How to Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up | S2022

[00:00:04] Welcome to From Barriers to Breakthroughs, the podcast that helps you create the life, business, and love you truly want. Not with silver bullets or magical pills, but by removing what's actually holding you back. Here's what nobody tells you about getting unstuck. It has nothing to do with what you know, but it has everything to do with that switch within that allows you to turn that knowledge into action.

[00:00:32] Your breakthrough begins now. Welcome to another episode of From Barriers to Breakthroughs. I'm your host, Rebecca Mountain. And one of the things I've been noting for the past few, probably past six months, maybe even as much as a year, is in the face of situations that are really tough, stressful.

[00:00:57] So whether it's economic, political, market-driven, personal, we can kind of take it for a while. And then at some point, we hit that moment when we're like, I'm done. I'm done. I can't do this anymore. Or we lose hope and we lose our ability to say, okay, you know, I can actually keep going. And we lose our, I call it our puff. We lose our ability to keep on going. And we stop.

[00:01:25] I call this the field of broken dreams and broken businesses. And it's an absolute tragedy because there are so many people who have so much like amazing talent and so much goodness that they could be bringing into the world, but they don't because they give up. And it's not that giving up is a bad thing. Like sometimes there's a time when you should quit because whatever you're doing isn't working anymore.

[00:01:50] But there are many, many moments, probably more where people gave up right before things took off again. And I'm talking about people who run a great business, have a great service. It is something that people need. But in a constricting market or in a down market, the demand for it can plummet. And we start to question ourselves when that happens. Like, is it me?

[00:02:15] So I wanted to share with you today four different strategies that you can use if you've been working your tail off. Maybe you've been doing the same stuff you've been doing for five years, 10 years, 20 years, and it doesn't look like it's working anymore. Don't give up. Keep going.

[00:02:36] But you kind of have to rejig your internal patterns in order to not feel the burden of what's going on in the world and to not make it personal. Because as soon as you make things personal, you know, like your business is doing very well, it's you. You are like two steps away from stumbling, falling flat in your face and not getting back up again. You know, hypothetically speaking, in regards to your business.

[00:03:06] This also works in relationships. It works in your life. It works in your community. And so think about something that you've been like, you've really been working hard on and you want to keep going, but you're kind of losing your puff. So one of the things I read recently, so I cannot for my life remember where I heard this, but I absolutely loved the concept. Is to change your motivation from achieving to becoming.

[00:03:34] And here's why that's so incredibly powerful. Achieving is something obviously that's important. We love it. Our brain like gets really, really jazzed when we achieve stuff. And especially if you're someone like me with an ADD brain, when you get those big wins, it feels amazing. And so in an environment in which those happen at a much lower frequency or at a much lower level than maybe you're used to or that you're expecting, you can come up against disappointment.

[00:04:03] And when you hit disappointment, it's really, really difficult to pull yourself back up again. You can stay down for longer. The bounce back takes more. So if you shift instead of achieving, you're like focus on becoming. Well, now that's a much more internally driven motivation. And when you move your motivation inward as opposed to outward, like achieving and accomplishing requires usually other people to say yes to you.

[00:04:31] Maybe you're not getting those as much as you used to and hurt your little feelings. But if you focus on becoming, that's like it's such a me thing. All the control comes back to you. What can I do? Who do I want to become? What is like maybe there's an avatar? Maybe there is a person that you're just like, I just love these particular qualities. You're not trying to replicate or pretend that you're someone else or copy.

[00:04:57] But you're looking at the traits, behaviors, philosophies, mindsets, and of these people that you really revere, whether they're living or dead, doesn't matter. Or maybe they're in a book. Maybe they're fiction. But you look into yourself and say, instead of always sort of tracking achievements, I'm going to track, can I become even 1% more like this? And again, not necessarily like another person, but like the person you want to become.

[00:05:24] When you put into your mind that you want to have these traits, you trigger the reticular activation system, and now your brain pays attention. And it will naturally start to move in that direction. So you're no longer are waiting and requiring something outside of yourself to happen in order for you to feel good and like you're progressing. You've taken all that control inside, and now you are the one measuring your own internal metrics and your feelings and your patterns will obviously shift. So that's one.

[00:05:54] So focus on becoming as opposed to achieving. The other thing you can do if you're like, well, I still need to achieve stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. But when things get tough, sometimes what I find is you take whatever goal you have and you break it down into smaller and smaller and smaller bits until you can say, I can do that. Because you may have had the energy to do like a three-day event, but maybe no one's signing up for three-day events anymore.

[00:06:23] Or maybe they're not going to pay you what you're worth for those three days. And you're like, well, I don't want to like lower my price because that lowers my value, which I'm 100% behind. But what can you do? Well, maybe instead of an in-person, you turn it into virtual. Maybe instead of three days, you turn it into one. Or maybe just sort of completely remodel how you do it and you change your approach. You have to take something that maybe you used to do and kind of go, what can I do?

[00:06:50] And still you get paid at your value level. So don't necessarily drop your price just because the economy is doing worse or because people are saying no. No doesn't mean that they don't appreciate your value. It's a no for a whole bunch of other reasons. That's up to them. But you can sort of make things smaller and more doable. Or maybe just going through the day-to-day existence is feeling like it's a bigger burden.

[00:07:17] So instead of setting your goals as to what feels like progress as being, I need to say, I'll just use an extreme example. I need to write a book. Well, maybe instead of saying, okay, well, I've got to write this giant book. Maybe you break it down into, I'm just going to write one chapter in the next 30 days. Or whatever time frame allows you enough time to get it done without creating crazy restrictions on your time and on your mental state and your mindset.

[00:07:45] But it allows you to feel like you're moving forward. So I call it the art of little chunking. I built that with one of my clients who was always super overwhelmed by the size and the immensity of what she actually wanted to accomplish. So we're like, okay, if this is what you want to accomplish, how do you break that down into smaller pieces? And take those smaller pieces and break them into smaller pieces. So a very simple example is like an annual plan. I want to make $100,000 this year. Great. $100,000.

[00:08:14] What are four big steps that you would need to complete in order to make $100,000 or maybe $100,000 more? Whatever your goal is. And it's not like you take $100,000 and divide by four. No. It's maybe you have to rejig your marketing or that maybe you have to look at your sales or your systems or your finances. So what are the four big steps that if you completed these four steps over the course of the year would naturally lead to an income of $100,000 or an improve of $100,000? Cool.

[00:08:43] Take that quarterly. It's called a quarterly objective and break it into three months. Create targets. Targets that are definable and yes, no. So objectives can be a little bit more nebulous. Monthly targets are very, very specific. This is from John Doerr's book, Measure What Matters. Love that book. Bit dry. Great concept. So a quarter divides into months. These become verifiable. You did or did not do them. Follow the bouncing ball. Months turn into weeks. Weeks turn into days.

[00:09:12] And that's how you take a big, big goal like, you know, $100,000 or a million dollars or $100 million, whatever you want to do. And you break it into I can do that levels. You take something that feels so out of touch because it's so far away, you know, 12 months down the road and you turn it into what am I doing on Tuesday? So it's a wonderful way of achieving this big, big goal. But with tiny little steps that make you feel like every single day you're working towards something important.

[00:09:41] So that's the second strategy. The art of little chunking. I stumbled over that one. The third one is don't tell yourself a story. So at the beginning, I was telling you that one of the dangers that people run into is that they make it personal. It's me or I'm doing something wrong. And you tell yourself a story that you are actually the problem. Or another story is just like, well, you know, the market's gone down. So, well, I guess I'm going down with it.

[00:10:12] That's like the art of giving up. And you can't let yourself go down that rabbit hole because it's a really tough one to pick up from when the market does turn. When the market turns, because it always does. Don't know when, but you know it's going to turn. You won't be ready. If you've given up and you've just like rolled up your carpet and gone home, you're not going to be ready for the uptick. And so the stories you tell yourself, you can't just tell yourself that everything is going to be fine. You know, it's got lions and tigers and bears.

[00:10:40] It doesn't really help you because it's not necessarily true. And your brain is going to be like, okay, like baloney. But what you can tell yourself is, okay, I'm going to have a realistic look at the market. What has gone down? What are the actual changes? And what's maybe one thing I can do that will allow me to still do the work that I know generates results? Because you don't necessarily have to change tactics. But you may have to do what you do a little bit more often.

[00:11:08] So I launched my high performance coaching program in March of 2020. Really bad timing because the pandemic had rolled in. Everything was shutting down and I'm like, uh, row. And I had sold my agency and this was, I didn't have anything. I'd burned the boats, broke the pots. And well, I guess here we go. The way I looked at it was it's an Easter egg hunt, but there's just not as many Easter eggs. So they're still out there. So I told myself the story that they're still there. There is still business to be had.

[00:11:38] However, I just have to take what I do, which was doing, you know, workshops and presentations. I just had to do more of them. And those are the ones that sell. Every single time I do a presentation, there's always some sort of response back, whether it's individuals or referrals or something. And so I didn't try to do a whole bunch of different things and maybe things I haven't even done before. I hadn't even tested, hadn't even tried. When a market goes down, that is not necessarily the time to test something new.

[00:12:06] It's the time to double down on what you already know works. So the story you need to tell yourself is not that I need to change and it's about me. It's what actually works. Go back through your stats. Look at where you've got your business from. Look at where you built your relationships more in a solid way and do more of that thing. Get really, really good at a few simple things because you won't be overwhelmed. You're just going to get much, much better at some of those things.

[00:12:33] And you're going to find that not only do you get business now, when the market lifts back up again, when things start to turn around, you will have earned market share. Because about 80% of people are going to roll up their carpet and go home and just wait. Or they're just going to give up on the field of broken dreams and broken promises. You don't have to be that way. So the last strategy, up to now we have, we've got the becoming versus achieving,

[00:13:04] getting things to the I can do that level. So the art of little chunking and don't tell yourself a story. The last one is to track action, not results. And again, what it comes down to is personal control and personal accountability agency. You can't determine if someone's going to say yes or no. You can't make them say yes or no. I mean, you can bully them. You can manipulate them. But those are not good practices. And I do not condone that behavior.

[00:13:33] What you can do instead of always basing your value on how often and how did people say yes to you, track instead what did you do. So again, this comes back to option three, which is what actually works. Track those actions. If presentations work, how many presentations did you do in the last week? Not how many referrals did you get or how many clients did you get from those presentations? That will come. But that's the outcome.

[00:14:03] That's an offshoot of what you can control. You can't control other people. Skip it. What can you control? How can you make your presentation that much more appealing? How can you enrich your call to action? How can you make it easier for people to say yes to you? What are the things that you can put into that presentation that are going to be so incredibly impactful that it's going to be like a no-brainer for people to want to come and engage with you? So that's just an example.

[00:14:31] So whether it's calls, follow-ups, email marketing, whether you do networking events, however you grow your business, that actually generates results. Not that makes the most money for you because, again, it can make a lot of money, but you have to be careful about how much your costs are. So look at your margins. Make sure you're doing something that has decent margins. Really high margins obviously are better, but you want to do something that has good margin. It does not take a lot of your energy like you actually like doing it.

[00:15:00] I use presentations because I just love doing it. I love doing this. I love talking. I love sharing. I love the impact that it has. It just came out of a two-day conference where I spoke four times, and the feedback that I got from other people was, wow, I really felt that you were talking to me, and I really feel like this is something I can get some help with. I'm like, cool, then Anna, let's go. That's the kind of thing that I really, really live for. And so what really turns your lights on? What makes you feel accomplished?

[00:15:27] What makes you feel like you're becoming the person that you really, really want to be? And we should always strive to be a little bit better at something, whether it's a little bit higher integrity. It's a little bit more trustworthy. A little bit of a better listener. Maybe a little bit better person that doesn't talk as much. One of my things with ADD is I'm like, I always want to talk. Maybe one of the things I can improve on is asking better questions, and then just shutting up and listening,

[00:15:55] and maybe listening in a way that I'm trying to gather some very specific information. So when you track your actions, that can be really rewarding. That's where you get the dopamine hit. So it takes you away from not getting that really great flesh feeling that you've accomplished something because you're waiting for someone to say yes. And I speak from this from personal experience. For the first part of this year, I had a tremendous amount of people were like, oh man, this sounds fantastic. And then they just went away. I have no idea where they went.

[00:16:25] Over time, I figured it out. But for a short period of time, I'm like, is it me? Like, am I the problem? Like, do I stink? And I realized that, again, over time, when I found out where the silence and the non-responsiveness was coming from, it never had anything to do with me. So I'm really glad that while I went that way, because we can always go that way. We always go down into our negative thoughts. But it's how long we stay there that determines whether we succeed and pull ourselves out of it or stay there.

[00:16:54] And over time, lose our momentum and then stop. And that's where it becomes dangerous. Because once you stop, finding that ability to move again becomes very difficult. Because often we say, well, you know, I got to wait till I'm motivated. But motivation comes after you start moving. Not before. You will never be ready. Ready is something you see in the rearview mirror. Oh, I must have been ready. If you just say, I will do this when I'm ready. Dude, you are making excuses for yourself.

[00:17:24] And you are never going to see the light of day of whatever it is that you want to accomplish. So again, the four things just to go over really quickly. Focus on becoming, not achieving. Get everything you want to do down to an I can do that level. Careful about the stories you tell yourself. And track your actions, not the outcomes. And when you do those four things, no matter what happens in any market or in any relationship, in your community, in your life, in your work, anywhere,

[00:17:50] you will not slow down and sit down and become one of the people that gave up right before things took off. Thanks for sharing, coming and listening on another one of my episodes of From Barriers to Breakthroughs. Make sure you tune in to the next ones. You can go and see all of the episodes and all the different ways that you can become a higher performing, happier, wealthier, and more fulfilled human being. And there you have it.

[00:18:18] Another step closer to removing what's been blocking your path. Remember, you already have everything you need inside you. Sometimes it just takes finding that one domino that's been holding back the rest. If today's episode helped you identify even one barrier you're ready to remove, then we're making some serious progress. To keep the breakthroughs coming, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and visit rebeccamountain.ca for additional resources to help you bridge that gap between knowing and doing.

[00:18:47] This is Rebecca, and you've been listening to From Barriers to Breakthroughs.