Dipping the Toe in...
Hello everybody, welcome to the shiny new blog, it's a little empty for now so I'm hoping you can help me fill it up with things you'd like to see or hear about from Crafts Revival.
It's been a hectic but enlightening couple of weeks for Crafts Revival and me. I signed up for a business start up course called a Taste of Enterprise through West Itchen Community Trust and ended up with the contact details of wonderful business mentors and a ready made network of potential business contacts. All that just for turning up to a free two day course and putting the work in, can't be bad can it? Making use of all the help you can get is the best advice I can offer any newly self employed person. No man, or indeed woman, is an island and no question you don't know the answer to is a stupid question.
Get out there and talk to people, anybody and everybody who will listen, about your business idea, you never know who you're going to meet. A chance meeting with an art and business student I got chatting with last week, while she was serving me in a shop when I was on a rare clothes buying excursion, resulted in an offer of help with one of my weakest areas which is graphic / logo design for business cards, stationery, web page etc. if we hadn't got chatting I'd never have known she was anything other than the nice girl who served me in the shop.
The biggest and most exciting change has been my mind set, I'm no longer telling people I am going to start a business, I now tell them I run a business... it's not a lie... despite not having had my first paying customer yet I am putting in a lot of work and just changing the way I talk about Crafts Revival as a going concern is making all the difference... I suppose the neuro linguistic programming book I've been ploughing through might have something to do with the change of thinking, when something new comes up I am tackling it as if I didn't know it couldn't be done instead of letting limitations paralyse me into inaction as used to happen.
But a course in NLP isn't essential, the things we often unconsciously tell ourselves throughout an average day make all the difference so each time I catch myself saying negative things about my abilities (especially the internal dialogue playing out inside my head) I decide to change it to a positive message instead if I can. Staying open to possibilities and grasping opportunities with both hands and making them work for is a good start. Good luck if you're a fledgling business start up, it's a long haul but I'm having such fun I definitely think it's worth it...
I'd love to know what you think of the BLOG so far and what you'd like to see here in future so please get in touch ... Thanks for reading and see you all soon ...
