What You Need To Know When You Feel Stuck
I created a business that gave everyone what they wanted, except for me. This wasn’t an a-ha moment of a realisation, a time I can pinpoint and say, “that’s when I knew.” It was an ongoing unpeeling of beliefs and actions until I came to terms, with hindsight, that that was the truth of it. I had set my business up for martyrdom. So it is quite a change that I now find myself teaching people to start with what they want, and more so that I am tweaking and transitioning every part of my business so that it works for me first.
In January 2019, I attended a webinar – it was a Q&A as part of the pre-order bonuses for a book I still haven’t read, but I really liked the author and wanted to be a part of the Q&A. Anyway, during the webinar, there was a lot of talk about solidly building the business up to what you want it to be, and using the income streams you wish to change to pay for the time you’re using to come up with something new. This is solid advice, but it wasn’t enough for me, desperate and in my glass box. “What if you can’t stand the work that pays anymore?” I pressed send, and as I saw the question float in the chatbox, I realised how desperate it sounded. Everyone else was posting woohoo’s and positive questions about building on their great news ideas, and my question looked at how I felt – forlorn and adrift.
Eventually, the author worked through the questions and got to mine. It was now very much out of context from what he was talking about before and sounding very pathetic when I heard it back in his voice. He assumed, correctly, that it was linked to the previous conversation and looked at it quizzically. I felt like the person in the Q&A who asks the most basic, obvious question, and felt the air ripple as all the other participants rolled their eyes at the precious time I was wasting with my stupid question.
“What do you do if you can’t stand the work anymore? I mean, if it’s that bad, then just stop doing it”. Then he moved on, and I felt crestfallen. He didn’t know how impossible it was to “just stop doing it” and how that was just not possible for me, how I had these commitments, how I needed the income, and absolutely no way out of this limbo. Looking back at this moment, I know three things: one is that it wasn’t as easy as he thought it was going to be, and two is that it also wasn’t as impossible as I thought it was going to be. And three is that, at that moment, I wasn’t ready to hear the answer.
Because ultimately, “just stop doing it” was the answer; it was what I did in the end. But before I could get to work on applying that right answer, I needed to unpeel the beliefs that were stopping me from believing it was. This is what hard work is. The stopping doing it or the starting doing it or doing it this way instead; that bit is easy. It’s only easy once you’ve unpeeled and discarded all the reasons you think it won’t be.
It took the rest of the year – twelve months of concentrated questioning and unpeeling around what I wanted from my life, from my work, and my beliefs around what was possible. I realised that I had spent most of my life existing in a narrative of what I am and am not allowed, what is and isn’t for me. I needed to unpeel, first of all, the belief that was most prominent on that webinar – that I wasn’t allowed to change. I needed to build the muscle of the idea that there wasn’t the spectre of a mum at the window of my life, banging on the glass when I did something wrong or telling me to come back in. I still need to remind myself, “you are allowed to do this” whenever I feel her imaginary eyes bore into the back of my head.
Two more, interlocking beliefs also needed to be unpeeled in a thick, onion-skin layer: “work should be hard” and “I should be in service.” The first is more comfortable to logic away when you remind yourself this isn’t a Victorian workhouse. But it gains extra strength from its partner: “I should be in service” starts a slippery slope to “I should do what others want because people won’t pay you for what you want because work is supposed to be hard.” And that is hard to argue with.
What transformed this belief was realising that an unhappy me isn’t in service of others. An unhappy me is one that’s phoning it in, feeling resentful, with most of my brain in the daydream of what I really want. That isn’t doing a good job, that isn’t being valued. When I began to advocate in small ways for what I wanted, by writing what I wanted to write and creating what I wanted to create, I was able to change the story. My business should be in service, yes to my customer, but also to me. It should be giving us both what we want. And if my business is in service to me and others, then the work should not be hard, because I don’t want that for me and I don’t want it for you.
Through all of this, there is one common undercurrent – the quiet but systematic taking over of the rulebook. We come into our business with the rulebook we’ve amalgamated over our lives – the chapters are written by our parents and teachers, the pages from old bosses, from friends, the post its and cuttings clipped in by society and the media. Everyone’s rule book is different from one thing: none of us got a say in it. We lug it around with us, using it to check every behaviour and every thought, and it never even came from our own beliefs. The key to changing your business is to acknowledge the rulebook, and bit by bit, day by day, tear up every single page. To question every rule and put your one in its place.
Because the key to changing your business is not the nuts and bolts of it – it’s giving yourself permission.
