Karen@KarenCommins.com

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™

Law of Attraction

Narrator’s Cup of Joe — Woo Woo Blend

When the fabulous Daniela Acitelli interviewed me in 2021 on Narrator’s Cup of Joe, her fantastic YouTube video show, we talked about a lot of different topics. She invited me on the show again in December, this time to discuss “woo woo” subjects: affirmations, visualizations, and manifestations.

Long-time readers will feel no surprise in my belief in and usage of affirmations and visualizations! Daniela and I enjoyed the sort of deep, meaningful conversation I could have all day, and I hope you like it, too.

Of course, I have additional stories and many resource links to share! I’ll add the video timecode for your reference.

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Feather, Phone, and Fun

I’ve been receiving Mike Dooley’s daily Notes from the Universe for years. I’ve taken some of his courses, and I enjoy how he presents material on the Law of Attraction.

I signed up for his Magical Mystery Manifesting Adventure, which began today. Each day in the 21 days, he and co-presenter Pam Grout will send an email with a secret mission of something to manifest.

When I read today’s assignment of a feather, I thought of a peacock feather. If you read my last blog post or saw this tweet or this Facebook post of a my picture of a real peacock, you might think I have a fondness for peacocks! I thought a feather would be unusual to find.

Drew and I were on our way to pick up something we had ordered. It was Friday lunchtime traffic on a major road that is always congested.

I saw we were about to drive by a flea market I like but haven’t shopped in for a year or more. It’s one of those places that used to be a grocery store but is now filled with several hundred vendors who sell everything from baseball cards to crystal chandeliers. Some of the booths contain so much merchandise that you can’t see everything and have difficulty even walking in. I fear one wrong move will send some precarious piece crashing to the floor.

I said I’d like to stop there. His first inclination was that it was too difficult to turn left out of its parking lot to get to the store. I said I had no business at the flea market and wasn’t looking for anything in particular. We should go on to our destination.

As we turned on the street by the flea market, I commented that we could’ve turned right out of the parking lot and gone only a little bit out of the way to the store. He offered to turn around, but I stubbornly said to keep going where we were headed.

He said again he could turn around because he knew I’d want to go to the flea market.

Reader, that wonderful man I married DID turn around, drove back to the flea market, and parked in front of the door.

I usually like to walk up and down every aisle, taking a quick look left and right to see everything crammed in all the stalls. I skipped a couple of aisles to avoid other shoppers and thought about leaving and returning some weekday when fewer people would be there.

I had not told Drew about the feather assignment.

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Antidote For A Dry Spell

 

As I wrote over 10 years ago, in order for your ship containing job contracts to come sailing in to your harbor, you have to keep sending out promotional and prospecting ships into the world. But what happens when you don’t see any results from your efforts? It’s so easy to fall into a negative mindset, especially when it seems that every narrator you know is announcing on social media that they had scheduled work through the next 6 months even before they were just hired for a 10-book series.

I still am not at the level of success that I envision, and some days, the critical voice in my mind starts in on me about what I haven’t accomplished. I notice that mean girl never gives me credit for all of the things I HAVE done! No matter how circumstances may appear in the moment, the key is to push the doubts away and keep marching toward your dream.

In 2012,  Dave Courvoisier wrote candidly on his blog about a dry spell he was experiencing in gaining work. In this article, I’m including and expanding on my response to him.

First, it’s possible to want something so badly that your desperation to have it can actually push it away from you. I wrote about this phenomenon in the article Voiceover and the Law of Paradoxical Intent.

I can tell you honestly that it was only after I truly ACCEPTED my life as it was that things really started to move forward for me.

Second, the number of jobs booked in a time period is only one small way of measuring success. I wrote about 3 techniques for maintaining a feel-good mentality about your career in the post The feel-good voiceover blog post of the summer!. I write my articles for myself as much as for my audience, and this is one post that I often re-read to maintain balance and objectivity during slow times.

I cannot overemphasize the 3rd technique too much — STOP THE COMPARISONS TO OTHER PEOPLE! It is the single greatest act of self-negation that keeps us from our good.

In fact, when I listened to Rob Lowe’s most excellent narration of his autobiographical audiobook Stories I Only Tell My Friends, I heard a compelling reason to keep going forward with your dream. When Lowe talked about meeting an unknown LeVar Burton about a week before ROOTS was aired on TV, he said:

“It showed me how quickly the rocket fuel of stardom can ignite, how unimaginably GIANT the g-forces can be as you are propelled into fame’s orbit.

Looking back, I also wonder at the mystery of destiny and fate. I marvel at the mercurial forces of fortune and am reminded that one must be ever vigilant to stay on one’s own path, without envy of others.”

When I don’t know what the next step is, I just take one. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best thing I could do at the time. It doesn’t matter if other people agree with me, cheer me on, throw spitballs my way, or totally ignore me.

It’s not about them. It’s about me. It’s about “staying vigilant on my path, without envy of others.”

All that matters is that I take that step…..because that step gets me one step closer to the life I’m meant to lead.

Law of Attraction

Shortly after I responded on Dave’s blog, I wrote the article Power of “I Am” In Maintaining a Positive Attitude. Whatever you put after those 2 words becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A passage in the 12/15/17 Science of Mind magazine daily guide really brings home this point.

“Whenever a negative, demeaning thought is believed and allowed to repeat, it is a prayer. “I am [blank] is a prayer. This thought repeatedly spoken becomes a belief. A belief becomes a reality, a prayer answered. By repeating the thoughts, “I am not good enough”…or “Life has always been a struggle”, I am actually creating that reality.

One of our greatest tools is practicing discipline with what we allow ourselves to think. The reality is that you must first believe your affirmation to be true of you.

…See and know your good, then praise and embrace it.”

We need to keep thinking and believing that the success we seek is coming to us. What we think about expands. If we focus on what we think we lack, we will continue to experience more of the same lack.

Just because things don’t happen on our timetable or in the way that we would expect them to show up doesn’t mean they aren’t going to happen. They probably will happen and be even greater than we could imagine!

Just keep smiling, taking steps, and sending out those ships!

 

Stop Complaining About Noise

In a recent Inc. Magazine article titled 7 Ways Successful People Have Better Mindsets, this quote practically leaped off the screen at me:

The biggest problem is thinking of problems as problems. Successful people know that when you focus on problems you have more problems, but when you focus on possibilities you have more opportunities.

It’s true. Our thoughts and words have tremendous creative power in shaping our lives. In fact, in one of my first blog posts 10 years ago, I wrote that nothing is more powerful on this planet than the words you think and speak. Everything that exists now was first a thought in a person’s mind. Speaking the thought out loud gives it creative power.

Wayne Dyer used to say, “What you think about expands”, and “You can’t get enough of what you don’t want.” When we’re repeatedly talking about something with energy and emotion, we’re actually telling the Universe, “please send me more of this.”

That’s great when we’re enthusiastically and excitedly talking about our latest audiobook contract or marketing plans. However, the same principle is at work when we’re animatedly griping about the leaf-blowers in the neighborhood.

An army of leaf blowers is coming soon to your neighborhood!

I can’t count the times when I’ve read posts from audiobook narrators in Facebook groups in which they whine about the external noise from the neighbors cutting their grass, planes flying overhead, nearby construction projects, or any other thing that interrupts their recording sessions. The people bemoaning these (first-world) problems seem to expect empathy from everyone else. If challenged, the complainer would say he’s merely venting off steam with people who understand the situation.

I never respond to those types of posts. If I did, I’d say, “Quit your bellyaching, and DO something about your recording space! It’s not up to the world to be quiet in order for you to have a cocoon of silence for recording.”

Before anyone gets offended at my harsh statement, let me add that I have walked in the naysayer’s shoes. In order to solve my multiple issues with an extremely noisy environment, I replaced all of the windows in my house and custom-built an additional room on my house with soundproofing techniques.

More importantly, I don’t respond because constant complaining really goes much deeper and has a more pronounced effect than most people realize.

Have you ever noticed that, when you’re sick and you tell and re-tell the story about all of your symptoms to everybody you know, you feel worse with each telling?

When I used to gripe about people yakking loudly on their cell phones or children screaming in restaurants, it seemed more and more of them would show up around me. OF COURSE THEY DID! I repeatedly focused my attention and poured lots of negative emotion in my comments about how much those situations annoyed me! I had an epiphany one day when I realized I had been saying, “We are a magnet for obnoxious children” — literally summoning the very condition I wanted to avoid!

I’ve learned — not that I’m always successful at it — that I have to keep my attention focused on WHAT I WANT, not what I don’t want.

The loud children and cell phone talkers in public are still around, but my reaction to them has changed. When I find myself getting annoyed by them or other irritants, I speak out loud affirmations like, “I am focusing my attention on what I want, which is a pleasant, enjoyable dinner.” Almost immediately, the environment — or at least my perception of it — shifts for the better.

Frequent grumbling doesn’t just steal your joy (and that of others around you) in the moment. You can be setting yourself up for an unfulfilled life.

I’ll leave you with these profound thoughts from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear: 

Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work….

…most important, you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended. It’s almost like inspiration puts up its hands and says, “Hey, sorry, buddy! I didn’t realize my presence was such a drag. I’ll take my business elsewhere.

…I have felt this phenomenon in my own life, whenever I start complaining. I have felt the way my self-pity slams the door on inspiration, making the room feel suddenly cold, small, and empty. That being the case, I took this path as a young person: I started telling myself that I enjoyed my work. I proclaimed that I enjoyed every single aspect of my creative endeavors—the agony and the ecstasy, the success and the failure, the joy and the embarrassment, the dry spells and the grind and the stumble and the confusion and the stupidity of it all. I even dared to say this aloud. I told the universe (and anyone who would listen) that I was committed to living a creative life not in order to save the world, not as an act of protest, not to become famous, not to gain entrance to the canon, not to challenge the system, not to show the bastards, not to prove to my family that I was worthy, not as a form of deep therapeutic emotional catharsis . . . but simply because I liked it. So try saying this: “I enjoy my creativity.” And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it.

Photo: Hector Alejandro/Flickr
 

How to Afford Your Editor, Proofer, or Narrator TODAY

An author recently wrote that her fans were demanding audiobooks, but she couldn’t afford to spend any money up-front for the narrator’s fee and other costs of production.

Narrators frequently bemoan the fact that, instead of narrating the next book, they are spending too much time editing an audiobook because they can’t afford to hire an editor.

I’ve previously written about our words being a self-fulfilling prophecy and encouraged you to think/write/speak what you WANT into being.

Thinking or saying “I can’t afford it” is often a knee-jerk reaction immediately offered by Resistance to keep you from taking action toward the good you seek.

If you’re among the people who frequently tell yourself “I can’t afford it”, I urge you to do this exercise, which I first wrote about in my review of Fabienne Frederickson’s Mindset Retreat last September.

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10 Comments About Fabienne Frederickson’s Mindset Retreat

At the end of September, I attended Fabienne Frederickson’s 3-day Mindset Retreat in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Fabienne, a highly successful entrepreneur and business coach, is the founder of Boldheart.com (formerly ClientAttraction.com). Anyone who reviews and implements one of the many free ideas on her site or in her YouTube videos is sure to improve their business.

Before I go further, let me say that I like Fabienne. I like her approach, and I like the results I’ve achieved with her methods. She always gives me some new way to think about things in my business.

I spoke with her briefly at the conclusion of the Mindset Retreat. She asked whether I would feel comfortable speaking on camera about the event. At first, I declined, but, after thinking about it a few minutes, I decided I would leave a video testimonial.

However, I didn’t speak on camera for her. I did it for ME. Speaking before a camera was a way to move out of my comfort zone and do something new. I also considered that experience as preparation for my October presentation at the Georgia Romance Writers Conference. I said something like this:

Hi, I’m Karen Commins, and I’m a professional audiobook narrator. You can find my audiobooks on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

I have studied the Law of Attraction, but I have not heard it taught the way Fabienne teaches it. She brings together concepts from a wide variety of sources.

If you’re thinking about attending the Mindset Retreat, I encourage you to give it a try.

As a performer, I’m already successful in my business. I’m just not at the level where I want to be. The concepts that Fabienne teaches work for all types of businesses.

I don’t know whether Fabienne will use my video in her marketing. However, I wanted to write a balanced review about the event so that people can make a more informed decision about its value.

4 Aspects That Made the Event Totally Worthwhile

1) Fabienne lives the Law of Attraction, pulls from a variety of sources, and teaches these principles in a unique and compelling way.

Much of the material covered during the 3 days was already known to me. While it’s always great to get reminders of these ideas, I did have several “Aha!” moments where I heard some things I hadn’t heard or read previously. Per my notes, here is one big revelation:

When you ask, it is given 100% of the time.

Most people ask for results and expect the result to show up.

We get confused because we wait for the result to show up.

The opportunity for you to get that thing is what shows up.

Opportunities don’t come from a person but through them.

 

2) The structure of the event forced me and gave me time to deeply reflect on how I want my life to be and how my life is going at the moment.

Fabienne would speak for a bit before giving us journaling prompts and 5-15 minutes of quiet time for writing. For instance, one of the first prompts was the Ideal Day Exercise. Basically, if money were no object and you could do, have, or be anything you wanted, what would your ideal day be like? You have to write as much detail as possible to visualize where you are, who you’re with, what you do each day, where and how you live, etc.

I first did this exercise in 1992 while reading Barbara Sher’s life-changing book I COULD DO ANYTHING IF I ONLY KNEW WHAT IT WAS. I’ve just about achieved the ideal day I wrote back then! It was helpful to write down a new ideal day vision because I hadn’t really taken that step and needed to do so. I’ve previously written about why it’s extremely important to WRITE DOWN your goals.

I originally was concerned because the chairs were set up in long rows without tables. I never like sitting so close to people that we touch shoulders or any other body part. I always chose an aisle seat so that I could move my chair slightly away from the one next to it.

In addition, being in such close proximity is a fast way to catch colds. Since my job is dependent on my voice, the risk of a cold is an even greater concern for me.

The room is set up without tables in order to accommodate the many times that we were also instructed to share what we wrote with other attendees. Fabienne encouraged us to talk with people we didn’t know. This tactic had the side effect of helping some people to gain much-needed confidence that they need to be an entrepreneur.

3) Through the exercises, I identified opportunities and subsequent concrete actions I could take to increase my business.

The subtitle of the event should be: You can’t get results from your opportunities if you don’t take action on them. This theme was often repeated over the course of the 3 days.

If I only learned and did 1 particular exercise, the entire trip was worthwhile:  

50 Ways to Make Money Right Now.

The point of the 50 Ways exercise is to change your mindset from “I can’t afford it” to “How can I afford it?”. You have to write down 50 ways you could make money. They could be either in your personal life or business life. You can’t stop until you list 50 ways.

I tried to make most of my ideas business-related, but I also listed ways I could utilize assets that I already have. I listed ideas I had already considered, like directing other narrators, and some I’d never even thought about, like renting out my pool.

Somewhere around idea #26, some really inspired and exciting business-related ideas came to me! 

I ended up with 57 ideas, with 9 of them using some of Drew’s talents and skills. I have already taken action on a half dozen of the things I wrote on my list and am quite pleased with the results! I wrote in my journal on Day 2:

Those 3 ideas [particular ones on my list] are brilliant! Maybe I wouldn’t have had them if I hadn’t come, so I will hereby declare the trip an amazing success!

I am really getting the importance of taking action on my opportunities. I [took 2 steps] before going downstairs at 7:40am. It felt good to take actions before breakfast.

 

4) I spent time analyzing my emotions and belief systems and re-learned ways to improve them.

Fabienne gave us laminated copies of the list of 22 Emotions found in Abraham-Hicks’ landmark book Ask and It Is Given, along with copies of several powerful affirmations. While I had read these materials in the past, I realized that I need to work with the Emotions list every day in order to maintain a true positive mindset.

6 Aspects That I Didn’t Like

1)  Many of the phrases,  pictures, and segments throughout Fabienne’s presentation are highly manipulative to lead you toward a decision to join her Client Attraction Business School (CABS). In fact, the whole Mindset Retreat is a “sell” for CABS. The slides are almost subliminal advertising.

Without a doubt, Fabienne is a brilliant marketer. She encourages everyone to market themselves “with authenticity, integrity, and love.” I’m just not sure that she always uses her expertise in this way.

During the sessions, she talked about joining a “tribe” and being part of a “loving, supportive community”. On day #2, the late afternoon session was devoted to an Internet live stream of 8 (count ’em, 8!) of her CABS students gushing about their successes after joining the program. The session was supposed to be “inspirational”, but I considered it more in the category of “self-promotional.”

I checked out mentally while listening to the first of the 8 people. I wasn’t feeling well, so I checked out of the room altogether.

I wasn’t in the room when the cost of CABS was finally revealed. However, another attendee told me it was $8000 a year.

According to that person, Fabienne said that you would pay $40,000 for the same education at a traditional business school. Like I said, Fabienne is a brilliant marketer, and the “comparative value” is a tried and true marketing technique. A logical person could evaluate the statement and reach the conclusion that you could take that same $8000 and get a college degree that would actually mean something in the work place.

That attendee was torn about whether to commit to that much expense. I told her that she could get the necessary marketing tactics and increase the number and quality of her clients just by spending 15 bucks to get C. J. Hayden’s fantastic book on marketing, GET CLIENTS NOW! (I was wrong. The book only costs 10 bucks.)

2) The 50 Ways to Make Money exercise, while extremely valuable (pardon the pun), was scheduled for maximum manipulative advantage.

The evening session on Day 1 was labeled as a “Bonus Session: Juicy Stuff”. Over the course of 46 slides, Fabienne talked about how the company you keep and your environment directly affect your income level and success.

She stated that we must study the people at the level we want to be and learn everything we can from them. I wrote in my notes:

If someone in your industry is doing better than you, stop resenting them and start looking at what they’re doing. Whoever you want to be like, be with them.

On the surface, that point is sound advice. However, it followed numerous comments about taking action on opportunities. Looking back in the context of the session and those to come, it seems a bit like brainwashing people as they join a cult.

She led us down a path toward agreement that we need to invest in ourselves and our business. Then, we were told that people use many excuses, starting with “I can’t afford it”.

We were given the 50 Ways exercise at 9:45pm as we concluded the evening session. Fabienne said we needed to have it done by 8am the next day. Even though I was worn out, I stayed up past midnight working on that exercise. I listed 32 options before I just had to quit and finally get some sleep.

With this exercise, Fabienne proved to everyone that they COULD find a way to afford anything, just in time for the next day’s opportunity to sign-up for CABS.

3) The 30 to 60 minutes we spent on the first day in the fund-raising drive to support a village in Africa was inappropriate.

It’s Fabienne’s personal cause, and I didn’t appreciate her using time I paid for to have this pitch be a part of the content. It’s not like we were at a fund-raising dinner where everyone knew the appeal was coming. It was in a section called “Unstoppable Giving” that meandered and morphed into this unexpected request for funds.

I have my own philanthropy goals and avenues, so I didn’t contribute to this campaign. I was astonished that the Retreat participants pledged a staggering $115,000!

Those committing money signed a Client Attraction banner. Fabienne showed a video of her taking such a banner to Africa. The banner makes it look like Fabienne’s business is actually donating the funding (and potentially taking the charitable deductions on taxes) rather than the many individual contributors.

Not only was I flabbergasted by the large amount, but that outcome was totally incongruent with the next point.

4)  The event is billed as “Mastering the Inner Game of Abundance” yet is managed as a conference for penny-pinchers.

Prior to the event, attendees could access a Facebook group. Most of the messages I saw in the group were from people looking for roommates at the hotel and shared rides to/from the airport. The rooms had double beds, and many attendees were staying in a room and potentially sleeping in a bed with people they didn’t know.

The sessions extended well into the evening each day. Day 1 had a session from 7:00-9:00pm and then HOMEWORK. Day 2 had a session from 7:30pm-9:30pm.  The last session on Day 3 was from 4:00-600pm, but many people had already checked out of the hotel and left the meeting by that point.

Why have a conference at a luxury hotel on beautiful Ft. Lauderdale beach if the attendees will never have the time to enjoy the beach except at sunrise and lunch? This question deserves a close look.

Ft. Lauderdale beach is a definite draw. Many attendees flew in from other countries. Presumably, they would have been less inclined to attend if the event were held somewhere less beautiful, luxurious, and exotic.

Once the people are there, though, Fabienne obviously has learned through the years of hosting this event that a large percentage of her audience will not pay the hotel bill for more than 3 nights. Therefore, she has to cram the most material into 2 very long days. If she dropped the fund-raising pitch and the self-promotional live stream from Days 1 and 2, both days could have ended at normal conference times, like 5pm.

One person told me that she didn’t have enough open credit on her card to pay the hotel. She felt hassled because the hotel staff demanded a security deposit of $300 because she had to pay part of her bill with cash. Not to be unkind, but I wondered why she was attending this event if she was maxed out on credit. Perhaps she would say that it was a leap of faith to be there so she could get in an abundance mentality and start earning income to erase her debt.

The attendees were charged differently depending on when they signed up. You paid more for the event as it drew closer. I would have preferred that all attendees were charged the same price.

5) The constant up-sell spiels for VIP Access were as frequent and annoying as Florida palmetto bugs.

Attendees could pay an additional $199 above the event fees for early entrance to the meeting room, reserved seat cards, a bonus Q&A session one day with Fabienne and her husband Derek, and lunch each day. Every communication about the Retreat included a “reminder” about the VIP Access.

When I registered and picked up my badge, the girls manning the registration table told me it still wasn’t too late to upgrade to the VIP experience. I said, “That’s okay. I’m a VIP as I stand here.” I don’t think they were too amused.

 6) If I never hear Katy Perry’s song Roar again, it will be too soon.

That song is Fabienne’s theme song. Don’t get me wrong — theme songs are great. I have used them myself. I didn’t even have anything against this particular song.

My issue was that it was PLAYED SO **LOUDLY**  that it could be heard in the next county! We had to hear this song — in its entirety — BLASTED at the beginning of each session, 4 times a day, so that Fabienne and the CABS students could sing and dance to it. It also was played during the breaks. Enough!