Today I’m trying an experiment. I’m writing this post by hand (with a pen!) and I don’t know what I”m going to say yet. But I’m going to see what I come up with, and if it’s interesting I’ll turn it into a blog post.

This is a little different to my normal way of writing. Usually I write an outline, try to write a section, get annoyed at not being able to write anything, then invoke the “terrible first draft is okay” rule and give myself permission to write whatever I can come up with. Once I’ve got something down, I’m set. I still spend about half my time fiddling with wording, reordering, restructuring, rewriting, but once I have something down the hard part is over. I know that if I just keep fiddling for a bit, I’ll get a post I’m happy with.

Writing with a pen is different. I usually use this method when I’m journaling, AKA dumping my brain onto paper. There’s no pressure to make grammatical (or logical) sense. I just write my thoughts straight onto paper. Pose questions and explore what comes up. Usually get lost down twisty passages of thought that lead nowhere in particular, but at least I usually see interesting things along the way.

Writing this post is different again. I’m intending it to be read by others, so I’m taking a little more care to make sense and explain things. Compared to how I usually write posts I’m getting a lot written very quickly. Only: I don’t know quite where I’m going.

I like the spontaneous way this post formed itself. It feels funny calling it a post when it’s still pen on paper, but it seems the best way to refer to it. I hope to write again like this in the future and maybe even have something useful come out in the process.

Thanks for reading this little experiment, and enjoy the rest of your long weekend.

In which I reflect on some hard stuff and good stuff in my week, with the hope of just maybe figuring out where all that time goes to.

The hard stuff

Feeling aimless

I’m not sure whether I’m still adjusting to not working full-time, but I’ve been having real trouble getting motivated this week. I think I’ve realised that quitting my job was only half the battle, and the other half is filling the gap with work that is everything I want it to be (or at least a few of those things). Fulfilling, creative, enjoyable, meaningful, does-good-things-for-the-world, and maybe even pays money so I don’t go broke and insert-disaster-scenario-here. I have a way to go yet. But I think I’m making progress.

The good stuff

Disentangling the new-business-idea-every-week pattern

This pattern has had a long history. I’ve struggled with persistence and commitment for years. If you’ve been following the weekly check-ins, you’ll know that I tend to hop between business ideas pretty frequently. Which is a problem when I just want to settle down, focus, and actually finish something for once.

I’ve been playing around with the approach that Havi shares on The Fluent Self and in her products for investigating where these patterns come from, getting to know why they’re here and finding a resolution for them. I started investigating this pattern by thinking of the cause of my behaviour as a fear. And importantly, thinking of this fear as a self-constructed means of protecting myself from something.

When I looked into it, I found that my fear was trying to protect myself from failure. I have a pretty long string of failed business projects, but I hadn’t realised it was a big deal for me. But even more important than failure was my fear’s mission to protect me from unenjoyable work. If I’m going to fail, I might as well enjoy doing so, right?

I had a chat with my fear, and we agreed that I can’t guarantee success, but I can do a pretty good job of keeping my work enjoyable. So we focused on that bit as the important bit and let the fear-of-failure slide for the moment.

The way this fear is protecting me is by preventing me from committing to an idea and persisting with it unless I make sure the work starts off enjoyable and stays that way. And I think I can manage that. I’ll watch myself and take some time out when I need it to make the work fun again.

It’s early days yet, but I’m hopeful that this pattern is on the mend. I’ve got a much clearer picture now of how it’s operating. Hopefully we’ll be seeing some finished projects in the not too distant future.

Little things

There’s a few things that I enjoy pretty frequently, but I don’t often stop to feel thankful for.

I still have a motorbike! And it still works! (even better than when I got it after I got it serviced last week). Oftentimes I’ll arrive somewhere with a bit of a buzz after the ride. It sure beats buying a car or catching busses everywhere.

Running. I haven’t been running as much as I’d like to recently, but when I do I feel so much better for it. I’m not sure why, but while I’m running I seem to be able to organise my thoughts and think much more clearly. I think it might be time to start experimenting with going running at different times of the day (currently I just run in the evenings) to see if I can find a time that I won’t miss.

Writing. It’s great just going through the process of writing this and working on explaining something to someone else instead of just writing to myself. It takes time (the above item took nearly an hour to write and edit), but it’s worth it to sort things out in my head and to actually share them.

That’s all from me!

How was your week? Let us know how you’re going in the comments!

Welcome BarCampians! Here’s the list of online business resources:

Blogs

• IttyBiz – home business marketing advice. In particular, check out the marketing school category.
• Thirty Day Challenge – great video course on niche website creation
• Finance Your Freedom – market testing and lifestyle design
• 7 Business Ideas – more market testing
• 7 Business Ideas Intro to Market Testing – figuring out if an idea is likely to work before you implement it
• The Fluent Self – dealing with the inner stuff along the way

Stuff worth buying

• Online Business School from IttyBiz – Kinda like my talk but with much more detail. Walks you through the main points to consider when starting one of the business types I mentioned. Great for a high-level view of this stuff. If you’ve had a read of all the free stuff and you’re keen to get started, this is for you.
• Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic from The Fluent Self – EBook I mentioned in the talk. Spend a bit of time on Havi’s blog, and if what she talks about resonates with you, I’d highly recommend checking out this book.

People I mentioned

• GoBuro
• IttyBiz
• Productive Flourishing
• The Fluent Self
• WordPrezzie
• Etsy
• Men With Pens

Update: Here are my slides from my presentation at BarCamp.

This is the third time I’ve tried writing this post. It seems that I can’t produce reflection on demand, so to save confusion and embarrassment at all the late posts, the Friday Check-in will now be known as the Weekly Check-in.

The hard stuff

This post doesn’t want to be written

What is with that? Some times I can write fluidly and other times I’m just staring at the screen (or the paper) and the neurons just aren’t firing. *pauses to do some shiva nata*. Ok, I guess sometimes I just won’t be in the mood to write. I can deal with that.

The good stuff

The business idea is evolving!

So before my business idea was to help tiny businesses automate the non-fun parts of their business. That’s ok, but I came up with an idea that’s an even better match for my skills.

Project management

Project management sounds boring, so I definitely need a new name for this one. My aim is to help tiny businesses (the same guys as before) launch a project that’s bigger than anything they’ve done before. Awesome-big, but also scary-big. I’ve had some experience with project management at uni and my brain naturally likes to organise and plan such things. The big thing though is that I love working towards the completion of a grand vision, and if I can help ittybizzes towards theirs, all the better.

To start with, I’m offering free half-hour accountability meetings for business owners who are just starting their business. Great practice for me, and I’ll be providing a useful service at the same time.

If this is you (you’re starting a one or two-person business) and you’d like to take me up on the offer, shoot me an email and we’ll work out a time. We’ll have a weekly chat to reflect on the previous week, look at some ways to improve and plan some goals for the following week. If you’re just starting out and you’re not making as much progress as you’d like, this could be just what you need to stay on track and work through any problems that come up.

Quitting my job

I’m not sure whether this one belongs under ‘hard’ or ‘good’, so this might be a bit of a mish-mash. Here goes.

So I quit my job this week. In some ways this is a huge thing (seeing how stuck I was feeling in the job) but for some reason it feels small, like it was just another step I knew I would take. NEIS has made it a whole lot easier, and I’d be panicking right now if I didn’t have the income support as a safety net.

Money is still going to be a challenge though, until I start bringing in some income from the business. Until I do, I’ll be surviving on less than half my current income, backed up by the money I saved since I started the job last July.

This change, and what it will mean, is still settling in. I’m sure that I’ll write about it more as I go.

That’s all for now.

Hope you have a wonderful week! Feel free to tell us about your own week in the comments.

It’s Friday again, and this time I managed to write something on time. Horray!

The hard stuff

One month launch plan goes kaput

So last week I talked about how I was going to launch a business of some sort in the next month. I knew it’d be challenging, even if I stuck to the bare essentials, but I expected my plans to last longer than a week. Luckily they’ve only died because a better plan has come along, but it still sucks to have set a nice clear milestone and then to abandon it. “So what happened?” I hear you asking. Well, read on to find out.

The good stuff

The New Enterprise Incentive Scheme

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I’ve been wanting to start a business for awhile now. Lately, I’ve been stuck on the quitting-to-work-on-it-full-time bit, since I only have enough savings to last me a few months, and it looked like I would have to find a very generous friend with a spare couch to sleep on until the business got going. If it got going. Maybe I should just cruise along working part-time and get something started first? But that wasn’t very much fun and I was feeling very stuck.

Enter NEIS.

NEIS is a government program that provides aspiring entrepreneurs with a few months training and a year’s allowance and mentoring to develop their small business idea. This is REALLY cool because although I’ll be really poor for a year (the allowance isn’t much) it’s a lot better than living off nothing. The only sucky part is the mound of paperwork I’ll have to wade through, but I think it’ll be worth it

This is the discovery that killed the one month launch plan. The program requires that you start an entirely new business, so as far as I know, I won’t be able to begin operation until I’ve finished the 2-3 months of training. Sigh. I’ll just do as much preparation as I can in the meantime.

I feel kinda silly for bashing my head against the wall of “you must be self-sufficient and will my idea work and How Am I Going To Survive?” for so long when NEIS has been available the whole time. I’d even heard about it 6 months ago or so, it just wasn’t at the front of my mind. But I’m aware of it now, and I think the time is right.

Volunteering it up

A whole lot of stuff to do with volunteer work has popped up in my reality recently. I started by thinking about testing my consulting idea by working for free. Steve posted this article on volunteering. Today I helped put up a yurt for the wellbeing and spiritual festival in Queanbeyan, and the person running the yurt business told me the story of how doing a bit of volunteer work lead to the start of his business (and I also had an awesome time helping out). Talk about clues from the universe! Long story short, I’m going to start my business by doing volunteer work for other home businesses. I plan to start out pretty open-ended and just help out in whatever way I can. By doing that for a while I’m sure I’ll develop my skills, meet lots of people and find a good niche to work for. All good

Shiva Nata

I got my Shiva Nata DVD this week (warning: wackiness) . I’ll do a full review later, but suffice to say the last few weeks have been pretty awesome, at least in a things-are-getting-unstuck kinda way.

And BarCamp is coming up!

BarCampCanberra was one of *the* highlights of last year. For the uninitiated, BarCamp is what happens when you throw a bunch of geeks in a room or two and tell them to self-organise a conference about whatever they happen to think is awesome right now. Highly, highly recommended. I’m planning on presenting this year, so come along to hear me rant about online business, or just to soak up the atmosphere of concentrated geeky awesomeness.

Lots to look forward to!

Have a wonderful weekend and catch you soon!

Being Monday, am I allowed to call this a Friday check-in? I’m afraid someone is going to revoke my right to use the word ‘Friday’. Moving right into it…

The hard stuff

Problems with one-off ideas

I had a surge of energy last week when I realised that I could come up with an idea and test the market for it using keyword research. The idea of creating a product in isolation and marketing it using Google AdWords seemed really appealing since I could pick an idea, develop it quickly and get it out there, and if I wanted to do something completely different next time I’d be able to do that too. But then I realised that I wanted to build something that I would want to work on in the long-term, built for people who I want to hang out with. Not just a short-term project to build, market and leave running.

Not knowing what to do

Once I’d figured out that I wanted to do something that involved a longer-term relationship with people, I was stuck not knowing what to do. I had a few ideas for projects but nothing I was really fired up about. And since I was trying to find a long-term direction, I figured it would be a good idea to figure out what my life purpose was before starting. Every time I try to do this I never seem to get very far, but I still find the idea of having an overriding life purpose to be incredibly alluring. Contemplating it might be fine in small doses, but obsessing over it seems to be a recipe for depression. Feeling stuck and not knowing what to do really sucked.

The good stuff

Inspiration

Eventually I realised that the reason I was having so much trouble figuring out what to do was because I was looking outwards to what the world needed instead of inward to what I wanted to do. There’s an infinite array of things people need, but a much narrower selection of things that people need AND I can do well AND I would enjoy doing. Once I thought of looking for things that I wanted to do myself and sat down to brainstorm some ideas, I had an idea that I really liked within 10 minutes or so, and a bunch of planning for the business done within a few hours. My happiness seems to depend a lot on whether I have a project to pursue that I’m enthusiastic about, so I’m really glad to have something to focus on. What’s the idea? I’m working on it, and I’ll announce something when I’m a bit further along. Soon!

The one month launch

Nick Cernis wrote a great article about launching a project with a light-weight plan and a time-frame of one month. I tend to either spend too much time planning a project then not launch it, or pick a project that will take 6 months, minimum, then lose enthusiasm and not launch it. Not Good. Doing a one month launch is restrictive, but in a good way. Web applications are out, since it’s a rare web app that can be built in a month by one person. But services are in, ebooks are in, subscriptions to progressively released content are in. That, and the thought of actually launching something in a month, makes me happy.

Accountability

I’ve started meeting up once a week with Luke of Code Spammer’s Paradise to make plans for the week and hold each other accountable for them. This is so simple, but it completely changes my attitude towards what I’m trying to do. If you’re having trouble staying on track with something, go find an accountability partner. Now! I’ll wait. By Thursday I plan to have settled on an idea for the one month launch and done some market research for it. Horray for targets

Teleconferences

I’ve participated in a couple of teleconferences over the last few weeks. They’ve both been awesome, so this is my chance to rave about them a little.

The first is Marketing 101 run by Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz, where I’ve been refreshing the real fundamentals of marketing – USPs, target demographics, features vs. benefits – and also learning a whole bunch of useful ideas to try out once I’ve actually got a business to market (soon!). I was already familiar with the core concepts, but hearing it explained with plenty of real-world examples and Q&A with people really helped to convey the spirit behind the information. The course is mostly finished, but you can still get the recordings of the past sessions (which is how I’ve been listening anyway, to save on international phone bills). The course will be released as a set of recordings, but at a higher price, so if you’re interested, it’s cheaper to jump in now and get the recordings while the course is still running. You can read more about it here.

The second course was the recession busting course run by both Naomi and Havi from Fluent Self. The course is focused towards people looking to beat the recession by starting and running a online home business. I picked up a bunch of ideas from it, but I think the greatest value I get from these courses is from hanging out with people who get online business and self-employment. If you’re kinda interested in this stuff then listening to this course might be a good way to get a taste of it. It’s cheap ($US19) and covers a whole bunch of ideas. It’s not enough to launch a business on, but it does have a whole lot of helpful advice and you get to soak up the way Havi and Naomi think.

That’s it!

I’d wish you an awesome weekend, except it’s already Monday. Oops. Enjoy the rest of your week!

Ok, so it’s actually Saturday (sssh!). But that doesn’t stop me reflecting on the week…

The hard stuff

Feeling blocked

I’ve been feeling the “procrastinate and find it hard to focus because something isn’t right for me to dive into it” feeling about starting the game dev article series. I spent the first few days of the week really looking forward to my days off work (Thursday and Friday), but when it came to them I didn’t accomplish much. I’ve done a bit of thinking about it, and I think my lack of clarity is caused by mixing the two sources of motivation I wrote about previously. I haven’t been consciously using one or the other, so I’m defaulting to a mix of both. The result is that I feel conflicted instead of motivated. I’ve only just figured this out (horray for insights!), so I’ll have a play with it over the coming week.

The good stuff

The Fluent Self

What’s so great about The Fluent Self? Havi writes about fear and stuckedness, and dealing with it. I didn’t realise how much of an issue this was until I started thinking about doing scary things (ie. job quitting and online-business-making) and getting annoyed at not doing them (see above). Along with IttyBiz, this blog supplies great brain-food for those working towards biggifying something (ok, I’ll stop stealing Havi’s words now).

Talking to Clay

I had a chat to Clay from Finance Your Freedom the other day about how to start an online business that doesn’t fail (like the last four or so I’ve been involved with). He pulled out a key point, the lack of which I think underlies all the failures thus far: do market research and identify a demand before creating a product. In this case, market research == search engine keyword research, and a demand == people searching for something. I’ve had a vague notion I should be doing something like this, but I’ve never gotten into keyword research before. I’m having a go at the first three days of the thirty day challenge to get the hang of it. I’m feeling much more confident of being able to make something that actually gets some interest, and it’s nice to be able to get some instant feedback on ideas instead of committing a month or two (minimum) to building them first.

That’s it for this week!

Hopefully I’ll have some Real Live Actual progress to share next week. Catch you then!

Over at The Fluent Self, Havi has a weekly check-in ritual to reflect on the week. I’ve decided to borrow this ritual (thanks Havi!) and see if I can’t gain a bit of perspective. Ready? Here we go…

The hard stuff

Losing momentum

The last week’s been full of planning but not so much doing. But first, maybe it’d be good to take a look at what I’m planning. I’ve come up with five “projects” that I’d like to put some time into:

• BotLand: A web-based not-quite-realtime strategy game with awesome tweakability.
• Game dev blog articles: A series of blog articles where I write about my attempts to develop Botland the Right Way. Best practices, agile methods, and tips from the trenches. That kind of thing.
• Game dev consulting: Where I help game developers (who are probably part of a startup) to adopt said best practices and bring their out-of-control projects a little more under control.
• EEEBot: Makin it. I need to buy some parts first though. Anyone know where I can source a 74HC32N, L293E and 74HC00N IC for the motor controller?
• This blog post! And the next, and the next (every week).

I haven’t actually made much progress on them this week, but on the other hand it’s pretty awesome having the list, and I’m feeling ready to get going That actually sounds pretty good, so what’s the hard bit? I work Monday to Wednesday at the moment, and having those three days away from this stuff takes its toll on my momentum.

The good stuff

Bike!

I got my bike today! It’s a 1998 Kawasaki GPX 250, and it looks something like this. Oh man it’s fun. I’ve been in the process of getting one for over a month, but I didn’t know how fun it would be until I rode on the back of David‘s bike to inspect the one I ended up buying. That was my first time on a bike going > 25k/h, and he has a Suzuki GS500, which is a fair bit more powerful than mine Anyway… conclusion: Awesome.

Aikido

The Aikido beginners course starts for the year this week at ANU. I’ve been heading over to ANU before work for a few days to put up posters and help at the market day stall. Our strategy was to play videos on my laptop, then capture people as they stopped to watch the video. Very effective If you’re interested in learning a martial art and you’ve got Tuesday and/or Sunday evenings free, I highly recommend joining up for the Aiki-kai beginners course at ANU. It’s awesome fun and cheap too (only $90 for the whole semester). Here, watch a video to see what it looks like

Tidying my mind, tidying my room

I meditate pretty much daily. I vary the technique I use (eg. watching the breath, visualisations, etc) and I also have quite a variation in the “quality” of the meditation. Sometimes I’ll feel quite peaceful, other times I’ll be really distracted and unfocused. I find when I have a particularly peaceful meditation, I’ll often go on a tidying binge afterwards, and that happened this week I cleaned up a bunch of stuff lying around my room, then got through about 50 emails, then did a bunch of small things I’d wanted to do for awhile. Now I have a bit more mental and physical space to work in again

This blog post

I feel a bit clearer and more motivated having written it. Yay

And that’s it!

Catch you next week, if not sooner

Have you ever noticed how some people have a huge impact on the world? People like Mahatma Gandhi and Richard Brandson, who each in their own way have created massive changes in the world. How do they do that, when the vast majority of people leave little legacy beyond their family and a small contribution at work? Let’s take a look at the sort of motivation they need to do what they do, and then we can dive into where it comes from and how it works.

Let’s start by having a look at the conditions for creating an impact. To be able to make a huge impact, these people need to have a) a very strong source of motivation that b) points in a consistent direction. If one of these conditions is missing, you’re not going to have a great impact. I’ve often had ideas for software projects (usually web apps) that seemed great when I was planning them, but just didn’t seem worth developing after a few weeks had passed. I’d get upset that my motivation was fading, then a new idea would grab me and the whole process would start over again. Continually changing direction doesn’t work, at least not if you want finished projects. Likewise, if you have no motivation, nothing’s going to happen. This is what happens when you don’t really know what you want to do so you just go to work, come home and watch anime all evening. At this stage a consistent direction isn’t even an issue because you don’t have the energy to pursue anything. So to have an impact of any scale, you need to have a strong source of motivation, and it needs to point in a consistent direction.

It’s nice to know what we’re after, but at this stage it’s still a bit academic. Knowing that you need a strong source of motivation pointed in a consistent direction doesn’t give you one. To get a better idea of how to have a consistent sense of direction, let’s have a look at why we don’t have one right now. Imagine that you’ve got a problem that you’re trying to solve, so you go to your friends for advice. You talk to one of them and they give you a great-sounding piece of advice. You’re pretty confident that you know what to do now, but you’re not completely sure so you ask another friend for a second opinion. Their advice is great too, but there’s a problem – it’s different! Now you’ve got two great ideas but you’re stuck because you don’t know which to go with. How does this relate to motivation? We need to pick a single, reliable source of direction to motivate us. In the case of motivation, there happen to be two sources to choose between. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Your own highest enjoyment of life

The first source of motivation is your own highest enjoyment of life. Chances are you’re aware of what many people in your life want from you. Your boss wants you to work overtime, your partner wants you to spend more time with them, and your friends are wondering why they don’t see you any more. Each of these pressures is like advice from one of your friends in the previous example. To use this source of motivation,  you tune out everyone else’s clamouring that pushes you in different directions and tune in to your own true desires. You’re tapping into this source of motivation when you say “Enough is enough! I’m sick of being pushed around! I know what I want, and it’s my way or the highway!”. By following this source of motivation, you become an empowered agent working on behalf of your desires; you have a mission and you’re not going to let anything get in your way. You figure out what you want and make a plan. Then you identify all the challenges, the parts of your plan that you think you’ll have trouble with, and you seek to dominate and conquer them with a complete overkill. Say, for example, you want to save up money for a deposit on a house. The thought of owning your own house makes you drool, you want it that much. However, it’s going to take 3 years to save up the money, and you’re worried that you’ll be tempted to spend the money on other things. You decide that enough’s enough, and you’re not going to let anything stop you. So you head over to your bank and set up a 3 year fixed-term savings account that you are unable to withdraw from and set up an automatic transfer to take money out of your salary on pay day and deposit it in this savings account. For good measure, you bet a friend that you can make it without touching your savings and arrange to show them your bank statements every month, with the promise of paying them a hefty sum if you slip up (which is close to impossible anyway, thanks to the arrangement with the bank). After doing all this, do you think you’ll have much trouble sticking to your plan? Nothing is going to stop you now.

That’s pretty awesome, we’ve gone from being pretty wishy-washy about our goal to being certain that we’ll succeed. But wait, there was another source of motivation, wasn’t there?

The highest good of all

The other source of motivation you can tap into is working for the highest good of all. Again, you tune out the pressures you feel from different people, and you still make contact with your desires, but this time you’re focus is on what you can create and give. You become an empowered agent working for the good of the planet, the good of the universe. You’re here to create, to love, and to set a great example of how to live. If you set a goal and you’re not feeling motivated, it’s because your goal won’t help enough people in a meaningful way. To illustrate how that might work, let’s return to the house buying example. This time, you start by looking at who will benefit from the achievement of the goal apart from yourself. Your partner will be able to enjoy the house too. You’ve also got a few close friends who are also planning on buying a house, so you start meeting up regularly and discussing the sort of houses you’re looking for. Together, you plan to buy houses in the same suburb so you’ll be close to each other. You’re worried about spending your savings on impulse buys, so with your friends you set up a pooled high-interest savings account that you can all deposit your money into, requiring all of your signatures for a withdrawal. With your pooled savings you can access a higher interest account than you could otherwise, so you’ll all end up better off financially than if you had used individual savings accounts. Your plan is working really well, so you start blogging about it to share your plan and your progress with other people from around the world. Now keeping up with your deposits to the savings account is a no-brainer. Your friends and your blog readers are helping you out and looking up to you. With all that support, do you think you’ll have much trouble sticking to your plan?

That should give you a taste of the sort of motivation that can really make an impact. If you’d like to dig deeper, you might enjoy Steve’s series on polarity and Pace and Kyeli’s series of motivation. Good luck!

I’ve been a vegetarian for most of my life, but at the start of this year I finally went vegan. I’m still eating a vegan diet now and I feel great for it. I know there are plenty of people out there interested in making dietary shifts, so In this post I’ll talk a bit about some of the obstacles you might face going from a vegetarian to a vegan diet, or in fact in any dietary shift. I’ll also talk about some solutions (yay!).

One of the first obstacles you might face are family influences, or the influence of the people you live with. At the time when I started this trial, I was living with my family (my parents, brother and sister). My brother is vegetarian, but the rest of my family is omnivorous. Some members of my family had strong objections to me removing dairy products from my diet, believing I’d be socially ostracised. This caused a regular conflict at meal times, especially since I wasn’t cooking my own food for dinner, so whoever was cooking would have to prepare a vegan meal as well as a carnivorous one. Not such a big leap when you’ve already been making a vegetarian side meal, but a cause of tension none the less. This situation was unsustainable, and had I not moved out of home a few weeks into the trial I’m not sure if I could’ve kept it up. I now live in a sharehouse (phew) and although my housemate is omnivorous we cook for ourselves so it’s a non-issue.

The lesson here is that to succeed in a dietary shift, you’ll need acceptance from the people around you, particularly the people you live with. It’s quite possible to live with people who eat a different diet, as long as there’s no tension or conflict between you over what you eat. Here are some steps you can take to overcome this obstacle:

1. Spend the time to discuss your plans with the people you live with if you think it could become an issue.
2. If you’re not already preparing your own meals, begin to do so. Gain some independence, which will give you more control over what you eat.
3. If all else fails, it may well be easier to find somewhere else to live. Eeep! If you’re lucky, you will already be planning to move (as I was).

So there’s a few steps to help with family conflicts. The second obstacle I’d like to discuss is eating out. This can be a challenge since most restaurants have vegetarian options but not vegan options, and you won’t always be lucky enough to find yourself at your friendly neighbourhood vegan restaurant. I thought this was going to be a problem until I watched Karen Knowler’s video, where she discussed eating out on the raw food diet, which is off the planet when compared with the Standard Australian Diet. Her approach when eating out is simply to ask for a salad, request that any meat or dairy products be removed, then double or triple the size. If you’re eating a vegan diet, the solution is even simpler: just ask if X contains dairy or ask for X without cheese/milk/eggs.

Doing this comes down to a matter of your own confidence in your diet. Do you feel uncomfortable about what you’re eating, particularly when it’s different from what all of your friends are eating? Do you feel guilty at the thought of asking your waiter for a modified meal? Or are you proud of your food choices and comfortable with the extra attention from your friends that eating a different diet will bring?

I’m still getting the hang of eating out as a vegan, but so far it’s been far less trouble than I expected. That’s largely because I feel really happy, comfortable and self-confident with this diet, something I never expected when I started. That’s great to hear if you’re already comfortable being different from your friends, but what if you’re not? That’s too much to cover in one post, but you might find this article by Steve Pavlina valuable. Have a look at the “Social Shift” section.

So there’s a few solutions to the largest problems I faced in making the leap from vegetarian to vegan: family influences and eating out. I feel a whole lot better about what I eat now after wanting to make this shift for a long time. Good luck with your own changes and let us know how it goes!