Know thyself to succeed.
Part of the decision of allowing yourself to succeed, as I’ve compulsively fulminated detailed, is allowing yourself to learn about yourself from your mistakes. It’s choosing to understand why you do the good and bad things you do, instead of, say, continually choosing to date men who dislike and manipulate you. It’s taking responsibility for your choice to be manipulated, instead of saying, tediously, melodramatically, “It’s not my fault; I’m the victim here!” One path will lead you to perpetual unhappiness, and the other path may, eventually, lead you to looking across the kitchen table at a man who thinks you’re wonderful. (But that would be logical, and that’s crazy talk, I know.)
I see this kind of self-defeating behavior all the time and it makes me want to scream, especially, when I observe it in the small business owners I coach. For example, people who have bits and pieces of a website (…or something…) online for 3 years. A website that is clearly dragging down their ability to do business. When I point this situation out to them, the client tells me he/she is too busy too fix it. Too busy doing what? They don’t have any clients. When I suggest that they hire someone competent to create and run the site in question, so that they can focus on the aspect(s) of business they enjoy, in order to save their business, I get The Look from clients:
“But Carlota, I don’t have money to fix the site. I gave my mom’s boyfriend’s cousin’s little sister’s boyfriend $500 and he took it, and they broke up, and he never did the site, and um, now I’m broke.” When I suggest that a large reason they’re broke is that they’re ashamed of the website, and by extension their business, thus they don’t put the time into the business necessary to raise the money to fix the website, sh*t suddenly gets super real. “Oh, no no, no: I’m going to take a WordPress class and fix it.” And then it’s 6 months later and the client’s site is still a mess, and I’m the Delphic Oracle or something. (Again.)
Here’s a better idea: learn from your mistakes, and do your research and hire someone competent to fix your site TODAY. If you didn’t feel comfortable building your site in the first place, years ago, why would you suddenly be able to fix it now? Far more likely that you’ll just keep on making excuses and suddenly another two years will have passed and you’ll hear yourself telling someone, “Yeah, being self-employed is really hard.” That is extremely true. But it’s even harder to be self-employed or do anything successfully IF YOU DON’T ALLOW YOURSELF TO LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES.
If you don’t have money to hire someone, fine, take down your site, take down all the dead links, and use your Google+ profile as a very nice free platform. (This especially applies to all those “social media specialists” who have dead links on their Twitter account, or LinkedIn and then seriously email me, asking if I want to collaborate with them. Sure. Of course. Sounds great. Pencil me in for the 25th of Never.) Just make your peace with your mistakes–you made a mistake, so what? No one died! Forgive yourself so you can stop wasting your own damn time!
Follow the instructions on your Google+ profile, and put up photos, information about yourself, and your business, or services, your job-hunt, or whatever it is you’re doing and wow: your shameful “site” is gone, you have a lovely new profile, and one less excuse reason to hold you back from your eventual success. You have a much better chance of growing your business to actually raise the money to find a competent designer.
In the meantime, you have a platform that allows you to follow and interact with others in your field/industry/calling, and crucially, NOT BE ASHAMED. If you’re not ashamed, you might actually remember why you started your business, or whatever, and how much you enjoy it. If you allow yourself to enjoy it, you might actually be good at it. If you’re good at something, you can start, over time, making money….see where I’m going with this?