Before you ask me, “Helen are you a Business Addict?” let me quickly add, “no, no I’m not.” [Shock, horror!]

Instead, you can call me an “Experience Hunter”.

Hope I haven’t burst some image you had of me about some hard core Gordon Gecko business person, walking the streets, closing deals and hustling for the next dollar.  For everyone who’s read my thoughts on hustling, you know where I stand in my recent blog post Everybody Do The Hustle and thankfully, I’m not the only one who thinks that way as Jason Zook writes in Why You Shouldn’t Hustle.

Seriously though, I’m not here to talk about hustling again because frankly, I don’t want to waste my time.

Like the next person, of course I worry where the next dollar will come from but I’m not going to bust a gut, work all hours like a maniac and push my body and mind to the limit. Frankly, there’s more to life and when you’re frazzled, you cannot take the time to take in, experience, wonder, observe, participate, contribute, ask, engage, reflect or grow with the experiences that life hands you.

Sometimes we just need to let life happen to us to make us question how and why we’re reacting to it and if it’s achieving our purpose.

Okay, that got a bit heavy so instead, I’d love to share what I got up to today.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet in person the two ladies Fiona Redding and Lauren Bartley who host a podcast I listen to every week called the Business Addicts.  Fiona and Lauren put the call out to their community to come along to the NAB Village and co-work for the day.  I decided to go along to meet them in person but also learn more about what others were doing and hopefully, build some new networks who can help me with my work and website.

Even though I received some bad news during the day that put a dampener on things, I was thankful that the community members were so open and sharing of their knowledge to help me.  Some of them even spoke a different language when they spoke about their websites throwing terms like SEO, AdWords and analytics – all foreign to me as a long time blogger who just likes to write for the love of writing and share experiences openly.

It did get me thinking that I may be missing something here after spending years writing about my personal learning journeys through different social media in that I wasn’t writing for particular audiences – I was writing it for myself.  After all, I was using blogging as a ‘sense making’ tool and not a marketing tool.

So it brought up once again the questions I had swirling around in my mind about how I’m using these tools; how others can use them and for what purpose.

People can use these tools for their own professional and personal development (which is my focus); but where do you draw the line between what is learning and what is marketing?

How do employees in organisations draw the line on using these for their own development versus how they use the tools to market products and services and advocate their company to customers?

These are the questions that constantly keep mulling about in my head.  If anyone has any answers, be sure to let me know as I need some clarity.

So here is a short video on what I did today.

And my first ever Facebook Live video!