Thanks to Kim Gray at the National Association of Virtual Assistants for Coaches for inviting me to present a telecall on how VAs can help new coaches succeed. Details to follow.

Happy New Year to my clients and colleagues. I’ve lost count of the number of people I know who are planning to reinvent themselves or their businesses this year, and I’m sure you’ll all keep me on my toes through the rest of the frigid Wisconsin winter. Here’s to an exciting and productive 2010!

The website revamp is nearly done now. I doubt I’ll ever go back to an HTML site — I’m addicted to the relative ease of updating WordPress sites in general, and the tweakability of the Thesis theme in particular.

~ It’s amazing how helping clients with their blogs has distracted me from my own blog… ~

I’m back at work after my break, and raring to go. This month I’m taking a short training course in SEO, so I can help my clients make their websites stand out in a crowded market. Online training must be one of the most amazing benefits of living in a wired world. The only drawback is the temptation to dabble in a little of everything and spend way too many hours in front of the computer!

This week I’m savoring the last part of my winter break, a “staycation” that I’ve been planning for almost a year. It’s been great to stay in out of the cold, take it easy, and enjoy the little stuff, like reading a book, brushing the cats, choosing some new seeds from my many seed catalogs, and starting on a new hobby: cheesemaking! This week’s project is “30-minute mozzarella.” I’ll tell you more about that if it works out.

Now here’s a wonderful way to start the year’s blogging. I just made someone so happy that he asked to send me a testimonial, and I’d like to show it off here until I can pull together a proper “What my clients say” page on the website.

“My project was stuck.  I knew that there had to be a way to get it back up and running but I had no clue what the right tools were or how to find them. I contacted Christine with a description of my problem. She got back to me right away with a few questions. The next day Christine emailed me with three very interesting options and she was able to explain them in ways that I could understand. I tried one. It worked! Immediately my project was back up and running, better than before. Christine is a great communicator and clearly has a passion for what she does. I kind of look forward to the next time I hit a bump so that I can see what fresh and useful ideas she has to help me get to the next level.”  – Jeff F., therapist

As always, I’m delighted that I could help — this is exactly why I became  a VA!

I recently finished a six-week training course in the basics of 1ShoppingCart, and will be offering cart setup and management to my VA clients starting in January. Stay tuned for more details.

I just posted a list of don’t-miss nonfiction books to a forum of other VAs, and I thought I’d add the info here, too. These are three books that really changed my perception of the world, and I highly recommend them.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. If you’re intrigued by the idea of following your gut instinct or intuition or whatever you call it, this is a must-read. How does one person instantly spot that an artwork is a fake, despite multiple test results “proving” its authenticity? Why is it a good idea for police officers to patrol alone instead of in pairs? And so on.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Continuing on the theme of trusting yourself, this will give you some fantastic insights into staying safe and maintaining boundaries, and it could literally save your life. It’s a serious book but it’s not depressing.

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Not a diet book but a science journalist’s investigation into the nutritional advice we’ve all been getting for decades. Guess what? Refined carbohydrates, *not* fat, may be at the core of most of our killer diseases, but the research has been ignored or distorted for various reasons. Hallelujah — I can eat butter again! 

After resisting the idea for a while, I recently joined Facebook, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like it. I find it easier than email for keeping in contact with people I don’t see often enough, and I’ve even found a couple of long-lost friends. (I wish it were a little simpler to navigate, though — even after 15 years of Web use, I find the “new” Facebook kind of confusing and not very logically organized.) I have a VA colleague who gets most of her clients through Facebook, and I can’t wait to learn how she does it. I’ll share more about that in a future posting.