[bwb]

Hi Matt,

Any new undertaking can seem overwhelming if you don't know where to start. You can easily mind-lock if you are filled with the urge to do something now, but your goals aren't clear enough for you to know what to do next. Give this plan a shot:

1. It's been said that "you won't see how to do it until you see yourself doing it". Start by visualizing your outcome. What's your life going to be like once your Internet business has started up and is successful? What will you be doing during the day? How will you feel about your work and your business? How much money will you have? Now visualize yourself hard at work creating your new business. How does that feel? What emotions does it evoke?

2. Align yourself with your goal. Start thinking of yourself as a business owner. Read publications written for small business owners. Join local small business associations and meet other business owners. Join online forums related to your business. Act like a business owner and think like a business owner.

3. Research everything you need to know about starting your business: how to incorporate (if you choose to do so), how to pay your taxes, how to open an online store, how to get a merchant account and process credit card payments, etc. Keep a list of everything that you're worried about, and knock them out, one by one, by learning what you need to know to give yourself confidence. Keep a journal to document your progress and write down the most important things you learn. Use your new contacts in the business community as starting points. You can ask them about their experience with web hosts, credit card processors, wholesalers, customers, and so on. Successful people are often very willing to share the secrets of their success; you just have to ask!

4. Turn your high-level goal (own an online business) into the beginnings of a plan. You don't need to know every step, just what your immediate projects are. These may be things like "find something to sell", "get my business framework in place", "open my store", and "find customers for my store". By now, you've primed your subconscious mind by aligning yourself with your goal, and it's time to put it to work for you. Write down what you want to start planning, then just start writing everything that comes into your head. Ideas will probably come to you faster than you can write them down! When your head is empty, go back and organize your thoughts into a list of projects.

5. Write down some action that you can take to move forward on each of your projects. Maybe one of your projects is "open a bank account". Your next action is "research commercial banks on the web" or "call my local bank and ask about business accounts", then once you get that done, your next action might be "visit [Bank name] to open the account". Some projects may be dependent on other projects. Your bank account project's first action might be to complete the "pick my busines name" project.

6. Look at your list of actions. What can you do right now? Do it!

When you find yourself "stuck", unable to make any forward progress on your project, it's time to take a few minutes to relax and take a step back. Do the visualization exercise again: Your business is successful. You are successful. What does your world look like? How do you feel? Good.

Now, go back to your list of projects. Your list may be full of things you need to learn, or things you need to accomplish, or both. Start with the one you've been neglecting the longest and ask yourself "what's the next action on this?". Write it down. Make it a physical action, so unambiguous that if you had a personal assistant, you could hand it off to them and rest assured that it would get done correctly. Don't write down something like "pick a shopping cart service". A concrete action would be something like "search Google for hosted shopping carts, and write a comparison table for them", or "call [your business owner friend] and ask how they got started selling on eBay".

If your next action is something you can do at that moment, do it! Otherwise, go to the next project on your list and ask yourself the same question. Once you find something that you have the resources and energy to do RIGHT NOW, just do it.

If your project involves making a big decision, get all the information you need, review it carefully, then sleep on it. Make your next action "take a nap, then make my decision". If you're still stuck on a decision after you've slept on it, start asking yourself why you're stuck. Go back to your pad of paper and ask your subconscious for clarity. Update your projects and actions based on what your subconscious has told you. Maybe you wrote down "too little information". Do some more research. Maybe you wrote down "don't know how to choose". Call or email another business owner and ask how they make similar decisions, or search the web to see if someone has asked this kind of question on a forum.

If you've gone through your whole list of actions and there's nothing you can do right now (maybe because it's the middle of the night and all of your action items involve calling people on the phone), don't despair! You now know everything you need to do next to make progress toward your goals. You can just relax, knowing that there's nothing you need to do right now. Your world is in harmony. Get some sleep, and then first thing the next morning, start working down your list. Resist the temptation to just go back to your old, unproductive morning routine. Before you check your e-mail and check all your favorite web sites, knock four things off your list of actions. Each action you complete will just give you more energy to start working on the next, and before you know it, it will be time to go back and start thinking about all the actions for phase 2.

The advice in this post was influenced heavily by the books "Getting Things Done" and "Ready For Anything" by David Allen and by Steve's posts on intention-manifestation and accessing your subconscious mind.

Best of luck to you, and keep us posted on your progress!

-Brian