Five Struggles In My Business, And How I’m Working Through Them
As I’ve been working on my new course The Playbook, I’ve been reflecting on what struggles I’ve experienced in the last year of my business. I think it’s natural that as you work through something to help others, you start to reflect on where you yourself needed help and what walls rose up in front of you as you made your way through the business wilderness.
As I’ve been talking about The Playbook in emails and on Instagram people have recognised these struggles in themselves too, so I thought it might be useful today to talk through them in more detail and, crucially, give you my thoughts and experiences of how I’m working my way through them.
Feeling out of control
I have struggled at times with feeling out of control with the direction of the business. You feel like you’re driving along quite happily, following the map and looking at the view outside the window – and then suddenly you wake up, and it turns out you’ve been sat in the back seat and there’s no one driving this car that’s rolling down a road you don’t recognise. You can easily find yourself in a situation where you can’t tell if you’re running the business, or if it’s running you.
Of course, then comes the indecision of ‘what do I really want?’, and ‘where is this going?’. One of my greatest learnings is that although this is something we want to strive hard to find and fix, it’s something we really need to surrender to. If you try to keep a baby bird safe by squeezing it tightly between two white-knuckled hands, then you’re going to end up with a suffocated bird.
I have found that rather than have arbitrary, tangible goals in place (because these are too changeable and too easily influenced by others) I’ve instead created a feeling that I want to foster in my life and in my business. This helps me with my decision-making as it better connects to the limbic part of my brain, and I can know whether something is wrong or right for me based on whether it builds towards that feeling I’m trying to achieve.
Freaking out about a crowded market
Particularly in fields like coaching and courses, it’s easy to feel the walls closing in around you. With other markets, like physical products or traditional services, there’s less of a leap of faith for the customer. When comparing candle brands they can choose the one whose scent they like the most, or they can choose the web designer who can complete the functionality they need. With coaching and courses, there aren’t these same parameters. Customers have to make a decision based on our promise, so when someone comes along with a similar promise we panic because there’s only so many ways we can talk about our own promise – the customer can’t smell or see them, they just have to trust us more.
I must admit that whenever I’ve seen someone introduce their business coaching offering or announce their marketing course, there’s been a pang in my chest – a pang that at once says ‘no keep out that’s mine, ‘oh lord they’re bound to be so much better than me’ and ‘that’s it, I’m done, there’s no more room’. But after those first five seconds I’ve learnt to steady the ship. To know that what someone else does has no bearing on the quality of my own work. To remember that a thriving marketplace means that everyone does better, clients get greater results and we all legitimise each other. I also trust in what I have built, and what I can continue to do. Rather than catastrophise around what someone else is doing, I dive back into my own business. I think about my own strengths, what makes me different from them, and work on ways I can clarify and communicate these even more.
Paralysed by the endless possibilities
In a business model where the only boundary on what you can do is the ideas you can have, it’s easy to get completely paralysed. It’s not like you are bound by warehousing or shipping – quite literally, if you can dream it you can do it, whether that’s a course, an ebook, workshops or client work. While one-to-one work is somewhat bound by the hours of the day, there are still so many endless combinations of in-person, Skype coaching, group programmes, all on top of the millions of one-to-many ideas you have.
This year particularly I’ve ground myself into a rut by going forwards and backwards between ideas. “I can do this course, while I take on these clients, actually no not those clients, in fact I’m moving this course forward, hey what about this idea I LOVE this idea, ok I’ll push the course back again, in fact I’m going to take on more clients”. You want to do it all, you want to share your ideas, you want to help people in lots of different ways, but something’s got to give. And invariably, that becomes the quality of the product and your own self.
This year I’ve learnt to prioritise, to take time to connect to what I really want in life, and what things are going to best get me there. The clear future vision and feeling I’ve created becomes the standard that all my goals and ideas are held up to and I’m in constant contact with. This keeps me focused on keeping streamlined and setting goals that are taking me to defined end point, rather than being busy striving towards a life I haven’t even defined. I’m also remembering the mantra that this is a business I’m building for the rest of my life – if I do all the things in the next eight months, what’s left for the next eight years?
Worrying about sustainable income
This is true for any kind of self-employment and the bad news is, it never goes away. You never get to a point where you don’t think ‘oh god what if no one buys this?’. For me especially this year, as we’ve been working to buy a house, the pressure of ‘wow we have a lot of expenses coming up and then we also have to pay a mortgage forever’ has really hit this one home. Every launch that didn’t go the way I’d like, every week without an enquiry in my inbox has felt like an ominous bell in the distance.
But here’s what I realised. No business knows for sure that they’re going to make money that month. There is always a chance that the whole world loses the taste for Coca-Cola. But what happens is that they have a foundation they’ve built upon for months and years that means it’s incredibly unlikely they’ll make no money. They have a mix of product offerings, run seasonal campaigns, have done enough good work that old customers will come back to buy again. As long as we’re constantly working on building that brand, it becomes unlikely for us, too, that we’ll run out of money.
As well as this mindset and working on my marketing to build sustainability in my income, I’ve also worked on a bit of a toolbox to help me with short term fixes should I need to. I outlined this more in this blog post, but having an outlook of flexibility is key here. We so often back ourselves into corners because of rules and deadlines we’ve set ourselves – “I can’t start that yet because I haven’t got the photos and I’m launching it in May” or “I need to get it all finished before I can sell it”. Being agile and remembering that you are the only person you’re answerable too helps you to make decisions that will make you money when you need it.
Believing my own value
I know that so often this is what it comes down to for many of us – whether or not we do something depends ultimately on how we feel about ourselves, our value and our ability. There are so many times where I’m working on something and I think “well this is of absolutely no value to anyone”, or I’ll not post in Stories for a few days because I’ll be in “who gives a crap about what I’ve got to say?” slump. The key thing here, I think, is not to aim for an existence that is totally free from self doubt at all times – because that’s not realistic and is just giving you something else to beat yourself up about. The key is in not allowing it to linger, and take over.
I’ve found it useful to first of all meet that panicked voice with logic – “what you’ve said in the past has been valuable, so why wouldn’t it be now? Nothing has changed, see these comments and emails that tell you so”. Crucially, however, is that I try to take myself out of the equation as much as possible, because it’s not about me. I am not the best judge of what is valuable to someone who is a year into their coaching business and struggling to take it to the next level – they are. It’s not down to me to decide. When I concentrate on approaching things from the point of view of the person I’m serving, it instantly becomes easier because it’s not about me – I am just the conduit to their own understanding.
The Playbook is a course for coaches, teachers, mentors and anyone who helps to facilitate a change in others – if you’re struggling to stand out, feeling out of control and just not getting to the next level, then you’re exactly who I created this course for. Find out more about it here.
