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December is the time of the year when I start thinking about making resolutions for the upcoming year. I usually have a long list of things I want to change. A recent road trip down South gave me time to think. As the miles slipped by, I thought back to previous years and how I made my resolutions on Jan. 1 and by Feb. 1 I was feeling defeated because I had fallen back into my old ways.

We start the year off excited and convinced that we are going to stick to our resolutions this time, but we don’t. It’s too much all at once. During my drive it hit me. Why did I feel like I had to wait until Jan. 1 to make a change? Every day is a new day, a fresh start, an opportunity to start over. Why should I wait until the New Year and get upset when I miss my goal? Then give up completely and go back to life as it was before I made the resolution. This year I decided to do something different. Instead of resolutions, I came up with a list of things I wanted to do for this upcoming year. Things I felt were doable, things that wouldn’t make me feel like a loser. Instead of trying to add them all in during the first month of the new year I would incorporate them throughout the year. Here is my list below.

Monthly Check-ins

Instead of waiting until the month of December to reflect on your life, decide to check in at the end of each month. At that time, evaluate what went well and what didn’t. Decide what you need to do more of and what you need to stop doing. Don’t rush through this exercise. Really think about any changes you need to make.

Have a Master Plan

Decide what is important, what you want to get accomplished, how you want to feel once it is accomplished, who can help you, and what resources you need. Then work toward that plan. No longer should you just act and react. Everything you do should fit into your master plan.

Ditch Information Overload

There is a lot of information coming at you all day every day from many different sources. Social media has taken over our lives. There are webinars, podcasts, Periscopes. My inbox is full every day with someone trying to sell or teach me something. Free offers and paid offers are mines for the taking. It can become overwhelming. For 2017, make some choices. Decide which people you are going to follow. Cultivate those relationships. Only read and implement information and strategies from them. There is a lot if information out there, but it might not be right for you right now. When you are feeling overwhelmed turn off your screen. Relax, breathe, meditate, and spend time with your family and friends. Give yourself time to refresh.

Stop being an Information Collector

Are you guilty of collecting information and then not implementing? Do you have folders of notes from workshops, webinars, and trainings that you have tucked away in a drawer never to be seen again? Get rid of it if you are not going to do anything with it. Make 2017 the year of implementation.

This article was written by, The BOSS Network Influencer, Conchetta Jones.

Conchetta Jones is an author, model, speaker, and certified Overflow Coach. As founder/owner of She’s All That! Woman. A personal development and lifestyle company, she helps women to identify the obstacles in their lives that are keeping them stuck from living the life of their dreams.

Learn more about Conchetta via her website at www.satwoman.com

Follow her on Twitter @_satwoman

I have a lot of random jewelry components in my Craft Hoarder's Paradise™ (aka, my garage), so I've been dipping into that stash to create my latest wreaths. For today's wreath, I used a color palette I'm very fond of (turquoise and red) to create a small fun and funky wreath that has a bit of a folk art/Scandinavian flavor: a Red & Turquoise Valentine Heart Wreath.

Wreath a Day #5: Turquoise & Red Valentine Heart Wreath

This post contains affiliate links.

I have a lot of jewelry supplies because I love making jewelry, but the sad truth is, I don't make jewelry often enough to use up all the supplies I own. I could make a necklace every day for a year (maybe that will be next year's project?), and still not use up all the supplies I have. Does anyone else have the same craft supply hoarding problem I have?

I got these jewelry components from the Fire Mountain Gems $1 Sale (Check out my haul video here).

Supplies Needed:

• Grapevine wreath*
• Wireless chenille stem ribbon
• Red ribbon*
• Turquoise Beads
• Metal Leaf Beads
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks*

I got the wireless chenille stem ribbon at Consumer Crafts, but you can use any white or silver ribbon you have on hand for this project. In fact, you can substitute any supplies you DO have for the ones I used in this project. Just use it as a jumping off point for your own creativity!

You can get wreath forms at DollarTree.com.

Step 1: Wrap Ribbon Around the Wreath Form

Secure a piece of silver ribbon or the wireless chenille stem ribbon to the back of the wreath, and then wrap it around the wreath form. When you get all the way around the wreath, cut the ribbon and glue the end of the ribbon to the back of the wreath. (Bonus points if you manage to line the ends of the ribbon up with each other!)

Step 2: Add Beads

Next, hot glue some of the metallic leaf beads to the wreath. I arranged them in alternating color order, and placed a wire mesh heart bead at the top of the wreath.

But the wreath isn't finished... it needs something more.

Add 1" plastic turquoise-colored beads to the top of the flat leaf beads. Hot glue them in place.

Somehow the wreath isn't quite done. It needs something to pull it all together.

Step 3: Add More Ribbon

When I added this red ribbon over the top of the wreath, it really came together.

Hot glue the end of red ribbon to the back of the wreath, and then wrap it around the wreath, between the round turquoise-colored beads.

Tie a piece of ribbon or baker's twine to the top of the wreath to provide a way to hang your wreath.

The red ribbon really makes the turquoise beads pop, and the chenille ribbon and leaves make a great backdrop and add visual interest to the wreath. Finally, the valentine heart at the top gives the wreath a sweet focal point.

I hope you are having as much fun watching me bust my stash as I am having making these crazy wreaths! To follow along with my project, check out my other Wreath a Day posts.

Famed women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred held a press conference today, announcing that her client Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, is suing Donald Trump for defamation. Zervos is one of many women who have come forward with their own accounts of being sexually harassed and/or abused by Trump.

In the suit (which you can read in full here), Zervos describes being kissed on the mouth upon meeting Trump for the first time—which other women have also described him doing—as well as being more aggressively assaulted during a job interview later.

Ms. Zervos was ambushed by Mr. Trump on more than one occasion. Mr. Trump suddenly, and without her consent, kissed her on her mouth repeatedly; he touched her breast; and he pressed his genitals up against her. Ms. Zervos never consented to any of this disgusting touching. Instead, she repeatedly expressed that he should stop his inappropriate sexual behavior, including by shoving him away from her forcefully, and telling him to “get real.” Mr. Trump did not care, he kept touching her anyway.

But it’s not the abuse Zervos is suing over. Instead, she’s suing for defamation after she came public last year and Trump called her, and the other women coming forward around the election, liars.

Mr. Trump immediately lied, saying that he “never met [Ms. Zervos] at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately.” He quickly went further, describing Ms. Zervos’s experience, along with those of others, as “made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED;” “100% fabricated and made-up charges;” “totally false;” “totally phoney [sic] stories, 100% made up by women (many already proven false);” “made up stories and lies;” “[t]otally made up nonsense.” He falsely stated: “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign, total fabrication. The events never happened.” During the last presidential debate, he stated that these women were either being put forward by the Clinton campaign, or were motivated to come forward by getting “ten minutes of fame,” and nothing more.

Zervos, who is on the record of having passed a polygraph test in regard to her account of these events, says she didn’t come forward before because she thought his behavior “was either a test or an isolated incident, about which Mr. Trump was embarrassed and ashamed.”

But when those Access Hollywood tapes leaked, in which Trump described  his fame-enabled ability to “just start kissing [women]. . . Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” she says she realized that her experience with her wasn’t unusual, it was “his normal behavior towards women, and that Mr. Trump believed that he was entitled to engage in that misconduct because of his position.”

Zervos says she simply wants Trump to admit that she didn’t fabricate her story. During the press conference, she stated,

Since Mr Trump has not issued a retraction, as I requested, he has therefore left me with no alternative other than to sue him in order to vindicate my reputation. I want Mr. Trump to know that I will still be willing to dismiss my case against him, immediately, for no monetary compensation, if he would simply retract his false and defamatory statements about me and admit that I told the truth about him.

Allred compared Trump’s situation to that of Bill Clinton’s, reminding the press that sitting (or almost sitting) presidents can be deposed, and impeached. No matter what sort of Twitter rant Trump inevitably responds with, she hopes Zervos’ suit is taken seriously by the rest of us. Because, as she herself put it,

Women are not a footnote to history. They matter, we value them … and we value women that allege that they have been the victims of injustice.

(via LawNewz, image via screengrab)

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As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I want to reflect on all the positive things that have stemmed from this great man sharing his visions and dreams to make the world a better place. Yet, there in my #techie mind, I begin to wonder what if…

What if Dr. King had some of the modern marvels that we use daily to communicate, entertain, and share our personal views with our community and the world:  Would things have been different?

While having lunch with my friend and fellow #techie Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus—which uses state of art machine learning as a central nervous system to its product offering—we began to run the mental algorithmic reasons of what if. The first thing that came to mind is what if Dr. King had access to machine learning.

Now, I know that some think that machine learning is something mythical, but it’s not.   Machine learning is a powerful way to forecast possibilities through the usage of data analytics and data insights.

“Half of the industry uses machine learning as a buzzword, yet as a society we have not unearthed the brevity of its capabilities.” —Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus

Take a peek below at the possibilities that Rishabh and I dreamt up.

1. Discourse Identity

If Dr. King had access, he would’ve run a large-scale semantic analysis, running social media and social feeds of entire cities to see which cities had max discourse and minimum discourse to identify influential and noninfluential cities.

2. Information Dissemination and Network Effect

Use the maximum discourse hotspots to identify and quantify the speed at which information is being spread to the neighboring cities. This would have allowed MLK to identify which discourse-ridden hotspots were also rapidly affecting neighboring communities.

3. Time Utilization

Having the ability to find the top discourse spots, time utilization would have enabled him to focus on five strategic heat spots that had a significant impact on surrounding areas. He could’ve rapidly affected those surrounding areas indirectly and organically, thus impacting the country. He could have minimized his travel time to different cities and used his remaining time to focus on ways to improve and further understanding between races.

4. Data visualization

Mapping and contrasting U.S. Census data and finding correlations between social economic factors and the tendency toward racism. Using data visualization services like DOMO, MLK could have visualized complex data and gathered a complete picture of underlying patterns and problem points at the core of our U.S. culture. Big data would become easy to handle because everything would be visualized.

5. Finding Those That Matter

Finding the right person to recruit other people by noticing their sharing coefficient. Dr. King could have calculated the sharing coefficient of each user on the network to find the trendsetters and sympathizers of the cause that could influence that many more people to spread the message even further and organically.

“MLK achieved a monumental task of uniting the nation without machine learning. With machine learning there’s a high chance history textbooks might have referred to him as President-elect.” —Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus

6. Automated Recruiting

Using state of the art products, we have to create automated campaigns to persuade people that are on the fence or who are sympathetic to the cause to join and further the cause. He could’ve tracked what emails are being opened, how many times an email has been opened, find out people who are accessing the email the most and give a weighted score to them and interact with a higher score of people. Also, he could have run Facebook Lead Ads to gather contact information, insert it directly into Salesforce, and produce an email marketing campaign. Using Pardot, he could have emailed campaigns to those of a certain weighted score to encourage them to spread the message.

Rishabh Sharma is a successful Indian-American entrepreneur and technologist based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, he has combined his passion for the arts with his passion for technology. He is the executive producer and founder of Poletus one of the leading social media marketing companies.