Strategy

It is amazing how success rarely looks like you expect. Case in point: I just successfully launched a huge new training program. And then almost shut down completely.

Yep. It’s the ugly truth coming at you here. It’s so important to me to pull back the curtain on the reality of owning your own business. So here it is…

After weeks of preparation for my virtual workshop, “What to do When Everything Seems Urgent” – writing a sales page, working with a sales coach, a business coach and a web designer, preparing course content, and administrative systems galore… here is what the day of the workshop looked like:

1. I gave the workshop while sitting on my couch, very prepared, but nervous as hell.
2. Results: great attendance, great feedback, great enrollments for my Boot Camp.
3. EUPHORIA!!! People enrolled! I’m profitable!!!!!
4. I’m REALLY tired (I was so excited I didn’t sleep the night before!)
5. Now I have to put the finishing touches on the materials. I’m even more tired.
6. Why didn’t more people enroll?
7. I still need to promote this to have a few more people enroll.
8. I’m exhausted… what was I thinking?

I went from nervous to euphoric to exhausted self-doubt in a matter of an hour. You know what I call this?

NORMAL.

Whenever you make a BIG stretch outside your comfort zone, your comfort zone wants to snap back to its original dimensions. And it’s a sneaky little sucker. It will use all the tricks in the book to get you to believe that this discomfort is harmful as opposed to what it really is: growth.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of thoughts that will creep in, “compliments” of your comfort zone:

1.Exaggeration:  “I’m tired. I don’t want to be tired ALL the time. I better stop this.”
2.Diminishment: “You only had 16 people sign up? You should have had 50. That wasn’t worth it.”
3.Judgment: “You’re a fraud. Everyone is going to find out that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
4.Pure self- doubt: “Who do you think you are?”

I honestly spent a rough few days with these kinds of thoughts myself. I talked to colleagues and friends, ate some chocolate, worked out, and watched mindless television. Whatever I needed to do to get through the latest expansion of my comfort zone.

What is your best strategy for dealing with this sneaky little sucker?

When my husband Adam and I were in the early stages of planning our wedding, we observed several couples who were stressed-out and complaining about planning their weddings. I was puzzled. I mean, you get to taste cake, play with flowers, and try on pretty dresses. What’s not to love?

In a rare case of foresight, we decided that we were going to have fun during the eight months of planning our wedding. If it stopped being fun, we either needed to adjust our attitudes, or ditch the deposits and go to Las Vegas for a quickie wedding.

So we focused on making it fun. We kept an eye on our attitudes. We didn’t let other people’s opinions swat us from our vision of our perfect day. We (or at least I) really didn’t want to get married by Elvis in the Hunka Burnin’ Love Chapel.

Guess what? It was a blast. All eight months of it.

But think of it – 240 days of planning for one day of fun. 99.583% of that time we were on the journey to the wedding, rather than at the destination. If we had let ourselves get totally stressed out for that 99.583% of time, we might never have even gotten to the wedding!

So my question to you is – do you treat your business this way?

Do you consciously decide to enjoy it on a daily basis, consider your opinions and priorities first, and create a plan of attack that is fun?

Too often, this is not the case. We struggle to do things the way someone else says we should, allowing ourselves to believe that if we suffer today, we’ll see a payoff later, and that we just need to work harder.

Don’t do it! You know what the business owner’s version of the Elvis Chapel is? Having to get a job!

A while ago, I bought a pair of dress pants in a size larger than the rest of my clothes. Just needed some breathing room around the beltline, if you know what I mean. Two months later, I noticed I had outgrown those pants, along with every other pair I owned. As much as I wanted to think it was a growth spurt, and supermodel height was in my near future, I had to face the fact that it was time to change my eating habits.

So, I began eating right, and being really restrictive with what I ate. A month passed and I was barely seeing any results. And then all of a sudden, it seemed like every day I saw the scale moving in the right direction. I was puzzled – what had changed?

Very quickly I realized I had done just one simple thing – I stopped letting myself get crazy hungry. That’s it.

When I got really hungry, my body felt deprived and panicky and held on to my extra weight to store up against an impending famine. By consistently nourishing myself with foods on my approved eating plan, my body realized it wouldn’t be starved or made to suffer. No need to hold on to the fat stores in case of emergency!

Of course, when I fleshed out (so to speak) this theory, I thought of the business parallels. Think about it…

When you consistently do the things that feed your business, do you stress out? Do you gorge yourself on self-pity? Are you bloated with worry? Do your goals seem to be moving further away from you? Nope.

So how do you keep from feeling like you’re starving in business?

1.    Identify the activities that best nourish your business.
2.    Engage in those “nourishing” activities on a daily basis (consistency is key!).
3.    Write down your goals.
4.    Track your activity and progress.
5.    Evaluate your results, and adjust your activity as needed.

The above will keep you feeling nourished in your business, and will keep those feelings of panic and stress at bay.

Four years ago I hired a coach and she had me complete an extensive questionnaire before we started working together. I recently found the questionnaire and want to share a question and my answer because it has been a cornerstone of my business to this day.

Question: How do you want your future website to portray you and your business?  

My Answer: Professional, approachable, to-the-point, knowledgeable and transparent. I always felt shut out by highly successful people who list all their accomplishments and never shared that, YES they have days where they stay in their pajamas and eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. These people seemed so disciplined and perfect, that if I ever had a bad day, it felt like – well, Jack Canfield never has a bad day, so I guess since I slacked for two hours today I’m screwed.

In reality, successful people do have bad days – something I didn’t realize for years. And I really let the idea of perfection hold me back. Or, I used not being perfect as an excuse, take your pick.

Letting a sidetracked day or week completely derail you or punishing yourself for getting off course is judgmental, detrimental and unproductive (i.e. “OK, I’ll need to make 50 phone calls for being such a slacker last week” – yeah, that’s motivating). Just gently bring yourself back on course, ask if there are any lessons you can learn, forgive yourself, and move on. We are all human!

Mid-morning after writing an article, making inquiries about speaking engagements, listening to a marketing training, and returning my email, I decided to have a little fun. I’ve been experimenting with ways to get my hair up and off my neck in a low-maintenance summer ‘do, and thought it was high time to put in a little more hands-on research.

Working from home, for myself ROCKS, by the way.

So I went into my bathroom, and tried to open the drawer to get some bobby pins. The drawer stuck, and I noticed that there were some cotton makeup remover squares cluttering up the side of the drawer.

“That’s weird,” I thought. “I don’t use those. I’ll just throw them away.”

Then I came across a perfume bottle. Whoops! I realized that belonged on the countertop, not in the drawer, so I removed that as well. And the dental floss. And the pain reliever.

I tried the drawer again. Still stuck. So I reached in and jiggled and shuffled things around until finally the drawer came free.

Feeling like I’d really accomplished something, I then found myself wondering…“What was I looking for? And why?”

I started laughing, of course, because this so very much reminds me of my clients and business. It’s so easy to get sidetracked and forget the purpose of what we’re actually trying to accomplish!