#43: How to Enjoy Being Successful
Did you know you can run your business AND have fun doing it?
We have been conditioned to think we need to suffer in order to achieve, but what if we didn't have to suffer or be miserable to have success?
In this episode, I outline the:
#1 reason you’re feeling like business is a struggle.
Secret about where your focus goes and how it will transform your approach.
Winning perspective that will make business so much more fun for you!
This episode is for you if you need a reminder to step back and have FUN while running your business! Celebrate those small wins, rejoice with your team, and use everything you learned for the next season of your entrepreneurial journey!
Check out my new free new training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:00):
Have you been struggling with wondering, why am I doing all this? This is stressful. This is overwhelming. There are so many people that need so many things for me as an entrepreneur. Why am I even making this much effort? I might as well just go back to fill in the blank. And if this is something that you've been struggling with. I'm going to share that you are not alone. It's a very common sentiment amongst entrepreneurs who are scaling and they really struggle with having fun in their business. And some of you might even be wondering, well, what do you mean Laura? Like, I'm supposed to be having fun at this? I thought I got the fun. I thought I was able to achieve the fun when I got to the next level of revenue, when I made that next hire, when I had that next launch, that just did the thing that I always wanted to do, and it finally would do it. Now it's fun. And this idea of delayed gratification is very common amongst high achieving entrepreneurs. And in this episode, I'm going to share with you why it's actually putting you at a total disservice in your organization and why you can actually have so much fun on your way out, but I'm going to be sharing very specific things that I recommend that my clients do and that I do in my own company to make sure that we have fun in the everyday. Because if you've put everything on the line to be an entrepreneur, you might as well have fun doing it, right? Stay tuned.
(01:33):
Here's the challenge: so many entrepreneurs, dream of leading a life of impact by creating a multi-million dollar brand, but only a tiny percentage of businesses actually scale to that point. On this podcast, we speak openly authentically about what it takes to scale your business following the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts, and leaders, looking at the behind the scenes of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned. My name is Laura Meyer. And I'm your host. I'm a serial entrepreneur, wife and mom to three. I love talking all things business, especially digging into the mindset and strategies of scaling joyfully to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. Let's go,
(02:16):
Hey, what's up friends? So what is this all about fun? This is a time of year when so many of us are looking forward to having that time off where we can finally have fun and we're putting in all the work and we're doing all the hustle so that over the holidays, we can actually enjoy ourselves, right? If this is something you've been thinking about, I actually want to share with you why you can have fun starting today. You don't have to wait until that break to actually enjoy the process of being an entrepreneur. And many people struggle with this idea. They struggle with this idea because we have been conditioned to suffer in order to achieve. I mean, think about it. Think about when we were kids, right? We had to do the thing that our parents wanted us to do so that we could go outside and have fun.
(03:05):
And I want to propose like, what if this could be different? What if we don't have to suffer and to be miserable, earn our success. And what if we've already arrived? What if we are already successful? So when I work with clients, a lot of times we set up these goals and when we set up these big goals together, then everything bubbles to the surface, all of the emotion and the nervousness and all of our attachment around what that goal means comes up. And then as it comes up, there's all of these conversations around deservedness around this head trash of this, like, well, what if we don't achieve it? And, and we start hedging our bets, a lot of us where we think, well, if I aim really low and then I achieve it, then it doesn't mean that I'm a failure. And we're so afraid of being a failure as entrepreneurs that we actually set the bar so low, that we undermine our own success in being able to grow and achieve our dreams and have as much impact on as many people as possible.
(04:17):
So this idea that we need to suffer along the way and be miserable so that we can earn the fun that's going to come is something that I really want you to flip on your head, as you're thinking about this idea. And as you're thinking about this, I want to illustrate it with a little story. Several years ago, I was invited to this gorgeous destination wedding. It was from a peer of mine from when I was in the wedding industry. And it's a friend who owns an invitation company called Two Paper Dolls. You might've heard of it if you're listening, because this company is one of the top companies in the world when it comes to creating custom gorgeous invitations. And my friend who's the owner of the company was marrying her life partner. And we received this stunning packet in the mail. And my friend creates invitations for celebrities, creates paper products for the white house, like no big deal, right?
(05:15):
And we get this invitation, it's a box and I open it up and we're sorting through all the different papers and RSVPs. And, and I'm just getting more and more excited about how amazing this wedding's going to be. And at the bottom of this gorgeous box is a wooden carving of the state of Maine. And on it, it says, "The journey is the reward." And it's a quote Tau. I remember looking at it at the time thinking, you know what? I don't know if I'm so good at this journey is the reward thing. I'm really putting in a lot of effort and I'm struggling tremendously as an entrepreneur because I think that if I can just get past this next stage in business, then it's going to be easier. It'll be more fun. That's where the reward will be. And I held up my hand and I looked down and I thought, Hmm, this might be worth considering this whole journey is the reward idea.
(06:12):
And since then I closed down the business that I was running at the time, and I'm now a consultant. And one of the biggest pieces of advice that I provide to my own clients is let's figure out how to make this fun. And what typically gets in the way of fun is that we're just doing so many things that you can't win at anything. And your team is constantly fixing this and fixing that, but nothing is ever brought to the finish line and celebrated. And as a result, everybody just keeps struggling and struggling, but they stop having fun. And this is came up recently with a client where I advised the founding team. You know, what, when was the last time you celebrated a win and they decided to do that. And the whole entire team was energized as they were going into another launch.
(07:02):
And it's usually just a simple activity of remembering that once you actually complete something, make sure that you celebrate it and also make sure that you don't have so much going on, that you can never actually finish a single task to the degree that it's measurable to the degree to which you can have fun around it. And then also assigning meaning to what is and isn't working. And I remember having a conversation recently with another client who thought, well, I don't know if that's working and we went back and we decided, oh my gosh, it actually it worked great against what it is that we said that we were going to do. And now let's just recycle that idea and reapply it, and now it'll work even better. And so sometimes we get very caught in our own emotions and we compare ourselves to other people and we assign it meaning of, oh, well, that's not working instead of choosing a new thought of, well, of course this is working I'm, I'm on my way to making this work really, really well. And I'm learning as I go. And how fun is that?
(08:07):
And it, a lot of times, it's just the thoughts that we're choosing as we're scaling our businesses. And as we're communicating with our team. And the third thing that gets in the way of fun is that we're so close to the edge. We are under so much pressure that there is zero margin for error and that all of that worry and our stress becomes so heavy that we can't enjoy the fun of actually growing a business. And when we look at children who are having fun and I have three children, my children are six and eight and five months.
(08:41):
And I look at my five month old and she's just learning how to roll over now. And I look at the, her face when she's learning and there's so much discovery and there's so much excitement. She's not assigning meaning to it. She's not like on her side, taking her little chubby legs, swinging it over the other leg and trying to figure out if she can get her shoulder underneath herself, just at the right spot so that she rolls on her over on her tummy. And the look on her face is so much excitement and wonder. It's not, she's not wondering like, hmm, if I don't roll my chubby little leg over the other one, this one time, that must mean that I am a complete failure and I shouldn't be doing this and just forget it, right? These are conditionings that we grow up with that affect our performance, but aren't inherently how we're made. We're made to be in this wondering curiosity and exploration. That is so, so fun. And when she finally rolls her leg over and she gets onto her tummy and she props her elbows underneath her and puts her head up, she is so proud of herself. It's the cutest thing. And we both laugh so hard because it's fun.
(09:50):
And as you're thinking about growing and scaling your business or going into that next launch or setting up that next goal, I want to encourage you to make it fun, to choose the thoughts, that peak curiosity to make you wonder hmm. I wonder how this is going to go. And if you have people in your world who are a little bit of a dream killer, they, um, maybe say to you, well, I don't know if this is going to be work or it's their baggage, don't buy into it. That's their stuff. It's really up to you as an entrepreneur to choose what you want to believe about it. And if you're so close to the edge, I'd encourage you to give yourself permission, just to dial it back a little bit to say, well, what happens if I don't meet this goal exactly the way that it needs to happen and is it going to still be okay?
(10:44):
Am I still going to be able to feed my family or make payroll? And if you're at a place where you are on razor thin edges, for me personally, that messed with my mind so badly that it was really hard for me to have fun around it. I would encourage you to think about how you can create more margin for error in your business that you can enjoy the process, where not every single decision is make or break. Not every single hire has to work out perfectly because it was so much money and you have so little time and like, how are you going to just find another person? And that's going to be so difficult. So I'm just going to make this person work, even though they're really taking away from my ability to have fun in this business. I'm going to ask you to give yourself permission, to have fun, to not do that to yourself, quite so much on the way up to being totally committed to your goals and dreams, but being open to when they happen, giving yourself more time, more margin to actually achieve the thing so that you're not under so much pressure to get it done so soon.
(11:53):
So that it's extremely difficult to actually take the advice that I'm providing to you and implementing it into your business. And the way that I typically work with clients is I come on board, we schedule out the goals for the next 90 days. We come up with a strategy. A lot of times the founder doesn't even really need to be involved in the implementation of the strategy. And I can work directly with the team on implementing the strategies in a way that gets us closer to the goal as we go. So we constantly are just meeting, looking at metrics, adjusting the sales and trying to get closer and closer to that target over time. And what I love to do is I love to make it fun. And when I show up to a meeting with my clients and their teams, I'll say, okay, this is great. We just learned this thing. And now we get to take that learning. And we get to make adjustments that bring us closer to the goal or that if we don't pay quick attention to, it could keep us further off from our goal than we want to be. And as we get into this discovery process of, hmm, I wonder if this system, process, tried and true method would be a good application in this situation, and let's just see what happens and let's have fun with it. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see what happens.
(13:12):
Let's make this adjustment, let's send this email, let's do this thing. Let's change up the script. Let's go ahead and take a selfie of ourselves and send it to a client and see what happens. See if we can get them to pay attention to our marketing message in a way that was maybe different from the last time let's go ahead and change up the subject heading. Let's send it out to a new group of people on our list. Let's experiment and have fun and see if we can reach our goal. And when we do that, when we approach it from that perspective, it is so much fun. The meetings or enjoy audible, we're able to connect and we laugh and we discover. And if this is something that is missing from your organization right now, it usually, again, starts with your thoughts. It starts with this thought of business has to be difficult. And once we achieve the milestone, then it becomes fun. Or that we have to be suffering and miserable to actually earn our success or that we have to work hard to be successful. And while this is hard work, it can be hard work and fun. And when these thoughts come up, pay attention to them, question them, be curious about them and approach it from this place of this is just a big science experiment and we're really curious about what is, and is not going to work here.
(14:42):
So if you've been just struggling, you've been miserable up to this point. I want you to stop and pause and question that. Question those thoughts and those beliefs that may be contributing to the actions in your organization, that's contributing to the result. And usually what happens is that the more fun I have in a company, actually, the more they are blowing it out of the water when it comes to results. And I don't think that is by accident. I actually think that having fun in business is actually the best business strategy that you can have. And once I figured this out, my whole perspective on business changed, I'm so much happier. I'm so much more joyful. And it's a really interesting to start from scratch with this set of beliefs.
(15:35):
So for example, at this time of recording, I am in the process of partnering with my friend Kelly Roach on a new business, and we'll be launching it in February. And the truth is neither one of us needs to do this. I'm very busy with my consulting company. It's going really well. And Kelly just crossed eight figures with her company. So neither of us needs this revenue, right? So why are we doing this? It's only worth doing if we're changing lives and we're having fun doing it. And so why don't more people enjoy this process of scaling because we've been trained to suffer too, and been conditioned to suffer in order to achieve. And I'm going to ask you what, if it could be different? What if everything that you're doing could be fun? What if you could simplify your business, you could win it more things.
(16:29):
And what if winning was so fun that you couldn't help, but celebrate it with everybody on your team? And what if every single time something isn't working, the way that you wanted it to work? All it meant was that you're getting closer to what will work and what if you could free yourself up for more margin so that you're not so close to the edge, that if something doesn't work out it's okay. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean that your business is going backwards. It doesn't mean that your best days are behind you. All it means is that you are one step closer to getting what you want out of your life and business. And you just had an amazing learning experience that you can't wait to carry forward into the next season of your entrepreneurial.
(17:21):
Hey there, before you head out, I want to let you know about a free new training I have right on a brand new website called yournextmillion.me. It's yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses, to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. And I have to tell you, it is not what you think. So check it out at yournextmillion.me. And if you loved this show, will you subscribe to it and share it with a friend, or just say something nice about it to someone, you know, I'd really appreciate it so much. Thanks so much for being here and I'll see you next.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.