Today I’m going to talk about the trough of sorrow.
This is a really important part in every business’s journey.
Every entrepreneur has a roller coaster of emotion, they feel from owning their business.
Sometimes things are going great we are a Rockstar and people are throwing money at us singing our praises and sending us referrals.
And sometimes things just don’t feel like they’re working.
We feel like we’re putting in a lot of effort. We’re tilling the fields, we’re planting our seeds, we’re watering them and caring for them. But the harvest isn’t very good.
And we can start to project all the way to the future and say at this current level, things aren’t working.
They’re never going to work. I should just stop and get out.
Making Changes
Now, this is really important feedback from a psychology perspective. If things aren’t working, we definitely need to make changes.
We need to make the smallest changes that will actually fix things.
That doesn’t usually mean wadding up the whole thing and throwing it in the trashcan. Usually there are some adaptations to be made.
And one of the first ones is typically our mind.
This is like sports psychology. If you’re in a game and you’re losing, if you’re watching the scoreboard the entire time, you’re never going to stop losing.
You’re never going to get ahead by focusing on the scoreboard too much.
You have to be mildly aware so that you know what has to be done glancing up at it, but most of the work happens on the field, in the game, through actions, through activities through focusing on what needs to be done.
Worrying too much about the scoreboard and not enough about actions is one of the typical things that will really get an entrepreneur stuck.
Psychology or mindset.
So if you think that you don’t deserve good things or that people don’t want your service, or that you live in a place where there might not be a demand for what you have.
Some of those can be limiting beliefs, and some of those can be true.
And if they’re limiting beliefs, until you overcome them, you will live out that reality.
Envisioning
So the first step to a new reality is being able to actually see it in your mind’s eye having some clarity.
If I asked you to build a house and I gave you a stack of all the materials, the chances of you actually building a house is almost 0% unless your first step was to plan out the building of the house. To figure out what each of those steps might look like together and have a vision of the end house you just start nailing boards together, it is not going to turn out most likely. There’s a small chance that it will put the probability goes way down.
So the first step is envisioning what does this house look like?
Based on your skills, it might be a single story house, it might have a flat roof might have a slanted roof, you’re gonna make different choices.
But now that you have it in your head, you can start to map out how long does this board need to be? And how long does this board need to be you can actually build it.
So the first step is envisioning what success actually looks like. And the further that is from you the cloudier that picture is going to be.
Working With A Cloudy Future
So usually you might just have some rough ideas in the house building example.
You might just know, I want it to be a rectangle. Well, great. How long are the long sides? Let’s start there. How long should the short sides but you might lay out the long sides first and then figure out the next step as you go.
But the key is is to get away from this into picture of the house has to be perfect to what steps can I take now to make things better? And better? And this is really really hard.
The Risks Of Entrepreneurship
Dealing with a psychological pain is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur. People think being risky means that you’re risking money. That can be part of it.
But the biggest risk is that you’re putting yourself in the game in a position to be possibly ridiculed to feel bad about yourself. And you have to drive forward past that.
There’s a quote I really like in a book called The Fighter’s Mind about an ultra-marathon runner. And his quote was, it never always gets worse.
“It Never Always Gets Worse.”
-David Horton (in The Fighter’s Mind)
His experience was in running these ultra-marathons. He would get tired, he would have shin splints at the 10 mile mark a 15 mile mark, he would feel like he couldn’t go any further.
And he saw that the game his brain plays was it was hard to project forward and say I feel bad now.
I’m going to feel worse and another mile I’ll feel even worse than two miles.
If I stay on this trajectory and the worsening continues at this pace I will not survive it in mile five.
What he actually found is as he kept running, oftentimes, it actually got better. It dissipated, it stayed the same. It didn’t keep trending on that same pathway.
Double Down On Taking Action
So sometimes we get in our brain that we know so much about the present, that we overestimate our ability to project the future and say how things are going to be so this is just an encouragement to you as much as this to remind myself that sometimes when things aren’t totally working the way that you want them to work, double down on what you actually can do.
Double down on your vision about what you think things should look like when they are working and focus on the actions in front of you and ignore the scoreboard glance up know your goals and then get down to the work about what is in your control.
Good luck riding out the roller coaster!
