SheHive Partner, Lisa Schmidt, started out as a writer. Then came along a boy, a change of plans, and Lisa soon found herself in law school. After years as a successful litigator, Lisa returned to her creative roots last year and formed Your Law Geek, a small business providing legal research and writing for other lawyers. 

​This November, Lisa is taking a month off from her business to focus her efforts on another creative passion - writing a speculative fiction book. (Think: vampires!) Lisa sat down with us on Facebook Live to talk about NaNoWriMo, her month-long sabbatical and the importance of women's voices in storytelling. Click below to check out the interview!

Yesterday, SheHive Partner, Heather Coleman-Voss, sat down to talk with us about Covid and Careers on Facebook Live. Heather is a career coach and small business owner who, after contracting Covid-19 in April and battling extreme fatigue, random rashes, and neuropathy for five months, is finally feeling well enough to get back to a full client load.

​Check out what Heather has to say about living with Covid and, from her perspective as a career coach, what this pandemic means for your job search and career aspirations.

Last week Jane Pierce, the SheHive’s resident intuitive, sat down with us for a special Halloween edition of our Partner Spotlight on Facebook Live to talk all things "woogity" (the SheHive term for anything spiritual or energetic we can't explain) - including “the Pissy Curse.”

Jane is a psychic reader, ordained Tzaddi minister and Reiki Master who has been teaching tarot, astrology, and energy work since the 1990s after a near-death experience during a miscarriage enhanced her psychic gifts. Jane uses her decades of experience with tarot and astrology to show the deeper patterns that shape lives and empower people to create a more intentional future.

Click below to watch her interview.

This week we had a chance to interview SheHive Partner, Jessica Van Valkenburgh, on Facebook Live about learning to love your body. Jessica wants to help women break the painful cycles of negative body image, which are considered normal in our society. Jessica is an advocate for women to love and accept their bodies and their whole selves. She works to inspire a different approach to self-love - beginning at home in our bodies, hearts, minds, and souls - and to expose the powerful connection between movement, breath, mindfulness and feelings for healing. 

Who gets to define “busy” in modern professional life? What is the threshold beyond which you are “too busy” to take on a new project? And what counts as “busy” anyway? Can you be “busy” simply because you are not working?
​
Freelancers and small business owners struggle with the feast-or-famine nature of business all the time. When a client asks if you are busy it can be tempting to drop everything and make space for paying work. But “busy” in this context almost always carries a sub-context. “Busy” really means “doing work for someone else.” It rarely means “taking personal time”, “focusing on yourself” or even just “off the clock.” Self-employment doesn’t come with a clock. In the struggle to develop a successful business margins are thin, when they exist at all.

When I shifted my practice entirely virtual and stopped taking litigation cases, part of the long-term strategy was to allow me time to write for myself – to put together downloadable how-to guides that generate passive income, and eventually finish one of the speculative fiction novels I have been working on for years. But nature abhors a vacuum. I quickly found my clients had more than enough work to fill my schedule most of the time. When they didn’t, creativity fatigue would set in along with feelings that I wasn’t “doing enough” for my business. As a result, no “personal” writing has been getting done. 

That’s because I never consider myself “busy” when working on or for myself. Clients can interrupt personal writing projects because what they need brings in money. Valuing my own work is much harder.

Here’s the thing, though. When you get mired in everyone else’s priorities, you miss out on your own best life. If you let others decide whether you are busy with the right things, you (and I) will never put yourself first and meet your goals.
​
Starting next Monday, I’m going to be offering a writing workshop called “Chasing Your Tale: Building Your Writer’s Toolkit.” It’s based on the lessons I’ve learned researching fiction writing while trying to break the habit of letting others define “busy” and put myself first.

So if writing a book is somewhere on your vision board, or if you just want to learn some tools to tell better stories, come join me every other Monday from 8/17 through 10/26 at 6:30 pm EDT. Let’s be busy together and put the focus back on ourselves.

Lisa Schmidt,
SheHive Partner & Attorney, Schmidt Law Services