The Total De-stress Plan
She covers relaxation, covering the different techniques you can use and making your workplace and home much more amenable to it; diet and how you can reduce stress by eating sensibly; exercise, giving details of different types of exercise that are particularly good for stress-relief (i.e. yoga); and pampering, treating yourself well to aid relaxation.
The final chapter gives some ‘fast-track alternative solutions to stress-related problems’ if you have particular issues you want to deal with more quickly.
The book is a very comprehensive coverage of the subject of stress-relief. I’ve come away from it with a list of things that I can put into practice straight away and a few things that I plan to read up on further. I particularly like the idea of making my home and office a more relaxing place and will be following up on this in the coming weeks.
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Gearing up for some marketing
I’ve spent the last couple of days preparing a 28-day marketing plan as laid out by Get Clients Now!. I’m hoping that following a plan will help us kick-start our marketing which has been a bit non-existent recently. We’ve had quite a lot on so project work has been taking most of our attention, but now that we’ve got a few big projects coming to an end we need to get out there and find some new clients.
It’s going to be quite an intense 28 days. Actually it’s something that I’d planned to do as part of my 90 days of brilliance – so part of following my 90-day plan is to follow a 28-day plan. Hmmm, do you think I’m taking this a bit too far? Well, it’s helping feed my need for lists of things to tick off at least.
My goal for the 28 days is to find 6 new prospects – that’s 6 solid prospects to prepare quotes for. Is that asking two much for 4 weeks or does it sound like I’m not aiming high enough? I’m finding it difficult to tell.
I’m due to start the programme on Monday (good to start at the beginning of the week). Shall report back on my progress!
Feel-good moment
Isn’t it great when you feel appreciated for what you do? It’s not like I sit around feeling unappreciated by our clients because they don’t tell me they love me every day, but it is rather nice to be told you’ve done a good job, isn’t it? That’s what happened to us today. We’d just gone live with a client website and the client phoned up this afternoon to say ‘it’s bloody good’. Just that, not to ask us to do anything, just to tell us how pleased he was.
Now if I was looking for a boost to my motivation, that would definitely be it!
New-look for Webfooted Designs
I didn’t have a chance to post last night as we were having a big push to launch the new-look website for our web design company. We’re really pleased with our sparkly new site. This is phase one of our revamp – we have lots of exciting new things to add in the coming weeks.
This redesign has been a long time coming for us. As web designers we need to have a top-notch website, but it’s always the last one to get updated. Isn’t that always the way? It’s partly because we always give priority to our clients’ sites, but also because we can find it very painful to work on our own stuff. I think it’s because we’re too close to it so we’re always really critical of everything we do – we’re our own worst clients. In fact this time round we chose to get a graphic designer friend of ours to design the logo for us and we think he did a fantastic job. It really gave a kick-start to the design process.
The Confidence Plan
I was immediately absorbed by it and made the mistake of starting it without a pen and paper to hand and then found myself champing at the bit to start writing my thoughts down. Now that’s a sign of a good book! I was impressed with how it started with laying the groundworks – encouraging you to start taking the smallest actions as taking action in itself can help build your confidence. The chapter on increasing your energy was also an eye-opener. The idea of dealing with the energy drains in your life – things that might seem insignificant but that drain a little bit of energy every time you notice them (like my leaving things piled up on the sofa – if I just tidied them away I’d feel so much better). Brilliant!
To be honest quite a bit of it is stuff that I’ve read elsewhere but in a ‘getting things done’ or ‘improving your effectiveness’ kind of way. Applying it to building my confidence was an interesting take. And of course the more times you read something the more it reinforces it in your mind. If you feel like you could do with working on your confidence I would highly recommend reading this book.
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Pushing past that comfort zone!
I’ve had a couple of days of doing things that stretch my comfort zone. Thursday evening I went to my first book club meeting. I felt quite nervous beforehand because I really didn’t know what to expect, but of course when I got there it was absolutely fine. It turned out that I already knew the woman who organises it (just hadn’t made the connection between name and face) and she was incredibly welcoming and encouraging, as were the rest of the group. I can’t wait for the next one now. What I need to work on is being more confident about speaking without having to be encouraged first.
And yesterday I went to my first speed networking event. There were a few familiar faces there which was good but I also spoke to lots of people I hadn’t met before. It was a really positive afternoon – I got some good reactions to my introduction and have made some promising contacts. Apart from a couple of people everyone was really nice and went out of their way to be interested. There was one bloke who I found completely rude – while I did my 60-second intro he actively looked bored and then told me that he had no interest in my business because he already had a website – then he went on to try to sell me his product… Come on, he only had to pretend to be interested for 60 seconds, that’s not much to ask is it?
Overall a really good, confidence-boosting couple of days. Just need to keep it up.
Confidence boosting link
As my current reading is on the subject of confidence I’ve been doing some looking around for related websites. The BBC has a good secton on improving your confidence, which includes some practical exercises to boost your confidence. Definitely looks like it’s worth spending a bit of time there and seeing what they have to say.
How’s your vision?
I had a brilliant meeting with my partner this afternoon. All of the ‘self-improvement’ books I’ve been reading recently say that to be successful you need to have a clear vision of what you want your work and lifestyle to be in the future. One of the tips is to imagine where you want to be in five years time and then decide what you can be doing right now to work towards it. As a small example one of the things that I’ve said in my 5-year goal is that our house is tidy and uncluttered, a calm place to relax in. Well, there’s lots that I can do to get to that – how about starting with doing a bit of uncluttering? I could make a list of all the things that I think need doing to get the house as I would want it and start working through it. Make sense?
Where does today’s meeting come in? Well, I realised that I’d been doing all this dreaming of where I want to be in the future but hadn’t actually asked my partner how he felt about that vision. What if he was dreaming up something entirely different (hopefully not living with a tall brunette, seeing as I’m rather short and fair…). So a couple of days ago I asked him to give it some thought and this afternoon we sat down to go through it together. And you know what? He was completely happy with what I had written down (no bossing from me, honestly). Goes to show that we’re on the same wavelength.
The outcome of the meeting is a list of things that we need to tackle to move towards our goal. We have another meeting planned for Monday morning to make a more specific action list to work through. Feeling hugely positive as a result of that and can’t wait to start actively working towards our future.
Moving ISP
We’ve tentatively started the process of moving to a different broadband supplier today. We’ve been with Pipex for a very long time but have been getting increasingly disatisfied with them. The connectivity has been pretty reasonable (apart from a couple of weird blips recently which may be our router or may be them, not sure…) but their customer service has been atrocious.
If you have a problem you have to pay a high rate to phone and usually end up speaking to somebody in India who spends ages going through the standard stuff with you and doesn’t really try to understand what your actual problem is. If you email for support you are first faced with a message saying ‘we can’t even say hello unless you tell us all your security info’ and then get a random and completely nonsensical reply several weeks after you’ve solved the problem for yourself. Utterly laughable.
Not to mention when they phone you but then refuse to tell you what the call is about unless you answer the security questions. I have a policy that I won’t give out any info over the phone unless I have made the call. Asking me to give my date of birth, mother’s maiden name, bra size etc. when they have initiated the call makes absolutely no sense and is … um … rather insecure.
So, bye bye Pipex, and hello Zen Internet who have been recommended to us by a friend. First impressions are good – I phoned up yesterday for some info and got a very helpful response. So let’s see how the transfer of service goes (eek!). We’ve been told that we may lose our phone line for one to two hours but apart from that we shouldn’t be internetless for too long. Hope not!
Another blog added to blogroll
The latest addition to the resources page is Steve Parks’ blog on entrepreneurship. Steve doesn’t post that regularly but when he does it’s always a good read. I particularly enjoy his thoughts arising from train journeys – sitting on a train obviously gets the thoughts flowing for him.
