Thursday, December 8, 2011

The Wolf at Your Door!


Watch out! The Wolf at Your Door post is here!

No Wolf at Your Door?
Are you curious as to what I am going on about?
How many times have you started and restarted on the road to building your business?

(PS - Pre-Script. note. I am a Brit, living in the UK, writing this blog, mainly for the US market. We use different spellings than the USA and this blog is set to American English, so you UK residents don't nood to errect me every time I apprear to make a spolling mystake. I've cheque'd it hall lots of times but there may be the odd sperring error)!

I digress, back to the post!

Will you commit to your New Years resolutions in 2012? Or will they just fade into nothing and be forgotten about by the end of the first week of January?

There are people who have made it you know. You can too, if only you'd just get your finger out and get on with it. No-more false starts! This post relates to whatever you are going to do in life, whether it is a conventional off-line business or an online business.

Why do people make plans and set goals, but then do not work on them?

We are all full of great intentions, we may say, I will do this and then I will do that. Full of excitement we will hurriedly get going on our project. Then we hit a snag, or a problem and then we stop.

The drive to build your business can come from two directions as I see it. There are benefits to both directions, but there are also penalties and pitfalls. I'm not going to explain them here, I think they are self evident anyway!

Direction One.
You decide that you want and desire more out of life and after much deliberation, decide on a plan to get what you desire by building a business. The desire and imagination you have fuels your drive to build your business. I believe this is the best form of motivation. Being self-motivated and driving your own business from a positive angle.

You would use planning, delegation, working and doing anything that needs to be done. Checking and keeping records, visualization, affirmations, self-talk and perseverance to keep your goal in mind and keep yourself constantly working towards it!

Direction Two.
You may find that circumstances are not good in your current work, (or maybe you have no work at present), bills and creditors are looming, knocking at your door! (There's The Wolf)!

Under fear of penalty, of losing your home or pending redundancy, your change in fortune then fires your desire to work to simply earn enough money to live. At this stage you can only just hope and prey for money to come in to pay your debts to keep the Wolf from your door.

However, the Wolf at your door is sometimes the only real motivation that will physically force you to get a move on and work at your business. Starting a business when you have already the support of an income from a day-job, or have money coming in already, with no pressing bills, is much easier. There is less pressure and no sense of urgency, so you take your own sweet time about doing things!

The Wolf at your door is sometimes the only real motivation that will physically force you to get a move on and work at your business.

I was on a film-set once-upon-a-long-time-ago, there was a stage-coach being used in the filming. The director, (who had no-knowledge of horses), asked about the whipping of the horses to make them move, as regards to potential cruelty to horses. (But, actually more concerned with the finished legality of his film commercial).

It turns out that a horse does not actually ever get whipped! It may have happened in training once or twice, if the horse did not spook into motion at the sound of the whip. But, after being hit those couple of times the horse would learn and spook into motion just on the sound of the whip.

The trainer (who was also the driver of the stagecoach in the commercial), said that it is like when you've seen horses spooked into running in cowboy films when guns are fired into the air! You don't ever think that they would have ever shot the horses in order to train them would you? Conversely, horses are very bright and can be trained not to react to gunfire or the sound of a whip!

I can't help thinking if those none-starters among us, couldn't do with a little whip training or gun-fire to wake them up!

Lets hope that you do not have to work and build your business under those stressful conditions, but sometimes, it is the only thing that will motivate some people. Moreover; Lets hope that that is not you, but if you have had lots of false starts and cannot get yourself motivated, then maybe you need to get a Wolf at your door!

If you do not have a driver on a stagecoach, whipping the horses enough to scare them into running, the coach won't move. That knock you just heard at your door, well, lets hope it isn't the bailiff or the postman with your P45. (A UK job market pink-slip you get when you leave work, voluntary or involuntary (Loosing your job) for those of you in the USA and elsewhere)!

A short story.
A friend and business associate whom I am in the process of helping with his own online business, is currently working at a regular day-job. He previously always claimed to be 'at-it' and 'working on this or that,' but he had never seen any cash from his business. In reality, he was only logging-in most of the time to various blogs and accounts, to see if some miracle had happened. In addition, he never committed to spending even a little money in his business.

Then he was threatened with redundancy and started putting a little money in (as I advised), and put real time into his online business. He put in an hour before he went to work, at work he was constantly making spoken notes into a dicta-phone, on his return home, he immediately got sat down at his computer.

He ate his evening meal and helped his children with their homework, all from his workstation for his online business. His week-ends were spent in front of the PC also. This went on for three or four weeks, then the worst thing happened, he did lose his job! For the next two months he had no job and no-income.

He put even less time in to his online business, because he was now having to walk his children to and from school and walk on shopping trips etc.

He had applied to social security for state benefits, but there was some delay. In the mean-time, he and his spouse sold their cars to pay the mortgage and other bills that first two months, (after-all they could not even afford to put fuel in them).

His wife was always unable to work because of some illness or recurring complaint. He also canceled the motor insurance and cashed in on his private health scheme. He now had nothing to fall back on, the Wolf was well and truly at his door.

His days were spent looking for work, writing and rewriting his CV, looking through job-center jobs, newspapers and surfing the internet for work. He was out-and-about for most of the day walking the industrial estates physically asking if there was any work. Eventually he found another job, doing exactly what he was doing before, on the same pay, but working for a different company.

He had kept up with some of his online efforts in the evenings, whilst unemployed, but he was losing his drive and determination due to stress and depression. It was even hard for me, watching him go through this whilst trying to give him vision and hope.

Just about the week before he started his new job, (it was at the end of the month), he received an affiliate payment from his online efforts from the affiliate marketing I had been helping him with two months before. $1,400 was the amount, (about £700 UK GBP at the time), so I set about working on what he should use it on in his business, to try and help him make even more money faster.

I put in a lot of work, showing cash flow forecasts and writing out in detail what to do next. I pointed out that the income he had made, was made whilst he was employed and working for someone else.

Plus, that income was only a starting income and he could build on it from there. His net take-home-pay was only £350 and it only took him one real months work as a newbie and he made £700 for the month! This was a great set of stats for a newbie, but he didn't seem interested. I was more excited for him than he was for himself!

About three days later, he told me that he had spent the money on a few bills, took the family out for a meal and to the movies, bought some presents and even a secondhand car for £300 from a family member. Now, whilst he did make good use of the money, he could have spent it more wisely by putting it back into his business, buying automation software and memberships with better services with more available features.

Once he started back into work, he went back to only visiting his online business when he had nothing else to do. He stopped posting ads with ad-words, left his blogs unattended and seemed to have forgotten how to do most of the stuff I had taught him. He couldn't remember how to set-up Google alerts to post topical items to his Twitter group!

I realized that he was not learning this stuff at all, but just letting me talk him through things step by step, not taking notes, nor bookmarking sites, not even keeping the hand-written lists I had sent him in the post, along with an A-to-Z note-book required to keep an additional off-line hard copy of sign-in details, like user-names and passwords for the many sites you need to use.

His Twitter group became bogged down with none-follow-back, none-posting-tweeple. His online business went back to how it was prior to him losing his job.

I blame the false-sense of security his job provides. Instead of making his own moves and being responsible for his own income, he is reliant on a day-job that could just as easily kick him out on the street with just a months notice as it did before!

No one is perfect!
Having not learned my lesson, I helped another friend by building two twitter groups and an email list with Aweber, up to about 2,500 twitter followers each and about 1,000 email followers. I was even writing his emails for him!

I handed the whole thing over to him after ongoing training with him, (like the idiot I was), then three months later he just closed all of the accounts, deleting all of the work I had done. He said he couldn't be bothered with it all! (The actual word was Bov-verd). What an idiot!

All done without a single word of thanks, except that I had made some money promoting my own affiliate products to his list. (Which was my list really since I had built his business with my own hard work).

If affiliate marketing is not for you, if you are not inspired by the amount of money you can make in relation to the pittance of an income and hard work of a day job, then you need to stick with the day job. (I think rudely, the saying goes, 'You cannot teach a pig to sing! So don't try)!

I am learning that point the hard way!

If you are not motivated to develop your own online business through the simple-common-sense reasoning to know that; You have to be making your own moves in this world; Even for the sheer excitement, pleasure, joy and desire of wanting to build it, then maybe you should get a Wolf to your door! Find a reason and really scare yourself into action. Use what if's and maybe's. Here are a few suggestions.

What if:-
I loose my job?
I cannot work through ill health?
The market my company sells in fails?
I am suddenly faced with an ill partner, causing crushing debt?
I have house repair bills after a storm and the insurance does not cover it?
New people start at my work-place and I hate them, and they make my life a misery at work?

All of the above are actual problems that people have told me about as the main reasons for deciding to build their own business.

If you can develop your own list, relative to your own life, maybe that will motivate you into action. If you've tried everything else and failed before, then why not try some negative motivation. Some 'OR ELSE' motivation, as I like to call it!



Is there a Wolf at Your Door? No?
Well, perhaps you should get one!


Howwwwwwwooooooooooo!
AndyGold.

TAGS: Negative Motivation, Motivation, Wolf at your Door,

© AndyGold 2011

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