Chapter 18
How do I sustain my commitment?
You are on your way. Idea refined, researched and ready to go. Numbers crunched and profit figures looking plausible. It’s time to think about how you keep going through all the ups and downs that your own business will invariably throw at you.
In this chapter you will discover:
- simple and effective tools to keep your motivation high
- why tracking your business daily is essential to success
- what my favourite sound is in the world, and how it relates to business.
With no boss, or organisational structure to ensure you deliver your work on time, how do you keep motivated and working towards your goals? To be successful in your own business, your motivation and self-discipline to do the work you need to, must be ever present. All fine in theory but even the most focused, task-driven business owners will share with you times when it was all too much, and they faltered.
Sustaining your motivation and commitment to the business can be easy at times and then almost impossible at others. Accept this. Accept that you are human and there will be times when you think your business is fun, exhilarating and energising, and other times when you think the exact opposite.
Jane from Jane Plan shares her ride: ‘There’s part of me that absolutely loves this and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s quite overwhelming a lot of the time. If you have a job, I don’t think you have the extremes as in your own business. You don’t have that huge high but at the same time you don’t have that big low either. A job is a much more constant thing so it’s learning to deal with the ebb and the flow of the business that’s hard.’
Sustain your commitment by using these eight suggestions below:
Look at your vision board daily
Remember in Chapter 4 you created a fabulous vision for your business? It is an evocative and inspirational representation of how you want your business to be. A daily view of the board will reconnect you with your excitement and aspiration about the business and feed your energy. With each repeated view, you are strengthening that neural pathway associated with achieving your business vision.
If you have decided that you are creating a legacy business, then that too will sustain your commitment. You want to be around for a long time, not just until your interest wanes.
Helen from Montezuma’s explains: ‘What you don’t appreciate is when you set up a business you fall in love with it. It is a bit like a child that’s now growing into a petulant teenager. We just don’t want to part with it, which is a nice position to be in. Now we’ve got children we talk about the future a lot more. Our plans for the business are very much for a long-term family business. If one of our girls wanted to come into the business at some point, that would be amazing. Obviously, that’s quite a way off, but Montezuma’s will hopefully be around in 10, 20, 50 years’ time.’
Find an accountability buddy
Perhaps you are one of those people who find it easy to plan and write ‘to do’ lists, but then struggle to bring the plan to life or to actually do the tasks on the list. This might be because those activities require you to do something that you feel scared about or uncomfortable with.
Sometimes it is easier to procrastinate, to do a simpler task and avoid that discomfort. Often those tasks we avoid are the very ones that will move our business to the next level. And yet we find ways not to do them.
Finding an accountability buddy will help you manage this unhelpful tendency. An accountability buddy is simply that, a friend who will keep you accountable to do what you said you would do.
It is important to choose someone whom you respect, and in some way, don’t want to disappoint. You need to have that feeling with them, so you feel compelled to complete your tasks in between your calls.
Once you have found the right person, set up a weekly call to review each other’s tasks and commitments. Knowing that you have a call with someone on a certain day will motivate you to get those tasks you committed to done.
Track your progress
Life is busy. So busy we can forget how far we have come. Tracking the progress in your business against your goals will remind you how far you have come and what success you have had.
When you are going on a journey, you set your destination and along the way you check how close you are to getting there. Running your business is no different. You have set the destination with your goals, created the route with your plan and now you need to check how far you have come.
Tracking your business progress against a set of metrics representing your goals, will enable you to feel in control. You will have a sense of what’s worked and what hasn’t in building your business. Your confidence will grow as you get to understand more about how your business works.
Track the following metrics weekly:
- income
- expenses
- website traffic
- sales pipeline.
Remember why you will succeed
When we are constantly stretching ourselves out of our comfort zone, we can wonder if we will ever succeed. We don’t have people telling us how well we are doing or giving us feedback, so we need to rely on ourselves.
You need to bolster yourself and have something to tap that you can look at if your spirits are flagging. Spend some time creating this list.
Ten reasons why you will succeed at this business
Make a list of the 10 reasons why your business will succeed. These may range from relevant work experience to your tenacity or other personal qualities. They can also include things you have done in your personal life. Then, if you should hit a point that makes you feel despondent about your abilities, reach for this list and refresh your self-belief.
Get the love
Customer love is a two-way street. Yes, it starts with you delighting your customers, but it finishes with you getting wonderful feedback from your happy clients.
Create a customer love file, on your computer or buy a physical file. Then each time you receive some positive feedback, take it and place it in the file.
This will serve two purposes:
- when you need to be reminded of the great work you do, it is there right in front of you
- you will have an easy way to find customer testimonials should you need them for your website or other promotional material.
Justine Roberts from Mumsnet recounts how her customer feedback kept her going in the early days: ‘Although it was proving very hard to make it a financially viable business, it very quickly became a useful thing for our readers. I would receive emails from people saying, “This is a life saver”, “I’ve met such wonderful people, thank you so much”. We would get those emails every week, and I always thought, if something is this useful and this loved, it has got to eventually make itself pay, surely. So I clung on to that hope.’
Three daily wins
When we reflect on the day that has passed, it is more common for us to remember what we haven’t done, what hasn’t gone right and our issues than it is to reflect on all of the positive things that have happened that day. Consequently, we end the day feeling pressured, and anxious about the problems we have to solve.
Imagine if you ended the day remembering things that had gone well, and that you had completed? You would finish work feeling buoyed about what had gone well, content that you had done some work and even a little excited about the next day.
A simple exercise to do at the end of each day is to take five minutes and write down three things that have gone well for you. They can be big or small. It may be you landed a big client you had been working on for a while, or you updated your LinkedIn profile.
Finishing the day thinking of what has gone well will start to make you more optimistic. This is because as you get into the habit of finishing each day looking for what has gone well, over time you will naturally start to ask yourself during the day, ‘Is this something I can add to my list?’ Thus turning your mind into looking for the positive in the moment.
Support
Starting up your new business can feel like a lonely adventure at times. You are so busy that time to maintain your friendships slips away as you spend what precious spare time you have with your family.
From my survey of 300 Corporate Crossovers, the main thing they missed about their job wasn’t the money, it was their old work mates. They felt lonely starting up by themselves, having no one in their office to bounce ideas off or to share successes or frustrations with.
There will also be times when you may want to bounce an idea off someone, or try out a new approach or strategy.
There is a range of support options for you as a business owner. Give them all a try, as some you will really like, and others not quite so much. Keep an open mind.
- networking groups
- Facebook groups to stay in touch
- a coach mentor to help you through it
- Chambers of Commerce
- your accountant.
Luisa Gonzalez counts her family and self-belief as a key source of her support: ‘I think that I have an amazing family as last year I was really having a bad moment and my Mum and Dad flew from Venezuela to give me support. Everyone in the family is “keep going, keep going”. I think it’s also the belief that it is going to work. I mean, that’s the main thing. If you don’t believe in what you are doing, that’s the end. As long as you believe in what you are doing you can take anything.’
As Catherine Watkin says: ‘One of my biggest supports is other women who are running their businesses and are going through the same stuff that I am. They understand me and inspire me, and are inspired by me. It’s one of the things I like most about being in business for myself. Because there are a lot of days it’s really, really tough but one of the things I like the most is being part of this interconnected web of other women in business. It’s ultimately the best thing about it all.’
Celebrate!
I have a confession. My favourite sound in the world is not the laughter of my two children; it is the ‘pop’ of the cork being released from a bottle of champagne.
‘Pop.’
That wonderful sound conjures up celebration, conviviality and a sense of occasion.
Celebrating our achievements and successes, allows us to acknowledge what we have done, and to burn that feeling of achievement and success into our brains.
Too often, we have moved onto the next project or the next goal without pausing to celebrate our achievement. Time rushes by, and what we have done gets blurred. We forget the great things we have done, and how we stretched ourselves to achieve them.
Actively remembering our successes and feeling successful, enables us to build more success! It provides you fuel to keep going forward.
Each time you achieve a milestone, make sure you mark it with a celebration.
Be savvy
Create a system to collect testimonials and feedback from customers. Whether you send them an email with questions to prompt a testimonial, or ask for a LinkedIn referral, do it as soon as they have finished using your offering. That way, the experience you gave them is fresh in their mind, and they will be more keen to do it.
Caution
One of my favourite quotes is from Jim Rohn, a personal development guru from the US: ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ Consciously choose to spend your time with people who motivate, support and inspire you to live your full potential.
Busy woman’s shortcut
Social media is a great way to stay connected and build international connections and drive traffic to your website. But it can also be a wonderful tool to aid procrastination. Create two 15-minute time slots in your day, at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., to ‘do’ your social media. That way you will avoid falling into the time suck trap.