A birthday is a time to celebrate and reflect.
This month we celebrating Lifeshiift’s birthday; reflecting on its growth since the website went live one year ago. Hard to remember that up to that point it was just an idea that I had about creating a community to support women as they make transitions in their lives.
The idea for Lifeshiift was born out of my experience of selling my business and losing my husband in the same year. While I had always planned to find meaning in my life beyond my hectic consulting career, the search for what would bring that meaning started in earnest that pivotal year.
The Goal Came First
As I struggled with finding what would give my own life meaning, I realized that my search, while individual was not unique. Many of my friends were finding their own paths some with real purpose and others that just seemed to shrink into themselves. There had to be a need to find purpose.
Lifeshiift became my goal – a virtual community for women going through transitions where they could share their experiences, frustrations and wins with other women experiencing the same. After that the task was to really understand what the brand was and to make it a reality.
Birth
At birth, Lifeshiift was a website that showcased the brand. There was also a professionally made video that I called my Origin Story that explained how Lifeshiift came to be. Beyond that, there was a blog, a nascent Youtube channel and Instagram/Facebook sites. We attracted traffic to our website by creating a mailing list that included friends, family and anyone who said “ gee that’s a great idea”.
Since then, we have learned a ton, consumed “how to” videos, made mistakes and discovered as we went. In the last year Lifeshiift has:
- Found a talented team – virtual assistant, web editor, video editor
- Posted 23 videos – with a total of more than 2.4K views
- Posted 11 blogs with hundreds of views each
- Created 99 Instagram posts some with thousands of views
- Documented adventure travels
- Hosted 2 virtual events with inspiring speakers
- Created a professional email list
- Received thoughtful advice from our subscribers
Going forward we want to expand our reach so that we can inspire more women like us who are lifeshifting.
What I Have Learned
One of the great outcomes from reflections is that it helps you see things in perspective. Some of the lessons learned or relearned in this first year of Lifeshiift are:
- Measure the gains not the gaps – while I had some very high expectations about the growth of subscribers that were not reached, I can also see how much we have achieved in this year.
- Stay flexible – while this is always true no matter what you are trying to accomplish, this principle could not be truer when you are developing something that you have never done before. We tried many different avenues. Some did not work. We kept what worked and dropped what did not.
- Ask for help – we have a small team that works on Lifeshiift with me and we are all learning every day. Beyond that, we have had many generous advisors who have helped to guide us through all the challenges of growing Lifeshiift. In addition, Lifeshiifters have generously provided feedback and thoughts about how to make things better.
- Learn to recognize opportunities even when they are disguised – at our last event, our speaker Toni Sharman mentioned a book called Take the Next Step – The Bridge Will Be There. This sums up how important inspiration is to taking action. When Lifeshiifters did not comment on posts on our website and social media, we decided to put them in the same virtual room in an event. What happened was magic. Participants shared experiences and challenges that they were facing.
Now it is your turn to reflect on Lifeshiift. What have you learned from Lifeshiift? What do you think we should know that will make Lifeshiift better?
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