Running a business is a not for the faint of heart. It’s challenging. You don’t just have good days and bad days. You have good months and bad months. Good years and bad years. Sometimes you follow the exact same plan, strategy and systems that worked in the past, and you can’t get it to produce now. Business has ups and downs. And while I haven’t yet mastered the art of being able to control all business outcomes. I have learned that I am in control of how I experience the journey.
Just because the road to success is bumpy, doesn’t mean you have to get bruised and battered along the way. In the early years of business, my happiness was too often tied to my performance. That is an exhausting way to live your life. And your happiness is really built on a false foundation. When business isn’t going well, it feels almost impossible not to be stressed, worried, and disappointed. Learning to disconnect my results from my happiness has been one of the best lessons I’ve learned as a business owner.
When I launched Amy Walker Consulting in 2012, I’d already been an entrepreneur for 10 years. And to be quite honest, I was tired of the emotional roller coaster. I knew I needed to gear up emotionally and mentally to launch this new company and I also knew that I couldn’t do it the same way I had done it in the past. So I created some rules for myself. Hopefully these rules will help you avoid the bumps and bruises on the path to success.
I don’t do frantic. That’s my motto. And I repeat it to myself every time I start feeling like everything has to happen RIGHT NOW! It’s a fine line between feeling motivated to hustle and feeling frantic. But frantic is never good for me. Frantic makes me start something and jump to something else before I finished the first project. Frantic causes me to make decisions based off of a fear that everything will fall apart rather than out of faith that everything will work out.- Self Care isn’t optional. If you want to be happy while building a business and managing all the ups and downs, you’ve got to make your happiness a priority. Self care looks different for everyone. It doesn’t have to be spa days and pedicures. My self care more often looks like a hammock and my Ukulele or a good book. Maybe even a power nap in the afternoon when my brain starts to get sluggish. When we are at our best, we have a better capacity to manage all of our demands. We are also more capable of staying happy in the case of setbacks when we feel good.
- Forgive myself first. I have a tendency to be forgiving of others, but hold myself to impossible standards. Can you relate? I don’t like making mistakes. When I would make a mistake, I would put all of my focus on fixing the situation and making it right. The whole time, beating myself up for my imperfections. Guess what I’ve learned? The road to success comes with LOTS of mistakes. I can fix most, but not all. And if I will forgive myself first, then I can jump into coming up with new solutions without beating myself up. It’s much more productive!
- It might take time to fix this problem, but it only takes minutes to change how I feel. Some problems in business take days to solve. Some take months. For a larger company, it might take a few years to steer the ship. You can’t fix everything in an instant. Sometimes you have to be patient. But, I can change how I feel at any point in time. I can use Emotional Intelligence skills to analyze and adjust how I feel about a situation. It’s just as good as actually fixing a problem when it comes to your happiness.
- My emotions can be stable even when the numbers aren’t. This one is a big one! Your sales are in the dumps, guess what doesn’t have to be? Your emotions and stress level. We are simply not good problem solvers when our brain is full of stress. So allowing yourself to be stable and calm no matter what is the BEST gift you can give your business.
- No success or failure in business can take away my relationships. On the days when business hits me the hardest, I hug my children, flirt with my husband, text my siblings, and joke with my friends. Because there is NOTHING that can happen in business that will take away what I am building with the people that matter most to me.
Avoiding the bumps and bruises on the path to success requires perspectives. The way you choose to approach the challenges will really affect how much happiness you feel in the growth phases. Don’t wait for success to arrive to feel great. Do it today!