It’s just about summer, and what I’m hearing from some of my clients is that it’s a little hard to stay focused on their goals (aka what they “said they wanted to do”) because it’s so beautiful out. I really can resonate with that.
I remember, especially at the beginning of my business, 14 years ago, I would find it difficult to really stay focused on my work, and business. I realized that it wasn’t so much for me that it was summer, but that I wasn’t as dedicated to it as I needed to be for it to be successful – and I probably had some limiting beliefs around whether I could be successful or what I should be doing instead.
To that end, I am going to bring you through a process. You will identify what you said you wanted, (or perhaps you haven’t even said what you wanted, but you’re getting distracted) and maybe the distraction right now is how beautiful it is out.
Read on or watch the video
As I’m recording the video which goes with this blog, there are beautiful flowers behind me and the birds are singing. It’s a beautiful day out today here in New Hampshire, and that would warrant anybody to want to play hooky, right? When you have your own business, you really can, and so that’s hard sometimes.
The process starts with the Unscatter Your Life guide, which is available on the front page of my website (download it and go to page four). Page 4 is about how this is all going to come down to your decision and how to stay non-distracted, and is called the Wheel of Entrepreneurial Life. The Wheel is a way for you to decide what area of your life you want to focus on to change – because we can’t change everything all at once. We want to, and we try to, and we fail – so the way to make progress is just to pick one area and pick the area that’s really calling to you the most and decide what you want and how badly you want it and where you are right now. I’m not going to go into all those details because that’s all in the guide.
Guess what! I’m going to add a bonus here. The bonus comes from the workshop I did in early May, which was called ‘Spring Into Your Breakthrough’. Once you decide what it is you want and set your goal, you will take an Extra Powerful step from the spring workshop. Example…you want to be closer to your children – that’s your goal. You are in the ‘family’ part of the Entrepreneurial Life Wheel. Let’s say your children are early-teenagers and they just don’t need you or want you the way they used to (it’s hard, I know as I had two of them. One of them’s gone, and the other one right now is getting to be more of a mid-teenager!). So then you want to ask yourself:
- ‘What is a challenge for me?’ And you’re going to say something along the lines of, ‘Well, a challenge for me might be my sadness that s/he doesn’t want to play games anymore’. So you write that down.
- ‘What else is a challenge for me?’ And you might have another answer such as ‘s/he’s so busy hanging out with her/his friends that there’s hardly any time left for me.’ So you go progressively deeper.
- ‘What else is a challenge for me?’ And go a little deeper. What’s really going on for you? Maybe when you start looking at the inside like that, there are fears there. ‘I fear that s/he might get into drugs and alcohol because I’m not there all the time’. or ‘S/he might start hanging out with the wrong people’. I don’t know.
- ‘What is the real challenge?’ This is where I really want you to go very, very deep.
I did this (asking progressively deeper challenge questions) recently one-on-one with one of my VIP clients, and that client came up with his answers – to really dial into fear of failure and fear of success. If your answers are anything that can be connected to fear of failure or failure of success, then you are going deep enough. In this example, it might be that you fear failure as a mom/dad. That could be what’s at the root of it. That fear could be saying ‘What will you do with your life?’ Or it could be saying, ‘If you have more time to work / work on your business, that will mean you need to redefine who your are’.
Redefinition, even though we say we want it, is really a big deal. It’s no joke to redefine yourself. As long as we’re in the loop of saying ‘I want, I want…’ we get to have that as a crutch. If there’s actually something that we like, we can actually really get it, our whole bodies are like ‘Whaaat? Alert, alert! I didn’t really want it’.
That reminds me of a little story (I’m going off on a little teeny weeny tangent and then I’ll bring it back)
When I was small, maybe four or five years old, I wanted an inchworm for Christmas. The inchworm was one of these toys that you rode on, you sat on it and bounced and it moved forward. That seemed so magical and far away from me. I remember going downstairs on Christmas day and seeing that inchworm in front of the Christmas tree … I couldn’t even speak, I was so dumbfounded that I got the thing I wished for, and my parents were looking at me…they can’t wait. They got the cameras ready and they’re ready to go. I was frozen; paralyzed with fear. I remember saying, “I just wanted to pull it”. And that’s all I could do. I could just pull it because the manifestation of the thing that in my head was unretrievable – I couldn’t manifest it to get it. It had shocked my system.
It’s quite like that for us. When we say we want something and we’ve been wanting it and wanting it, we get addicted to wanting it. And in fact, if you really dial down and dig deep underneath all of this stuff, you’ll realize that that’s what’s there: the Wanting Addiction. Through the process of asking the Challenge Questions, you are empowered to decide, is this really and truly what you want? And what do you need to overcome? What kind of fears do you need to work through and get over to truly achieve it, or- perhaps the process has allowed you to determine that you don’t want it at all.
So that’s why I love the guide, because if you download it and you really do it, it can be in and of itself transformational. And then of course there’s an option to talk to me- send me a little message saying ‘Hey, I want to talk to you about this’ – there is a free session waiting for you because it’s important – and especially at the beginning of the summer I want you to be able to enjoy your summer, and I want you to be able to do the transformation your way in a way that is so meaningful for you.
So download the guide, ask yourself the challenge questions, set up your follow up call and, and tell me – what do you really want? Has it changed since the beginning of the year or maybe since the beginning of the quarter? What area of life does it relate to?
I can’t wait to see you on the other side.