Product Launches, Angry Customers, Sick Kids, Oh MY!

The daily life of a work at home mom can be called, at times, well, overwhelming. I’ve been working on a new product for a while now (Backlinking 101 for those of you in the Internet Marketing industry).  Today is launch day. Wouldn’t you know, everything that could go wrong with this launch started going wrong.  I couldn’t get the membership software to work the way I wanted it to, the buttons weren’t playing nice with the rest of the pieces. I was getting really frustrated on Friday.

I decided to just let it go, against every grain of my being (which says, keep hammering that square peg into a round hole until you make the peg round and it fits dangit!) I decided to take the weekend off. I didn’t work on the launch, or anything for the site all weekend. I was prepared to come to the table Monday morning with fresh eyes, and a renewed spirit. Pump it all out, and be ready. set. go. for Tuesday morning at 9am CST (the designated or randomly chosen by me time to launch this thing)

Wouldn’t you know, over the weekend I managed to accidentally make one of my customers mad. She left the program. I was pretty upset about the whole thing, and then I wake up at 5am with my poor little kiddo moaning in her room. Beat red, 102.4 temp, aching all over. She can’t go to school. Dang. Just lost my two and a half hours of silence.

At this point I get her set up with some Elderberry Concentrate and a movie, and start “working”. Although my mind was in a million other places, and I couldn’t figure out what I needed to do. The language the software instructions were using was English I’m sure, but really looked like Greek to me.

I finally threw my hands up in despair and sent out a cry for help.

I realized the only thing I REALLY wanted to be doing right then and there, in that moment was snuggling on the couch with my sick kid. Of course I wanted my product to launch on time. I’d told some people it was going live on Tuesday. I seriously value dependability. AND all I wanted to do was snuggle with my little one.

I decided to send a message to my masterful tech person who has helped me set up membership sites in the past. Asked her to give me a shout when she got my message, I could use some help. After that, I just let it go. If the product didn’t launch on time, it just didn’t. I would just have to explain, and get over it.

Hanna and I snuggled up on the couch, watching The Jeff Corwin experience (Yay Netflix!), and shortly she was sound asleep. Once she was sleeping I got up and low and behold, there was an email from my angry customer. We started talking, and things started fixing themselves. It really was just a big misunderstanding. TIP: offhanded joking tone does not always translate in text… just sayin’.

Then I got a response from my tech person, who was able to fairly quickly make things work correctly. I received an affiliate payment from a program that hasn’t paid me anything for months, and the payment totally covered the payment to my tech person. By the time Hanna woke up, everything was on course, and running smoothly.

Yesterday morning started out like crap. I felt like crap. I was unmotivated, really didn’t care about work at all, and didn’t really want to do it at all… which is really unlike me.

Those days don’t happen very often, and I’m really glad I realized (with the help of a couple good twitter friends) I should listen to how I’m feeling. When I did I was able to take action that changed the flow and energy of the day. Taking that 45 minutes to lay down with Hanna (which was really the only thing I wanted to do at that moment) allowed other things to start to flow in.

I, personally, will almost always just keep hammering away, no matter how I feel or what I’d really RATHER be doing. BUT it’s experiences like this one that show me, over and over again, if I can just take a step back, and do what I really feel pulled to do, it can change the rest of the day. Where I could have just kept banging and banging on things, I followed my inspiration, and everything came together smoothly and easily.

What about you? Do you follow your inspiration or do you keep pushing forward, trying to force things in to place? I’d love to hear your stories about following your inspiration. You can tell me in the comments or even send them to me via the contact page. I’d love to start sharing more readers stories!