If you want to learn How to Build Resilience in Business then this short 10-minute video is definitely for you. It's a short training I recorded for my private members group, but felt that you'd benefit from it if you're wondering how to make the most out of 2021 for your business.
How we handle the ups and downs in business is relevant now, more so than ever with everything that's going on in business.
Most business owners see running a business as a bit like a football match. It's played over a finite amount of time, the aim is to score goals against the opposing team and the team who scores the most goals wins.
At the end of the day when the final whistle goes, we get to decamp irrespective of the result, win, lose or draw. There's some rest and relaxation followed by practice and then you go out again and focus on the next game.
For some reason people think it's the same in business; in so much that we're going to miraculously go out, score loads of goals and win in business and that's it.
The reality is that in business, building business resilience is an infinite game, and @Simon Sinek wrote a book about it, where the only real competitor in business is yourself. He introduces it in this short video: ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk7MpiP-sFI
He talks about if you want to get to doing $10,000/mth in sales and achieve it, that's great...but what happens next?
You hit $10k and then want to hit $20k and so on. It never ends, the game is infinite. During this infinite games you're going to have skirmishes, like a war, you prepare for battle, you go into battle, you lose some troops, someone declares themselves victorious then you retreat, recover...and do it all over again!
The ultimate loss in business is when you feel you've lost too many battles and in business terms ultimately give up.
There are people out there who simply love the battle, they love fighting the war. They don't care about winning clients or making money. They just enjoy the energy and process from running a business.
Therefore resilience in business isn't really a "thing" unless you are losing the battle with yourself and maybe aren't enjoying the process of running a business.
When things start to go wrong in business and we take them on board as a personal assault on us, especially when they're out of our control, like COVID, there's nothing we can do to influence it.
Resilience in Business comes from facing up to those external circumstances and accepting that they are just the norm. You have to carry on regardless. If you start to change your tactics and give those external factors energy, you are allowing them to win.
When we start pivoting wildly and trying too many new ideas that aren't battletested we open ourselves up to being flanked and overwhelmed by the opposition (remember here that the opposition is yourself!).
Resilience in business means doing much of the same when the chips are down because you know that process works. Obviously with small, incremental improvements.
When external factors, naysayers, difficult clients, or whatever is happening outside of my control appear, and they will in business, you've got to ignore them, don't give them energy.
It is JUST A PART OF THE PROCESS.
There's no point in giving it power.
There's no point in turning it into a negative emotion, it doesn't serve any purpose.
It's a bit like jumping out an aeroplane but it's not happening for another three weeks. If I spend the next three weeks worrying about it, giving it energy, it's not going to make it any better, in my mind it will only make it worse!
The only time you have to worry about jumping out of an aeroplane is when you're at 10,000 feet, strapped to your instructor and at the door about to jump out. That's when you should worry!
Being resilient means ignoring that worry/stress up until the point when we enter into battle.
In business we catastrophise, but the reality is the little skirmishes you enter into aren't catastrophic to your business. They're merely annoyances.
Being more resilient in business is nothing more than starting to find a way to empower yourself to enjoy these little skirmishes.
If you want to learn how to build resilience in business, then this video is definitely for you.
It's a short 10-minute training which I produced for my private members group. Apologies for the
quality of the video, it's not fantastic. I recorded it through Zoom, but hopefully the
content is good and you'll get tons out of it. How we handle these ups and downs, and I kind of
alluded to this just before Christmas, or in between Christmas and the year, sorry, with the
video which I did last week about Simon Sinek talking about the Infinite Games. It's quite
relevant now, more so than ever because of obviously what happened, the announcement here
in the UK on Monday and lockdowns. Most people for some reason see business as a bit more
like a football match. So they see it as like a, you think about a football or any sports match,
it's a finite amount of time, like 90 minutes. The goal is to obviously score goals and the team
who scores the most goals wins. The team who has more goals scored against and loses, if they score
the same it's a draw. At the end of the day, when the game's over, the final whistle goes, we get to
decamp, irrespective of win, lose or draw. We get to have a bit of R&R, we go out and do a bit of
practice and then we go back and take on the next game. For some reason, people in business think
that it's the same in business. That all of a sudden, miraculously, we're going to go out and
score loads of goals and win and that's it. But the stark reality is that the game is infinite
in business. It just, and Simon Sinek's written a great book on this if you want to go and check it
out, because this is how we ultimately build up resilience in business. He talks about, if you
want to get to a, like doing 10k months for example, have a six-figure business or whatever it is, well
that's great but what happens after that? Like it just carries on and then you hit 10k and then you
want to do 20k and it's like, what happens next? So for as long as you carry on running your business,
it is this infinite game and what's going to happen during that infinite game, there's going
to be skirmishes. Imagine it's a little bit like a war, a battle, you know, it's probably a bit of
a negative analogy but I can't think of a better one at the moment. Imagine it's a bit like a war,
you prepare for battle, you go into battle, you either lose a few troops or you win the battle
but then you retreat, go back, re-energise yourself and then you have to go back into battle again.
The side which ultimately wins or loses from that, if you lose, ultimately you have to, you kind of
just go, do you know what, that's it, we've lost the war, we back out and we don't go back into
battle again. And if you think about it in business terms, that's when we just give up,
we give up the fight and it's done. There are people out there who just enjoy the battle,
they don't give a **** about whether they get clients or not, they don't give a **** about
whether they hit those five-figure months or six-figure years, they just enjoy going in, like,
preparing for battle, getting dressed up in all the gear for battle, they enjoy the energy and
the buzz that they get in battle, they enjoy the buzz and the energy from losing in battle,
like, they just enjoy the whole war, they're almost slightly scary people. I count myself
to be one of those people, I don't, I don't care, kind of, what happens, like, obviously I want to
see everybody have great results, that's ultimately what this game is about. If we get knocked, if we
take, you know, when things go wrong, if we start to take those things on board personally, especially
when they're out of our control, so we have stuff which is in our control, we have stuff which is
out of our control, COVID, totally out of our control, let's be fair, there's nothing we can do
to influence that, the only way we could influence it, potentially, is if we, you know, take business
out of the picture for a second, is if we go and, sort of, isolate ourselves on our metaphorical
islands, that's the only way we could ultimately protect ourselves from this, but if we want to
carry on fighting the war, we've got to face up to that external, like, thing, circumstance that's
going on around us and carry on regardless. It's a bit like, if we start to give it energy and
change the way that we do our business, change our tactics that we take into battle with us, imagine
if we go back into battle with a new tactic that we haven't tried and tested before, how successful
do we think that's going to be? So, if we end up pivoting too much when things, like, negative things
like now, that are going on around us, we open ourselves up to be flanked, you know, for the
opposition to come in at our sides, because we hadn't thought about it, because we've got this new
un-battle-tested strategy that we're trying to build, okay? So, the worst thing you could do is
allow these external circumstances right now to influence your decision making, turn back to what
you know works, go back to the familiar, double down on what is familiar, because that will, ultimately,
it's actually a safe place to be, but you know that it has probably a better chance of working
than trying something completely new right now. And as a part of that, the bit which many of you
won't, you know, most of you won't be so familiar with or practiced at it, like, I've been in business
for 17 years running my own businesses, I had a couple of side hustles in a job before that, so
you could argue I've been in business for the best part of two decades, this is the third recession
technically that I've run a business through, you learn to just roll with the punches. I don't take
it personally when clients, prospective clients or other social media gurus and experts try and,
you know, maybe without trying, make my life difficult or say negative things about me or
decide that they want to leave or any of those sorts of things. It is just a part of the process.
There is no point in giving it power, okay? There is no point in turning it into a negative emotion
and giving it power. Super important to remember. It didn't serve anybody. It's a bit like, imagine
if I was going to jump out of an aeroplane next week. If I spend the next week worrying about it,
like, I'm going to tell myself all of these stories and stresses and worries and everything
else and actually the reality is I don't really need to worry about it until I'm 34,000 feet up
in the air strapped to somebody and the doors flung open and I'm about to jump out. That's the
only time when really I need to **** myself. Do you get the analogy here? Like, for most of us,
we might lose our little mini battles, skirmishes that we lose. We might lose the odd client,
100 quid here, 200 quid there, even 500 pounds here or there. It doesn't matter. That's not
going to break us. It's not going to, we're not going to lose our houses as a result of those
little, like, skirmishes that we end up losing. But if we give power to that, we're going to end
up worrying about it for the next week, the next month, the next year. We're going to take it
personally and what happens is it narrows our focus. I think many of you will have heard me
talk about fixed mindset and growth mindset in the past. A growth mindset, so fixed mindset is I can't.
We take it personally. I can't. The world is against me. I just keep on losing. I can't.
That's when we start to lose the war. That's when we start to just give up and become prisoners and
we don't stand a chance of winning it. Growth mindset is when we turn that around and go,
how can I make more money? How can I get my next client? What could I do to turn this around?
How could we start to just maybe think about this slightly differently? Add another layer of
defences into what we're doing. Time, like, don't get me wrong, not negating what's going on around us
like right now. It's very hard to, you know, it's impossible to ignore it. A couple of things I want
you to do for me over the next few days. I want you to start to tune out from the news. Very basic
thing. Check in on the news once a week just to see what's going on in the world, but you don't
need to check in every day. You don't need to watch the nine o'clock news to get all the latest
updates. We know where we're at now, okay? So start to switch off from it because that's an
external circumstance or thing that we can't control. So let's just switch it off and start
to ignore it. Do you know what I did this week? Switched a load of notifications off that were
popping up on my phone. New apps I'd signed up to over the last few weeks, months. Just turn the
notifications off. Too much. It's too much noise at the moment. Do you know what else I did? I
went into my diary and I graded all of my appointments for this week on a scale of one
to ten. Ten being the highest level of anxiety I was getting when I looked at like gut instincts
and I looked at that thing in my diary. How anxious does it make me feel? If I felt it was
going to add to my workload, if it was like above a six or a seven, I cancelled it. So I removed
several things from my diary this week that were just not important. Just making me anxious. Maybe
they were important but it was just too stressful. So the things you know which trigger you, now is
the time to start switching them off. News is one of them. Appointments, notifications and things
like that. It's a process of just simplifying life so you can give attention now to the things which
are most important. Again, this is reiterating a lot of stuff which you already know through
being in Fearless as well. Marketing. We always talk about and I'm probably going to sound like
a broken record. Assets versus activity. We can get so tied up doing marketing activity on a daily
basis that doesn't necessarily produce immediate results and it can erode any kind of positive
kind of momentum and enthusiasm and things like that because we put all this time and energy into
marketing activities but we don't necessarily get the results immediately from it.
Might get a few likes and things like that but we don't necessarily get clients. Assets are different.
You can bury yourself. Treat it like a hobby. Bury yourself in building marketing assets that are
going to stand the test of time. Books, YouTube channel. Remember the b-hacks we talked about
during the last coaching session? Plan for 2021. Building out these big hairy audacious goals.
Marketing assets. YouTube channels. Books. Blog articles. Google my business. Getting tons of
reviews. Writing up case studies for client success stories. Things like that. They're all
going to be there ad infinitum so if you stop doing the marketing activity and you
stop spending money on Facebook ads or any kind of advertising for that matter, these assets are
still going to be there sweating away for you. This is about realizing so in the infinite game
the difference there is with marketing activity we want the immediate result. We want the satisfaction
of going into battle and winning that one battle. Building assets is like arming ourselves for the
long-term war that we know that we're going to face. Multiple battles.
