Working from home has a lot going for it. What I love most is that I don’t have to join in the rush hour traffic any more. I found that my blood pressure and stress levels actually reduced significantly when I began working from home – even with all the uncertainties of running a small business!

However, there can also be challenges if you work from home, or spend most of the time on your own. The following are situations that you may have come across:

Be at work while you’re at work
If you have, or are just starting, a business that is to provide your main income then you will need some self-discipline. The freedom to do what you want, when you want is wonderful – but take care not to get carried away! You may find yourself tempted to ‘pop out’ to the supermarket, the gym, or even the golf course – because it’s quieter during the day. And those little jobs around the house start beckoning now that you see them all the time. Before you know it, big chunks of your day have disappeared in non-work activities and you’re struggling to get enough clients or sales to make your business viable.

Just as if you were working for someone else, you need to have regular working hours – but you can be a bit creative! You don’t have to be ‘at work’ from 9-5, if you work better early in the morning, you might choose 6am-2pm. Or, if you’re a night owl you might prefer 2pm-10pm. It doesn’t matter so much when you work, as long as you put the hours in and work while you’re ‘at work’.

Set a time for ‘going home’
Some people have the opposite problem and would work around the clock if they could! If this is you, then you will need to set yourself a time to stop work and ‘go home’. It can be very tempting to just do ‘one more thing’ – I know I’m guilty of researching on the internet and losing track of time. But all your efforts could be for nothing if you make yourself ill by pushing too hard.

Believe it or not, having a proper break at the end of the day will actually help you get more done. Have you ever had a problem that you spent ages trying to solve and then find that the answer comes to you the next day while you’re in the shower or brushing your teeth? That’s because your subconscious carries on working while you’re relaxing or asleep – and it actually needs you to stop thinking about the problem while it takes over! 

Set Boundaries for Family and Friends
This is a particularly sensitive and tricky area. When you work from home, friends and family will often phone for a chat or drop in for coffee – just because they can. They don’t understand that you’re trying to make a living or have deadlines to meet. So you have to tell them, and teach them about your hours of business. 

If you don’t set boundaries, you’ll end up feeling resentful and not enjoy their company so much when you are ‘off duty’. They may be a bit surprised at first but will soon get the message if you continue to stand firm. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, practise what you want to say beforehand so you’re prepared when they call. It’s OK to say that you’re busy right now and can you call them back later (at a time to suit you). 

Schedule meetings in your diary
A lot of business owners don’t like the isolation of working on their own. They miss having people around them. So, while it’s important to use your working day productively, you also need to schedule in meetings with a fellow business owner. Have coffee or lunch and bat some ideas around. Don’t be afraid to ask for advice. Be mutually supportive. Celebrate your wins. Commiserate and pick up the pieces if necessary. You can’t usually do this with friends and family because they don’t understand what it’s like to be in business. 

Do choose carefully who you trust with details about your business – and make sure it doesn’t turn into a mutual moaning session! The aim is to feel less isolated, not become totally depressed.

Make Room to Work
If you’re cramped in a tiny space under the stairs, or perched on the end of the dining table, you will struggle to make headway with your business. It’s important that you have enough room to work, room to keep your papers tidily and room to make and take phone calls in a business-like way. 

Turning up to client meetings with coffee rings or jam on a proposal is not professional. Keep telling your little ones to ‘be careful’ around your papers or laptop, and the result will be nervous dispositions all round. Just as you need to be able to separate work time from home time, so you need to have somewhere that is just for your business and that won’t interfere with family life. 

© Louise Barnes-Johnston, 2008 - Used with permission

Louise Barnes-Johnston is “The Business Accelerator”. She provides business coaching and mentoring for entrepreneurs and owners of small businesses. Get a copy of her FREE report “10 Ways to Boost Your Business” at http://www.frontline-results.com (http://www NULL.frontline-results NULL.com/)

What would happen if your web designer disappeared tomorrow? or if someone managed to hack into your web site? Things have been known to go wrong, and if they go, it can make your life agony.

Why would anyone want to hack my web site?

Chances are they don’t, however your website is probably on a server or network which holds tens, hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of other websites. If any of those become a target, yours could be affected.

… to make your life easier in any eventuality, you only need to take a few steps…

There are four parts to your site: Domain name, Hosting, Website files, and Database (optional).

You need to make sure that you and/or your future designer can take over quickly with the minimum of hassle.

Website files – When your website is complete, either ask your current designer for the files on CD or have them zipped and emailed to you for backup. If you know how to FTP, get the ftp details so you can do it yourself at regular intervals if necessary. Or there is sometimes a ‘backup’ option if you can gain access to the control panel for your site.

Database – Not all sites, but most now have databases. These need to be accessed separately. If you have access to your control panel, the ‘backup’ option usually backs up the database with the files so you should be OK. If not, use a MySQL or SQL export to do so. (Get your designer to walk you through the steps)

Hosting – Is your site hosting with a major company or directly with the web designer? If the latter, this could disappear with them if things go wrong. It’s easily replaceable however so don’t worry about keeping hold of it.

Domain name – If your domain name is a .co.uk, goto nic.uk (http://nic NULL.uk) (or nic.com (http://nic NULL.com) for .com/.net/.org) Make sure that your name is listed by the registrant details and not your designer. This means if worse comes to the worse, you have easy access to moving it with you, if it’s not. Ask your web designer if it can be changed. (If you’ve opted out, it may look blank although you will still be assigned to it)

If you make regular updates to the site, make sure you keep regular backups of both the site files and database. If you run an online shop, just the database should suffice. Just double-check with your designer for specific information.

Ultimately you should now have a CD of files and database, control panel login and password and/or ftp login and password. This means if things go wrong, everything can be restored relatively quickly.

If necessary, this disk and password can go to your current designer or a new one and you should be back up and running with the minimum amount of data loss.

Remember, insurance can replace your equipment but it can’t replace your data.

Yet another potential web design client has come my way with Google adverts on their website. Promises of extra money, assumptions of better rankings and more professional look… tempted?

Don’t even think about it!

If you’re running the site deliberately to make money from advertising or a hobby site with advertising to pay for itself, fine. Even then you need one heck of a high hit rate for this to make any real money.

Google ads, and of course other automated advertising systems read the content of the site and choose relevent ads. If you’re an accountant, and trying to run ads on your business site, Google will quite happily pay you 20p to redirect your potential clients to your competitor’s website. Nobody wants that!… except of course your competitor.

When you’re discussing your design requirements with your web, graphics, or IT person, and you start to utter those words ‘Should I put those Google ads on my site?’ prepare to be shot.

• They don’t improve your Google listings
• They don’t look professional
• They don’t make your company or website look nice/big/clever/important
• They are links AWAY from your site and do not bring visitors in
• They will show up your competitors
• They will lose you business

Getting your website designed can be an expensive process, it can also take a few weeks to months of your time, so how can you be sure you’ll get the right person for the job?

A website is typically broken down into the 5 parts (more for more complicated sites)

• The Design:- the actual look and feel of the site
• The HTML:- the coding which works behind the design but allows (or disallows) search engines, readability etc.
• The Server-side Coding:- This adds the main functionality to the site, email forms, database, forums etc.
• The Marketing:- This helps your site be seen.
• The Support:- Who do you call when things go wrong?

Every-body’s requirements are different, but most people will need to consider all of the above to get the right long-term relationship. Here’s how:

The Design

Have a look through the designer’s portfolio, notice the colours, layouts and styles. Everybody has a different idea as to what does and doesn’t look good. If there was one right answer, every site would look exactly the same! What you want is a designer who can produce work that you like. If they already produce designs you like the look of, then you’ve saved half the trouble of this stage.

During the design process, most designers will allow constant amendments (within reason) to get the results you want. Be sure to check with them beforehand. Some designers offer 1 draft, 1 amends and 1 final. From experience, this is usually enough. For budget and time’s sake, it’s usually best to try and stick with this anyway. If you know exactly what you want, and are a good communicator, then this will be easy.

Also to make it easier for your designer, pick a few sites you like the look of, take note of colour-schemes, styles again and let your designer know. This again will save time as they should be able to merge the elements you like into a flat file ready for processing. BE SURE YOU’RE HAPPY WITH THE DESIGN AT THIS STAGE, CHANGES TO THE DESIGN LATER ON CAN INCUR EXTRA CHARGES.

The HTML

The next phase is usually to construct the HTML. This is where the design is taken by a CSS coder, broken down into it’s many parts to be rebuilt for the web. It’s up to this person whether to leave a large red box as a red box image, or write the HTML to draw a box with a red background on the fly. This is to ensure their are as few actual images as possible but keeping to the original design. This stage generates a list of instructions for the browser (firefox, internet explorer) to follow, for example ‘Show this image, put it over there, next to it write ‘Welcome to my site’ etc.

There are two main ways of doing this, neither are wrong, but one is certainly better practice than the other.

Method 1 – tables.
The boffins at the HTML decisions office decided to give us a command for our arsenal. The table allows us to add a table of information and add in prices, contents pages, menus etc. Web designers have figured out that if you have a 3×3 table, you can insert images and use this for placement.

Whilst this works, it does have further issues, the main one being accessibility and search engines. Blind people using the internet through screen readers and search engines, both read a site in a linear fashion, tables can make this a very awkward process as the machines will treat a table as a table of data. It also generates lots and lots of code which the search engines have to sift through to find your content.

Method 2 – CSS.
This is much better practice, the text and containers are placed in the html. A separate file tells the browser where everything goes. This separate file can be easily ignored by robots and search engines get right into your text. It also has many more positioning features than tables and can create a much more user-friendly experience. If you want quality over budget, you could also ask if they do XHTML rather than HTML. XHTML is a slightly better use of HTML, it is given slightly more preference again in the search engines but is has very strict rules so can be difficult to find someone who can.

Ask your web designer which method they use. For your purposes, it may not matter. You can often get cheaper rates from people using method 1, but better quality site, better search engine results and better accessibility from method 2. When you get your site, right click and hit view source. If your code is full of <table> , <tr> and <td> tags, they’ve probably used tables. Ask a random IT professional or web designer on Ecademy to check, most will take seconds to be able to tell you. Make sure you got what you paid for. While you’re there, check for the <frame> tag. If it’s there, you may need to kick up a stink. Search engines, particularly Google hate frames and they should be banned.

The Server Side Coding
PHP, Perl, ASP.NET, Coldfusion are just some of many. This code you never see on the website, but it manages so much. It doesn’t matter which one your designer uses, as long as they’re competent at it. If you want the site to be edited later by in-house staff however, it is better to match up the technologies to make sure they understand what they’re about to be given.

The serverside coding is the part that does things behind the scenes. (instant results and effects are usually another format entirely, Javascript. This is for another blog) When you upload a file, something needs to receive and know what to do with that file. When you complete a contact us form, something needs to know how to process it. If you’re administering your own site, there must be code to do so.

When browsing their portfolio, test what you can. If you want a user registration and login, have a look to see if they’ve done it before, try logging in with fake details. You’ll no doubt get an error message, but make sure the error message is on the same site. If the login sends you to another site, this code is probably managed by a third party. If you want a forum, make sure it can be done, calculators, crm’s, cms’s etc.

It’s at this stage you may hear words like Joomla, Mambo, Drupal. Don’t worry, your designer is not putting a hex on you. All of these (plus many more) are pre-built packages available for free download which many web designers use. They take a lot of the hassle out making a website editable. Some designers use their own software (like myself) as they can be pretty generic. All should be able to provide you with a demonstration so you can see how easy/complicated it is to manage your site. If you don’t like it, ask about alternatives.

Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

Find out what they can offer you in terms of marketing. Search engines will not find you if they don’t know you’re there. Any good designer will submit your site to all the major search engines by default. If they don’t, find out why not. You can also submit your site yourself using services such as addme.com (use a temporary or free email address so you can avoid the junk mail) This submits your site for free to most of the major search engines. You only need to do this once however.

Ask about search engine optimisation. This is often talked about as a separate service but most of it should actually be covered in the HTML part of the site at no extra cost. If you have the ability to amend your own information, a good designer can give you good pointers, or speak to Nikki Pilkington on Ecademy for ongoing checks and reports. To do it yourself, 299steps.com offers some fantastic advice.

Pay-per-click, this can be completely self managed. Google’s own system allows you to pay for adverts on certain searches. You’re bidding for positions though so some keywords are more expensive than others. If you can’t work it out, or would rather not have to worry about it yourself, again your ongoing SEO person or Nikki Pilkington or even your designer can manage these for you.

The Support

By the almost random nature of the internet, things do go wrong. Your website will crash, it will go down, it will run slowly from time to time. Sometimes you can’t get your email, sometimes you can’t send. What support packages does your web design offer? More often than not, if things go wrong it’s not your web designers fault, but they should have enough knowledge to tell you where the problem is and what you can do to fix it. If you have an IT support person, this may already be covered but it’s worth checking. The most important points are how easy is it to get hold of the right support person when you need them? Do you often have to leave messages on voicemails or can you only call during certain times? How quickly do they respond to emails? Ask if you can speak to one or two of their clients, ask specifically for people on their portfolio and find out what they think of the designer you’re considering.

Hopefully this will ensure you are better armed for that first enquiry into getting your site designed or redesigned and that you can understand some of the jargon you may have thrown at you.

We all want to be the best at what we do and some of us already are but there are always improvements we can make which make us better, quicker, nicer, easier to deal with, easier to talk and so on.

I’ve seen so many businesses that like what they do and never change. They sit and slow stagnate being left behind by all their competition whilst they are moving forwards.

Now I can’t hire 10 more developers, expand the office, increase my sales team and training over night. But what I can do is make more subtle changes.

Every week, I target 2 improvements a week, and I keep them in a list to review to ensure that months on, I’m still sticking to them. My logic is that with 10 developers, I’d need a suitable way of organising our clients and contacts which can be easily understood by anyone accessing their information. So rather than tackling this when I’m busy interviewing, I have a simple online/offline filing system which is already in use and easy to work with.

This week, I’ve implemented a better time-management structure to keep time-wasting to a minimum. I’ve also added a pdf feature to my web editing suite. One improvement to my processes, one to my main product.

If I keep improving, no matter how slight, then I will never become stagnant, keep moving forward and by the end of every year, I will have improved 104 things in my business/life and products, a dramatic improvement!

Steadily moving forwards is less risk and easier than leaping forwards, like the hare and the tortoise.

• What can you improve on now?
• Is your filing system not as useful as it once was?
• Are you spending too much time on Ecademy?
• Do you find the last hour of every day the least productive?
• Are your products as good as they could be?
• Is your website/promotional literature/Ecademy profile up to date? Does it really sell you?
• Is your desk a mess? Could you find a way of being more organised?
• Do your staff have the right training?
• Do they have any suggestions for improvements within the company?

Many people I speak to as potential clients are left in this situation. They’ve forked out for a nice (or not so nice) website, they’ve added it into the google thingy and now… nothing… not a sausage… or an enquiry.

If you want an egg to roll off the table into a bucket, you need to tip the table in the right direction and make sure the bucket is ready and in place to receive aforementioned egg.

How do you tip the table? There are a number of ways including paying Google for clicks to your site, through to a little tweaking to help position your website. (See Nikki Pilkington’s (http://www NULL.ecademy NULL.com/account NULL.php?id=173621) 299 steps to website heaven (http://www NULL.299steps NULL.com/) for some great tips, or talk to Nikki, another SEO specialist or even your web designer directly.

One easy way is to basically link to it. Make sure in the editing page of your Ecademy profile your web address is filled in. If you have a blog or other websites, link back to your main website with descriptive text. (don’t just call the link ‘Click Here’)

So the table’s been tipped, with any luck, the egg will start to roll. Any eggs placed on the table in future will also roll. Now how to get it into the bucket instead of on the floor?

Route your visitors through the site and make sure they finish up with a call to action. Come and see us, send me an email, call me for a no-obligation quote, speak to me for impartial advice.

When?

Call me NOW for a quote!

What’s the catch?

Call me now for a FREE instant quote!

Can what you do initially be done online? Do you sell widgets? Could you ship them to clients paying through the site? Can your quoting system be automated in the form of an online calculator? Could the site book appointments/viewings/meetings/rooms online? This makes the table slippy to make the egg slide better. Eggs don’t want to think, but they can break so make it easy.

You can of course complement table tipping with egg removal. This method involves picking up the egg you want in the bucket, and placing it directly inside. Make sure your website address is on every business card, letterhead, invoice, compliments slip, mailshot, newspaper ad, magazine, and catalogue you hand out. This method is easier individually than the table tipping method, but you can only move the eggs you’re targetting. Any eggs you miss will stay on the table.

Eggs are now starting to slide and more are being laid? Get some statistics for your website. I know it’s a load of numbers but they are useful numbers. Google Analytics provide a very nice, clean tool, sometimes they’re even built into your web hosting package. These statistics will show you how many eggs were laid on the table, how they slid and where they landed. If 90% of your eggs are leaving the table at the wrong side, maybe you need to adjust the tilt. If people are leaving when they read the ‘About Us’ page, what am I doing to scare them off? Change it, watch the stats, see if it’s made a difference. The more you offer value (depth of tilt) and the easier it is for eggs to slide, the more eggs will start flowing through.

Once the eggs are falling into the bucket, it’s then up to you to do what you do best to catch them.

How many people hit your site last month?
How many people used your enquiry form or called you whilst on the website?
How many of these enquiries turned into sales?

“But the website isn’t our main way of generating business”

It doesn’t have to the main way, but if you’re marketing to billions of people, you want to convert some surely. Otherwise they’re using your competitors.

Where are your eggs getting stuck?

My sister is moving house today. I wanted to help but as I have no car at the moment, and she has lots of male friends with, I’d effectively be dead weight. Instead I did something completely out of character and offered to babysit her two month old baby Ethan. My intentions were that I could do all the necessary stuff and leave him quietly playing or sleeping while I catch up on some work.

Ethan was delivered this morning along with:

• 1 pram
• 1 carry seat
• 1 baby bouncer
• 6 clean nappies
• 3 changes of clothes
• 3 bottles of pre-prepared formula
• 1 small tub of formula with measuring spoon just in case
• 2 sterilised dummies
• 1 plastic changing mat
• 1 pack of babywipes
• 1 small tub of Sudocrem
• 1 pack of unscented pocket tissues
• 1 blanket
• 1 coat, one woolly hat
• 1 bottle of Colic medicine with applicator.

He’s coming here for a few hours! I’d hate to see his overnight bag! No wonder my sister needs to move!

I carefully positioned Ethan’s bouncer on my bed, central so the vibrating/bouncing electronic functions had no chance of slowly dropping him off the edge. We moved Ethan from car seat to bouncer and there he sat, quiet, staring, watching. We caught each other’s gaze, he stared, I stared. As if from a distance I heard some instructions about nappy changing, feeding schedules, medicine and bottle warming, but all I could do was watch his eyes narrow and face screw up as she left.

I think we managed about 2 minutes of silence before it started. The ground swelled, the walls curved inwards and the noise… oh the noise! I rocked him, I cuddled him, I swaddled him, I turned on rock music, classical music, Jazz, Easy listening (I have eclectic tastes) and nothing was working. A very short amount of silence followed, during which time Ethan just stared, his face turned red, his tongue poking slightly through his thin lips… This could only mean one thing.

I pulled out the cold plastic changing mat and placed this monster on it. Carefully undid his buttons and removed the lower half of his clothes to reveal the guardians. Those cute blue bears on nappies designed to give false hope to those who venture within. I removed around 3 pounds of yellowy sludge holding down my own potential contribution in the process and cleaned away all evidence that he was ever hiding toxic waste about his person.

And then silence…

He stopped crying, I could hear birds and dear and antelope again, which I found weird living in the centre of Watford. He looked at me and almost smiled. And then he did what only males can do. Managed a nice clean stream of urine right over the edge of the changing mat and soaked my duvet. Despite my frustration, I was quite impressed.

But that is why my house smells, I don’t think I can ever remove the smell of baby poo from my nostrils, clothing, furnishings or anything else. After reading a story from the only book I had to hand (Advanced PHP Programming) he got bored and went to sleep. He’s due to be fed in 30 minutes… I’m enjoying the peace… Only another 5 hours to go before he is taken away by his mother, someone who has the strength and patience to do this every day, all day.

As I finish this off, he’s stirring, stretching, preparing for another onslaught… I have bottles on standby, two holsters and cowboy hat. I’m ready for you Ethan, This time I’m ready!

Mothers day is coming up in March, this year I won’t forget.

I’m going to help others share this information, it’s not secretive, yet so few know about it.

Assuming you have an office, or a student computer, you want to kit it out with some useful software. It can be costly, your options are: Buy the software outright (costing thousands), Obtain illegal copies of the software (Illegal and often very awkward), or find an alternative.

What would you do?

Let me suggest the alternatives and the answer should be obvious:

Software comparisons

Microsoft Office 2007 (http://www NULL.amazon NULL.co NULL.uk/Microsoft-Office-2007-Professional-PC/dp/B000HEV6ES/ref=pd_bbs_sr_6?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1201353926&sr=8-6)
(Containing: Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher and Access)

Openoffice Any version (http://www NULL.openoffice NULL.org/)
(Containing: Write, Math, Draw, Impress, Calc and Base)

Both have the same basic functions, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database software. Open office is missing it’s version of outlook, but you can use Thunderbird and Lightening.

Openoffice can open and save Microsoft Office documents and most other formats with ease. Microsoft Office can open MS Office documents but not most of Openoffice’s formats.

Microsoft office offer updates for a few years after sale, once this time is over, you need to pay for an upgrade.

Openoffice offer updates and upgrades for life, all included in the cost.

Microsoft office 2003 costs £280 through Amazon (http://www NULL.amazon NULL.co NULL.uk)
Openoffice costs nothing… ever…

Antivirus

I’ll keep this one simple as I’ve covered this on another blog. My personal experiences are as follows

Norton

£17.99 through Amazon. Seems to have a habit of slowing down PCs. It has also let through the odd virus on my machine. The first thing I, and my IT professional friends and colleagues remove when they arrive at a call-out. You do need a good antivirus, but I wouldn’t recommend this one.

McAffee

£9.99 from Amazon. Works much faster than Norton, but I have had the odd virus get through it’s scanning process.

AVG

Free from Grisoft (http://free NULL.grisoft NULL.com/). (Free for personal non-commercial, around £25 for commercial) If this is going on your home computer, download the free one. If on work, unfortunately you do technically need to pay, however you get your money’s worth. Easy to setup and then just ignore. It runs itself, updates itself and doesn’t slow down computers very much at all. (Except during a scan, but this can be stopped) It’s very good at preventing virus attacks and has never let a virus onto my computer! My other article about virus scanning is here.

For web based solutions, see Joomla (http://www NULL.joomla NULL.org/), WordPress (http://wordpress NULL.org/)(this blog uses it), osCommerce (http://www NULL.oscommerce NULL.org).

For other ideas for software replacements, do a web search for the software name followed by the words ‘open-source’.

You should see some great recommendations from people using this same method of obtaining free software legally.

If you are UK based and really don’t know where to start, speak to Alan Lord at The Open Learning Centre (http://www NULL.theopenlearningcentre NULL.com/) for training and advice. The cost for one of his seminars is around the cost of one virus scanner. Don’t buy it, use AVG and use the money you saved to get some more great information from the Open Learning Centre. Say I sent you

Last night I attended an amazing Ecademy (http://www NULL.ecademy NULL.com/account NULL.php?id=217922&xref=217922) meeting in London. The meeting had over 200 attendees each one as fascinating as the last. I wanted to share the information we received from the guest speakers that night as already it has proven to be a valuable tool. I will continue using it in my every day life.

French (http://www NULL.ecademy NULL.com/account NULL.php?id=52521&xref=217922)-Burgess (http://www NULL.ecademy NULL.com/account NULL.php?id=39782&xref=217922) Six Step Belief Change System is designed to help you get out of your own way. It is needed by people who want to improve or completely re-invent themselves. It’s a system which helps with motivation, getting things done, and getting things done better than before.

Step 1 – Choose what it is you want.

In my business, I want to become a better networker, I want to be able to approach strangers more easily and talk to them as I do my own friends.

Focus on what it is you want, not what you don’t want. When you focus on what you don’t want, you tend to get it. I don’t want to run out of money and have to ration food, but for this example, I will rephrase it as: I want to keep making money and clear £xxxx per month to ensure I can buy what I want, when I want.

Step 2 – Audit your thoughts.

Take a piece of paper, head it with the choice above and draw two columns below. Head each column: ‘Helpful Thoughts’ and ‘Unhelpful Thoughts’

Now write down all the thoughts you have about the above goal and put them into one of the columns. Helpful comments are positive comments: ‘I need take on new clients’, ‘I could speak to x about distributing’. Unhelpful comments are negative comments: ‘I haven’t got the money to pay for ….’, ‘I’m no good at talking to strangers’, ‘what if it doesn’t work?’

Step 3 – What iffing.

Look through your helpful and unhelpful thoughts and get to know them and understand where they’re coming from. Now take each unhelpful comment in turn, and convert it into a positive ‘What if’ and write these in the helpful comments box.

i.e.
I am no good at talking to strangers.
becomes:-
I do have a skill for talking to strangers.

What if it doesn’t work
becomes:-
What if it does work?
What if it works very well?

Step 4 – Provide Evidence.

When you use ‘What if ….’ negatively, you provide evidence reinforcing the many reasons why you shouldn’t do something. ‘I always mess up conversations with people’, ‘I always end up being stuck talking to the one person no-one else wants to talk to.’

So do the same with the positive ‘what ifs’ you wrote above. Continue each ‘What if…’ with ‘…because…’

i.e.
I do have a skill for talking to strangers because I do sometimes meet some very interesting and powerful people, I have developed contacts that I know I can rely on and talk to whenever I need help. I have received business from some of these contacts, and have made new contacts because of it.

What if it does work? Because I have worked on projects more complicated than this before, and they worked beautifully. I have helped others with similar projects, and they worked fine. I have had a few people literally throwing money at me for other projects they are interested in.

Step 5 – Experience the new situation.

When you think about negative outcomes, do you envisage them? do you imagine being there, imagine the complaining phone calls, imagine the shame, and imagine people saying negative things about you?

Does that really happen? You’ve seen it so many times, you believe it will actually happen, you almost implant a false memory and provide more reasons not to do something.

Again, in reverse, imagine this ‘what if…’ imagine what would happen if it did work, imagine the congratulations and smiles you get from important people. Imagine those phone calls out of the blue ‘Hi, I’ve been speaking to a client of mine and he said that you are fantastic at …. can we arrange a meeting, I have a job for you.’

Mentally rehearse this scenario, what you see, feel, how you walk, how you stand, how you speak to people. Keep rehearsing this in your head over and over.

You now have a goal, you have an emotional connection with the outcome, one which will help drive you to perform better and achieve more.

Step 6 – Imaginary friends.

Would you normally be more relaxed talking to a one-man-band company face to face or the CEO of a multi-national company?

Which scenario would you perform better in? Which would you present to more effectively? Which would you spend more time preparing for?

Would you perform better if your spouse was there? When your business partner or member of staff is present, would you feel more comfortable or confident?

Would you feel more confident talking to high powered business executives if you were one yourself?

If you’re not something you need to be, imagine you are. Don’t say it, else you’ll be lying and could be locked up. Just imagine it. I feel absolutely comfortable talking to this woman because my business has been around for as long as hers and is doing as well as hers. (Don’t use this one if you are offering you’re about to defend them in a criminal case, or specialise in business rescue loans!)

With these pointers in mind, change your mindset, decide that you can do it and provide evidence for this. Visualise the outcome and keep the feeling in memory. Be who you want to be in any situation and achieve all those things you put off until tomorrow.

6 Step Belief Change Official Document from French and Burgess