Do you lie when people ask you how is business going? Is the lie causing you unnecessary suffering? I started my second entrepreneurial journey a year ago after not getting much traction with the first venture.
Apparently, I've taken the 'fail fast and move on' advice to heart.
After a year of lackluster results, I had to get really honest with myself.
As I took inventory (some might call it an autopsy), I had to look at what happened.
The record was clear - I had taken on projects that I should have passed on, I had undervalued my work and further diminished my value by asking to be paid too little, I had tried to tackle everything on my own, I hadn't invested my time wisely.
All of the actions I took showed up.
It's all math.
Even when you don't like the outcomes you are getting, they are the sum total of the inputs.
If you add up everything you are doing and it doesn't add up to what you want, it's time to figure out what's causing your equation not to balance.
I asked this simple but powerful question: is this what you want? I forced myself to get really quiet and allowed myself to move beyond the defensive stance we often take when we are working but what we are doing is not working.
I allowed myself to feel every negative emotion - disappointment, fear, anger and once all the waves of emotion passed, something happened.
Shift happened.
Just the act of telling the truth and acknowledging what was allowed a shift to occur.
Now I wish I could tell you that the clients then fell out of the sky or that an assistant with magical powers showed up and took everything off of my plate but that didn't happen.
What happened instead was I started righting the ship.
I got clear on specifically what problem I help business owners solve and how, I started taking a stand and acknowledging the work it takes on my part to deliver the results, decided to stop making it look easy, stopped apologizing for asking to be compensated for that, and I got a mentor who has been where I am and has already journeyed to where I'm going and I started listening to her.
So here is the key takeaway for you: to stop going in the wrong direction, you have to STOP first and do some things that are completely the opposite of what you may think you need to do.
They may include things like invest in yourself and in your business even if you think you can not afford to, raise your fees if you are doing too much for too little, acknowledge that you didn't have it right or do it right and THEN you will get yourself on the right track.
What lies are you telling about your business?