The path starts looking a lot less clear, and we start to doubt ourselves.  Who are we to lead this Good?  What if there is someone out there already doing a better job?  Where will all this effort and belief lead us?  And what about the mortgage payments in the meantime?

Sometimes, we even start to think about other paths that lead us away from our Good Works.  Even though we know in our hearts that we’re meant for bigger things, we choose to put our energy into looking for safer, more traditional ways of making a living.  Ways that are easier to explain to people, ways that feel secure, easy, and more paved.

We all feel this way sometimes, Do Gooders!  Every single one of us.  Even those fancy-schmancy Do-Gooders who seem to have it all worked out.  Even those folks who you admire the most.  All of us feel fear and worry about screwing it all up, of not making the money we need to live, of not having anyone show up to our shindigs and teleclasses. (Even me!)

The bad news is, it’s part of the journey and part of the job of leading people into a better world to feel this way sometimes.  Avoiding it is impossible.  The good news is, if you’re feeling this way, you know you’re in good company and that you’re on the right path to doing real true Good.

When you feel this way, it is not the time to give up.  It’s not a “sign” that you aren’t meant to do your Good Works.  Not even close!  No, you mustn’t believe those thoughts that equate fear, uncertainty and doubt with the thought of “I cannot…”   Because you CAN.  Of course you can.  Others with much less than you have made it, so you can, too.

Know that you aren’t alone.

Know that the world has waited for the things only you can bring us.  Only the message you can share, or the way that you can share it.

Know that you can do this.

And know that I believe in you! And I am one of many who only want to see a spark in you, a whisper of the leader you are so that we can join your cause and fly the flag of change, peace, love, or whatever your message is – out into the world with you.

So no giving up, Do Gooders.  One step, then the next.  This path will take you to places you cannot imagine, and all you need do is to keep walking forward and trust that the Good you do matters.  Every little ounce of it!

When you are facing any kind of change in your life, you’ll experience several different phases of emotion.  And because our emotions have such an impact on our work (we are heart-driven people, after all!), they will naturally impact on our ability to get things moving in our businesses.

The Change Curve (graph below) can help you understand why there are times when suddenly building your new life as a self-employed Do-Gooder feels hard and slow, and why sometimes it all suddenly comes much more easily to you.  As we implement changes and begin to really understand them, our motivation and ability to perform at top levels increases.  But your emotions and where you are on the Change Curve also can make you feel stuck if you don’t have the tools to move past them into the later phases of Change.

(If you missed them, you can read the last few posts on the Change Curve here.)

Today I want to focus on how to get yourself moving through Phase 3 – Resistance/Anger and Phase 4 – Letting Go.

It’s totally normal to start feeling some pretty negative emotions once you realize that big changes are needed in your life.  We experience frustration with ourselves for letting things go on for so long without taking action.  We start beating ourselves up for not noticing the signs earlier.  And we get angry that it seems to come so easily to other people.  It’s all just unfair and annoying!  In Phase 3, this resistance and anger feels very strong, and sometimes, even overwhelming.  Your motivation takes a serious dip during this phase and the next one.  It feels like you’re stuck, like there isn’t any hope, like things are worse than they’ve ever been.

This is the point at which some people really do get stuck.  It feels so bad that instead of pushing through it and moving forward, they go back to the earlier phases of change like denial.  It was all so much better then!  They start wondering if maybe it isn’t all so bad to just stay the same.  For people questioning self-employment, questions about security, finances, health insurance, and even missing the commute (!) start to emerge.  Our self doubts start shouting at us, “Who do you think you are?  You’re not nearly good enough/smart enough/etc. to do this!”  So we go back to denial, where it’s easy to pretend that everything is okay again.

But this is not how we serve the world and live the lives we were meant to live.  If we allow ourselves to give up at this point, we rob the world of our gifts, and we live small lives of unfulfilled potential.  Tragedy!

Pushing through Phase 4:  Letting Go is sometimes tricky.  This is when you really need to make sure you have great supporters, inspiration and people around you that won’t let you quit.  Letting go is a scary part of change, but in order to really make things different you must let go and get ready for new things in your life.  Making space for new ideas, creativity and even money is a necessary part of this journey.  But this takes extraordinary courage sometimes, and it also means you have to learn to trust yourself, quiet those doubtful voices, and take a big leap of faith.  (Remember, courage isn’t about not being afraid.  It’s about doing what you have to do regardless of being afraid!)

Here are some tips for moving through these two tricky phases so you can start to see and feel the good stuff on the other side:

• Talk it through.  Seriously, you need a coach, a mentor or someone who just oozes positivity to help you really expose those negative self doubts.  They can’t live in the light, so once you put them out there, the majority of them will just evaporate!
• Keep focused on your Vision.  You need to learn how to inspire yourself through the fear and worry about the future.  This is going to be a key leadership skill when you are leading your movement and changing the world!  Might as well start practicing it now.  Get really, really, REALLY clear on what you want from your life and then hang onto that Vision as tightly as you can.
• Stop trying to plan it all out.  You can’t possibly know everything that is going to happen to you on this journey.  If you spend too much time trying to think about it, you’ll get completely wound up tight into your own head.  All that planning stuff will be important, but right now, you need to let your heart lead you!
• Take baby steps.  Even the smallest action to move you an inch closer to your Vision is enough during these phases.  Be kind and gentle on yourself and allow yourself the time to just inch along for a little while until it starts to feel better to take big leaps.  Do what feels somewhat safe right now, but what will move your in the direction you want to go instead of allowing yourself to go back into the safety of denial (which is just an illusion of safety anyway!)

If you can give yourself permission to work through this dip in the change curve, you’ll be less likely to panic and run backwards into your old life.  The new one is there, waiting for you!  Just keep marching forward bit by bit, and soon it will feel so much better!

Next week, we’ll continue our change curve journey and I’ll talk more about how it will feel and what you can look like when you start going back up that curve.  (Spoiler alert!  It’s awesome!!)

If you’re a Do-Gooder, you’re doing both!

Your business will need lots of technical, tried-and-tested things like strategies, systems, and spreadsheets.  But your movement to change the world will also need an incredible leader.  And leaders need leadership skills to get their message out to the world.

In the video below, I talk about how you can be a leader and get your message of change into the world.  This key leadership skill requires you to have a great Vision.  I’ll tell you how to get one, and then how to make it work for you! (And in less than 8 minutes!)

Here’s the short story:

• You need a vision to help you stay motivated, focused, and inspired.
• You need to communicate your vision to motivate and inspire others.
• A Vision is simple and short, it tells the world what you want to change and is an ideal outcome, and is not be confused with your Mission.
• Your Mission tells the world what your role is in delivering your Vision.  It’s your purpose.  It’s what you do for the world.
• I’m here to help!

What is YOUR vision of change in the world?  Share it with us in the comments below!  How can we join your tribe and help you change the world??

When you are facing any kind of change in your life, you’ll experience several different phases of emotion.  And because our emotions have such an impact on our work (we are heart-driven people, after all!), they will naturally impact on our ability to get things moving in our businesses.

The Change Curve (graph below) can help you understand why there are times when suddenly building your new life as a self-employed Do-Gooder feels hard and slow, and why sometimes it all suddenly comes much more easily to you.  As we implement changes and begin to really understand them, our motivation and ability to perform at top levels increases.  But your emotions and where you are on the Change Curve also can make you feel stuck if you don’t have the tools to move past them into the later phases of Change.

(If you missed them, you can read the last few posts on the Change Curve here.)

Today I want to focus on how to get yourself moving through Phase 2 – Realisation (or Realization for those of us in the USA!)

Once you have the moment of awakening and manage to move out of denial that your true purpose and authentic life is something other than the one you’re living, your motivation and activity actually increases for a short time.  This is because suddenly, you need to do SOMETHING!  Suddenly, just getting by and walking someone else’s path is no longer an option for you.  You know you need to change something, and as soon as possible!

So realization gets you moving towards something – but it is a very uncomfortable place, too.  At this point, you know something is wrong and you want to change, but the direction that you need to go is unclear.  You’re suddenly surrounded by things you don’t like in your life.  You can see the signs all around you that things aren’t the way you want or need in order to fulfill your potential and purpose.  And all that discomfort can get you into a real panic.

If you recognize yourself as being in the Realization Phase, here are some tools to get you moving forward again:

• Talk it through.  Find a trusted friend, coach, or mentor to help you really look at the reality of your situation and the opportunities and options you have in front of you.  Don’t let the overwhelming feelings spiral out of control in your head!
• Find answers to your questions.  Right now, because you’re in the beginning phases of change, there will be a lot of unknowns and unanswered questions that will feel a bit scary.  Start doing some research, and thinking about what you want to do to take some steps towards changing your life.  Find out what is possible, and knock of the easy “no way, not gonna happen’s!” out of your thinking as soon as you can.
• Start tracking your progress.  It’s amazing how much we actually move forward without noticing it.  Start keeping a successes log or journal, noting down your actions and process as you think through what you’re willing to change and the steps you’re taking to change them.  Even if they are just a couple of bullet points in a notebook somewhere, you’ll be amazed when you look back at how far you’ve come!
• Give yourself some time.  This phase requires you to really begin processing the reality of the changes you want to make in your life.  This takes time.  So give yourself permission to just think things through.  Try not to rush it, if you can!

You’ll notice that your motivation and performance increases in this phase, and is likely to decrease as you move through the next few phases.  Don’t despair!  The good news is, with a few tips and tools we can get you moving through these phases very quickly, without getting you too depressed or feeling like giving up.

The great thing about the Change Curve is that just by raising your awareness of how you’re feeling about your new life and business as you build them, you will be able to progress through the phases of change much more quickly and painlessly than the average business builder.  The important thing is to keep moving forward and don’t let the normal emotions of change get you stuck.

Next time, we’ll be talking more about the next two phases (Resistance/Anger and Letting Go) which is where some people just give up.  But not you, Do-Gooder!  We’re gonna get you through it, and you’ll be doing good before you know it!

In the comments below, I’d love to hear your strategies for motivating yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed and panicked.  How do you get moving forward again?

I once had a therapist tell me, “If I wanted you to nail something into that wall over there and gave you a hammer and nails, I expect you’d try and put the nail in with your head!”  I seem to have a natural ability to make things harder than they need to be.  I always figured if it didn’t feel hard, I must not be doing it right.  I assumed that all that suffering was par for the course.  If I wanted to be successful, I had to work hard, push through it, keep striving.  That’s what they tell us here in America.  All we have to do is to work hard, and all our dreams will come true.

But that is, of course, a big fat lie.

The truth is that many successful people don’t work very hard at all.  Some of them get success in unscrupulous ways, others just seem to be too lucky for their own good and it all comes very easily.  And many, many hard working people don’t ever achieve their dreams.  Hard work is no guarantee that you’ll have a happy life.

Here’s the Big Secret:  If you want a life full of joy, fun and happiness, you can’t get there through “suffering.”  In fact, if you’re suffering right now thinking you’ll have joy and happiness some magical day when your business takes off, you are sadly mistaken.  People who are happily successful know that you must bring joy and happiness with you on the journey.  These things are not a destination!

The best advice I ever got was this:  If it feels like hard work, you’re not doing it right.

And that is very true about building a heart-centered business.  When it feels too much like hard work, when you’re stressing out about how to do the next thing on your list, when it is stealing the joy and fun out of your life, it’s a sign that it’s time to reassess your strategy.  Sit back and find another way.  Because this work we’re doing?  It’s supposed to feel NATURAL.  It’s supposed to be EASY.  That’s how we know we’re in the right zone, doing the right things, and making a real difference.

And the success?  It’ll start rushing into your life without you even having to try very hard.  Just like magic! But suffering will block it all from happening.

Let it be easy.  Let joy and laughter and fun be natural by-products of your business activities.  This is how you know you’re on the right track!  This is how you’ll know when you’re in the zone of what you’re here to do.

I see people getting stuck in these stages of change again and again, in their personal lives and in their businesses.  It’s a human thing, apparently!  Over the next several weeks, I want to talk more about each of the stages of change and how to know when you’re stuck in them.  And of course, what you can do to get past them.

If you’re facing a big change in your life (and starting a business is a life changing event!), the first thing you’ll likely experience is a bit of denial.  In business, this happens a lot more often than you might think.  In almost every size and shape of business, it’s easy to ignore the warning signs that things aren’t working, or that customer needs have changed, or that we need to do something different about how we’re running the show.  In our search for control and stability in our lives, we fail to notice the signs that change is happening all around us, all the time.

When you’re starting your business, denial takes a slightly unusual form though.  Often, denial shows up as these kind of thoughts:

“I probably can’t do it.  Who am I to start a business?  So many others are doing it better than I am already.  I have nothing special to offer.  I’m not good/smart/rich/famous/extroverted/etc., enough.”

In her book, A Return to Love:  Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles, Marianne Williamson said:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Denial is where we get stuck at the beginning when we fear our own greatness.

To move out of denial, we need two things:

1. A wake up call.  Without a sense of urgency, it will be too easy for you to ignore your fears rather than face them.  So ask yourself what you are really here for.  What will the world miss out on if you don’t try?  What do you really have to lose?  What do you have to gain?
2. Lots of truth.  You need to do some soul searching so that you can realize your true gifts and be inspired by your own power and light inside of you.  Get help from people who love and know you best.  Ask them if they think these fears are real or not!

Right now, you can do some great development work and really push yourself out of that denial stage  by signing up for my FREE e-course – Are you Ready for Self-Employment.  (You can sign up here.)  It’s all about uncovering those hidden sparks inside you that you keep denying are there.  And once you find them, once you feel them radiating from within you, I can promise you denial is not going to be holding you down any more!

You were meant to do good in the world, my friends.  Get out of denial and get out there and do your good.  (You know I’m right about this!)

Next week, I’ll talk about the next stage – Realization! – and what you can do to help move yourself one step further to bringing real change into your life and into your business.

What changes are you struggling with right now?  Where are you on this change curve?

Even though some business tools aren’t really appropriate for solo-entrepreneurs, there are many that are – especially if you tweak them a bit for your own purposes.  Project management tools are especially useful for the very early stages of building your business, so I want to tell you about one of the basics – The Project Management Triangle.  This tool is useful in so many ways, but today we’ll talk about how it can help you make better business decisions to help get rid of the overwhelmed feelings many business beginners feel in the early stages of growing a business.

When you are starting a business from scratch, there are tons of decisions to make.  If you’re not careful, you’ll begin to get overwhelmed with offers from people for products you “must” have, with advice on what every website needs to attract customers, and pressure to be an expert in EVERYTHING from the moment you launch.

So what’s the secret?

You have to get really good at prioritizing so that you don’t waste time and money doing things that aren’t really going to get your where you want to go.

In the video below, I talk about the Project Management Triangle – a simple tool that can really help you make decisions early on, and can help you prioritize where you will allow yourself to be a beginner and where you’ll need to be that expert.

Allow yourself to be a beginner!  You do not have to have the best of everything right from the start.  Using tools like this one (and others that we’ll talk about in upcoming weeks) you can learn to practice tried-and-tested business tools to help you GROW your business.  Remember, you’re not giving birth to a full-grown enterprise here.

It’s okay to do things “good enough” for now. If you haven’t got the time to make it perfect, you must be prepared to compromise on cost or quality.

And the same goes for the other corners of the triangle.  They all need to be balanced out and clarified so that you don’t get in over your head and overwhelmed with things you can’t pay for, things you don’t have time for, and things you don’t need to be perfect right from the start.

Keep these parameters in mind as you develop your next step for your business and it will give you better results and make life so much easier!

It’s a bit like the process that happens when someone close to you passes away.  There are defined stages that people experience, and depending what stage you’re in, you’ll be more or less open to making big changes in your behaviors that will bring a change in your life.

Lots of people are ready for things to change around them.  (Or so they think!)  Pay attention to people around you over the next few days and I’ll bet you’ll hear people say things like:

• This just isn’t right.  Someone should do something about it.
• If I was in charge, it wouldn’t be this way.
• If I could only have more (money, time, energy, etc.), things would be different.
• Things just keep getting in my way.
• When I win the lottery I will….do something extraordinary.

These folks feel they are ready for change to happen to them.  But they lack the mindset that allows the to DO SOMETHING about their own situation.  Instead, they stay in a place of circumstance, blame, and helplessness.

One of the guru’s of change and leadership during change is John P. Kotter.  In his book, The Heart of Change (2002, Harvard Business School Press), Kotter talks about the first step to changing anyone’s behaviors - increase the urgency. 

Until and unless you feel that changing is urgent, you aren’t going to change.  You might think about change and wish for it, even pray for it, but until you are shoved out of your comfort zone and the urgency is clear to you, lasting change rarely happens.

Think about the last diet you went on.  What were the motivating factors to make you wake up one day and decide, “Today is the day!”?  I would wager it was a sense of urgency that something must be done.  Maybe you worried about your health, or your jeans didn’t fit that day.  Something happened to make your urgency increase.  And this made you take the small steps towards change that day that you needed to take.  It’s the same in pretty much every area of our lives.

Until you’re ready TO change, and not just ready FOR change, you probably won’t make any progress towards your goals.  If you’re stuck and can’t figure out why, this might be it!  You might not be ready yet and you need to push through the other stages of change that are necessary for your urgency to increase. This is true in our personal lives, in our careers and in our businesses.

Another way of looking at this is the change curve below.  Change is a process, and it isn’t really until you get to step 4 that things really start to change!   The first four steps feel pretty rotten, but they can also go really fast if you don’t let yourself get stuck in them.

You can see that the curve goes down before it goes up.  This shows how you probably feel about life during these early stages.  But once you do get through the letting go phase, things start feeling fantastic!  And if you stick with it, your motivation and productivity actually goes higher than it was before you made the change.

So where are you on this curve?  Are you still just waiting for your life to change around you, or are you ready TO make your life change?  If it’s the latter, it’s time to hire a coach and get to work! But if not, it’s time to look a bit deeper into those excuses you’re telling yourself.

Change starts with one person, with one moment, with one decision, and with one small action.  What action can you take today to move one teeny tiny step closer to the changes you want in your life?  Go and do it!

Over the next seven weeks, I’m going to be going into each of these stages more in-depth.  We’ll look at how you can coach yourself through them and how to know when you are stuck and need a bit more help.  So stay tuned!

It’s important that we practice what we preach, that we live mindfully and non-judgmentally, and that we are constantly working on our self-growth and personal development.  It is also important that we have our own coach.

One of the reasons we need to have our own coach is because coaching is such a powerful tool that one can only really know it’s power if we have experienced it ourselves.  And the other reason is a bit of a secret but I’ll tell you anyway – the truth is that coaches learn as much from being a client as they do from their formal training.

I’ve had a variety of coaches working with me off and on since 2008.  Not all of them were great, but I have learned more about good coaching from even the ones I wouldn’t work with again than I have from any other experience or training in my life.

Here are the things I’ve learned from my coaches over the years, all of which have fundamentally changed my life, taught me to be a good coach myself, and helped me make the huge changes that I have made in the last two years:

• How to stop taking everything (especially myself!) too seriously – which meant I have been able to let go of being “perfect” and just try stuff out.
• To have more FUN! (This one was critical.  I bought a bike, started gardening and improved my health with fun!)
• I have to be careful not to underplay my successes.  Celebrate and document them so I can look back at how far I’ve come.
• I’m more capable than I give myself credit for, so I can trust myself and my intuition
• When I tell myself things like, “You’re just faking it ’till you make it” it’s a total lie.  No one can fake success.  If I’m doing well, it’s because I AM successful!
• How to pay attention to my body and listen to what it needs BEFORE it screams at me and puts me into a panic in the only way it knows how to get my attention. (Usually by simulating a heart attack.  Not fun!)
• To allow myself to love myself – and to say it, out loud, regularly.  (This was a hard one!)
• That I need things to be fun, even in my work, to be happy.  I don’t like doing things the way everyone else says they should be done.
• To be an observer in life, and just treat things as an experiment sometimes.  This helps me learn to stop trying to control every thing.
• On the outside of my brain, in reality, my life is pretty close to perfect without me even trying very hard.

These are all lessons that I am certain would have taken me lots and lots of therapy and decades to learn.  But they are my lessons that I live every day now, all thanks to the work I have done with my coaches.  I would not be who I am, or where I am (literally and figuratively) without them.

Having a coach is a transformational experience.  It is extremely rewarding, powerful, and uplifting because coaches know just how to tap into your potential and unlock all those things that you’ve hidden behind fear and doubts.  It is truly something that must be experienced to be understood.  But the beauty of the coaching relationship is that it is ever-changing and growing.  Each coach and each session builds and builds on itself, because as a client, it’s all about my journey.  I set the agenda, I set the pace, and my coach just gives me the space to surprise myself.

And that’s why I have a coach, and will never be without one.  I’m not done growing!

What has coaching taught you??

(This post is dedicated to all the awesome coaches out there, but especially to the ones I have worked with over the years.  THANK YOU for believing in me and being part of my journey!)

While you’re building your business, and especially when you are planning to become self-employed, trust is also a critical factor in your success.  In the video below, I talk about why trusting yourself is so critical, and how to know if you need to work on trusting yourself more so you can make the brave leaps forward you need to make to really get your business flying.

Kenneth Bregman (writer for Harvard Business Review and leadership strategist) says:

This trusting of yourself is not just about writing a speech. It’s about speaking in meetings. It’s about choosing projects to pursue. It’s about advocating for budgets. It’s about having the courage to do work that moves you. Can you trust yourself enough to follow your own impulses?

If you need to work on trusting yourself, the best way to do that is to work with a good coach who can help you identify the things that might be keeping you from trusting more, and support you in building your self-trust.

Or you can just get out there and start making mistakes and learn along the way. But whatever you do, don’t go into this game without lots of self trust!  It will end up sabotaging your business and ultimately damage the relationship you have with yourself.

It’s time to start being brave and believing in yourself!

Below in the comments, I’d love to hear how trusting and believing your self would change your life. 

What would you do if you knew for absolute certain that you’ll be okay and that you can trust your impulses and intuition?  How would you change the world??