Linky Tuesday: Anti Recession-Freakout Edition

Since, let’s face it, this dismal economic news is on a lot of our minds (especially if we’re trying to start or run businesses), most of my links this week fall into that rough category. Here’s a little anti-panic tool kit for you. The sky is not actually falling and we are not all actually doomed to wandering a blackened landscape trying to keep from being eaten by Reavers.

Feels that way, but it’s not. So here’s to optimism:

• Tom Hoobyar is a smart guy who has run lots of businesses and has a very practical, no-nonsense approach to just about everything. (I found him through a terrific interview he did with Perry Marshall.) His post on a Dark and Stormy Night gives a little mindset-framing lesson on how to approach those “oh-shit” moments.
• Relationship Marketing Principles. It’s not just me who goes on about this relationship stuff; there are a few (very few, in my experience) “real” ad people who get it, too. James Hipkin is one of them. Check out his outlining of the principles of relationship marketing from the ad agency view. Very useful.
• Jane Chin’s Liberation Story. Clay Collins is running a series on folks who have successfully escaped day jobs and gone on to freer, more fulfilling lives. The whole series is great. I liked this story of a woman who found a way to thrive as an entrepreneur (with a new baby and a giant Bay Area mortgage, at that) by redefining her day job to be more ethical, more far-reaching, and defined to solve a problem that needed fixing.
• There’s no one better than Havi Brooks at taming the full-on freakout. She’s the ninja of nonagression, the contessa of calm, the diva of destuckification. She’s doing something called the Non-Sucky Yoga Month that involves packaging a yoga DVD that doesn’t make you want to shoot anyone, with a bunch of Havi add-ons to help you actually benefit from it instead of watching dust gather on your good intentions. I recently bought Havi’s similar program on the insane Dance of Shiva practice, so I can vouch that she has good stuff to offer.
• Michael Martine wrote a great Recession Post about how to keep your head when all around you the Marketing Reavers are trying to make you even more freaked out, in order to sell you crap you don’t need. I won’t tell you blogging is “recession proof,” but relationship and content marketing does provide a pretty good innoculation, and some highly useful tools for times of great general craziness.
• I wrote a post on Three Ways to Grow Your Community in an Economic Crisis for Copyblogger, to answer some questions folks had about just how bloggers and content marketers can use the current economic crappiness to benefit themselves and their readers.
• And last, I offer you this Late Night “Whoa” Moment, purely because it is weird and entertaining. In the words of Dr. Seuss, “these things are fun, and fun is good.”

Stay fun, stay sane, keep your head.

Flickr Creative Commons image by cloud nine.