Getting over intimidation… often has a weird side effect, especially for me. And maybe for you too. Who knows.
I’ve been dragging my feet for maybe a year when it came to upgrading my WordPress version (which means, procrastination is often born out of intimidation). I started blogging when it was at 2.2 and never changed it. I was too afraid to lose it. The video I had with instructions seemed too complicated. I was worried the plugins wouldn’t work anymore.
And so now we’re at 2.7.1. Oh dear. Now I was REALLY afraid to mess with what seemed to be working fine.
Except it wasn’t working all that fine. I was missing out on a lot of cool stuff I could be doing with it if only I had the courage to upgrade.
So I took this course and got this really cool plugin. It came with a condition. I had to install it and use it, and then report back on what happened.
Sooooo I finally installed it and — the installation wouldn’t complete. I kept getting error messages. Darn, I thought. Must be my ancient platform.
So now what?
I called www.myfavoritewebhost.info to inquire about upgrading my WordPress version. About backing up the data base.
And then I went ahead and backed up all the data bases.
And then… I decided to use Fantastico to upgrade a barely started blog that I had all but forgotten about. It worked fine, both before and after.
Okay, so then I tried another one that actually had stuff on it, a theme, a photo, and miscellaneous other things. It worked okay too.
Then, I decided to take a chance. I held my breath as I clicked "update" for this one, my flagship blog. The apple of my eye, with hundreds of pages (or so it seems anyway). And it worked. Yay!
And then I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or cry. This was so easy I couldnt’ believe it. Talk about stress relief. I had no idea how much stress this thing had been causing me. But think about it, the anxiety caused by being intimidated and therefore procrastinating, all the while knowing that I had to do this thing. And suddenly it was all gone.
Either I have progressed hugely or it had always been this easy and I just met someone who explained it to me the complicated way. What the heck.
What’s interesting is that this sort of thing has happened to me before. A number of times. Some of it very recently.
Here I am, dragging my feet on something that intimidates the socks off me and it turns out a piece of cake.
Do you ever have that happen to you? Why don’t you share in the comment section, and if you’d like, I would really appreciate if you could also share what you do to get over it — at last.
In my case it’s often a do or die kind of thing. I had to do this if I wanted to use the action opt-in popup plugin — or pay someone to do it for me, and I"m trying to save my money for other stuff…
So I decided to give it a try — and it was easy. And fast. I mean, it took just a couple of minutes each. So I did the rest of my blogs too.
The only ones that are still ancient are ones that I installed by hand (don’t ask), so the nifty tool Fantastico won’t be able to uninstall them. So I’ll have to call tech support to help with that, and I think they said they would.
Anyway, it’s been an interesting day, and quite exhilarating too.
I just set up two new blogs — one for me (Richmond Web Marketing ) and one for a friend/client (Richmond Handyman Express ). And now that I’ve got it down, it didn’t take long at all. The photo on the Handyman blog will need some trimming I suppose, but what the heck. I might also change the theme, but first I’ll check with him to see what he likes.
Anyway, do leave a comment and share your thoughts about intimidation and what you do about it.
And have a fantastic day!
Elisabeth
P.S.: Now that I think of it, that’s the kind of stuff that Jason’s Time Management course helps with too… I should go watch the videos again and re-view it all!
So that’s on the agenda for the next few days.