Exhausted? Let’s Reframe for the Year Ahead
It’s the middle of January, and the shimmer of the New Year is fading. Perhaps you relate. As entrepreneurs, the New Year can make us feel overwhelmed and exhausted because we just finished climbing a mountain in the previous year – and now we have to climb the whole thing again.
One of my clients just hit her first seven-figure year. She was so excited and so proud of herself, but I could feel that there was something missing from that joy.
So I asked her, “What’s wrong?”
And she said, “Now it’s January and I’m tired but I have to do it all over again. How am I gonna hit seven figures again?”
I used to feel this way too, but this year I noticed something really special – that I don’t actually feel that way. I feel excited about the year to come.
There are a couple reasons why I feel this way, and I hope that they can help spark your excitement about your new year as well.
First, don’t take everything so seriously. We have this tendency to think that we have to do everything perfectly. If we’re going to do this year at all, we have to do better than last year. We have to find more clients! We have to make more money!
But this thinking sucks the joy out of everything we do – it makes work feel like a means to an end rather than a process or a journey.
This year, I invite you to step into treating everything like an adventure game. The golden stuff isn’t actually the end of the game – it’s the treasures that you collect along the way.
When we’re intentional about looking for the treasures hiding at each and every step of our journey, moving into the new year becomes so much more exciting.
This brings me to my second point.
There are probably parts of your business that you dread or that feel like a slog. And depending on where you are in your business, I can’t just sit here and tell you not to do them.
Sometimes we do have to move through the pieces that we don’t like.
However, identifying the parts of your business that you don’t love, in turn gives you an awareness of the parts of your business that you do love.
Instead of letting the unsavory parts of your business cloud your attitude, channel your energy and focus into all of the parts of your business that you absolutely love.
It’s also important to remember that there are ways to make the tricky parts of your business easier, and now’s a great time to start thinking about what those might be.
For example, if you hate writing newsletters, you might start making spoken audio recordings of your newsletters and letting someone else edit the transcriptions for you.
If you hate doing reach-outs, maybe use a software that allows you to input all of your reach-out names ahead of time.
So this year, I invite you to focus on embracing the pieces of your business that you do love and finding potential shifts for the pieces that you don’t love.
This doesn’t have to be a slog. Maybe we can work to make the hard parts easier – and maybe we can even find some joy along the way.
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