Q36: Why Do I Always Put My Own Self-Care Last?

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Without you, your business is nothing. So your top priority always is looking after you because you are both your business’s finest asset and its worst liability. When anything threatens your health and well-being, you cannot work and your income dries up or your business comes under threat in other ways. This is called self-care, and because we are so poor at prioritising it we need to think of it as Extreme or Radical. We need always to focus on it first and foremost and what we tend to do is leave it to last. If there are a few […]

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Q35: How Can I Work Better with My Husband?

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“What are your best tips for better working with my business partner who is also my husband, especially when we don’t see eye to eye?” My client co-owns a business with her husband in which they both work. She feels the division of labour is unfair and resentment builds up and then explodes. Her partner doesn’t like his list of jobs increasing. He doesn’t really see the problem and is reluctant to talk about it. She feels misunderstood especially in the amount of her own workload and commitment to the business. The burden falls on her for dealing with people, […]

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Q34: Is It OK to Talk Openly About My Spirituality?

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“People will think I’m a whack job!” For the longest time, I was a bit too circumspect about this, fearing the whack job diagnosis myself. And I know some of my friends and family and colleagues and clients do not agree with a lot of my own spiritual and esoteric beliefs. If anything, that just serves to strengthen them. I know what’s true for me. Also, my beliefs are visceral or as my friend, Susie-From-Manchester would say “I just knowed it, Miss.” Other people spouting on about theirs, where we are not in agreement, just makes mine strengthen. It’s like […]

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Q33: Why Is There No Money in My Ideas Yet?

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One of the few types of client I have found it most difficult to help to employ themselves for money is the one who’s in love with ideas. She’s a Scanner, so she tells me. Oh God, I think. Another one. Yes, I’ve read that book too and it is wonderful, but it gives us permission to be scattered. No, it gives us permission to glory in being scattered. Newsflash! At our level, there’s no money in ideas. And that may not matter to you because I too know very well that a stonking idea is, on occasion, better than […]

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Q32: Who Am I To…?

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You are a unique and wonderful human being. I know this because I know you personally, I have been your coach, and you and your lovely husband have been to visit me in my home. Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once. If you don’t live your life to the fullest, no-one will give a damn except you, and those that love and respect you like your husband, those beautiful children (once they are old enough), your wonderful friends, and me. It is your job (and yours alone) to live your own unique life in whatever way that […]

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Q28: How Can I Be Loud or Different Enough to Get Noticed?

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Two clients generously donated to this topic. The first client said that she has a feeling that her voice isn’t loud enough to be heard, even if her idea is good and valid. And the second client said there is so much noise and so much marketing going on everywhere you look that she can’t possibly cut through that, no matter how good she is at what she does because no-one’s listening so why bother with an exercise in futility? Although these might look the same, I sense a lack of confidence in the first and a fatigue with the […]

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Q27: Why Is It Taking Me So Long to Get My Website LIVE?

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This is one of those questions I wanted to answer with “I have no earthly idea!” Only I do. Provided you decide to go with a self-hosted WordPress website, and with other solutions for all I know, every single word on your website can be changed in a heartbeat. So, don’t get hung up on your website. Many people don’t visit them or even bother to read them anymore anyway. Even those that do visit do not chronologically read every word in the order you intend. Keep the copy on your website very short, above the fold, don’t make us […]

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Q26: Why Do I Feel Like I Am Being Unprofessional?

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“Why Do I Feel Like I Am Being Unprofessional in Giving Away All My Best Work?” Together with my clients and colleagues and friends a few of us have been reading THANK & Grow Rich by Pam Grout this summer. I put the word THANK in caps every time I use it because many people misread it and think I am recommending Think & Grow Rich which is a fine book too, but not the one we are reading together during August 2017. Grouty was looking over my shoulder as I was writing this, my own book. Quite early on […]

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Q25: Will I Ever Learn to Love Marketing & Selling?

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Gentle Reader, prepare yourself. I think this might be the one you most need to read but least want to. Nothing sells itself. Which means you do have to learn both marketing and sales, yes. And, in my considerable, experience almost no-one wants to do that. It brings out more bonkersness than almost any other type of question in my work. Marketing accounts for about fifty percent of the work I do. If I didn’t market myself, no-one would ever find me or become a client. And they don’t just need to discover I exist to become a client. They […]

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Q24: What’s the Best Way to Enforce My Terms?

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“What do you do when you send your client an invoice at the end of month one, and another at the end of month two, and a third at the end of month three, by which point he hasn’t paid any of them, and you haven’t enforced your terms and you have no idea how to do that?” Received wisdom is that you charge interest. Don’t do that. If you can’t collect your bill, which you can’t so far, how on earth are you going to collect interest on top? Yes, there is legal provision for you to do that […]

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