Fun :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Richard Branson, London Marathon, pic by Nick J. Webb

Looking today for some inspiration for a blog post, I decided to take a dive into the archives (a standard tip as one of the ways to deal with blogger’s block).

I noticed that back in October 2004 I had posted here about some key principles to which Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is said to have attributed the brand’s success – Virgin’s “brand values”. The book Business the Richard Branson Way: 10 Secrets of the World’s Greatest Brand Builder, by Des Dearborn.

The principles were:

value for money
quality
reliability
innovation
an indefinable, but nonetheless palpable, sense of fun

So I was thinking, how would a home based business go, applying those principles or taking them as a model set of brand values?

I can’t imagine anyone arguing seriously against the first three: value for money, quality and reliability. So surely we can take them as read.

I’m personally ok with innovation in any business context, including for professionals working from home. For example in my coaching business I am always keen to learn about ways I can coach more effectively from a distance – e.g. I love Skype for that, both the audio and video versions.

Sense of fun as a brand value

But what I found really interesting to be reminded about was the Branson/Virgin commitment to fun.

Then I realized I am reminded of it whenever I get on a Virgin flight, which I do fairly frequently. The crew always seem to have a genuine sense of fun, while at the same time having an air of knowing what they are doing professionally, just as much as I see with crew on planes of their competitors.

And by the way, now that I think of it, I wonder why the crew on the competitor planes don’t give any sense that they are having fun, any sense that they might be feeling – if I can put it this way – that right now the best thing they could be doing in the whole world is helping to make my flight and that of a crowd of others on the plane as comfortable, safe and enjoyable as it could be. As the Virgin crews seem to be able to do.

My sense is that it’s that kind of “sense of fun” the adventure-loving, knighted tycoon Branson means as one of the key Virgin values.

So back to the professionals working from home.

I’m trying to think whether having and displaying a sense of fun (indefinable, but nonetheless palpable) is part of how I do business now.

I certainly feel it is. I know I enjoy the coaching process, including when it is dealing with quite serious business issues. I enjoy helping companies develop and implement their social media strategies. In that sense I have a sense of fun about what I do. And I enjoy continually learning more about coaching and social media and sharing what I learn.

I quite like the idea of elevating the sense of fun I *feel* in doing business to being a key brand value. After all, if I’m not having fun doing business and letting that show, I believe I’m going to have a difficult time trying to help clients look to having a sense of fun in their business – however indefinable, but nonetheless palpable that might be.

What do you feel about all that.?

Is a sense of fun a useful, appropriate value for a business?

Is there anything about working from home that makes it particularly appropriate – or inappropriate?

Can you share an example of how having and displaying a sense of fun might help (or has helped) your business or a business you know about?

Or the obverse – how it has been present but has not served your business, or someone else’s, well?

If you’re experiencing blogger’s block, chances are your blogging has stopped being fun.

Whether your first blog post was great fun or a serious, perhaps gut-wrenching challenge – not everyone loves writing – if you kept going for more than a month or two you presumably were getting some joy out of it, on some level.

More so if you have been blogging for years.

Is there still joy for you in blogging?

Is it perhaps the most enjoyable thing you do every day, or one of the most enjoyable?

Or is it, at least sometimes, a chore and something from which you can very easily be distracted?

And if you’re someone who hasn’t started blogging yet, do you wonder whether you could enjoy the process, or would it be just hard slog?

I’m talking of course about business blogging. For someone blogging as a hobby, the presumption would be that he or she is having fun.

Even with business blogging, I believe there are some people for whom their blogging is more fun than, say, eating, or chatting with friends.

But for many of us, myself included, it is some sort of mixture of joy and dutiful work, with the joy sometimes anticipated but not immediately evident.

No different, fundamentally, from our experience of business – something that at times can flow effortlessly and be quite pleasurable, even joyful and that at times can be seriously challenging, perhaps stressful and even make us wonder why we were so dumb as to give up that perfectly good job we had, and the car, and the office, etc etc.

(At which times we forget, conveniently, the intra-office politics, the commute, the lousy coffee… in short, all the reasons we chucked that way of life for this work at home caper.)

With blogging, what I find as with other business-related activities, is that once I get going I almost always enjoy the process and certainly enjoy completing various projects, including blog posts.

So for me the trick is to get going. That means in turn that I need to set up systems and processes that take the stress out of getting going. And in the course of writing this post I remembered I had written about this before. I did a quick search on the archives of this blog and found a post from way back in 2005, Blogger’s Block Zapped Thanks to a Well-Travelled Meme. The meme in question is a good one: I’m planning to challenge myself and use in the next few days – watch this space.

I recommend you also check out Grant Griffiths’ excellent post on the subject: Writer’s Block – It’s all about the cows. Grant thinks blogging should be fun, too. Yes, even (especially?) business blogging.

What really gives me joy with blogging is getting feedback that a particular post has helped someone understand something better or find something they were looking for. But to get to that I have to first do the post, which means getting started…

Do you have any tricks of the trade to share, for beating blogger’s block?