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When you start a business, or try anything in your life, it’s super important to understand that what you’re doing might not work. Most people don’t approach their lives this way. Even as a coach, I’m here to nurture your belief, so it might feel like contradictory advice. However, you can believe that you’ll achieve your goal while still understanding that it might not work.
As an entrepreneur, you’ll have ideas all the time. Everything is worth a try. However, if you’re putting pressure on yourself by believing everything you try should work out, you’re setting yourself up for a rollercoaster of emotion and eventually burnout. It’s time to try thinking, “This might not work.”
Tune in this week because I’m talking about the idea of approaching everything you do in your business through the lens of understanding that it might not work. I’m sharing how this mindset will serve you best on your journey as an entrepreneur, and how to leverage this belief as you try new things.
I want to give away all of my best secrets, and that’s why I’ve created a free training. If you’re a coach or you want to start a similar business and are struggling to figure out how to get started, you need this training. To get it, all you have to do is click here!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why understanding that things might not work out is just as important as believing you can achieve your goal.
- How putting too much pressure and belief on the things you’re trying puts you on an exhausting rollercoaster of joy and disappointment.
- My own practice of allowing bad ideas in order to find the good ones.
- How to start leveraging the thought, “This might not work…” in your business.
Mentioned on the Show:
- When you’re ready to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10X level, then come check out Be Bold.
- If you’re a coach who is already certified through The Life Coach School, I want to help you take your coaching to the next level. Interested? Get on the waitlist here.
- Get on the waitlist for Business Minded here.
- Follow me on Instagram or Facebook!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
- Follow my brand new business Instagram account where I’ll be sharing my business tips for all you entrepreneurs!
- Get my Free Training on How to Develop a Coaching Practice
- Simon Sinek: Down a Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin
- Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin
- I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: This Might Not Work.Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master-certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.
Hey there everybody. How’s it going today? Welcome to an Entrepreneur Talk episode. I just want to share with you a DM I just got literally just came in from a lovely listener and follower, thank you for this message. I’m going to keep your name anonymous since I didn’t get permission to share this. but this is from somebody who took my free training, which you can get at jodysfreetraining.com.
And she said, “Hi, Jody, I’m just reaching out to thank you for creating the free training on how to develop a coaching practice. I can’t find the ad on your feed, I honestly don’t even know how I found it but I’m a transformational coach. I know I’m a good coach but I’m not a good entrepreneur yet. And for the last few days I started to doubt myself to the point of looking for another job. This training as simple and clear as it is, helped me so much. Thank you.”
So to this transformational coach I am so glad that you’re not abandoning your passion, your calling and your ability to help impact the world. And to anybody else listening who has a coaching practice or any other similar service based business that wants to figure out how to cut through the overwhelm and all the different advice out there. Go check out my free training at jodysfreetraining.com. And then stay tuned. We’re going to have a lot more help coming this year.
I’m very excited about the things my team and I are working on, so pay attention to your emails and keep listening to this podcast and we’ll get the word out when things are ready to go.
I want to talk to you today about the idea of approaching everything you do in your business through the lens of this might not work. I had this realization because I was listening to, I think it was Seth Godin, and I wish I could remember. I heard him on a podcast interviewed recently with Simon Sinek on Simon Sinek’s podcast. So it might have been on there. But it also just might be in his book because I started listening to his book, Linchpin, which is an older book he published a while ago, but I hadn’t read it before and he mentioned it as one of his favorite books that he’s written.
And so I started listening to it and it really is brilliant, highly recommend. So anyway in one of those two places, I think it was Seth Godin, in one of those places that said that he goes into everything with the idea, this might not work. And it wasn’t until he said that that I realized I do the same thing. Well, yeah, I didn’t even think about it because I just sort of took for granted that maybe everybody does that. That’s when I realized that most people don’t.
And here’s the other thing as a coach, I’m always trying to help people nurture their belief and tell them the importance of believing in yourself. And so I know that feels contradictory advice. How could I tell you, you’ve got to believe that you’re going to be able to achieve your goal and at the same time go into with the thought, this might not work and here is why. Both of those things are equally important. Is because the way that you’re going to achieve your goal, the timeline by which you achieve your goal is very unknown.
In my experience, not just in my business, even in my personal life, the way at which I have been able to let’s just say, get married for example or become a mother or buy a home or any of the things that I’ve wanted to do and that I’ve set after. Have not usually happened in the way or on the timeline that I thought they would happen. Sometimes they have been easier in some ways. And in some ways they have been harder or taken longer.
So if you’re putting your belief in the how or you put too much belief in the things that you’re trying then you’re setting yourself up to be on that rollercoaster of disappointment and happiness and success and joy when it does work but that rollercoaster, even though there are highs on it is exhausting. That is what leads to burnout, that is what wears people out. That’s what makes people abandon their businesses. So let me give some examples of when this mindset might come up and how to leverage it to serve you best in your business.
So as the visionary CEO of my business I have ideas all the time, I have ideas about things we should try, things we might want to change. And a lot of my ideas are bad ideas, they are. I have to allow the ideas to come in order to find the good ones but that doesn’t mean that I have a lot of good ideas, I just have a lot of ideas. And for me, my process is that I need to be able to talk through them out loud, sometimes just hearing myself talk about them gives me clarity about whether they’re good ideas or not.
Other times I need a little bit of feedback. I need to bounce it off people. I need to have people kind of push back on it. And I need to have some discussion around ideas. And a lot of times when I share ideas with people, they’ll go, “That is such a good idea. That’s brilliant.” Which again, I like hearing that I have brilliant ideas.
But whenever they’re like, “That’s totally going to get you there. That’s totally going to work. Oh, yeah, for sure, everybody’s going to love that. People are definitely going to sign up for that. That’s going to sell out easily. That’s going to be a win for sure.” People say these things and you think that would be what I would want to hear, but I have this part of my brain that’s like, “Or not.” And sometimes I say that out loud.
Sometimes I just keep it to myself, but I don’t really ever go all in on this is the thing for sure that’s going to get us where we’re trying to go, achieve whatever goals, serve people in the way we’re trying to, this is the thing. I really don’t. What I do is I go into it with, “Yeah, maybe, I think it’s a good idea. I think it could work and also it might not work. It might not work, let’s go.” Because when I go into it with that mindset then it not working isn’t a big shock and a big disappointment if it doesn’t.
And it also doesn’t mean that we’re not going to achieve our goal in the end. It just means we’re going to have to try something different. That wasn’t going to be the way. Now we’re going to have to try something else. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m not still disappointed. I would love for everything to just work the first time. There’s still some disappointment but it’s not like the rollercoaster of that’s amazing, look what we did. And oh my goodness, that didn’t work, how depressing and this, how discouraging.
I don’t want you to be on that rollercoaster, that is not fun. So it’s, this might work, I think it’s a good idea. I like the idea. I’m excited about this idea but also it might not work but let’s just try it anyway. Let’s just try it and see. You know how we will know? By trying it out and seeing. I can tell you, I’ve done this with marketing strategies, with sales techniques, with programs, with pricing. I’ve done this with everything and I continue to do it. We have some pretty big changes coming up in our business in the next little while that I’ll be telling you about.
And in my mind I’m like this is going to help us get where we’re trying to go. It’s going to make things even better for all of our clients. It’s going to make things even better for us. And yet in the back of my mind I’m like, or not, it might not work. So you’ve got to know that. That’s the healthiest way to go into anything in your business because then if it doesn’t work I’m not going to quit and get discouraged and walk away. I’m just going to go, “Okay, well, let’s shift it again, let’s try something different.”
Okay, so I want you to think about your business like a science experiment because it is like a science experiment. It is not a reflection of your value or worth or whether or not you’re capable or whether or not you’re smart or good or spiritual or any of that. It’s not any of that, it’s just a science experiment. Think about a scientist going into a lab trying to find a cure for a disease. She does not go, “Oh man, I thought that this was going to be the cure.” She goes, “Okay, not that, let’s try something else. Okay, not that, let’s try something else.”
And she continues to learn as she tries new things every time. When you can think of it like a science experiment you expect the word ‘experiment’ means we expect there to be a lot of trial and error. Here is the other thing I want to say, you’ve got to take into account your risk level. So I’m not talking about mortgage your home, second mortgage your home and deplete your 401(k) and empty your savings account and go all in and know that it might not work. I do not do things like that to build my business.
I’m not willing to take that kind of a risk because I know it might not work. Now, does that minimize my growth? Yeah, probably. I’m okay with that. I’m not willing to risk anything that is going to be really problematic in my life or in my business. I do not take money out of my business that I couldn’t afford to not get a return on. I only invest an amount that if I don’t get a return we would be okay.
The same with my personal life. In the beginning of my business when I was using some of my personal funds to fund the business. I went and got a little, small work from home part-time job and I used that money to fund the business so that I didn’t have to worry about impacting our family budget because we didn’t have a lot of wiggle room in the budget. So I only put in money that I could afford to ‘lose’. I never think of it as a loss. I think of it as it cost me that much money to do that experiment, but some people would use the other word.
The same with my time. I’m not going to stress myself out working night and day, not getting enough sleep, not being with my family in the way that I want to in the hopes that one day I’ll create something where I have a perfectly balanced life. That doesn’t really tend to work out so well for most people. So whatever I put into it, I’m willing to invest that in this experiment. I’m not investing it in the final outcome because I don’t know how long it will take to get to that point. I’m investing it in the experiment.
Think about a project, if you’re like me and you ever have done a craft project or a sewing project, that’s what kinds of things are kind of fun for us to do at times. My husband will sometimes go buy some lumber and build something or he’s really into guitars. He bought a guitar kit and built a guitar. So whatever it is for you, usually we’re willing to put time and maybe some money into supplies or what have you in the name of a hobby. We don’t put a lot of pressure on what are we going to get in the end out of that hobby.
And you have to think of your business like a hobby that ultimately we want to generate revenue. That is the goal, don’t get me wrong, but how much money or time or other resources can you put in to grow or achieve your desired outcomes as quickly as possible? Don’t go overboard. Don’t put yourself in a risky situation because then you’re going to be operating from stress and overwhelm and fear and scarcity which makes you less effective at what you’re trying to do in the first place.
So this might not work. I think it’s a good idea. I’m excited and I know for sure we’re going to achieve our goal. Maybe this will be the way but maybe not, let’s go. And make sure you’re not risking more than you are comfortable walking away from. Alright everybody, thanks for joining me for Entre-Talk. I’ll see you on Friday for our regular episode. Take care.
Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.
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