#75: When You Just Have to Embrace the Suck
On the path of entrepreneurship, there are many moments in which we, as business owners, find ourselves having to grow through something difficult.
This is often phrased in platitudes that make great Instagram quote squares. You have to look backwards before you move forwards. Get uncomfortable. Do the hard thing. Be brave! Take action.
But the truth of the matter is, the growth through those difficult times .. it's often simply embracing the suck.
Recently I've spoken about embracing the suck to many clients in my private client group. And I had my own experience with it that I'm reluctantly excited to share with you on today's podcast episode.
If you need a little comedic relief paired with an age-old business lesson, tune in to learn how to move through those difficulties and come out the other side stronger!
Check out my 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)
In the path of entrepreneurship, there are many moments in which we, as business owners find ourselves having to, grow through something difficult. Maybe it’s a different challenge, something that feels super hard, or simply is frustrating before it gets better.
This is often phrased in platitudes that make great Instagram quote squares. Like you have to look backwards before you move forwards. Get uncomfortable. Do the hard thing. Be brave! Take action. You can’t open up Pinterest for home organization ideas without being inundated with buzzwords.
But really what we're talking about is just simply embracing the suck. Yes, embrace the suck. It is a term I often refer to as the least sophisticated, but most accurate way to talk about things that are really, really sucky that we just have to figure out how to move through so we can get to the thing that we really want.
I've spoken recently about embracing the suck too many clients in my private client group, and how we can get better at... Getting used to that discomfort. And I had my own experience with it that I'm reluctantly excited to share with you on today's podcast episode.
About a month ago, I realized that I had spent an entire year following the same daily, somewhat mundane routine. I get up, walk the dog, help the kids get ready, get them off to school. Sit by my computer all day and at five o'clock I go back upstairs when the nanny leaves and manage the chaos until bedtime. This was a daily routine. Again and again and again. As an extrovert, not leaving my house very much and pretty much sitting in my basement all day.
As the world opened back up, I hit a breaking point. It was time to do something. I had to get out of the house before I would go absolutely insane. So my husband did what every well-meaning upper class suburbanite would do, and we joined a country club. We looked at a couple of different options and went with a basic model with dining, pool, tennis and golf without too many bells and whistles, but nice enough where there is a sense of community and an opportunity to get involved. Upon greeting some moms the first day. I mentioned casually that I used to play competitive tennis in high school and a year of college.
Now granted, this was more than half my life ago, but if I say so myself, that at one point in my life, I was pretty darn good. They encouraged me to get involved and it was a good idea. I started to take lessons again. The pro-rated me and I started and joined up for some USTA tennis matches. Here I am, getting back in competitive tennis in my forties, with three kids at home. Heck yeah - I was feeling pretty proud of myself.
The weekend before the first match, I was invited to go out to hit balls with a group of women. I was rusty but didn’t think too much of it… until a few days later I received a very polite and kind email from one of the women I was playing with who gently (but accurately) told me that I would probably struggle in the competitive matches at the rating level in which the pro provided. Maybe I should take some time, rate myself a bit lower and not get involved so soon in matches. Ouch.
And to be honest, she was totally right. When I was out actually competing versus taking lessons, I had a lot more balls going into the net, a lot more hits that are wide or long. I double faulted twice in a row. I was NOT competitive tennis material. It was difficult to get that email. I felt embarrassed, humiliated. I was a competitor. A darn good one point. I'm a winner. I'm good at things, an achiever. I'm not used to failing.
I emailed her a gracious thank you for saving me the embarrassment of actually going to the matches and being the odd woman out. And then immediately signed up for another lesson. Later on that day, I saw myself being replaced in the rest of the matches throughout the summer, and encouragement from the coordinator saying, "Why don't you join us at the end of the summer when you've had a little bit more practice." Sometimes the suck hurts.
Embracing the suck is something that I needed to do in order to be able to play competitive tennis again. It hurts when we're really good at what we do. When we are achievers and we're used to excelling at our craft. It hurts when we're competitive and we're athletes, when we're entrepreneurs and we like to win. But staying in the suck sometimes keeps us from getting on the other side of it. My immediate reaction was, well, I just shouldn't play. I'm terrible. Why would I get back out there? And then I realized that the sooner I embrace the suck, the sooner I'm going to be able to get into competitive matches and overcome all of the mindset trash and rusty form that was keeping me stuck.
So many times as entrepreneurs, we have to just embrace the suck. And I think by not sugarcoating it, not calling it anything else than what it is, not trying to make it sound pretty or glamorous with Instagram worthy quotes or platitudes. We're being a lot more honest about what this actually feels like. The gut wrenching, hard hitting, not being good enough fearing, horrifying reality, that we're terrible at something, and the only way to get better at it is by letting it suck for a little while.
I wanted to share with you a couple of different examples of when I think it's really important for entrepreneurs and their teams to embrace the suck. The first is when it comes to expanding your team. So many people who are growing a multimillion dollar business, stay at that mark because maybe they have developed a few people underneath them who are the catchall, but the people underneath those people haven't been properly delegated to. There's somebody working directly the entrepreneur who's pretty good at catching the ball, but they haven't taken the time to actually develop leaders under leaders and delegating properly.
People who could actually follow standard operating procedures, or do time consuming tasks that are drowning the leadership team. They stay stuck at the same revenue level because there's only so many evenings and weekends leadership can handle minutiae and detailed tasks, and honestly - it’s time consuming to standardize enough to hand off to somebody else, so they just keep doing them.
Thing about delegation is that much like serving tennis ball after tennis ball until they go in consistently - it sucks before it gets better. It is truly the definition of embracing the suck. It's going to be way more time consuming in the short term than it will be in the long term. But when you get on the other side of delegating properly, so it doesn't land back on your lap, so the person doesn't say, "I didn't know what to do. Do you mind just doing it?" So the person doesn't make a mistake and leaves the delegator tempted to regain control.
It’s painful to release something and see the growing pains when someone else is taking over and learning and to delegate well IS very time consuming. The good news is that once you do it well, just ONCE and document it carefully, you never have to embrace the suck again. And embracing it and using it as an opportunity to develop your own leadership skills is the only way to grow.
Another time when entrepreneurs often need to embrace the suck is when it comes to not breaking everything in your business because things aren’t performing the way you expected and it seems easier (and more fun!) to try a new, shiny idea. So many entrepreneurs are quick starters on the Kolbe and they struggle with follow-through. Maybe this sounds familiar. And once a plan is in place or structures are formed or processes, taking place where you've made a decision about a marketing activity, for example, which is a very popular place for entrepreneurs to like to break things by diverting their attention to something new without first embracing the suck and moving through it to optimize that special something they dreamed up into a profitable and valuable piece of the business.
The key here is to not break it, not say, okay, so we now have this program that's meant for this certain population that's designed to help with this specific problem. GREAT! We like our decisions and we like our reasons. And then the week before change everything about the positioning, the packaging, the pricing of that solution because we haven’t yet moved through the suck into making this a viable element of the business. That would be, for many entrepreneurs, like sitting on your hands with a blindfold on trying to not talk at something that's screaming your name. It is a really difficult way to ignore something that is waiting for bright new ideas. For so many entrepreneurs they can't help themselves. Even if there's a great plan in place. They have to blow it up.
They just don't know any other way to be. And for them, embracing the suck has a lot to do with letting your team execute on a well thought out idea that you decided well in advance, and trusting that it was the right strategy for the right time in your business. Trusting that decision. I'm not saying don't change something. If your gut or your intuition is saying, it's not the direction, but knowing that difference between your intuition, anticipating that something isn't going to convert, or it's not going to work well versus reacting, responding. Because you simply can't help but blow something up because it's your nature, is a key component of self-awareness and part of the suckiness that you need to embrace in order to become a mature business owner.
Sometimes embracing the suck in the business. It has a lot to do with just rolling up your sleeves to fix something, being willing to have the final say on a standard operating procedure or a plan or all of the detailed things that we want nothing to do with, but make our lives easier, make it better for our team to be able to execute confidently.
And sometimes it's a matter of revisiting something that we've checked off the list. And we moved on as visionary entrepreneurs, we'd like to be done and done. We don't want to have to go backwards on something, revisit something, fix something that's been decided on or have to redo anything. But the truth is, is that in the dynamic ever-changing environment of digital marketing, sales, online entrepreneurship, things need to constantly be revisited and say, is this the very best we can do? Is this the top level fulfillment? Are we still competitive? Does the positioning still make sense? Is this still the exact offer that our audience will care about and will receive transformation around? Are we providing top level coaching, mentorship, curriculum? What is current, relevant to the audience? Given the changes around us? The great part about online entrepreneurship is that it's so fast paced, things can happen in an instant that take years to implement in traditional business.
All of this is just part of embracing the suck and the flip side of the excitement and nature of this crazy online space that we all live in. It’s a wild ride, and super fun, but sometimes we get a little spoiled and forget that some things that suck initially actually give us tons of freedom, growth and enjoyment. Maybe embracing the suck is the only way to be. Humbled - for sure, but always getting better and better results. I’d even go as far to say that the degree to which you can embrace it, is the degree to which you’ll be successful. Because if you can match suckiness with inspired action, keeping an open mind to what’s possible by moving through it, there’s really no glass ceiling at that point.
At the time of recording I'm in a personal season of suck with my tennis game. I'm taking two lessons a week from a head pro who's reminding me how good my strokes are and how much it sucks when I miss it. Maybe a year from now, I'll be coming back and telling you about all of my USTA championship wins. But right now, I'm on my own journey, embracing what sucks and leaning into my mediocrity. And when I back to my glory days once again…. You’ll be the first to know.
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.