Prioritizing Outcomes Over Results & Gratitude Over Disappointment
What outcomes are you prioritizing? The Big Comeback Event is approaching fast – we’ll be holding it virtually on December 8-10 (tickets are just $95 through October 21st – use promo code save400). At this event, we will work together to complete your very own 14-step Revenue Breakthrough Certified Plan.
But since we’re planning ahead – one of the things that always gets in the way after making plans is that moment when your expectations don’t meet your results.
Often, you end up throwing away your plan, and then you start to run your business without any notion of what you’re working towards. Soon enough, you find yourself feeling lost and upset.
Sound familiar? Then keep reading… I think the story I’m about to tell will help you get through those moments when your reality doesn’t quite match up with your expectations.
My client was looking at me through Zoom, tears running down her face.
She said, “Monica, I just did a speaking event for a yoga studio, and there were only five people there. And only one person signed up for a sales conversation with me. I spent so much time prepping the talk and trying so hard to get everything right, and it feels like I’ve put so much work in and didn’t get any results.”
And as I watched her sit there and tell me this story, my heart just broke for her, because I know how hard it is to do the work and not get immediate results.
It happens to so many entrepreneurs, especially in the beginning. You shoot a video and only get 12 views. You show up for a livestream and only two people are watching. You decide to start a group program and you only get three people to register.
In all honesty, I think one of the best ways to deal with those minor results, no matter where you are, is to feel gratitude. It’s one of those things that keeps you positive and keeps you moving forward.
What kept me going in the beginning of my first business was that every single person who viewed my video or signed up for my program was a celebration.
Mind you, I have never stopped wanting more – even today. But in wanting more, I can also feel the joy of what I already have. My desire for more doesn’t come from a place of scarcity – it comes from a place of joy and gratitude.
When you can internalize and honor this distinction, it completely changes your vibration and results. I still feel the effects of that mental shift today.
In fact, I’m often surprised when clients come to me with high expectations – especially at the start of their business – and they can’t find gratitude for every single person who has chosen to sign up with them.
Because learning how to be happy with the small wins will train you to receive the big wins.
And by “happy,” I don’t mean satisfied, as in curbing your ambition. You’ll still want more – but you can go after it with a more positive and self-supportive foundation.
There’s one more concept here that I want to share. I think this is helpful when you’re training yourself to notice the small wins.
And that is understanding the difference between a result and an outcome.
A result is the immediate impact that you make – like the number of people who sign up for sales conversations with you after a talk, the number of people who sign on as clients, or whether a person agrees to work with you after a sales conversation.
Many of us are literally addicted to immediate outcomes. We want to know that our work is directly contributing to our goals. We want that dopamine hit – that “oh my gosh, I posted my first video and a hundred people watched it right away!”
It makes us very impatient, and it makes it impossible to commit to the process of watching the results of our work shift and change over time. And it also makes it very difficult to keep up with marketing activities, because most marketing activities don’t bring us immediate results.
What makes an impact is people seeing you over and over and over again. So one of the things I highly recommend is detaching yourself from your results and instead attaching yourself to your outcome.
Now, in my book, your outcomes are the positive long-term impacts of every little minute-to-minute thing that you do.
For example, if you make and post a video and only get 12 views, the result is that you only got 12 views. But the outcome is that you learned how to do a video, or you practiced doing a video, or you now have the mental muscle memory to upload and tag a video.
When you’re focusing on outcome, you tell yourself, “I’m going to keep going with videos because, in the long run, once I’ve been doing this every week or every other week, I’m going to start to amass a crowd of people who are used to seeing me on video, and maybe I’ll eventually even drive ads to my videos.”
On a more esoteric level, a positive outcome could be that you overcame your inertia to do the video. You overcame your resistance, your laziness, your procrastination, and you did it anyway.
And that is going to give you the strength to do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing that you don’t want to do in order to eventually create success in your business.
Any work you do for your business can yield so many positive outcomes. But if you prioritize your addiction to immediate results, it’s going to make it so difficult to persevere through the lack of immediate results that you will, in all honesty, experience more often than not.
So my invitation to you this week is, number one, to notice the small wins and find gratitude for anyone who is engaging with your business, and, number two, to distinguish between a result and an outcome and shift your value system to prioritize outcomes.
Commit to the process. Eventually, you’ll get to the outcome that you really want. And if you want more help building a process that works for you, don’t forget to check out our virtual Big Comeback Event (use promo code save400) and come make your own 14-step Revenue Breakthrough Certified Plan.
Remember – once you start to see the outcomes of what you’re doing, everything becomes worth doing. Trust.
