By Stephanie Foster
 I love working at home. The flexibility is a delight, and even the rough times are pretty good. But it is most definitely not for everyone, not even for all the people who think they want to work from home.
The single biggest challenge for many people is how easy it is to procrastinate. Even people who have been working at home for years can suddenly find it hard to resist this urge. If you aren't going to be serious about your work, however, you aren't going to make it in the work at home world.
How do you know if you have a chance?
Success rarely comes easily to those who work at home. It is, after all, work. Often hard work. So start out by thinking about how well you work without someone watching over you. Are you self motivated or do you need someone telling you to get to work?
An early test is how you do when figuring out what it is you want to do to earn money from home. Commit yourself to a schedule for that
and see how it goes. The more serious you are about figuring out what it is you want to do from home, the more time it may take you to investigate your options properly... unless you already know what you're going to do of course.
If you find yourself procrastinating from the start, work hard on breaking that habit immediately. It slows down your path to success, and can keep you from succeeding at all.
Have you talked to your family about it?
Working from home without family support makes succeeding even more difficult. The trouble is that most people know about all the scams associated with it, not about the many very real possibilities to earn a decent amount of money. Then again, sometimes family members just resent the time it takes.
It's not just the family members in your household that can be at issue. Parents, in-laws, siblings and so forth can be just as unsupportive and make you question what you are doing. While the support of those you actually live with is most important, other opinions can drag you down.
It's important that you talk about expectations for your efforts with those who are most impacted by what you are doing. If you're going to be staying up late or getting up early to get work done, your family needs to understand. If you're going to need quiet time at other hours, once again you will need them to understand. If it's going to take away from your former free time, the reasons once again will need to be discussed.
While some people do succeed despite others in their family insisting that they're going to fail or just generally being unsupportive, it is much more difficult. If you want to work from home you should make an effort to get that support.
What are your expectations?
The prospect of working from home seems to fire up all kinds of dreams in people. Some think they ought to be earning $1000/day almost right from the start. I blame the many work at home scams plus the hype from those who do enjoy such wild successes for that.
Thank goodness many people have much more realistic expectations than that.
Your earning potential depends on many factors. The kind of work you will be doing. The effort you put into it. Sometimes even random luck plays a role. Some people chance upon that perfect niche right from the start while others search for years.
The trouble with expecting instant success isn't just that it puts your expectations too high. It also encourages people to bounce from opportunity to opportunity, without ever really giving things a fair chance to work out. How can you expect to succeed when you don't give yourself the time to do so?
Excessively high earnings expectations can lead you wide open to flat out scams or merely paying out too much money for information. It's easy to spend a lot of money on resources that will teach you many of the secrets, but if you're too eager for immediate success you're probably not going to take enough time to figure out which ones are legitimate or provide quality information, never mind actually putting the information to good use.
Taking the time to think before you start working at home can really improve your chances of success. There's no one right way to go about it, but there are many things to be wary of. If you take your time to find the right opportunity and to talk things over with family, you may find that you enjoy what you do tremendously for many years.
Stephanie Foster runs http://www.homewiththekids.com/ as a resource for people who want to work at home. Get more ideas on how you can work at home at her site. Getting Past Your Fears in Your Home Business
By Stephanie Foster
 Fear is something most people don't really like to talk about. You want to feel as though you are doing everything you can to succeed. But for most people there's some aspect of their home business that is harder for them to work on than others, or something they would like to do but haven't worked up the nerve for yet.
In my own case, I can cite two examples. The first is releasing my first ebook for sale. I've done a free one before, but the thought that people might pay for what I write is quite an idea. Releasing it has been a challenge, even though I know the information is good.
Then again, I get similarly nervous anytime I see someone reading my work, even though it is almost always praised.
But there's a bigger step I hope to take: either podcasting or video blogging. I know I'll work myself up to face those fears sometime; it's just a matter of when and how.
How do I do that?
The first step for me is to simply work up to it. Getting things ready for release is one of the easiest times to procrastinate, of course, as I try to make everything just perfect. Perfect shouldn't matter, however. Good enough should be, well, good enough.
The big step comes in deciding to take action. You have to figure out what it will take to make yourself do so. For me, that means not having an audience. Makes me more self conscious and therefore more reluctant to do what I ought to be getting done It may be different for you.
That decision to take action is a huge step, especially if you really do follow through on it. There are no benefits to failing to take action. Taking action means you might fail or you might succeed. It's a risk.
Fortunately, it's a risk that often feels good after. No matter how nervous trying something new for my business makes me, even if it's a flop, it feels good to have just tried.
Sometimes fear is a good thing. If you're fearful about overspending on your home business, you probably need to be looking at what it is you are doing. You could be right about that. If you're considering something that might make a mess of your business reputation, that's another good reason to think again.
Overall, I like it when something makes me a little nervous in business. It means I'm challenging the limitations I've placed on myself. While getting past my fears hasn't always lead to success, it has helped me to move forward many times.
Stephanie Foster blogs at http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/blog/ about running a successful home business. She offers advice on affiliate marketing and other topics at her site. Blogging Share Your Opinion. (0 posts)
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