Become fearless doing the doing

: In the past I held positions of responsibility and always had others who did the doing things for me. I used to supervise personnel; I tended to be in charge of my own work unit, and my own time. I once attended a job interview where I was asked by members of the interview panel how would I organize and set up a telephone conference. I replied that I would email/telephone the IT guys with dates and times and have them do it. To my horror, I learned that apparently I was the one responsible for this task and would have to arrange this telephone conference myself. Gee that sucked! Needless to say I immediately lost interest in the job (nor did I get it, for some strange reason). Whenever I retell this story I still manage to laugh at my reaction “What, I have to organize what?” Thank goodness for my attitude readjustment! Over the years I’ve had many job and career changes and with each role someone would always be available who I could count on to help me out. Always, without fail! Never having to worry about all that other ‘stuff’ kept me a prisoner of my own comfort zone. There was always someone else who did that ‘stuff’ while I got on with other work I was responsible for, there was always a safety net. Back to the advertising leaflets, I tried, with the help of others to find personnel to do that ‘stuff’ (handing out leaflets while I would be doing something else I was responsible for) for me. I quite simply couldn’t find anyone who was okay with doing ‘stuff’ for me. Then an amazing thing happened. As I was telling my sad and pitiful tale to a friend of mine, my friend cheerfully offered to help out. I was stunned and thought to myself “if my friend is willing to go out on a limb for me, what was my hang up? The hang up was easy to identify. It was the fear of doing something for the first time. It was once again time to step outside my comfort zone. Sigh. After I gave myself a stern silent talking to, like “What on earth is up with you?” “You know you’ve been running away from having to do this that’s why now you have to do this, you need this experience!” “Becoming fearless will set you free!” Reply to self, “easy for you to say!” Once I worked out exactly what my strategy would be in overcoming this fear I became peaceful with a new attitude of “Let’s do this, it’ll be fun and you never know how many nice people I’ll meet today?” and “This is the perfect excuse and trade off to do lunch in town with my friend” Remember back to when you first stepped outside your comfort zone. Maybe you were scared and fearful because you were unaware of what would happen next or you were fearful of being rejected by others of what you had to offer (for example: advertising leaflets)? Now recall the second, third (or more) time you did the same thing. What was your experience like after several times of doing the same thing? My wild assumption is that you learned something new every time and you adjusted your strategies accordingly. Your mind remembers all that you do (whether consciously or unconsciously). The more you do something outside your comfort zone, the easier it will become to adjust to your new comfort zone. Whenever you try on something new know that it does get easier with time and as you continue to learn, grow and as you continue doing, you’ll become an expert before you know it. Michaela Scherr

Tips for an excellent book page layout that get noticed

People are nowadays fascinated with color and creative designs. The more attractive and colorful an object is, the higher is the possibility for a person of buying an object. So if one even plans to write a book, much has to be considered about the layout of the book page for the enhanced sales of the book. First and foremost, one has to choose the right font style for the body type of the book layout. This is very important for both the appearance of the book and for the transference of files for printing purposes. There are numerous fonts to choose from for the book, but the most common fonts are the Old style fonts that are easily readable for large body copy like Times New Roman and Baskerville. While creating the layout of the page, remember to use a contrast font for the heading. Most of the times, children’s books are set in a slab serif font. With regards to printing of the book, it is very important to ensure that all the fonts that are chosen are resident in the Windows font folder; including the italicized and bold versions. This is because some of the fonts may not be installed into the computer, thus resulting in the difficulty of printing of the material. To avoid any complications in such matters, it is better to use common book fonts like Garamond and Times New Roman. The next thing to remember about the layout of the book page is that for the page layout to be visually appealing, and to keep the readers interested in it, it is necessary to have contrast on the pages. Use contrasting type for headings and keep them different from the body type. Make it a point to choose one justification for the book, and to stick to it. The center justification is considered to give the book layout a formal look. Left justification produces a more conservative professional look while full justification gives the book layout a clean and orderly look. Creativity always brings success to arts. In the art of writing a book, creating a unique visual element that you like, to be repeated throughout the book, gives the book a special look. This visual element could be a decorative ornament under each heading or a fancy drop cap. Organization is very important in a page layout. So make it a point to organize your type properly by grouping things together that relate to each other. The next point to consider in a page layout is the addition of a picture or art on a page. The difference between using no pictures and a single picture is much greater than the difference between using one picture and several pictures on a page. Having a picture as a whole page background proves to be very attractive. However, the real challenge here lies in finding a picture that fits with having text on parts of it. Never compromise on the aspect of interference between structures in the picture and the text. The classic layout of a combination of text and a large picture on a page is functional, but proves to be quite boring in terms of layout. Instead, putting the picture in the center of the page and having the text waved around looks more attractive. Having a small picture on a page too is a great idea as this picture may add a lot of attraction to a text page if used wisely. The picture, preferably black and white, has to be a small object with a message. These pictures can be chosen from a wide range of hundreds of thousands of professional stock photos found at picture agencies like AgeFotoStock and Alamy. Whatever photo is chosen, make sure that there is a lot of white space on the page to let the reader give their eyes some rest. Make sure that the layout of the page is the same for each page of the book, like in all pages being left centered, right centered or centered. This is because if you mix designs, the perspective client will consider you to be unprofessional. Avoid clashing of colors of the design and the font of the page. Keep the number of colors, and fonts used in the page layout at a minimum to avoid clashing of the different colors and fonts. And most important of all, think and plan out the page layout before actually attempting to do the page layout. Using all these methods will indeed produce a page layout that will be tempting and interesting to the perspective reader of the book!