How I chose Nicole Paull as my VA

Last week, I wrote about my experience talking with Virtual Assistants as I searched for someone to work with me following the ending of more than a decade with my VA, Marie. I said that I’d share why I chose Nicole as my new Virtual Assistant if people were interested. I received nearly 100 comments and emails asking for that. So here I am to tell the tale. :)

On the surface, Nicole and C, the other Virtual Assistant I was considering, were similar in many ways—I think either of them would have done a fine job, and would have been great to work with. Their fees were just $15 different—and that didn’t factor into my decision making at all. At the end of the day, what made the decision for me was the difference in their energies.

C felt very high-energied to me. She sounded bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and ready to take on the world. She actually has more experience, and in more areas than Nicole. If I had to give an analogy, it would be that she felt very much like I’d be the driver of a Lamborghini on a flat stretch of road, with no cops in sight.

Nicole is very much alive, but not as lit up as C. I liked that a lot. And, when she talked, listening to her, getting me, felt like a hug. The analogy I would use would be of walking down a country lane with an experienced wise woman, arm in arm, planning and conjuring, and letting the journey together softly unfold.

While there are moments when I’m absolutely up for going wide open on a flat stretch of road, on a daily basis, I’m just not that girl. I’ve said many times that I’m the least goal-oriented person I know. In fact, when Dawn came onboard as COO of AssistU, she quickly learned that I couldn’t be pushed by arbitrarily set deadlines. In fact, I resent being pushed at all. I’ve never been one to believe in jumping off a proverbial building and growing wings on the way down. For about as long as I can remember, ardently staying off a gerbil wheel has been important to me; I can't imagine putting myself on one when I'm the boss calling my own shots!

And as if I needed to see that more clearly, today, just before I settled in to write this post, I commented on a post by the ineffable Naomi Dunford (caution: if strong language bothers you don’t click that link). The point of her post? That it’s really impossible to keep up. I wrote, in part:

“Will I ever be you, or Brogan, or Godin, or Vaynerchuk? Maybe not. But I don’t aspire to working it the way you guys appear to. And all the money in all the world isn’t worth what I’d give up to make working that way happen.

Choices. We all have them to make, yanno?

I’m genuinely happy. My business has continued to thrive. I take time away from work easily and often (including being able to not work the last quarter of the year), and it’s allowed me to actually focus on the relationships I choose to focus on (including those created through Twitter, FB, LI, my blogs, networking, etc) , while continuing to live life off the gerbil wheel.”

So it all fits. The journey. The huggy thing. Life off the gerbil wheel. Nicole.

As I shared with you last week, this search really was the first time I’ve had to go through the process that I teach in our Virtual Assistant training, and that I take clients through in my Registry Gold system. And I was delighted to find, at the end of the day, that, as I’ve always believed it should be, who Nicole is, mattered far more than what she could do.

Comments

[Cyndi Perron]

Congrats to you and Nicole! As a soon to be graduate, it warms my soul to read your thoughts and realize how lucky I will be when my clients and I can let our journey together softly unfold. Thank you for sharing!