Clearly the gloom and uncertainty created by global financial mismanagement are in large part to blame.  National bankruptcy and stagnation put jobs, businesses and tax take at risk, leaving governments and individuals alike wondering how to make ends meet.

But we cannot put all the blame on banks and politicians.  They have only done what many of us have done, albeit on a grander scale.  Remember when you “point the finger”, there are 3 fingers pointing back at yourself!

Governments and the public sector have spent too much.  That is the core problem – in Greece, in the US, in Britain … and in the average household.

They have treated themselves to affluence before they earned it.  They have borrowed money with no thought how they will cover the downside, see themselves through the (totally predictable 8 yearly) downturns or repay it.

So have we.

Charlie Kennedy fired the warning shot in 2004 when private UK debt topped £1 trillion.  Nobody listened.

What causes stress and worse is not the prospect of losing your job, it’s not having a plan for how you will pay the bills for 6 – 12 months after you lose your job, being unrecoverably in debt having blown the rainy day fund on extravagant holidays and unsustainable mortgages.

We can hardly blame Greece, RBS or even the worst culprits America, when we have been just as irresponsible.

Three further thoughts on this.  “Stress” is the wrong word.  Stress is good.  Stress puts the floppy rubber band to work – something that is long overdue in the public sector.  But when you overstretch the rubber, it snaps.  That’s Di-stress.  And it’s caused by living beyond your means.

Secondly, there are clearly many causes of distress.  CIPD cites work overload and “bad” bosses as well as the fear of redundancy.  But money worries and losing control of your debt and spending addiction aggravate these situations.  If you have some financial slack, you are more likely to insist that your workload is manageable, to part company with a louse.

Finally, perhaps with new awareness of the harsh economic realities we will be able to abandon all the fatuous unproductive procedural nonsense, robospeak and email overload that has built up over the last 20 years.

1. Don’t be woolly! Stick ruthlessly to your definition of success.

2. Be enthusiastic. It’s catching.

3. Do the sums. Find 10 clients who’ll pay you to enjoy yourself.

4. Use your ears. The ratio of ears to mouths is significant!

5. Think self-employed. The dependency culture is dead.

6. Scare yourself! Life is not a rehearsal.

7. Take your medicine. You have just enrolled on a lifelong personal growth programme.

8. Be a go-giver. It’s your main promotional strategy.

9. Look good! Misery loves company!

10. Vision first. Only do what activates your vision.

So you’re thinking of going freelance! Where do you start? Not with a close study of the tax implications that’s for sure. And not with what sort of car you need either! Start with YOU. Get you into the right “space” – inspired yet realistic, simply organised, justifiably confident but without a trace of arrogance.

You are definitely not alone. Millions, even the “winners”, are disillusioned with the rat-race. They’re opting for quality rather than just quantity – “Life Shift”.

Andrew Ferguson has supported some 10000 “Life Shifters” through this process since he founded The Breakthrough Network in 1988. Here he summarises very briefly the key moves to make when you decide to enhance your career and your life.

1. Don’t be woolly! Life begins with vision and values. Decide what matters most to you. Define what you mean by success. Stop trying to achieve someone else’s definition. Remove money from the equation by asking yourself “What’s the money for?” That is the vision. The main reason people’s lives are not rewarding is that their vision is not clear, is not their own or is constrained by others’ limitations.
What’s the why in your life?

2. Be enthusiastic. And find others who are even more inspired and enthusiastic about your vision than you are. Fulfilment arrives when you connect with your whole self and develop sensitivity to your environment. Unrealistic expectations and addictive levels of consumption distract you from this, but a vision that gives you joy attracts money and people to you. It is difficult to say No to someone who has Yes written all over them!
So what will make your heart sing and light up your life?

3. Do the sums. Review and severely prune your costs and long-term commitments. Divide your annual needs by 40 (not 52) to tell you what you need to earn per week. Then work out how many people giving you say £10 or £25 fulfils this target. It will probably be less than 0.1% of your local market. So 99.9% of them can hate it and you’re still in clover!
Who are the next 10 people who’ll help you ?

4. Use your ears. Listen…to the market out there and your “inner wisdom”, especially the bits you don’t want to hear. Money too is a good feedback mechanism. When it’s apparently not working, it’s giving you information. Maybe your goals are unrealistic or you need to move on; maybe there’s a block in your behaviour or attitude. That’s your next challenge!
What are you most reluctant to hear? What are you most reluctant to let go? That’s what’s stopping you! Let it go!

5. Think self-employed. Nobody else will find you work or develop your talents. It’s entirely up to you. So you need to make yourself irresistible! Develop excellence in 3 portable skills that are congruent with your vision. Become “The only…something”, and build alliances with other specialists. Self-employed people feed each other with work.
What are your 3 excellences?

6. Scare yourself! Exit the comfort zone and take risks. We all back-slide, back to our old addictions. The biggest risk is to give up your addictions – to stress, fame, money, security, pride.
What do you suspect you need to stop doing? When are you going to? Why not now?!

7. Take your medicine. When all’s going well, anyone can do this. To stay afloat long-term though, you need to respond positively to the rough as well as the smooth. For every stage of life there are distractions and pitfalls to avoid, attachments to release and lessons to learn. Working for yourself is a Personal Development Workshop 365 days a year! Overall you have to avoid being negative and over-busy and learn to put your true self out there.
What’s the lesson you keep refusing to learn?

8. Be a go-giver. Offer yourself. Give your time. Support others and their visions and causes. Put yourself about helpfully. Join things. But beware of becoming a doormat martyr. You can do little for those who have not taken charge of their lives or whose approach to life conflicts with where you’re taking yours. Your Yes only has value if you know how to say No. At the same time equip your allies and invite everyone on board (cf 3 above).
Who will receive what from you next?

9. Look good! When you feel good inside, it shows outside. And it’s far more effective than glitz and facade. Glow! The key to success is joy. Aim to be more joyful every day. Notice what makes you joyful and repeat it. Notice what makes you miserable and delete it.
When do you feel best about you? Why not feel like that all the time?

10. Vision first. Vision is the touchstone: it defines what your priorities are and what you do first from now on. For the next 12 hours you are not to do anything that is not a top priority step towards your vision! LifeShift can take time, so the sooner you start the better. Make a plan and activate it immediately. Repeat these 10 tasks until your vision shines out.
Are you prepared to invest 12 hours in you? Or don’t you deserve a life?

The lesson of life is to discover yourself. It takes a whole life to do this.
The lesson of work and business is also that we discover ourselves.
Work is the place we each create in order to learn and grow.

Join us for The Kitchen Table on September 8 or 21 to nail down your next Life Shift steps.

• The Life Shift Books by Andrew Ferguson are the definitive reference book on rebalancing work and life.  They expand on these brief notes to help you create a life that works … and work that has life in it.
• www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net also helps by setting up connections with other Life Shifters and providing a steady stream of new ideas and inspirations.
• Andrew Ferguson is also available for personal Life Shift coaching/counselling at very affordable rates, face to face or over the phone.

© Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson: Life and Business Relaunch Coach                      t: 020 7473 5544

MA Oxon, Chartered Marketer, FCIM, FIC

SFEDI accredited and award-winning Business Advisor

Breakthrough Centre, 29 Adine Road, London E13 8LL

www.LifeShift.co.uk                                               e: andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk  www.TheKitchenTable.CO                                 www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net

Andrew Ferguson’s Life Shift Books provide in-depth explanation of the issues each phase of life presents – visit www.LifeShift.co.uk for books and more.  He is also available for 121 Coach/Counselling and small group work round www.TheKitchenTable.CO  

Real Life Work Balance is a strategy for life.  It is person-centred, and makes no concessions to the corporate collective.  Individuals empower themselves to apply every dimension of themselves in the life-long search for authenticity and their own personal integrity.

We harness Creative Imagination to discover who we are and who we could become, and as we grow through the phases of life we keep uncovering new dimensions of what it is to be human.  Music and the Arts are the ideal forum for this, but we can all be artists of our own lives in our own way – thinking like a jazzman, exploring new perspectives, expressing our take on life.

Our Intuitive Self acts as a lightning conductor connecting us to the awesome, to the natural world, to awareness of our  journey and to the genuine needs of humanity and the planet.

Work then becomes, as I described it 25 years ago, “a place we each create in order to learn and grow” and work our Authority.  The more we let go of unhealthy attachments and addictive materialistic behaviours, the more likely we are to find our real needs met … but only of course if we apply ourselves enthusiastically and work our Will.  This takes an open heart, a willingness to trust, risk and be vulnerable, to put ourselves out in the world and take what it throws at us – to learn and grow.

Real Life Work Balance starts therefore with a visionary strategy for your own personal evolution and self-empowerment.  Without this you have very little to contribute … at work or at home. Without this there is no ‘balance’; there is just a diminishing of the human being, reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator – the epsilon in Huxley’s Brave New World.  No wonder 70% of the workforce have psychologically left. 

The 3 building blocks

The Mental faculty has to be kept in perspective – thinking things through, creating simple solutions, giving intelligent feedback, philosophising, applying the mind are all good; but analysis paralysis, long-winded bureaucracy and clever, clever sophistry take us away from life not towards it. 

Far more important is the ability to be emotionally present to yourself and others, to have care in the process; this is the basis for all our relationships. You don’t think your way to emotional intelligence, you feel it.

The Emotional Self has been treated with undisguised contempt for many years, but this is changing as business creates a workplace that is life-enhancing and fulfilling.

Real emotional intelligence is experienced and developed through feeling, not thinking.  We must enter the light and the shadow of feeling, and release all the the stifled energy locked up there.  We must in particular practise being joyful, but also face and come to terms with our anger, shame, guilt and sadness.  Only then can we get out of our way enough to hear anybody else.

Finally Work Life Balance requires we take care of our physical selves – health, nutrition, exercise and physical activity – working with the hands.  Stress builds up when we lose touch with our physical selves; we deprive ourselves of an outlet for tension and suffer adrenalin overload.  The only cure for stress is physical activity.

When you colonise all these 7 human energies, you take your whole self to work.  You can do this on your own, but to restore your own Life Work Balance, it seriously helps to surround yourself with others who have made this their priority.

Isn’t it time you joined the world you want to live in?

 (based on an article originally written October 2003)

© Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson: Freelance Small Business Specialist                      t: 020 7473 5544

MA Oxon, Chartered Marketer, FRSA, FCIM, FIBC

SFEDI accredited and award-winning Business Advisor

Breakthrough Centre, 29 Adine Road, London E13 8LL

www.LifeShift.co.uk                                               e: andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk  www.TheKitchenTable.CO                                 www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net

Andrew Ferguson’s Life Shift Books provide in-depth explanation of the issues each phase of life presents – visit www.LifeShift.co.uk for books and more.  He is also available for 121 Coach/Counselling and small group work round www.TheKitchenTable.Co  

 99.9% of your “market” couldn’t care less.  The good news is that the other 0.01% can make you rich.

It’s not necessarily that easy to profile your market, but start by noticing who is enthusiastic about what you do and heartily appreciates you.  They will be people who are looking for the outcome you deliver as their highest priority.

Think about the situation somebody would need to be in, in order to really need you and your outcome.  That’s your market.

ACTION:  make certain the people you’re reaching out to are your enthusiasts.

© Andrew Ferguson   http://bit.ly /718KDH 

Andrew Ferguson is a Chartered Marketer specialising in responsible enterprise for 30 years.
His main website is www.LifeShift.co.uk for details of books and support services.

Think about all the relationships you have – with friends, family, partners, work colleagues, customers and suppliers, mentors, role-models and people you don’t even know personally.  Which of them make you greater?  Which of them support your growth, your journey?  Those are the “magnificent” relationships, where both of you are enhanced.

All you need to bring to relationship is you, your whole imperfect self and the commitment to self-discovery and growth – the growth of yourself and those around you.  Too often relationship is seen as a hiding-place, somewhere to run where someone else will be given the responsibility for sorting your life out.  Yet others can only help if you’re prepared to help yourself.

Relationship starts with self-reliance – not expecting someone else to make you whole.  When two “half-people” meet and try to form a whole something, all you have is co-dependency – and dependency destroys relationship.  Neither party grows; both are diminished.

It helps to understand how you get to feel good about you – your motivation; and to recognise that others may have other ways of getting there.  One of the biggest mistakes we make is to assume that everyone else approaches life the same way we do.  The helpful person is mystified to be perceived as an interfering nuisance; the ambitious leader can feel frustrated by their team and by the quiet professionals who clean up so efficiently behind them.  We try and force people to operate according to our own value and reward systems, and this creates conflict.

Each of us has a sequence of strategies for dealing with conflict, and when those strategies clash, the conflict is further deepened.  Take the trouble to find out how this works, and you will stop ploughing all your relationships into the mud.

Magnificent relationships survive, even thrive on conflict, troubles, the sticky spells and setbacks.

This is the basis for good relationships with customers, for fully effective team-building, for a happier home and social life.

Join us for the Annual www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net Gathering in London: May 26 2011, and create some magnificent relationships.

© Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson: Life and Business Relaunch Coach                      t: 020 7473 5544

MA Oxon, Chartered Marketer, FRSA, FCIM, FIC

SFEDI accredited and award-winning Business Advisor

Breakthrough Centre, 29 Adine Road, London E13 8LL

www.LifeShift.co.uk                                               e: andrew@thewiseoldowl.co.uk  www.TheKitchenTable.CO                                 www.BreakthroughNetwork.

Andrew Ferguson’s Life Shift Books provide in-depth explanation of the issues each phase of life presents – visit www.LifeShift.co.uk for books and more.  He is also available for 121 Coach/ Counselling and small group work round www.TheKitchenTable.CO

- Be Discriminating

- Be Active

- Be Helpful

- Be Visible

- Be Positive

But before I expand on that, here’s your Invitation to our Annual Gathering on May 26 in East London.  e: andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk for details.  It’s only £15 inc supper and drinks, and if you’re not already a member of the fabulous www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net your fee includes free Life Membership (worth £40!).

Be Discriminating

Select a website that reflects your values and special interests.  Common values bind and define a community which is the basis for meaningful communication.  For instance, www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net  is the only online meeting-place for self-employed enterprise and businesses with a social, green, responsible, holistic remit. 

The perfect Business Social Networking Website supports its members to achieve their purpose in life and work – to make a life, not just a living.  It sees its role as facilitating mutually productive relationships between people.

You can plod round articles, websites and blogs for ever, but the answer to any question you have is a person, and a good networking website makes it easy for you to find that Person through its open, searchable Directory and a clutter-free Forum.  www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net is probably unique in making this direct contact easy. 

Breakthrough Network has always been dedicated to relieving the isolation of self-employment and making connections between like-minded people … whether through events and courses, bulletins, the uniquely indexed paper directory or personal interaction.  Our tag-line right from the start was “Creating a forum to support those taking charge of their lives through self-employment and other personal growth routes”; this is just a super new way of doing that.

Since 1988, the technology has changed dramatically.  We haven’t followed it slavishly, but have been quite selective and waited until a particular piece of technology actually works better than what went before.  The Forum element of websites now comes in this category (once the rubbish has been weeded out).  It is more democratic than blogs, which tend to be guru- or ego-centred, and a little one-way.  We are using the technology to connect people, not separate them, so you can support each other through expertise, trading and alliances.

Our Forum is the main meeting place for members, much as the Breakthrough building was in the early days – uniquely simple and sophisticated, intelligent and seriously useful.  We have a fabulous team of people already, and will keep expanding this over time.  I certainly see myself diverting most of my networking and connecting through this medium, and have set it up so it is breathtakingly easy for everyone else to do the same.

We’ve been connecting enterprising people like you for mutual support for 20 years, so we know a bit about what makes this sort of interaction work. 

Now we can meet every day!  We can connect with the buzz – what’s current and how others are responding and benefitting.  We can exchange insight and expertise, make new connections and experience again the sense of community we had all those years ago in Breakthrough Centre, Shepherd’s Bush.

Any problems, including difficulty getting hold of the person you want, email andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk or call GB (0)20 7473 5544 and I’ll help you make the connection.  What other social networking site offers that.

Be Active

Social networking offers a non-intrusive medium for responsible marketing.  It’s a great, low-cost way of starting to connect with potential customers for your business.

This has nothing to do with the sort of unsolicited, unqualified pitching other websites seem to encourage.  I call that abuse.  The right way is to be active and visible in a website’s Forum, so potential clients and allies keep being reminded of you.  Don’t overdo it, but just signing up will achieve very little. 

I make a point of engaging with forums/websites one day a week, and I have one basic message I’m communicating each week, which I adapt to each site, as well as responding to other posts, which is of course far more important.

Personally I prefer sites with an interactive Forum – twitter, facebook … and of course www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net !  Marketing works on repetition, and the advantage such media have is that they repeat your message to people who are viewing the site from choice.

Actively seek answers too.  The Forum is the core of the website.  It is where you raise questions you want other members to help you with, seek connections and alliances, float ideas/topics you’d like to explore with other members and share useful topical information on enterprise themes … for instance where the market’s going, what’s changing, what’s been superceded.

The fundamental principle is that “The Answer to Your Questions is a PERSON!”  If you’ve tried using other forums and blogs, you’ll perhaps have found that the responses you get are rather unsatisfactory.  Whether because the expertise isn’t there, or because you can’t be certain of the provenance of the respondent, or because the responses reflect someone else’s personal experience rather than your own situation, or because of misunderstandings, over-enthusiastic selling or poor communication … you can be left feeling underwhelmed.

www.breakthroughnetwork.net does it differently.

You can sometimes find factual answers on the web, but only the most basic questions have a simple factual answer.  The answer to most questions depends on your circumstances, your values and preferences.   Facts as such don’t get you very far – but reliable experience relevant to your situation gets you a very long way indeed.

To tap this experience you need a person who’s been there before and knows their way around.  www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net has nearly 600 experts with your taste in responsible person-centred enterprise.  You can ask your question in the Forum and get mature, intelligent responses.  AND you can search the Directory to find just the right person to contact DIRECT (no messing about with traffic diversions).

Ask for the information you need in the Forum and you won’t need to email me, because I will see it and answer you there.  It will only work for you if you’re active there.

Be Helpful

The one key word in networking is ‘Give’.  This is what works – at best giving without any thought of benefit, giving unconditionally, to be helpful.

With www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net we have created a community where members give to each other, link up for mutual benefit and generously share insight, experience, expertise and seriously useful answers.

If you take more than you give, you create a referral-free zone around yourself.  Don’t be surprised if this doesn’t generate connections.

Being helpful is far more likely to make a good impression and make the recipient feel like deepening the relationship.  This is how joint ventures happen too

Be Visible

Giving and supporting others is the best way to enhance your visibility within the network.  You don’t want to get known for being a self-centred nuisance.

I cannot overemphasise how important it is to be seen every week making yourself useful and interesting in any online websites you’re using.  Ask good questions.  Post replies and valuable insights into current topics and issues (but not the sort of drivel that passes for intelligent commentary on most of facebook!) 

Make certain you’re seen in the Forum.  Share your expertise.  Be helpful.  Respond thoughtfully to questions and topics.  Come back regularly for the Buzz.

When you respond to a question, you don’t just connect with the questioner.  Everyone else sees what you’re saying, and somewhere a head starts nodding approval.  The more you appear in the Forum, and the more sense you make there, the higher your visibility.

You will benefit yourself, by feeling more a part of the community; others will benefit from your expertise; and you are starting, building and refreshing masses of relationships without even realising it.

How can we help if you stay buried under your duvet?!  Tell us what you’re looking for.  “The Answer to Your Questions is a PERSON!”  and the Forum is where you’ll find the PERSON who can help you find the answers that will work for you.  You just click on their name and there they are!   And there you are too, as visible as we can make you.

It’s all breathtakingly simple, transparent and user-friendly (no really!), with a high quality of the sort of socially responsible, good-hearted people Breakthrough has always attracted.

Be easy to find.  To ensure you and your particular skills can be found, take 5 minutes now to add a few key words and contact details to your Profile in the Directory.  There’s no confusing muddle here, so it really is quick to get to your Profile and then back to the Forum.

Much of the activity in www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net happens in the Members Directory.  So it’s crucial your Profile tells us what you have to offer and how to contact you.

I know for instance that Rachael Ross will help me organise myself to work from home; that Julian Childs is a sales and marketing consultant with a specialism in careers coaching for certain specific groups; that Clarissa Stoneham is the person to call if I find myself involved with young offenders seeking work.  I know this because their Profiles are fully completed, and each has posted a telephone number where I can contact them direct.  They have also used other elements of the network to make themselves more visible … and here they are again!

At the very least enter your “Services Offered”, so it’s easy for us all to find you through a Search.  Include a telephone number and ideally an email address, so it’s also easy for other members to contact you.

Expand your entry in “Description of Services” with phrases like Chocolate Manufacturing, Marketing & Business Development, Therapist, Adviser or Portrait Artist & Cartoonist – rich words that people might search for.

Members can only contact you if you at least enter a telephone number (still the most effective medium for dialogue) and ideally an email address.  Then we can all direct other people to you, and it’s much easier to include you.  Because of the nominal entry fee, it is much safer to reveal details here than on unpatrolled websites.

While you’re on the site, say hello and give us some feedback.

There is room for you to show up to 3 URLs, and promote the portfolio career or varied personas many of us have.  And it is easy to insert a photo or distinctive picture to represent you.  Include your country and nearest big town in your profile, so those who want to organise local gatherings can find you.  You can select what data you want to reveal about yourself, so we can look you up when you raise or answer a question, and make contact direct … and so can you!

The answer to your questions is a PERSON, so members will often go straight to the person. It is dead easy to Search the Directory, select from the profiles that come up and make contact direct.  This way you can find like-minded suppliers and allies, and get gently acquainted before you make any expensive, irrevocable or awkward commitments … and others can make contact with you for the supply of your services, skills and experience. 

Suppose you’re looking for someone to help you with your software, a Chinese retail expert, an accountant in Rome, a wine shop in LA, a holiday in Greece or insider info on the art market.  The uniquely brilliant Search tool takes you straight to the word you’ve searched on, wherever it appears in the Network Directory; so forget those ghastly Search tools on the property websites, and those endless lists and categories that never quite have the phrase you want, ours is a doddle!  Search the Directory using “Any of my keywords” or get a closer fit with “Exact Phrase”.

You can also find people whose surname you’ve forgotten, or that Adonis who lives in Edinburgh or does gardening, but his whole name escapes you.

www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net is completely unique in its searchability and unlike other Forum/blog/network sites our technology does not get in the way of the connections.

Two more final ways to raise your visibility.  Connect with the site organiser (for www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net that’s Andrew Ferguson e: andrew.ferguson@LifeShift.co.uk).  I am far more likely to remember you when a query comes up.  The other way to connect is to write one or more of our eMags.  The One Minute eMag is another Breakthrough first -  no-one has time for any more than 60 seconds online; and as a result our eMag gets read.  And if you help me deliver the weekly eMag I will never forget you!

Be Positive

Communicate Positively.  We will take a stand against materialism, negativity and denial in the interactions on this Forum, and discourage trivial gossip and boring self-promotion.

Positive Communication goes beyond this.  You need to stick with the initial response you get, follow through and help them help you.   Answers on other Forums are inadequate because no question worth its salt can be answered in a few words of type … with no account taken of personal situations and preferences.  Even the classic “What’s the current rate of VAT?” can’t be answered intelligently without more background.

The revolutionary idea of this site is that through the initial responses you get to the queries and issues you raise in our Online Forum, you will find the right person for a proper dialogue … beyond the Internet shorthand.

For instance, you have a question –Network Members bring their years of experience and specialist skills to bear, (and you too become one of those members sharing your special knowledge).

From the initial responses you receive, you get an idea who might be worth following up for a conversation about your personal situation.  So you call them (or initially email to see if they’re up for a bit more interaction), and together you adapt their understanding to your situation.

Now, if your question is worth asking, then a good answer, specific to you, has a value too.  As a rough guide, we suggest that after an initial few minutes of generous networking time, a very nominal fee of something like £10 for 15 or 20 minutes is agreed between you.  The website takes nothing; the £10 is purely a valuing of the respondent’s expertise … and it might actually be a swap of some kind.

One of the really differentiating qualities of this website is the way it enables members to get gradually acquainted.  This is surely how we like to come alongside possible future collaborators and suppliers.  We like to see how they think and operate; we want to see how they work and deal with other people’s dilemmas.  Once you’ve seen a bit of this and built your confidence, you can make contact and have an initial conversation, with no expectation of anything more than an initial answer and maybe a tenner’s worth of their time.  This creates such a safe way of building relationships.

The relationship that develops beyond this is also up to you both to negotiate.  That 15 minutes might be all you need for now; or it might have given you both a chance to get acquainted and file each other away for future reference.  You might then refer each other on to others, include them in joint ventures, tell them about opportunities and generally add them to your personal network.  Or you might decide to team up as buddies for co-counselling or regular exchange, or enter into a consultancy or trading arrangement for income.

We have always uniquely operated at the point where Enterprise Development meets Personal Development … because we recognise that there are few if any business or career problems – just personal issues thinly disguised.  If in attempting to answer each others’ questions, we fail to take into account the personal dimension, we will fail to have anything very useful to contribute to the business issues raised.

Positively friendly.  This is not just a user-friendly website; the users are friendly too.  In fact all the members are your friends already; there’s no need to prove how cool you are by accumulating friends – friendship is a given.

You know how valuable it is going to Networking Events – the people you never knew existed, the ideas and opportunities that come at you out of the blue, the feel-good you get from being useful and helpful, the serendipity.

The Breakthrough Network Forum is a Networking Event that’s always open – 24/7.  Check in and see who’s there, what’s hot and what’s not, what you weren’t even aware you didn’t know about.  Get the local/topical buzz.  Find the person you need and the ideas you didn’t even know you needed … and let the right people find you too!  No booking, no travelling, no hanging about – it starts when you arrive.  The more you engage with it, the better you’ll find it works for you.  Make a date at least once a week with www.breakthroughnetwork.net!

Somehow at Networking Events, you often miss the one key person you needed to meet – here you can search the Directory Profiles, so there are no misses.                                    

Staying connected to great support is crucial at this time.  And it’s available on the Breakthrough Online Forum all the time.  Got a question, or fancy feedback on a project?  Looking for ideas or information?  Your hunt starts here.  Keep us posted too on things that have helped you and might help the rest of us.

Search Tip.  Get clever with www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net … because this is a really clever site!  Put a good keyword in your Forum questions; because one of the unique features of www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net  is that you can search for topics … and find old topics which on any other site will be buried in an unwieldy index … if you can find them at all!

Put a word like “market, money, tips, book” or even more specifically “flash, London, DVD” in your post and then search the forum.  Your post will come up, but also any other posts with the same keyword.                              

WHO you will find on this wonderful website

There is a whole lively community of holistic and responsible enterprises, professional advisers and coaches on www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net.

Here you will find other service providers with a passion for people, good will and integrity.  They will often be owner managers or social enterprises; and you will also find the familiar mix of “portfolio people”, expert hobby/lifestyle businesses and virtual home-workers.  Most members will tend to be or at least think self-employed, enjoying the independence of managing their own lives, but appreciating the value of belonging to a generous community of helpful like-minded people.  Small Within Big is what is really Beautiful.

The thing that most differentiates Breakthrough Network from LinkedIn, ecademy and facebook (its nearest competitors) is its members’ focus on working towards a personal positive purpose in life – socially and ecologically responsible, providing authentic leadership, joy and meaning.  They link up to form brilliant teams and we link these socially responsible entrepreneurs to the right support and challenge for them.

There’s 3 ways to join:

Use this link http://www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net/partner_signup.php to secure Life Membership for just £9.50 (this is a 75% discount on the full list price)

OR

Attend a www.TheKitchenTable.co event (the fee needs to be £9.50)

OR

Buy the full set of 5 LifeShift Books for £39.95 and we throw in FREE Life Membership of www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net

Tell all your friends to join, and they too will save £30 to be Life Members.  They get this benefit because of your commitment to networking and Breakthrough.

Rest assured the site is as safe and secure as we can make it.  Only those who make a small commitment and reveal themselves can even see the Forum.  But this is so effective at keeping out unsavoury elements we’re even losing genuine new members.  So please reassure those you refer that the membership is worth knowing and the Forum works better than any other, because they too can’t see it till they join!

© Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson: Life and Business Relaunch Coach                      t: 020 7473 5544

MA Oxon, Chartered Marketer, FRSA, FCIM, FIC

SFEDI accredited and award-winning Business Advisor

Breakthrough Centre, 29 Adine Road, London E13 8LL

www.LifeShift.co.uk                                               e: andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk  www.TheKitchenTable.CO                                 www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net

Andrew Ferguson

I think my worst blunder of all has been to believe that I or any of us have the faintest idea what’s going on!
We can’t see where we’re going – that’s the future and it hasn’t got here yet. We can’t see more than one step ahead of us – probably not even that.
In 1987 I was living at Findhorn in Scotland, and met Pat Rodegast who was presenting at a conference. Pat ‘channelled’ a character who called himself Emmanuel, and as I was agonising over what I should be doing, my future career progression and options, Emmanuel (or Pat – one was never quite clear which it was!) butted in “Andrew, what happens next is none of your business!”
Driving back to London, tired from celebrating the end of my 6 months in Findhorn, I bounced off the central reservation of the A84 and ‘woke up’. I limped back home … walked into Shepherds Bush and put down £100 deposit on The Breakthrough Centre.
It seemed right in that moment. Malcolm Stern looked it over, and it felt right. William Bloom looked it over, and it felt right.
And that’s all we have – a sense of what’s right … now.

My basic blunder has been not to have trusted that enough … not to have embraced the ‘unknowing’.
This brings me to my two other interconnected blunders – the things that interfere with this essential trust – time and money.
The Money Blunder
It is a mistake to confuse your personal identity with money and the stuff it buys – to believe money measures anything.
Buying an unnecessarily large house, as I did in 1983, was an investment in stuff (even if it did appreciate by 50%pa); and when you invest in stuff, it’s your soul that pays for it.
The real trick, which I missed then, is to get a free roof over your head as early as possible – then you only need £600/month and can invest all your time and money in your vision.
It is fiendishly difficult to fund a business, and premises, and an extravagant lifestyle all at the same time. And if you are beholden to money, or dragging shedloads of debt behind you, you make bad decisions. For instance:
I relied on government for 40% of my income – too many eggs in one basket.
I contorted my vision to fit a foreign agenda, in order to pay for the vision.
I’m not in this for the money … which is just as well! It still mystifies the new enthusiasts for Holistic, Social Enterprise that 89% of all entrepreneurs do it for non-financial reasons. You know the difference between an Entrepreneur and a 12” Pizza? Yup, a 12” Pizza can feed a family of 4!
The Timing Blunder
I have kept on with some things too long – anxious not to cut off the money supply, trying to push the river uphill. And I have scrapped other things too SOON, moved on too soon, changed names and identities.
One of the neat ways I found to scrap things was to try to control them – at one point I took fright and got above myself all at the same time, and put a limit on the number of Network members we’d take on – and membership fell away from that point.
This brings me back to the main blunder – I thought I was looking for a life … when I was IN it, right now, and it was, and is, something extraordinary. But I lacked the courage of my convictions, and always held back. Why? Lack of trust, not believing in it enough to take the risk of getting it wrong/looking an idiot; as John Cleese has said ‘The Englishman goes through life, desperately trying to avoid embarrassment’. But I also worried about how I would cope with a huge success!
Fear of Success is even more destructive than Fear of Failure – I had both!!
Why did I sometimes move on too soon? Well, I forgot about the time it can take for a spark to become a flame – typically 20-30 years, during which you face Rejection, Ridicule, Rabid Opposition and then Reluctant (back-handed) acceptance from a cynical, blinkered media.
They rubbished us in 1990, and though I found a publisher as a result, it made me even more wary of breaking ranks and putting my head above the parapet. Trying to control it, holding back, hiding meant not engaging with the media and promoting it aggressively. But at least I prepared the ground for all the later versions of Holistic Enterprise – Authentic Business, Alterpreneur, Work Life Balance (which totally misses the point, but hey, that’s politics); Zenployment.
If you can just hang on long enough, the media eventually promote your idea as if they always knew it was right – usually when it’s reimported from America. 10 years later it’s Labour party policy; 20 years later it’s Tory party policy.
Right now Green is all the rage (even if it means nuclear and wave power, which both have severe environmental implications), and Social Enterprise is seen as the solution to everything from Youth Crime to the crisis in the NHS (even though they’re not putting our money where their mouth is).
Green and Holistic Enterprise are indistinguishable – green, ethical, creative, artistic, spiritually aligned enterprise – and both have come of age … 25 years after we started it.
So trust me – you’re doing something extraordinary too. Don’t be put off by ridicule or cynicism – it’s just fear, envy, shame and mindless prejudice. Instead, listen to your intuition; it will tell you when to shift. And listen to money, because it does talk. Just don’t identify with it.
In short, don’t be bland … blunder!
As Anita Roddick says “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.”

© Andrew Ferguson

Andrew Ferguson: Life and Business Relaunch Coach                      t: 020 7473 5544

MA Oxon, Chartered Marketer, FCIM, FIC

SFEDI accredited and award-winning Business Advisor

Breakthrough Centre, 29 Adine Road, London E13 8LL

www.LifeShift.co.uk                                               e: andrew@thewiseoldowl.co.uk  www.TheKitchenTable.CO                                 www.BreakthroughNetwork.Net

Andrew Ferguson’s Life Shift Books provide in-depth explanation of the issues each phase of life presents – visit www.LifeShift.co.uk for books and more.  He is also available for 121 Coach/Counselling and small group work round www.TheKitchenTable.CO  

He noticed that most people on the Tube, in cafes and even walking along the pavement are locked into high-speed, apparently one-way conversations on their mobile phones.  At first it seems they are talking to themselves.  This led him to recognise that these days communication is 99% output and only 1% input or listening.

The thought flits in that it must be desperately frustrating or at least seriously inconvenient not to be able to have more than one conversation simultaneously.

What if you could speak to 12000 people all at once?  With his new iapp, the Ferguson Drivelbox, you automatically record your output, and it is streamed randomly to your address book.  An assortment of grunts, non-committal noises and standard phrases such as “I’m on the train”, “Wicked”, “Nevahh” and “You’re breaking up” are inserted in case a recipient of your message does actually respond.  So you can satisfy your craving to be constantly talking … even in your sleep.

Drivelbox is available from Dixons – £395.

Summary

1                    The number of MPs must overall reflect votes cast

2                    The failed welfare state must be replaced by a basic UK Citizen Income

3                    As it passes responsibility back to citizens, Government must reduce the tax take by 50%

4                    Strong green tax strategies and low carbon action by government are now long overdue

5                    UK has to take the lead in reversing the population explosion

6                    Prison has to be reinvented for the 90% it fails to rehabilitate, and made harsher for the hardcore

7                    Social Enterprise is ready to take the place of Government in most areas.

These are key issues for the Enterprise Sector because:

• Business in common with the population at large is crippled by the burden of Government
• Business, especially the 99% which are small businesses, cannot compete with welfare to create jobs
• Without a clear lead from Government, Business cannot afford to implement green, low carbon or social enterprise strategies
• Business cannot absorb even the population we have now; with 10 bn people there is just not enough to go round
• A mob of hungry, homeless, marginalised, unemployable people; unrepresentative pseudo-democracy; and a state in which 0.01% of the population is allowed to make everyone else’s life a misery; is a recipe for civil unrest which is not a context in which enterprise can flourish.

We also need less lawyers, career politicians and debating specialists; and more engineers, creatives and action-oriented leaders.

These changes create a society where everyone has every opportunity to contribute and responsibility is rewarded.

This Agenda has 7 main components: 

1                    Real Representation

2                    Citizen Income

3                    Small Government

4                    Sustainable Economics

5                    Population Management

6                    Prison Reform

7                    Social Enterprise

Real Representation

The number of MPs must overall reflect votes cast.

We have a pseudo-democracy.  No Government since 1945 has secured a popular mandate or represented more than 20% of the electorate.  As a result no Government has had the authority to make the radical changes which the massive shifts of the C20th demand.  Liberals and Greens command substantial support – variously 20 to 35% of votes cast and, if those votes counted, a great many more; 20% of the votes regularly gives Liberals 8% of MPs; 8% of votes has just delivered the Greens its first, one and only MP.  This is a travesty and a swindle.  In 1998 Blair shelved Roy Jenkins’ Commission proposals for AV+, in spite of accepting there was “a powerful case”.

Under the AV+ electoral system, proposed by the exhaustive Jenkins Commission in 1998, and accepted as “a well-argued and powerful case” by Prime Minister Blair, the number of MPs will more accurately reflect the proportion of votes cast.

Politicians are mystified why 40% don’t vote; they are in denial when told there is no point voting because most votes don’t count.  Many, even most, voters vote tactically to keep a party out, rather than to support what they really want. 

 AV+ overcomes all these injustices.  First Past the Post (FPTP) continues to elect 80% of MPs as now, and a really popular local Independent candidate can still thus get into parliament.  But 20% of MPs are selected from regional lists to top up the regional disparity.  As a result Tories in Scotland and the Northern Cities, Labour supporters in the Home Counties and Shires, Liberals and Greens everywhere have their views represented in Parliament and even Government.  There are then no more “wasted votes”, and turnout can be expected to rise sharply. 

The current system always delivers minority one party government with no mandate for its manifesto … until 2010 when the Tories had to accept a coalition with the Liberals, and some tempering of their policies.  The main objection to PR generally is that it tends to produce coalitions – those who make this objection prefer Governments supported by, at the very most, only 25% of the electorate, behaving as if they had won a mandate.  A tiny difference in votes can produce a completely unrepresentative landslide.  In North Africa and the Arab Spring countries, this absence of democracy has been a key cause of protests and rebellion.

If government is to recover any validity, and gain the authority to, if necessary, force through legislation on climate change and other elements of this Agenda, we must have proper Proportional Representation.  There are some very big radical changes that are now urgently needed.  It will take Governments that represent more than one narrow, partisan constituency to see them through, especially in the face of opposition from the treasury and civil service; smaller, simpler government means less power and smaller budgets for bureaucrats.

Politicians opposed to democracy are playing a cynical game over PR; to avoid the real debate (on AV+), they set up a completely irrelevant referendum on something else (AV); they then deployed an underhand campaign of lies and sophistry to scare the electorate.   The No Vote in the referendum on AV on May 5 2011 destroyed any prospect of democracy in Britain for a generation.

Politicians have been “debating” (ie filibustering) on this for 50 years, and most people are angry with the unaccountability and sleaze of politics.  Real representation could have saved the day.

Citizen Income (CI)

The failed welfare state must be replaced by a basic UK Citizen Income

The welfare state now costs us £180 bn pa, 25% of Government spend – that’s £8000 from every single household in the UK.   And this system has failed because it still leaves millions in poverty, demeaned, humiliated, discouraged … and criminalised if they attempt to secure a living.  It is the C21st’s answer to the Victorian workhouse and only ensures the perpetuation of an under-class.

The solution, a key feature of Liberal and Green manifestos for decades, is to scrap the whole convoluted mess and replace it with Citizen Income, a sort of tax credit paid to all UK Passport holders aged 16 and over.

There are so many benefits to CI (and no downsides) that it is hard to know where to begin … and harder to understand why no Government has introduced it.  It would have spared Gordon Brown his humiliation.  And polls have consistently shown that 50% of MPs and Lords support it.

The main beneficiaries are some 20 million adults who for one reason or another have too little income to take care of themselves and their families; this includes not just the unemployed, but the ill and incapacitated, carers of all kinds and those on low incomes including many pensioners.  Students, their parents, the self-employed and those nearing “retirement” also benefit.

Low income marginalises people, and most of our social ills emanate from poverty and the poor start it gives some 15% of our future citizens.  So we all benefit if those, even temporarily, in need are provided with an immediate, unconditional, non-means-tested, administratively simple safety net.

Currently the unemployed are paid a derisory benefit and pursued by fraud inspectors if they use their initiative to supplement this.  Even with the latest (IDS) reforms, their benefit may be withdrawn at any time and meanwhile they are taxed at 65% on their earnings.  A Citizen Income would instead pay them say £72/week (see below) which they would continue to receive in perpetuity; their additional income would be taxed at 35% (inc NI).

The benefit is perhaps most marked for those drifting in and out of employment.  On losing your job, you slowly realise that the dole is designed to cater only for long-term “claimant professionals”; you cannot claim for 8 weeks each time you leave employment, so if you take a 3 week job, you lose 8 weeks of benefit; some benefits, eg council tax reduction, can take up to 12 months to come through; and you are not allowed to seek assistance from  a Job Centre without an appointment which you have to make by telephone … and the Job Centre telephones are unmanned most of the time..

CI is in marked contrast to the nightmare of sanctions, incentives, job seeker schemes and mean-spirited means testing.  You are receiving CI while you have a job, so the day you lose it, you still have CI; if you find some part-time, seasonal or self-employed work, you keep all your CI and pay tax on your earnings.  CI is flexible – it reflects the modern ebb and flow of employment, whereas the present system fails to cater for the vast grey area between the long gone “job for life” and the dole.  CI is the incentive to “get on your bike”.

Those on “incapacity benefit” have an especially poor deal from the present (and revised) system.  Many, even most, of the 800,000 who claim this benefit want to work and indeed can work … just not all the time or as reliably as employers reasonably require; so they have to claim incapacity to get any income at all and are then barred from working (or claim the dole and get taxed at 65%).  Under CI they receive £72/week and when they can work they are not penalised for supplementing their income.  Those left, in genuine disability, are then more clearly identifiable for assistance.  CI particularly helps those doing a little work with Social Enterprises; at present they cannot be paid anything, which is demeaning and vindictive; it undermines their vulnerable self-esteem.

As Galen said nearly 2000 years ago, “Work is the Therapy”.  For the 4 million in the categories above, taking an initial low-paid, part-time job should be incentivised not penalised, as that job will restore self-esteem and health, and could be the first step back on the ladder.  CI ensures “it always pays to work”, without all the impenetrable complexity of the present “system”.

CI delivers similar simplicity to times off work for sickness; it replaces SSP but also removes the sanctions on what you can and can’t do while off-sick.  Like “incapacity”, sickness is not always total.

The latest (IDS) reforms remove the Byzantine complications of Working Tax Credits, but parents combining work with child care get an even better deal from CI, because they can choose more flexibly and seasonally how they organise their lives.  Under CI, this flexibility also applies to couples starting families; instead of maternity and paternity payments, CI enables couples to choose more freely who will do what work when.  They no longer need to fear they are breaking any of the morass of rules and means tests.  And they can run their own lives, instead of having to do it the Government’s way.

Another group of carers continue to have an extremely raw deal – the 1.5 million carers of the elderly, without whom the NHS would have collapsed long ago.  CI would for the first time recognise their contribution and give them a non-means-tested allowance.  Parents being cared for by their young children similarly benefit.

Pensioners only benefit from CI in that if they have been thrifty and accumulated savings that produce an income, they will not lose a £ for every £ over the threshold.  At least initially, pensioners’ CI might need to be higher than the £72 suggested, perhaps from age 70.  But on the plus side, CI does introduce greater flexibility and freedom.  You might carry on working or work at something new; you might semi-retire earlier and free up a job for others; you could take sabbaticals and retraining years throughout mid- and later- life.  CI is a sort of pension that starts at 16.  Work, if it’s not gruelling physical work is good for our health, fitness and mental agility.  The pension was originally supposed to provide for about 5 or 10 years, so now improvements in medical care enable us to live to 85 or more, a higher Pension CI at 75 is generous.

Students face depressing choices under the present system – stay on at school to get better qualifications … and have nothing to live on; burden themselves with crippling debts in order to go to university; take on a low skill, low-paid job with no prospects; or enter the benefits poverty trap.  CI provides young people with some basic survival money, to be topped up with whatever work they can fit in around their studies.  It welcomes them to adult life instead of inflicting a depressing first experience from which many never recover.

CI provides incentives and support for all to work and make their contribution, but none more so than the self-employed.  CI gives a significant boost to the Enterprise Culture because it provides basic support to get started, and keep going through the difficult first 3 years.  The 80% failure rate (inside 2 years) can be expected to drop sharply.  And as self-employment usually involves reskilling and training, CI provides support during this time as well.

CI is a non-means-tested dividend, so the current disincentives to save and secure one’s own home are removed; you no longer lose your right to “benefit” just because you’ve not blown all your money on holidays and luxuries

CI helps businesses in 2 main ways.  It transforms a disaffected, over-stressed workforce into an enthusiastic pool of initiative.  Especially smaller businesses have difficulty justifying full-time and permanent jobs; but knowing a potential employee is already receiving £72 a week makes it easier for them to feel good about offering part-time or less well-paid work which can lead to better things.  The current 65% tax militates in exactly the opposite direction.

CI also removes the need to calculate, adjudicate and collect SSP, maternity/paternity pay, working tax or universal credits and NI (which needs to be integrated with income tax); with personal allowances abolished, everyone is taxed the same (35% up to £37,500 pa).

So we all benefit from a fairer distribution of the nation’s resources, replacing penal sanctions on effort with encouragement of responsibility and initiative, poverty with possibility, complexity with simplicity and transparency, an impenetrable maze of benefits (and 1050 allowances) with one simple Citizen Income.  We all benefit through increased dignity and self-respect, and less envy and negativity.  This will transform society, and empower government who will no longer need to juggle the conflicting claims of various disadvantaged and marginalised groups.

How Citizen Income works

For the sake of argument, let us start by distributing the £180bn welfare budget to the 48 million adults who qualify.  That’s £72 a week, £3750 pa.  All benefits and personal allowances are scrapped, and a combined tax and NI charge of 35% is levied on all income – a 4% point rise on present levels.

At £10,700pa, the tax/NI take equals the new CI (tax credit), so the tax system gradually recovers most of the Citizen Income paid out.  A couple can earn £21,400 without effectively being taxed, and those on the average income of £25000 pay about £800 less tax too.  But the government is no worse off; in fact it receives an extra £59bn by scrapping personal allowances, and £21bn from taxing incomes up to the national average wage at 4% points more; a similar increase on incomes above this raises another £10bn.  So the exchequer recovers nearly half the cost of the old welfare budget/new tax credit straightaway, and almost certainly a great deal more as millions on benefit are freed up to earn more … and spend more.  Compared to recent heavily unpopular and resisted “cuts”, Citizen Income is a massive money-spinner.

Small Government

As it passes responsibility back to citizens, Government must reduce the tax take by 50%.

David Cameron invites us to take personal responsibility (and Blair invited a partnership in his New Dawn speech).  Most of us would relish this, but it does mean government releasing control, relaxing its excessive responsibility for everything … and releasing the budget that goes with it.

The Bigger Society starts with very much Smaller Government.  The government currently spends (and therefore collects from us tax payers) £720bn pa; that’s £32000 per household, £15000 from every adult voter.  For starters a quarter of this will be returned to the tax payer as a Citizen’s Dividend.  For starters.  As responsibility is handed back to the people, the burden of tax and government should reduce by a further 10% in real terms for at least the next 4 years.

Enterprise (and Finance) makes the money; government spends it.  At 55% of GDP, Government, the admin function, is far too big.  As each department grows, it proliferates bureaucracy which adds cost out of all proportion to output.  Throwing money at for instance the NHS or schools simply increases this proliferation; the bigger the hole the faster it swallows money.  In the world of Enterprise, shortage of funds and diminished margins force creativity and inventiveness; government lacks this mechanism, but the way to make the public sector more efficient and productive is to starve it of funds and borrowing.

The target is to halve government spending by 2015, though half of this reduction is achieved through scrapping welfare and replacing it with a basic Citizen Income.  CI is therefore the first priority, and once it is in place (2012) and responsibility has been handed back to the people, CI can be increased and charges can be levied for health care in particular.  There are some areas from which government will withdraw altogether, such as industry and enterprise – it will simply create an intelligent level playing field and leave Enterprise to do the rest, with the handcuffs off.  Other areas, such as policing and the judiciary, can be shrunk as an intelligent prison system targets hard core crime and the fat that has accumulated is worked off.

Work expands to fill the time available; most of this work is non-essential and can be quietly dropped.  To prove this point: in Rank Xerox in the ‘80’s, a sizeable group of senior managers were invited to go self-employed and work part-time for Xerox.  They were offered the various reports and monitors they had always had … but at a true cost of production eg around £650 for a monthly sales report (30 years ago!); none decided they still needed these reports and better solutions were found.

Sustainable Economics

Strong green tax strategies and low carbon action by government are now long overdue.

We need to use fewer resources every year, not more.  Commodities like copper, silver, rare metals, phosphates and timber will soon go the way of oil.  We simply have to temper our greed and acquisitiveness, our “affluenza”, and stop turning more and more of the planet into rubbish.  Recycling is still embryonic and taxation still fails to discriminate against virgin materials and built-in obsolescence.

If we had acted on what was obvious 50 year ago, we in the UK would now be leading the world in green, solar, low carbon production, and the skilled engineering workforce dumped by Thatcher in the ‘80’s would have been diverted into the only industry we can afford to have grow – what again in the ‘80’s was described as the SHE economy, “Sane, Humane, Ecological”.  Otherwise and overall, we need to move towards zero growth as our target.  Someone has to take the lead on this, and it’s us.

Something like 40% of the general public now take serious energy-saving measures.  The green agenda has been promoted and pioneered for over 50 years, and has now passed from the usual ridicule and resistance to be clearly visible on the political radar.

Government now has to instigate the policies which will create a clear, level playing field for business; it must also set a good example in the pressing necessity of cancelling the Carbon Footprint.

In deciding the order of priorities for government, account has been taken of ease of application, economic effectiveness, degree of environmental impact, prejudice and continuing resistance.

The Green List for Government

1 Cut street lighting by 75% – half the lamps for half the time.  This on its own exceeds our Kyoto commitment

2 Transfer the burden of taxation onto unsustainable production and distribution operations, high-energy use, and processes using virgin raw materials (paper, copper, glass etc).  Tax petrol/diesel rather than the Road Fund License; make recycled paper and glass cheaper than virgin materials; make high food mile products more expensive than locally produced

3  Promote community-based third sector Social Enterprise, through a 5 year rolling plan of funding and support (instead of turning the tap on and off every 3-6 months)

4  Ban tropical hardwood and biofuel imports, patio heaters and peat products; during the 5 year withdrawal period, tax them increasingly heavily

5  Devolve planning and taxation powers to local communities

6  Promote measures of Quality of Life and personal evolution such as The Happiness Index instead of GDP; measure key determinants of the sustainability of the natural environment – air and ocean pollution levels, forest area increase, population changes – and announce all these measures at the same time as the monthly base rate update

7  Cancel the Carbon Footprint.  In the end the only way to reduce the carbon footprint is to reduce the number of footprints (see Population Management).

Population Management

UK has to take the lead in reversing the population explosion.

When the writer was born there were 2bn people on the planet, now there are 7 and we are threatened with 10.  We are become a plague.  Reducing the carbon footprint means reducing the number of footprints.  Otherwise we face shortages of (and conflicts over) water, food, land and housing.

The UK is a heavily overpopulated island, so we should follow the lead of catholic Italy which has managed to reduce its population.  The goal is quality of human life, not quantity of human lives however miserable they are.  Nothing Draconian is needed, just awareness and removal of incentives to procreate.

India traded radios for vasectomies; China’s one child policy was notorious.  Their awareness of the need to manage population was creditable but nothing so violent is needed.  A campaign along the lines of the anti-fur or Clunk Click seat-belt campaigns will suffice to change awareness and behaviour.  We also need to scotch the sophistry that we need more people for economic growth and to pay for a growing number of pensions.  People do not create wealth, they just cost.  Enterprise creates wealth.  So there will be more resources to pay for pensions if there are fewer people, and in future therefore fewer pensioners.  In any case state pensions and elderly care are paid from the 23% of income we all paid as National Insurance.

The awareness needed is that every woman is entitled to (and encouraged to have) one child; and if every couple have 2 children, the population stabilises.  So instead of paying £25 per week for every child, there will be a first payment of £36 a week (half the Citizen Income rate, but in addition to the CI every woman receives) for the first child which is the one that incurs the most cost, and nothing thereafter.  Childless women might also qualify for larger pensions.  This is consistent with giving parents responsibility and choice; large families are a lifestyle choice.  As with CI, only UK passport holding women will qualify.

Policies such as are common in Australia and the USA, strictly restricting immigration and citizenship to certain jobs and ages, will be introduced together with a 10 year moratorium on all new citizenships.

If the UK can stabilise and then reduce its population to 60 million, and show that happiness and quality of life rises (as it assuredly will), other countries especially China, India and perhaps even Africa will see the logic and follow suit.

Prison Reform

Prison has to be reinvented for the 90% it fails to rehabilitate, and made harsher for the hardcore.

Prison Reform is part of these “AIMS” because prison deals with those who fail (often through no fault of their own. or as a direct result of poverty) in their responsibilities to society.

We have far too many people in prison, and most of them should not be there.  Some ¾ are either mentally inadequate and need to be cared for, or so driven to desperation by the hopelessness of their condition that they resort to crime simply to survive … and they are not very good at it.

Citizen Income will overcome or at least mitigate these problems by alleviating the poverty which causes most crime, and Social Enterprise will do the rest.  Many of these vulnerable people and most of the rest fall prey to drugs and drug dealers; Social Enterprise is again part of the answer.

The remaining 10% are the real core of what prison needs to deal with.  Prison needs to be a seriously harsh regime for the hard core of outlaws; this hard core amounts to just 6000 people or 0.01% of the population who make life a misery for the decent 99.9%.

Dante’s Inferno is the model for the new prison system.  Most will never enter it, but all first offenders will be shown what awaits them if they reoffend.

The first circle of prison is a high quality retraining and reskilling enterprise, open to all voluntarily as well.  The second circle is “prison proper” with most creature comforts removed; compliance wins the prisoner promotion to the first circle; deviance, violence, bullying, gang activities, attempted take-over, bribing warders, victimising, threatening or harassing other prisoners all take one further into the third circle, where all “human rights” are forfeited and Citizen Income is withdrawn.  Only compliance takes you back from there to level 2 and so on; further deviance takes one deeper with progressively harsher conditions.  Serious repeat offenders automatically start in lower circles and have to work their way out.  The 7^th circle houses the most incorrigible 600 or 0.001%.

Social Enterprise

Social Enterprise is ready to take the place of Government in most areas.

Government bureaucracy is not good at detecting and solving social issues; the exceptions are probably quasi-social enterprises already.

Social Enterprises, charities, voluntary organisations and other ethical enterprises play a large part in providing care.

Especially those who currently swell the prison population quite inappropriately are better handled by social enterprise funded by government.  10% of the welfare budget or £18bn should be enough, and as each prisoner costs us £45000 pa (more than most public schools charge), that’s where the first £2.7bn comes from.  As it becomes clear that crime is a really nasty option, crime will reduce, and the cost of crime with it.

Those who need more support than Citizen Income are similarly best handled by Social Enterprise/charity.  The mechanisms are all in place, and useful local government initiatives can with advantage transfer out of the state sector.

Also many who are currently reluctant to do a bit of work for a charity will now join in, because no-one will be watching and reporting them to have their incapacity or dole money withdrawn.  Work is the therapy and these contributions to the local Social Enterprise will often lead to more gainful employment.

Conclusion

Government is increasingly distant from the people.  This Agenda brings us together inclusively; and stops us sleepwalking into disorder.  More people with more money in their pockets is a much better recipe for success.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens cannot change the world.  Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”    Margaret Mead.

Andrew Ferguson

MA Oxon, FRSA, FIC, FCIM

Chartered Marketer, SFEDI Business Advisor

T: 020 7473 5544

E: andrew.ferguson@lifeshift.co.uk

www.LifeShift.co.uk

March 2011 (updated July 2011)

Up to 6 of us gather for 90 minutes to focus one at a time on “What’s Next?” We derive insight and new thought-provoking ideas from each other; and there is time after the structured session for further conversation and conclusions.

The results are remarkable and the commonest outcomes are clarity and the confidence to take action.

Not  bad for a tenner!

 Call 020 7473 5544 to book or email andrew@thewiseoldowl.co.uk

Our March dates are:

March 10 at 6.45 for 7pm (light supper at 8.30):     £15

March 15 at 3.45 for 4pm (with super bikkies!):      £10

March 23 at 12.45 for 1pm (sandwiches too!):      £15

Please note this new extra time, for those with home responsibilities.

 Do also encourage those who would benefit from business support at exceptionally low cost to join us for The Kitchen Table in March. 

www.TheKitchenTable.co is a low-cost service providing invaluable support to the small business community.  More free or low-cost support is available through www.LifeShift.co.uk (blog, free programme and books from £10) and www.BreakthroughNetwork.net (intelligent forum and directory)