This one went much smoother than the last video of me speaking.

BIG thanks to Claire and Pete for inviting me to present.  And special thanks to Dietz Media for making a video of me speaking that I finally love.

If you are looking for a speaker for your event, talk to me.

I started watching her after my friend Mariah went to her b-school and came back with all of these stories about how awesome and amazing and great she was.

As with everything that everyone loves I have been skeptical.

I am always skeptical.

You found the best product in the world? The cure for world peace? Pshaw. Yeah. Sure.

In fact, most of the time I don’t even TRY whatever they are telling me is amazing and wonderful. I just assume it will be terrible and don’t even need to try it because everyone loves terrible things and it can’t possibly work how they say it will work.

The other night I got an email about a new program that Marie Forleo was launching and a link to some videos she had created about her business. I then stayed up until mid-night watching all of the videos because we all have hobbies and watching videos about business is mine.

In true entrepreneur fashion, I spent this morning trying to use Facebook to crowdsource creative ideas on how I could raise $2,000 to take the online program she just launched. I am a big believer in investing in education. I am such a big believer in this that I very recently invested $55,000 in a Philosophy degree. Do you know how useful my in-depth knowledge of The Cave is? Very.

My Facebook friends had  awesome  terrible strange plenty of ideas.

The winning one was selling stuff on e-bay which made me think about the fact that I could totally SELL STUFF online. Except, noone wants my stuff because  few things in this house have both survived Aiden’s sticky hands AND his curiosity.

So I decided to turn my blog into my own personal ebay and sell my mind which has somehow survived Aiden’s sticky hands.

What can you buy?

An Hour-long Private Brainstorm-$250

I am offering five people the chance to pick my brain for a one hour phone or skype session.

We can talk about how to take your offline business online, we can talk about how to start a blog, we talk about how you can make money blogging ,we can talk about how to create a media kit, or how to pitch national media, or land a book agent. Or whatever your heart desires. My brain is yours for one hour.

But Cassie, why would I spend $250 for an hour of your brain power? Because I know that if you spend an hour on the phone with me you will leave with at least one idea that can generate $500 in profit. See? It’s like I am giving you $250 to talk to me.

As an added bonus,  you will receive a copy of the e-book “Tall Order! Seven Master Strategies to Organize Your Life and Double Your Success In Half the Time.” a book from my brilliant and successful coach Honoree. 

Pay-What-You-Can-Hour-long Live Q&A:

I am hosting an hour-long live Q&A next Thursday, May 17th from 6:00-7:00 central time. You can ask me questions about blogging, business, social media and anything else that you would like my insight on. You can donate any amount from $20 to $20,000  to join. I will send you information to access the live session once you register.

On top of that, I will be sharing my whole b-school journey in my brand spankin new newsletter. 

What happens if I raise more than $2,000?

I will donate anything I raise over $2,000 to Hope Runs, a non-profit NGO working in Kenya and Tanzania, using athletics, education, and social entrepreneurship to empower AIDS orphans.

Questions?

I have since decided that was one of the best decisions that I ever made.

Every morning I open my Google reader and take a peek into the lives of some of my favorite writers, many of them fellow mothers living across the country with their own very different family lives. They share their struggles and questions and troubles and there is a sense of community in this mom blogging space that I haven’t witnessed in other online spaces.

This morning one of my dear blogging friends published an e-book of curated letters from mothers across the country. The story of how this e-book came about is inspiring and amazing and I wrote about it over on She Posts today, go check it out. 

I found this on Raising Cool Kids. A site I have become completely obsessed with.

The night after we pulled his tooth out I heard him crying in his bed. When I asked him what was wrong his tears turned into a full on sob.

“I just want my tooth back in my mouth. I just want everything to go back to normal.”

It took all the strength in the world not to say “me too” and curl up with him and cry.

Things move too fast.

I have been thinking about going back to school. Actually, I have never stopped thinking about going back to school but I think I found a program I might actually want to do. A program that would work with my current life schedule. I am not ready to tell you what the program is but I can tell that if you thought I was crazy for getting a Philosophy degree? You are going to totally lose your mind on this one.

Last weekend I started working on my entrance essay and found myself pouring on to the page words that I didn’t know I had in me. What came out of it was a twenty-page memoir type essay about a story that I have spent the past five years trying to figure out how to tell.

I want to tell more stories.

Wednesday I wore a dress and tights and was probably over-dressed but I really didn’t care. I took the day off and instead of sitting in my office, building beautiful things and talking to myself, I went to see people! People! I decided that  people seeing required tights and a dress. Because sometimes that is just the way it is.

I really want to re-invent this blog, or maybe delete and start a new blog from scratch. Sometimes I imagine that I could be a food blogger, or a craft blogger or maybe a humor blogger. But then I realize that I would have to learn to cook, or sew, or craft. These feelings aren’t just applicable to this blog, its how I think about my life sometimes too. Maybe I can erase and start anew as a baker, or a musician that travels the country, or maybe even a celebrity. Perhaps, I could be more Paris Hilton like?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my life, I really do. I just wish there was more consistency in being me. I wish I had a specific talent or hobby or personality trait that perfectly described me. I try to imagine if I were a character in a book who I would be, but I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t fit into a book because my character would be too messy and all over the place. A good friend of mine describes me as “un-categorically strange,” because I can’t even fit into the traditional definitions of strange. I am my own kind of weird, my own kind character and sometimes that is completely annoying.

Today I am linking up with Just Write.

On a completely unrelated note you can find me over here this week talking about what trends we are going to see in the next year. I am also over here talking about How-To get press for your blog. 

Oh 2011, you were so bi-polar.

I considered creating a 2011 recap post with a bunch of pictures from the year. I started thumbing through Facebook to find pictures I could use and most of them looked something like this:

(last New Years Eve. Yes, those are potato chips in my hand)

And this:

(This was taken in March. I was pretending to be Marilyn Monroe–see the resemblance?)

I am really good at photo opps. Clearly.

This year Aiden and I  moved into our first house and took my first full-time job. I traveled to New York, Chicago, Nashville, Palm Springs, New Orleans and San Diego. I wrote a ton, created more powerpoints than I ever imagined possible and watched over 70 episodes of Gossip Girl. (not an easy task) I grew my own food,  got over my fear of public speaking, ate sea urchin, rode in a petty cab and survived Aiden’s first day of kindergarten. I met Drew Brees, Giuliana Rancic, Bob Harper and sat on Melissa Peterman’s lap. I welcomed old friends who came back home, I threw fits, quit speaking to people, made new friends, made up with old friends and became more demanding than I have ever been in my life.

A couple of months ago I went to Camp Mighty and attended a session that talked about intention and how we fit intention into our lives. It occurred to me that this past year I was not at all intentional with the things that I did and the way that I spent my time. I had absolutely no goals or direction other than survival. I was simply existing, wading through the days and hoping good stuff would happen. (and good stuff did happen)

When I was in college my entire  experience was centered around this larger purpose of graduating college. I had this big lofty goal and all I had to do to achieve it was meet with my guidance counselor twice a year and check courses off of a list. At the end of that list was diploma and with that diploma all of my dreams would come true. Right?

 After college there wasn’t any big lofty goal. I wasn’t the only person who spent their first year after college wading in the un-known—none of my friend’s seemed to have a center purpose for their lives either. Ok, there were a few of them who had long ago made it their goal to become President and were now sitting in the background of episodes of c-span but those are a rare breed.

I haven’t set one single goal and because of that I haven’t had any steps in place that were leading in any kind of direction.

2012 is going to be my year of intention.

My goal for 2012 is to set some goals.

I want to ask for lofty things that probably won’t happen but I can at least start building my life to move in the direction I need it to go.

What are your 2012 goals?

“As a PR professional I often get asked about Klout scores and if I use them when choosing the bloggers that we work with. The answer? Yes and no. When you are choosing bloggers to partner with, there are a number of things that go into that choice, one of which being how big of a reach that blogger has. I would never solely look at someone’s Klout score to determine how much influence they have. With access to Twitter, Facebook and Google+, I can look at a number of statistics that show me how large of a reach a blogger has.So againthe question of whether or not Klout is even necessary comes up. If we have access to all of these different stats, why do we need a tool that grades our social presence?”

Read the rest over at She Posts.

Last summer I met Jill from Founding Moms at Tech Week in Chicago. She was an AMAZING speaker and I came home and internet stalked her made sure that I subscribed to all of her updates. She has a great newsletter for mom entrepreneurs that I think every single one of you should subscribe to. Why am I telling you this? Because I got an issue of her newsletter today and everything she linked to was amazing. (Like an opportunity to pitch your products to Good Morning America)

Anyways, you can subscribe here and then magic will show up in your inbox every now and again.

In case you want to see how amazing of a speaker Jill really is:

What else do I have for you?

• My good friend Claire kicked off 12 Days of Giving today and she is also hosting a Twitter for Good un-conference you should sign up for.
• Also? My client GoGo squeeZ is hosting the 12 days of GoGo this week. Head over there and win fun stuff!
• A couple of weeks ago I went to Camp Mighty and this week some of the videos are up. Go watch!
• Babble announced their top 100 mom bloggers today and so many of my friends are on there. This makes me very happy.
• The BEST thing I found all day? Roseanne is on Twitter. Yes, THE Roseanne. However, she is much more angry than I every remember her being…

I never realized how much I read into things until this past year. In a candid conversation with a friend I translated all of the things he said to me and what I actually heard. Following this conversation he referred to me as slightly neurotic and I  really can’t argue with that.

A few weeks ago I was reading about the way people communicate in emails and it got me thinking…

I grew up with the internet.

The first time I flirted with a boy? Yahoo chat rooms. (Go ahead, judge me) The first time I got asked out on a date? MSN messenger. How did I make plans with friends on the weekend? AIM. I grew up learning how to read virtual body language and taking social cues from the way people wrote, the speed of response and the length of response.  Picture me, at the age of fourteen, hunched over my computer trying to figure out if that well placed “….” was a cue for me to say something smart, or if I had confused them, or if they were nervous, or what the hell “….” was supposed to mean.

When I started using the internet for professional reasons I began communicating with people from different generations. Meaning that many of these people didn’t grow up on MSN messenger and weren’t emailing when they were fifteen years old and their style of communicating through text was incredibly different from mine.

So I spent my days trying to decide if their shortened response was because they were annoyed, or busy or if they just hated emailing. I have spent far too much time stressing over whether or not their strategically placed exclamation mark was a sign of excitement or anger.

Needless to say I have been fascinated with the way that people communicate online for far too long. Which makes me wonder how much the way we communicate via email and IM will change as new generations enter the workforce? Studies show that Gen Z will take communicating via instant messenger over email any day, which makes me wonder how inter-office communication will evolve in the next decade.

What do you think?

How do you approach virtual body language?

Do you stress over the way you respond to emails and the responses you receive?

Am I the only one?