I woke up Saturday morning to a sick computer. Upon calling my technician, I heard those dreaded words: “You’ve got a big problem. You’ve got to bring it in.”

Most of you can relate to that feeling of having to take your computer to the “doctor.” Dread (how serious is it going to be), losing communication (no email contact), information loss (I need that phone number), and work downtime, especially when it’s your livelihood. Even though it was a weekend, there were things that needed to be done.

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In this blog I continue my discussion about how to easily capture a casual discussion of friends and relatives using a handheld recorder.

A good way is if you place the recorder in the center of the table or area where the speakers are talking. This works well unless you’re trying to cover a large area. If it is a large room or there are other conflicting conversations or noise going on, there may still be some unclear words.

Another good way is if the speaker(s) holds the recorder to their mouth. These last two ways are probably going to be the more likely ways to record in a large gathering. Try as much as possible to have the speaker speak “to” the recorder, rather than have their voice turned away from the recorder.

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One of the easiest ways to capture your memoirs was related in my last blog, and that is recording family or friends as they are exchanging stories with each other. I always carry a hand held recorder with me, especially at family gatherings or reunions, in order to take advantage of these opportunities.

A caveat here. Of course you know it is illegal to record anyone unless they know and approve; however, I don’t think recording a general family/friend conversation would fall into that category as long as you don’t plan to use it for malicious purposes, and unless some in the group strenuously objects.

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We need to satisfy our curiosity. Aren’t you sometimes curious about what your mother or father were like when they were children? Have you asked one of their siblings?

I have an elderly aunt and during the last time that I saw her, I asked if she would talk to me about what my father was like when he was a young boy. She said she didn’t want to talk about those times. I didn’t want to upset her so didn’t insist, but I will forever regret not trying to at least get her to do it surreptitiously by asking her questions and recording it.

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Videos and audios are also great for capturing our memoirs, and I’m all for doing those as well. But because systems become outdated, viewing them can become difficult or impossible. In my book I reference how my husband’s parents made a wonderful video documentary of their life, but we can no longer view it without an expensive conversion from one media to another.

For some reason something happened today which made me remember something my grandmother and I used to share. When I was a young child, she used to like for me to “do” her hair. That meant curling it in pin curls with bobby pins all over her head with no rhyme or reason. She used to say to me, “I don’t care how the back looks. I can’t see it. Just make the front look good.”

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The difference between a memoir and an autobiography is that a memoir is a collection of your memories, while an autobiography is a detailed, chronological narration of your life. To write your memoirs, you are documenting those things which you remember and they don’t necessarily have to be in sequence—and you don’t need to document everything. Only those things that you want to pass on to others.

It seems to me that in this modern day and age, while there are plenty of documentaries being made, they are not necessarily about the ordinary, everyday lives that we live. A lot of this history is being lost.

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Have you ever thought about how many roles you’ve held in your lifetime? For a start, your very first role in life was as a son or daughter. At the same time you were likely a grandchild, possibly a brother or sister and niece or nephew.

As you grew older you added others, such as girlfriend, boyfriend, student, athlete, pre-teen, teenager, etc. Then you added your career designations, husband, wife, military, school, college, perhaps divorced, traveler, singer, and on and on. There are thousands of designations that you could have been throughout your lifetime and each of them played a role in making up your memoirs.

To the right of this blog you will see the cover of my latest book, “How to Write Your Memoir: Three Simple Steps.” In it I suggest that one of the ways to start writing your memoirs is to think of all the roles you have played in your life, their importance, and start writing about one or more of them. You will be amazed at how simple that will be and how soon you will have a collection of memoirs to document your life.

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For the past five years I have been talking about creating information products and how they can benefit your business. Nothing has ever been truer than in today’s market. We all really need information products.

When consumers go into the super market they read the labels before buying. They want information. When they purchase clothes, they read the labels. When they purchase a T V, a phone, a computer, anything, they expect to have information about it.

The same is true of your services. No matter what they are—selling insurance (what kind of insurance do you sell?), being a coach (what kind of coach are you and what specifically do you do?), providing bookkeeping services, virtual assistant, project manager, owning a restaurant—it do

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We all talk about it, we all fret about it and it catches all of us in its elusive thread at some time or other, some more than others. I’m afraid I’m one of those who gets caught in it more than others and before I know it I’ve over extended myself to the point of overwhelm.

So, what has been eating up my time for the past few months?

For one thing I had committed to doing teleseminars for my new membership site.  After starting them I soon realized that I needed more experience in the actual doing of teleseminars. I knew how, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I lacked the experience of actually having done it. Read more

On February 16th, 4:00 PM PST, Patsy Bellah will interview Connie Ragen Green as part of the Transcription Riches membership site.  This interview and the one on March 2 with Gail Rosenthal will be the last two that non members will be able to attend free.

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