Give Up The Grind

I recently collaborated with Melissa Swink of Melissa Swink & Co. on an amazing webinar, “Give Up the Grind: 3 Keys to Running Your Business with Ease.” We provided the three keys to successfully building a business with ease, based on what we’ve discovered through working with clients and building our own businesses. 

Thanks to all of you who made it live and or who signed up to receive the recording!

If you missed it, don’t worry; I’m sharing a few pieces of the webinar, in today’s blog. I’m going to share three big mindset patterns that tend to keep people stuck in the grind. In other words, how do you give up that need to just be going and going and going… hustling harder and burning yourself out... as you build a successful business?

I believe there are three mindset-related issues that keep people in the grind for longer than they need to be: Self-worth, martyr syndrome, and perfectionism. 

Self-Worth

At a high level, our own self-worth plays into how many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to other people. 

Thanks to social media and influencers, it’s so easy to see what other people are doing. Social media has really made hustling look sexy. It's created a culture of “go, go, go” and “do, do, do” and “produce, produce.” 

“Look at the millions of dollars this person is making over here!” “Look how successful this business is over there!” 

There's a lot of propaganda around why it's better to be working really hard, all the time. 

And when you have a weak commitment to why you’ve created your business, or a lack of confidence in why your products/services matter, you’re falling into this self-worth trap where you’re comparing yourself to other people. 

It's very tempting to compare how hard you're working to how hard other people are working. And if it looks like other people are working harder than you, then you're inclined to mimic that. 

I got into this in more detail in the webinar, but this is part of how self-worth ties into not being willing to give up the grind mindset. 

Martyr Syndrome

I’ve lovingly nicknamed this next mindset pitfall the “martyr syndrome.”

I work with a lot of clients who were excellent workers - but what made them excellent workers doesn’t necessarily make them excellent leaders.

What ends up happening is that they train the people around them to know that they will always be the person to fall back on if things aren't working. 

While that's a really valuable talent to have, this contributes to hustling until you burn out. You've made yourself indispensable and you have to be the one - all the time - to make things happen.

Sometimes you're going to want that, especially if your business is in a pinch, but when you're trying to scale or trying to change your mindset from “worker” to “CEO” or even work fewer hours in your business, it’s not going to work. 

If it's always on you, all the time, to make things happen, then giving up the grind is going to be impossible. 

Perfectionism

I say this with all the love in the world because I'm still a recovering perfectionist, myself.

But perfectionism is one of those places where people are more focused on their business being perfect than their business being impactful. 

There are a lot of consequences to that - and not just that you’re creating extra work for yourself. It also usually means that you're not even getting to the parts of your business that you really enjoy. 

The way this plays out with clients that I work with is that they resist even starting a business for a really long time, even though they've had the idea for years. Or, on the flip side, maybe they've started it, but they are so resistant to finally launching the product or producing the workshop or reaching out to the potential clients because they feel like their messaging isn't perfect, their brand isn’t perfect, or what they're selling isn't perfect. 

When you're striving for that perfection, you're constantly managing all the details. You’re still working really hard, and probably putting a lot of busy work on your plate, rather than just aiming for whatever you're putting out into the world to be impactful on people. 

When you're just focused on the impact, it works. If it's a little messy or if there are things you want to tweak here and there, at least you're putting yourself out there and getting to move things forward. 

Those are just three of the mindsets that I find get in the way of people being able to give up their grind and run their businesses more successfully and with a lot more ease. In the webinar, Melissa and I covered two more keys to successfully transitioning to a more easeful business. I also talked about some facilitative practices to go alongside some of this mindset work. 

Now don’t you wish you had caught the whole webinar? If you wish you were there, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a link to the recording.