Another day, a little more dread. You can’t bring yourself to look at the situation because of fear, shame or anxiety.

Perhaps it’s your finances, or a relationship. A room in your house that’s got over-cluttered, a health concern, or a looming deadline that you know you can’t realistically meet.

I want to share with you a process you can use to clear the situation up. It’s the process I used to turn around the uptake of my last workshop, where I went from having two participants to ten participants in less than two weeks, and regained my sense of peace.

1. What’s going on?
If you’re ignoring what’s happening and just hoping it will get better, it’s time to come out of ostrich mode. What are the facts, what is the truth? With my workshop, I allowed myself to feel the angst I was experiencing and also acknowledged that I might need to cancel. What are you feeling and what is the down-and-dirty reality here?

2. What else is true?
When the facts are out in the open, your gremlins will love to pounce. (Hint: This may well be the reason you told yourself it was better to keep things under wraps in the first place.) Gremlins are hungry for the very worst, the very harshest. With my workshop, they were delightedly keen to focus on all the empty space, on all those people who hadn’t enrolled. Now is the time to seek out some alternative points of view. How did I know, for example, that two wasn’t the ideal number?! Could I say for sure that a dozen participants would be better? There’s an inspirational urban legend about U2 once playing a gig for just four people. This step is about relinquishing our role as master of the universe and conceding that we don’t know the bigger picture and we don’t have control over outcome.

3. Who can help?
It’s vital to break the painful coziness of keeping secrets. Instead, tell the truth, reach out and ask for help. Part of you desperately won’t want this – it will freak out and scream: “What are you doing!? You can’t reveal this!” Just quietly get on with doing it anyway, choosing your confidantes wisely and knowing that there is safety in honesty. I was nervous about admitting in my last blog post that there were low numbers for the workshop because I didn’t want those who’d signed up to be concerned. I was moved when one of them emailed me immediately saying: “However many people attend, it’s gonna be a wonderful workshop”. You may be surprised by the kindness of strangers – and of the not so strange.

4. What are my strategies now?
Fear can keep us absolutely paralysed. Once we’ve acknowledged the fear, loosened the hold of our one-track gremlins and told the truth about the situation, it’s now time to get into action. I committed to pulling out all the stops in my last-minute promotion of the workshop. I wrote some new copy, blogged about it, asked people to recommend the workshop to friends, went on local radio (which you can listen to here), sent the blurb to online publications, tweeted about it, shared the link on Facebook, followed up with people who had expressed an interest. It worked. What are the strategies for your situation? If you don’t know what might work, others will. Seek out a debt advisor, a professional decutterer, a book on healthy relationships etc.

Honesty, cleaning up and returning to action can feel incredibly scary – yet it’s just one part of us which is scared. Another part of us has a constant and unerring sense of safety because it knows that our safety is a given and doesn’t come from any external circumstances – and that part of us will lead us back to peace.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) Choose an area of your life where you’re experiencing that nagging sense of unease. Now use the four questions to face the truth, get into action, and recover your peace.

2) Leave a comment on this blog post, letting us know how this process works for you. Is this a new way of approaching a murky situation? Which steps do you find hardest, and which come easily?

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2010

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Found an area you really want to clean up?

Many people will have made a new year’s resolution with the intention of sorting out a troublesome area and then watched it fall by the wayside. It’s important to know that change is often big and complex and there might be some vital parts of the journey missing – like honestly acknowledging where you’re starting from.

The New Way Resolutions e-course walks you through a step-by-step process for making an actual change.

Click here to find out more about this process and how it could help you. NB There’s a special offer on until 31st January 2010…

The likelihood is, you never are.

Short story for you: I led a workshop which showed fellow coaches how to use Twitter to grow their businesses. Lots of them wanted to learn more so there’s now a masterclass series available, via teleconference, starting 9th November. That’s just three weeks from idea to actualization and the point is: the interest was there, the timing felt right, I was being encouraged from all sides – so why not?

Every time I’ve launched a new workshop or programme, I’ve offered it with just a title and a synopsis. I’ve known the general stake and have felt the heart of the work – and people have hired me or enrolled based on that. Having the date in the diary and people to whom you’re committed provides that all-important external deadline that every solopreneur craves. The detailed planning and structuring then takes place with that date in mind.

So much of what we do as entrepreneurs is stuff we’re not ready for. Our first radio interview, first talk, first community workshop, first funding application. I’m reminded of that scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding when Cameron Diaz’s character has the microphone thrust into her hand  and is told she’s singing. She holds back, petrified at first, and yet soon she is reveling in the experience, delighted to have been pushed. On the entrepreneurial path, it is vital to respond to pushes, give ourselves pushes and then feel ourselves being pushed onwards and onwards by the dates we set and the commitments we make.

There’s obviously a balance to be found here. We don’t want to be underprepared. We don’t want to commit to offering anything which we genuinely don’t have the time or resources to put together. Yet nor do we want to fall into the too-common trap of overpreparing, letting a project fall stale because it’s continually being revised on our office desk. We need to trust that there’s a point where we can release into the public domain because so much of the evolution of a venture takes place collectively. If you look at a movement like Transition Towns or 10:10, you’ll see that so much of what takes place is beyond anything that an individual could have conceived in his or her own mind.

The secret is: We’re never really ready to offer anything because the readiness comes as a result of the offering. As with my Twitter masterclass, as long as there’s one person enrolled (and there is!), people will take benefit and the venture will move forward.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) What are you sitting on? What project have you been mulling over and over without really getting anywhere?

2) How could you start nudging this into the public domain? What step do you not quite feel ready for but which might actually be the step that helps you BE ready? One action may be to join a social networking forum – like Facebook or Twitter – and start connecting with others who could collaborate with you, or help you move this project forward.

3) Time for some bravery. Launch an idea knowing the heart of it and with some structure (e.g. a date or a way for people to get connected with you), trusting that ideas and support will flow in from others and in turn bolster you in your feeling of readiness.

4) Leave a comment on this blog post, letting us know how you are doing with moving your venture forward, piece by piece. What helps you know you’re ready? When does holding back… hold you back?

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2009

Stop Waiting – Time To Spread The Word

You have a venture and want to let more people know about it. Maybe you want to find your ideal clients, maybe you want to find collaborators or funders.

In my experience, Twitter is a fantastic way of networking with vast amounts of people whilst using little energy. It makes it fun and easy to spread the word about the project you’re passionate about.

Join us for this 4-week masterclass series via teleconference. We start Monday 9th November and then speak again the following three Mondays throughout the month. You also receive a 45-minute mentoring session which helps you get super-clear about who you want to communicate with and how to reach them in the most effective ways.

For more information, click here. There are now only five places available so to avoid disappointment, do book yours now.

Many of us have been to workshops which engaged only our brains. We’ve sat with paper and pen, talked through relatively superficial questions, and left without knowing each others’ names. When I go to a workshop, I want to be taken on a journey. I want to go from somewhere to somewhere and I want to trust the workshop facilitator to be my guide. I want them to have a map, but not grip on to it too firmly. Katie did this beautifully. There was a flow from one exercise to the next and my whole body was involved through sound, movement, words, drama and more. She stood back and allowed us to explore and then stepped in with her exquisite intuition to nudge us towards new places to look. I left the day with so much serenity, humming contentedly to myself all the way home.

When I go on these journeys, I also want to feel like others are there with me – that’s we’re seeing each other and being seen. I am always blown away by how my fear-of-failure-busting gang connects and supports each other. This group shared hugs and tears, acknowledgements and whoops of celebration. They’ve all swapped emails and are already continuing their conversations. In fact, a couple of them have suggested that they have a six month reunion – and this is a group who spent just six hours with each other.

It is a precious honour to be trusted to guide people through a learning journey and this weekend I’ve been reminded of how equally wonderful it is to find someone, such as Katie, who can do that for me. It’s a true skill to create a space safe enough for a group of strangers to explore an issue such as fear of failure, resistance, self-doubt, and insecurities. After my workshop, one of the more apprehensive participants said to me: “It was amazing how quickly and easily I could open up to people I didn’t know. I realised that we were all in the same boat so no-one was judging anyone else”. If as a workshop facilitator you can set up the expectation of openness and model vulnerability, something sacred is created. It’s a container which allows people to let go and go deep. They can cry and sing and shout – as they did this weekend! – and actually move through a block, rather than merely thinking about it.

The World Needs Your Passion, So…

1) What kind of journey do you already take others on? Fear to freedom? Stress to calm? Overwhelm to simplicity? Unfitness to health? What do you do naturally, just because of who you are? – and are there ways in which you could package this and actually offer that journey as a 1-1 or group process?

2) What journey are you ready for? Where do you want to go from and to? Who can be your guide?

3) Check out Katie’s website, The Rose Window, for her full moon chanting, workshops & upcoming second album launch.

© Corrina Gordon-Barnes, 2009

** There’s no blog next week so here’s a challenge… If YOU were writing this blog, what would you write about? Where are you noticing yourself doing – or wanting to do – things differently? How could your experiences help others in finding new pathways? **

** Fail workshop coming to London…. June 2009, date and venue tbc. Book early to avoid disappointment**