What NOT to do when you get the wobbles
Written by Julia Bickerstaff // April 28, 2014 // Daily Juice // No comments
There’s a super- tricky time when you’re running a business. It comes after the initial excitement of starting it and before you get the sense that you can really make it work. It can be a glum ‘ol time because you’re working hard and – let’s get real here – you’re not making much money.
When you’re in the glums it’s hard to keep going with the same enthusiasm that you had at the beginning. Some people are fiercely determined and they just storm on through. The rest of us? Well we get the wobbles!
Lots of things go pear-shaped when we wobble but the worst is that we start to sabotage our chance of success. How? Well when we get the feeling that our business might not work we start to put a little less effort in to it. Sounds counter intuitive huh, but it’s not really. We’re just humans doing the very natural thing of saving our energy until we really need it! Out in the wild we wouldn’t bust a gut on something that might not work. Well not unless we had no other option.
Most of the fiercely determined business owners have no other option. They HAVE to make their businesses work. We wobblers though often have a plan B. It might not be very attractive but it’s enough to invoke our caveman instincts and conserve our energy.
The BIG problem with wobbling is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you start to think that your business might not work, you put a little less effort in to it. Less effort means (even) less success. Less success means you start to *believe* the business won’t work. Believing the business won’t work make you want to put even less effort in to it. And so on and so forth until you kinda drift away from what’s by now just a shell of a business.
So what can you do to stop this happening?
1. The first thing is to acknowledge that you’re in the wobbles! Mostly we KNOW when we’re in the wobbles we just don’t admit it to ourselves!
2. Then you need to decide if you’re in or out. I’m not suggesting your raise the white flag at the first whiff of a wobble, but you’ve got to decide NOW whether you’re going to give you business the full effort or whether you’re going to shut it down. YUP that’s the choice.
3. Finally commit to keeping your effort up. Not as hard as it sounds when you know why it might dwindle!
Do you wobble?!
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