Emotional Resilience & Freedom
The surefire way to know if you're on the right track with your business...
I’ve learnt a lot about myself this past month.
I separated from my business partner and left the prior business around 12th August.
The first 10 days I spent thinking about what I wanted to do, and chatting with people about ideas.
It was important for me to not jump into something too quickly, which I’d later regret.
Building a business should be fun and serve your lifestyle. I don’t want to create something I’m a slave to.
For a long time I kept myself trapped. The idea “you need to do sales calls… and because you live in Bali (GMT +8) the timezone doesn’t work… so you need a partner to do sales”.
Of course, there’s a bazillion kinds of businesses that don’t take sales calls. But not any that I had a lot of experience in.
That was one of the traps I built for myself.
The traps.
Selling to a market we had no audience or brand recognition. Necessitating cold traffic > sales call if we want fast income. As mentioned above, creating a belief of “having to do sales, but not able to do it myself’”. Which gave up my power and control of my own destiny.
Needing a team around me. It’s not like I couldn’t schedule my own calls in the diary, or process client payments myself. I just got comfortable with other people doing everything that felt like admin / tedious / techy. I was reluctant to let go and get dirty myself.
Sunk cost. I’ve written in the past about the irrational optimism as entrepreneurs. You have to run at things with 100% conviction. Believing it’s going to work. Equally important is knowing when to let go and move on. “This time” might be when you break through… or maybe this vehicle isn’t meant for you.
Mismanaging money. I thought cash would keep flowing in ever larger quantities. So I didn’t invest in alternate income streams. When my primary income dried up, suddenly I was burning through savings at break neck speed. Again, giving up my power. You think and make decisions differently when you’re nervously looking over your shoulder.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most thick-headed of them all?
“You don’t have business problems. You have personal problems that reflect into your business” - someone smart, I’m not sure who.Through my 20’s I was a keen Olympic lifter. I got pretty good. About as far as my non-elite strength genetics were going to allow me to get.
But the last couple of years has been a constant “one step forwards, two steps back” with niggly injuries.
Long-term stability/mobility issues that I was very good at circumventing, finally catching up with me.
There’s only so many times you can load heavy ass weights on compromised tissue before it breaks down.
What I finally understood in the last year is that I have to go back to the very beginning. Rebuild solid foundations.
Figure out why my left ankle has always jammed up. Stabilise my shaky right hip. Straighten my scoliosis. Calm my overactive right upper trap.
Pushing through or going around simply doesn’t work any more.
I have to slow down, to speed up.
I’ve committed to doing the things I know I should, but often didn’t, do.
Nobody wants to do bird dogs and side planks.
Alas, they’re the foundations that keep you training without breaking down.
Playing different.
Core strength & structural balance = SOPs & steady business growth = saving & investing in cash flowing assets.
I’m playing business different this time.
Building SOP’s the first time I do something, even though it takes a bit longer to get it done.
It feels easy.
When the business is big and established, it feels an insurmountable task. To document and systemise everything because there’s so much.
I didn’t have time for that. I had to pay other people to do it.
Well… now I do have time.
Just like I have time to do my hip airplanes, when I’m willing to let go of a set of heavy squats.
Becoming willing because I see the long play instead of the short term.
People preach long-term thinking. Most don’t follow their own advice across the board.
I would talk long-term games in some areas, but play short-term games in others.
Now I’m getting aligned with the long-term game across all areas.
On the personal side too. I never want to be caught in a trap again where I need money and it’s not in my control.
I’m committed to:
Building my savings back up (which I did pretty well before)
Investing in cash flowing assets (which I didn’t do so well before)
It hits different when you have a family to support.
Emotional resilience.
It’s been a long time since I was at the face of the business.
When someone else is doing the sales. Another person fulfilling the client work. You’re inoculated from the emotional ups and downs.
You feel the macro ups and downs of having a good/bad month, or when a client complains/wins big.
But you don’t feel the everyday micro ups and downs. The high of closing a new sale, or deflation of getting a ‘no’ you thought would be a ‘yes’.
Seeing something go wrong with a client you’re working with. The feeling you’re not doing enough or letting them down in some way.
Doing the dirty work in the business requires emotional resilience.
I know I’ve been in my comfort zone the past couple of years. I’ve not needed a solid practice of working through emotional stuff related to business.
This past 3 weeks I’ve journaled more pages than I have in the past 12 months.
I’ve realised that staying on the straight and narrow. Doing the most valuable tasks in the business will always bring up emotional stuff.
“If you don’t have the business you want, it’s because you’ve not become the person who is ready to run it”. - someone else smart.Emotional freedom.
Exponential growth by definition comes from doing something different.
You can grow in a linear fashion by being 1% better at the same thing.
But to take leaps, you have to solve bigger problems.
Let’s be honest…
There are businesses in the world that turn over trillions of dollars.
Enterprises that make generations of offspring billionaires, hundreds of years later.
The idea that any of us should be growing in a linear fashion. That we are somewhere near our potential… it’s ludicrous.
To go back to my training analogy, we are ALL very much in the newbie gains stage of business.
The lifecycle of training is short. Within 5-10 years you’re gonna be relatively near your potential and happy to add a few kilos a year to your lifts.
In business?
The lifecycle is much longer. 14 years in this game is nothing.
We are all within the potentiality field of “looking at a protein shake and our arms grow”.
To take exponential leaps… to solve bigger problems…
Requires doing something different.
Something new.
AKA creativity.
You might not think of yourself as ‘creative’.
Reserving that word for ‘artists’. But believe me, solving problems is a creative endeavour.
You’re charting an untrod path.
Creating something that was not there before.
The pre-requisite for creativity?
Emotional freedom.
The ‘stuff’ that comes up. The resistance or feeling some kinda way about moves you’re making.
It’s a blessing.
The portal to creative breakthrough. Exponential expansion.
You can’t separate yourself as a human being from yourself as a business operator.
A focus on creating emotional freedom opens the door to creative breakthrough and levelling up.
The practice that is bringing the greatest ROI in my business right now is journalling.
Creating emotional freedom for myself.