Today, we’re talking about why this mindset of waiting until you’re successful, might be holding you back from creating that success in your business.
“When I’m successful, then I’ll … “
This is a question that really shook things up for me, because it showed me where I was holding myself back in my business and in my life.
And it can be one of those chicken, egg situations, right? You know you want up level your habits, and your team, and you technology, and your brand, but you need the clients and the cashflow, right? It can feel very tricky.
But it can also feel tricky when there’s areas of your life you want to upgrade. Maybe you want to upgrade your home, or your car, or your office space, or go on vacation. But you feel like “I have to wait until I’m successful to do that. First I’ve got to put in all the long hours and all the hard work, right?”
Well, maybe not.
If you caught last week’s episode about defining what success truly means to you in your life, in your health, in your relationships, and yes, in your business, then you know that I believe entrepreneurs can experience their version of success right now.
Today, I want to share with you a few shifts that will help you to stop waiting for someday to experience that success in your life and in your business.
Here’s the tricky part about finding yourself in this loop of “when I’m successful, then I’ll do those things.” What tends to happen when we find yourself in that loop is then suddenly, we are putting off the exact things that would help us get where we want to go.
If one of the things you’ve been saying to yourself is, “When I’m successful, then I’ll hire a cleaner.” This is something that I myself have run into over and over again in my life.
Think about how long it takes you to clean your house. For me, I’m a little bit of a neat freak, so for me to really clean the way that I would want to clean the house, that would take be six to eight hours, from top to bottom.
Think about that. “When I’m successful, I’ll hire a cleaner.” But, if I’m putting that action off, if I’m putting that off, what does that mean I’m doing?
I’m instead of spending the money, however much it might cost to hire a cleaner to come, I now am spending my time and my energy for six to eight hours doing a task that doesn’t provide value to my business.
It doesn’t provide value to my business. If I really think about what my definition of success means, to me, it’s also taking that time (that six to eight hours I would be cleaning my house) it’s taking that time away from
- quality time with my kids
- quality time with my family
- quality time with my husband
- quality time with my friends
It’s taking away from time I could be investing in my own needs, my self care, my health, my fitness. It’s taking a lot of valuable time away from me.
This is something that I started noticing in my own business really, really early on. Because as someone who has been running this business for nearly a decade, I’ve been very aware of a few things.
I have very limited time
At first it was because I had little children and then it became just because I decided I didn’t want to work 60 hours a week, that wasn’t going to work for my life or my lifestyle.
I’ve only got about 20 or 25 hours a week I’ve carved out for my business. I know that for my definition of success I include time with my friends and family, time on my own personal development and spirituality and includes making sure that I’m taking care of myself (that’s just so important).
Having that definition of success is so incredibly powerful as your start to think about this conundrum that we find ourselves in.
Where we say to ourselves, “When I’m successful, then I’ll hire than cleaner.” When you think about it, if you hired that cleaner you would free up however many hours that is.
I want to walk you through this process I took myself through when I was making these decisions. Because I quickly realized that hiring that cleaner, even twice a month, suddenly freed up so much of my bandwidth.
Here’s the first part of today’s thought process that we’re going to go through.
Adding on to that, something that I have done is this exercise called Future You. And Future You is all about picking a milestone that feels like “oh, this is something big, something I need to be thinking about, what this means to me”.
For me, that is five years from now, I’m going to be turning 40. I can see what 40 looks like. And I can also think about what does 40 mean for me?
It’s going to be a big change from where we are right now, where they’re really, really little. It means they’re going to be super independent, and it means I have a big opportunity in front of me to really grow my life, my family, my business the direction I want it to go.
A couple big things started to show up for me as I was thinking about future me.
Future Racheal, at 40, with 12 year old twins, eight year old. Future me wants to be there with my kids.
- I want to show up for all the soccer games
- I want to take them camping
- I want to travel with them
- I want to take them sailing up and down the east coast, like I did when I was a kid.
- I want to be able to have these bigger adventures and experiences with them when they’re that age, because it’s such a fun, fun stage
What does that look like in other areas of my life?
Future me wants to have just an incredible relationship with my husband. In five years, that means 15 years of marriage, that is a long time. So I want to make sure that we’re celebrating that. Some other things come up when I think about future me.
Be thinking about yourself.
[clickToTweet tweet=”What does success look like in your family, in your relationships, in your health?” quote=”That milestone in the future, what does success look like in your family, in your relationships, in your health?” theme=”style2″]
Future me knows I’ve got super active kids and they’re already athletic, so if I’m going to keep up with those kids, future me needs to be taking care of her health.
Future me doesn’t want to have days where I’m just too tired to really do much, or future me doesn’t want to go in to weekends being too run down from the week that I can’t show up and have lots of fun with the kids.
I can already tell, there’s things they’re going to want to do, they’re going to be in to sports, they’re going to be in to hiking, they’re going to be in to doing all of these activities, I want to have the energy for that.
Future me takes care of herself. Future me goes on walks all the time. Future me is physically active, so she can be active with her kids. So she can go hiking with her kids. So it’s not a big deal if we decide to spend all day in Disney World.
There’s also future me in my business. So I just outlined all these things that will happen in my life, future me in five years, at the 40 year mark, 15 years of marriage, it’s a big milestone for me.
Now I’m going to think about how will my business support that. How will my business support what I want to be doing.
Future me in my business wants to be reaching and serving more people. As I said, my kids will be older, I feel like I’m stepping in to a new stage of life where now, I have a lot more freedom and bandwidth because they’re more independent.
That means future me will be able to reach and serve more people, be able to travel a lot easier without stressing about little toddlers at home.
Future me loves the idea of hosting in person events and retreats. Future me wants to be able to host a team retreat each and every year.
Future me wants to be able to give back in a really big way. This year we’ve started giving back behind the scenes to different organizations that really matter to us, and I want to be able to expand on that even more.
So for my business, and again, it’s all about supporting my life. It’s all about making sure that it makes sense and supports other goals we might have like
- how big of an impact we want to make
- how many people do we want to touch
- how many organizations do we want to support
- how many donations do we want to make
How will your business look five years from today?
So for me it looks very similar to what I have, just more impact. And also, a few more high level in person events and maybe an in person mastermind type of thing, and I can already see it.
Five years away is going to come up like that, the last five years passed really, really quickly. So thinking through this exercise Future You, pick that milestone date in the future.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Think about that milestone. What does it look like? What does that success look like for you?” quote=”Think about that milestone. What does it look like? What does that success look like for you?” theme=”style2″]
We need to actually bring it back to reality and start thinking about how are we showing up today.
Future You, you already know what you want that to look like. You probably have a really clear idea of what you want to be experiencing. So that’s what you want to have. Now we need to bring it back to what do you need to do in order to have that.
So, thinking about future me, five years from today, one of the big things for me, and I preach this all the time, is my health, my well being, my self care, and it’s because it’s my greatest weakness.
It’s my greatest area of opportunity. So, if I know when my twins are 12 and little guy is eight, that I will need to be super healthy in order to keep up with them, in order to take them sailing, in order to go hiking, then what do I need to do in order to be that way?
I need to show up today just as I want to be five years from today. I can’t wait until the couple months before I turn 40 to finally take the steps, right?
I need to take the steps now. Even if they’re small steps. I know that I want to be able to take them hiking for a week, that means I need to start working on that, I need to be showing up, I need to be getting out there every morning and getting my morning miles in.
It doesn’t mean I need to hurt myself, but it means I need to show up at that level in order to experience that in the future.
How do I want this to translate in to my marriage? We’ll be married 15 years at that point. So for us, in order to make sure the marriage is strong and solid and where we want it to be, we want to be able to have these awesome experiences five years from now.
What could I do right now to invest in that relationship? Well, weekly date nights. Making sure that every day we’re taking a little bit of time, even if it’s just five minutes, to just sit down and hold hands and talk about our day. Investing in that right now.
So where do you need to invest in your relationships now so that they will be there for future you?
Where do you need to invest in your health now so that it will be there for future you?
In your business, where do you need to invest your resources, okay, your time, your energy and your money so that it will be there for future you? So where do you need to invest those time, energy and resources?
If future you is running a six figure, or multiple six figure, or seven figure business, what types of things do you need to invest in now in order to get there? Where do you need to put your energy?
This is so important, and this is something I talk about all the time if you’ve taken my Fired Up and Focused Challenge, where is your time going?
Because if your time is going in to busy work, then it’s going to be really hard to get where you need to go.
[clickToTweet tweet=”What does future you need, and how would you show up if future you was sitting here right now?” quote=”What does future you need, and how would you show up if future you was sitting here right now?” theme=”style2″]
How would you show up, what would you do different, what do you need to upgrade, what habits do you need to upgrade and where do you need to invest your time, your energy and your money?
What you want to have, what you want to feel, what you want to experience, then we talked about what you need to do right now in order to take those steps towards future you.
You can’t close that gap like in the blink of an eye, you’ve got to take the steps now in order to make that happen.
Who do you need to be in order to achieve those goals?
This is so important, and it’s kind of the mindset piece that I think we often don’t think about. But who do you need to be? What I mean by that is, how are you showing up?
So for me, especially in my business, future me wants me to operating higher. That means I can’t wait till right before I hit the deadline to start operating at that level.
If I’m going to be CEO of a million dollar business in five years, that means I’ve got to show up like the CEO of a million dollar business right now. Mindset, wise. I might not have all the systems, I might not all the support, but I can have the mindset.
So what does that look like?
Well, a million dollar CEO is going to do the strategic planning. Million dollar CEO is going to make sure that they are working on those most important things in their business. So they’re focused on the marketing, the sales, the big picture strategic planning, designing new programs, products and services.
They’re going to be focused on the higher end work and not so much the nitty gritty, day to day details. The CEO is going to show up as a CEO and make hard decisions, which means they’re going to say no to anything that’s not aligned with their vision.
How do you need to show up right now?
If you want to someday be running a six figure or seven figure business, how do you need to show up right now? Who do you need to be right now?
You need to show up as a CEO. You need to make sure you’re time, energy and resources are going in the right areas.
You need to stay focused on the big picture and stay focused on that big picture strategy. You need to make sure that you’re not getting distracted by those shiny objects. So big picture CEO doesn’t get pulled off course by tons of phomo and new things popping up in their view all the time.
Who do you need to be right now? This is such a powerful question and I hope that this starts to get you guys thinking about how you’re showing up in all of these areas of your life and your business and starting to see where you can upgrade your habits and your mindset.
Write Your Definition of Success!
Yes - you CAN have it all!
But first, you've gotta define what it all means to you!