December 2017

Why I’m Leaving Facebook (Kinda!) And Why That’s GREAT NEWS If You Run A Business

Do you ever make decisions that surprise you? That feel scary but right?

Sometimes when I take a step back from my business and do some visioning, it surprises me what comes through. And the deep dive work I did last week brought me a big surprise: I’m moving most of my business stuff off Facebook. There are so many reasons, but the big ones are in this video – and I’d love to know whether they resonate with you:

[video_page_section type=”vimeo” position=”default” image=”https://www.clarejosa.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-22-at-11.24.00.png” btn=”light” heading=”” subheading=”” cta=”” video_width=”720″ ]https://vimeo.com/248448336[/video_page_section]

Find out more here: https://www.clarejosa.com/leavingfacebook/
To be honest, it wasn’t a huge surprise, after my seven week social media detox over the summer (here’s a video about the five surprising lessons that taught me – they might help you, too). But it feels like a big leap.

The video is part of my recent training on Why Goal-Setting Stinks – all about how traditional goal-setting can be the one thing that keeps us stuck, dreaming big but playing small. Attendees found it really useful and are feeling much more relaxed and inspired about 2018. I’d love that for you, too, so you can still watch it (or watch it again if you’ve already seen it!) here (until 5pm today):

https://www.clarejosa.com/2018-goals-replay/

And with that I’m wrapping up for the holidays. I hope you get time to take some time out, too.

I wish you and your family a very happy Christmas (if you celebrate it) and look forward to hanging out with you in 2018. I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to create!

With love and gratitude,

Clare x

Clare Josa, Author | Mentor | World-Changer

P.S. You still have until 5pm UK time to catch my training on Why Goal-Setting Stinks and What Your Business Wishes You Were Doing Instead. It could be transformational for you in 2018. Here’s where to watch it now: https://www.clarejosa.com/2018-goals-replay/

Proof That Passionate World-Changer CAN Achieve The Impossible: Outcome Of EU Vote On EUVAT Thresholds

Create, Take Inspired Action

Three years ago this week a small group of businesswomen met for the first time, having only previously chatted on social media. They were surrounded by some of the most senior people in the UK’s Treasury and HMRC and a government minister, who told them nothing could be done about the EU VAT law change that had accidentally closed down thousands of micro businesses.

Those women gave them hell over a change to EU VAT laws that all 28 Member State governments had voted in, which risked putting millions of microbusinesses out of business – or forcing them to trade illegally.

The law was a good idea – to make you pay VAT on digital stuff (think eBooks / MP3s / software downloads) based on where the CUSTOMER was, not the selling business. It was intended to stop the likes of Apple and Amazon avoiding tax by locating in low-VAT countries.

BUT We Needed EU VAT Thresholds

The sledgehammer that cracked the nut didn’t realise that most online businesses:

Are tiny, compared to Amazon, so don’t have an international tax team
Automatically sell internationally, because that’s how the internet works
Don’t have access to the data to prove where our customers are in the way the laws required, so we could’t comply with the new rules

Over the following two years, the volunteers who supported the EU VAT Action Campaign:

proved the disastrous unintended consequences of these laws with a 2000-business quantitative study
met with the UK government, including the UK Prime Minister and the most senior policy advisers at Downing Street
evidenced the need for EU VAT thresholds and proved to the finance ministries that they wouldn’t lose out by agreeing to them
got consultative status with the UK’s HMRC, HM Treasury and the European Commission, so we could represent the thousands of businesses who desperately needed their help
represented those businesses at the 2015 Fiscalis event, with representatives of all 28 Member States’ Finance Ministries – which was pivotal in proving the need for thresholds and convincing Finance Ministers to consider them
raised the profile of the problem with savvy social media campaigns, including a Twitter storm that got #EUVAT trending
got thousands of micro businesses taking positive action – writing to their MEPs, visiting their MPs, getting the word out there to create an unignorable case for the need for change
giving keynote speeches at the European Parliament, to motivate MEPs, the European Commission and business organisations to take action

I am honoured to have been a co-founder of that group, to have given those keynotes and to have spoken at the Fiscalis event. I am immensely grateful to the thousands of businesses who supported us over the past three years.

On 1st December last year, Pierre Moscovici announced proposals for EU VAT thresholds. This was a HUGE achievement from EVERYONE , but the proposals had to spend a year going through Tax Committee meetings, being debated and looked at from every angle. They could have been derailed at any point. Ironically, the work we did meant that there was no way to rush these changes through. The EU Commission took the impact assessment very seriously.

Over the summer, 26 of the 28 Member States had agreed to a €10k EU VAT threshold (for non-domestic digital B2C sales), below which domestic VAT rules would apply, and €100k EU VAT threshold below which simplifications to the rules would apply, allowing growing businesses to keep trading. We continued to work with the EU Commission and key Member States to help address the remaining objections.

And today was the Big Day – ECOFIN – the meeting of all 28 Finance Ministers – had to vote on the legislative changes. Here is what happened:

The new EU VAT thresholds won’t come into effect until 1st January 2019, so we are urging micro business owners to write to their tax authority and Finance Minister to ask what can be done to help them keep trading until they legally become exempt from these rules.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped us with this campaign. Over and over we have been told that the reason it succeeded is because it was positive, evidence-based and proactive, rather than looking to blame or sling mud. We couldn’t have done it without your support.

If you’re covering this news and want to interview me for comments, you can reach me here.

And if you’ve got questions, we’re continuing the discussion in our Facebook group: EU VAT Action Campaign Group.

Thank you!

P.S. Know anyone who was stressed about these rules? Are you part of any small business groups? Please share this update with them!

The Moment When A Dream Becomes Real!

Books And CDs, Take Inspired Action

I had a dream from the age of six, but by the time I was fifteen, I had given someone else the power to make sure it would never happen. And they never even knew.

That dream? To write a novel.

A throwaway comment from an English teacher got stored in my head as the belief that I couldn’t write a story. I never wrote another one, apart from those I had to for English exams. After thirteen years of motherhood, I never told my kids a made-up story, because I believed I couldn’t.

I published five life-changing non-fiction books, but that wasn’t enough for me to consider myself an ‘author’ – because I hadn’t published a novel.

Yes, I know it sounds irrational, but that’s how limiting beliefs work. I’m guessing you know that, too.

Then, one day in July this year, I had had enough. I did some block-clearing work and ditched that belief. I didn’t feel any different, which was a huge disappointment. But two days later I had drafted seven novels. Three months later I had written two of them. Today the first 500 copies of the first book (edited, type-set, gorgeous cover done) were delivered to me, ready for shipping before Christmas to everyone who has believed in me and pre-ordered it.

Here’s how excited I was:

And if you want to join me for the launch party, here’s where to get your copy:

[thrive_link color=’blue’ link=’https://www.clarejosa.com/youtakeyourselfwithyou/’ target=’_self’ size=’medium’ align=’aligncenter’]I Want My Copy![/thrive_link]

See you there!

What To Do When You Feel Like The Only One Who Isn’t Full Of Christmas Cheer: Handling Grief At Christmas

Grow

No one teaches you how to handle grief at Christmas after losing a loved-one.

The recent Twitter storm about triggers for grief at Christmas made it clear how many of us struggle to feel festive at this time of year, how close the pain of loss is to the surface. But it’s not something we talk about. Social media is silent, apart from the occasional ‘miss you, Mum’ post on the big day.

As I head into my second Christmas without my Mum, the pain is triggered by the number of times a day I suddenly remember she has gone. The huge waves of grief from those early months have subsided. But it still shocks me how often I forget she’s not there any more. Daily. Silly things act as triggers:

Seeing a gift she might love and suddenly remembering I can’t give it to her
Seeing a Christmas advert and wanting to call her, to laugh about how corny it is, then realising I can’t
The silly things the kinds say in the run-up to Christmas that I know would make her laugh
How excited my kids get when they find their Christmas stockings in the box of decorations
My six year old insisting on counting backwards on his Advent calendar doors, so he can tell how many ‘sleeps’ are left until Christmas (very sensible idea)
The school plays she’ll never see – and wanting to text her photos of her grandsons in them

We each have our own list. And the one thing most of us have in common is the belief that we have to go through this silently, without letting anyone in.

Putting up the decorations proved too much for me last night. “I’ll never see Mum’s Christmas tree again!” was a thought that got me sobbing, in front of the kids, right when we should have been listening to carols and filling the house with joy as we put up our own tree.

And I got a double whammy this year. Over the summer I was writing my first novel, You Take Yourself With You, and the lead male character (Christof) was experiencing his first Christmas without his Dad, who had died in a car crash that he survived. Writing about Christof’s experiences of ‘the first xyz, since…’ shone light on my own grief and made me explore my own healing process. Developing the story of how he coped made me contrast my character’s strategies with my own.

Last year – our first Christmas without Mum, who was always the life and soul of the festival – I managed to break with tradition and go to someone’s house who had never hosted our Christmas. It really helped. This year will be the first Christmas I have hosted without Mum there – and without my Dad, who will be with his new wife’s family for their first Christmas after getting married.

The thing is, I made a promise to myself after Mum died that I would stop the many ways we ‘pretend’ in life. I would allow my social media feed to show the less-beautiful stuff, as well as the happy stuff. I would let people know if I didn’t feel up to something. I would talk openly about the emotions I was feeling around losing Mum. And working through the tsunamis of pain that would often overwhelmed me at first, I developed some tools that really helped me to move through them, rather than pretending they weren’t there.

And when I stopped fighting the emotions and allowed them to wash through me, I felt the relief afterwards – the closure – the letting go – in a way that would have been impossible had I carried on pretending, storing those painful experiences up for a future date when they would catch me unawares.

Here are three strategies that helped me to handle the grief and loss – and how I’ll be using them this Christmas:

1. Accept

I can’t change the past and I can’t easily change my subconscious emotional response to it. As Carl Jung said, “what you resist persists.” If you fight the emotions and push them down, they will find a way to get you, later. If you allow yourself to experience them, without diving in to the drama, they pass on through more quickly than you might think.

When I was studying to become a meditation teacher, a wise old Buddhist monk once told me that any emotion, left to its own devices, would pass on through in under sixty seconds. At the time, I was far from grateful to him for this wisdom. I was convinced that negative emotions were justified in lasting for the hours, days and even months they managed in my life. But now I can see he was right. The pain I felt was caused more by the stories I was telling myself than by the emotions themselves, which were nothing more than a chemical reaction in my body.

There’s a how-to for you on this here: Is Your Monkey Mind Telling You The Truth About Stress?

So when my memories of Mum come up, nowadays I allow myself to experience them, knowing that doing anything else is like trying to deny how much I care. Here are some practical ways that meditation can make this easier.

2. Breathe

When emotions come up, it’s natural to tense up and hold your breath. But that triggers your body’s sympathetic nervous system – your fight / flight / freeze response – firing off your stress hormones and feeding the painful emotions with negative thoughts.

The simple act of breathing, deeply and mindfully, can reset this cascade of hormones, giving you access to more neutral thoughts and emotions, allowing the grief to pass on through. When you know how to go straight through the middle and come out the other side, you no longer have to avoid; to pretend; to white-wash.

If you’re not sure how to do this, there’s a guided meditation that takes you through it here. I will be using exactly this technique to get grounded and let go of those emotions, as we go through Christmas this year.

3. Choose

The real work in handling grief at Christmas comes before the big day. The more you can work with techniques such as mindfulness or gratitude to retrain your mind to think thoughts that make you feel good, on a day-to-day basis, the easier it is to bounce back from difficult emotions.

Keep a gratitude journal or building up a daily mindfulness practice can pay back every day for the rest of your life.

And I have been doing this by turning painful memories round. I allow myself to experience them – for example, the fact that I won’t ever see Mum’s Christmas tree again – and then I will turn them into gratitude: “I am grateful that I had so many years of seeing how much Mum

Accept - Breathe - Choose - a 3-step strategy for handing grief at Christmas.Click To Tweet

I hope these three strategies help you this Christmas. Let me know if you have any tips of your own, via the comments.

And, above all, if you find the festive season difficult, please make sure you let people help you. Talk to them about how you’re feeling. You don’t have to do this on your own. Allowing them to walk by your side could be the greatest Christmas gift ever, for both of you.

With love,

Clare Josa’s new novel – You Take Yourself With You – has been described as ‘unputdownable’ by readers and is available in-store and online.

How To Do Something You Thought Was Impossible

Create

Have you got a secret dream that has spent too long on the back-burner?This has been a big week for me. I’ve done something I never thought I would ever, ever, ever do.

I published my first novel.

For 30 years I believed I couldn’t write a story, all because of a throw-away comment from a stressed-out teacher. For 13 years of motherhood, I had never told my children a ‘made up’ story, because of this. Despite publishing five non-fiction books, I didn’t consider myself an ‘author’, because I hadn’t published a novel.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what happens when a sticky belief gets in the way.

Have you had that experience? Where you resist doing something that’s really important to you, maybe even saying ‘no’ when your heart is screaming ‘yes’, because there’s a bit of you inside that is scared, that believes you can’t do it, even if your logical brain knows you can?

I regularly see articles from coaches and psychologists telling us just to ‘think different thoughts’ or ‘change those beliefs’ or ‘use your logic’ and all will be well. But have you noticed that they don’t tell you ‘how’? That’s because you can’t think your way out of a negative, limiting belief. As Einstein said:

You can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

And here’s the thing: after 17+ years of mentoring passionate world-changers, I have seen time and again that their previous efforts to deal with their blocks by pretending they’re not there, or trying to flip a belief from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I can’, just makes things worse. See page 146 of Dare To Dream Bigger (search: Why ‘Can’ Is Not The Opposite Of ‘Can’t’ , if you’ve got the Kindle version) for how-to on turning this one around.

It sets up a cycle of inner conflict that means we’re rejecting part of ourselves. We’re pretending. We’re white-washing. And it triggers the ‘backfire effect’, where the tiny bit of you that really, really believes that crazy limiting belief digs its heels in and defends that belief to the end. It gets hard-wired into your neurology (the Reticular Activating System and your synapses), so you’ll spot even more reasons why that belief is correct and your behaviour will reflect that inner truth.

You can’t just flip that around. It’s one of the reasons why positive thinking often doesn’t work.

[Tweet “There’s more to achieving impossible dreams that just #positivethinking. #daretodreambigger #youtakeyourselfwithyou”]

It’s why I don’t teach that kind of ‘sticky plaster’ in the work I do, as you’ll know if you’ve read Dare To Dream Bigger!

So how did I get stuck for thirty years, not doing something I was hungry to do, because of that “I can’t write stories” belief?

Because I distracted myself with being too busy with everything else to admit that belief even existed. I followed other projects and pretended I was ok with not doing something I had wanted to do since I was six. I grew up writing stories every summer and single-handedly keeping our local library in business. For 29 1/2 years, pretending I was ok with not writing stories worked – kinda. Until the day came when the quiet voice inside of me started to turn into a lion’s roar, waking me up at 3am, telling me I needed to write novels.

I was so scared!

I had to finally deal with that limiting belief, with those fear-stories and self-doubts. And to make that happen, I did something I have never done before.

It got me clearing out that limiting belief – and all the decades of behaviours and supporting beliefs that had been its virtual cheerleaders. And it worked so well that I was able to publish You Take Yourself With You this week, without feeling scared. To give you a comparison, as I recently told Tim Lewis in his Begin Self-Publishing podcast, Imposter Syndrome was shouting so loudly last year that the night before Dare To Dream Bigger was due at the printer, I deleted the manuscript!

I didn’t have any of that kind of inner drama this time. And, despite the huge stretch for me as a writer, I and my family never doubted that You Take Yourself With You would get published.

I would LOVE you to have that kind of certainty about your dreams.

Do you have a secret dream that has been on the back-burner for far too long? Is there something you wish you could do or create that you have been putting off?

Could 2018 be your year?

I want to teach you HOW I cleared out that block, so you can do it for your dreams, too.

I’d like to invite you to the virtual launch party for You Take Yourself With You.

On December 14th – at a computer of your choice – I’m going to be spilling the beans on how I cleared out a 30-year-old belief that I couldn’t write a story, so that I:

drafted seven novels in the next two days
wrote two of them over the summer
published the first this week – just 4 1/2 months later physical copies are in bookstores and online!

I want to share with you the exact, step by step how-to I used to shift that sticky block, so you can do it with whatever your dreams are, too.

I’m also going to give you my visualisation process for fast-tracking your way towards that dream.

Hint: this process even works if you’re like me and don’t think in pictures – and just nod politely when someone tells you to visualise!

Q: Which dream would you LOVE to make come true in 2018?

How would it feel to be able to clear out the blocks that have kept you from taking massive action on that dream? Here’s how to join me for this life-changing event:

https://www.clarejosa.com/reach-dreams-2018/

I can’t wait to share it with you!