to leave a comment.

This week the list is focusing alot on not being afraid to write and how just taking the time to write will help you grow as a writer.

I will start off with Julie Roads of Writing Roads with her tweet about Copyblogger’s post on How to Get Copywriters to Mentor you for Free. I will say at first when I started reading his first paragragh about if you want mentoring to learn do write with great prose but you don’t have the money….”get into their heads”. However, knowing Copyblogger is one of the most predominant sites on copywriting and blogging, I figured there was more to this bit of a sentence and I kept reading.
And I received some great pointers:
1) Read and learn. Be the shadow of those who write well and take notes of the words they use. Of course not word for word, but study how they choose the words and how they structure words.
2) Take the time to physically write these lessons down. By taking the deliberate action of writing these lessons down, you can retain the value much better. 3) Growth will occur by writing down and studying how others write because it challenges your memory muscle.

And Dave offers a challenge in this post to writers—-check it out!

Then I noticed this tweet by Cathy Bryant on writing character emotion on April 10th. Now, when I clicked on the link to this post, I was taken to the most current post of today, which was an interview with Cheryl Wyatt. I was thinking this was the post for the writing character emotion so I started reading it…great interview and Cathy asks some great questions about writing. Then I went to the post about writing character emotions on April 10th and it is another great post where she creates a discussion around the emotion of anger and shares her answers with you.

Through my google reader, I found this post by Rebecca Benston of Benston Blogs about The Best Advice I ever GotRebecca discusses how in the book, The Right to Write, is explains sometimes just by putting your emotions or experiences in written form helps with your writing. At least you are doing the physical task of writing something and not stopping yourself by listening to your inner voice say, “why are you writing that down, no one cares about how you got angry at the guy who cut in front of you at the grocery store.” For me, I wrote down when I took my daughter to the doctor and what she was doing while we were waiting. It helped me think about describing things using my senses at the time–what I saw, heard, smelled felt.

Next, just found this one on Twitter—from @travellinda. A forum for women writers called SheWrites. A newly created ning group for women writers to gather and support each other.

Today begins a new month of 2009. Even though I did not do it deliberately, today was the day I started writing. My first task was to write about a memory of my mom. I had made a time limit of just 15 minutes because I felt it would work for me.

I feel really good I started completing a beginning of a goal I made at the beginning of the year. Another thing I did that helped me get started writing, was I talked to friends about what I thought I was interested in writing about and they gave me ideas of how to get started. My bigger goal is to complete my first book by the end of 2009.

One of my friends, Karen Pierce Gonzalez, wrote a book called, Folktales: What are yours? and after I read it I realized all writing doesn’t have to be a novel. I mean, I knew that but when I thought about writing, I keep thinking about the whole process and not just taking it a step at a time.

Another lovely lady, Lynn Serafinn, wrote a book titled, Garden of the Soul. In reading her book, I was reminded about the creative process of writing and coming back to my self and knowing that if I want to write, I should write. Not to focus on the fear, but celebrate the possibilities. Remember the joy of writing and

One of the reasons I work with authors is because I get the opportunity to read their works and experience their writing style. I enjoy becoming familiar with their journey of writing and I truly enjoy it.

So I hope if you are a writer but haven’t accomplished all your goals you started out at the first of the year, you will realize it isn’t too late. Start a new and realize you can still complete your goals.

Here are a few thoughts:

**When setting goals, you may not start exactly when you first thing, but the important things is all about doing it and taking the time to do it. I have heard from other writers they choose other “requirements” for themselves to make the time for writing. Some of them will set a word count to hit each time they write, some will do all their writing 1 day in a week.

**Know that your initial goal may change as time passes.

**Keep moving forward. Stopping is one of the things that derails goals from being completed.

**If you need help, ask for it. Sometimes, it just helps when you allow others to give you suggestions

Now your turn–are there writing goals you haven’t finished or continued? Share them and we can help each other to complete them.

You are excited about your newest project…you have gotten your coffee or tea and you sit down to write..and BANG! Nothing comes to mind. What do you do? You create a new tape.

Let me explain and to do this I need to tell you how I created a new tape.

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend of mine, Pam Butler. Her and I were talking about the evening before at the St. Pete/Tampa eWomen networking event. I was telling her about a conversation I had with a lady who I wanted to talk with for sometime but haven’t had a chance to meet yet. So I went on to tell Pam about my introduction with this woman and how I thought I just messed up the whole thing.

“Pam, I went up to her and I was so excited to meet her, I said the wrong thing and I just felt silly. But you know, I guess she didn’t mind me coming up to her too much because she told me to wait when we were interrupted by someone saying goodbye to her before they left. I really hope she doesn’t think I am a complete nut.”

“Teresa, that is YOUR perception of how she took what you said and did, however, I bet that was not the reality. I bet she thought you were charming and pleasant to speak with.

Then she said it….“You need to stop playing that tape and create a new tape.”

Pam continued, “You have been thinking about what YOU think you did wrong and that the meeting with her went badly. You need to erase that tape and write a new tape. You have spend your morning and afternoon thinking about this and it is only breeding more negativity and what you need to do is bring in the positive thoughts about the experience.”

Now, I did call this woman yesterday morning and left her a voicemail to say it was lovely to meet her and asked her how I could be of service to her and the organization she works with but I still hadn’t felt great about the whole situation.

Of course, not until Pam helped me realize I just needed to create a new tape of the night before and place happier and positive reinforcements into the situation. And guess what?

By 4pm yesterday, I received a call back from this lady, saying to me that she enjoyed speaking with me the night before and she would love to get together and talk more.

Have you ever met someone and just knew they were placed in your life for a reason? Pam is one of those blessings to me.