When it Come to Making Your Small Business Plan, is the Online Aspect Giving You Chills?
May 22, 2009 by Sharon Wilson
Filed under Diversify Your Income, Spiritualpreneurism
I’ve talked to many Spiritualpreneurs who seem to have a great fear of running the online aspect of their business, but (and this is coming from a real ‘techno-phobe’ here), having an online business is a lot less complicated than you may think it is!
Having any kind of business starts first at the Inner level – and if you don’t believe you can know what you’re doing when it comes to running your business online, there are a lot of other piggybacking beliefs that are riding on that…
- I don’t have what it takes
- I’m not good at technology
- Everybody else knows more than me
- I don’t have the time
- I glaze over when it comes to learning things like this…
You’ve got all these things rolling around inside your head – it’s sort of like Prego Spaghetti Sauce – ‘It’s all in there’!
So the first thing you want to do is get clear on what the beliefs are that you’re telling yourself – get really honest with yourself – what are you telling yourself about why you can’t have an online business?
Then, while you’re putting together your small business plan, start to identify the areas that you feel like you need more support on. If you’re feeling like, “Oh I just don’t understand blogging. Social Networking – it gives me a headache! I don’t get how to do this or that…”
Well, start out with identifying the areas YOU think are important to having in an online business, and anywhere that you feel you are lacking.
You also want to identify the areas you feel belong in an online business that you really do feel like you have some sense about, because there are things that are really serving you at an inner level with your beliefs, and at an outer level you do have competencies and skill sets and brilliances that are serving you.
People tend to focus on everything they can’t do, everything that don’t know how to do, everything that’s confusing or overwhelming – but you have to remember that for everyone that says they can’t do an online business, there are both inner and outer level reasons you have to address in areas that are both serving you and not serving you.
It’s very important to look at it from both sides.
A good starting point for having an effective online business, whether you understand all the ‘technology’ involved or not, is to simply map it out. Take a piece of paper and make a flow chart.
- OK, someone comes to my blog or website. What happens?
- What do I want them to experience?
- What do I want to have occur?
Map it out all the way down to all the different levels of all the different things you want to offer. Think of it as your online small business plan.
Online business are often based in having an effective profit funnel – you introduce yourself to people through free or lower end products and begin building relationships and credibility, eventually going all the way up through to higher end products – programs, seminars, continuity programs – it goes all the way through. Read more
Where Are You in Your Entrepreneur Journey?
February 19, 2009 by Sharon Wilson
Filed under Blog Talk Radio, Spiritualpreneurism
This year at Coaching From Spirit, I’ve really begun to see becoming a Spiritualpreneur as being on a journey, and as a Coach it’s exciting to me to be able to share my own journey with you through these online tools like blogging and social networking and my most recent setup on Blog Talk Radio!
I created the show, Empowering Spiritualpreneurs, as a way to bring people together in the Spiritualpreneur community to share tips, insights and resources with you from their own journeys as a way of empowering you as a Spiritualpreneur in all that you are doing.
Recently I had internationally recognized author, speaker, coach and editor of Synchronicity in Your Life Magazine, the Synchronicity Expert, Bill White as a guest on my show, and he shared a powerful story from his journey as a Spiritualpreneur!
Bill began with talking about how he wasn’t always a successful entrepreneur – for him it was a journey from blue collar work to white collar to finally getting into entrepreneurship.
He talked about having a lot of ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit when he was in grade school. In fact, he actually started a business in grade school of making necklaces and selling them to the other kids in class!
Unfortunately, the mothers that were sending their kids to school with lunch money that was being spent on Bill’s business venture didn’t appreciate it too much, and he wound up with being called to the principal’s office and being told to shut his business down.
A simple thing, perhaps, but Bill made an important point – it happens a lot to children when they have bright ideas – oftentimes an adult’s first response is to shut it down (even for what may seem like a good reason!).
But the child, when told at such a young age that, “You can’t do things like this”, may very well end up internalizing the “You Can’t” part of the message, which can affect them more than they may realize.
It was not many years later that Bill witnessed the absolute collapse of his family – his parents separated, his grandmother died on Christmas, his grandfather followed soon after, and he was crushed!
He just couldn’t understand how all of this could be happening and he rebelled against it, which meant that by the time he got to high school, despite the fact that he had good grades, a guidance counsellor took one look at him and told him that she thought he was best suited for blue collar work…
Once again, Bill had an authority figure helping him to create the “You Can’t” belief – something that he accepted and internalized, and that caused him to follow a path on his journey that he didn’t even realize he had a choice in for a very long time.
He kept that reality, and by his mid-20s, Bill was working as a contractor.
He was actually making great money, but he was absolutely miserable! There was nothing in his external world that was fulfilling what he actually wanted internally.
The programming and the beliefs he was brought up in – the stories that he was telling himself – were keeping him in something that didn’t match and didn’t jive with anything that he really wanted to do or be.
Bill shared on my show that through a unique series of synchronicities, he finally reaches several stages of unfolding in a different direction, though not all of the things he went through were absolutely positive…
Bill had a dream that a guy came up to him and said, “Hey, you better get to a doctor – you have cancer.”
A couple months later, he found a tumor, and he was told that he had one year to live if he didn’t have surgery immediately. Read more
How Can You Build Relationships With Your Clients in Order to Serve Them in the Highest Possible Way?
December 9, 2008 by Sharon Wilson
Filed under Uncategorized
- Image via Wikipedia
It’s truly amazing to think about how much the world has changed.
It was not very long ago that people had no conception whatsoever of being able to communicate and interact with people on such a grand scale as is now possible to do!
I love talking to people and connecting with people. I’m a coach – it’s what I was born for!
But when I started my own business, all of the technology involved sometimes came up as a contrast for me. It was all very new to me (and still is in many ways – it seems like they come out with something new every day!) and if I had allowed it to, learning and using all of the necessary technology could easily have become a stumbling block and a source of frustration for me.
I was able to shift my perception around the use of all this technology (computers, the internet, etc.) by using my energy management tools:
Using all of these processes and others to manage my energy around this issue, I was able to begin to see technology in a whole new light. Instead of seeing it as a frustration and something that I had to depend on and worry about, I began to see it for what it is…
…an opportunity to talk to more people and build relationships with more people than I had ever been able to do or even conceive of before!
But it’s something to be careful of. In what is becoming an increasingly virtual world, it can be easy to become impersonal in your interactions with people.
What are some of the ways that you, as a Spiritualpreneur, can build strong relationships using technology with the highest Intention of truly serving the clients of your own business?
