As a small business CEO, to manage your business is to manage yourself. At times, it is not your business that is stuck… it is you. There is much to do and it often feels not enough time to do it all. There are ups and downs -downs and downs- and we are easily impacted. However, the most successful businesses are not run by the best of us, but by the most persistent of us. The perseverance we need is for forward motion.
Plan the actions, not just the concepts. Don’t get caught in a never-ending cycle of researching, strategizing, and planning that you never take action. Sometimes the paralyzing focus on what you cannot do takes over, so you do nothing. Whatever you focus on I is what grows, therefore, focus on what you can do. What can you do right now, with where you are and what you have? And wherever you don’t have a budget, add elbow grease and simply do more of the things a budget would have afforded hiring others to do.
Do the doing. There will be season when you do more than others. However, when more is required, do what you need to do now so that you are where you want to be later. In the long list of tasks, there will always be items that you want to do less than others. Breakthrough the temptation to procrastinate by starting with the tasks you least want to do. Finally, to feel the momentum of your work, focus your doing on a project basis. Working on a project to completion allows you to see and feel progress. Much like cleaning a full room allows you to see progress toward a clean house.
Trial and error, not perfection. There is an illusion that if you just plan long enough, learn enough, strategize enough, etc… that you’ll get it right the first time. That type of perfection is an illusion. You see there is a level of education you cannot get until you execute. Everything before the doing is theory. Levels of perfection come with practice (doing over and over again). The goal is to do, learn from what was done and incorporate the lessons into the next round of doing. When things don’t go as planned, it is not failure. It is feedback, so apply it.
What next? Use the feedback to plan your next moves, the next round of doing. When redoing, you aren’t starting from the beginning. You are moving forward with more information. Strengthen the foundation of your process and build up using the feedback. And as you get better and better, have more and more results… do not forget to celebrate.
Need a plan of action that uses your strengths, resources, and where you are to get unstuck? Let’s talk. ShaCannon.info/talk