What is the #1 thing that ruins small businesses?
Mental Drama.
The thoughts you allow to swirl around your head can stop you from taking action to get visible, talk to people, make offers, and everything else that is essential to making your business thrive.
Mental drama keeps you working on that sales page until it’s perfect. Mental drama keeps you overthinking what to call your podcast instead of launching the damn thing. Mental drama keeps you trying something that is NOT working for you just because some expert told you that was the way to do it. Mental drama keeps you searching for that next freebie that will be the silver bullet to finally figuring out how to make your business work.
These are all lies. Launch before it’s perfect, make a choice, follow your intuition, and above all: take action to figure out how.
Here’s 3 things that will help you get out of the spiral of mental drama and start moving forward.
Understand how your brain works.
Here’s how we think we work: thoughts are just observations about reality, feelings just happen, and we don’t have control over our behavior – we “hope” that we will follow through on our goals.
Here’s how we actually work: circumstances are neutral, our thoughts are how we interpret the world (and they are optional), our thoughts create our feelings, and every action we take is caused by a feeling we have.
Thoughts -> Feelings -> Actions -> Results.
“This isn’t going to work” -> Discouraged -> Let procrastination take over -> Business doesn’t work.
Change your thoughts to create any feeling you want, choose your feelings to inspire the actions that are going to get you the results you want.
“I’m going to figure out how to make this work” -> Determination -> Try different things -> Eventually you figure out how to make it work
Trust yourself.
Here’s what I believe: you know how to build your business. You know what to try next, and if it fails, you will know the next thing to try. Mental drama makes you second guess, self doubt, and look to others for instruction and validation.
Trust yourself. There are a lot of right ways to build a business, and if you keep taking action in the direction of your inspiration and intuition, you will get there.
It’s not a guarantee that the “next right step” will be a step that works. It might be a step that fails. That’s ok. Failure is massively important. If you’re not failing regularly, you’re not doing enough to move your business forward.
By all means: work with a coach, join a mastermind, have an accountability biz buddy – but don’t confuse their role with your role. Take ownership of your business. Embrace failure, listen to your intuition, and don’t stop moving forward and trying the next right thing.
Accept that it’s OK for it to feel easy.
With all the talk of hustle and hard work, you might feel like if your business doesn’t feel like a slog, you’re doing it wrong. Nope. If you’re getting results and moving forward, you’re definitely doing it right.
The sweet spot in business is loving the journey – loving the hustle and grind. Wearing yourself down into the ground is not the sweet spot.
We are living in a time where it is totally possible to build a business (from home in your PJS no less) that is massively profitable while doing things you really love. Facebook – I love it. My business has been built there. Talking to people – I love it. When I’m not doing it enough, my business doesn’t grow.
I never understood the people who talk about flow vs hustle until I realized that my hustle feels like flow. Yours can too, and the crazy part is that your business will explode when you find that sweet spot.
Don’t get it twisted – I’m not talking about laying around doing nothing and getting stacks of cash deposited in your account. I mean.. make the right investment and that could totally happen, but that isn’t what I do or teach. I’m talking about creating a business that is tailored to your strengths and passions: the things you’d do for free anyway. Because I’d be on Facebook and talking to people anyway – I just figured out how to make a business out of it.
Ok friends. CUT THE MENTAL DRAMA. It’s keep you stuck and holding you back.
