Stuck In Your Business?

I was speaking to a client this week and she said she felt stuck. She had been working on her business to get lots of practical pieces in place such as her website, her programmes, her leaflets, Facebook business page, newsletter, and so on and with those achieved she said she felt stuck. “I want clients - I want to work with my ideal clients, so what now?” On a practical level, I felt this was a really strange question since we had worked on her 90 day marketing plan and she had decided on her 3 marketing activities for that period of time and so it was really clear what was next. But her feeling stuck was not a practical issue. It would have been easy to say, well just look at your marketing plan and get on with it. I had a sense that there was more to it than the practical because she is a smart woman who really wants to help the world and isn’t afraid of hard work. So I asked her a question. “If your day today was an ideal day for your business, how would that look?” And she proceeded to tell me that she would have clarity that she would know exactly what to do, it would just flow, there would be no efforting, and it would be effortless. There would be no “stuckness”, no confusion, she would feel inspired to take action and follow her marketing plan. She would have plenty of time to do all the things she wanted to do, plus work on her business. After all, isn’t that the way it was meant to be? And then she jumped straight back into what she was feeling now. She said that her mind was too busy; it was on overload, she felt overwhelmed with so much to do and so ended up doing nothing much at all and feeling stuck. That in turn led to feelings of frustration and impotency. This is such a common scenario for the solo-preneur! To feel stuck, overwhelmed and wondering “Why can’t it be easy and straight forward?” Even after buying products and programmes that were meant to simplify and make it easy and straightforward and fun, it can still feel difficult and confusing. So what is happening? Why is this? Why is it that we feel this way? In a nutshell, it’s the story. We have a story, a conceptual framework, of how we want it to be or how we have heard it is for other people, or how it should be from the experts, and then when it isn’t like that, we fall into the trap of thinking we have somehow got it “wrong”. If the experts say that there are 3 simple steps to take to build your Facebook page and you have spent 3 days trying to get it right, that can lead to frustration because we are not living up to the story of how it is meant to be. My story I know because it happens to me too! One tiny example is that I bought a social media programme where the expert told me it would save me tons of time, that I only had to spend 30 minutes or something like that per day and I could build a 6 figure business. I spent a long time beating myself up because I felt overwhelmed by all the information thrown at me, not to mention the 90 minute classes that took me 2 days to get through! It wasn’t until someone pointed out that the guy who created the programme sure enough thought it was simple and straightforward because his brain worked in that way. He wasn’t lying, he was telling his truth. For me it was way over my head, way too time consuming, way too complicated. I had told myself the story that if it was so simple and timesaving then there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t make it happen. I believed the story and then I believed the next story of why I couldn’t do it and gave myself a hard time about it every day for a long time. Our human lives are living stories. Stories we create about how we think we should be living and other stories we take on from other people about how we should be living, what we should be wearing, what we should charge, how much we should be making per month, and so on. It’s all made up. Everything is made up. We make it up via the power of thought. Then we use that same power of thought to judge. Judge and Juror We make judgments about what is right and what is wrong. We make ourselves and others either right or wrong depending on which story we decide to believe. We judge ourselves negatively because we haven’t got the clarity we should have to take inspired action. If we only had that clarity, then our businesses would run much smoother, there would be an abundance of clients and money. All made up. All stories. All made up by us via the power of thought. We are living in a world of stories every single minute of every single day. Some people call it the Illusion of life. When a person understands this is the way it is, that it is a story, that it is not real, as my client did when I pointed this out to her, then something changes. Nothing on the outside changed, but the situation looked very different. In that moment she could see that she was the one creating the story of how she could only work when her mind was clear. She could also see how her whole life, along with everyone elses lives, are constant stories we give power to by believing them and then judging them as either right or wrong. It was powerful because it didn’t require her to do anything. The change came purely from having a conversation. And there was no homework for her to do – no tools to use or new habits to create, no charts to fill in. Just a simple understanding of how we are always creating our reality (story) and making a judgment. Simple and yet profound. So I wonder whether you recognize a place in your life (or several) where you are making judgment that is limiting you and your business? And I know that is paradoxical because there is judgment in that very question! And yet, seeing it for what it is can be very freeing. Seeing that life is unfolding in the perfect way without judgment is extremely liberating and of course, I have just made a judgment by calling it “perfect”. What I am pointing to is the fact that there is never a right or a wrong way of doing anything, and the more we can get away from judging things as right or wrong the better. Or at the very least realize that it is the judgment that is limiting us.