by jackiezimmerman | Sep 20, 2019 | Writing, Online Presence Building
I really want to be your hairstylist. Wait..what I mean is I really want to be like you hairstylist. Let me explain.
Today, for the first time in 8 months, I got a hair cut and long-overdue color update. I’m not proud of the recent state of my hair, but it was the result of making hard choices, like paying bills or having kick-ass hair. The beginning of 2019 was really hard for me. I had no business, no clients and no money but things have turned around and now I can pay bills and have kick-ass hair. I’m really living the dream.
Ok, but why are you talking about your hair?
I really like getting my hair done. I find the whole experience really appealing and exciting. My stylist, Michelle, has been my friend for about 8 years and I met her while doing a half marathon for the Crohn’s and Colitis foundation. We’re both Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients, and I like visiting with her, talking about her family and talks about our diseased butts. It’s just what we do. I love having my hair colored and washed, and Michelle massages my head and I think I’ve almost proposed to her a few times while sitting in her chair. I always leave looking far better than when I walked in and today I realized that I also leave feeling really confident. I’m confident about how I look, which makes me feel good, which makes me even more confident and so on. It’s not just about having good hair, because if you’ve ever seen me in the wild, you know that I can’t really do my own hair and I’m sure Michelle is embarrassed by what I do on a daily basis. Anyway, getting my hair done is about the experience. It’s about the relationship I have with Michelle, and the confidence I have that lasts well after my appointment. I know I look good and I wish like hell I had a presentation or something to give right now. Instead, I’m just going to take 10 selfies to post on Instagram.
Ok, but really…you’re still talking about your hair…
Here’s my point. Finally. I want the relationships I have with my clients to be like the one I have with Michelle. I want to know about their lives, to create friendships with them, and most importantly, I want them to feel like I make them look good. When I write an enewsletter for a client, I want her to be confident about how it will be perceived by the people on her list. When I design a website for a client, I want her to know her business looks good and to feel like she can snag any potential client she meets. The relationships I built with my clients are more than transactional and I hope working with me is an experience that they want to keep doing.
Shameless plug: If you’d like to talk about how we can create a relationship like this, shoot me a message and let’s talk about how we can do cool stuff together.
Extra Shameless Comment: But seriously, look how good my hair looks!
by jackiezimmerman | Aug 6, 2019 | Writing
I’ve been arguing with my husband lately. You see, he keeps telling me how impressive it is that my business is doing well and I keep telling him how unimpressive it is. I know… he sounds awful, right?! ?
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by jackiezimmerman | Mar 21, 2019 | Writing
The year was 2006. It was before social media was huge and sharing pictures of food became the norm. It was a simpler time.
I was finishing up my undergraduate degree in Graphic Design and in my final semester, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Back in my day (2006), there wasn’t really a way to share this information with everyone I knew at one time and I’m not even really sure I wanted to share it with everyone. I was 21 and had zero people in my life I could talk to about MS, so I started a blog where I could essentially talk to myself. I had no idea what a pivotal moment this would be in my life.
I began writing about my life, fears, struggles and everything else about living with MS at a young age…and with the wonders of the internet, other people read it. In 2009, when I was also diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I decided to up my blogging game and started sharing way too much information about my life with UC. And people read that one too. I had developed a way of sharing my story that was open and it was here that my “voice” was born. I prided my writing on being candid and embarrassed myself regularly on the internet for the greater good. I was honest, and vulgar and shared too much information but it was all me, and people liked it.
People liked it so much that other websites started asking me to write for them, which was mind-blowing at the time. People wanted to pay me to talk about this stuff? Ok, sign me up. For years I’ve been writing articles for various health sites about living with MS and Inflammatory Bowel Disease and over these years I began to write for a larger audience. My articles became less about me personally and more about general information regarding living with chronic illness. It’s all valuable information, but my tone and my voice had gotten lost. The sass and personality that helped me gain notoriety in the first place had gotten toned down in order to keep my pieces appealing to larger audiences.
It wasn’t until I decided to start Queen of GSD, that I realized how lost my voice actually was. I wrote all the copy for this website and it sounded stale and generic. It wasn’t me but it was the way I had learned to write. I was trying to appeal to the masses, to not offend and to be informative because that’s what I was used to. I remember being very frustrated with myself. Why the hell couldn’t I just write how I talk? Why was this so hard?
It took revision after revision to finally find my sass again. I had to talk out loud to other people about what I wanted to do, and who I wanted to work with in order to see what I would say off the tongue. It was weirdly like interviewing myself. It was in one of these verbal vomit sessions that I actually came up with Queen of GSD.
“I just get shit done. I’m like the queen of getting shit done”.
At that moment, when I decided to have “shit” in the title of my business, I knew I was back. It’s not just that I like to swear or that swearing is the brand I wanted to create, but it was that I had given myself the permission to run the risk of offending someone, while simultaneously opening myself up to the people who I really want to work with. And the result is that I work with women who are like-minded, sassy, powerful and direct. The women who like what they read here, like working with me because this is really who I am. I’m honest, I’m good at what I do, I swear, I have typos and I have grammatical errors if Grammarly doesn’t pick them up.
Don’t get me wrong… I still totally write for those other sites because duh, money. But I have to admit… I feel like I’m having a Brett Farve-like come back. It feels damn good to rediscover my voice in my writing, which is giving me the confidence I need to keep kicking ass.
