What You'll Discover In This Episode:
Ever boiled a frog? Unless you’re a chef specializing in French cuisine, probably not. You might have heard the apologue of boiling a frog though. In case you haven’t, the gist is this:
If you put a frog in boiling water, it will feel pain and quickly jump out. If you were to put the same frog in room temperature water then slowly bring the water to a boil, however, the frog would not perceive the danger and will unknowingly get cooked to death. Morbid? Yes, but the analogy I’m about to make is an important one to let sink in…
When you normalize behaviors in your business over time that you would never have found to be acceptable when you started your business, you are that frog, allowing yourself to be slowly boiled alive because you’re not recognizing the dangerous conditions all around you.
You see, you likely never would have started your business if you knew it meant working late every night and on weekends, rarely taking a real lunch break, not paying yourself what you’re worth, dealing with insanely difficult clients on the daily, and not having time for your friends, family, and hobbies. Oh, and did I forget to mention feeling overworked, overwhelmed, overly exhausted, and stressed out? No one would sign up for that. You didn’t sign up for that!
But an hour here, a lunch break there, a difficult client here, and a month without paying yourself there, has snowballed into behavior patterns that you have normalized over the years. What started out as painless one-offs, you have come to think of as acceptable, as if they’re just the way things have to be when you run a business.
Well, let me tell you, that’s bullsh!t!
Bring more joy back into running your business simply by refusing to accept the negative experiences you’re having as normal and seeking out opportunities to raise your standards and change your behaviors, so they work better for your life and the business you WANT to run.
Don’t surrender to death by 1,000 paper cuts. Don’t allow yourself to get boiled alive slowly. Take a stand and unnormalized your normal!
In this episode of Productivity Straight Talk, I dive into the strategy of taking a hard look at your business to recognize that you’ve normalized certain behaviors that aren’t normal at all. Once you identify the behaviors that don’t feel good in your business, you can begin to change the experience of running a business to one that is more joyful.