Sometimes, the hardest thing to do in business is to just show up.
There are days when everything seems intent on going to hell no matter what you do. People just keep quitting. Mistakes keep being made. The progress you thought you saw last week…where is it? Were you hallucinating?
Those are the times when it’s really tempting to either retreat into a dark corner somewhere or just put your nose to the grindstone and hope that just working really hard will solve the problem.
Yeah, it doesn’t. What usually happens is that when you come up for air, the issue has blown over. But it’s just waiting for the right set of circumstances to pop up again. “Hey, you clever entrepreneur. It’s me again! You’re friend, Mistakes That Could Have Been Avoided!” Or maybe your friend’s name is Things You Wish You Could Hand Off But People Always Mess Up.
I was in a meeting with an entrepreneur the other day. She clearly did not want to be there – she came in with a huff, sat down, and pulled out her phone. A lot of our work centers on setting the business up to transition away from her control, and I could tell that this was a day she wished she could be anywhere but the office. We started the meeting but it was clear she was not really mentally present for it. This was a great example of an instance in which the business needed her to show up – just be there – but showing up was the absolute last thing she wanted to do or felt capable of doing.
I called attention to what I was observing and asked her how she felt. She acknowledged that when she was walking into the building she thought, “I’m over this. Can’t I just retire?” Her honesty allowed us to address what was causing her to not show up – feeling overwhelmed, alone in the business, and ill-equipped for the task at hand.
These are all very normal things for people in positions of business leadership to feel. Feeling this way doesn’t make you irresponsible, bad, or incapable. It makes you human. The trick is, when you start to notice feeling these things – to stop. Yes. I said, STOP. Consider what is happening and what your limitations are. Have you built out the infrastructure of the business to acknowledge your humanity? Or does it operate on your infallibility?
Here’s the truth: None of us can show up 100% of the time. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to, even entrepreneurs. Expecting this of yourself, or setting yourself up for this in the long-term is what will lead to you eventually hating your business.
You might be thinking, if it’s impossible for us to show up 100% of the time, why did you show a key in a door above? Well, the truth is that you are often a – if not the – key decision maker in your business. So if you decide not to show up for whatever reason, those doors can’t open. Things get waylaid. People hit walls. The things you want to accomplish and know your business the potential to achieve can’t happen. But guess what? The answer is not just to figure out how to be perfect or work harder.
How can you avoid this? That’s where internal infrastructure comes in. You can create systems and processes that support the business so that you don’t have to. Think about it a little like automation – rather than you sending out every email to everyone on your email list, you set up an automation to send things at a set time. These are the structures that give you breathing room to live your life, which is what allows you to be the intrepid entrepreneur you are.
Activity: Think of the last time you had a hard time showing up for something related to your business. How did you feel? What was happening to cause this kind of reaction? How did you address the problem? Did you actually address it, or did you pull the nose-to-the-grindstone trick?