I have been a fan of trying to define myself for years. I so closely identified with my ISTJ-ness (Meyer-Briggs) that I created a blog version of the test (bloginality). It just makes me feel more firm in myself when I understand ME.

I don't know why I was surprised when Tara made the suggestion to me that defining myself would help my business. (Seriously, her ideastorming *is* magic, if you need some help, she's your girl!) Idea being, if I knew more about myself, I could sell to my Right People better.

Enter the book Style Statement: Live by Your Own Design. After reading through the text portion of the book, I spent the last week just going over the worksheets and writing in my little black composition book every evening. When the questions got hard to answer, I set it down and waited until I was inspired again. I wrote a lot of words that I associated with myself.

In the end, I came up with a result that resonates with me, and gives me a style to enhance how I already dress, communicate, and express my personality and my business.

Structured Fanciful

That means that 80% of my personality follows the guiding principle of Structured, and the other 20% (or creative portion) of my personality is Fanciful.

Structured was really a no brainer, once I saw the word and the synonyms, it captured my orderly-ness, my love for architectural elements that are lined up, and my need to have lists that follow the pattern of the previous lists.

Fanciful was a little harder. My tagline of "giggly geeky girl" had me wanting to capture the girly-ness but without calling myself Feminine (which has a lot of nurturing associated with it) or Romantic (true, but not quite encapsulating it all) or Designed (which seems to imply fashionable and trendy, where I have my own flow). Once I saw the word Fanciful and looked it up in the thesaurus, it fit.

What will I do with this information? It will be my guiding principle when creating for the kadyellebee shop... but I think I've already followed this look without knowing it! Just embracing it seems so natural now, making lists with curlies in the sidebar (and using words like "sidebar" :wink: ) are ME, and making it my standard is okay.

Give yourself a moment to consider what your guiding principle is. Trust me, it's a fun ride!

It was sad to see the news today: Vox is closing September 30, 2010.  I used Vox as my primary blog for almost 3 years, managing my moblogging and media consumption.  Plus, I worked for Six Apart during the time Vox was launching and growing.

I'm moving my posts and photos over to my old TypePad blog: kdlb-pad.  This way, I have all those archives somewhere.

I still must figure out what to do with my media tracking - I loved that about Vox, having date-managed Books, Movies, and Music.  I'm using Goodreads now for my books, but I never pulled in any of the Vox stuff.

bye-bye, Vox, I'll miss you.