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You’d have to have been hiding out in a dark theater from dawn to nightfall not to have noticed the job market is tenuous now and impacting not only the way we work, but triggering our fears about the choices we make and how to apply our resources effectively.

Companies may still struggle with the concept of “the customer first” (see Fast Company’s Putting Customer’s First article*), but entrepreneurs know customers are their lifeblood.  Still, they have to find ways to extend themselves further to nurture those relationships, and thus, warrant the price tag for their products or services.

All this can add up to some questions about where to spend your time and how to keep your income stable without overspending on marketing.  Be wary of too much unstructured activity such as social networking, SEO work, website revisions, newsletters and blogs that don’t bring clients, and long network meetings or phone calls that may be pleasant, but unproductive.  If you have more than 500 unattended emails and feel you’re losing control, you are.  It’s like you’re Lucy Arnez and Ethel Mertz, in I Love Lucy, where they’re packing chocolates at the chocolate factory, eating their product as it comes down the conveyor belt in order to keep up with the ones that keep coming. 

Don’t let fear of missing out govern your email inbox.  Treat your emails like snail mail, look at them once and decide their usefulness, responding right then in the period you’ve delegated for reviewing emails, or deleting them.  Otherwise you feel like Audrey Hepburn in Charade, running from something but not sure what.  Maybe you’re running TO something, chasing business, instead of allowing business.  To do this requires a balance of well-chosen efforts and release. 

If you’re a professional speaker, counselor or similar professional talking about success and yet, having challenges now with your own bills, you might even feel like a fake.  You can relate to Kim Novak in Vertigo, not sure if you can be loved and accepted just as you are or if you have to play the other woman just to get and keep your customer’s attention. 

But those beliefs of being lovable, good enough and the like, are old beliefs formed in childhood that are not based in reality.  Anyone taking risks has failures, but that doesn’t make them the failure.  You will make mistakes, but mistakes and failure are not bad, they simply are an unrealized goal which doesn’t mean anything other than it’s time to set another one and go for it.

Yet, what happens when business is dying off and you’re teetering on financial collapse?  If you’re in serious debt, begin to reduce it wherever you can by making arrangements with your creditors.  Consider a low-interest loan.  Look at good faith loans from family or friends.  Take a second job if necessary.  But those are all steps to be aware of in advance, not just when the wolf is at your back door. 

You can’t go around like you’re one of the crazy group of individuals searching for a cachet of money, as in the 1963 comedy, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  Determine exactly how much money you need now, what you want it for and how you’ll use it when you have it.  In other words, be specific.  Then set another goal beyond your needed amount to challenge yourself, so you’re not too comfortable or reliant on actions to just get by.

There will always be unknowns as an entrepreneur and that’s part of the excitement, challenge and risk as you fulfill your own daily work choices.  Julie Andrews, in The Sound of Music, was afraid of her unknown career as a governess, but she kept moving forward anyway until it was proven that her actions were leading in the very direction she needed to go.

This is an unsettling economic period, but it will pass; and there will be an upswing in jobs and money again.  For now it’s a time to hold steady, yet not too tight. You want to be flexible for new opportunities, yet not unwise in your decisions to risk what you cannot afford to lose.  It’s a momentary downturn our country and world is experiencing and still there is plenty of abundance to tap into.  So have a clear strategy in place to help you calculate the pluses and minuses of the risks you’ll need to take and go forward with a solid action plan in place.

Then, be sure to factor in some down time to kick back, grab your popcorn and enjoy an upbeat movie that inspires and reaffirms you.  You’re not trapped. You have a myriad of choices and you can make it happen!

* http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/87/customer-1.html

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