Just the other day I got a brilliant opportunity to go to a seminar entitled ‘How to be an Entrepreneur.' Well being in the self employed, online, network marketing, entrepreneur style business myself, I have to say it sounded right up my street and I absolutely jumped at the chance.

‘Great,' I thought, ‘here's a chance to meet with and learn from lots of like minded people and develop on my skills and knowledge.'

So imagine how disappointed I felt when one of the first people I encountered was coming form a very different direction.

You see during the break a group had formed and started to chat openly about their business goals and ideas. One of the ladies in the group went on to describe her idea for a coaching business for individuals involved in the school system.

Well, education being a big talking point in any society I thought this was a great idea and proceeded to ask her more about it and that's when the cracks started to show.

This lady had had her idea for some time but had never done anything about it and then one day she happened across a website that designed and hosted free websites so seeing her opportunity present itself she hurried to the ‘Sign me up' button and was off.

Being new to the world of technology it's quite understandable that this would seem like a good option and it's always commendable to finally take the bull by the horns.

It had been about a month since this lady (who we will call Sarah) had designed her site and she was planning to launch her business in 2 weeks time.

"But Denise," Sarah said "the problem is I don't know what to do to get my site to appear on the listings in the search engines, how do I make it come up when people type my business name?"

Another reasonable question I thought, a lot of people have no idea how SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) works but that does not mean that they can not run a successful business. So wanting to help Sarah get the most out of the day I began to talk her through everything I knew that could help her to get a good listing with various search engines.

"Yeah," replied Sarah "the thing is though Denise, that I saw all that and there just seemed to be so much information to read that I didn't know where to start and to be honest I just want it to be done, I can't be bothered with all that reading, it takes too long."

Having done some coaching myself in the past it took all my professionalism not to scream out at this woman "Well if you can't be bothered to help yourself what the heck do you want me to do?"

But I guess the answer was that she wanted me to do it for her.

Some people want it all: the cars; the clothes; the money; the big beach house and 6 holidays a year. And they figure they can get it all if someone will just come along and fix it for them.

Well, I am sorry to be the bubble buster but I'm afraid that life just doesn't work like that.

Look at the list of excuses that Sarah gave for not doing the most basic of tasks to help her business:

‘There's so much information'
‘I don't know where to start'
‘I just want it to be done'
‘I can't be bothered with all the reading'

The truth of the matter is that setting up in business for yourself is hard work. It will be long hours and late nights, there will be times when you just wish that someone else would do it all fore you and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
But the rewards are also all yours. The goals that you are working towards will be all the better for persevering.

Sarah did not have the drive, the commitment or the self belief to truly dedicate herself fully to her project but if you do imagine where you could be a year from now and imagine whether or not Sarah would be there too.

Whether you tell yourself you can or you tell yourself you can't - you're always right.