Hey there Troublemakers everywhere. This is part two of my Disruption Session on what being a troublemaker is actually all about, because it’s probably not what you are expecting.
I’m all about teaching people how to shake up the beliefs and patterns that are keeping you stuck so that you can feel confident about creating a new life for yourself and actually start achieving your dreams.
My passion is for helping people with their business so I’m all about helping business startups and entrepreneurs get a running start. What I’ve found though, from working with business people from all different levels over the past 20 years is in almost all cases the challenges you overcome in your business area effect every area of your life. So what you conquer in business you can apply to your relationships, health and finances and emotional stability. Being stuck in one usually also means you get stuck in others as well, so clearing out, shaking up and causing a business disruption creates an eruption for more options and better results in every part of your life.
So basically, it’s all about living a life that you love and look forward to and get excited about when you wake up in the morning.
So in my first blog, I went over what that shakeup is all about, why it’s important and how it works. So this time I’m just taking that one step further with a disruptive plan to be able to break out of wherever you are. The disruptive plan is often taking the pressure off a little bit. A lot of people do the all-or-nothing type thing and some people can do that and it’s powerful and motivating for them, but most people are just not able to, they might start but then it’s quickly back to where they started.
And what I mean by the all-or-nothing is that you get rid of your job straight away and then jump into a business, whatever it may be, and just go for it. I’m not necessarily a massive fan of that. What I would say is let’s hatch an escape plan. Let’s have a disruptive plan to build a side business, or what some people are calling a side hustle. Let’s do that and gradually step down from your job so maybe you do your business in the evenings and weekends, then go down to three days a week in your job, or even four, and have that extra day or two on your business and the important thing here is you use that business time well.
And for me, I look at learning and growth. Start there. So you don’t need a lot of time in your business to get that. Actually you can learn a lot just from seeing how much you do and how effective your time is on those weekends. Are you doing the work or are you off with friends having fun? So right there you have learnings and you can look deeper and see what about the work you are avoiding and that’s how your business will start to grow.
A lot of people build these businesses and their expectation is to make hundreds of thousands of dollars straight away. I see this, especially in the personal development industry with coaches and therapists who think, ‘Oh, you know, I should be earning six figures plus while working 25 hours or less a week doing shit that doesn’t work’. And the reality is, no, it doesn’t work that way. It can eventually, but it takes time and work to get to there, it’s not something that just comes with the job title because you can charge your clients whatever you like by the hour, but if you haven’t actually done any of the work on yourself and grown yourself they won’t get results and they won’t refer you.
I believe you’ve got to earn the right to be successful. And part of earning the right to be successful is going through multiple breakouts.
One of those things could be facing fears, like:
- Fear of rejection.
- Fear of sales.
- Fear of promotion.
- Fear of the good opinion of other people.
- Fears around cash flow.
- Fears around authority figures.
- Fears around government.
All those things and many, many more that get thrown up for people when they go to break out.
These are the things that we’ve got to face, and not just face, we’ve got to break out of them. And breaking out of them, it kind of accurately suggests force, that we are attacking them and breaking out.
So when you go on this attack you need a plan. And the plan can be a part-time side hustle. This can apply to every breakout level, but I’ll use the first 0 to 100K as an example.
So the 0 to 100K is breaking out of your job and doing your first 100K in your business.
There are four stages when it comes to breaking through.
Here’s how it works.
Step one is learnings, lots of them.
Initially the learnings are about your customer, in terms of what your customer wants, and that’s the most important information. Being able to research and understand your customer and the problems that they have is crucial. You need to know the things that are holding them back because at the end of the day, that’s typically why they’re going to want your product or service. It’s going to solve some type of problem and give them a certain result, or have them feel in some way different, and if we can fast track that, then they’re probably going to love your product or service.
It’s really important to pay attention here because while you are learning about your customer, what you’re really learning about is yourself, and this type of learning is really deep and massively, massively impacting.
Now, some learnings are really easy, and some are very challenging. What we want is to get rid of the easy learnings and focus on the challenging ones, because that’s what is going to build your business.
Easy learning is learning intellectually. A lot of people will go to seminar after seminar and read book after book and they develop this incredible intellectual understanding. I often say this in events, every single person in this room knows how to transform their life, but are they actually doing it?
Most of the time the answer is no, because the difference between knowing and doing is worlds apart.
And so a lot of the time I say to people, you know, burn the books, stop going through all this intellectual information because you are not applying it, you are just living inside your comfort zone of what feels safe and what feels clever.
And by the exact same way I say stop spending so much time on the things you know already. Stop trying to build the best administration system, tax system or write the world’s best proposal and instead get out there and be disruptive, make a sales mess, get some cash flow because that’s where the real learning is.
The things that you are afraid of or not good at or not clever at holds the key to you learning the most about yourself and what you need to do to break out. And 99% of the time when you go and just do it it’s not as bad as you were expecting, it’s not as big as that fear was in your head and you go, ‘Wow, I can actually do this!’ And that opens up so much ability and confidence to take other steps, and the next time it will be a bit bigger and you will get a bigger result.
So step one is learnings, we’re learning about our customer but indirectly we’re learning about ourselves. And the challenge here is to stay really present to it all and be in that mindset of collecting all the learnings, because what can happen is you feel like the failure of the fear gets really strong or you get embarrassed or feel like you should know what you are doing and all these emotions come up. And when that happens then you can start to make really poor decisions and take action in ways that are not serving you or your business because you just want the emotion to stop. So for most people that’s taking the exit strategy and going back to those old familiar habits and just living this stuck life. And they don’t actually want that, they want to be successful and they want to reach that vision, but when you increase emotion you decrease intelligence and you don’t make the decisions you would make if you were calm and objective.
And that’s where having a great coach or a board or a great support system that is not emotionally connected really works (so not mum, not dad, not someone that’s employed, that’s projecting all their fears onto you). Someone that is a specialist, that’s objective, someone like me that is going to help you not only identify the learnings, but create a structure that is going to ensure you follow through.
So make a mess, get out of your comfort zone and get a whole heap of learnings really quickly. And then what we want to do is move to the next step, which is growth.
Step two is growth and application.
This is where you take those learnings and you apply them to yourself and the way you run your business. So this step is all about gentle changes. It’s about learning what works and doing that more, and learning what doesn’t work and doing that less, and learning where you are getting stuck and breaking through that.
A lot of people stay stuck in step number one, which is learning, learning, learning about the business, but they don’t apply it and they typically don’t apply it because it’s uncomfortable. They can feel like they’re breaking in two because they are working so hard and gathering all this really great information and not seeing the results because they are not willing to change anything.
And that’s why having a support system outside of the business is crucial because they can flag it for you when you are not applying or not using that information for growth.
So again, having that committed and impartial coach or advisory board is so essential for getting the most out of the first two steps.
Step three is money.
This is the exciting one, what everyone wants is money, that’s why they do this, but usually they want the money first before the learnings and the application.
Part of that is because when you look at people who are successful you see how much money they are making and go, ‘That’s it, that’s success, I want that.’
But actually these people have already been through steps one and two over and over, and they keep learning and applying and step up a bit more every time to get those millions. You just weren’t on the journey with them to see that, all the way back at the start, you are just looking at the end results, but a lot of stuff has happened to them on this journey and you need for that to be part of your success as well if you want to get to step three and get the money.
And I see a lot of new business people do really well in the first two steps and then let it all come crashing down because they’ve got all of this money and they get super excited and then spend it on the wrong things. They don’t save; they don’t reinvest it because they are so excited. Remember, when emotion goes up intelligence goes down, even over really great emotions.
So for them it’s the money part where they’ll get a whole heap of learnings around cash flow so they need to apply that learning and use that money well and stay calm if they want to break through to the next step. If you don’t apply these learning then you will be working hard for the rest of your life just to stay where you are.
Step four is time.
If you are not attracted and really motivated by money (and if you have some wounds around cash flow this might be the case) then chances are you are doing all this for time.
I believe time is the new currency and what really everyone wants, even those that say they want the money, the higher aim is the freedom to be able to do what they want, when they want.
So if you invest step three (money) correctly, then you’ll get a whole heap of time, and once we’ve got that time, then we can fully start to look at entirely breaking out of the job and taking that side hustle and creating a fulltime business.
Now this could be a 90 day kind of approach. It could be six months, it could be 12 months. Really it’s determined by how much you’re willing to learn and grow.
Typically when people quit their job and start businesses, the reverse happens. They’ve created all this time, they’ve got all of this money, maybe through savings, and so they invest their money in their business and expect it to cycle back around and turn into growth and learning.
And because they have so much time they waste it and watch TV, or hang with friends or do whatever they want when they want because that’s the lifestyle they wanted in the first place. There is no one standing over them telling them how to spend their time effectively and they love that, only they can’t sustain that because it’s a backwards approach and your business is not going to grow or learn anything without you.
The key is to do an audit on yourself, to get clarity, to have that self-awareness so that then you can start to transition to the next levels.
So make a mess straight away – without any knowledge – and get rapid learnings.
Apply those learnings to your business and leverage that to get rapid growth.
With that growth will come money (often from unexpected sources).
Invest that money and get time.
As you grow in your business you have to change and every time you can find a way to leverage that change then you break out and move to the next level. And really it’s the realization that failure is a key and creating a new, positive relationship to failure.
And I say to people, that’s exactly right. That’s what the breakout is. You have to evolve. Once you have all four then you have reached the next breakout level and it’s time to start over again.
The leader that is doing 100K in their business is completely different to the leader that is doing a million, and the leader that is doing 10 million is completely different as well. They each have totally different values, different belief systems, different risk ratios, different decision-making processes.
The more money you’re earning in your business means a bigger vision, a bigger focus. Instead of day to day or week to week you’re thinking six months, 12 months, three to five years in the future, and that’s your predominant thought process, so you don’t get stuck in the problems. It also means you will be making decisions quickly and pouncing on opportunities where previously you were probably procrastinating on those decisions and stuck in a little bit more fear.
And it might take a few businesses before you really get there. You know, the first business is a learning business, even the second business might be a learning business and maybe your third will be the million dollar ticket. You have to work through until you find that business that really works for you and fits.
Clarity never comes up front, it comes on the journey, and we’ve got to keep moving, we’ve got to keep showing up.
And the key to showing up, and I say this at events, is 90% of success is just showing up. But the key to showing up is to show up when you don’t want to. When every part of you does not want to show up and face it, that’s when we show up. And that’s what successful people do, is they’ve got the ability to be able to push themselves, to show up in those times of crises and to break out. And this is what my Troublemakers company does. This is what we help people do, is to break out of your job, to break out of your business, to break into life.
So join us at our free Troublemaker events and start putting your business into action and know that we have your back through any rough patches so you can keep stepping up and moving forward to reach those amazing goals.
Stay troublesome!
Matt Catling