I expect guys want to read articles about business planning, market strategies and other ‘tangible’ stuff, but I keep writing about emotions and mental stuff.
Why do I do this?
I assume guys coming to MENtrepreneurs expect advice like ‘Seven Steps to Riches’ or ‘Launch Your Business In A Weekend’ or ‘Getting VC Money Step-by-Step”.
Why do I write about the invisible mental world, and not on the tangibles?
Because:
Business sustainability isn’t about a better ‘plan’ or an ‘exit strategy’. For three quarters of all the business owners (21 million) sustainability is about ‘getting FROM the day, not just THROUGH the day, as Jim Rohn said. It’s about learning. It’s about improvement. It’s about what this journey makes of us, not about what we get.
What do you do when twenty years have gone under your bridge and you are still trying to make it ‘through’ the day? What do you do when the stress fractures your primary relationships, and you have so much invested that you can’t call it quits?
Long-term Success / Avoiding Heartache or Burnout
Keeping your business alive as a solo-preneur isn’t about executing a better plan, it’s all about honing instinct and character. To make maters worse, it’s experimental. We can’t afford to screw-up too often – even if we believe that living in our car is nostalgic like Colonel Sanders’ or romantic like Robert and Kim Kiyosaki.
I focus on the ‘challenge’ of attitude rather than the ‘task’ of getting market share because I've not had an enterprising father to guide me through the decades. I’ve made a transition from ‘ambition’ to one of ‘meaning’ and I still believe that the truth sets us free.
Recall the last two articles I’ve posted.
Failing without Becoming One
I’ve chronicled my experience of failing to launch this year’s expedition as planned. Having worked for nearly two years to produce the MENtrepreneurs website and the Enterprising Cycle DVD, I fully expected my fourth Trans-America expedition to be a reward and a celebration for so much effort and sacrifice. I was wrong.
I imagined half a million dollars of work as the fuel required to fire my career, and our company, across the Snake River canyon, and did Evil Kenevil. You recall a small technical glitch that turned his dream into a scary rescue in the river far below? I thought we’d be cycling across America meeting guys and doing workshops so that we could touch down softly on the other side of the chasm, funded once again. So much for plans and hard work.
I’ve been able to recognize some of the ‘delaying’ factors – like our DVD being in hand far before the marketing got going, making sales insufficient to self-fund the expedition. I could blame the sour economy, or the corporate ‘pause’ on sponsorships, or even economic recovery programs where the ‘funding’ seems to vaporize long before we innovators’ can raise our hand for an RFP or contract.
Anchoring the ISS
If the reward we expect moves while we put in all the effort then there’s disappointment in store. Imagine discovering there are no ‘jobs’ after you finally get a degree? How about no ‘sales’ after the product finally makes it to the market? Our emotional ‘cups’ spill and all our fears squeeze the ‘fight’ ‘flight’ or ‘freeze’ behaviors into action and we have a meltdown – literally falling apart from within. It’s like we hang up the ‘closed’ sign and leave for the day, even though our bodies are still at work, or we still have the shop open, while holding back an emotional eruption, trying to not rip the head off the next whining customer that comes in.
Eventually, we go through all the stages of the death and dying process, and somewhere out the other end we pick ourselves up by our boot straps, vaguely remembering the entrepreneurial ‘seizure’ of our youth, or our daily need to fix our ‘addiction’ with another chase, and we give it another ‘stupid’ best effort.
Sound familiar?
One ‘click’ to ‘Snap Out of It’!
If I’ve written well, you should be feeling rather lousy by now. If not, then recall the pains of a decent failure, or the heartache of discovering a financial ‘hole’ in your books, or maybe an unfruitful marketing ‘expert’ you believed would turn everything around. Feels pretty lousy, right?
Here’s a quick and simple way to ‘snap’ out of this resulting ‘funk’.
1) Open notepad, or Word.
2) Watch this video and monitor your emotions and self-talk.
Write your observation down.
You see?
Memory coaches teach us that all we need to do to recall anything is pin the ‘word’ with an image that is ‘exaggerated’ or really ‘contrasting’, like our pitiful moaning over a ‘situation’ with the image of Nick Vujicic inspiring people.
Ok, your turn. Snap the image of yourself with Nick’s attitude into mind!
One ‘click’ and you can ‘snap out of it’