The Work of Completion: Letting Go to Go Forward
Are you struggling with completion? As I was teaching the RISE Business Academy class this week, one of my clients was trying to plan her first 90 days of 2023 – and something just wasn’t clicking.
She raised her hand and said, “I’m trying to fill my group program, but I still haven’t planned out the webinar to launch it or even sent out any promotional emails.”
I could see the shame in her eyes and hear it in her voice on the Zoom call. When I asked her why, she said, “Well, when I did my group program in March, I didn’t fill it, and I don’t want to do that again.”
By the way, if you haven’t yet heard, we are coming together as a community to plan the first 90 days of 2023 this Saturday, December 17. All you need to do to come is purchase a Breakthrough Planner ($32) at www.BreakthroughPlanners.com.
Once you purchase the Planner, I won’t leave you hanging! I’ll show you exactly how to use it to plan out an amazing first 90 days of 2023 and use it each day and week to make it the best quarter ever.
OK – now, back to my client, my guess is that you can relate to her dilemma.
As entrepreneurs, when we try to do something for the second or the third time, and it didn’t work the last time we did it, it’s so hard to find the motivation to do it again.
But what’s most important for us as entrepreneurs is to give ourselves a fresh start – to understand that just because something didn’t work the first time doesn’t mean it’s not going to work the second or the third time.
And in fact, the basis of entrepreneurship is the ability to look at what you did the first time, change it, look at what could be done differently, and then do it again and make it better.
But so many of us struggle so hard with the disappointment of things not working the first time that we don’t even give ourselves the chance to work towards mastery and excellence.
One technique that I train all of my clients in is the technique of completion: making sure that you complete everything that you do so that when you’re done doing it, you can leave it in the past.
Right now, in the present moment, you are creating a new future for yourself. If your mind is occupied with your past failures, then you’re bound to repeat those failures in the future.
So many of us do this all the time. We carry the fears, the worries, the disappointments of the past in the present moment. It feels like, maybe, if we keep them in our minds, we’ll somehow have the awareness to prevent ourselves from making the same mistake again.
But the exact opposite happens. What we end up doing is carrying the past into our present and then creating a future that looks exactly like the past, because that’s all we’re thinking about.
When I learned this concept, it was revolutionary for me. I, like many of you, love to just pour over every gory detail of my past with some inane hope that if I just look at it 89,000 times, I’m somehow going to make it different, make it better, or make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
It was so eye-opening and yet so obvious when I realized that I hadn’t been letting go of my past.
So I want to share with you this work of completion and how you can use it to open up yourself and your business to creating a different, better future.
So let’s take a launch for our example – let’s say you held an event for a program that you wanted to fill and you didn’t fill it.
You can respond by sitting down, grabbing a journal, and answering these four questions.
Question number one: what actually happened during the launch? Here, we really want to stay in numbers – this many people came to my event, this many people asked for sales conversations, and this many people signed up for my program, and so on.
Question number two: what do you think worked? Maybe you thought the structure of the event was great, the platform you used was great, and so on.
Question number three: what didn’t work? Maybe you didn’t send out enough promotional emails, or the emails weren’t that good. Maybe the name of the webinar didn’t draw the right audience.
Question number four: what would you do differently in the future? How could you improve upon the elements that didn’t go so well?
If you get to a point where you’re thinking, gosh, I just don’t know what didn’t work. I don’t know what I could do differently, this is when you want to bring in a business coach to help you strategize.
Someone who knows more than you do can look at your numbers, the titles of your webinar, your offerings, your target market, and so on, and help you decipher the answers to the questions that we just discussed.
And once you’ve done all this writing and reflection – and potentially brought in a business coach to help you – then it’s time to really let it go, right?
I’ve learned the lessons from this. I’m going to stop thinking about it, and I’m going to release it from my body.
Sometimes ceremony can help with this as well. You might take your written reflections and burn them, drown them in water, or plant them in the earth.
Now, there have been moments in my business when I’ve done all of this and it still hurts. I’m disappointed, and I’m not able to let it go. These are the moments when you may want to get some more help – like enlisting a therapist, healer, or body worker to help you work through it.
Oftentimes, if you’re struggling to let go of something like this, it’s because this disappointment triggered some deeper belief or fear that you already had.
There have been times in my business when I’ve had to do all of this. I’ve done the journaling. I’ve gotten the help of a strategist to help me look at what I’ve done wrong. I’ve talked to a therapist. I’ve talked to a healer.
And then and only then was I able to truly come to completion.
I also want you to really understand that completion isn’t about knowing what happened. Sometimes you’re not going to know why people didn’t sign up or why it didn’t work. It’s about learning what you want to do differently the next time, and then releasing it from your body.
Many of us, especially those of us who are analytical thinkers, want to know why something happened – and you may never get those answers.
You just have to let it go from your body, from your thoughts, from your words, so that you can create a different future. It’s not worth bringing that pain with you.
So my invitation for you this week is to think about what’s incomplete for you – what went wrong this year or in the past few years that you’re still carrying? And then I invite you to follow this process of completion.
Because it’s time for you to be able to create a different future.
If you’d like to create a different future with us, I want to invite you to join us at the Breakthrough Planner Day that’s happening this Saturday, December 17.
All you need to do to join the Planner Day is purchase a Breakthrough Planner for $32 at www.BreakthroughPlanners.com. Then we’ll be coming together as a group to work through our Planners together and create the most amazing first 90 days of 2023!
Because the best path towards transformation is the path that you’ve planned out. And the best way to plan? Together, of course!
