What to do if you’re working hard but not liking the results

The other day, I took all 3 of my kids to the park and plopped them in swings. And as I watched their varying degrees of success with swinging, I had to think of you (and me) and how we approach “working hard” and “being productive” and “trying to make things work.”

I had one kid in a bucket swing. She had positively no idea what she was doing when it came to swinging. If I pushed her, she liked it, but as she slowed down, she started getting frustrated and just thrashing around trying to make herself go but making herself tired and even more frustrated in the process. As far as she was concerned, the only way to swing was if someone pushed her.

Middling needed an initial shove. And she knows there’s this pumping thing you have to do to swing, and that looks like bending your knees and stretching them out again at certain points. For brief moments, she was even theoretically doing it “right,” but it still wasn’t really enough to actually build her own momentum.

{Stick with me here. I promise this relates to you.}

Big kid is tall enough to kick back a little and recently learned how to legit swing on her own. You could say she’s “working” by kicking her legs back and forth, but she’s learned how to leverage her body weight, so she could swing a looooooooooong time before she’d actually get tired… and she was going WAY higher than her sisters, all on her own power.

Big kid is in FLOW on the swings. She’s not actively thinking about what to do. She’s got the FEEL of it now. She moves at the right moments, leans a little less if she just wants to enjoy the back and forth of the swing, and leans harder if she wants to go higher.

Flow can happen in your business too. But most of you are like my Middling.

You’re looking at how high other people are swinging, and you’re trying to replicate their moves and work harder (but you’re really just flailing your legs around back and forth). You’re trying hard (ahem, wearing yourself out). You’re scooping up the swinging people’s blueprints and tools and even their “mindset work.” You’re meditating and taking cold showers and journaling and throwing all the right-looking stuff at your head, and sometimes it even works a bit.

But, when you learn to feel your way into the right moves for you – the right habits, strategies, and methods – you’ll fly in a way that won’t have you constantly staring at the guy next to you and make you exhausted in the process.

In theory, this sounds great, right? Get in the swing of things in your business – pump when you want to go higher, but otherwise, have this really natural way of letting things just be fun and easy?

(I can hear some of you already: “oh boy… another person talking about how stuff should be easy… some of this shit is hard and definitely not always fun!” Yup, I get it. My Big kid didn’t always know how to swing. She straight up fell off of them a few times too [just like I did as an entrepreneur – face first into the dirt]. And just because you know how to get in the flow doesn’t mean things won’t come along that periodically knock you off course. But there’s this messy in-between phase where you recognize that more is possible but you’re desperately figuring out how to actually do that for yourself.)

So, how do you do that?

 

A coach is here to help you have the guts to practice over and over, make you aware of what you’re doing, and be patient with yourself until you naturally “get it.” I can’t make you get it, but I can help you stop making it so hard on yourself so that you give yourself the opportunity to get in the flow of things.

 

I would love to help you with that too – let’s talk!