This Will Make You Think Differently About Business Overwhelm
Do you ever feel sometimes that as you grow your business, you're white knuckling it?
By that I mean, you're holding on for dear life - you're driving this jalopy where the doors are falling off, and you're just putting duct tape on it, and you're just hoping it gets you to your destination.
Today, I want to talk to you about thinking differently about business overwhelm. Why it’s not only OK, but it’s actually a sign of positive growth.
Being successful, and white-knuckling it
I've been running my business now for over 14 years and I've had a lot of ups and downs as I've shared many times.
But I will admit that because I have spent quite a few years coaching other businesses after having had different levels of success in my own business, it is sometimes hard to remember how it feels in the beginning, or how it feels along the way at different stages of growing your business.
It's easy for me to say ‘Stick with it. If you keep going, if you keep doing what you're doing, if you stay consistent, you will be successful.’
It's easy for me to say that standing on the other side of certain successes, because I've done it. And I've seen the results.
If you're still in the heart of your business where you haven't really seen those results yet, you might be reading this, wanting to believe me, but you also might be questioning me a little bit.
Like ‘Yeah, maybe’ or ‘Maybe I keep doing this and nothing happens, or ‘I never get those results’ or ‘Maybe you can do it, but I can't.’
Let me tell you that I remember having those same feelings and doubts. And as I grow the No BS Agency Mastery business, even though it is related to branding, it's really a new business, right?
Building a training programme that is helping other small business owners grow is a completely different business model from selling done-for-you branding services to other clients.
That was my business Worst Of All Design. It's the business that I built this whole No BS Agency model on. And it's what I teach and train all of my students on.
But this business is completely different. And so in many senses, in the last few years, I've actually started from scratch and I've been white knuckling the building of this business.
So although I started from a different place, with a lot more authority, a bigger audience, more money in the bank, and probably a lot more confidence, I still started a new business and had to learn a completely new business model
And through that process, I've had the opportunity to go back to how it felt in the beginning of my first business, and how it felt to drive that jalopy, when you feel like the wheels are about to fall off and the doors hanging off and you're like speeding down the highway going ‘I hope this thing gets me to my destination!’
I was recently having a conversation with my second-in-command, Amanda, about how I was feeling.
On the one hand, this business and community has grown tremendously and is so much more beautiful than I even imagined it to be, and in quite a short amount of time.
I feel really proud of that.
I'm really excited, not just about all of the people that I get to meet and work with, but also for all of their results and successes.
It's incredibly inspiring, and it's really fun to be around.
And yet, while all this beautiful, exciting stuff is happening in this business, I'm white knuckling it.
I'm kind of terrified. I'm growing this business and because of this business model, which, again, is quite different from done-for-you services. The No BS Agency Training program has to grow in a certain way in order to support itself, because in done-for-you services, especially the way that I teach them, you don't need almost anything in order to generate a lot of money.
Steve and I could literally generate $40,000, just the two of us, in our bedroom if we wanted to right now, because there's nothing else that's needed.
But building this No BS Agency business is totally different, because there's a lot of infrastructure, support and behind the scenes stuff that needs to happen.
Challenges, failure and growth
And so from that perspective, there are so many things that I am learning and implementing and trying to implement quickly, in order to make the business successful, in order for it to become what I want it to become and get the results I want it to get for the number of people I want to get results for.
And as I was sharing this with Amanda, she shared with me that, especially as you are growing a business, you're going to perpetually feel like you are a bit out of control.
It’s as if you're trying to tape everything together, and the reason you're always going to feel like that is because that's just part of the growing process.
Growth is about doing things and trying things that you don't know how to do yet, about learning how to do things you haven't done before.
And when you do things you haven't done before, or learn things you don't know about yet, you will necessarily try things that you haven't tried, and they won't always work.
And you'll probably be trying and learning lots of different things at the same time that you haven't done before.
So you're perpetually failing in all these different ways simultaneously.
And I don't know about you, but failing at a lot of different things all the time is not a completely relaxing state to be in.
It doesn't necessarily make you go to bed feeling all warm and fuzzy and relaxed.
Every night can be quite stressful, because when you try something and it doesn't work, then you have to figure out another way to do it.
And maybe you gave yourself a timeline or a guideline for yourself and if you're like me, you probably gave yourself a goal and had an expectation of when you were going to conquer this new skill or learn this new system.
And again, I don't know about you, I usually don't give myself that much time. So when I don't do it in the time allotted for myself, it feels like a failure.
And if you are perpetually feeling like ‘I'm not quite doing this as fast as I thought I was going to’ that can also be very stressful.
What I loved about what Amanda shared with me was the idea of getting used to it - this is business.
And this is a sign of you growing.
Nobody builds a business without feeling like this pretty consistently, because if you didn't, and you weren't experiencing these feelings of stress, then you would probably be staying in a perpetual state of safety, where you're not really changing, or pushing yourself.
And when you're not pushing yourself to try something new, to learn new skills, to add new systems, you’re just standing still, and you don’t really grow.
But you and I? We are not standing in place.
We have big goals that we are striving for.
And we have ideas of what we want our businesses and our lives to look like.
And so we are, by definition, pushing ourselves to do things we haven't done before to get things we haven't had before.
I wanted to share that with you because instead of feeling ‘Okay, well, when I get to my destination, I'll feel better. This feeling of stress is because it's not quite working yet, but when it gets working, it's not going to feel like this anymore.’
Even when you run a million dollar business, it still feels like that, because now you're trying to run a $5 million business.
You’re always striving to build something better than the thing that you have.
And it's not necessarily because you're not content, but it's the nature of being an entrepreneur.
You will always be trying to improve the thing that you are working on. And business requires that by the way.
You can't create a business and then just stay stagnant. Your business will die because the world around you is not stagnant.
The world around you is constantly changing and you need to be adaptable.
Being a business owner means being adaptable and growing and learning at all times.
Managing overwhelming feelings as an entrepreneur
I want you to walk away with two thoughts.
One of them is if you’ve felt like you've been driving the jalopy and the wheels are about to fall off, and it's stressing you out, is there an opportunity for acceptance here?
Is there an opportunity for you to say, ‘Maybe that's just being an entrepreneur’?
Maybe feeling like you’re duct taping this plane together while you fly it isn’t you doing anything wrong.
Maybe that's actually exactly how it feels to be an entrepreneur, and this is just part of growing and pushing to grow quickly, which is likely what you're doing.
If you're reading this post, you're probably looking to cut the BS and get there as quickly as possible. I know I am.
So, accept it, instead of what I've done for many years, which is resist it.
Maybe it's just a good sign, it just shows that you are doing the very thing that you want to be doing.
The second is that you don't have to be stressed out along the way.
I know I just said it's okay to be stressed out. That's part of it.
Well, how you feel about what's going on isn’t really going to go away, because you'll always be growing.
And that's both the bad news and the good news, because you can actually change how you feel about it right now.
If you know that being an entrepreneur is always forever, until you decide not to do it anymore, and is always going to be putting you in this state of discomfort, where you're doing things you don't know how to do, trying things you don't know and never done before, trying things, failing and having to pivot - that is just a part of it.
And if right now that stresses you out, you'll always be stressed out no matter how successful you are.
So you can also choose to just work on not feeling that way, or at least lessening that feeling.
And that is something that I have been working on for years.
Have I gotten rid of it? Absolutely not.
But I will tell you that I feel a lot less overwhelmed by running my business now than I did five years ago.
And it's not because it's less overwhelming.
It's because at some point, I realised that overwhelming feeling was something I was always going to feel if I was going to be an entrepreneur.
So I might as well just work on that feeling, instead of trying to get to a place in business where that feeling will go away.
Because guess what?
it's not going to be based on external results.
I have been in debt. I have made a million dollars. And I can tell you that the stress level is more about how I relate to what's going on than it does to the money.
So my suggestion to you is to accept the fact that business is a bit of a white-knuckling experience, and to approach how you feel about that separately from the results and outcomes that are happening.
Because if you can learn to deal with (not get rid of) that overwhelming feeling, regardless of what's happening in your business at any particular moment, you're going to be able to handle it so much better in the future.
And you're going to be able to enjoy the journey so much more.
And that's what business is. It's a journey.
I know I'm racing to the finish line, and my husband will tell you that I often feel like I'm racing.
But if I stop and think about it, which I try to do, often daily, then I remember that there is no destination.
And so you have to sit back and kind of enjoy the ride.
Try to enjoy it as much as you can.
Here’s what you need to get…
Being an entrepreneur, no matter what business, is always a challenge. And you’re always going to feel like you’re ‘building it as you fly’, whether you’ve just started, or your bank account has a healthy 6-, 7- or 8-figures.
If you can accept that the stress and overwhelm isn’t a bad thing, but a sign that you’re growing and expanding as an agency owner, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you can actually accomplish.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to learn all my tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!