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.