Alicia Andersen

What No One Knows

I'm going to do things a little differently with this About Me than I normally would.  I'm going to change my Bio and give you the full story, because, well, I'm tired of editing it.  You can know as much about what brought me to right here as you can stand to read.  I title it, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

What Made Me Open Up

Last week, on March 5, 2009, a gas explosion downtown levelled the gallery that shows my husband's work and killed a good friend of ours.  I'm still reeling.  We're lucky that he wasn't there, because he very well could have been. And not only did most of our income come from sales made there, but my husband had poured so much of himself into it, remodeling and networking, in the last two years.  It's the 3d big door to slam in our faces financially since my son was born, but even more, we lost someone who mattered.  I sat at her funeral yesterday and thought, it's time.  It's time to open up and let the chips start falling where they may.

I had it all.

I had the most amazing childhood I could ask for, until I was 10.  My parents were madly in love, we lived in the most beautiful place I've ever been-Alaska-and we lived a very comfortable upper middle class life.  Instead of trying to always have more, my father instead tried to protect us from having too much, so we lived in a balance of abundance: love, beauty, family, outdoors, art, food, laughter, with a sense of plenty and restraint.

He did this because my mother came from a wealthy and innovative family, and we were blessed for the combination.  Holidays were magical, friends were plentiful: camping trips miles from nowhere accessed only by boats laden with steaks and pancake breakfasts, christmas skating parties followed by hot chocolate by the fire, plays and musicals, and trips down to my grandparents ranch.  This is where I learned what abundance is, and without it, I don't know if I would have made it through.

When I was 10, my mom's increasing erratic behavior led her to divorce my dad.  It was a nightmare slide into schizophrenia for all of us.  Things looked normal on the outside, but were horribly wrong on the inside.  All of the things which had seemed full of life, that money could provide, were empty.  Her money allowed her for 15 years to do whatever she wanted, never having to face her illness, despite two forced hospitalizations that were desperate attempts to get her help.  .

So when I was 10 I began to hate money. 

The rejection and confusion from our friends pushed me outside the track of what everyone's supposed to do.  I wanted nothing do do with life as everyone else was living it, it seemed like a joke and a shell.  I was a straight-A student and didn't care.  I wanted to go to where people were having fun.  So while my classmates went to Harvard, Yale, and MIT, I went to Boulder, Colorado, where I promptly dropped out to travel, mountaineer, and ski.  I ultimately landed in Aspen, Colorado, where my dad grew up.  Inside, I was a mess.  All I wanted was to live a plain, happy life connected to the only thing that gave me any peace...the outdoors. 

I chased this until my son was born.

I moved up to Bozeman, Montana, where I majored in Geography and Creative Writing, because that's what I loved.  Hand me down furniture and drafty old houses grounded me somehow.  Getting a 9 to 5 job seemed ridiculous when I could waitress, ski, and travel, and I did, around the West and Hawaii.  I learned a lot about business along the way...turns out it's in my blood.  I found qigong, which is a lot like tai chi, in Hawaii, and nursed myself back to health with it.  And just before my 30th birthday I decided to move back to Bozeman.

I got my first real job, despite the paycut, in a design firm, because I wanted to be a designer. Except by the time my son was born, I was working only in the business side, because that's where I was needed.  We weren't ready financially and I was terrified emotionally.  His artist income barely supported him!  I'd have to go back to work as soon as my son was born, and was heartbroken, because part of the reason I'd never settled into a career is that the only thing that I really ever wanted to was be a stay-at-home mom.  I knew enough to know that I'd have to own my own business to have any freedom, and also enough to know that in a traditional business, there's no freedom for years and years, if ever.

Things went downhill fast.

My son Michael was a booming 9 lbs but had problems gaining weight.  By the time he was 6 months old, he had slipped from the 90th percentile in weight to the 10th.  I was feeding him around the clock, and even though I did try to go back to work, I had to quit, from the exhaustion and needing to have my son with me all the time to nurse.  He eventually did get better, and is doing well now, but for 15 long financial months I couldn't work, and it sucked up almost everything we had set aside. 

During this time, I was researching everything I could at the library to help him grow. 

One day, just 3 months into it, I brushed by a book on the shelf, and it fell on the ground.

It was Robert Kyosaki's book about the 4 quadrants.  I put it in my pile and took it home.  And when I was done reading it, I had a new appreciation for network marketing (I had been very opposed), but felt there was no product I'd ever want to be part of.  I still didn't get it.  There I was, asking for help, but wasn't understanding the answer.

Two months later (March 2007) , a newsletter came in the mail to our house by mistake and caught my eye.  An MLM guru was predicting a major recession and advised everyone get into MLML promptly.  It had a ring of truth, but still I wasn't really open.  I focused instead on what kind of job I wanted to get.

I couldn't waitress anymore because my back had gotten so bad.  I was so exhausted I couldn't really even drive.  Always before I could solve financial problems by working more and harder, but now my hands were tied.  During this time a friend joined a network marketing opportunity, but never brought it up to me directly...and I continued to avoid it!  It was a new company I'd never heard of and I was suspicious.

I got a job, but it fell through.  I decided to go back to what I really know, business, and started consulting.  I made enough money to pay for daycare and then some, but it still wasn't enough to dig us back out.  Even bookkeeping was drying up in the recession. I went to a presentation as a favor, was intrigued, but still wasn't convinced!  The whole network marketing thing seemed so...cheesy.

Finally one day I'd had enough. 

No one could have anticipated how things would go, or how we'd end up in so much trouble.  I needed money for my son.  Suddenly, I saw truly the value that money had for ME.  It meant I could be at home with my son.  And suddenly, I wanted all the abundance I thought I'd lost forever back.

I understood the REAL value of money.

I said to a friend,

I'm going to get us out of this, and then I'm going to write a book and tell other people how to, because this is NOT how life is supposed to be!  It's supposed to be amazing and fun and beautiful and this SUCKS!  Everyone should know there's more to life than this!

She looked at me, and said dryly, "I'm sure that's already been done" before going back to what she was doing.  But I'd stated my intention to the universe.  Now I just had to figure out how to. 

I was complaining one day to the friend that had shown me the opportunity that everything I was trying to do was like pushing a brick wall.  She said, maybe you're doing the wrong thing.

Things fell into place.

I signed up and waited for the buyers remorse to kick in.  It didn't.  Instead, I felt for the first time in a long time that I'd fallen back into life's flow.  I was fired up!  I did everything they said!

And I was met with disaster.

I signed up 2 people right away, during a company transition.  Problems led both people to quit, and it was made worse by the fact that if I'd had better training to begin with, I'd have recognized that neither was a good candidate anyway.  Word spread around my friends that it was a bust.  I went to a big event.  I told my upline that of the people I knew who would be interested, bad experience had corrupted my chances.  I needed to know how to move past my immediate group of friends.  I was told I was 'limiting myself with negaitivity'.

I stood up for myself and got clear with them, but my plan was to come back and basically try to cold call people I didn't know as well!  What an UTTER DISASTER that was!

And it got worse.

Letters from our town's Chamber of Commerce went out saying our company was a pyramid.  It turns out that something had been misfiled, and the company was cleared of wrongdoing, but it stopped me in my tracks.  And sent me searching for information on the internet, where I learned about.... Attraction Marketing. 

I was led the whole way.

By whom or what I leave others to say.  I just say the Universe. 

I have abundance back.  I'm able to work my own business and don't have to sacrifice 10 years of my son's childhood to do it.  Everything I've learned has deepened my understanding of real abundance, given me strength, courage, and the commitment to help others find their way to abundance as well.  Joy is NOT lost in tragedy or a slow downward slide, we have to ability to embrace it every day.

Because we ALL deserve the chance, if we're willing to go for it.

My husband & I have done our best to eek an existence out of where we want to live, ever since we realized what WE think life is all about.  You only have one life. 

How do you want to be remembered, and more importantly, how do you want to feel about your life when it's time for you to go?

I spent 4 months learning Attraction Marketing, with the expess purpose of setting it up to make it easier for others to follow me.  I don't know where life is leading me, or how exactly I'm going to get there, but I do know 3 things:

I was given network marketing

I'm here to help other people have better lives

I was born to love my family, enjoy my friends, and have the freedom to appreciate what I love on this earth, because being here really is a gift.

I wish you many, many happinesses on your journey as well.