Be a Hermit Crab, Not a Butterfly - (My BEST Advice for Coaches, Experts and Consultants in 2022)

What's up, family? What's going on? Welcome back to another video. This week I had the honors of getting to speak inside of one of my friends programs. She asked me to be the keynote speaker for her program graduation, which is such a cool thing to do to add a little bit extra value for your customers and like, celebrate that the students hit a milestone. So I was really, really excited to come speak to her event or speak at her event. And I created this speech that's like a commencement speech. And it really made me think about this time of year and how school is ending. Like, I think our kids only have, like 13 days left here. And just all of the feelings that come up when you're finishing something and when you're graduating and you're going on to that next level, right? Because the May or this graduation time period, it feels kind of similar to New Year's Eve or like a new beginning. So. So as we wrap up the school year, as we wrap up the winter and head into spring and then summer, it feels like a refresh. And when you are graduating and you're celebrating finishing something, you're always looking forward to, what is the next thing? Or what, what am I going to do next? And as entrepreneurs or as coaches and experts, people running a business online, we. We get to keep going all the time, right? Like, we finish something and there's always something else. So I had to make this reframe in my own brain very early on that there was no end goal. And I used to get really frustrated by that. Of like, man, I like, did the thing, but I'm not excited about the thing or, like, I'm not as excited as I thought I would be about hitting this goal. And I had to reframe the way I was thinking about it in that it's not. It doesn't have to be frustrating that you get to keep thinking bigger, but even in that switch of, like, I get to keep growing and I get to keep thinking bigger, we're already seeing it differently than, like, man, I'm just never satisfied. I always want the next thing, and it's never enough for me. No. As a visionary and as someone who is always inspired and creative, that's part of the journey. And the sooner that you can accept that about yourself instead of, like, feeling shame about it like I did, of like, why can't I just be satisfied? It can shift a lot of different things for you. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was thinking about, you know, new rebirths and transformations and what it Looks like to hit those goals inside your business and finish things. My first grade daughter, inside of her class this spring, they had a bunch of caterpillars brought in and they had a butterfly net. So they fed the caterpillars and they made the chrysalis as expected, and they hung the chrysalis. It's this little sheet of paper. They like hung this sheet of paper with all these chrysalises. Chrysalis, however you say that hanging up inside of a net. And then they waited and they, they waited for these caterpillars who had, had crawled in there and built their chrysalis and they waited for them to transform into butterflies. And I was there volunteering inside of my daughter's class one of the days when it happened. Except this butterfly, their wings didn't quite form correctly. So it fell, it immediately, like for some reason it couldn't open the wings and it fell to the bottom of this net and immediately everyone's like, oh, it died. Like the butterflies wings and form correctly and now it's done. Long story or short shorter version of this? Long story is that eventually this butterfly just needed a little bit more time. But it made me think about just how we expect the journey to look and how we expect we're going to like go into this cocoon or have this experience and we're going to be different on the other side of the experience and then we're done and that's it. And that's, that's the growth, that's the story, that's how it goes. But as I was thinking about what it's really like as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, and it's much more like a messy, dirty experience. Something that's not comfortable and not pretty to look at. Like a snake. A snake is always outgrowing its skin. It's always forming a new skin and leaving the other one behind. A hermit crab, also not a cute, inspiring butterfly type creature, is always growing and searching for a new home. So as entrepreneurs, we're like looking for the butterfly metamorphosis. But in reality we need to accept the snake side of growth and the hermit crab, the ugly, like creepy side of growth. Because it's not always going to be pretty, it's not always going to be inspiring. There aren't going to be names created about snakes and hermit crabs, but that's what we get to keep doing, is we get to keep growing and we get to keep exploring new skins and trying on new versions of ourselves and new shells. You know, we get to Feel this growth, and we get to create in any direction that we want to create. But the key is making a decision. At some point, you have to decide what that's going to look like. And as entrepreneurs, we have to make a lot of decisions. And it gets really tiring how many different decisions that we have to make. Like, decision fatigue is a real thing. But we're constantly, you know, who are we going to hire? What are we going to launch? What tools are we going to use? Is this software better than that software? Should I hire this coach or that coach? Like, we have so many decisions that we have to make as entrepreneurs. And there was this quote by Tim Ferriss that I absolutely love or this explanation from Tim Ferriss, and he's talking about how the word decision actually has the Latin root of incision. Incision meaning to cut. When we think about getting cut, that's not comfortable either. Like, most of us think about surgery or, like, maybe chopping vegetables and cutting a finger off or, you know, it's like, such a. Also a negative connotation. So when we think about deciding, we're thinking about cutting and, like, cutting off all of the other options and, like, being stuck. We equate decisions with, like, making the wrong decision or we're so fearful of regret, or like, we're going to go in the wrong direction, we're going to cut ourselves off from other opportunities that might even be better. But when you think about it, if you can reframe the cutting off of things, you can cut off things that are no longer serving you, and you can stop doing the things that aren't propelling you forward. So you think about what you can cut off from your life and make that decision where you always have that momentum and you're already. You're always having, like, consistent. A consistent trajectory forward. That's actually more important. So your next level is going to require you to cut off things that are no longer serving you. There's this principle, the 8020 rule, Pareto's principle, where 80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort. And as entrepreneurs, as you get busier and as you get more clients and as your business starts to grow, there are going to be more and more opportunities that are coming up for you all the time. But it's key for you to look at. What is that 20% that I can go all in on and then remove the other 80% and, like, peel back those onion layers of things I'm just doing to be busy or because I feel like I owe Somebody, something or I have people pleasing tendencies, whatever that might look like for you. Just know that it's going to become really important for you to become aware of what you don't need in your business and what to start getting rid of. Especially even from like a cost perspective. What are you spending money on inside your business that you don't actually need, or what are you investing in that isn't necessary? And it's just money that's going out the window instead of in your pocket or in your bank account. That's where profit margins can get really slim as people start growing. So that's another thing to keep in mind. So as we're talking about making decisions and thinking about what we're deciding, I think it's super interesting. I'm literally writing a book about making decisions and, and becoming a decision maker inside of your life. So this is a very top of mind thing for me and I've been doing a lot of research about it. But the really interesting thing is how many decisions we make based on our memory of ourselves. So if you think about yourself and you think about like what you've experienced and what you've done, or what you haven't done, what you haven't finished, things you've committed to and you haven't done, like your confidence can start being affected by these memories of yourself. So then when you're thinking about your next level, you're remembering like, oh well, I said I was going to do that last time and it didn't pan out, or like I made a bad investment so I'm not good with money or you know, this happen. Like we have all these memories about how it was in the past that can actually keep us stuck instead of moving forward into that next version of ourselves. So the entrepreneurial journey is so crazy and we almost have to like get amnesia about what it looked like before because we are, we're growing so fast, we're shedding that skin that it's going to look completely different because you're making, you're making new choices and you're solving problems from a higher perspective. And if you really want to quantum leap into that next version of yourself, you, you have to completely forget about the past and you can only solve problems as the future version of yourself. So I've had an opportunity to hang out in some pretty cool rooms. I've joined a lot of high level masterminds with lots of multiple million dollar business owners. And there's some themes that I noticed, three themes actually when it comes to what how they think about growth and how they think about making money in their business. And one of the biggest things that I've seen across all of these different entrepreneurs is consistency. And oftentimes we mistake consistency with thinking that it means we have to run a hundred miles an hour at all times. Like we have to be consistent. We got to post every day, we got to post 10 times a day. We need to, you know, have 30 sales conversations every day. But in reality, thinking about consistency is realizing there are going to be seasons of ebb and flow in your business. There's going to be sprints and there's going to be rest and there's going to be moments of play and there's going to be moments of hard work. And you have to be able to differentiate and give yourself the opportunity to ebb and flow and you know, have that scale that kind of balances itself out. So being consistent is honoring your own cycles and knowing that you're going to feel different throughout the entire day. You might be really energized in the morning and super tired in the afternoon and you can't expect yourself to perform the same way in the afternoon as you do in the morning. So just being in that observation standpoint of watching your own energy levels and stepping back and being like, oh, isn't that interesting? Like I'm not really inspired to create content in the afternoon, maybe I should move that task to the morning and you can kind of start hacking your own brain or hacking your own schedule. Same with every week. Fridays you might not feel like working and so then you're actually operating in the 80% of non productivity that's not adding into what's really driving the results. So why not just take Friday off? Why not take Monday off? You know, like think about what's really going to bring you joy in your schedule and that feeling of like super gratitude for your business and how do you build more of that in to your daily, weekly and monthly cycle? Same thing for women. Like I get, I get very not creative in certain times of the month. I kind of just want to curl up under a blanket and not talk to any humans. So I know like I probably shouldn't have a launch where I have to be engaged and be chatting with people on that month or that not that month, that would be a lot of time not peopling that week of not really feeling like doing anything or like, you know, a few days during the month when I don't really feel like interacting. I better not have big things planned for those days, so you can start thinking about honoring your own energy levels and your own cycles of rest and cycles of inspiration and creativity. This happens seasonally as well. I go into a little bit of a hibernation period in the fall where I don't feel as creative as I do in the spring. And for a while, I used to judge myself in those phases and be like, man, what's wrong with me? Like, why do I get squirrely every fall? And why do I get weird and, like, not want to do things? But after really being in this space of observation for a few years in a row, I started to see the patterns of, like, oh, okay, this is normal. Like, this is just what I do biologically in the fall, and I'm not going to try to fight against it, because that's like trying to push a rock up a hill, right? Like, that's. It's not productive. It's not worth it. If I can arrest and recover and get really energetic for that next phase, that's going to only work in my favor. So that's a really big thing, is recognizing those seasons and in yourself. And the other thing is to make sure that you give yourself opportunities to grow exponentially and do things that are super uncomfortable. Whether it's investing in a coach that you're afraid is, you know, it's like, really out of your comfort zone or doing live streams. Maybe that's where you're at and you're like, I don't like my face on camera. Like, it looks weird. Maybe that's the thing you go do next. So whatever it is, whatever that block is that you feel like you're up against and whatever that, if you're like, man, if I could just do that thing, I could get further. Whatever that is for you, do that, find that thing, overcome. Like, step over that block, over that wall and keep growing beyond it. The other thing is just making sure that, you know, you are the decision maker of your life. Like, first and foremost, you get to decide what your schedule looks like. You get to decide how you make money, who you work with, what you're going to do, what you're not going to do. You know, what kind of PR opportunities you're going to take. If you're going to be on that person's podcast or in that person's summit. Like, you get to choose. And if you don't want to, you can say no. So that's like one of. That's. The third thing is, like, making sure that, you know, you're the boss of your life and of your business and you can become the decision maker who decides what it's going to look like for you. So hopefully this is helpful. If you guys have any questions, make sure you reach out to me on Instagram. I love chatting with people in the DMs and like answering questions and stuff, so find me over on Instagram. Also, make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss any updates and I will keep bringing you more inspirational content, more marketing info, some of these deep dives, how to sessions, all that stuff. If you guys want to learn anything, let me know in the comments and I will see you in the next video. Thanks.