83 - Are you Sabotaging Your Own Success? 2 Things to STOP doing TODAY to see Growth in your Business!
Stop sabotaging your success, babe! Danielle shares what to STOP and What’s Next!
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE:
It’s time to talk about the two things you might be doing that are sabotaging your success, and keeping your business from growing.
Danielle also shares what to do instead so you can achieve those big goals you have for your life and business!
Looking for Shortcuts
Often, we want success to happen overnight and so when things are not working as fast as we want, we end up switching gears and doing something totally different.
If you find yourself hoping from trend to trend not really having a clear idea of what your strategy is in order to scale your business, this could be you.
As entrepreneurs often we end up with a bunch of half-finished projects that we think didn’t “Work” but maybe we just didn’t give it enough time to gain traction. We want the microwave version of success but really sometimes what we need is the slow cooker!
Instead of looking for shortcuts, get clear and confident on your plan and then get accountability and support to see it through!
Avoiding Failure
It's human nature to try to avoid failing, being embarrassed or getting rejected, right? This filters into our businesses and we often play it safe so that we feel accomplished or successful.
You are going to fail along the way, and that is OKAY! You’ll be told no, you’ll make mistakes, you’ll have days maybe a week where you get nothing done because of life circumstances! The more you embrace the fact that challenges WILL come and the failure that is necessary in order to achieve your goals, the less time you’ll waste! As you normalize failure, you’ll be able to manage your emotions better and you’ll have space to dream bigger and take more significant risks because you know that it is OKAY to fail.
Reframe failure in your own mind. Instead of trying to avoid failure, create goals that are focused on the action steps you are taking instead of the outcomes.
If your goal is to land a certain amount of clients, find out what your conversion rate is and then focus on the amount of proposals, sales conversations or promotions you put out. So, for example, if your conversion rate is 20%, then to land two clients, you know you need to send out 10 proposals. See your wins as the number of proposals you send out instead of the amount of clients you bring in.
Remember - success is cultivated over time and through failure! You got this, babe!
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Danielle: Welcome back to the podcast. I am super excited that you are here today. We are gonna be diving into the topic of sabotage. Are you sabotaging your own success? And I am going to talk about two things that I'm gonna encourage you with love to stop doing today so that you can actually see your business grow to the next level.
[00:00:21] So if you have been feeling like you've been sort of stuck in your business or you're, you're feeling like it's not progressing the way that you want it to, I'm gonna be talking about two things that might be holding you back from growing your business to the next level and actually sabotaging the success of your business.
[00:00:40] So before we get into that, though, I wanted to remind everyone that this week is the absolute last week to get your application in for our mastermind. So, if you have been thinking about joining our intimate community of other entrepreneurs, that you can brainstorm with, connect with, get advice from and [00:01:00] have accountability with, then apply on our website.
[00:01:03] You can go to businessbabescollective.com/mastermind. We are so excited to connect with you and to welcome you into this incredible intimate community. We have some amazing new members who are joining us, which we're so excited about. And as I shared on previous episodes, we are actually doing our very first in person mastermind day, which we're so excited for.
[00:01:28] And we're going to be implementing some new in-person ways that we're gonna get together with our mastermind to compliment the ways that we get together online as well. So merging those two beautiful things together to make our mastermind experience even better. So if you've been on the fence with, should I apply, should I not apply? I really encourage you just get your application in. And I would love to have that conversation with you to see if it is a good fit for the next steps in your business, because I would love to [00:02:00] support you. And I would love to bring you into our incredible group so that we can hold you accountable. We can help you reach those big, scary goals that you have for yourself and for your business this year.
[00:02:12] So let us support you. Come apply to the mastermind. If you are listening to this and it is after August 1st, still get your application in because you'll then be put on the wait list for the next time we open up the doors. All right. So now let's go ahead and get started with our episode.
[00:02:32] Welcome to the business babes collective podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Wiebe. In this podcast, you'll learn tangible business tips and strategies on how to grow successfully and sustainably. We'll also interview seasoned entrepreneurs so you can listen in on their stories and see behind the scenes of what it took to grow and scale their businesses. Let's dive in, as we discussed the wild, exciting, crazy, challenging, rollercoaster ride of [00:03:00] entrepreneurship.
[00:03:02] All right. So two things that you might be doing right now that are sabotaging your own success, that I am going to encourage you to stop doing today so that you can start growing and scaling your business the way that you want to. So, before we get started with talking about these two things. I wanna let you know that I have been there.
[00:03:23] I have totally been in seasons of my business, not just when I first started my business, but even recently, and this is something that I have to work through often. And there's so many different ways that we, as entrepreneurs, can sabotage our success when we start to see that momentum or when we are starting something new or just launching our business, or maybe we're pivoting our business, right?
[00:03:45] There's a lot of different things that go into it, both strategy as well as mindset. And so if you are struggling with these things, I want you to know there is no shame around that at all, because these are all things that I'm speaking to because I [00:04:00] have either gone through it in the past, I have gone through it recently, or I'm going through it right now.
[00:04:05] Okay, so I'm speaking from a place of, I've been there. I've done that. And these are the things that I've learned that has, have helped me to grow and scale our business, and that have helped my clients to scale their businesses as well. Okay. So two things that I want you to stop doing, let's dive into it.
[00:04:22] number one is looking for shortcuts. So I think often we want to see success happen right away. Right. We want success to happen overnight. And so when we don't see that the things that we are doing are working fast enough, we end up switching gears and doing something totally different. This could come up in a few different ways. So if you find yourself trying to kind of hop on all the different trends, you're, you're hopping on trend to trend, to trend, and you're scrolling social media, trying to figure out like, what should I be doing?
[00:04:58] Or what is this person [00:05:00] doing? Or what strategy is this business owner coming up with? Or you get distracted by all these shiny objects, right? You don't really have necessarily a clear idea of what your goals are or what you should be doing on a daily basis in order to move your business to the next level. I remember early on in my business, I totally felt this way.
[00:05:20] I remember seeing everyone else on social media and it seemed like they were having success overnight. And I would look at their social media profiles and I would look at their YouTube videos or whatever it was. And I was like, okay, I need to be doing what they're doing. And so I would hop on that trend and then I would try that for a little while, and then things wouldn't be moving as fast as I thought they should, and so I was like, okay, well, what is this person doing over here?
[00:05:45] So then I would pivot and start doing this other thing for a few months, and then I would hop on another trend. And so basically I was just hopping from trend to trend, to strategy, to strategy. And it was very overwhelming and it was very confusing. [00:06:00] So I think that as business owners, we end up with a, with so many half finished, really good ideas, right. We have these strategies that we put in place. And then we only do that strategy for a couple of weeks or a month or maybe six months or maybe a year.
[00:06:18] But when it's not having the result that we want it to, and it's not going as fast enough, then we just hop on that next thing. Often, what we want is that microwave version of success, right? Like we want it to happen so quickly when sometimes what we really need is a slow cooker, right? We need everything to marinate.
[00:06:40] We need to hone our skills. We need to, uh, actually give it enough time to. So I see this a lot with clients that I work with and what they'll do is they'll tell me, oh, I, you know, I've tried that and it didn't work for me in the past, or I'm trying it right now and it's actually not working. And so [00:07:00] when we actually dig in deeper though, and I ask them some work, follow up questions, often what I find is that they've only been working on that thing or doing that strategy for a couple of weeks or a couple of months.
[00:07:12] And so they haven't seen the fruit of their labor, right? They haven't seen those results yet. And I know I've talked about this on other podcast episodes, but as business owners, we are always planting seeds, right? Think of your business as this garden. And I don't know if you guys have done any gardening before I personally am not a huge gardener. We live in Vancouver in an apartment, and so we don't have a lot of space to garden, but I do have people in my life that garden and when the garden starts, it looks pretty bleak, right? Like nothing is really poking through the, the soil. And, you know, you're planting a lot of things. You're doing so much work to get the garden ready for all of those plants and those fruits and those vegetables and those [00:08:00] beautiful things to bloom.
[00:08:02] And often you don't see the fruit and you don't see the result of what you're doing until months later, sometimes even years later. And so we really have to look at our business in the same way that we might not see the results of what we're doing right now tomorrow, or even next month, or even next year. I have talked to so many entrepreneurs and, you know, people that I interview on the podcast often and they say, you know, that thing that I was working towards that took me three years, or that took me five years, but that took me even 10 years to secure that partnership or to, you know, write my first book or to, um, have my own Netflix show or whatever that was like that big, massive goal that they had for their business or for their career. And it took them years to actually accomplish.
[00:08:57] And I think there's something so beautiful about that. [00:09:00] And I think if we can really understand that as entrepreneurs, we can be so much more patient and we can also enjoy the journey so much more as well. So what I want, and this actionable step that I want for you is to, instead of looking for the shortcut, I want you to get super clear and super confident on a strategy on your plan of how you are going to grow your business.
[00:09:27] Get excited about it, make a plan and then put it into place. And I want you to work that plan and I want you to be consistent. And then get accountability, get supports that you can actually see that plan through to the very end instead of getting, you know, a quarter of the way through or halfway through and then pivoting to something else, right?
[00:09:48] So that's what I wanna encourage you, that is the first thing that is the first thing that I want you to stop doing, looking for shortcuts and instead get a clear plan of action and then work that [00:10:00] plan. Okay. The second way that you might be sabotaging your own success is avoiding failure.
[00:10:07] So I think this is just human nature that we try to avoid failing, right? We don't wanna be embarrassed. We don't wanna get it rejected and it makes sense, right? Like this is not a comfortable thing. We don't love the idea of working on something and having challenges or, you know, experiencing rejection, all of those things, right? And so what we end up doing is we end up sabotaging our own success because we play it safe.
[00:10:34] So we want to make sure that we can guarantee our success. So what we do is that we play at a smaller level and we end up putting our goals at this really low point where we know for sure we can hit those goals because we don't wanna be disappointed, right? We don't wanna set a goal and then be so disappointed that we didn't hit that goal.
[00:10:58] Now, what I [00:11:00] want us to do is I want us to actually reframe the idea of how we look at failure, right? Because you are going to fail along the way. And that is totally okay. You're gonna be told no, you're gonna make mistakes. You're going to humiliate yourself in some, in some senses, right? Like the amount of times I have been so embarrassed in my journey of entrepreneurship.
[00:11:23] It's way too many times to count, but that is just a part of the process. And so you'll have days too, or maybe even weeks where you're gonna get nothing done in your business because of life circumstances, maybe your computer breaks down, or maybe your toddler takes your phone and drops it in the toilet.
[00:11:41] Like, I don't know, right. There's gonna be things that are gonna happen in your life and in your business that are gonna feel like big failures, and you're gonna feel like it's the end of the world, but the more you can embrace, the fact that challenges will come and failure is actually [00:12:00] necessary in order to achieve your goals, the less time that you're gonna waste, because the more time you're gonna be able to manage your emotions, you'll normalize failure and it won't feel as big of a deal.
[00:12:12] And you'll also be able to dream bigger because you're gonna be able to make, take more significant risks because you know, it's okay if you don't hit those massive goals that you set for yourself, because you're gonna be further along if you start to dream big and you set these big goals, than if you just set your goals really, really achievable because you're not gonna be stretching your comfort zone.
[00:12:39] So I want you to reframe failure in your own mind. And instead of trying to avoid it, understand it's part of the process and in order to achieve really big, scary goals that you're going after you are going to experience failure and that's okay because we all experience failure and, [00:13:00] really, the more you can just be aware of, be okay with it, and just embrace the fact that you're gonna land on your face. You're gonna be embarrassed. You're going to trip up on your words, whatever it is, when you're chasing those big goals. And just knowing that the people that achieve really, really big things, the people that you admire in business, they've probably just failed more than you have.
[00:13:26] That's the only difference between you and them is that they were willing to actually do the things that maybe you're holding yourself back from doing, because you're scared of failure. So think about that. Take that with you today. I hope this episode was helpful for you, and I really hope that you take these two things that we talked about, which is not looking for shortcuts and instead, making sure that you're clear and confident on your plan and working that plan and also not avoiding failure, but knowing that it's a part of the process and embracing it.
[00:13:59] If [00:14:00] you enjoyed this episode, I would love, love, love it if you would share it with a friend or if you would share it on your Instagram stories and tag me, you can tag me @danilivinglife and @businessbabesco, and we will repost you and connect with you there. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day and amazing rest of your week. And I also can't wait to see your application come in for the mastermind again, go to businessbabescollective.com/mastermind to apply. Otherwise we will see you back here for our next episode this Thursday.
[00:14:35] If you love this episode, make sure you screenshot, post, and tag us on Instagram @businessbabesco. Want to know when the next episode goes live? Subscribe on your podcast app, and while you're there, leave us a review. Until next time, keep dreaming big, setting goals and taking action.