The Year I Regretted Everything
“Solve big problems early. Rebound after one missed workout, not a decade of inactivity.
Repair a strained relationship the next day, not years later.
Fix overspending before it becomes a lifestyle.
Problems with simple solutions at first become difficult to unwind over time.”
– James Clear, Atomic Habits
I love this quotation so much that I’ve literally been copying and pasting it onto the to-do list I create each week.
There’s something so important about facing the things we avoid, EARLY.
I can look at my life overall and trace so many of my problems back to waiting or ignoring. Waiting until that hard conversation became easier (which it never did). Or ignoring those little intuitive nudges that something wasn’t working.
I remember hiring a new event team to run my events – and by the 2nd meeting I knew it wasn’t going to work. They were sloppy, unorganized and unprofessional. Clearly my little event wasn’t a priority. I even spoke about it with my husband.
He said to me, “Monica, it’s not too late to make another arrangement. You could pay them a fair payment and then move on.”
But I was afraid to be bold, to be mean, to be – dare I say it – a b#$@tch. So I carried on. And the relationship continued to worsen on both sides. The event itself was my worst event experience to this day. I cried for days afterwards. And I needed a two-week vacation just to get it all out of my system and move forwards.
Hindsight is 20/20 and there’s so many ways I could have dealt better with that situation – from holding onto the reins more tightly to asking more for what I wanted. But the truth is that I just hid away from facing the decision head on, and most important EARLY on.
I wish I could say that was the last time this happened.
But it wasn’t. That same year, I also avoided some hard conversations. I had two full-time employees who weren’t working out. And instead of having the conversation I needed to have with them and perhaps letting them go – I just worked harder to make up for all that they weren’t doing.
I told myself things like, “They aren’t that bad.” Or, “At least some work is getting done.” Or, “It’s just too hard to hire and train again.” Or, “This isn’t the right time.” And definitely, “There’s no one out there for me.”
These were all excuses. Because I didn’t want to face the problem early and directly. Looking back there wasn’t a huge hit to our revenue or profit that year. But I did suffer from what I call trust scars. A trust scar is when you find yourself struggling to trust people again and you start to just operate from an insulated island, consciously and subconsciously. I started taking more of the work on myself and keeping people at arm’s distance.
Today, these lessons live within me as red flags. I try to handle problems both in my personal life and my professional life as soon as they come up. And address them head on. And my mantra is, “I can do this. And my company will stay strong no matter what happens in front of me.”
Today, when I feel that niggly feeling of avoiding a hard conversation or a brewing problem, I HATE it. I can’t even go for a run or walk in peace if I feel like I’m avoiding something or not listening to an inner voice. I guess 15 years of business have really shifted that part of me.
And thankfully the trust scars are almost gone.
The good news for you is that once you stop avoiding and facing things head on – you too will start to become addicted to that feeling. “What feeling?” you ask. The feeling of peace when you know things are handled and that you’ve done the best you can.
Now, my guess is that you can relate to some aspect of these scenarios. Whether you are working with a Virtual Assistant who just isn’t grooving with you, or a vendor who seems to be ignoring you, or a client who is a bully – or any comparable scenario.
What I can tell you from nursing my own pain over here is that it’s not worth it to silently suffer! You deserve to have people around you that support you fully, in the way that you want to be supported. You deserve to be able to have hard conversations with people and not feel like you are going to crush them. You deserve to be able to make changes without the fear that your whole company will topple down.
You created that business and no matter what you do, it will keep going.
But remember the fastest and easiest way to deal with something is to address it early and honestly. Have that conversation with your virtual assistant about why she didn’t make the deadline you agreed on. Talk to your website vendor about why she isn’t sending you regular status reports. Ask your client who seems to be unhappy how you both can shift the relationship.
Don’t wait until it becomes easier (because it won’t).
Don’t wait until it’s the right time (because it rarely is).
Don’t try to take on more yourself (because you’ll just burn out).
And most importantly…
Don’t stop trusting people (because loneliness is real and can be very painful).
I’ve posted this article over in our Facebook Group (if you haven’t joined you’ll need to answer a few questions first). I’d love for you to comment there and tell me about your own problem scenarios. This is a topic that we just don’t talk about enough as it’s deeply vulnerable. But we do need each other on this one.
Hop on over there and leave a comment and join the discussion.
