Allison Maslan, author of Blast off!

Author and Coach Allison Maslan Helps You ‘Blast Off’ in 2010

by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC

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These days, the market is flooded with self-help books. Unfortunately, all too many of them leave me feeling dull and lifeless, and they don’t really “help” very much. Half of the books I come across hit you over the head with “power talk” that makes you feel guilty for not being rich or for getting the occasional cold (I won’t mention names, but I have indeed tossed more than one self-help book across the room because of this!). The other half usually drown you in lofty “woo woo” language that never quite gets down to practical action. Frustrating! For a new self-help book to stand out from the crowd and become keeper in my library, it would need to be friendly, engaging, fun AND practical. In other words, it would actually have to HELP me help myself. In her new book Blast Off! The Surefire Success Plan to Launch Your Dreams into Reality, author, coach and registered homeopath Allison Maslan, has achieved exactly that. Her book is a step-by-step programme to achieving some of the most challenging and important goals in life: career, relationship, health, fun/adventure, and of course financial security. In my own experience as a coach, I know that when people wish to make positive changes in their lives in any of these areas, they can frequently feel overwhelmed. I know that there are two keys to helping them get started: 1) make the challenge feel light and fun and 2) break the challenge into smaller, and not so daunting, chunks. Maslan uses both of these strategies in her book Blast Off! Her creative and colourful use of language (Daily Launch Tools, Weekly Flight Assessments, etc) and her easy break-downs of tasks and targets (Sun-up Scripts, Mini-Feats, etc) give Blast Off! a quality of lightness that helps readers believe they can and will achieve their goals and aspirations. But most importantly, Maslan keeps the reader focussed on the bigger picture: life purpose and the path of your whole life. Thus, unlike other books that might just focus on one aspect of life, like money, relationships or health, Blast Off! is a holistic handbook for creating the life you want to live. Written with a charm that immediately makes you feel at home, Allison avoids the downfalls of so many other self-help authors (no condescending “power talk”, no airy-fairy stuff). With Blast Off!, Allison Maslan has written an accessible, inviting and honest handbook, with a sweet, down-to-earth charm and practical action steps. The combination results in something that is both believable and useful. In other words, this is one self-help book that actually IS showing you how to help yourself. Blast Off!, along with the excellent organised companion Workbook, is kind of like having a life coach in a book. Certainly worth checking out to enhance your New Year’s resolutions in 2010.

Blast Off! The Surefire Success Plan to Launch Your Dreams into Reality by Allison Maslan is coming to Amazon on 19 January 2010. I have joined up with over 20 other mind-body-spirit professionals to help celebrate the release of this special book. Together, we are giving away an array of very special gifts to everyone who purchases the book during its launch. To find out how you can receive these gifts, go to http://www.myblastoff.com/booklaunch.

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Sample Vison Board from Blastation

This week I took this cutting edge new sofware programme (developed by Allison Maslan) for a spin. After reading this review (I give you screen shots of the programme and describe the features pretty fully), take Blastation for a test drive yourself on a FREE 30-day trial http://ow.ly/KMx.

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About a year ago, I attended a course with Patrick Ryan called “Awakened Wisdom”. On that course, I set many goals for myself to achieve over the next 2 years and beyond. Now, I know that I am absolutely USELESS when it comes to keeping paper documents, so I wanted to make some sort of computer-based tracking system for myself to create my 2-year targets and then break them down into smaller chunks (monthly, weekly, daily). I used an Excel spreadsheet and put all kinds of pretty colours on it. I used a different colour for each time frame: one for “Life Dream” and one for the year, month, week and day. I called it my “15-minute focus” because I didn’t want to spend gobs of time on it every day, or I wouldn’t get any work done. Instead, I wanted to use it as a way to focus my vision on the bigger picture every day, and keep my perspective on how my daily activities were working towards that goal. Here’s a screen shot of what it looked like almost exactly 1 year ago (hahah… notice that my “Life Dream” last Christmas was that my book The Garden of the Soul sold 30 million copies… I’m still working on that one!):

Well, I have to say, it did work pretty well and kept me on target for a while. If I look back at it now, most of the things I had set out to do were all pretty much achieved, and most of those things that weren’t achieved were replaced with stuff that was even better. I found this method so useful that I even shared it with several of my coaching clients, who liked it very much.

But after a couple of months, it started to get a bit of clumsy and I tended not to use it as much as I did when I first made it. There were too many words, too much scrolling up and down, no real way to “see” visually what I had achieved. I found it took me a lot longer than 15 minutes a day, because of the way it was laid out, and it didn’t really replace my need to use a daily diary quite separately from this (which I developed on yet another spreadsheet). Sometimes I found myself forgetting where I had written things down because I needed so many different places to write them!

But lo’ and behold, only a few months ago, a woman named Allison Maslan came into my life, asking me to coach her around creating a marketing campaign for her upcoming book Blast Off!. Well, of course I was really pleased to meet such a wonderful new client, and get to work on such a fun book campaign, but the bonus surprise for me was when she showed me Blastation – an online software programme she had designed for exactly the same purpose as my 15-Minute Focus spreadsheet…

But seeing them side-by-side was like comparing an old 78 rpm gramophone to a digital surround-sound system. Blastation was everything I had wanted my spreadsheet to be, but it did it all faster, prettier and more visually. It overcame every single one of the drawbacks of my home-made goals-setting spreadsheet had. Heck, it even used a similar colour scheme as I had chosen for my 15-Minute Focus, only a lot bolder and more eye-catching. I had to laugh when I saw that. It was just too perfect.

Blastation gives you 6 major areas of life in which to set goals: career, relationships, wealth, spiritual life, health and personal fulfilment (which includes FUN!).

For each of these areas, you set your “Big Picture Vision”, your “mile steps” and then your “mini-feats.” That’s very similar to the way I had my system laid out, only more streamlined. Then, it also gives you a “sunup script” which sort of reminds me of the “morning pages” Julia Cameron uses in The Artist’s Way (which I use with a lot of my clients). It also has “rocket words” which are basically your self-pep talk (or affirmations) for the day. It allows you to upload pictures, so it’s not all words, words, words.

AND do you know what? It even has a calendar that you can integrate with Outlook. I couldn’t believe it when I saw this.

But the thing I really, really liked was the “Life-o-Meter”. It’s like a petrol gauge that shows you how much you are living up to your goals. Every time you achieve a goal on time it sends you up the gauge towards 100%. Pretty cool, yes?

It also comes with excellent tutorials and guidance on how to use it effectively. Frankly, I’m going to recommend Blastation to my clients because it really is a great way to set goals, and stay motivated as you move towards them. And for coaches, it’s a great way for you to monitor your clients’ progress.

I rarely (if ever) talk about online coaching products, but this particular one just felt so fun and so USEFUL, I really wanted to review it and let people take it for a spin. Allison offers a 30-day free trial of the software, so you can see for yourself whether you think it could help you move closer to your life dreams.

And I do think a few months’ subscription would also make a really unique Christmas gift. Check out Blastation HERE.

My rating?  5-stars for:

• usefulness
• easy-of-use
• aesthetic appearance
• originality
• and FUN!

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