There are times when we need someone to call us out so we stop making excuses and put our priorities in order. As a coach I’m going to offer this advice…
Start positioning yourself today and decide what you are thinking about!
Don’t be afraid to test and try new things. Look for an easier, quicker and smarter way to do things using your innate creativity and innovative thinking.
To see changes, you first need to believe in yourself that you can do anything when you put your mind to it!
You need to commit to the decisions that you are making to see the changes that you want. Have you finished what you said you would do today?
Check out today’s Mimika TV episode Innovation & Creativity.
TRANSCRIPT
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
Welcome to the Unstick Your Mind podcast on Mimika TV. Get ready to get unstuck, align with your true purpose, and unlock your God-given potential.
Oftentimes, we don’t think about what we’re thinking about. I describe myself as a mindset metacog coach, which really means I challenge you to think about what you’re thinking because, oftentimes, we just react. We just make decisions. We do things. We get this panic attack where we see everybody else is this person’s got this much investment, this one’s made this much money, and that kind of, “Oh, I’ve got to do what’s the next app. What’s the next shiny object?” and we stay in a reactive mode, and that is not really conducive for creation.
Sometimes, we need to take a step back and really start to look at ourselves because, as I mentioned earlier, business problems are personal problems in disguise, that if you are finding that it’s hard to grow and that something feels stuck, I’ll always say you need to look at yourself first. You need to put on your own oxygen mask before you can help anyone else, because there’s no point if you use up all your energy and you burn yourself out and you don’t have anything else to give.
Also, you cannot be in that space of your brain where you are constantly in fear and anxiety and stress and driven to reach the next thing and be creative. You have to make the decision to take a step back and to really look at things from what I call an eagle-eye perspective.
Now, if you’ve ever observed the difference between chicken and eagles, like I say, a lot of people get stuck in the chicken coop, worrying about what’s right in front of them, picking the little seeds, trying to do what everybody else is doing, but, as founders and as creators and business owners, we have an opportunity to take ourselves out of the chicken coop, pull ourselves and give ourselves an eagle-eye view, and to look ahead and say where do I really want to go? Is this decision I’m making now really where I want to be, because just any small degree you make, you change one degree today, and you’ll be somewhere else in 30 days or a year. Just like when you’re in the ship. You just take one small degree in another direction, and you’re going to end up somewhere else.
I always say you are in the driver’s seat to determine where that direction is, but, oftentimes, we don’t think about where we’re actually heading. We just react to the environment or the expectation, so my first challenge would be just to stop and to think about what does that big goal look like.
I know a lot of founders, and especially when you’re looking at investment, you do these business plans and you have to do these projections, and that’s all great, but oftentimes we don’t actually even think about why am I motivated to do this? When it gets hard, am I going to have the energy to continue?
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
Going back to what you mentioned about burnout, burnout is a classic sign of when you are pushing yourself beyond your limits, but you’ve also lost sight of your purpose because, here’s the thing, you will experience burnout. I personally had a tremendous experience of this in 2015 and ’16. I, literally, had burnout in a big way where I had a business failure. I had the loss of… My mother-in-law died from cancer, and I had one of my teenagers in crisis was suicidal and depressed. I, literally, could not cope with everything that, eventually, I got so sick. I was in bed for three months, and I couldn’t actually do anything.
I would not advise getting to that stage, and that’s, unfortunately, when a lot of people push so hard, they physically burn out. They ruin relationships. Their marriages get destroyed, families get destroyed, because we don’t see the signs along the way, because important… and I know it’s sounds cliche, but self-care is so important. If you’re not taking care of yourself and reading the signs, like, “Hey, I’m working too hard. I need to take a step back. I’m not seeing the kids that often. Maybe I need to reassess,” but, again, that’s up to you to decide what your values are because, when you experience burnout, when you push yourself past your physical abilities, but also past what your beliefs and your value, if you value time with your family, but your boss is expecting 80-hour weeks, there’s going to be an incongruent feeling in you and, eventually, you cannot continue if you are not running on what I call purpose fuel.
That purpose fuel is one of those motivations that will keep you going no matter what, that you will always find a way around a problem. Your creativity is there, and you’re able to find creative solutions to problems because you’re staying in that mental space of “how can we do this” with calm. Really, it’s challenging yourself to take yourself out of that frantic sort of what we call scarcity, energy and thinking, and get you to really start to vision your… and be in the driver’s seat of where you want to go because, then, you will know when to say no, because no is one of the most powerful words in our vocabulary that we don’t exercise enough because we are so worried about being in fear and in lack, missing opportunities, not making enough money, feeling pushed from behind.
A lot of entrepreneurs that I work with always say, “I just feel like I can’t get off this carousel, this merry-go-round. I’m being pushed and pushed, and I want to stop, but I can’t. Well, we all have a choice. We have a choice to wake up in the morning, and we decide what we do. If we don’t like our current situation, it’s up to us to choose. We can’t blame anyone else or blame the circumstance or the pandemic or the environment. We have the choice to choose. That is really one of the most powerful things to realize is you can avoid burnout by making the decisions, the small incremental decisions daily that’ll, eventually, get you to that destination by making small degrees of change.
Goals-setting is one of those things that I feel is… It’s great to have goals, but, even more so than goals, I like to take it a step further and have growth goals because, here’s the thing, when you have a goal set in mind and you have this expectation and, if you don’t meet the expectation or achieve the goal, what happens is that people get a lot of disappointment and then they feel bad, and then a lot of times they get depressed and whatever. They go downhill fast.
Goals sometimes keep moving. It’s like a mirage. Having a set goal, if you don’t achieve them, this can be a negative connotation. Well, I’m more like, “Let’s create growth goals.” What is a growth goal? It means you celebrate the wins along the way as you’re growing to get to where you want to go because, with business and life and relationships, there’s always growth, but if we’re so fixated on this one finite idea of what this should look like, of what… Having a destination in mind is good, but I’d say pick your destination, but enjoy the ride.
It’s like going on a road trip. You know where you eventually want to go, but maybe there’s a side road that takes you. The GPS reroutes you somewhere else, and you have to take off and go fill up with gas and get some more fuel or, perhaps, the traffic is slowing you down and it’ll… Instead of getting angry that you’re not at the speed you want to be, just enjoy the journey where you are at and stay in that creative energy, in that creative mental space and, eventually, you’ll get to where you want to be. Having a growth mindset is that, even though I’m not where I want to be, thank goodness, I’m not where I was, but I’m going to celebrate today for the growth and the achievements I’ve made today in today’s moment.
Goals are one of those things that could be… Financial is just one thing, but that’s really not what life is all about. It’s not just about making money. To me, I like the whole perspective of taking someone through a purpose process like what is the actual purpose of why you’re doing it?
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
Making money is great because it means you can help somebody, but if that’s your only motivation, it’s not going to take you as far, where if you have an idea of what’s the bigger picture like do I want to leave a legacy, do I want to make an impact, do I want to start something that’s going to be… that can run without me, that is a job creation, that it’s helping others out of a hard situation, think about it in a bigger picture because, money, you can always make more money, but you can never have more time, and you can’t really get back time especially in relationships.
I think your relationship goals and how you build the people and the team around you is so vital to your success that, if you are around people because… Jim Rohn has a saying that says, “You are the result of the five people you spend the most time with.” Make sure you challenge where you’re getting your information from. Where are you being fed mentally, because so many of us will spend the time and the money to go to the gym, to buy organic food, to get a personal trainer, to get healthy, but we really don’t think of mental health as a wellness approach. We wait until our mental health becomes a crisis, and then we have to go see a psychologist and get medication.
Well, I’m more like, “How can we have a wellness approach to how we think and put as much effort and time?” If I’m going to take care of my body by eating well, it also means I need to take care of my mind, which means my mind needs sleep. My mind needs good nutrition. My mind needs opportunities for rest, because your mind is the one thing that’s going to help you get to where you want to go.
At the end of the day, brains are what run the world. There are brains behind relationships, businesses and opportunities that, if we don’t take care of our minds and our brains, we really don’t have a lot to look forward to, so I always like say think for the future, but enjoy today, and make the decisions today that are going to get you to where you want be.
Well, it’s one of these experiences where I always think, “Think back to what you were like when you were a kid.” Surprisingly, your five-year-old self is more in tuned with who you really were than you are right now because, as an adult, when you start to learn about life and worrying about what everybody is thinking, you start to either play it small or maybe push aside goals and ideas. Sometimes, there’s something intrinsic like likes and desires. Just think about when you were five. You would go out and play freely. You would color and create, be creative and you didn’t have those boundaries of, ooh, maybe I shouldn’t do that.
Not everybody at five wants to be a rocket scientist, but getting back into that space of when I can think about without worrying about what people think or about paying the bills, can I get into that space of going back to what that feels good, like Marie Kondo coined the term, what sparks joy, and go back to that place that helps you remember about when you were feeling joyful, because there’s a difference between being happy and joyful. Joyful is that unbound energy where you’re like, “I have the energy to do this. No matter what, I want to do this. I’m so excited to learn this that it doesn’t matter what the consequences are.”
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
I learned to ride horses when I was really younger and, even though it was hard work, I knew that I was so joyful being there that it didn’t matter what I had to deal with to get there. I was prepared to do that. When you can get back to that space of being in touch with who you really are and taking the masks off, and I know it’s hard, the older we get, the harder it is to really peel those masks off, but really having a really honest conversation with yourself and, here’s a good tip, you can ask yourself why.
Keep asking yourself six, seven degrees of why. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to run a business? Why do I want to make money? Why is money important to me? You’ll be surprised that, when you can get in touch with what you really think, you’ll get into that layer of your subconscious that is actually driving your decisions because we think our conscious mind is, but it actually isn’t. That would be a good example if you want to get in touch with your purpose and your why. I know it sounds cliche, but it is so true. When you know what your why is, then the rest of the world and the rest of whatever you are faced with just seems like easy pickings because you know you’re doing this for a purpose.
Yeah. I mean, as I said, I would have to ask you why do you feel like you… they get a bad rep? Well, I would have to say, I mean, it sounds like you had a bad experience, which I can totally understand, but what I would say, the first thing that I would say, is we can’t make assumptions on what everybody else is thinking. Yes, that is true that there are a lot of people out there who are selling things and people don’t get value from that, but, again, ask yourself this. Why did you invest money in this thing or product or service or whatever? What was the reason why you invested in them? What was your perception of value, because your perception of value isn’t necessarily everybody’s perception of value. What you mentioned now is really more of a generalized statement because that’s assuming everybody thinks like that.
Now, not everybody thinks that buying courses and coaching or investing in a marketing agent and agency to do their marketing is bad investment. A lot of people actually find it a very good investment. So, again, you have to question yourself. Why do I think like this? Is it based on an experience? Everyone says, “`Well, they say.” Well, who’s they? Like really? Oftentimes, when you start to scratch below the surface, it comes down to each individual’s, person’s value system because what you value and what I value are very different. It’s neither wrong or right. They’re just different.
If we can come to their place and understand, if I value… For somebody in my case, I’ve worked with clients who they feel like their health is on the brink of disaster. Their marriage is about to implode and their business is about to fail. They are so desperate for help that they don’t care how much they invest, and they see the value in getting help with that it. For me, helping them through that life, that life moment, helps them to save their relationships, save their health and save their business. How do you put a value on that? Just think about that. How do you put a monetary value on learning skills or changing your life?
Not everybody’s in the business of changing lives. Of course, I’m a bit biased as a coach. To me, I see that as a huge calling as well and a mission, but even if you are a business owner, like my husband being agency owner, I know, a lot of the time, his clients would say, “Well, what have you done for me lately? How have you shown only your value?”It really comes down to how every person values money, time, resources, and to really ask yourself how do I view this? Maybe it requires a little bit of deep thinking about what you value, and how do you put a monetary value on your idea of things?
For a millionaire, investing a hundred thousand in a coach or in a program that’s going to help grow their business is nothing, but, for someone who thinks a hundred dollars is expensive, that seems almost unachievable. Again, it’s what is value to you, and you will pay for what you value.
Well, everybody knows there’s no such thing as a get-rich-quick scheme. If you’ve heard that, then they lied. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint and sometimes… Well, I know from my our own experience it takes sometimes years to see an investment, and so if you’re thinking that a quick fix or a quick investment or an injection of cash is really going to solve all your problems, isn’t necessarily true because here’s another thing to think about. How you do one thing is how you do life. How you invest your time is how you invest your money, and what you value with your time and what you value with your money are one and the same thing. If you value, let’s say, health, physical health, you hire a personal trainer to go to the gym, a nutritionist to work on your diet plan, these value in that, but you know that’s going to take time just like building a business or changing your mind.
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
Part of how I train people is I don’t say there’s no such thing as quick fixes. This is about you learning something and a skill that you can take with you for the rest of your life, but it requires effort. It requires intentional thought and retraining those neuro pathways to think of new ways because as children, if you think about when you were a kid and how easy it was to learn things, you never thought about undoing old ways. You just learn things from new.
This is a classic example. One of my personal challenges when I turned 31 is to learn to figure skate. Now, I never learned to figure skate as a kid. I was a ballet dancer. For me, this was a new challenge, but now, what, 10 to years later, I still work with a coach. Every week I show up at the rink, and we work on something small and, as frustrating as it is for me, I have to unlearn my old habits and relearn new ones, because you would think they were the same, but dancing and skating are not so much compatible when it comes to safety on the ice. I’m an exact example of that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
When you are consistent, when you are persistent and you are able to just keep showing up and doing the hard work when it accounts and if you can have that long-term growth mindsets, then you can achieve anything you want to in life as long as you know that it requires the effort. But even more than just effort, it requires commitment, so you need to ask yourself, “Am I in this for the long haul, or am I in this for a quick fix?” Sorry, honey, to tell you no quick fixes ever work out, so that’s up to you to choose and to decide.
You’ll have to ask yourself what do I want out of this? You have decide. You have two things in life. You either can invest your time or your money. Now, when you have more money, you can hire people to do things, but when you don’t have enough money, you’ve got more time. Now, you can either take the time to learn it, and it’ll just take a longer time to get there. It doesn’t mean that you won’t. If you’re impatient, then you need to be willing to invest the money in someone else because there is no other way around life. You have to do the work.
Perhaps what you need to ask yourself is maybe it’s too soon for me to grow. Maybe those goals that I have of getting there, for someone who’s 200 pounds overweight who wants to lose 200, there’s no way you can lose 200 pounds in a month. That is unrealistic. You have to really have some realistic goals that, if my experience, my maturity and my understanding are not exactly where they need to be, then go find ways to get more mature and to get more understanding.
In other words, invest in a course or invest in a coach or invest in a consultant, hiring somebody who can help you shortcut the process. If you aren’t in that position, then you just have to do the work. There is no other way around it, and oftentimes just reaching out for help. There’s lots of people out there especially in the business world who love to offer help and advice that sometimes just asking for help instead of pretending like you have it all together is sometimes the most effective, like, “Hey, I’m really struggling with this.”
Community is where that comes in, finding a group, because I know entrepreneurship can be very lonely especially when you feel like it’s just you in the world. You’re just trying to take on this. Finding others who are in the same boat is really freeing. It’s so important to be able to find like-minded peers or a community that you can share your life struggles with because you will find you’re not the only one in the boat. There’s a lot of other people who perhaps will say, “Hey, I tried this. Maybe you can try that.” Having that peer support is important. If you’re feeling isolated and you feel like you don’t know what you don’t know and you want to grow, you have to reach out for help, whichever that, whatever that means and whichever way it’s possible.
When I wanted to learn photography, I went back to school and learned the skills, but I wanted to learn the business of photography even more. There was a mentor that I had a course with which I really loved, and I harassed him for eight months to coach me personally and to teach me his whole system, and he kept, “Oh, no, I don’t do that. I don’t do that,” and eventually, I was persistent enough, he said, “Okay, I’ll let you spend one day with me.” What his investment that he required for his time was a huge investment for me back then especially when I had two kids aged two and four. To make that investment really was a stretch, but I know that, every time I’ve stretched myself to invest more than I think that I can afford or to invest my time and effort, it always comes back tenfold to me. It always pays back in dividends.
This is the thing you’ll never feel comfortable when you stretch it because your brain is built for comfort. Your primitive brain is always going to make you feel fearful like, “Oh, we couldn’t do that. Oh, no, I couldn’t afford that. Oh, no, why would I do that?” You’re never going to feel comfortable, so just get used to the fact that discomfort is here to stay, but it’s up to you to find the courage to push past that discomfort, because most high achievers and athletes and people who a lot in life are still afraid. They just do it afraid. They just don’t let the fear stop them.
I’d say this challenge for you today is to consider what are ways you want to go, what are you prepared to do in the moment, and also what you’re willing to let go of, whether it’s fear, apprehension, and really just have a time to sit down and to think about your values and where you want to go. That’ll help steer you in the right direction.
Avoiding Entrepreneurial Breakdown
Sometimes, things are just for joy. The purpose is to find enjoyment. It doesn’t always have to have of a major monetary or… For me, I love photography as a hobby and, eventually, I was like… Well, people would say, “Well, you’re so good at it. You should charge money for it,” and people started asking me to take pictures of their kids. They asked me to take photos of weddings and, eventually, I started to build up a reputation, and I was like, “Okay, I suppose I have a business.” That eventually became a business because it’s something that I applied myself to and really decided it’s what I wanted to do, but it came with a good six, seven-year old learning curve.
Then ice skating to me has just been something for fun because I think we’ve lost that sense of… It always has to be about the money or it always has to be about growth, but also sometimes there’s things that you do for fun to find that joy because if we lose joy and we lose our purpose, then life can be pretty dull. I’d say whatever it is that you feel like you want to do, and I do advise that people who are very focused on in any shape or form do something that it will involve the other side of your brain which is less analytical, more creative, so go watch a movie, go to a museum, go ignite your childlike wonder, go on a trip to the zoo, take the kids to the park. Do something for fun, and your future self will thank you for it.
The school of hard knocks, experiencing life, making mistakes. As I said, I have had several many coaches and mentors. I mean, I’m a voracious reader. I read at least book a week. I love to listen to them on audio. I’m always learning, and that’s something. Having that learning mindset is really helpful. I can’t pinpoint one particular person because I’ve learned so much from a collection of people because I’m always looking for the gold and the lessons through other people’s stories and, also, as a podcaster, I love learning from other people, so it’s hard to pinpoint it, but I would say my biggest growth process has been having the mindset that I’m teachable, I’m coachable, and I’m ready to learn. I don’t know everything and I certainly will never know everything, but I’m willing to learn from someone else, and I’m willing to listen and I’m willing to be corrected when needed. If I make a mistake, I’m willing to admit that I’ve made a mistake.
Failure is not fatal. Like you said in the beginning, it’s not the end of the world. What’s the worst that could happen? If you fail and then you get back up again. Like, on the icing rink, I know I’m going to fall sometimes. What can I do? I just need to pick myself up and keep going.
Yeah. Well, as I said, mine is faith based. I have come from the Christian faith, but the way that I’ve infused my training is that I base it on belief because, if you do not believe in yourself, you will not show up and do what you need to do. Self-belief is one of those underrated parts of building a business or building something of value that, if you don’t believe in yourself, you will exclude yourself from opportunities. The thought process, “Oh, I’m not good enough. Oh, nobody will think that I’m I’m there yet,” and then the whole fake-it-till-you-make-it thing comes in, and I don’t believe you have to fake it. I believe you can be authentic, but having that faith within yourself.
For me, I personally believe that we are all connected to a higher power. Some people like to call it the universe, but I like to give God the credit. We got to give credit where credit is due because he’s the God of the universe who’s created us all as a mind, a body and a spirit. Our spirit, or sometimes people call it your intuition or your gut, is always guiding you. If you can connect your mind with your spirit and your heart, then you become unstoppable because then you truly are complete in your purpose, and then nothing can really hold you back when you get those all in alignment.
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