It turns out it is possible to spend a long weekend in Adelaide. But, no matter how many beers you drink or how many songs you sing, it is quite tiring.
Anyway, in going to great lengths (literally) to prove this fact I did of course ignore this blog. Now, somewhat unsure whether it is dinner time or breakfast, I present a mish mash of stuff that has happened recently. Normal business will be resumed next week (probably).
Fearless Fridays
Business consultant and personal coach, Anna Lundberg, interviewed me for her excellent series Fearless Fridays. It's always strange to talk about my journey of life re-design, especially when I am in it and still unsure of how it will end up.
You can (and watch) read the interview here: Fearless Fridays: From burnout to a better way.
A new business
For the individual, one of the challenges of blogging or setting up and running a web site is the sheer volume of work, often mundane, that is required to try to make it work. In late 2016 I set about trying to alleviate this by farming out some of the work to a virtual assistant.
In the first few months of this outsourcing odyssey my experience was very negative but these days I am trying to find the positive in everything I do. In this case it actually led me to believe I could set up a business that would provide what I was looking for. Not that it doesn't exist, but I just figured I might be able to do it better.
The result is that my business bizee.co pivotted in the second half of 2017 to start providing virtual personal assistants to individuals and small business owners to help them grow by taking away the repetitive tasks. The premise is that any one running a small enterprise, whether a physical business or a blog could better spend his or her time focusing on what they do best and not necessarily on the admin side of things.
It's early days but we are working with a variety of clients who can benefit from my personal experience and the great team of VAs that we are putting together!
New articles
I have written a couple of articles with very differing themes. I was very grateful to be asked to write a piece about blogging for the excellent Business of Adventure web site.
Still in the wake of our family adventure in Serbia & Montenegro this summer the Serbian online and print publication Blic, asked me to contribute to a piece about travelling with children. It recently appeared in print and will also be online soon. I will publish an English version soon on this site.
Would you like to write a post?
And talking of new articles, in January 2018 we will start a series of guest posts. So if there is anyone out there who would like to write a post for The Armchair Mountaineer, then get in touch. I would love to feature stories of transformation - tales that demonstrate the power the outdoors in making life happier and healthier.