Quit making your business dance
Are you forcing your business to dance? Are you putting immense pressure on your business to reach specific goals in an arbitrary amount of time?
Does this pressure leave you feeling like a failure if you don’t reach them?
In this episode, I share with you how to take all of that pressure off your shoulders. It is important to know when you need to slow down and calm your energy to take one small step at a time.
We often don’t step back and appreciate how far we have come and the little moments that have led us to the place we are now.
View your business as a soul that will evolve on its own. Observe what is working and observe what is not and then bring your energy back to a creative space. Forget about the past except for the lessons.
I invite you to look back and reflect on all of the things that you have been challenged by and have overcome.
Superfreaks do not make their businesses dance.
We do not put pressure on ourselves to succeed within a certain amount of time. We will give ourselves as much creative space as possible to thrive and flourish.
Connect with me if you are making your business dance. I want to know what you are going to do to slow down, to take the pressure off, to be present with what is, and to move powerfully into the future.
See below for a full transcript.
Don’t forget to go to the bottom of this page and let me know in the comments any questions or what you think or just share the love on social. Thanks
Transcript of Podcast
I want to have a conversation with you, especially if you are a woman in business. But this is not of course exclusive just to women, it seems to be a theme, however.
The theme is around this idea that when we leave our comfort zone behind and we're starting a new business or we set a new goal, and we want to see that goal come to fruition; perhaps to income level, perhaps it is a certain, I don't know, amount of students or certain whatever, whatever it might be. I see this happen with women, so often, as a thing, and it's like we want the whole experience to hurry up and we put a whole lot of pressure on the end result and needing it to happen in a specific way, by a specific date or a specific time, and we put a lot of emphasis on that end moment.
Then if we don't achieve it by that end moment, well, who knows what's going to happen, but…
… we often put so much pressure on ourselves, to make something happen by then, that this result, starts to become attached to our sense of worth.
So let me give you an example, this comes up all of the time it's like, Okay, I've been running my business for X number of years now and it's still not where I want it to go. And I'm getting really frustrated. The story of I've been running it for x number of years, repeats over and over and over again, and that amount of time starts to build up as some kind of pressure timer and like we should be somewhere other than where we are right now.
And that's not to say that I don't see you and acknowledge you if you're feeling frustrated about how long you've been in business for. I am saying that it's kind of useless to beat yourself up over how long something has taken up until this moment. Because it has you believe or perceive that there's some kind of race or there's some kind of timing within which it needs to happen. And that pressure that you're placing on yourself, if you are, is what's getting in the way of …
...your presence,
…your manifestation capability,
…your ability to work with what you have,
…your willingness to take risks and to really see the opportunities that are in front of you.
That's just one example that is telling the story of how long it's been. And how it needs to change.
Another example is, well, you know I have this launch going on, or I have this particular date where I've given myself this much time. And if it doesn't happen inside of this launch, like it's going to mean something about me, or it's going to mean something about my business.
So I witness people do this all the time, they will launch something and it doesn't go the way that they want, and then they decide that they must be a failure, or it's not working, or it's never going to work for them, or they look around at other people doing similar things and make up a story about why it's not working for everyone, which I spoke about, sort of last week in my podcast, my last podcast.
It's just very interesting to hear people place some kind of arbitrary time in front of us, which says if it doesn't happen by this date. I'll be really frustrated if it doesn't happen by this date, it means I'm failing if it doesn't happen by this date, my husband will be annoyed at me, if it doesn't happen by this date, what does it mean about the future of my business? Like I'm placing all of my need for the business to succeed on this particular thing happening when I say it should because I want to pay for something, I want to do something like it needs to work.
Can you hear the energy behind what I'm saying, - it needs to work so much pressure.
The final example I'm going to give is when someone says, for example, I started my business, it's been going for this long, I've got this launch, and I'm giving myself this much time, I'm giving myself six months, and if it doesn't work, I'm going back to my job.
Now. This can be really healthy, I don't mind a bit of a healthy timeline, but it's only healthy if you can do it from a place of non attachment, if you can do it from a place of, you know, I'm perfectly willing and I'm going to be okay if I do go back to work.
I will really honestly say to you, my friends, that not many people actually quit their job, go through that process of transitioning to having their own business and genuinely set an amount of time within which it needs to work, without having some kind of unhealthy attachment to that end step. Like my husband has given me this much time right. This is how much money I've got remaining like it needs to work within this much time, I'll be so ashamed of myself I never want to go back to my job and so I need to give it six months.
It can be really healthy to have pressure and it can also really quickly turn on you,
…so we need to be very, very careful with our mindset in that situation. So all of these scenarios, I'm giving you are examples of places where…
we put our self worth, our actual worth, our energy, our self confidence, our self esteem onto the result of our business.
It's also like, if our business was a person, we would be saying, hurry up. Hurry up. You're not going quick enough. Hurry up. I needed to do something. Hurry up, you need to evolve faster than you're evolving. And if you're a creative person, or if you are around children or you have children, you will understand this metaphor as being extraordinarily unhealthy for our capability to exponentially succeed.
So for example; if your child is learning to crawl and learning to walk. When your child is doing anything, you can't really, hurry up, a child you can't hurry that development you can't force them to learn to speak, crawl, walk, or think any faster than they already do.
And we wouldn't do that to a child, we wouldn't do that to ourselves, except we do we do it to our businesses.
So what I want you to think about in this moment is, instead of thinking of, you know, putting these arbitrary timelines, making up some meaning about what it means about you or your business or your capability to succeed, if it hasn't happened within a certain amount of time, take all of that pressure off. Because what you're doing, is what I call, making your business dance, and what I mean by that is it's like you have a shotgun, and you're pointing it, if your business was a person, you're pointing it at that person's feet, and you're shooting at the ground and you're saying, dance, like dance, dance and hurry up and dance, you're trying to make it do something in the amount of time that you want it to happen now.
Think about if you were being kind of chased around, and forced to do something faster and you were doing the very best that you could. Or think about a child learning to walk, placing pressure, that kind of pressure onto a human being which effectively, your business is run by you as a human being.
When you place that kind of pressure on a child does it hinder them, or does it help them. Anyone knows, it does not help them, it actually hinders them so much in their development because rather than focusing on
where they are,
and what's working and
being able to learn from mistakes, and
focus and feeling encouraged.
Instead, we focus on
what's not working,
what's not happening fast enough,
why it's not working.
What's wrong with you, all of the things that could potentially be a problem
when really it just might be, we need to slow down, calm ourselves and take one small step in front of the other.
Now, the reason I bring this up is because I think it's really, really, really powerful to remember that sometimes we…
overestimate what we can do in six months or a year,
but we majorly underestimate what we can do in five years or two years or three years.
I've been having lots of conversations with clients and with friends of mine, where we go back to our two years ago self, or our three years ago self, or five years or 10 years, and you look back, and you think 'wow, I am a completely different person.'
Now, in between those, even 90 days right, you might not feel like much is happening you might feel in fact like you're wading through honey like nothing's happening, it's so slow. My favorite thing to teach my clients is….
…that the subtle tiny shifts, the subtle tiny changes, like there's a moment to moment awareness and realizations and moments of awakening. They are the ones that have you in five years time look back and say, 'How did I even do this, I didn't even know'.
See most people are looking at their life, day to day and judging how it's going, based on how they feel, moment to moment to moment, but if we zoom out, we can usually see that things are on a general trajectory. So while you might have up days and down days, especially in the last couple of years where the world has been very up and down in general in terms of our collective psychology, what's going on, the uncertainty, the level of change and shift, you know, we can feel like, in general, things are going in a certain direction when we zoom all the way out and look at how life is going.
That is a more accurate representation of how things are going than looking at where you are, how long it's taken for you to get here and not really seeing and acknowledging how far you've come along the way. So what happens is when I'm working with somebody who has like a long time where they have been working in their business and they're saying 'it still hasn't worked for me.' Often what's happening is they're not appreciating how much they've actually done, in that amount of time, so while they might be saying, ‘I've been doing this for over a decade, and I'm still not making a million dollars a year,’ or whatever, because they're comparing themselves to someone else or something else.
When you look back at what they were doing all that time ago and all of the other things that they've created in that decade, you can see why they're still able to hold down a business and how incredible it is, and have created all of these other things as well, which are naturally quite a distraction from business sometimes. Then when you look at someone who is say they have a launch, and they're placing some kind of pressure on the amount of money they need to make by a certain time or their own self worth by that amount of time.
What we're not appreciating in that moment is, just what a person is capable of when they look at that launch as one launch inside of many a learning opportunity and opportunity to look at mistakes, look at what worked, look at what didn't, assess what happened, and then come back and feel really good.
So, there's so many different ways that we can look at 'stop making your business, dance,' and actually start paying attention to what can I do in this moment.
Forget about the past, except for the lessons, and look at what I want to do in this moment.
Because how ever long it's taking you to get here, has nothing to do with how long it's going to take to get to the next level, except your decision, but it's going to not take as long. Right.
So if you're somebody who also has a business where you're placing a lot of pressure on yourself to meet it to work within a certain amount of time, either because of the launch or because you've made up something, you know. I really want to invite you to consider that it's a very masculine, patriarchal paradigm that you're placing so much pressure on yourself, your business to do something before it's ready.
If you think of your business, and this is a very feminine way of doing business, a feminine way of leading,
think about your projects in the business about having a soul that will evolve on its own, you can actually…
be with it,
be in commune with it,
kind of talk with it, really, I really mean that, and observe what's working and
observe what's not and
make gentle adjustments as you go.
As opposed to placing all of this pressure on needing to do something for you and you to get something out of it, first go, second go, third go, and…
…not appreciating how far we've come,
…not appreciating how much things have changed,
…not appreciating all of the challenges that we have overcome on the way to get here and
instead just focusing on what's not working right.
So the invitation is to look back and see all of the things that you've been challenged by that you've overcome, to look back and see
…all of the different ways where,
…you might have gone and had children,
…you might have had life circumstances that have distracted you,
…you might have felt like with all these lack of knowledge that I have, I've still been able to run my business,
…you might feel like even with, you know this launch particularly is not working but
I've learned so many lessons, you can actually come back to the present, and make a decision and assess and re strategize about what you want to do next. And that's the most important thing.
Personally, it took me over a decade to get to a point where I can really look back and see the shifts that I had made and I know that part of the reason why I'm here, and I've said this to you so many times. Part of the reason why I'm here and I'm still able to teach you and to coach you, and to do this podcast, even, is because in times when I could have made up that it wasn't working and I was a failure and there's no point continuing, I decided instead to look at what I could do, to look at what was available to me to come back to the moment, and re strategize and that is purely why I'm still here, it's because I didn't give up.
Now that doesn't mean don't take breaks,
that doesn't mean I haven't had times when I've literally had to go and make money somewhere else during the course of growing my business.
That doesn't mean I haven't had to do the things I've needed to do to leverage what my energy, my time and money to make sure that I could still stay in the game.
All of that is part of it, but it's about not making meaning of the things that you made up that should work by a certain amount of time and making up a story about yourself.
So if you find yourself where you're in a launch having some kind of experience that doesn't feel like it's working. I've been there. I've experienced it many times, what I call that space is like the abyss, or the void. It's a point where you're in a period of time after which you said something would happen, and it hasn't happened. What do you do now?
So who you are in those moments, who you are in the void, who are in the abyss, they count the most,
because in that moment where you don't know what could happen next, that's when you can make a choice,
you can make a choice to speculate that everything's gonna go wrong from here,
you can make a choice to speculate your worth as a human being, or
you can make a choice to speculate that it's all going to go up from here
because there are some lessons that you're here to learn, you're going to learn them, you're going to apply them and it takes however long it takes.
So from now on,
Superfreaks, do not make their projects, their goals, their businesses, dance.
They observe.
They dance with it.
They follow the rhythm, but they're not shooting at the ground.
They're listening,
they're playing along,
they're dancing along,
they're really paying attention to what's working, what's not.
What can I add here.
Let's take the time pressure off.
Okay so I had a belief here, about how long it might take. it's taking a little bit longer. What am I going to decide about myself and my future based on this,
…am I going to decide it's going to take me longer,
…am I going to decide is something wrong with me
…or am I going to decide it just takes however long it takes, and I'm going to be here until it takes.
And I'm here to tell you that. Personally for me when I decided that I was just going to be here for however long it takes, it took that pressure off, and it was like, all of the bandwidth that was once being taken up used up by my negative thoughts and fears my negative beliefs and all that junk. Once that was gone. It was like, huh, if I just took all the pressure off, I probably would have been here so much earlier, because all that bandwidth is now available for me to make clear decisions take aligned actions, be present, be mindful and re strategize.
So my friends, Superfreaks, do not make their businesses dance, they don't make their children dance - metaphorically. We don't make ourselves we put pressure on ourselves to need to succeed within a certain amount of time. And while it can sound paradoxical because we like to set SMART goals, put your goals out into the future, decide, need to specific and has to be measurable... I actually don't believe in that anyway.
While that it seems paradoxical, it's taking the pressure off ourselves and giving ourselves as much creative space as possible, that has us thrive and flourish. And that energy of thriving and flourishing, is exactly what causes us to feel even more creative. We have more energy, we have more sustainability, we have more presence, and we have more power in that presence.
And that's an extremely magnetic energy to be in, it's very feminine and it's very powerful.
And that energy is what draws people, even more, more opportunities, clients, money business you name it.
So, if you are currently making your projects, making your goals, making your business dance, I want to hear from you, you can DM me, message me, leave a comment on my website, underneath the podcast. I want to know, what are you going to do to actually slow down and bring this up into a place we're going to change what you believe about what's happening to take the pressure off yourself to present with what is and to move powerfully into the future.
Stay Curious, Stay open. The life you crave is so much closer than you think.
LOVE
Hayley xx
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