Following on from the previous post on asking for help, if you are in a tough place right now, I’ve listed some websites below that may be of help to you with particular issues you’re facing – please do get in touch with them, even anonymously, to start getting help. And please feel free to add your favourite non-profit services in the comments!

General/Umbrella Services

Citizen’s Advice Bureau (UK): www.citizensadvice.org.uk
Citizen’s Information (Ireland): www.citizensinformation.ie
Reach Out (Ireland): ie.reachout.com

Crisis & Mental Health Support

Samaritans (UK & Ireland): www.samaritans.org/
Pieta House – preventing self-harm and suicide (Ireland): www.pieta.ie/
Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA): www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
International Suicide Hotlines: www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html
List of Domestic Violence resources (UK): www.bbc.co.uk/health/support/domestic_violence_usefulcontacts_index.shtml
Women’s Aid (Ireland): www.womensaid.ie/
Amen – for male victims of domestic violence and their children (Ireland): www.amen.ie
Domestic Violence Hotline (USA): www.thehotline.org
One in Four – sexual abuse support (Ireland): www.oneinfour.ie
Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (USA): www.rainn.org
Mental Health America (USA): www.nmha.org/
Mental health charity Mind’s “People’s, Groups & Communities” listings (UK): www.mind.org.uk/help/people_groups_and_communities
Rethink Mental Illness (UK): www.rethink.org/
Aware Defeat Depression (NI): www.aware-ni.org
Aware (Irelend): www.aware.ie
WAVE, charity for victims of ‘The Troubles’: www.wavetraumacentre.org.uk
Bullying support (UK): www.bullying.co.uk

For Young People

Young Minds (UK): www.youngminds.org.uk/
Rathbone (UK): http://www.rathboneuk.org/ (I’m a volunteer chair with Rathbone’s NI board)
Spun Out (Ireland): www.spunout.ie/
Teen Between – for support of young people with separated parents (Ireland): teenbetween.ie
Committee for Children (Worldwide): www.cfchildren.org/

For Families

Home Start (UK): www.home-start.org.uk
Family Support Northern Ireland: www.familysupportni.gov.uk/
Age NI’s Advice & Advocacy Service (NI): www.ageuk.org.uk/northern-ireland/about-us/our-work/advice–advocacy-service/
Action For Children’s Family Support site: www.actionforchildren.org.uk/our-services/family-support
Gingerbread single parents charity (UK): www.gingerbread.org.uk/
One Family single parents charity (Ireland): www.onefamily.ie/

Bereavement Support

List of resources (UK): http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/support/bereavement_usefulcontacts_index.shtml
Child Bereavement Charity: www.childbereavement.org.uk
Bereavement Counselling Service of Ireland: Bereavement Ireland
Console, for people bereaved by suicide (Ireland): www.console.ie

Financial & Debt Advice

Consumer Credit Counselling Service (UK): www.cccs.co.uk
Debt Advice Foundation (UK): www.debtadvicefoundation.org
MoneySavingExpert’s Debt Help Plan (UK): www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/debt-help-plan
MoneySavingExpert’s Budget Planner (UK): www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/Budget-planning
MoneySavingExpert’s Benefits Checker (UK): www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/benefits-check
Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Ireland): www.mabs.ie
Credit Counseling Agency (USA): www.creditguard.org

Health & Disability

NHS Choices (UK): www.nhs.uk
Disability Action (NI): www.disabilityaction.org
Sight-loss Charity RNIB (UK): www.rnib.org.uk
Sight-loss Charity NCBI (Ireland): www.ncbi.ie
Action on Hearing Loss (UK): www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk
Hearing Charities of America (USA): www.hearingcharities.org
Irish Wheelchair Association (Ireland): www.iwa.ie

Eating Disorders

B-eat – Beating Eating Disorders (UK): www.b-eat.co.uk/
Eating Association Disorder of Ireland (Ireland): www.bodywhys.ie
National Eating Disorders Association (USA): www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/
Overeaters Anonymous (Worldwide): www.oa.org

LGBT Support

Lesbian Advocacy Service Online (NI): lasionline.org/
LGBT Helpline (Ireland): www.lgbt.ie/
BelongTo (Ireland): www.belongto.org
Gaelick.com (Ireland): www.gaelick.com/
Stonewall (UK): www.stonewall.org.uk/
Advocate.com (USA): www.advocate.com

If what you need isn’t listed here, do get yourself somewhere where you can get online in private and search for support sites and forums. When I suffered from depression in 2004/2005 I found an online community of sufferers who helped me greatly – and when I was coming out of it I found that going back on to help others in a worse place than me helped my own recovery. You’re never alone in your experience.

Finally, for a message of hope from people who once felt like giving up, I just love this video by Pixar employees. It gets better.

If you need something – ASK. Don’t wait for someone to notice that you need help. Remember that others can choose to respond or not – so don’t get hung up on one particular person being the one you need to help you. Sometimes you’re so busy looking at one person, waiting for them to ‘give’, that you don’t notice the person behind you offering what you need.

It doesn’t have to be a person. Ask the universe, Lady Luck, your god/goddess, the Great Big Nothing – whoever or whatever you subscribe to. Just make the request: by saying ‘I need help!’ – even if only to yourself – you are making progress.

You don’t have to ask someone you know. Never underestimate the kindness of strangers. And if you don’t know if an organisation exists to help people with the issue you’re facing, make it your business to find out. (And see some links at the bottom of this post.) Until you need such places, you’re probably not aware of their existence.

Maybe you’re scared of looking weak? If so, ask yourself: would I rather appear strong whilst suffering or move forward, feeling better? Allowing yourself to be vulnerable is a much greater type of strength than the defensive, brittle, breakable kind.

Maybe you’re scared of people saying no? Remember that they do have that right, and that it’s okay; don’t waste time and energy being angry at them. Instead, keep making the request, of different people, or in different ways, until you get the help you need. History is full of success stories of people who just kept asking.

Help is out there!

First, let go of the details. Focus on the essence of what you’re asking for:

• If your request is for more money, focus on feelings of abundance/security/freedom/etc.
• If you’re asking for a specific job, focus on feelings of having a fulfilling/lucrative/exciting/stable/dynamic/etc. career
• If your request is for a particular lover, focus instead on the feeling of being with a well-matched lover, with all the qualities you wish for in them and in your relationship

Use the specifics to get enthused if need be, but tag on an ‘or something even better’ to the end to allow for as-yet-unknown-but-preferable alternatives. It’s easier to daydream about something/someone we already know than something/someone we haven’t encountered yet – but don’t underestimate the power of your imagination! And of course, letting go of those specifics doesn’t mean they’re not the answer – they may well be. Just don’t let specifics blind you to other solutions, or trick you into mistaking one particular ‘no’ for an overall ‘no’.

Make it a goal to notice ways in which your ‘requests’ are being granted in many areas of your life. Getting into the habit of appreciation for what’s already working is a surefire way to noticing more good things in your life and boosting your energy to change everything else, if you still want to. (This is why I have clients start the Wheel of Life exercise by looking at what’s already working instead of focusing on what they’re unhappy about.) Healthy (not blind!) optimism leads to longer lives and better relationships.

And look for ways in which you can be the one answering the request.

And finally: ask the internet! We have the biggest library in the world at our fingertips* – use it! Tongue-in-cheek site “Let Me Google That For You” exists because of frustration at people asking questions of other people before taking the first step themselves. But I know from clients, friends and family that some people just don’t automatically think ‘I could probably find something online’; particularly if they’re not big internet users. If this describes you, get comfortable with basic online research – remember, Knowledge is Confidence!

When you need serious help

Of course, there are times when we are facing serious issues or even crises, and asking for help is a major, difficult step. If this is where you are right now, please read the next post.

*The ‘biggest library in the world’ – along with your privacy rights – is under threat by proposed international treaty, ACTA. Watch this short, explanatory video to find out the threat to you the individual, as well as your favourite websites, and take action! (Further reading: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/24/acta-101?page=all)

Image credit: Mark Hillary (see more of his photos at www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary/)

In my last post, I blogged about Part 1 of my escape to a friend’s cottage in Donegal; a trip that was meant to be a time of writing and creating but came to be more about reading and gestating. This is the second post of two about unforgettable Anam Mara!

R(est) & R(eading), Lots Of

So, after our grey, windswept, atmospheric and brilliant weekend, Monday dawned clear and sunny – just as Himself had to leave for a week in the office. Murphy’s Law, eh? After breakfast we took a walk down the garden to the water’s edge, and then clambered into Foudre Bleu (my knackered Peugeot) for one last circuit of Atlantic Drive. Even more glorious in the sunshine, one view down over a beach had an almost Bond-film feel, I felt. Reluctantly, I headed for Derry (no offense to Derry, it’s a great city, hi) to see Himself onto the Belfast train, before turning back to the cottage for a week of actual work.

The plan was to make a start on some written coaching materials, but as I started reading through some notes I realised it had been quite a while since I’d made time to re-read and re-ponder some of my old coaching/business books and notes. And it was hitting me in this peaceful place how exhausted I was – that stop-start of getting sick, resting, trying to catch up, getting sick etc. that had been going on since at least the previous summer had worn me out physically and mentally. Before I could think about getting busy with creative output, therefore, I’d have to slow down and refresh my mental batteries. So I lit the fire, pulled up the armchair and settled in with my books and the laptop for a leisurely day of reading and taking notes. With a break for dinner and a glass of red, and a wee wander up the shoreline at the bottom of the garden as the sun went down.

The next day was bright and sunny again, so after another healthy breakfast and a workout, I flung open the French doors and settled into a chair in between them, for shelter. (Sunny as it was, it was cold and a tad breezy.) Wrapped in a favourite poncho/blanket, I began my daily practice of ‘automatic writing’. This is a practice I recommend to many clients – particularly anyone feeling stuck, lost, in denial or in need of some creative inspiration. I’ll not clutter up this post with the ‘how-to’ – but will blog about that shortly.

After 3 pages of writing all sorts of revelations and insights (and only the odd bit of nonsense) with a backdrop of water lapping on the shore – and the odd bleat from my friend the sheep, I felt de-cluttered and focused and decided to go suss out that Bond-film-esque beach we’d driven past so many times over the weekend. I packed up a couple of books, pen and paper and some emergency dark chocolate and headed for Atlantic Drive once more.

Beach Sanctuary

Trá na Rosann (Rosses’ Strand) is now officially one of my favourite places in the world. (The surf there  later claimed my iPhone - and I didn’t really mind. And believe me, I get attached to my iPhones. But sure isn’t an impetuous, gleeful dash into freezing foam off an Irish coastline more meaningful than a gadget, in the grand scheme of things?) The beach became my day-time ‘work’-place for that week, and I had a few favourite spots to sit in – with nicely-sloped rocks acting as chair backs, and a cushion in a plastic bag wrapped in a comfy blanket as a seat. I got into the habit of reading, writing notes, meditating, contemplating the horizon whilst munching on biscuits or chunks of dark chocolate, and then going for a run up the beach in the shallowest water. (It occurred to me that I could do with some toughening up really, so I ran through the bitterly cold water, reciting times tables to myself to distract myself from the pain. Hardcore, eh? I impressed myself.) Goodness knows what the odd visitor to the beach made of me sitting there in 2 layers of clothes, a woolly hat and sunglasses, surrounded by books, paper and pens and a bag of snacks. “Occupy Downings”?

All of this with no internet, and the laptop being used only in the evenings to take notes and write follow-up lists. And honestly, this was one of the most liberating aspects of the trip, being offline. They said I’d never cope! But I’d updated my social media avatars to show I was offline until 21/3/11, had put on an email autoresponder and told anyone who needed to know that I’d be off the radar until the 21st. And although I could have gone to the Singing Pub or Carraig Art to get online, I didn’t – apart from one temporary logon: I got a few texts on Monday from a client who was in need of some emergency support, so made the decision to go to Cáife na Sráide next day to use their wifi for an afternoon Skype call. (An excuse to have lunch there too – I prefer the fish and chips at the chippy a few doors down, but Cáife na Sráide are prawn ninjas! Crispy prawns in plum dipping sauce – oh my…)

Danger! Danger! (Okay, not really.)

To clear my head after the coaching call before settling back into my retreat, I decided to go on a short tour of the coast – I wanted to be sure that my beach was indeed the best beach to be spending my time on. (It was.) Consulting my map, I was trying to hug the coastline as closely as possible, and one of the places the road was closest to the ocean was ‘Horn Head Drive’. As I followed the signage for the drive, I wondered had I misread something, or missed a car park beside a pedestrian entrance – it was a one-lane road up the side of a cliff; quickly turning out of sight once you’d committed to the path. I’m not really a trepidatious person, and it was a Tuesday afternoon in March in Ireland, so I took the chance there’d be no tourist traffic and motored on. As I approached the first bend, I looked down to my left, onto the top of a smaller cliff, and ahead to a very short stretch of road and a very vast quantity of ocean, and it occurred to me it was perhaps a bad thing that my MacBook was in the boot. I stopped and sent a text to Himself warning him that it may be the last he’d hear from me, as I’d happened upon a steeply descending road with more twists and turns than an average season of ‘Lost’. And then I turned the corner, to see a route worthy of Gran Turismo disappear into the sea. (Fellow fans, remember this? And this? Ahhh, memories of student days…)

At this point, I undid my seat belt, thinking there was a slim chance I might not be able to control the car properly on the steep, winding descent; or indeed that the road might disappear altogether into the rocks, and I might have to throw myself from my beloved jalopy as we plunged over the side of the cliff. (I’m not a pessimist you understand, just occasionally given to theatricality.) I was thoroughly relishing the drama of it all – gunning a small car up the cliff roads near Tor Head in Co. Antrim is most entertaining, particularly for visiting friends who are used to larger, more robust vehicles, but this was another class of coastal thrill entirely. Of course, I did actually make it safely down the far side, and, head now nicely refreshed, I headed back to the cottage and resumed the routine that I enjoyed for the rest of that glorious week.

Do you need a break?

I really, really, really recommend taking a proper break from work like this if you can. One thing I hear again and again from clients – both personal coaching and business coaching clients – is that they’re burnt out and frazzled but are holding off until some major event or piece of work is ‘out of the way’ before pausing to take care of themselves. Or that they can’t take a break because too many people are depending on them. What happens if you don’t take a break, and then completely break down? You cannot keep your foot to the board without taking a break to recover every now and again – and sometimes, you need a bit of distance to get real clarity and perspective. If you can’t afford to get far away, think about swapping homes with a friend for a spell. And at the very least, consider an internet detox – it was an utter relief to be unplugged for a week and a bit. I love the connectedness of our modern world in many ways, but if you’re already feeling a bit depleted, being contactable through so many channels can feel like having so many tentacles wrapping around you, leaving you tangled up and exhausted.

Chill Out

Try meditation to give you a mental break – try this free online class in mindfulness meditation from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a highly respected leader in the field. Or search on ‘meditation’ on YouTube for a short video that you can get into easily. There are so many different styles, and voices, and images – all along the spectrum from no-nonsense to far-out hippy. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it! And for the most basic meditation of all: just sit and observe your breathing for some minutes. Don’t try and control it (unless you’re hyperventilating, which is unlikely if you’re still reading); just observe it. The shrinking of mental focus to this one rhythmic action will calm you down immensely.

Get Out of the City!

…Even whilst in the city. I’ve taken to calling into my local Botanic Gardens between meetings; a 20-minute wander through the tropical ravine and palm house have a remarkably calming effect. And when you can’t get anywhere near a blade of grass, you might be interested in this research by the University of Michigan which claims that looking at pictures of nature has a better effect on cognitive performance than an actual walk down a city street. (I feel duty-bound when citing research to also introduce you to, if you’re not already familiar with, Ben Goldacre’s wonderful www.badscience.net/.)

But better yet, make time to head off into a natural environment – a park, forest, mountain trail or beach; alone for head-clearing, or with friends, partner or family for shared enjoyment.

Your Health Is Your Wealth

And finally, do create good habits of exercise, diet and relaxation – and get a good sleep routine. We all of course have primary responsibility for our wellbeing, but if you’ve niggling health concerns, do seek advice/help. Go talk to your doctor, or specialist. (And change doctor if you aren’t happy with your current one – clients often tell me they avoid going to their doctor because they don’t find them helpful or sympathetic, but are sticking with them anyway because ‘that’s the family doctor we’ve always used’, or ‘I don’t want to cause offense’. Your wellbeing is too important to worry about causing offense!) Sometimes ‘R&R’ isn’t enough – although my retreat helped my health immensely in the short term, it was only when I went back to the doctor’s for a raft of tests later in the year that they discovered I’d been harbouring a streptococcus infection for quite some time, and nixed it. (Hoorah!) Remember: no-one is as invested in your health as you are. Ask for what you need.

If you want to take a mental holiday with more pictures, see my Flickr albums of Anam Mara and Belfast Botanic Gardens. (Or you can view them on www.facebook.com/soulambition.) All amateur and taken on an iPhone, but hopefully evocative all the same!

And if you want to find out more about Anam Mara, visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/anammara. (Please note I get no commission or fee for promoting it! I just adore the place.)

PS: Looking for the Gran Turismo tunes, I came across the original Japenese version’s soundtrack – this is awesome! Tho’ not at all relaxing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGLLZPk2uN0 – enjoy!

In my last post, I blogged about my imminent escape to a cottage in Donegal, for a self-imposed creative retreat. There is a tv in the cottage, but I wasn’t going to be using it; and there’s no internet access. My plan was to bring lots of materials and my laptop and start writing skeleton outlines for eBooks and other materials for the Soul Ambition site. As it turned out though, my retreat came to be more about creative input than creative output. It was such a fantastic, important time I’m not even going to try and distill it into one short post – there are so many great aspects to it that I hope it inspires some of you reading this to take some very precious time out, and create your own little island of peace and bliss. Looking back, it was an experience of two halves; so this is the first post of two about unforgettable Anam Mara. (And here’s Part 2!)

Burnout

Last November I did a talk at BizCamp Belfast about different kinds of burnout, how I’d experienced them and how I’d learned to cope with them. I can safely say it is the most packed room I’ve ever spoken to; it was a clearly a hot issue for the entrepreneurs and about-to-be entrepreneurs in attendance. I spoke about the career burnout of staying in an unfulfilling job for too long, and how this led eventually to depression – and then to the recovery and new sense of purpose that sparked the creation of Soul Ambition. I talked about financial burnout from an ill-advised property investment just before the market started to tank, and just after quitting the wrong-but-financially-secure old job to start a business – and how even the penury of those worst times felt infinitely preferable to the misery of feeling trapped in the wrong job. (Note the word ‘feeling’, here! Perception is reality…)
I talked about physical burnout, describing how a brilliant first half of 2010 gave way to a lengthy bout of tonsillitis/a chest infection that lasted from August to October, giving me a massive backlog of work to deal with in the end of the year. I talked about my ongoing challenge to keep myself grounded and ‘out of my head’. (In a centred, not a Hacienda-type, way, you understand.) Not long after I did the talk, the tonsillitis/chest infection returned, lasting from December to mid-January and further increasing the workload. Clearly I still had a way to go in managing my physical resources effectively.

So, after a necessarily busy January and February, making a start on the massive backlog and building up income once more, I decided I needed a proper break from client-facing work, to make a start on the coaching materials I’ll be making available through my site. I set up my auto-responder, changed my social network profile pics to one of a beach with ‘Offline ‘til 21/3’ splashed across it, loaded up the car with books, notebooks, my laptop and guitar, lots of healthy food (and a couple of bottles of wine) and a selection of yoga and exercise dvds, and set off for lovely Donegal.

Unplugged

I was staying in Anam Mara, a beautiful old stone cottage on the shores of Mulroy Bay, in Downings, Co. Donegal. Owned by my good friend Roisin, it’s been in the family for generations, and has been lovingly renovated and extended, with decking added to the back, overlooking the water. I arrived on a Thursday night, with what may have been snow on the roadsides, in rain and howling wind. Donegal at that time of year, with that sort of weather, is awesome in its wild, rugged beauty; my drive took me through the mountains and along dark shores, with cat’s eyes like glowing breadcrumbs along the hairpin roads. I’d driven this once before, when Roisin brought me to see the cottage for the first time a couple of weeks before; now in the dark I could only make out the looming shapes of the mountain slopes and occasional glimmers on the water, but I knew how breathtaking the views awaiting me in the morning would be. Arriving at the cottage, I had a thrill of anticipation as I turned off the engine and was plunged into darkness, unable to see the bay at the bottom of the garden, and hearing nothing but the wind. This was switching off.

Having unloaded the car and made up the bed, I went for a browse of the bookcase Roisin uses for guests to borrow from and replenish with the books they’ve already finished. I usually read non-fiction; books about business, psychology, self development, or Big Ideas of some sort, and I had a crate of them with me – but I had the urge for something frothy and undemanding. I grabbed a Maeve Binchy and curled up under the duvet with the wind assaulting the little window overlooking the bay. I was awake half the night with the noise, but I was lying there delighted by the drama of it all. It was bringing back memories of a family holiday to nearby Creeslough as a young child, staying in an old cottage with a turf fire, creaky windows and real peace and quiet in the spaces between nature’s crescendos.

Next day after a blissful lie-in, I went down to the kitchen overlooking the water, and cooked myself a healthy, brain-foodish breakfast (a variation on kedgeree with couscous instead of rice and Mediterranean flavours instead of Indian, if you’re interested). I made a start on organising my materials, and then wandered onto the decking to take in the view and the sea air. Anam Mara means ‘Soul of the Sea’ – I think I’ve got one of those. I never get tired of that sharp tang on the breeze, or of watching the water. A while after breakfast I stuck on a workout dvd* and pranced about the kitchen for a bit, as a black-faced sheep in the garden watched in that way that only a sheep can. At this point I decided that much as I was looking forward to getting stuck into some work-related reading in the peace and quiet, I was relishing not thinking about work for a while, and the feeling of being on a true holiday, rather than just taking a break. So I lit the fire and curled up on the sofa with the Binchy, finishing it by about 3pm. By now I was feeling completely unplugged and chilled out – so I took out my beloved guitar and serenaded the sheep from earlier for an hour or two, before jumping into the car to go pick up the other half, who was coming straight from work in Belfast to Letterkenny, by coach.

Now I’d said in my earlier post that he and I were both going to spend the weekend writing blog materials, with a reward of a few pints in the nearby Singing Pub on the Saturday night. As it turned out, what we both really wanted was a weekend of switching off and soaking up the atmosphere of our stunning surroundings. On the way back from Letterkenny we stopped at Carraigart’s only fish and chip shop, bringing our haul back to the fireside where we ate it from its paper and washed it down with a glass or two of red wine. (Needless to say, there on the edge of the Atlantic, the fish was delicious – no worries about a lazy monopoly there.) Fire blazing, we queued up some Christy Moore tracks and curled up on a pair of bean bags by the hearth.

Dhún na nGall

Next day we couldn’t wait to go explore Atlantic Drive; a famously scenic drive along the coast around Downings. The day was grey, wet and windy, but as I’ve said, Donegal wears that look well. I’m surprised I managed to keep the car on the road as each bend back towards the sea revealed another dramatic view of the grey-green surf and mountain slopes. Before we completed the loop back to Anam Mara, we came across a graveyard, and stopped off to take a wander through the crumbling headstones and look out over the swirling sea. Cold and wet by now, we were delighted to see the Singing Pub on the other side of the road; we’d heard great things about its food, its staff and its music. Unfortunately we only got to enjoy one of that holy triumvirate of Irish welcomes on this particular occasion; Tony ruefully informed us that the usual live music was being replaced that night with a charity pub quiz as Gaeilge. He even rang a nearby pub to check if they had any ceoil that evening, but as it was off-season, there was none to be had.

It was a shame to not hear a live tune or two here in the Gaeltacht, but we decided a home-cooked dinner and a bottle of red by the fire with some Celtic music courtesy of my iTunes library would be fair substitute. Later that evening, I found something in the cutlery drawer just about long enough to skewer marshmallows with, and set about burning my fingers and our gobs. I’d also found a promising paperback about a mysterious character with a penchant for the ‘red and rubicund’ who could see demons everywhere he went in London (which was mostly dark and mildly seedy pubs), holding them at bay whilst maintaining a secret career and writing his Memoirs of a Master Forger*. Going properly back to childhood roots now, I read it aloud by the turf fire, a most pleasing London-Irish juxtaposition following the Shane Macgowan & the Pogues tracks we’d played over dinner. I read ‘til my throat gave out, had some more wine, and read some more. Another night by the fire and I was more relaxed and happy than I can ever remember being. This was so much better than I’d even expected, and I’d expected it to be class.

The next day was to be the other half’s last at the cottage, with a return to work on Monday. Thirsty for more of the crashing surf along Atlantic Drive, we made the circuit again – and gasped and exclaimed the whole way round it again. One of his favourite quotes was “The value of life can be measured by how many times your soul has been deeply stirred” (Saichiro Honda). Well, if you want to regularly whip your soul into a frenzy, buy a house along Atlantic Drive. It really is one of the most wildly beautiful stretches of coastline I’ve ever seen – I can’t recommend it enough. We stopped off again at The Singing Pub, where a turf fire was blazing, and sat as close to it as was polite with another group hovering nearby, also gently steaming. (From the rain, I mean; I’m not casting aspersions.) Striking up a conversation, we discovered that one of the group was a Belfast musician, Glenn Simpson, who kindly gave us a copy of his album Let The Feast Begin to take back with us. (Speaking of which, my seafood basket was divine – the first bite is with the eye, and I’d it half eaten before I raised the first juicy morsel to my lips.)

Lunch devoured, we decided to do some more touring and headed west and north through Creeslough and Dunfanaghy, turning back as evening fell to pass by Mount Errigal. By this stage it was snowing, and there among the peaks it looked to me like some Tolkienesque wilderness. We parked and got out to try and take some photos, but lasted only a minute or two in the swirling snow before running back to the warmth of the car. Marvelling at such diversity and majesty of landscape, we headed for home and a blazing fire in the grate once more.

Creating Memories

For anyone in a relationship, making time to head off together into peace and quiet, just spending the hours and days reminding each other why you’re together, is one of the best investments you’ll ever make. It can be tough making space when you’ve got competing work schedules and are juggling social commitments, but it’s critical glue to keep you connected. Even when you’re back at home, long afterwards, reminiscing about the trip or planning the next can sustain you in times when it feels like life’s weighing more heavily.

The real trick, though, is making the everyday time together feel as special as the holiday. And you don’t need a Donegal cottage to create the magic; when you’re truly giving your attention to each other it doesn’t matter what view’s outside your window.

If you want to experience lovely Anam Mara for yourself, see the Facebook page for details on rates and booking. (No fee/commission to me for recommending!)

See the full set of photos from the trip on Flickr - and for how the next week went, read Anam Mara, Part 2: Seaside.

And if you’d like to read Himself’s take on the weekend, here’s his blog post – enjoy!

*Amazon affiliate links

Well, after a really, really busy January and February giving various talks, training courses and residentials, along with some one-to-one coaching, I’m off on a creative retreat! My plan for Soul Ambition was always to develop lots of self-study courses people could use for their personal, business and creative development. Now, after 4 great years of coaching and training in lots of diverse areas, it’s time for me to start consolidating that experience and research into ebooks and downloadable modules. Much of it will be free, e.g. confidence-building materials, as I passionately believe this is something that should be taught in school and not something you should need a life coach for. I’ll also be creating paid-for content that will be cheaper than one-to-one coaching whilst still being highly valuable.

I’ll be staying in a gorgeous cottage in Downings, Co. Donegal, on the breathtaking Atlantic Drive – more photos and information to follow on my return.

For someone who’s been called “Twitter Queen” and known (mocked, even! the fools…) for her zeal for social media, it’ll be a bit of a shock to the system; the cottage has no internet access. There is, however, internet access in Downings Resource Centre – or in the rather lovely Cáife Na Sráide in nearby Carrigart. I was delighted recently to be voted Chair of the Social Media Association for Business and we’ve events coming up soon in Belfast and Derry, so I may log on for an hour or so if needed – but I’m leaving things in the capable hands of our wonderful leadership group so may not be needed at all! If you’re interested in finding out more, I’ll be blogging about what it is we do when I get back. Keep an eye on the Facebook page for more details in the meantime, and we’re looking forward to launching our new site soon.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to a week of reading, writing, music, brisk walks and good food by the sea in gorgeous Downings – and no chance of pining as my other half’s coming up for the weekend too, to do some writing for his new blog. (We’ll reward ourselves with a pint or two in The Singing Pub on Saturday night, I think.) I’m also taking a rake of dance and workout dvds as part of my wellbeing drive, following tonsillitis-gate – a healthy body supports a creative mind! So I’ll be blogging about how that’s all going too, when I get back. Whatever you’ve planned for this week, I hope it’s a creative and inspiring one – see you on the other side!

Tracy

Photo credits: Donegal Cottage Holidays and TripAdvisor

So you’re trying to improve your career prospects with some new training, but you’ve no spare funds to invest in it. Or maybe you’re out of work and struggling to pay for necessary (and not-so-necessary) services. You’ve got little money, but a lot of time. What to do? Well, you could always start skill swapping – trading the skills you have to offer for skills you want to avail of.
Skill swapping is nothing new, but it’s gaining popularity due to the current economic climate, and the exponential rise of social networking. People are registering on sites like www.swapaskill.com, www.skillsbox.com and www.skillswapireland.net to find other active swappers, or posting ads on Gumtree and social networks like Twitter to suggest a trade.

What skills or talents do you have that you could swap for something you need? You could trade anything from ironing, to performing music, to cooking/baking – be creative! Make a list of what you can offer and what you’re looking for, and start telling people.

Some things to consider:

What basis of exchange will you use? Monetary value of the time exchanged? Or a straight hour-for-hour swap? Or project for project? You might want to allow for different hourly rates, or you might decide that an hour of each person’s time is equal. Get it agreed before you begin to ensure everyone’s happy. And if you’re trading a business/professional skill on a regular basis, seek proper tax advice to keep yourself right.

Get recommendations or evidence of the skill you’re bartering for, if it’s someone whose work you’re not familiar with.

Don’t limit yourself geographically – with social media, VOIP/video conferencing and screen-sharing software (such as Skype’s or join.me), you can do a lot via the internet.

Don’t overcommit – it’s easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, but there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re committing twice – as provider and as recipient!

Of course, you can apply the barter approach to other things too, when money’s tight. Home-swap holiday, anyone? www.intervac-homeexchange.com is a popular site. Or how about a swap-shop, like when you were kid? Host one at home, or use a site like www.swapshop.co.uk. When money’s tight, consider the assets you have that you could swap – time, skills, home, stuff. All is well in the barter economy!

“Are you trying to wreck the actual economy?!”

I recently mentioned skill swapping as a tactic small/bootstrap businesses might want to consider using during a talk on social media for business. I later got a rather tetchy message on Facebook asking was I seriously suggesting a return to a barter economy. Now, given that I’d briefly mentioned skill swapping in the middle of a presentation highlighting various ways businesses can use social media to boost their operations and thus income, I was somewhat surprised at the misinterpretation. But to pre-empt the question here, this is my position: I love swapping money for quality goods and services from excellent, customer-centric businesses. I love a flourishing economy with lots of healthy job creation, and I don’t subscribe to any sort of ‘money is the route of all evil’ dogma. To me, money is just a vehicle for the exchange of energy. I do, however, believe that skill swapping can be an excellent opportunity for people when their lack of money makes them unable to acquire certain goods and services at all. Or, for business owners who are over capacity and want to avoid making redundancies. Or when someone’s trying to build experience but is stuck in the ‘can’t get hired without experience/can’t get experience without getting hired’ loop.

Many small business owners reading the online conversation chipped in with great examples of how skill swapping had helped them through their start-up stage – and some people, of course are interested in switching to a less money-centric way of living. I’ve added links to a few interesting articles below, if you’d like to read more about the trend.

As with anything else, it’s a case of making your own mind up about whether or not it’s for you – and again, do speak to an accountant/your local tax office about tax implications if you’re going to use this in a professional capacity. If you’ve got skill swapping experiences to share – good or bad, I’d love to read them in the comments section below!

Wishing you all the best with your career and/or business,

Tracy

Further reading:

“Living without money and swapping skills” (www.bbc.co.uk)
“Save Money: Don’t pay for skills – swap them!” (MoneyMagpie)
“Forget money, pay with your skill” (Life and Style, The Guardian)
HMRC “VAT and barter transactions” info

Image credit: Delwin Stephen Campbell via Flickr

[A shorter version of this article was first published in Northern Ireland's "Belfast Telegraph" and "Sunday Life" in February 2011, and was uploaded to www.facebook.com/careerbuilders with additional links and tips.]

With this blog I aim to share what I’ve learned through my ongoing study, work with clients and my own ongoing journey of self-development. Many of my posts are quite theoretical or ‘how-to’ in nature, and I was originally going to post an update of this Soul Ambition article for Valentine’s day. But since I’ve just recently had a bit of a sharp life lesson, I thought I’d share a more personal story with you.

Today is the first Valentine’s day in seven years where I’ve not been single. And it’s not being marked in any particular way – neither of us is a fan of proscribed celebration (pay-three-times-the-fare-for-queuing-three-times-as-long New Year’s Eve being another bugbear) or of over-commercialisation of the human experience. But more to the point, we nearly weren’t a couple today due to a less-than-wise decision of mine. D’oh.

Single can be great…

I’d been single since 2006 (you could argue 2004, since ’06 was just a brief reprise of the relationship that ended in ’04); and had come to be very happy with that. Not the ‘happy to be single’ you think you have to claim to be, when your family’s prying and your friends are concerned – really, truly, happy-with-your-own-company kind of happy. Sitting in a bar in Brooklyn over a mimosa-and-daiquiri Sunday brunch with a new musician friend, one day last July, I said to him “I’m so glad I’m single! I was able to book my flights on Saturday, fly out on Wednesday, and do my own thing without worrying about anyone else’s plans.” For those of you who hate being single, believe me, there’s lots about it that is brilliant. It did take a while to get there of course; I was always a die-hard romantic and used to sigh that I was born to be in love and it was a terrible waste when I wasn’t. So after that last break-up, it took me a while to get comfortable, and then happy, with being single. If you’re at the stage where you just can’t see that ever being the case, this video might inspire you:

…Tho’ other people might try and convince you otherwise

Now some of you Facebook friends and Twitter followers will be familiar with the wise utterings of my Granny H, and will know she’s been on my case about ‘finding a man’ for some time. We’re very close, Granny H and I, though we don’t see eye to eye on my lifestyle choices. She does try to understand though; when I started going out with Mr ’04/’06, she’d asked “Does he have that, what is it you always say is wild important… Chemistry? Is there plenty of chemistry?” Fair play Granny.
In the last few years, I thought with one older sister married and a younger brother on the way to it (happily married now too – Happy Valentine’s day, Laura & Paul and Donal & Marcella – great choice of in-laws), the spotlight would be off me. But no. My Granny was still worried.

“Is there no man on the scene yet?”
“No Granny, I’m not bothered; I like my life the way it is – going off on adventures when I want and not having to take anyone else’s plans into consideration.”
“But what about when you’re old? You’re not getting any younger [I'm 33] – when you get to my age you’ll need someone to take care of you.”
“Granny, between good friends and the kindness of strangers, not to mention the advances of science, I don’t need to go finding a man just to be a home help.”
“Well what about kids?”
“I’m not sure I want any.”
[Genuinely appalled] “What sort of a strange human being ARE you?”

An argument ensued about my responsibility as a human being to procreate v. the problem of global over-population – she claimed natural disasters take care of the latter. Which reminds me now of the time she asked had I heard about the Greek earthquake that “shook a ween of them out of their beds”. (If you’re not/don’t speak Northern Irish, by the way, just do your best here.)

Last year, she decided the ‘problem’ needed looking into more closely.

“What is it you’re looking for in a man anyway?”
“I’m NOT looking, but if I was to be found he’d have to be a musician, or a writer or an artist, something creative,”
[Rolls eyes and tuts - Granny doesn't really see the point of music, for example - when she heard I was playing in a samba band and marching on the streets of Belfast with drums, I got one of her 'are you actually mad' looks. She likes a good hymn tho' - and is quite the performance poet.]
“Be a talker,”
“Ach! You need a quiet man…”
“Who you could talk all night to, and someone who cares about the bigger picture – not someone who’s happy to sit in front of soap operas every night of the week and thinks that’s a life.”
“Ach! You’re looking for an auld saint! There’s no such thing as the perfect man.”
“Well of course, and nor is that everyone’s idea of perfect, but you asked me what I wanted; I wasn’t going to start listing faults!”
“Tracy. The man you’re looking for hasn’t been born yet, and his ma and da are already dead!”

What a wit… If only podcasts had been around when she was younger. (She’ll not consider it now; my geekery’s another source of bemusement/mild exasperation. I do tweet her occasionally – @wisdomofgrannyh – tho’ I run the tweets past her first. I’m not sure she gets ‘the point’ of Twitter, but she gets enough to know to censor heavily. Truly wise.)

Dating someone special’s pretty class too

So I was adamant that a relationship wasn’t a priority, although I’d make room for one if I did meet someone who seemed a great match. Then in early November last year, a local journalist contacted me through Facebook (must add this to my ‘Social Media – Why Bother?‘ post!) to ask if I’d be interested in an interview and feature in a couple of local papers. Obviously, I was delighted with the opportunity, and met up with him in my favourite coffee shop at 3 o’clock, thinking I’d be there for about half an hour.

We talked non-stop for two full hours on everything from musical tastes, festivals, punk football (Sankt Pauli and FC United of Manchester), to travel, the meaning of life and a whole lot more, until I realised the time and thought I should really let the guy go. I hugged him goodbye and walked home grinning in amazement, and was on Facebook chat with him about an hour later, talking ’til midnight. We didn’t really stop talking, and after a few weeks of me giving chase and him not quite giving in, we officially became a couple in mid-December. Long runs the fox, eh? I phoned Granny H before Christmas and told her “You know that man you said was hadn’t been born yet, with the ma and already dead? Well, he has, and they’re alive and well; I’m meeting them on Thursday.” “Well then!” she replied, “just you bring him down here ’til I run my eye over him.” So I did, and I’m happy to report he impressed her with his good manners, and the poet in him loved the performance of ‘Wee Hughie‘ and ‘The Old Maid and The Burglar‘ I requested from her after dinner.

Now in December I’d come down with tonsillitis, for the second time in five months; it segued into a chest infection and took two rounds of antibiotics to clear. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I had to massively slow down with work. Himself was being a real gent though, bringing me chocolate, medicaments and take-aways, and not seeming to mind the spluttering or ubiquitous, unglamorous dressing gown – and with everyone being in the pre-Christmas wind-down, the pressure was slightly off with work until the new year. So we’d a great month of fireside talking, music and films; so far so great.

…But you can’t take your eye off the prize

Post-Christmas, I was getting ready to pour myself into work once more, when the tonsils flared up again. The third round of antibiotics were so strong they nixed the tonsil issue in a couple of days, but floored me for that week. In short, I was exhausted, pre-occupied about work and not really paying attention to this great relationship. Things felt a bit off and I was starting to have doubts and feel a bit of pressure; we both were, and both of us were walking on eggshells, after a couple of conversations about the relationship. Now I’ve done a lot of work on managing emotions through working with neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and emotional intelligence theory – so I was focused above all on being rational and not reacting emotionally to issues. Towards the end of the month I  ‘rationally’ decided that things weren’t likely to change and it was better for us both to call it a day and be friends. I do workshops on communication skills, and it comes up in coaching too of course; but I had convinced myself that it was too young a relationship for us to want to have to ‘work at’ communication or anything else. So we parted ways.

If you’re in it, be in it

A few busy days later, and it’s the weekend – and I finally have time to absorb it all. I started to realise that it wouldn’t have taken that much effort on my part to make things better – it wasn’t a case of ‘working at’ the relationship so much as just being really present in it; setting aside work worries, etc. and properly focusing on himself when I was with him.  One of the big realisations I had was that in believing that I don’t need a relationship (true), I hadn’t really appreciated meeting someone so compatible I’d want one with them. The theoretical notion of ‘a relationship’ didn’t encompass the reality of the living, breathing, amazing person I was with. And whilst I don’t share Granny H’s ‘time is running out’ worries, it did occur to me that if I were to focus on the business/travel for the next year or two and then think about a relationship – who’s to say I’d be able to find someone as fantastic then? I believe in holding out for the best and not settling for the sake of it – I’d had this pretty specific list, and the person I’d met had not only met but surpassed it. I also realised that I’d over-corrected on the ‘emotional’ front; I’d gone straight to thinking about the emotions involved without properly feeling them. Basically, using some great tools (NLP, CBT) in a rather over-zealous manner.

Sometimes you have to be vulnerable

This isn’t Big Brother, so I’ll not share too much detail of those couple of weeks – suffice to say, I went into hermit mode, did a lot of soul-searching, told him about the revelations I’d had about my own attitude in January, apologised profusely and tried to convince him to give us another shot. But, understandably wary, he wasn’t biting.

On Saturday evening, I sent a final message (I hadn’t managed to get a face-to-face chat with him) saying I’d also come to realise there was a bit of self-preservation going on, and I’d been putting up a bit of a wall after an argument earlier that month. I hadn’t realised I was doing it, as I thought I was just being ‘rational’. Part of me hoped that this admission might change his mind, but it didn’t seem hopeful and I was finally prepared to give up and move on.

45 minutes later I get a text saying he’s on the last train to Belfast.
Reader, I almost fainted.
He told me later he had considered just turning up at my door – I’m very glad he didn’t because after gaping at the text for about 5 mins, I had to run about getting tidied up, freshen up, clean my teeth, get changed… Only in Hollywood would the tear-stained, unsuspecting female open the door already primed with minty-fresh breath and fragrant oxters.

Redemption – and a truly romantic weekend!

A few hours later, shell-shocked, relieved and very happy, I’m curled up with him on the sofa and I check the date, because we’d decided we’d pretty much write off January and pick up again from here. It being the 12th of February, I declared it Punk Valentine’s Day – it’d been spontaneous, heartfelt and damn all to do with Hallmark; no flowers, chocolates or cuddly toys to be seen! (Instead, I gave him a model of Goodison Park, and he’d brought me a pair of NYC-inspired canvases he’d had his cousin paint for me for Christmas, which he’d only just got hold of. Nice.)

Making a weekend of it, we walked next day to historic Belfast pub The Crown for good old fish and chips with the rugby, and brought home the rest of our bottle of wine to drink curled up in front of a Joe Strummer documentary and a load of Stewart Lee stand-up videos. Now THAT’s what I call a romantic weekend.

So, kids, what did I learn in all of this?

Well, I still don’t like proscribed celebrations, Hallmark-sponsored consumer-fests or forced expressions of what should be genuine human emotions – give me spontaneity and raw feeling any day.

And I still wholeheartedly believe love is the most important thing in life (in whatever form it takes), even though it seems I temporarily forgot that! This episode was a sharp reminder of how important it is to pay attention; to not get distracted by less important things or write something off without taking time to properly consider what is needed and what you can do to improve matters. If you’re in it, be in it.

I learned to be careful not to over-correct. Having gone from being miserable about being single to being happy to be so, by focusing on all the positives of being free and independent, I forgot how fantastic it can be when you’ve chosen to share your life with someone else and act more like a team. And having overcome depression in the past by learning how to manage my emotions better, I forgot how important it is to express negative feelings (at least to yourself), as well as understanding them in a rational, mature way.

And whilst I don’t believe in beating yourself up for past ‘mistakes’, I do believe in growth through taking responsibility for your (in)actions, learning your lessons and making amends – I’m glad to have the chance to do that now. Thank-you Chris, you legend. You can expect a lot of home-cooked dinners and back rubs on no particular date…

So if you’re in danger of throwing away/damaging a good relationship because you’ve been neglecting it for other areas of your life, I hope that this was a cautionary tale that could help prevent a similar mistake. And for those of you who are single and feeling sad or bitter about that this Valentine’s Day, I hope you can feel better. If that first video didn’t do the trick, maybe a bit of dark humour will hit the spot?

Misery Bear: Valentine’s Day

Don Hertzfeldt’s “Ah, L’Amour” (Note: there’s a Bad Word in this – I did say ‘bitter’…)

[This article first appeared in Northern Ireland's "Belfast Telegraph" and 'Sunday Life" in January 2011, and was later added to http://www.facebook.com/careerbuilders, along with additional links and resources.]

Whether you’re actively job-hunting or just wistfully dreaming of a career change, there are many practical steps you can take to boost your employability (and promotability).

Know Yourself

To ensure a good career fit, you need to start with an understanding of yourself – your skills, preferences and motivations. What are your core values? Creativity? Structure? Developing expertise, and/or influence? Leadership or peace to get on with your job? You might like to try some psychometric/personality tests as an interesting viewpoint on your skills and possible career matches – just don’t let yourself feel pigeon-holed by the results. There’s a good free test based on the work of Jung and Myers here.

Know Your Industry

How well do you know your chosen industry? Are you up-to-date with the latest trends and developments? Find and subscribe to your industry’s most respected blogs, Twitter feeds and trade publications. (If you’re new to Twitter, here’s a guide on getting to grips with it.) You can read many trade publications and access MINTEL and COBRA market research information in your local business library and/or via government agencies set up to assist business owners.

Build Your Networks

Who are the main players in your chosen industry and what events do they attend? Get on mailing lists that will keep you abreast of upcoming conferences and trade shows, and then go and mingle. Online, seek out industry forums and groups and start making connections – LinkedIn groups can be very useful for finding contacts in your industry and taking part in discussions, thus raising your professional profile. (You can create a professional profile free at www.linkedin.com.) Look out for online seminars and teleseminars too – don’t limit yourself to local events. Seek out people already doing the job you’d like/working your chosen industry, and ask them for a brief interview for you to find out a bit more about it.

Know Where You Are

Take stock of where you are right now. (Take 10 minutes to do the ‘Wheel of Life’ exercise over at the main site as a starting point.) What’s your employment history, and what decisions did you make along the way? Create a ‘record of achievement’ that includes all your past achievements, your skills and any challenges you overcame. Include any personal examples that highlight ‘soft skills’. Creating and maintaining an up-to-date record of achievement will help you be able to pull together targeted CVs quickly and easily, but more importantly, it’ll serve as a boost to your confidence when it takes a knock – reminding you of how far you’ve come.

Know Where You Want To Be

If you’ve got a clear idea of what you’re looking for, fantastic. If not, consider your main job to be researching your dream job. Do you want a job that you’ll enjoy and do well in, but ultimately leave behind when you head home for the day? Or do you have a vocation of some sort where the work you do is deeply aligned with who you are? Are you seeking a change of field, or just a change of role? Do you want a role where you’re working primarily with people, things, data or ideas? If you feel completely lost, look back to the kinds of things you enjoyed doing as a child, where you lost track of time (a concept known as ‘flow’). What subjects do you enjoy watching documentaries about? Try making a list of all your interests down one side of a sheet of paper, and your skills on the other – come up with as many ways to combine them as you can, however whacky. When an idea sparks a flicker of interest, add it to your ‘research’ list and get cracking.

Mind the Gap

What are the qualifications and skills requirements for your chosen field or role? If you don’t already have them, how can you gain them? Contact your local colleges, and check out online courses – many of the world’s top-class universities have uploaded courses for free use (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk, for example, or iTunes U on your iTunes application). Can you get paid work experience or volunteering in your chosen field? If you’re in full-time employment, consider using annual leave for this purpose; an investment in your future.

From Vision to Reality

Imagine yourself already doing the work you love – walking and talking confidently and enjoying the feeling of doing something you love that you’re great at. Your reality reflects the movies you’re playing in your mind’s eye – start seeing yourself as great at interviews, or excelling in your role and you’ll be starting to make it happen. Then, having invested quality time daydreaming about your ideal role, start turning these dreams into concrete plans, with goals, milestones and reviews.

Stay Positive!

Don’t give in to despair or feelings of victimization – by people or circumstances. Don’t dwell on past failures or disappointments – ask ‘what can I learn from this, and what can I do to improve my chances?’ Remember that you control your feelings and your thoughts create your reality.

Luck = preparation x opportunity – make your own luck by maximising your preparation and creating opportunities through raising your profile and networking.

Wishing you every success!

Have you a burning career issue you’d like to see featured in a future post? Please comment below! Also, if you’ve a success story you’d like to share to inspire someone else who’s finding their career a struggle, I’d love to see that too!

Just a quick post – for now – to wish you all a very Happy New Year! Have you been thinking about what you want to get out of this year – and what you want to put in to it? Remember that your thoughts create your reality – you’re not at the mercy of what the year might throw at you, or of the whims of Lady Luck. Make your own luck, and choose your responses!

I have a whole load of posts in the oven, but due to tonsillitis that’s proving very difficult to shift (guess what’s taking a big priority for me this year – yes, health; blog posts to follow on my endeavours), they’re slightly delayed. I do take a lot of time and effort in crafting my posts, so don’t want to dash some off just to have something ‘out there’.

What I do do, however, is post small snippets and links on the Soul Ambition Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/soulambition. Click ‘like’ if you want to get those updates in between blog posts, and please feel free to add your comments or share links there that you think would be useful.

Talk to you ‘properly’ soon…

Tracy

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Having just spent the entire night engaged in WordPress-related jiggery-pokery, I thought I might indulge in an entirely non-geekish blog post. (Unless overuse of hyphens counts as geekishness, that is.)

Not being able to sleep night before last, being pumped full of antibiotics and assorted other medicaments to placate my overzealous tonsils, I announced to Twitter and Facebook that I was retiring to bed with John Steinbeck and his dog, Charley. (Thanks again Nick Fitzsimons for the loan of them.) Then ensued a surprising Facebook conversation about train stations, particularly Lurgan, Co. Armagh‘s, books and random encounters. It went like this…

Anto [of Tin Pot Operation] love that book.
Yesterday at 01:04

Me
Isn’t it class? I started reading it properly last week, or the week before – was getting on a train to Lurgan for the second time in my life. The first was the evening before – I’d gone to a tattoo studio to help the owner fix up some social media stuff [the excellent Raven Skin - check the new Facebook page!], and in all the craic and my haste to get on to dinner, I left my phone and keys there. On the train on the way home that first night I realised my error and thought I’d make the most of the sunny afternoon train trip back to pick them up next day by bringing a book about travelling.

I started reading it at Botanic [train station], and did a bit of people-gazing too and was idly thinking with all the snow it could be some Baltic country or something. I read the bit where Steinbeck says “all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” And I smiled, and nodded sagely, and then reminded myself I wasn’t really on a “trip”, even though I felt like I was on holiday; it was after all only a few-hour round trip to Lurgan.

On the train, it was warm and the sun was shining and the sky was blue and the usually nondescript countryside looked gorgeous in the snow, when I paused reading to enjoy it, and I thought it was a rather spiffing way to be spending an afternoon, and it only £6.60 return. I arrived there on time and headed back to the studio, had a great bit of craic with the owner [hi Donal!] and with some poor dude who’d just had the worst tattoo job ever done elsewhere and needed it fixed (with a scary moment after he left when I replicated the botch job on my arm to make the studio owner’s daughter laugh – and then realised I’d used permanent marker). I didn’t bother rushing back for the first available train but got the next, looking forward to an equally comfortable, tranquil return journey.

…Then we got to Moira and the train stopped for an awfully long time.

Eventually we got told that there were electrical lines across the crossing, and no ETA for us resuming. After about 40 minutes, we got told we were being sent back to Portadown to get put on a bus to Lisburn. Back we went through Lurgan train station – my 3rd visit in less than 24 hours. At Portadown, a wait for the courtesy bus. We board the bus, and get told it’s going as far as Lisburn and then we’re getting put on a train to Belfast. The bus goes back through Lurgan train station. It’s starting to feel a little like In Bruges or something.

Eventually I get back to Botanic, a couple of hours later than planned, cold and hungry, but wryly smiling at the wisdom of Mr Steinbeck. Ad Astra Per Alia Porci*…
(*The aforementioned botched tattoo, funnily enough, included the legend “Per Aspera Ad Astra”. I showed the dude Mr Steinbeck’s ubiquitous “Ad Astra Per Alia Porci” logo; he says, “Oh Steinbeck; I read a lot of his stuff.” Book as bookends, eh? It’s like Kramer’s coffee-table book.)
Yesterday at 01:24

Me ‎…I swear I haven’t been drinking..
Yesterday at 01:24

Anto
Haha that’s a great wee story, amazingly I have a similarly convoluted literary based Lurgan train anecdote. [!?!]

I dislocated my knee a few years ago and was off work for a good while – after I got the cast removed I had to go in from Lurgan to Belfast for an appointment, with a copy of Anton Chekov’s The Fiancee in my pocket. I decided to walk to Lurgan from my house (roughly about 4 miles). I left a good hour and half before my train and kept a good pace. Still, by the time I approached the station I was cutting it fine – I saw the barriers go down, but I was BUSTIN for the loo and had to pop in. The train was gone by the time I got out again!

So sitting reading Chekov in Lurgan Station, waiting for the next train an hour and 20 minutes later. Just me and an older lady with an American accent and a young local girl having a chat. After a while the girl calls to me that they were just talking about Chekov, and was I a fan. So the three of us get talking. The American lady is a born-again Christian who used to be a Buddhist, the girl is a medical student who is engaged to marry a fellah in the Israeli army. The conversation that ensues is one of the most interesting and unique that I have ever had the privilege to be a part of. The Israel/Palestine problem, long-distance relationships, Buddhism, Christianity, cultism, drug addiction. Three people perfectly balanced in terms of interest and experience communicating in an uncommonly open and remarkable way.

All due to Anton Chekov and [an unfortunate malady..]!

Well now. I found all this wonderfully entertaining in the wee hours. Particularly this line:

“…amazingly I have a similarly convoluted literary based Lurgan train anecdote.”

Does anyone else have a “similarly convoluted literary based Lurgan train anecdote” to share? (Or some geological information about the magnetic properties of the town?) Or just some heartwarming tale about travelling, books and conversations with strangers? Please share. I can’t sleep…

PS Trying to find a picture of the pigasus I showed Mr Unfortunate Tattoo, I came across this – someone’s had the actual thing tattooed on their arm. My word.

A public thank-you, by the way, to the lovely staff of the Ashburn Hotel (good food) and of The Batcave (nicely-stocked jukebox) who had a good old hoke for the aforementioned phone and keys before I realised where I’d left them. And to the lovely lollipop man who guided me across the road on the way back to Raven Skin, that next day. Made me come over all girlish, that did…

So, you’ve read the Facebook for Business: The Basics post, and you had a sinking feeling as you realised you had accidentally breached Terms of Service (ToS), by using a personal profile instead of a business page – adding friends, posting primarily business content – and/or maintaining multiple accounts. Now you realise you’re at risk of account deletion, or a ban.

Or maybe you’ve realised that whilst your friends and family don’t mind having your business/organisation as a ‘friend’, you’re alienating many more potential customers or fans who don’t like allowing brands access to their profiles (would you accept a ‘friend’ request from Coca-Cola, or Tesco?) and prefer to do their interactions with organisations via pages, with their privacy intact.

Perhaps you didn’t realise that by using a profile you’re missing out on the powerful analytics that Facebook provides with pages (Facebook “insights”), which you don’t get with profiles – or that there’s a limit on ‘friends’ (5,000) but not on ‘likes’.

Whichever it is, you’re now facing the prospect of a clean-up, re-building networks and moving people to your new page(s). Well fear not! With this post, I aim to help you fix up any mess with minimal time and disruption to your networks.

Update: Facebook have introduced an automatic process for converting a profile to a page. This is quicker, but has both pros and cons – read on to see if it will work for you, and if not, I’ve outlined the manual fix for all scenarios below.

Automatic Profile-to-Page Conversion

To permanently switch your profile to a page, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate. This will transfer your profile pictures and add all of your friends and subscribers as people who like your page. Note that this is the only information that will be transferred, so you must save any other important information before the switch (see Download Your Information below). You’ll also need to (temporarily) assign new admins for any groups or pages that you manage with this profile, as the account you’re converting will lose these admin rights during the conversion process. The conversion is irreverisible, so be sure you want to do it before you proceed.

One final point to consider is your vanity URL, if you already set one for your profile. At the time of writing, Facebook doesn’t state whether you’ll lose it or not, and whilst various blog posts are claiming you do, some commenters are saying they got to keep theirs. Some have suggested trademarking your name (if you haven’t already) to help with persuading FB to change it for you if it doesn’t work. In any case, as the T&Cs stand (and have always been), you cannot use a profile for anything other than you the individual, and you do need to make the switch one way or another.

Manual Fix

If the automatic solutions doesn’t suit you, you’ll find a manual fix to suit your circumstances in the list below. It’ll be a little bit futtery, but stick the kettle on, open a beer or pour a glass of wine and let’s get settled down to this one-time clean-up.

Now here’s the thing. You can do your clean-up strictly within ToS by deleting/converting illegitimate accounts as quickly as possible, and then building up your networks again – I’m going to call that the School Prefect route. Or you could choose to temporarily (continue to) flout the rules in order to smooth the transition/use re-work-saving shortcuts. I’m going to call that the Smoking Behind The Bike Shed route. (The ultimate SBTBS route is of course continuing with your breach-of-service activities in the hope that you don’t get caught, but I really don’t recommend that.) For some of the following steps, I’m going to give both options. Just be aware that whilst you have more than one account, you’re in breach of ToS; and if you’ve been using a personal profile for primarily business use that’s a breach too and anyone can report you at any time for being a dirty rotten spammer. So be warned, and proceed as you wish. Okay? Let’s get to it…

Which Type of Account Do You Want?

You can have one account, and one only – and only a personal account has an associated profile. Here, again, are your two options:

A personal account - which has a profile, named for you, not your business, and where you may or may not mention your business as part of your normal personal interaction. You won’t be using it excessively to sell to or otherwise spam your ‘friends’. You can use your profile to set up/maintain a business page (or pages; you may want to segment, for example) – and you may also use it to join groups and become fans of other pages.

A business account – for those very concerned about privacy (and it’s a valid concern of course; particularly for people in security-conscious occupations). If you only want to use Facebook for business purposes, you can, but only in a very limited way. You can use a business account to maintain one or more pages and social ads for your business. But, as it doesn’t have a profile, you won’t be able to add friends or join groups (such as business interest groups). You will, however be able to ‘like’ other pages. Note: You can upgrade a business account to a personal account at any time (see below).

If you’ve multiple accounts and/or are using a personal account for business, and are discovered (someone told me the other day they always ‘report for spam’ any business that sends them a friend request), you can have your account(s) deleted and may even be banned entirely from using Facebook. Remember: Facebook is a social network with some features for business, not the other way around.

With that in mind, choose what you want your account type to be. With either option, you’re going to be maintaining/creating business pages, which have a whole host of useful marketing tools (such as those Facebook insights) that profiles don’t have!

Pick The Scenario That Describes You

Click on the scenario that describes you from the list below (if I’ve missed any, let me know in the comments):

#1: I have one business account. I want to upgrade it to a personal account
#2: I have one personal account. I’ve been using it for business purposes and now want to keep it for personal use
#3: I have one or more personal account(s). I want to change to a business account
#4: I have a mix of business and personal accounts. I want to keep one business account
#5: I have a mix of business and personal accounts. I want to keep one personal account
#6: I have two or more personal accounts. I want to keep one personal account
#7: I have two or more business accounts. I want to keep one business account
#8: I have two or more business accounts. I want one personal account
#9: I want to delete the lot and start from scratch

#1: I have one business account. I want to upgrade it to a personal account.

At any time, you can upgrade your business account to a personal one, by clicking the ‘Create Your Profile’ button when you log in to your account. You’ll be asked for additional information; your full name, a security question, and an answer to your security question. Once this final registration step is completed, these changes cannot be reverted. You will then permanently have a personal account on the site.
NB: In this specific scenario, you’ll still be able to manage all the pages and socials ads you’ve created. Remember, fans of your pages will not have visibility or access to your personal profile. (See http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=12830 for more info)

…And you’re done!

#2: I have one personal account. I’ve been using it for business purposes and now want to keep it for personal use

If your profile currently shows your business name instead of your own name, you’re going to have to change that (see below). Regarding what sorts of things to post on your profile, and adding people, read Facebook’s ToS and do your best to stay on the right side of them. This is, however, a grey area – after all, if you run your own business, or are passionate about the business you’re working for, you’re going to talk about that socially, aren’t you? The rule of thumb I use is, converse in the same way with your Facebook friends as you would in person with offline friends. I do talk about my business to friends, I do even tell them if I’ve an event coming up, or a special offer I think they or their friends would be genuinely interested in – just as they tell me about their business/work, if their company’s doing anything interesting – discounts, hiring, whatever. It’s a vast subject for discussion – feel free to comment below!

1. If you have a business page, make most of your business-related posts there. You’ll still want to think about strategy/tone/frequency and type of posts – but that’s for another discussion
2. If you don’t already have a business page, set one up and save the URL (note there’s also the option at this point to import contacts from address books/email accounts)
3. Click the ’share’ link on your new page and choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or message people individually. (This is the really time-consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion.) You may wish to add a message to say you’re switching your profile to personal use and they can keep up to date with business info via this new page (to prepare them for when you drop them like hot potatoes…)
4. Review your past status updates/posts on your user profile, perhaps deleting any that look too full-on, and start talking like a human being who happens, among other things, to run/work for a business they love!
5. Set your status to an explanation that you’re moving business info to a page.
6. If you have to change your profile name (because you’ve it set as your business name and not your own), complete the following additional steps:
   1. If you’ve any old-style groups set up, note that when you change your name, that will become visible to every member of the group. So if privacy is an issue here, you may want to delete the group – again, letting people know to find your business on your new page instead. You can’t create old-style groups any more; see this note
   2. Delete anyone on your existing ‘friends’ list who you don’t want to keep when you change to your real name. (If this is everybody, or nearly everybody, and you’re up for something a bit more technical, you could use a script to delete large swathes of ‘friends’ at a time – see this Greasemonkey script as an example)
   3. You may wish to respond to any messages asking why you’ve dropped someone with something along the lines of ‘As per Facebook guidelines this profile is now strictly for personal use, I’ve created a new page for [insert name] where we’d love to keep in touch with you – hope to see you there!’
   4. Change your profile name as per this help page
7. Continue…

Alternative SBTBS fix:

If most/all of your friends are business acquaintances, and your profile is wrongly set up with a business name rather than your own name, the quickest route would be as follows:
1. If you don’t already have a business page, set one up and save the URL (note there’s also the option at this point to import contacts from address books/email accounts)
2. Click the ’share’ link on your new page and choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or message people individually. (This is the really time-consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion.) You may wish to add a message to say you’re switching your profile to personal use and they can keep up to date with business info via this new page
3. Save off any content you want to keep from existing profile/groups/events
4. If privacy is an issue, close down any groups of which you’re currently sole admin (see Groups)
5. Create a second personal profile with your correct name – being aware this is a temporary breach of ToS (multiple accounts), so do this at your own risk!
6. Log back into your old profile, go to your business page and make your new profile an admin of the page
7. Delete (don’t just deactivate) your old profile – here. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes (14 days, apparently) can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions
8. Continue…

#3: I have one or more personal account(s). I want to change to a business account

Maybe you’ve decided you only want a business account and don’t have any desire/use for any of the social aspects of Facebook at all? Update: You can now convert a personal account to a business one, via this link. NOTE:

1. All your confirmed friends will be converted into ‘likes’ – pending friend requests will be lost. It might be a nice idea to let people know you’re switching to a page format before converting, via a status update
2. The only other data transferred will be your profile picture, so you may want to Download Your Info first. If you have other pages/ads, you won’t be able to move these over, so you’ll lose those (and any events/groups) and have to create new ones. (See my note on ads, below)
3. Remember to delete any groups of which you’re currently sole admin (see Groups) before the conversion
4. There is no turning back with this option, so only make the switch if you’re sure you don’t want to maintain a personal profile. If you’re unsure, consider Fix 2, Fix 5 or Fix 6 instead

#4: I have a mix of business and personal accounts. I want to keep one business account

Whichever accounts you get rid of will lose their associated pages – there’s no way to transfer these to a business account (you could transfer to a personal account, by adding that account as an admin, so you might want to consider Fix 5 instead). As to ads – I’m waiting to hear back from Facebook as to whether these can be transferred to another account (see my note, below); in the meantime, if you’ve any insights on that please share below!

1. If you don’t already have a page associated with the business account you’re keeping (i.e. you created the account via a social ad), you have 2 choices. Either create one and save the URL (note there’s also the option at this point to import contacts from address books/email accounts), or convert one of your personal accounts to a page. Friends of this account will automatically be converted to ‘likes’ – see Fix 3 for full info. Remember to come back here to Fix 4 when finished to complete clean-up!
2. For any account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
   1. Save off info and photos from any pages/ads/groups/events managed by the accounts you’ll be deleting (see Download Your Info, below)
   2. Delete any groups of which you’re currently sole admin (see Groups)
   3. Go to the business page you’re keeping and click ’share’; choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or to message people individually. (This is the really time consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion)
   4. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account, via this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes (14 days, apparently) can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions
3. Recreate any other pages and ads from your saved info
4. Continue…

#5: I have a mix of business and personal accounts. I want one personal account

You’ve a choice here of whether to keep an existing personal account (perhaps to keep all the associated friends) or to upgrade an existing business account to a personal one (to keep the pages/ads associated with it).

If keeping a personal account:

1. Make this personal account the admin for any existing pages, groups and events, if possible (this won’t be possible for pages associated with a business account you’re deleting) – do this by logging in to other profiles in turn, going to the page/group/event in question and adding the profile you’re keeping as an admin
2. If you don’t already have a business page, set one up and save the URL (note there’s also the option at this point to import contacts from address books/email accounts)
3. For the account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
   1. Save off any info from pages/events/groups associated with other accounts (see Download Your Info, below)
   2. Save off any info from ads and see my note on ads, below
   3. (For personal accounts only:) Move over any friends you wish to keep by going to the profile you’ll be keeping and clicking the cog icon beside the ‘message’ button, top right. Click ’suggest friends’ from the drop-down menu that appears and select the ones you want to add
   4. (For personal accounts only:) Go to your new page and click the ’share’ link; choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or message people individually. (This is the really time-consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion.) You may wish to add a message to say you’re switching your profile to personal use and they can keep up to date with business info via this new page
   5. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account at this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
4. Continue…

If keeping a business account (and upgrading it to a personal account):

1. If you don’t already have a business page associated with this account, set one up
2. Save off any info from pages/events/groups associated with other accounts (see Download Your Info, below)
3. Save off any info from ads and see my note on ads, below
4. For remaining steps, choose from the following routes:School Prefect Route:
   1. For the account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
      1. Go to your business page and click the ’share’ link; choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or message people individually. (This is the really time-consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion.) You may wish to add a message to say you’re switching your profile to personal use and they can keep up to date with business info via this new page
      2. Delete any groups of which you’re currently sole admin or take a chance that you’ll be able to re-join/make yourself admin with your new profile (read Groups for more info)
      3. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account via this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
   2. Upgrade your business account by logging in and clicking the ‘Create your Profile’ button as per Fix 1

   Smoking Behind The Bike Shed Route:

   1. Upgrade your business account by logging in and clicking the ‘Create your Profile’ button. Be warned that you’ll have to provide your full name and a security question/answer – I’m only guessing, but if this is a duplicate of info already held by Facebook, it could trigger a ‘multiple account’ flag? You could (temporarily breaching ToS) use a different name until you’ve deleted other accounts and then change your name to the correct one – as always, your call!
   2. For the account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
      1. Go to the business page you’re keeping (or create one) and click the ’share’ link on your new page and choose to post to your own timeline or a friend’s, or to another page, or message people individually. (This is the really time-consuming part, which is why many people opt for the automatic conversion.) You may wish to add a message to say you’re switching your profile to personal use and they can keep up to date with business info via this new page
      2. For any group/event/page adminstrated by the account, make your newly-upgraded profile an administrator
      3. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account via this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
5. Continue…

#6: I have two or more personal accounts. I want to keep one personal account

As per Fix 5, ‘If Keeping a Personal Account’ (ignore business account info)

#7: I have two or more business accounts. I want to keep one business account

1. Choose which business account you’re going to keep (which will save any pages/ads associated with it)
2. For any account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
   1. Save off any info from ads associated with other accounts and see my note on ads, below
   2. Save off any content associated with pages etc, that you’d like to use in future
   3. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account via this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
3. Recreate pages and ads using saved content
4. Continue…

#8: I have two or more business accounts. I want one personal account

1. Choose which business account you’re going to keep and upgrade (which will save any pages/ads associated with it)
2. For any account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
   1. Save off any info from ads associated with other accounts and see my note on ads, below
   2. Save off any content associated with pages etc, that you’d like to use in future
   3. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account via this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
3. Recreate pages and ads using saved content
4. Upgrade the chosen business account by logging in and clicking the ‘Create your Profile’ button as per Fix 1
5. Continue…

#9: I want to delete the lot and start from scratch

1. For any account(s) you’re deleting, log in to each in turn and complete the following steps:
   1. Save off any info from ads and see my note on ads, below
   2. Save off any other content you want to keep (friends lists, photos, shared links, posts etc from profile/pages/groups/events)
   3. Delete any groups of which you’re currently the sole admin (see Groups)
   4. Delete (don’t just deactivate) the account, by logging into each in turn and going to this page. (NB: Interacting with Facebook before this request completes can undo your delete request – see this WikiHow article for full instructions)
2. Create your new account
3. Re-post old content as required

A Note About Deletions and Messages

I’m waiting to hear back from Facebook about what happens to messages and page invites sent from an account after it gets deleted (not deactivated) – the fixes above mostly include sending messages from an account just before deleting. With a delete apparently taking 14 days to complete, I think the messages would still remain in recipients’ inboxes – but if you know for sure, please let us know in the comments!

Groups

Here, I’m referring to old-style groups you may have had in place for your business – new groups are vastly different and were designed for social use (see this previous post for more info).

Facebook automatically deletes old-style groups once they’re empty (no members). If you created the group, you can delete the group by removing all members and then yourself. Note that if you were not the first admin and creator of this group, you will not be able to delete the group unless the group creator has left it voluntarily.

If you delete a profile without first deleting any group you maintained from it, the group will remain out there as long as it has one or more members. So make sure and delete any you don’t want to leave out there – remember, if you’re switching to a business account you won’t be able to rejoin any old group you previously maintained with a personal profile.

If you’ve already left the group, you will need to rejoin it and request admin status from the current admin. If the group has no current admin, and is a closed group, you or any other member will be able to take the admin position by clicking “Become Admin” on the right side of the group’s page. (NB: this option does not exist in open groups.) When the last admin leaves a group, there may be a delay before you see the option to become the new admin. You will need to check back periodically until the option appears.

A Note About Ads

For anyone already running Facebook ads: I don’t use ads, and since I can’t create a dummy business account to test my hypotheses without breaching ToS and risking a ban myself, I’m reliant on Facebook replying to some questions that have sprung to mind – and on you! If you have information/experience of some of these issues, please do comment below and I’ll add it into this post (with credit, of course). My current understanding (awaiting confirmation by Facebook) is that ads can’t be transferred from one account to another (if you upgrade from a business to a personal account, they do go with you). So I’d imagine you’d want to stop any ad campaigns you have running before deleting the account that’s managing them, and double-check what the billing implications are. If you’re running an ad, you’ll be familiar with the ad manager and know how to do this/get help from Facebook ad staff.

Contacting Facebook

If you need to contact Facebook directly, a couple of email addresses you can try are:

privacy@facebook.com
info@facebook.com

Download Info

You can now download all the information you’ve ever shared on Facebook – this video shows you how:

And You’re Done! Sort Of…

So that should be you – for now! If you think I’ve missed anything – please comment below and I’ll review for inclusion (with credit, of course). Facebook is constantly changing so do keep checking back to your favourite social media blogs – and don’t forget the Facebook Help center. I keep hearing people say they don’t understand Facebook, but when I ask have they used the help pages, reply ‘oh I never thought to look for help pages…’ Remember: Knowledge is Confidence!

Aside from the technical how-to’s, there are many ongoing discussions about appropriate and effective use of Facebook and other social media for business purposes. Get involved: If you’re using it, you’re part of the debate. We’re all learning as we go!

Special note: Perhaps you as the business owner aren’t going to be the one maintaining your social media presence? Or perhaps you as an employee have been tasked with doing so? There are privacy and even legal issues to be discussed if so; social media for business use is a relatively new field and solutions will need to be worked out company by company (and even department by department). For now, you may just want to use this info as a starting point for working out policy and strategy and investigating legal implications within your company.

Get It Right from the Start – Save your Time, Money and Reputation

Social media for business is still a relatively new field, and many business owners find it something of a minefield. Some of them are setting up profiles and pages in a panic, or initial rush of enthusiasm, without fully understanding the rules and functionality involved. Some have hired experts to do this for them, only to discover the ‘experts’ have created the wrong type of profile or page, confusing customers and damaging the credibility of the business. I’ve read articles and blog posts by marketers and PR consultants which have contained erroneous information, all of which adds to the confusion and fear surrounding social media for business use.

Whilst the area is relatively new, and Facebook is particularly prone to change, there are some basics that you should really get your head around now to prevent time-consuming re-work and potential damage to your brand. Get it right first time and it will be much easier to maintain. And if you’ve already made a right hames of it, fear not! Read this guide to fixing it.

Short on time? Here are the key points in bullet form:

1. You can have one account only
2. This can be a personal account/profile – to which you can add up to 5k friends - or a business account - which can only be used to maintain pages, not add friends
3. With either type of account, you can create as many pages as you want with unlimited ‘fans’ and extremely useful Facebook Insights
4. If you already have a group in place for business use, it’ll be supported (for now). If you don’t, you can no longer create business groups

Here are those key points in more detail.

Your Profile – Which Type?

CAUTION! I keep seeing businesses and other organisations setting up a profile for the organisation, but talking about it as a page. Be clear on the difference – most of the problems I encounter with clients stem from this misunderstanding, and it can lead to profile deletion and/or an outright ban. Here are the basics:

You are allowed one account, and one only

It doesn’t matter if you’ve used two different email addresses to set up one account for you and one for your business; it’s one account per person and violation of the ToS can result in profile deletion/a total ban.

Your one account can be a personal acount (full-functionality) with a profile or a business (limited-functionality) account

If you choose a personal account, you will:

• Need to be sure to stay on the right side of the no-spam terms and conditions applying to your profile. Facebook is a social networking site that offers some business features; it’s not a business site with social elements
• Be able to create and administer multiple pages and ad campaigns for your business. (Note: people who aren’t friends of your profile won’t be able to see your profile from your business page; when you post on your business page, the posts will show up with the page name, not yours)
• Have a limit of 5000 friends. (Many businesses erroneously using personal profiles at this point realise that they need to switch to a page)

If you choose a business account, you will:

• only be able to use the site to administer pages and ad campaigns
• have limited access to information on the site
• be able to view all the pages and social ads that you’ve created
• not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the pages you administer
• not be found in search results
• Be able to ‘like’ other pages
• not be able to send or receive friend requests

I’m going to repeat that last point. If you’ve got a business account, you will not be able to send or receive friend requests. This means that if you’ve set up a profile called ‘Acme Mortgages’, for example, and you’re adding people as friends, you’ve got it wrong. You can only add friends to a personal profile which should bear your real name. In a recent online discussion I took part in about this issue, someone said they always reported profiles when they got a friend request from a business. So yes, you may get away with using a personal profile for business use, but people can and will report you in an attempt to combat spam.

(Business) Pages

Facebook pages can be created by/for local businesses, artists/bands/public figures and brands/products/organisations. Each has their own functionality geared towards that usage type – e.g. a Facebook musician page has a player that you can display down the left-hand navigation area, or in a box along the top (see mine as an example). They can be indexed by search engines, so are extremely useful for SEO. They’re also much more viral than groups and have no limits on the number of people who can ‘like’ the page. They’re customisable – acting as a mini, Facebook-branded website for your business/organisation, and give you anonymity as noted above (posts you make in a group you maintain show with your name/avatar). If you want something a little more sexy than the standard design, Pagemodo offers a free design tool for building something sleek and functional. (And there are other, similar services out there too.) Pages also include the incredibly useful Facebook Insights marketing feature, helping you analyse user demographics (location, age range, gender), see which of your posts get the most interactions (helping you refine content and format and figure out which times of day are best for posting), and ensure you’re keeping people engaged.

Note: There are also ‘community pages’ – these are for ideas, topics and causes, and cannot be maintained or edited by any one person. Don’t use them for your business. (Find out more here.)

Here are some links to get you set up:

Guide to Facebook pages
Promoting your Page and Page Insights

Create a Vanity URL for Your Page

When you create a page, you choose a name for it, but the URL associated with the page is initially long and unwieldy. You can create an easy-to-remember URL for your page once you have 25 ‘fans’, by going to www.facebook.com/username/ and choosing the relevant page from the drop-down. You can also do this for your profile. For example, I secured www.facebook.com/tracydempsey for my personal profile; www.facebook.com/tracydempseymusic for my musician page and www.facebook.com/soulambition for my business page. I use these memorable URLs in print materials, email autosignatures, forum posts, etc., so that people don’t have to search for me or my business on Facebook, and to help me drive offline contacts to my online profiles.

Groups (No Longer for Business Use)

Old-style Facebook groups could be created by anyone, and ownership of the group/ability to ad and remove members was maintained by the group creator and/or anyone appointed as an admin. A lot of organisations used them to stay in touch with customers/interested parties; one of the advantages of groups over pages being that updates sent to group members go directly to their inboxes, whereas page updates don’t. This makes them useful for time-critical updates as they’re more likely to get noticed.

However, these types of groups have now been discontinued; one of the recent major Facebook updates was the introduction of new groups, which are designed to be a social tool (‘improving’ on the old friends lists), and not intended for business/brand use. You probably don’t want to use new groups for your business anyway (except maybe indirectly for market research, etc), since any member can add anyone they like, you can’t maintain control, and new-group functionality is designed for up to 250 users.

If you don’t already have one of the old-style Facebook groups for your business/organisation, you can no longer create one, so no need to worry about them! Stick with a page, maintained by either your personal profile, or a business one. If you do have an old-style group, they are still being supported – for now at least.

For those of you with old-style groups set up, here’s the original group information given at the Soul Ambition social media training sessions:

Facebook pages v Facebook groups
Guide to Facebook groups
How to maintain a successful group

Privacy

Concerns about privacy abound where Facebook’s concerned; just Google ‘Facebook controversy’ or ‘Facebook privacy concerns’ and settle into a comfy chair. In the meantime, some useful links:

Direct link to privacy settings
Facebook’s privacy policy
And a note on publicly-available info

You can now download all the information you’ve ever shared on Facebook – this video shows you how:

It’s Easier Than You Think

All of the above is information freely available to anyone who looks for it. Hiring a social media expert can be a wise decision (and this post can help you choose one); but for many, the better choice is to set up and maintain your online presence yourself. For any social network that you’re engaging in, spend a little bit of time going through the help section. Look up any question you have, read blog posts by established social media commentators, talk to your peers about best practice and what-not-to-do’s – there’s a plethora of useful, free information out there to help you get set up and guide you through changes as they happen. If you believe it’s easy to get your head around, it will be! (And on that note, see the Knowledge is Confidence post…)

When I do my confidence-building courses and coaching, I ask people what their biggest confidence saboteurs are. And one of the most common, in people’s business or personal lives, is a lack of knowledge. People are often scared of looking stupid, or ignorant, and dread being put on the spot in meetings, or in social settings. My response is that what’s important is not necessarily what you know, but your ability to go find out.

Small Talk

Sometimes people say that it’s small talk at tea breaks or in general social situations that makes them unconfident – that they’re not into the same things as other people so don’t ‘get’ the conversations. If you do want to feel more comfortable in your average casual conversation, a quick scan of the news/sport/entertainment headlines or trending topics on Twitter is often enough to have you feel you’ve some points of reference. (This isn’t about pretending to be someone you’re not, mind; I’m just talking about a little bit of oil for the wheels of standard small talk. Declaring confidently that you’ve no clue about what anyone’s talking about is of course equally valid, as is avoiding such conversations altogether. Good to have options tho’, isn’t it?)

On The Spot? Defer & Return

In a professional setting, if you get asked something in a meeting, or after a talk, to which you don’t know how to reply, you can just say “I’m not sure, but I’ll find out for you.” Then do your research, and get back to the questioner when you’ve found it out. If you need to figure out how to do something, do some online research, buy/borrow a book, take a course and/or ask for help from someone in the know. (Remember that people are usually happy to help if they can see you’re genuinely stuck, but few people like to feel they’re just doing your donkey work for you – let them know what you’ve already tried.)

Keep Learning

Obviously, if you’re in a job or role where you’re constantly having to defer answering questions, or having to ask too many of other people, there’s a problem. Perhaps just a training gap that needs to be bridged – or maybe you’re in the wrong job/role entirely? [Blog post on this topic to follow!] But for the most part, making use of the fantastic library-at-your-fingertips that is the internet, or the wealth of knowledge and advice available on social networking sites can boost your confidence – and credibility – no end.

Teach a man to fish…

So, don’t be afraid to ask for help, whilst being curious and confident enough to try and work it out for yourself if you can. If you’re in a rush, or you’ve got a one-off question in a specialist field, or you’ve tried something yourself and are stuck, asking a friend/colleague/mentor or posting a question on-line can often get you a speedy solution. For your long-term confidence, it is usually better if you can to do the research yourself (searching for articles, reading/watching ‘how-to’ tutorials, subscribing to specialist podcasts etc) and learn as you go.

A Handy Flow-Chart (From XKCD)

An excellent example of this philosophy is presented by the ever-so-witty XKCD:

www.XKCD.com (licensed under Creative Commons)

But please do feel free to ask any questions below..! And remember there is sometimes power in not knowing – being free of previous assumptions and out-of-date information can be a good place to be. We are always learning…

[Update: At my keynote at the Social Media Association for Business event in Belfast last night, I showed that XKCD diagram; Kathleen Holmlund afterwards shared this brilliant link with me! The next time someone asks you a 'lazy' question, send them this: lmgtfy.com. "LMGTFY" is a politer acronym than the one I'm familiar with...]

You know your viral video’s a true success when it’s been parodied by Sesame Street.

In an earlier post, I shared the ever-so-brilliant Old Spice ad which won the Grand Prix for film and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial this year.

Sesame Street’s spoof version has replaced the buff, manly man with blue, furry Grover:

Of course, Sesame Street are no newcomers to this social media malarkey – even lovable wise-asses Statler and Waldorf have found their niche:

Child’s play, really.