What's New, April?
The first day of the month is a fantastic time for a fresh start. It’s a clean, new number: one. Like a mini-New Year’s resolution, you can resolve today to be or do more of whatever you want in its solid, one-sy newness.
As I run my business and watch it grow, I’m finding it more important than ever to nurture my own well-being. I can better serve my clients. I can feel better as I work. I can project more positivity. I can. I can. I can. And you can, too.
Personal improvement should be a very real component of any actionable business plan. Write it in there, along with how you’re increasing revenue, amping up your marketing efforts and crushing the competition. A commitment to continual improvement keeps our minds unhinged from predictability. We’re more flexible and nimble. As beings unrestrained from the restrictive confines of stable mediocrity, we’re free.
The stale bread becomes crunchy breakfast toast. The unwatered flowers become decorative art. The gloomy skies break from spurts of morning grey and clear to the promise of sunshine.
In the name of interminable improvement to better our bodies and minds, here are a few resources to consider as you turn this blank page of April to transform this month into the springtime of a shiny, new you:
Facebook Blueprint
To be completely honest, I had no idea Facebook has a library filled with dozens of FREE courses you can take, but here we are. Facebook Blueprint training classes are conveniently labeled by level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and can be taken whenever you have the time. Topics include: Simplifying Lead Generation in a Cross-Device World; Closing the Deal with Conversions; Moving Hearts and Minds with the Traffic Objective; Bringing Your Business to Life with Stories; and more. My suggestion: Tomorrow morning as you sip your coffee and check emails, hold off on your inbox clearing for a few minutes and take a class that interests you. If there’s a compendium of free learning sent to us from the Facebook folks themselves, we might as well use it, right?
Udemy
I discovered Udemy by accident, several months ago when I had it in my mind to learn InDesign. Udemy is an online learning platform that offers (as per their official site) more than 100,000 classes and yes, the InDesign package is awesome. I took the “Adobe InDesign CC – Essentials Training Course,” which includes 77 lectures (a total of 6.5 hours of step-by-step instruction) and costs only $10.99. It’s kind of a no-brainer. Plus, they have a huge variety of things you can learn. If you’ve been wanting to strum a guitar on the beach this summer while onlookers listen to you play the sweet, sweet sounds of Jack Johnson, they even have acoustic guitar for beginners.
Canva
And speaking of design, if you haven’t yet explored the wonderful world of Canva, an incredible tool to create professional pieces, no graphic design degree required. The platform was created by Melanie Perkins in 2007, a design student frustrated with the clunkiness of the professional design programs like InDesign and Photoshop. Why couldn’t design be for all? She asked, in silent thoughts of gorgeous layouts and funky fonts. And so it was pondered, so it should be done. Today, Canva provides layouts for practically any design need, from a printed poster to an Instagram story. It’s free to use but the membership does have its perks (additional layouts, the ability to create a brand kit for team members to use, etc.) In the name of learning something new, I highly recommend checking it out.
Anyway, just a few thoughts on a sunny first day of April. On the subject of what's new, I’ll leave you with this final quote from my endless inspiration, Andy Warhol:
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”