They Laughed When I Said ‘Tell the World What Scares You’, and then they saw my Balance Sheet!

Note from Chris: This is a guest post from El Edwards.

It’s Monday morning, the first day of a brand new week. You stare at the blank, white screen in front of you, cursor flashing. What on earth are you going to do today?!

You pull out your planner, to-do list, GTD system or the good old fashioned diary, but it might as well be written in ancient Greek for all the help it gives you. You’re stuck.

Coffee? That’ll help won’t it? It’s bound to shift this fog and get you back in the right direction toward amassing your fortune, earning your keep, and generally keeping the proverbial wolf from the door. Because, let’s be honest, you don’t have time for this do you? You’ve a business to run.

There’s a whole world of stuff you should and could be doing right now but none of it feels right. Woah! Hang on a minute there cowboy. Feels? What’s this feeling nonsense you talk of? You’re an entrepreneur. You deal in plans and figures and goal setting and targets. Since when did you let your feelings dictate your work flow?

Well I have news for you sweetie. Feelings are what got you here in the first place.

Think back to why you started playing this game. What made you turn your back on the regular nine to five working for the man? Did it have something to do with dreams? Maybe a desire to spend more time with loved ones? Perhaps you wanted to earn a bit of cash whilst travelling the world? Forget travelling the world, do you have a desire to change it?

Whatever got you into this game, it certainly wasn’t facts, figures and balance sheets. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, your feelings have got you on this path so it’s time to play them at their own game. It’s time to start recognising your feelings for what they are and get real.

Stop pretending that you have it all together. The very next time your world feels a bit foggy, look around you. He might never admit it, but that guy over there in the slick suit and fancy tie? Yes him. He’s been where you are right now. And Ms ‘I have three degrees and six suits from Gucci’? She’ll be there next week. You are not alone.

The stuff whirling around inside that lovely head of yours is amazing. You can do such awesome stuff. But on the day that the fog descends, on the day when everything around you suddenly feels wobbly, you will feel all alone and shut off.

I’m here to blow the whistle on all that nonsense. The sooner we start being honest about this entrepreneurial journey of ours, the easier and more fun it will be.

Imagine that you’re having a dark day. Not black but certainly a darker shade of grey.

Just as you’re beginning to feel like the most frustrated person on the planet, your phone rings. It’s your best friend. A person who you not only respect and adore as a friend, but someone who you look up to in business too. So you pick up the phone expecting to hear of their latest triumph but instead, they tell you that they have a secret to share with you.

You grab another cup of coffee, ready for a tale of secret travels for their spouse’s birthday next month. But no, it’s not that kind of secret:

“Shhh, don’t tell anyone. I have something to tell you. I feel like a fake and a fraud. Everyone sees me as this hugely successful person. They respect my opinion and think I’m great. But the thing is, who am I to think I can run this multi-national corporation? I’m just me. Who am I kidding?!”

Wow! You land in your seat with a bump, the air knocked out of your lungs in shock. And then smiling and breathing a sigh of relief, you recover and prepare to welcome your friend to the club.

When was the last time you heard a peer own up to this darker side of business? Do you ever look around at your contemporaries and feel a slight tinge of envy because they have no worries?

I have news for you my friend. Every single person on this planet has days like this. There are some great actors in our circle but it’s an illusion.

It’s time to start being honest. It’s time to start being real. It’s time to shine a light on the dark stuff so it has no-where to hide. Who’s with me?

El Edwards is a muse and writes Heaven and El where she inspires people to live their dreams in an honest and authentic way. You can read more about El’s vision in her manifesto, Like A Breath Of Fresh Air. She’s also the founder of UK registered charity Give A Brick where she uses social media to empower unconditional love and giving.

3 Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Building A Business Online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCQgQhlEyyk

This guest post by Milt Baron is part of the VBL Guest Post Month!.

When entrepreneurs make the leap from real world offline business to online Internet business it can be tricky to know the best way to go about building your online presence. With so much conflicting information around and different approaches for different types of businesses it can be very confusing.
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Virtual Office Tips for Virtual Business Success!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk85OfMCrSA

This guest post by Valerio Paolini is part of the VBL Guest Post Month!

Today, we have the pleasure to see a guest video post from Valerio Paolini all the way from Rome, Italy. In this clip, Valerio shares practical tips on how to take your business to new heights utilizing virtual office magic tricks! Valerio highlights the Pareto efficiency in economics that we can all learn from. He also mentions the bliss of having a virtual business lifestyle, meeting new clients in 5-star hotels and restaurants.

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3 Awesome Steps to Virtual CEO Success

you keys to a Virtual CEO success

This guest post by Ben Lumley is part of the VBL Guest Post Month!

There are 3 keys to achievement: Common Sense, Hard work and Stick-with-it-ness – Thomas Edision

I wanted to look at something that a lot of the readers of virtualbusinesslifestyle.com will be very familiar with, Chris’s goal of becoming a Virtual CEO by the end of 2010. What I would like to do though, instead of looking at the mechanics of how he is reaching this mother of all goals, is identify 3 keys to Chris’s current and future success.

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How To Use Paper to Help Your Business Virtualize!

How To Use Paper to Help Your Business Virtualize

This guest post by Stu Lustman is part of the VBL Guest Post Month!

I’m Stu Lustman and I virtualize some but very little of my business so far.

Disclaimer: I am trying to virtualize more than I do now.  Also, I may bring up technical topics but I am not a techie. My business is in commercial finance.

Unlike many who jump into the lifestyle design concept, I already have a business that I enjoy doing that I am trying to virtualize and location independent-ize for myself.

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3 Daringly Different Ways To Run A Company From 3 Dangerously Different Countries!

This is a Guest Post by Jonny Gibaud, founder of Emergency Food Storage.

So it is guest post month of Virtual Business Lifestyle and so fittingly I have written a quest post. I know, I am very much on the ball.

For those that have never heard of me, My names is Jonny and I am a traveling entrepreneur who gets my kicks from travelling and living and running businesses in different countries.

In this post we will look at three of my recent “office” environments from which I have been expanding one of my companies EFS Ltd, and take a quick gander at some experiences, “Definately Do’s” and “Definately Don’ts” that will hopefully help you in your own Virtual Business adventures. And so our little story begins in sunny England.

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Archimedes Would Have Liked Outsourcing – Seriously!

Location: Company HQ – Reading Time: 8mins

This is a Guest Post by Adrian Swinscoe of AdrianSwinscoe.com, where he writes excellent articles all focused on Growing Your Business and making it as an entrepreneur – I sincerely suggest you check him out at his blog, after you’re done reading this one and commented here!

“Give me a lever big enough and I’ll move the world” – Archimedes

Entrepreneurs tend to be visionary in that they are able to spot an opportunity to solve a particular problem and find a market for that solution.

Entrepreneurs are known to be the ones who do whatever it takes to get something done and they don’t give up.

However, there is more to business than having a good idea and being determined.

In building a business, very little of the hard work involves coming up with the idea. Most of the effort goes into developing the key systems and processes that go into delivering the entrepreneur’s vision and making a business successful. Marketing, finance, project management, new product development, customer service and customer relationship management, all of these things are key to the entrepreneur’s ability to scale and replicate the business.

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Process Design for Automation, Outsourcing and a Better Life!

Location: Company Offices – Reading Time: 7-8mins

This is a Guest Post by Robert Granholm of The Lifestyle Design Project.

Process design is about understanding what you do, and I don’t mean that in some philosophical way, but in a very literal, “what steps do you actually take” way. We rarely stop to think how we get things done, most of the time we just…do them. Truth is though, the practice of breaking down how we get from point A to point B unearths ways to multiply our productivity in such a fierce way, it’s almost an entrepreneurial necessity. Streamline practices, outsource minutia, and be ruthlessly efficient by learning how to take on the process design mindset with a few key practices.I don’t mean to introduce another tool or getting things done methodology but instead, habits that will naturally wake you up to where you aren’t just efficient, but effectively efficient! (there’s a difference). Stop wasting time, effort and money doing things simply because you think that’s how things are. Someone once said hindsight is 20/20, well gaining perspective doesn’t always have to be after the fact!

Laundry or Launching

The design mindset is applicable anywhere in life, from doing your laundry to launching a product. Deconstructing the steps it takes to accomplish a task uncovers wasted energy, better tools, and simpler methods. Applied in your day to day endeavors you’ll find yourself less frustrated, more organized and with more time; applied to your business life and you’ll be amazed at the benefits. Entire time stealing endeavors like finding customers, or hunting down gigs can be shortened, easily outsourced or erased all together after you’ve taken the time understand what’s really happening as the hours tick away. Although I can elaborate for days on the importance of documentation and workflow vs just throwing yourself at something for productivity, I’ll leave that for the comments, here’s how to get your mind processing for all around results.

Your New Mental Habits

Understand the World – Sam Carpenter says it best in his book, Work the System, “Everything works fine 99.9 percent of the time.” And if that rubs you wrong way, take a look at this video that subtly reminds us that everything around us works 99.9 perfectly well, so putting things into a systems mindset works with the world, not against it….

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