How to Succeed Without Struggle (Spoiler Alert: You Can’t)
How to succeed without struggle, overwhelm, or upset:
Ummmm… actually, I don’t know how that works. And I must call bull…
Honestly, in my experience, doing business is uncomfortable because every step is unfamiliar the first time you do it (and maybe the 18th time too).
Your nervous system’s response to an unfamiliar situation is either flight, fight, freeze, or fawn – which translates to struggle, escape, confusion, or ignoring boundaries (in other words…struggle, overwhelm, upset).
You cannot get around this. You can only respond to it and nurture yourself through it.
Success in 2024 will not be a matter of what works and what doesn’t. It will be about your response when things don’t actually go as planned.
This is your personal power. This is your resilience: how you react when there’s a train wreck, when you forget to send a contract, when a client backs out who you thought for sure would sign.
This is what you do when you launch a new program and there’s crickets, when four people sign up but you needed at least 12 and now you have to figure out what to say to them.
Look, I’ve been through them all.
Once I did a sell-from-the-stage sponsorship that I had paid $19,000 for. I opened with a funny story that I’d told at least three times before. As I moved from line to line, there was total silence in the room: 250 people and no reaction at all.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud or crying (fine line). I kept going, but it was humbling. I learned later that the AV wasn’t working well and they couldn’t hear me – lesson learned: ask the room what they are thinking.
Another time, I had someone openly tell me that the dress I was wearing was not very flattering on me… five minutes before I was going on stage. Lovely.
In my early days, I went to a company that was so excited to have me be their health and balance expert (my first endeavor). I went home and totally freaked out and never followed up. I later learned they had hired someone else for a $25,000 contract. GULP. Missed that train.
I could go on and on here. But here’s the point: each time, I got back up. Not without tears and tantrums, and always with a biz coach helping to pull me forward, but I kept going.
I think my biggest breakthrough came when I realized that I could feel disappointment or rejection in my body and not die, that these feelings come in waves and I could ride them out.
Suddenly, I could launch anything I wanted, hire any vendor, try any strategy – because the worst that could happen was that I’d feel sick to my stomach for 2-5 days and hear the same old voices of shame and disappointment singing their songs in my head.
As long as I knew that this was temporary, I could keep going. I could practice soothing my nervous system with self-talk, long baths, somatic dance, good conversations, meditation, movement, and so on.
Resilience isn’t about being so strong that you never feel pain. It’s not about being so good that you don’t fall.
It’s about feeling the pain and knowing you won’t die, sitting through the discomfort of not getting what you wanted, asking for help when you need to verbalize what happened or get some advice on what to do next.
This is the key to success, and it’s a secret closely held by those who only like to talk about the other side of the pain: the glory days.
But I’d like to openly state that the pain is part of the process, and we are ALL strong enough to hold space for each other and sit through it.
Reach out to us at support@revenuebreakthrough.com or join our Facebook group to get additional support.
