Removal of Adsense Ads, New Tagline, New Domain

I just finished giving a speech on Passion or Money to the NUS alumni, and it went really well! Audience was very friendly and receptive, there was great response and questions asked were astute. It was a pity that the Q&A had to be cut short though due to overrun, but it surely was a positive sign that audience was engaged! Thanks a lot to everyone who turned up and participated so actively! :)

Removal of Adsense Ads

In the past few days I have been improvising on the layout as part of my goal to make it more user-friendly. As part of the revision, I decided to take off Adsense ads in the main posts. This means removing one of my income sources, and coaching and speaking will need to be my key revenue generators for now. Even then, I’m still moving ahead and will see the long-term implications. Hopefully all of you will find it easier to read the articles from hereon! :)

By the way, there is the donation section where you can donate if you have found my writings helpful! (Update Sep ’10: I’ve since removed it as Paypal does not allow non-US businesses to receive donations.)

New Tagline

Be your best self, Live your best life

After 6 months of working on my personal development business full-time, I believe I’ve found my voice – i.e. what I want to convey as a personal development coach. The new mission statement/tagline is now “Be Your Best Self. Live Your Best Life“. There are two parts to this.

The first part, “Be your best self“: If we examine everything that we do and look beyond death, the single one thing we know with a fair degree of certainty that we can carry with us through death is consciousness. Thus, investing on yourself to build and grow yourself has more far reaching effects than any other goal you strive to achieve.

The way towards being our best self is through increasing our consciousness such that we eventually reach the highest level of consciousness. The highest level of consciousness is enlightenment. I’m not sure if all of us can reach that in this lifetime, but that shouldn’t stop us from working towards that goal.

I want to enable people to grow consciously through the writings and my coaching. It is more important for people to to discern what they hear, filter then apply, as opposed to applying everything wholesale. I much rather have someone disagree with me after consciously evaluating what I say, than someone unconsciously agreeing with my philosophy. As you embark on the journey of growth, it is critically important you do that in a conscious manner. If you are just trying to grow in the name of growing and not really doing so consciously i.e. evaluating what you are taking in, it begets the question of whether you are really growing in the first place.

The second part of the tagline is to “Live your best life”, because hey – we only have one life to lead, so might as well make it the best, ya? :D

When I first started out, I was just mapping my audience to people who want to improve themselves. It was a great start, but it wasn’t focused enough. My efforts were very spread thinly trying to reach out to every single person, and my message wasn’t targeted.

There was a common thread that tied together people I worked the best with – people who desire to improve their lives, not just in a general, wellness/staying away from stress/generally being happy manner, but through active personal growth and striving for excellence. Excellence is one of my key values; contentment coupled with stagnancy isn’t.

This made me realize the kind of community I want to build is one that constantly strives for betterment. ‘Best’ connotes being driven and commitment to improvement/excellence.

New Domain

On that new mission statement above, Embrace Living as a term/name no longer resonates with my personal vision. Embrace Living gives the sense that it’s a passive, general wanting to be happy/contented with what you have/wellness. This isn’t in line with the excellence, passion for winning and being the best.

At the same time, with coaching and speaking being my key pillars of income now, the importance of centering myself as the brand identity rather than promoting myself under the guise of a company name is becoming more stark.

I’m changing embraceliving.net to celestinechua.com! :D I just registered celestinechua.com this week and I’m going to bring in the change within the next day.

This change is exciting because it feels like the whole identity of what I have been doing is now reborn! New domain, new tagline, new layout, all of which now resonates under one single identity. While the change in domain will translate to search engine optimization complications and admin changes, I’m really, really happy with how everything is moving! :D

Cheers to all! And let’s start to work towards being our best self so we can live our best life! ;) :D

Update, Oct ’11: We are now under a new domain – PersonalExcellence.co! More details: Announcing… All-New Personal Excellence [dot] Co!