As my friend and colleague, Carolyn Shaffer, knows well, a lot of us tend to worry these days about a lot of things.

Will we have enough income flow to see us through the years ahead?

How can we nourish crucial relationships with family and friends – when everyone’s scattered across the continent, or the globe?

What can we actually do to decrease the demand for fossil fuels – so we don’t have more disasters like we’ve already suffered in the Gulf this year?

A few years ago, Carolyn claimed her heritage in a long line of women who had all been “born worriers,” and decided  to take on the serious job of dispensing lighthearted wisdom for the heavy times in which we live.

Carolyn Shaffer
A long-time educator and, for more than 20 years, a clinical hypnotherapist and life coach (www.livingwellway.com), Carolyn has helped hundreds of clients move from fear and paralysis to joy and effective action. And, in response to the unprecedented global crises we face, Carolyn started whyworryguide.com to help thousands more learn how to make this shift quickly and affordably.

This week I will be Carolyn’s guest on her monthly Buddy Call. We’ll be talking about how all of us can move from worry to joy to effective action using virtual meeting tools (that are free or highly affordable) to reach more people and increase our income flow.

Strengthen Your Relationships With Family and Friends

Even if you aren’t in business for yourself, you can use the information and resources I’ll be sharing on Wednesday, August 11th, to take action on another front: strengthening your relationships with family and friends, especially those who live far away. In times of great change these relationships can turn out to be even more important than those multiple, flowing income streams.

Carolyn was a Madhatter in the Spring Session of the Madhatters Tea Party Group Coaching Program, so she’s been hard at work this summer applying what she learned to create new programs that will extend her coaching practice – using virtual meetings. She told me this week that she found the program demanding, especially for a computer-technology-challenged person like her, but also a lot of fun. Yes, F-U-N.

On this call, I’ll be sharing tips and resources for how you, too, can enter the world of virtual meetings and have a good time while you’re there.

Using our computers to communicate with each other – using text, still pictures, moving pictures and live drawing, along with our voices -  really does create conversations that are more engaging, more spontaneous, and more creative than just talking on the phone.  It’s true!

So, please join us on Wednesday, August 11th, at 6pm PDT for an hour of fun conversation. The call is FREE. So, bring your questions. Bring your sense of humor. Hell, you can even bring your worries! Between the two of us, Carolyn and I will do our best to help you with those, too.

There’s no cost to participate, but you do need to register at Carolyn’s site. Use the link below to sign up and Carolyn will send you the call number, conference code, and give you access to the call recording – in case you’d like to listen, but can’t participate Wednesday at 6pm PDT:

The Why Worry Guide Registration Page: http://www.whyworryguide.com/monthly-buddy-building-calls/

See you there! I mean hear you there…or hear you then…  It’ll be fun!

I’ve been touching the holy quite a bit over the last 4 weeks. Taking time to feel the passage into my 6th decade. I hope you’re all enjoying this glorious summer, too!

What a privilege to tarry…

This week I read a stunning piece by Jeff Jarvis in Business Week.

Jeff teaches at the CUNY School of Journalism and blogs at buzzmachine.com. His piece is short but packed a big punch.

He probed around a number of key issues in the conversation about openness – or transparency – and the Internet. The whole conversation of “publicness.”  His opening line was provocative, “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.”

The longer I live here, in southern Oregon, the more I see that what’s most important to people here is having a place to live their lives in “peace and privacy.” Migrants and natives alike.

I moved here not quite three years ago from Austin, Texas, and it’s taken me awhile to appreciate just how deliberately my fellow residents of the “State of Jefferson” cultivate their disconnection from the rest of the nation – and the world. I consider myself a very “private person,” but compared to most of my neighbors, I’m a virtual slut. So, I spend a lot of time trying to calibrate my enthusiasm for online learning and virtual business relationships with the thinking of most folks I’m shopping for groceries and gardening supplies with.

All week I’ve been pondering Jeff’s point about  the obstacle to more transparency in our online relating being “control,” not  “privacy.”

Privacy and Control Are Not the Same Issue

A new friend (who’s a 30-40-something) told me this week she just signed up for Facebook and that she wanted to talk to me about some “virtual meeting coaching.”  She was in a panic about how she was going to keep her real-life friends out of her Facebook. She said she didn’t want them “in there acting like they do.”

When I asked her why not, she said she wanted to be able to keep taking crazy, fun road-trips to the beach with them – without having to acknowledge “in public” that she enjoys their carousing. She was worried that if she let them into her Facebook, they would make her look bad to the other people she wanted in her Facebook and she wondered what she could do about that.

As I listened to her, I heard a perfect testimony for Jarvis’ suggestion that our hesitation about increasing the transparency of our online communication isn’t about “privacy.” It’s about “control” of how we reveal (or conceal) our different faces.

Privacy and control really aren’t the same issue, are they?  What we want from relating “virtually” are new ways to strengthen relationships – without being misunderstood or taken advantage of.

I gave my new friend some personal advice about how I’m handling this challenge, but I’m really interested in how the rest of you are handling it. How are you handling the opportunity to become more and more transparent with your online communication?

Will you help me out by leaving some comments below?

I’ve been stuck in a rabbit hole for about two months. I’m back.

I know it’s been almost 6o days since I’ve made a post here.  I apologize for the dead air. I can almost breath again today, so I want to catch back up and get going using this space to share my enthusiasm about web conferencing and other kinds of virtual meetings.

There’s a long story about where I’ve been. You can read here, if you enjoy soap operas.

The short version is that I had a wonderful chance to take a two-week vacation in Maui with my sweetheart right after President Obama’s inauguration. We had two truly glorious weeks watching Mama and baby whales playing 200 yards off our beach in the cleanest sea water I’ve ever seen.

Clear water, gorgeous fish!

We got to snorkel and swim with gorgeous tropical fish and big sea turtles.  The flowers were stunning. The air was as clean and sweet-smelling as everyone said it would be. It was paradise. And John and I celebrated three years of the best friendship neither of us ever imagined we would find in this lifetime. It was the best vacation I’ve ever had!

I arrived back in Ashland at the end of the first week in February full of vitality, well-rested, and eager to get started on the 5 joint ventures I was developing with virtual meeting toolmakers before we took our break.

I threw open the door to my office on February 7th… and promptly fell right down a rabbit hole!

(c) SaraPhotoGirl, "Down the Rabbit Hole"

I’ve been using Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” for a guidebook to the crazy country – and even crazier natives – I’ve been dealing with since I got home from Maui.

The long and short of the journey is that while hundreds of thousands of people across the country have been losing their jobs and their homes, I’ve been suddenly thrown into having to find a new place to live and work.  POW! Right out of the blue. Middle of the winter. Smack dab in the middle of the economic meltdown.

Now, the great thing about working for yourself is that you own your job, so nobody can take it away from you. On the other hand, the really tough thing about working for yourself is that when YOU can’t do your job, the job simply doesn’t get done.  And for the next two weeks – for the third time in less than three years – I’ll be moving my home and my office again in Ashland.

So, I apologize for the dead air. It’s been so crazy dealing with what happened to my home and my office while I was gone that I’ve been unable to focus on this blog until today. (I have been making entries on my Posterous blog just to keep from having to tell the same story over and over again.  If you’re curious, feel free to read the story here: http://meri.posterous.com.)

So, what’s up next at The Virtual Meeting Coach?

Stay tuned for a 10-day CONTEST! If you’re willing to make a quick 15-minute investment,  you can win your own FREE COPY of my best-selling virtual meeting guidebook, “The Coach’s Short List.”

Details coming right up!

And, I want to publicly thank everyone who has called and mailed me with inspiration and support! Your thoughts, your prayers, and your pure unadulterated sweetness have made an enormous contribution to my peace-of-mind in the midst of chaos. I appreciate you more than I know how to say!

Aloha one and all! And especially to Karl, Joanna and Michael, Geena and David, Deedie and Dave, Jeanette, Ira, Martha and Bob, Sharon, Susan and Roxanne, Sara, Maria, Stepan, Lynne, and most of all to John and my sweet Lady. And a big namaste to Cyril Helnwein and SarahPhotoGirl for allowing me to use their photos to show how this C-H-A-N-G-E has felt. Aren’t they terrific?! Wish I’d made ‘em myself…