I have a confession to make. I procrastinated on starting this website for way too long. For around a year, to be exact. I am not proud of it, and it really didn’t make me happy during that time, but I felt massively blocked and I really didn’t know why.
I’ve been working online since 2008, and since that time I’ve acted too quickly on many ideas. I must’ve bought dozens of domain names and started just as many websites (I’m sure you can relate!) Acting on ideas like this was fun and exciting, but once the initial excitement wore off so did all motivation. And so I abandoned just about all of those ideas (though luckily I was able to make some money via website flipping!)
So I told myself that not acting on the idea to start this new website was actually a good thing – that I was somehow committing to the idea more by not just starting something on a whim. But there comes a point when you can think about something too much. I had gone through several branding tasks, considered my target market very carefully, even topic and product ideas… I just wouldn’t set up the site and actually write.
So I decided enough was enough. Not acting was making me feel crappy about myself.
Here’s what I did to kickstart the process…
I got out a pen and paper. I find that tying myself to the computer is not always great for letting my thoughts flow. It’s also pretty distracting and, for this task, I needed some peace and quiet to really tune into what was going on.
I started a form of free writing, but I gave it a little direction by asking myself some questions:
- Why am I delaying starting my new website?
- Why is X thought/ feeling stopping me?
- What should I do next?
- When should I launch?
I didn’t write the first thing that came into my head. Instead, I practiced this technique from Jess Lively to tune into my intuition. I sat with the question for a while, even though thoughts started swirling around my head immediately (you aren’t good enough, it’s all been done before etc.)
I sat with each question for a couple of minutes and tried to really feel my answers. This felt a little silly at first, admittedly, but answers did come, and they took me to new questions.
When I dug deeper I realised I was afraid of serving the wrong people. I was afraid of trying to serve smart, ambitious women because I’d also have to be smart and ambitious! When I questioned myself further about why that was an issue, I felt myself saying that it’s OK… I’ve been running my business successfully since 2008. I do have valuable information to share, but it’s also OK to grow with my audience.
I even found myself coming up with some practical answers! Things like setting a launch date and sharing it with others to make it real, a content strategy to help me grow a community from the start, and a list of tasks I needed to do before launch.
And, as soon as I came to those answers, I immediately felt like writing this post!
So if you’re in the same boat and you’ve been badly procrastinating on a business idea, try this technique. Maybe your answers will lead to action, like mine, or maybe they’ll tell you it’s not the right direction for you. It might sound a little wishy-washy, but I think we all get pretty distracted by technology and we don’t always know exactly what we think and feel.
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