photo credit: CJ Sorg

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be involved in a strongman training session being run by my chiropractors son.

I’m really new to this kind of training, but from what was explained to me, strongman training involves two things:

1. Progressive increases in weight and specific exercises to increase your functional full body strength.
2. The practice of explosive strength exercises that work your entire body, stimulate your nervous system and make you want to throw up or die

At the end of the two hour training session, I had the opportunity to experience the second one by dragging a weighted sled 50m across a muddy yard in the cold rain.

It was probably the most unpleasant thing I’ve done in awhile and half way through it, I was sure I was going to give up.

10m from the end, I could feel my thigh muscles burning from trying to drag 65kg of sled through mud.

I’m not much heavier than 65kg so I may as well have been dragging my own dead body and by that stage it felt like I was.

At the brink of exhaustion, the only word that was ringing in my head was “STOP”.

My body had had enough and it delivering the message to my fading consciousness.

Just as I was about to call it quits, I could hear voices around me.

It was the other participants and my trainer, urging me on to not give up and that I was almost there.

From hearing the word “STOP”, all I could hear now was “You can do it!”, “Don’t give up, you’re almost there!”.

My body felt terrible, but somehow just hearing and believing that there was a possibility of success, it found the strength to keep moving forward.

Eventually I made it past the finish line and I collapsed in a heap on the ground.

When the blood eventually made it’s way back to my brain, I felt a sense of pride in knowing I managed to push myself past my mental limit and take action.

In acknowledging that, I knew that I would never have been able to do it without the encouragement of my trainer and the rest of the group.

And To the Point of This Story

Sometimes we get bogged down by people who tell us that we cannot achieve something. Eventually if we hear this enough, we may start to believe it ourselves and it becomes our own limiting belief.

In saying that, the opposite is true as well. If someone tells us we can do something and they say it persistently enough, we may start to believe that we are capable of achieving something.

If you want to stop negative thinking and overcome limiting beliefs, you need to do two things:

1. Minimize the negative influence that is stopping you
2. Maximize the positive influence that makes you take action

For instance, if you have friends who are constantly putting you down, then you should make a mental note to not take their advice seriously or just avoid them altogether.

If you have teachers or mentors who makes you feel smart and capable, spend more time talking to them and learn to trust their advice.

One method I find extremely effective is to buy an audiobook that speaks directly to my limiting belief and explains to me systematically how to overcome it.

I will play this audiobook over and over and over again until the limiting belief has been completely overwritten.

By having an external voice constantly and repeatedly explaining the solution to me in a logical fashion, my subconscious mind has no choice but to let go of the limiting belief.

Your internal voice is a powerful thing and what it says to you will determine what you will choose to do and what you will choose not to do in this life.

If you don’t like the sound of that voice, find an external one that you do like and listen to it until your internal voice matches it.

This is why sports teams have pep talks before games and why parents should always tell their kids that they are capable of anything they can put their mind to.

Taking action is also very important, but it all starts with believing in what is possible.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 4.4: Dealing with Negative Self Talk
2. Exercise 4.2: Expressing Ideas Clearly to Overcome Resistance
3. How to Reduce Fear by Thinking Like a Freelancer

photo credit: alexbrn

When I was 10 years old, I was asked by my 4th grade teacher to deliver a short story to the entire school. The reason she picked me was because I had scored the highest during a recent English exam and wanted to reward me by giving me this ‘honor’.

I thought it was cool that she picked me, though there was one problem. I suffered from an acute fear of standing in front of large crowds and talking while everyone stared at me in silence.

In other words, I suffered from stage fright.

I had two weeks to prepare my story and when the day came for me to deliver my story I chickened out.

I really hated the fact that I did that, but back then the idea of putting myself out there in front of a group of people and baring my soul through my words put me in a position of vulnerability that I just wasn’t comfortable with.

I always imagined that if I did it, people would laugh at me and I would just make a total fool of myself.

I always considered myself odd and different and that people wouldn’t like me if they knew the real me.

Many years later when I was in high school and had all but forgotten the incident, I was requested to become part of the class debate team.

Prior to that, the closest thing I had to solo on stage vocal experience was singing in a band. It was one song, a very short song, and I was clutching the microphone for dear life praying I wouldn’t forget the words.

Anyway, we were doing parliamentary style debating. In this style of debating you have 3 people on each side.

The first speaker introduces the main topic and argues the first point. The second speaker argues the second and third point.

And the third speaker basically listens to the first, second and third point of the opposing team and comes up with a rebuttal speech on the fly.

I was the third speaker, and it was my worse nightmare.

No script, no words I could read from, not even a few days to rehearse. Nothing.

Why did I agree to do this? Well, maybe I was haunted by the fact that I ran away from that speech all so many years ago. Maybe I thought debating would be a great way to impress my girlfriend. I do not know.

Well, on the day of the debate, I was sitting there with my heart threatening to burst out of my chest, counting down the seconds to when the second speaker of the opposing team would finish talking and sit down.

I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind to listen anymore, I was freaking out. All I really managed to do was chicken scratch their main points onto a torn piece of paper and then wait for my turn.

Finally it was my turn. I had 5 minutes to speak, no script and a scrap of paper that was barely readable from all the sweat that was dripping off my hands.

I walked up to the microphone, took one look at the crowd and my mind went blank.

Usually I would have something to fall back on. Notes, a paragraph of something to read, maybe even a fever that I could blame my poor performance on.

No such luck, and I had to do something.

Having nowhere to run and nothing to fall back on, I turned to the only option left available to me. I decided to be honest with my predicament.

I explained to the crowd that I had no script, and I had no idea what to say and that all I had was a scrap of paper with 3 points on what the opposition said.

I told them that I wasn’t sure if I could argue them but that I would try and proceeded to go through each point while I spoke my mind on my honest, unbiased opinion on why I thought they were wrong.

Every umm, ah, joke and honest criticism I could think of came flowing out of my mouth. It was like the people in the invention of lying, though in this case my honesty was driven by a whole lot of adrenaline.

After 7 minutes, when I should have stopped at 5, I concluded my speech and sat down. It was the longest 7 minutes of my life (at the time).

I thought I had done the worst speech in the world. If I had compared my speech to a music genre, I was punk rock when I should have been opera.

To make matters worse, I felt like I had just decimated the chances of my team wining, and that wasn’t cool.

When it came time to decide on the winner of the debate, the head judge commented on the opposing team first.

Positive reviews, good arguments, stayed within time blah blah blah. Give them the trophy already, I know we sucked because of me.

Next he came to our side and said pretty much the same thing, with one exception.

He told us that the debate was really close, up until it was my turn to speak.

“What seriously?” I thought to myself. “Are you really going to tell everyone how much I sucked right now?? Aww come on!”

He continued saying that my rebuttal had pretty much sealed the fate of the debate… as it had decimated, destroyed and crushed the opposition teams arguments (ok, maybe he didn’t say it that way, but somewhere along those lines).

He also said that he had never seen anyone speak the way I did during a debate. Very raw, yet entertaining. Concise and to the point. But most importantly, passionately convincing.

Because of that, the judges had also decided that I was to be chosen as best speaker for that debate and our team won.

I was over the moon, not to mention relieved that I hadn’t screwed up my team’s chances at progressing. Though, I couldn’t quite process what had happened at the time.

In my mind, I had done the worse speech imaginable.

I was crass, I was talking to the audience and expecting answers (in a debate!), made jokes every chance I got and was all over the stage.

While I was speaking I could see the judges were smiling and that the audience was laughing and responding to what I was saying.

At first, I though they had all been laughing at what I considered my vain attempt to debate.

Later on though people would come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed my part overall.

They told me that unlike the other debaters, I was engaging and it really felt like I was speaking directly to them.

They didn’t feel like I was pretending or that I was putting up a face. I was 110% myself and that seemed to work for them.

Basically what they were saying was that because I was so raw and honest, they felt like they connected the best with me and my speech.

What I learned from all this

What I learned from all this is that people would prefer to be around an honest prick than a lying nobleman.

When you are completely yourself, all the walls are down and people can see you as you are.

When people can see who you are, they don’t feel afraid of you. Because of that, they aren’t afraid to trust you and they are more willing to be their honest silly selves.

I realized that many people tend to try too hard to try to be perfect in order to impress others. I used to do this as well and frankly, I’ve found that this backfires more than it actually works.

To be yourself is to take a chance. To put your personality out there for the judgement of whoever passes by.

Sometimes this will be met by ridicule. Most times though I’ve found that it is met with acceptance and a strong desire to connect.

It is much easier to shut yourself off than to open up.

Also, being yourself lets other people know it is ok to be themselves as well. And I can’t think of anyone who isn’t happy to just be themselves.

As a take away from this post, can you remember a time when being yourself really helped you connect with another person?

If you do, please do share, I would really like to hear about it as I’m sure other people would like to as well.

Related posts:

1. How to Stop People From Dumping Their Work On You

photo credit: CarbonNYC

When it comes to your job, there are basically two things that will keep you from getting the flexibility you want:

1. How much negotiating leverage you have on your side
2. How afraid you are to ask for it

It’s all well and good if your company values you and you are confident that you have enough leverage that you are sure they wouldn’t fire you if you asked for what you wanted (namely a telecommuting position or more flexible work hours).

“But what if this doesn’t work? “

At the end of the day, no matter what cards you hold in your hands, if you don’t have another income option in the worse case scenario, you are basically making a gamble on your financial stability.

“What if they decide they would rather let you go than give you what you want. What then?”

Just this thought alone is enough to hold people back from taking the steps necessary to negotiate greater flexibility in their jobs. It definitely almost stopped me.

Before you go into your boss’s office to ask for greater work flexibility, it is a good idea to have a plan B.

For me, plan B was to get a part-time job or even to go back into freelancing.

I already had a few contacts and a person who I could reliably go to for work in case I somehow lost my job.

It wasn’t the most ideal situation, but at least I knew that in the end I would be able to pay the bills and feed myself.

Knowing that I would be able to support myself in the worse case scenario and knowing that I had leverage to negotiate gave me the confidence to ask for what I wanted in my current job.

Plus, I was at a point in my mind where I was determined to pursue my goal of becoming self employed or to have my own business, so it didn’t matter to me too greatly what job I had as long as it gave me enough income and more importantly, time to pursue it.

Being able to get a job that gave me time and work experience that was relevant to work and projects I wanted to do was an extra bonus.

So if you know that you have leverage to ask for what you want but are scared to do so because you freak out at the idea of losing your job, you need to think of your plan B.

If you know that you already have valid arguments to ask for greater work flexibility but are still holding back from making the move to ask, answering the following question just might help push you over the edge to go ahead and ask:

“What do you think you would do for money if you lost you job tomorrow?”

Related posts:

1. OEB 8 | Plan A: Negotiating a Flexible Work Arrangement
2. What Is A Telecommuting Job?
3. Introduction to The Insider’s Guide To Becoming A Teleworker

photo credit: Amy Loves Yah

I recently came across an interview about a man who escaped his office in the USA and now works remotely from his home in Italy.

From reading the interview, I gathered that there was one main factor that led to his decision to finally escape.

For the man in the story above, he tried to deny his feelings for years and years until one day he just couldn’t take it anymore.

His feeling of dissatisfaction for not going after his dream overcame his negative associations with potentially not having a job and this motivated him to take action.

Massive Action Comes From Strong Dissatisfaction

If you think about the times in your life about when you took massive action to make a change, you might notice that it was motivated by a strong sense of dissatisfaction.

For example, maybe you’d been trying to avoid fixing the blockage in the toilet in your house for some time.

You didn’t want to spend the money and there was more than one toilet in the house.

As such, you didn’t consider it an urgent issue to get the broken one fixed.

One day though, someone in your household forgets that the toilet is broken and decides to take a dump in it.

You try pouring a bucket of water into the toilet to “flush” it manually, but this just causes the contents of the toilet to overflow onto the bathroom floor.

Now you have a blocked, overflowed toilet and crap all over your bathroom.

You finally decide to call the plumber to get the toilet fixed.

How To Increase Your Dissatisfaction To Motivate Action

People who are usually successful at escaping the office tend to reach a breaking point that pushes them to take action.

That being said, you don’t have to wait until the whole situation has reached breaking point before you decide to do anything about changing it.

As human beings, we have the ability to imagine the potential negative consequences of not taking action.

On the flip side, we also have the ability to imagine the potential positive consequences of taking action.

Either one of these methods has the ability to disturb us enough that we feel driven to make a change from our current situation in order to move away from a potential bad situation or to move towards a potentially better one.

The fact is, if you’re not dissatisfied enough with your present situation, you aren’t going to do anything to change it.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 4.4: Dealing with Negative Self Talk
2. Step 4: Overcoming fear and believing in yourself

This is just going to be a very quick post whereby I briefly outline my 2 step process for escaping the 9-to5 with minimal financial risk and uncertainty.

I’ve mentioned before that the thing that used to be a great big hang up for me when I was attempting to freelance or work on my online business was that i’d always be worrying about money and couldn’t focus my attention fully on working on developing either one without feeling worried or stressed out.

Because of this, I decided that I would get a full-time job and work on freelancing and online business in my free time instead.

This didn’t pan out so well either because I soon found that with my full-time 9-to-5 job, I no longer had any time left in my day.

Eventually I realized that the only way I was going to be able to make this work was if I was able to earn a stable income and also have enough time during the week to work on my personal projects, namely developing my online business/ service.

Step 1: Base Income – Telecommuting or Part-Time Work

I decided that I needed a base income, an income that was going to be enough to support me (to pay all my bills and necessities) without taking up my entire week.

This meant taking on a job that would only take up no more than 30 hours or 4 days of my work week.

I also had another criteria that I wanted the job to be related to the degree that I had studied in university.

The reason for this is because I wanted to cover all my bases and didn’t want to have “Worked as a cashier in McDonalds for a year” on my resume if I found that a year later for some reason I needed or wanted to get into a professional job relating to my field.

Alright, so now I had my criteria for a base income job:

1. A job that took less than 4 days or 30 hours a week to perform
2. A job that was related to my degree so that it would help supplement my resume ( i worry about such things, so sue me)

The job that I ultimately got was a job as a Technical Writer in an Engineering Design Company. They didn’t let me work part time, so after a few months of working for them in the office, I got myself (with some luck) a full-time telecommuting agreement with them.

If you want to learn more about the process on how I did that, read my posts relating to the 6 Steps To Negotiating a Flexible Work Arrangement.

Step 2: Future Primary Income – Freelancing or Online Business

Once I got out of the office, I streamlined my work so that I had at least Friday off every week to focus on developing my future primary income.

The first thing I decided to do was to get some decent coaching and advice from people who I knew had already achieved the success that I was aiming for.

Ultimately I decided that I would focus the full efforts of my free time on developing an online business as I was still earning a full-time salary and didn’t need to supplement my income with freelance work.

The Reason I Do Things This Way

I cannot emphasize how important it has been for me to have this extra time to work on developing my future primary income.

Being able to focus an entire work day (minimum) and not attempting to squeeze time from personal time after work does wonders for reducing the stress levels and ensuring I don’t sacrifice time with my friends and partner.

I do believe it is possible to work on developing your online business or service income while having a 9-to-5 job, though I really dislike the idea of multi-tasking and avoid it whenever possible.

The reason for this because I find that multi-tasking not only slows me down, it degrades the quality of my work (due to having to constantly split my attention) and causes me to be less productive overall, which in itself defeats the purpose of multi-tasking in the first place.

Also, the ability to spend an extended amount of time focusing on solving a single problem shouldn’t be undermined.

Being able to do this has helped me bust through learning curves and focus all my energy on finding solutions for frustrating problems.

I outline in greater detail the entire process above in my free mini-course “the office escape blueprint”, so if you want to learn more about it feel free to check it out.

I don’t believe this process is for everyone, but if you don’t have an existing office escape plan and feel like this is a path that would fit well with your needs well, then go for it.

Related posts:

1. OEB 6 | The Benefits of Part-Time Work
2. OEB 7 | Things To Remember
3. OEB 2 | The Purpose Of Your Base Income

photo credit: vvvracer

I’m going to be frank. If you don’t make time for your passion now, you’re going to regret it later.

Most people I know complain about their job, about not having time, about not being happy.. about not having any passion for life.

Floating through life without direction, the closest I believe a lot of people get to realizing that we only have one life to live is when they hit their mid life crisis, look back and think “Sh*t, where did the time go??”

That’s not where I want to be in 40 years, and I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that isn’t where you want to be either.

We push all the things we want to do in life to the end of our to-do list, busying ourselves with our work, raising a family, squeezing in moments of relaxation and just trying our best to cope with the constant demands on our time.

I am scared… no, TERRIFIED by the idea of looking back on my life and regretting not having lived my life to the fullest.

Even when I look back to high school and I reflect on all the things I didn’t do because I was too scared in that moment to do it… man, those moments could have been awesome memories to look back on.

The turning point for me to finally escape the 9-to-5 was when I realized that if I didn’t do something to change my work and income situation in the long run, me and my partner would never get to see our families or friends back in our home countries.

Me and my partner are both from different countries and at the moment we are both living and working in Australia.

Add that to the fact that we each only get 4 weeks of leave a year and you can see where the problems start in trying to organize trips home.

I made the decision that I was not willing let my relationships with the people I care about dwindle and die over the years because I missed out on the important occasions in their lives.

I also made the decision that I would not wait until I was too old to brush my own teeth before I set out to try all the things I wanted to try before I died.

If you spent even 6 months of your entire life focused on learning from a mentor how to create a sufficient personal income for yourself so you won’t be bound to a 9-to-5 job, do you think you would make some progress?

What if you spend 1 year, 2 years or 3, do you really honestly believe that you would not succeed??

Compare that to 40 years of sitting in an office forever believing that self employment or having your own business is too difficult or impossible… YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME??!?

Seriously, what is holding you back? If you’re being honest with yourself, I will tell you that it is your lack of knowledge on what is currently possible which in turn is causing you to feel afraid to move away from the comfort and certainty of the 9-to-5.

For whatever you know right now, if you aren’t taking action its because what you currently know isn’t enough. You can earn a full time living from the comfort of your home, doing what you love and living the lifestyle you’ve always wanted.

In 2010 we we are at a point in history where it is possible for you to get in touch with virtually anybody in the world in some shape or form right from your computer.

Never in the history of man has there ever been a time when the world has been so connected, and it’s only just begun.

Services and businesses no longer need to be limited to the distance and price of physical travel. Nowadays, you can work with anyone, anywhere.

So ask yourself this question, “What is your passion?”

If all you hear in response to this question is a deafening silence, then instead ask yourself, “What would you like to do that would make you feel excited and alive?”

This will be your fuel and the thing that drives you to look past your fear and move forward.

EDUCATE yourself! There is so much good information out there (this blog included) that can teach you what you need to know.

At the same time don’t listen to every self proclaimed Guru out there who claims to have the turn key answer.

There is no turn key answer to life… and finding your passion is about having the time to look inwards and finding that thing or things that make you just want to jump out of bed each day and feel excited, happy and alive.

9-to-5 was hindering me from discovering my passion, so I got out of it.

When you don’t feel that constant push to keep moving… life slows down and things start coming into perspective.

Along with this, you’ll also start to slowly rediscover the things that make your heart go *Thump *Thump *Thump.

When you can feel your heart racing and your eyes light up when you talk about the thing you do for a living, that’s how you know you’ve found your passion.

Start looking for it now, because I can promise you that if there is one thing that sucks more than anything, it’s looking back on moments in your life and wishing you had had the guts to live it.

The next time you feel bogged down with life, step outside, take a deep breath and shout, “[sexual act] THIS [bodily waste], I’M GONNA [process of sexual act] DIE ONE DAY AND I WANT TO [process of sexual act] DIE  HAPPY”

If nothing else, it just feels good to scream.

Related posts:

1. What Martial Arts Taught Me About Finding Your Passion
2. OEB 1 | What is your passion?
3. Why I believe sincerity and passion is more important than SEO

There are going to be times when you are going to wake up and feel overly pessimistic. You’ll be walking around all day reaffirming to yourself that you are a loser and that the whole world is against you.

—-

You’ll smile at someone and they don’t smile back – you tell yourself its cause you’re ugly

A dog will bark at you for no reason (as they do) – you tell yourself you stink and it can read your aura of stink

You’ll come home and your spouse/partner yells at you for not picking up your socks and cleaning the bathroom – you tell yourself you’re useless hours after he/she has stopped saying it to you

—-

Negative self talk will steal away your drive and kill your motivation to do anything. The bad habit of having poor self esteem is usually something that is instilled in us at an early age by authoritative figures who talk down to us and make us feel worthless or like we can’t do anything.

I found that the easiest way to shut out the negative internal voices is to listen to a positive external voice; ideally positive talk from people who I deem credible. When I say credible, I mean people who I would take seriously or who present information in such a way that I feel that it makes sense to me personally.

If you don’t have an mp3 player or any sort of portable music player, it is time to get one and fill the playlist with everything from Anthony Robbins personal power to Maxwell’s Psycho Cybernetics.

If not audiotapes, play stuff that makes you happy or puts you in a positive state of mind. This could be the ending song of Dirty Dancing, the audio version of Mama Mia! Or your grandmothers voice telling you what a good boy or girl you are, it doesn’t matter.

The idea is to have a voice in your head other than your own that makes you feel happier or good about yourself.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 4.2: Expressing Ideas Clearly to Overcome Resistance
2. How to stop negative thinking and overcome limiting beliefs
3. The Paradox Of Choice – A Talk by Barry Schwartz

Another exercise you can do is role playing. If you’ve ever gone for an interview, you’ve probably tried this before in front of a mirror.

Create a list of as many possible questions and refutes that someone might have to your requests and follow the two steps as mentioned above.

Do your homework, come up with simple, realistic actions that you truly believe in and would do in order to refute any comebacks. To make it even more realistic, have some fun with it and get your partner to really get into character.

Ask him or her to try asking as an angry boss, a sarcastic boss or a sneaky boss. Ask them to try to give reasons that are as unreasonable as possible to prevent you from teleworking and refute those reasons clearly and calmly.

Take this a step further by getting into your office clothes or arranging a room to look like your bosses office. The goal here is to train yourself to feel as comfortable and as confident as possible when you approach your boss.

Once you’ve mastered this exercise, you’ll have the habit of being able to think before you speak and assess the situation properly before providing ideas.

Remember, you only need to make this work once, so do everything you can to ensure you are maximally prepared emotionally and mentally when approaching your boss to request teleworking.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 4.2: Expressing Ideas Clearly to Overcome Resistance
2. Exercise 4.1: Facing your Teleworking fears
3. Step 4: Overcoming fear and believing in yourself

“Where fear is, happiness is not”

~Seneca

Fear to take action will hold you back from achieving your dreams. It’s very easy to tell someone not to be afraid, however fear is a very predictable emotion.

It is what we feel when we feel uncertain or unprepared. We feel it when we experience a sense of danger that we might lose something important to us.

Knowing that this is why we feel fear, it gives us an opportunity to identify the fear factors that hold us back from taking action and train ourselves to either overcome them or work through them.

The following exercises are designed specifically to help you feel more confident by training your nervous system not to feel extreme fear when attempting to request to telework.

Think of when you first started driving. At first you might have been nervous, but overtime you grew more confident and relaxed as you realized that there were certain rules to driving that allowed you to anticipate what would happen next and react accordingly.

Exercise 4.1: Facing your Teleworking fears

Exercise 4.2: Expressing Ideas Clearly to Overcome Resistance

Exercise 4.3: Role Playing to Overcome Situational Fears

Exercise 4.4: Dealing with Negative Self Talk

Related posts:

1. Step 5: Approaching your boss: Asking to Telework
2. Exercise 4.1: Facing your Teleworking fears
3. Step 6: Post-Office and potential problems

In this post, I talk about my experience of how I managed to overcome my fear of meeting and networking for potential clients while freelancing.

Before I really started getting into freelancing, the idea of networking really freaked me out.

The reason it did was because I used to imagined networking as going into this big room full of people in suits and trying to sell them on my services and that I was the person they needed.

This idea made me feel like a phony because first of all, it is rare if not impossible to decide whether your service is best for an individual before you have ever met them.

In fact, I found that in alot of cases I could recommend someone else who I knew would be more suited and able to serve that person better than myself.

How I dealt with the problem

To deal  with my fear, I sat down one night and broke down the key components on which my fear was based on, which include the following:

1. I was afraid that if I recommended other people, I would lose potential business
2. I felt that if I was honest with what I was actually capable of doing, people wouldn’t hire me
3. I didn’t feel like I was good enough and that other people would always be able to provide a better service
4. Once I got a project, I felt like there was no turning back if I couldn’t meet the clients expectations, so i didn’t try to win projects at all

After honing in on the 4 fears that were holding me back and thinking about them properly, I came to the following conclusions:

1. If I recommended other people who I knew could serve them better, they would remember me for being honest and pointing them in the right direction. This could then possibly lead to them recommending people they know to me if they meet or know anyone who would be well suited to the services I was capable of providing
   
   Real World Example
   
   For example, there was a case when I had a potential client (lets call him Rob) ask me if I would be able to build a website for them using flash. I didn’t have much experience with flash and told him that I was more focused on building more  practical blogging websites optimized for search engine traffic and such.

   He told me he didn’t care for any of that and just wanted a site that was visual and dynamic; somewhere he could direct his clients to on his business card as something to boost his credibility. He said he did most of his networking locally and in person, so he didn’t care about being found in search engines (??)

   Anyway, instead of trying to insist to him that he was wrong or that I could help him (even though I knew I probably couldn’t meet his project criteria), I recommended him to a friend of mine who I knew could build flash websites and optimize them for search engines.

   After parting ways, I thought that was the end my interaction from him. A few weeks later I get a call from a person saying that they’d been recommended to me by Rob. Apparently Rob was so happy with the work of the friend I recommended to him that he felt grateful to me for pointing him in the right direction.

   Lesson learned

   People remember the people who help them.

   People will send people to the services of friends and people they like, even if slightly less capable than some other people they know

2. Don’t underestimate the quality of the service you feel you are capable of providing and be confident in what you know you can do. If the client could do it better than you, they wouldn’t be hiring you in the first place. Also, it is always possible to back out of a project if a client really starts to feel that the project isn’t moving in the direction they want, which usually doesn’t happen because alot of clients usually don’t know what they want as they lack the knowledge and experience, hence they pay the money to hire someone who knows, which in this case is YOU or someone you recommend them to
   
   Real World Example
   
   When I tried out for my first project on Elance, I really had nothing to show for it. I wasn’t a professionally trained graphic designer, barely knew anything about how to use adobe photoshop or illustrator and here I was looking to bid on a project where this guy wanted an entire book written on how to do this Brazilian martial art.

   I had some experience doing it and had also trained in a number of different martial arts before, however I didn’t know jack s*@t about writing eBooks or using the software to create them.

   After spending maybe  3 days trying to work out how adobe illustrator and in-design worked (i’ve since found out that during the whole project I had used it less than optimally), I made a quick and what I considered crappy example of what I believed I could offer in terms of service and then waited.

   A day later, this guy emails me saying he loves my stuff and that even though the bidding for the project would go on for a few more days, he’d already decided that I was the right fit for the job.

   Wow, I thought to myself. Here I’d though that the mock I made was a piece of sh*t and the guy loved it. As it goes, I won the job and spent the next month creating the book for him which he liked and paid me handsomely for.

   Lesson learned
   
   Your work doesn’t suck just because you think it does.

   Most clients don’t really know what they want when they write project specifications. It is your job to educate them and show them what is possible.

   Don’t underestimate what you can offer and giving it a shot is better than not trying at all. You can always pull out of the project if things don’t work out with no hard feelings or negative implications.
   

How I Do My Networking

Nowadays I usually get work through recommendations by friends or clients who I’ve managed to please with my work.

Even then, when I meet the prospective client I usually don’t start telling them what I can offer before asking them about what they want.

Its more of just having a conversation with them so I can see if I am actually right for them and can meet their needs.

If they are saying they want a specific thing that I can’t offer, I will be open with telling them that I can’t and will then explain to them what I am capable of doing.

If at the end of the conversation everyone is happy I have a client. If not, then I try to recommend someone who I feel can help and we part ways with no hard feelings.

Conclusion

Just remember that networking is nothing more than having a conversation with another person to see if you can meet their needs. You have to let go of the idea that every potential client you meet is someone who you have to work with and sell your services to, even if it is clearly a bad fit.

Don’t be like those door to door sales men who try to insist you buy their years worth of laundry coupons even though you’ve told them you have a washing machine and are not interested for the 100th time.

Find clients who you will enjoy working with and who you know whose needs you can meet. Redirect the rest to people who you think can help them, and those people usually end up sending more qualified clients your way as well.

Related posts:

1. How to Reduce Fear by Thinking Like a Freelancer
2. Step 4: Overcoming fear and believing in yourself
3. 3 tips to help you stand out and win freelance projects