The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.
-Atisha

To carry this little number one line further …

The greatest description of this author is Unfiltered.

“How dare he say such a thing … Describing me with one wickedly delicious word.”

Unfiltered?

Me?

You Betcha!

At first I was slightly offended to hear that this description rolled off a colleague’s tongue.

Unfiltered made me think of someone who is :

Disorganized, off the cuff, without a care, raw, pithy, bold, a visionary …

Wait a minute, could it be that this is an accurate portrait?

Holy Cow!

To be unfiltered is exactly who I want to be.

What it means to be unfiltered:

Throwing your head back and laughing out loud
Shooting big ideas at a target to see what sticks
Pure unabashed honesty
Confidence without caution
Open to grand ideas
Approachable
Obvious Imperfections
Impatient flights of fancy
Having no interest in political correctness
To be REAL .. You’ve got to be real!

Which word comes to mind when you describe yourself?

Consider playing with descriptive words to see what fits.
(It may feel uncomfortable at first … It gets better)

How do other people perceive you?

What messages are you sending out to the universe?

How do you affect other people?

Ask a good friend , call on a peer or ask a client for a testimonial.

You might just find that someone thinks you are … Unfiltered.

“What you see is what you get … Honey!” – Flip Wilson

Shann Vander Leek is the Founder of True Balance Life Coaching and Co-founder of Seize True Success. She is a Coach Training Alliance certified professional coach, and certified yoga instructor. Shann is a prolific blogger, published writer and co-author of the Best Selling Book – Wake Up Women BE Happy Healthy & Wealthy. Shann’s personal style and direct approach have guided and inspired many in overcoming personal and professional challenges. Her background in sales, marketing and client development, along with leading a talented sales force for many years prepared her for the business of professional coaching. Shann inspires women in transition to create balance in their lives through personal coaching, yoga and creative expression. Telephone and email consultations make her accessible to clients all over the world. To find out about her Coaching Programs for Women, call Shann at 231.668.111 or visit www.truebalancelifecoaching.com

Thanks to Israelnewsletter.com for submitting this post:

Benzi Ronen is currently on a quest for his next start-up. He and his partner Yossi Pik recently launched Buddy Runner (www.buddyrunner.com ), a personal virtual fitness trainer for your mobile phone.  Israel Newsletter recently had the opportunity to sit with Benzi to learn about his newest venture.

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Most recently Benzi was Vice President of Product Management and User Experience at SAP. Prior to SAP, he co-founded and was CEO of Octago Inc. based in San Francisco. He was a product manager at both Microsoft (Redmond) and Netscape (Mountain View) and completed an MBA at the University of Michigan and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. He met his business partner, Yossi Pik, at SAP where they had a chance to work together and realize that their skills and passions were complementary.  Yossi was VP of Research and Development where he led a team of 70 people.  You can read more about Benzi’s “Journey of an Entrepreneur” via his blog at http://benzironen.wordpress.com

Give us the elevator pitch about BuddyRunner
Benzi Ronen, co-founder, Buddy Runner: Buddy Runner provides the capabilities of an expensive GPS enabled personal trainer on your Android phone. Buddy Runner allows you to monitor each run by recording your distance, pace, time, elevation, and route. A personal dashboard is created for viewing, analyzing and sharing your progress. With over 10,000 downloads during the first 4 weeks of our launch as well as  being one of the highest ranked applications within the Android Market, we are much better positioned to place our next big bet.

Our premise for Buddy Runner is that smart phones will become our personal assistants for different aspects of our lives. Examples include; help with administration, managing our social lives, shopping assistance, and the area we are focused on which is a person trainer to get you fit and live a healthier life.

The convergence between a cellphone in everyone’s pocket , computing power on small devices, and mobile high speed Internet access created the perfect storm for the next technological gold rush.   Smart phones are in their infancy but became top of mind when Apple released the iPhone.  Why was this a significant transitional event and what makes a smart phone different from the phones we have seen to date?

• Smart phones provide a technology platform that enable developers to easily develop applications and make use of the different functionality of the phone.
• Smart Phone providers succeeded in circumventing the telecommunication companies that had a lock on what could run on the phone by delivering a market place where developers could freely upload their applications and consumers could easily download them.  In addition, there is a payment scheme on the store which provides incentives for developers to let their imaginations lose.
• iPhone’s slick user experience and savvy marketing quickly turned a geeky concept into a must have consumer electronics device for everyone.

Given the openness of Google Android, is there a technical barrier to entry?  How will you differentiate?
BR: Yossi and I selected the Google Android platform as our beachhead before broadening to other smart phone platforms. Our rationale was driven by Google’s open platform approach which provided us with the ability to rapidly build, experiment, and iterate our technology development. This approach worked well since today we are able to leverage most of our technology investment (server side) as we traverse to additional smart phone devices.

The tsunami of smart phone applications (already over 25,000 for the iPhone) make it difficult to gain market attention. Most of the applications being offered involve relatively little development (less than 30 days of development), don’t have any technological patents and have a short shelf life since their cache wears off quickly. As a result, the application demand behaves similar to movie box office hits. There is a short window of opportunity to materialize a big hit and the general public’s attention quickly moves on to the next new thing.

With Buddy Runner we have focused on a lifestyle category. We don’t expect to appeal to the masses but are rather focused on gaining the attention of a homogeneous segment of users that run at least once a week outdoors, are interested in tracking their results, and are willing to run with their cellphone which they often also use as their music player. This group becomes a diehard segment since the application becomes more meaningful as it contains more of your personal workout data.

What is the next step for BuddyRunner?  Risks?
BR: Since we are bootstrapping the company, we need to quickly determine the best way to monetize our success without challenging our popularity among users. We are constantly debating our long term vision with the need to generate revenue in the short term.

The fitness category has a many large gorillas which have a big interest in securing their positions. Nike and Apple released a joint offering (Nike Plus) which includes a pedometer within the shoe that communicates with the iPod.  Garmin, Polar, Suunto each have their version of high end fitness watches. Each company is trying to leverage their strength (brand, market traction, technology) in order to become the leader in this category.
It is clear to us that we will not be able to become a significant contender by playing by the same rules. Our product roadmap depends on utilizing the unique benefits of a smart phone and incorporating them into your workout in a way that none of our competitors are capable of doing. In addition, we need to ensure we differentiate ourselves among other fitness application running on smart phones so that we can justify charging a fee that will provide us the gas to bootstrap our way to the future.

Enjoy your Run!

Most of the women I know wrestle with feeling overwhelmed from time to time.  Typically, this stems from a commendable desire to try to get a lot done in the course of the day which leads to us taking on way more responsibility than we could possibly ever handle.  Unfortunately, by the time we realize that we’re overextended we feel so buried in obligations we don’t even know how (or where) to start to digging out from under. 

So if you’re tired and burned-out from trying to be a superwoman   Here are some suggestions on how to restore your sanity and retire that pretty red cape once and for all.

A big part of feeling overwhelmed is not knowing where to start.  Try to pick three areas of your life: personal, relationship and career/professional and write down ALL the nagging things (both big and small) that are rippling under the surface and effecting your peace of mind.  This “brain dump” alone can be useful in that it shows you what you really need to deal with so that it’s not as  Getting Things Done author, David Allen so aptly terms it, “a nebulous mass of undo-ability”

Prioritize: Once you identify the items in each category, rank them on a scale of 1 to 5.  1 being very important, 5 being very trivial. 

Decide: Of all the #1 items on your to-do list decide: 1) which are the ones that are the most important to you in terms of life goals, values, passions and 2) which tasks/projects once accomplished will give you the most bang for your proverbial buck.

Act:  Break your top 3 most important tasks into 3 actionable subtasks and decide what is the next “actionable” step that you could take towards its attainment.  Many times we feel overwhelmed because we see a mountain and think we are supposed to leap over it…we forget that it is a process and that it is made up of lots of smaller tasks which are victories in themselves.  So “clean out attic” (something I just did a few weeks ago) becomes “call carting service to rent dumpster” and “buy clear plastic containers“, etc.

Assign:  Tim Ferriss, in his worthwhile (if a wee bit optimistic) book, The Four-Hour Work Week talks a lot about the importance of farming out tasks that you do not need to do.  He is a big proponent of leveraging high school and college students — even virtual assistants overseas to handle mundane tasks that can be real time-wasters

Just Say “No”: Too many people (women, in particular) are uncomfortable with saying “no”.  I’m not always great at it myself….but I’m getting better.  I think a reasonable way to avoid getting committed to projects you’d just as soon leave alone, is to buy yourself sometime and never answer on the fly, if possible.  You can save yourself a great deal of kicking yourself afterward by going with something like, “I really can’t commit to that right now because I have a lot going on and always want to an excellent job on whatever I commit to.  I’m going to look at my calendar and commitments and get back to you”.  Then afterward do some soul searching and make sure that you are doing something that you want to do or feel is important to do.

6 A Day:  The legend is that Charles Schwab paid a friend $25,000 for this idea because it radically improved the effectiveness of his organization.  Pick 6 (no more, no less) of your high-priority, next actionable step tasks and do them each work day.  Where will you get the most traction on the things that matter to you most?  Whether it is having a better relationship with your kid — or getting  that new client.

Let Go:  Overwhelm is often a product of staying on the treadmill of success for a long time and not realizing that you need at least one (preferably two) days off per week.   Stephen Covey author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls this “sharpening the saw”.  The joke is that this guy is trying to saw this tree with a dull saw.  He’s sweating, straining, not being very effective.  So another guy says, “Hey, why not take a break and sharpen that saw?”.  To which the first gentleman replies incredulously, “Can’t you see I’m trying to cut down this tree?!!“.  In other words, if your mental “blades” are dull and rusty you can’t be very effective.

Just some thoughts to get this thing rolling in the spirit of  “Hey, I’m doing the best I can.  Doing pretty darn good — and trying to get a little better every day“.  I hope you find some of these tips helpful in reducing your stress load. 

Geralyn Coopersmith, MA, CSCS is an exercise physiologist, certified personal trainer, author of Fit + Female:  The Complete Fitness and Nutrition Game Plan for Your Unique Body Type and the creator of The Best Me Ever, a comprehensive weight loss and wellness system just for women.  It’s a first of its kind program designed to fit into a busy women’s life.  Lose weight and look great — 90 Day Unconditional Money Back Guarantee!!

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