How a Rockstar was made.

Ok Ok not really a Rockstar LOL It's just me...Teash...the one they say rocks and they call Star...It's my journey from zero belief in myself to a list of skills I could never have imagined possible!

It was about 12 years ago where it all started for me. I was a single Mum with one child on the pension and it was challenging. I did not think I had any REAL skills, you know the ones that could offer me employment in anything other than waiting tables, washing dishes or cleaning hotel rooms.  

However a friend of mine saw the potential in connecting me to the world wide web and bought me a very basic computer for $200. To say I was grateful would be an understatement.

Life as I knew it completely changed from that moment. The first thing I did was enrol myself in a distance education course studying Information technology. In my holidays I would enter competitions to win my son the toys that I couldn’t afford to buy him. In 2 years I spent about 9 months of that entering competitions (I did quite well by the way, around $8000 in prizes).

What that gave me was so much more than some cool prizes. There was a massive online community around 20,000 people who were registered in the forum. I was really fired up and passionate about helping people succeed in that space. I would help people in the forum, teach them what they needed to know, make their lives a little easier and I did it because I loved doing it.

It didn’t take long for the team running the site to invite me to join the team and become a forum admin. I absolutely loved doing that and found I had lots of opportunity to use my new skills from my course in IT to assist the users and I loved being a part of the team keeping the site running smoothly, archiving old competition listings and moving things around if they were posted by a user in the wrong place. 

I completed another IT certification that was specifically for IT Support and then moved up again to the next level of certification and almost finished that too (life kinda found a new priority for me just before I finished the last module so I chose to let it go) then when the space was clear to study some more I found The Coaching Institute and enrolled in the Diploma of Life Coaching. 

That was 4 years ago now and at that time TCI did not have much of a presence on Facebook. One weekend a couple of us enthusiasts that were longing for the connection of other coaches gathered together and with the inspired challenge from Sharon Pearson to fill a Facebook Group with 1000 coaches in 3 days we set to work, and yes, by midnight Sunday we had filled the group.

Again I had a platform to do what I loved which was to help people get the most out of the space and connect them with the resources they needed. Within around 6 months of just being me and doing what I loved - helping people, I was invited to join the TCI Team.

Fast forward 4 years and I have been blessed with the incredible mentoring, teaching, opportunities and support of being a team member with TCI and employed to do exactly what I love. My skills have increased exponentially to include successful strategies in Social Media Marketing, Community development, Leadership development, Team Culture development, Brand Culture development, Content curation, production and design. TCI's Social Media presence and the standard it is delivered in is as world class as the service it provides. 

Now the space has opened up for me to do something more, I now have an opportunity to teach people these awesome strategies and help people learn and get the most out of Social Media for their businesses so they too can have outstanding results. 

And so Social Vibes has been born and with this new platform I want to help people create a business environment that cares for their clients no matter how much distance is between them. As the world becomes more digitally focused we must focus on learning how to draw our attention in even closer to serving from the heart even when it cannot be seen, heard or felt in real life. 

Via Social Vibes service I will do that by assisting small business owners to begin their social media platforms with great strategies in place that allow that servants heart to shine through setting up standards in communication and service delivery and bringing a Virtual WOW element in all they do. 

I will teach this without the overuse of tech jargon and make it simple and easy to do, no matter where they’re at, in terms of marketing or IT skills.

Using the hashtag #BuildTheTribe the tips out there are available to find easily if you know how (if you don’t know how to use hashtags or what they are you can find it out in my very simple explanation blog right HERE).

I look forward to making many many lives so much easier. Perhaps even YOUR life :) Please feel free to connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest & Twitter. 

Chat soon!

Hashtags - What are they and what's the fuss?

You’ve heard about them. 

You’ve seen them.

You may have even tried to USE them.

You’ve probably seen them OVERUSED. #afullsentencehashtag

What on earth are they???

Well…let me explain.

I’ll leave the jargon right out of it too.

A hashtag is a word, any word or string of words, that has a # symbol in front of it. 

Anyone can decide which word or topic they want to use as a hashtag. 

You’ll find hashtags used on places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google + and Tumblr (just to name a few) and the idea is that, if you post a post and include the hashtag in it, then when you go to the hashtag stream, you will see all the other posts on, let’s say Facebook, that everyone else has posted, who also used that hashtag in their post.

Let me give you an example to make that even clearer. 

 I use #BuildTheTribe on some of my posts and my mission is to build up a whole bunch of useful tips on how you can build your tribe on social media. So rather than you having to scroll through my Social Vibes page to find all the great tips, all you need to do is type #BuildTheTribe into the search bar at the top of your Facebook page.

Then what you will get is a whole stream of posts that have used that hashtag.

Have a go right now.

See it?

Cool huh? :)

The other way to quickly access the hashtag stream is to click on the hashtag when you see it. Have you noticed that the word is blue when it’s a hashtag? That’s because it has turned into a link, like the same as you would see a link to a page on the internet. 

You will notice there are people you don’t know in that hashtag stream. This is your opportunity to check them out, like a networking event for Social Media :) You might like what they do and want to connect. Boom. Virtual Networking.

Like anything it’s very easy to use once you know how. So go ahead and click on the next hashtag you see..you won’t break the internet! 

Happy Hashtagging folks :)

Life De Fined

It’s amazing how complicated we make answering the ultimate question “What is the meaning of life”.  Take everything away, clothes, houses, technology and imagine yourself as a naked being in amongst the trees, basking in the warmth of the sun, drinking from a river flowing through the valley.  What’s left? What meaning does your life hold now?

It’s really quite simple don’t you think? Isn’t the act of life extremely and blatantly obvious?  First and foremost don’t we simply just LIVE? We have life. We do this by the mere act of breathing and our hearts beating to the pulse of the universal flow of life energy?

So if you were asked...have you truly lived the answer could only be yes - could it not? So - so long as you are breathing and your heart is beating – you are alive! Let’s not complicate the act of LIVING now.

The statement “but have you REALLY lived?” is absurd and is the complication I speak of in the very first paragraph.  Living and having experiences within that life are two completely different things...get it right!

In an instant you have your complication right there. One minute you were in search of the simple answer then BOOM someone had to fill your head with questions that were completely irrelevant!!

Ok back to the point of living.

You’re -

Alive ü check

Breathing ücheck

Pulsating ü check

We have well established the simplicity of Living...it doesn’t take much, but if that’s all there was we would have died out a million years ago of sheer boredom...so what else did life come with?

Enter LOVE *insert awwww here*

Love is an energy within us and you can describe it with all the nice fluffy words that you like but at the guts of it those fluffy descriptive words are a mere expression of your intellect. If you are breathing you are showing yourself love.  In contrast if you are holding your breath and starving yourself of oxygen in order to take your life away from yourself, then you are not showing yourself love.  It’s simple really.

Can you appreciate what I am doing here? It is not a mere trivialisation of life but a simplification in order to inspire humility. 

We get so caught up in worrying about our “life’s purpose” that we take for granted the gift of life in all of its simplicity.

You HAVE life. 

Creating a meaningful experience, an emotional experience, sharing with others, contributing to others...that's all the cool stuff we get to do BECAUSE we have LIFE and the sheer JOY of that, the LOVE we feel, is what inspires us to BE more meaningful in this life.

Thank you for sharing these precious moments of your life experience with me. I trust it has added something inspiring and positive for you to think about...

As always leave me a comment, like the post where I shared on my Facebook page, hey even share it on if you think it will be of interest to others xx

Live Your Dream!