Greg Faxon (YouTube) reflects on recurring periods of demotivation in his business and outlines three primary causes: unrealistic expectations (the "emotional cycle of change" and the Valley of Despair), low personal energy (life events, need for breaks, energy audits, deload weeks), and natural evolution of the business (loss of honeymoon-phase passion). For each cause he gives actionable strategies: avoid shame, lower the bar and stay the course, take vacations/add energy sources/schedule deloads, embrace boredom/set new goals, and consider coaching or courses. He closes by normalizing the slump and urging persistence.
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You know, honestly, I don't even really want to record this video right now. Oh, I just feel. I just feel like business is hard, man. If you're. If you're watching this and you're in a slump, I'm in the exact same place. And over the last 10 years of business, probably once or twice a year, I've gotten into this place where I'm totally demotivated to work on the business. I feel like I've lost my passion for the business. A lot of times I'll go look up other types of businesses or like, one time I even applied for a job, just feeling like I don't want to do this anymore. The weird thing is, it doesn't necessarily matter how successful your business is, because my business has grown and continued to grow throughout the last 10 years of business. But I still found myself in these lows where it's like a struggle to even respond to an email. So if this is you, I've actually learned a few things that help. And even though I'm in a bit of a dip now, I understand how to get out of it. Because every year that I've gone through these slumps, I've starting, like a few years ago, I've started to create a running log like an Apple Note, where I literally jot down what got me in the slump and what helped me get out of it. And I've broken it down to three main categories. The first reason why you might be feeling demotivated in your business has to do with expectations. If you've ever done a renovation on part of your home, like a bathroom renovation, you know that it always takes twice as long as you were quoted, and it always costs twice as much as you were quoted. The same thing can happen with entrepreneurship. So sometimes we set these goals or we, you know, start a new program, a coaching program, or we get excited about some marketing strategy, and in our minds, we can see the result that we want. It's similar to. You can see the new bathroom, exactly how it's going to look when it's finished, and you get excited about it. What we don't understand at the early points in a project, though, is what's required, the costs, the parts that suck, right? If you get excited about. For example, I started doing YouTube, I don't know, seriously, maybe six to eight months ago, and I was excited about the potential of YouTube, but I didn't realize all the hard parts, all the work that was involved. And so there's a theory called the emotional cycle of change. Okay. And there's a bunch of phases and this graph, I'll try to put it up on the screen when I edit this. The first phase is called uninformed optimism, and it's exactly that. You don't know what you don't know yet. And it's just exciting. It seems like there's a new possibility and you feel hope. Similar to when, you know, you hire the contractors to do the bathroom. You're talking about what you want. You can see the vision. But very quickly, once you get started, you go into informed pessimism. Okay, now you know that it's kind of gonna suck. So, you know, the workers coming, they're starting to destroy the old bathroom. They're ripping the tiles off you. You got people in your house, Everything's a mess. You know, you can't use the bathroom. It's a pain in the butt. This is informed pessimism. You know now what you don't know, and you have a pessimistic view of it. And if you continue down the path, if you keep working on the thing, you end up in what, I don't know who created this name, but it's because. The Valley of Despair. The Valley of Despair. This is the low point. It's like the door is off the hinges. You, like, need to pee with the door open in your new bathroom. Like, everything's way over budget. The thing got delayed. You're just like, this sucks. It's actually worse now than it was before I decided to start to do the thing. And you really realize, oh, yeah, okay, if I wanted a new bathroom, I actually have to get rid of the old one. And you start to wonder, why did I even do this in the first place? The old bathroom was fine. Same thing in your business. When you undergo any change, a new project, you're like, super out of your comfort zone. And this is where a lot of people quit and do the equivalent of renovating a new room in their house. We would never actually do that in real life, but it's like, if you stop the bathroom renovation, you're like, okay, this isn't going well. Let's renovate the living room. And what you would end up with is a bunch of unfinished rooms. A lot of people end up doing that in their business. And I've done this before as well. You say, okay, Facebook ads are going to be the new thing. I'm so excited about the potential of bring in new people on autopilot. Starting Facebook ads. Oh, shit, it's getting expensive. Ads aren't Working Let me try YouTube or let me try cold reach Outs. And you have to start from scratch on the next thing instead. What we really want to do is if you keep going through the valley of despair, you keep learning about the thing, you keep putting in the time, you get to informed optimism, this new phase. Informed optimism is when you understand what's involved now, but. But you see the potential of coming out of it. You're starting to get some wins. You're like, all right, this isn't a panacea. It's not easy way to make money that I thought it would be, but I'm starting to have hope again. And if you continue on, you get to success, you achieve the thing you want. It's like the sink comes in, it looks great. You're starting to rebuild the new bathroom now. Everything's looking good, and finally you get there, it's done, the project's done. You did it, Bathroom's finished. So this emotional cycle of change, I think is really interesting because to bring it back to why you don't feel motivated in your business. One reason could be because you're demoralized, because you're in that valley of despair where you're putting in work, but you're not seeing rewards from it. That's really demotivating, right? Because we start to question, was it really worth doing this at all? I don't like working hard for not getting any rewards. So what's the lesson here? If you feel demoralized and that's why you're not feeling motivated, the first thing we want to do is to avoid the shame spiral. Okay? One thing we can do is we start to personalize this. We start to feel like a failure. And we're like, why? It seems like everyone else is getting good results with this. Seems like everyone else figured out how to make, like, a membership site work. But, like, I don't have anyone joining my membership. Whatever it is for you. And the fact that you're in the Valley of Despair doesn't mean you suck. It just means that's the phase that you're in in your business. And more than that, it means that you had the wrong expectations. You thought it was going to be easy, and you're now learning it's not easy. One thing that can help is sharing with, like, friends, colleagues, family members, how you're doing. Because when you get in this shame spiral and you feel like you're failing, the tendency, for me at least, is to kind of go within and be like, I don't want to Let anyone know that I'm not actually doing a really good job on this project. But sometimes it's actually just helpful to vent, to talk to a colleague and be like, man, I feel like I suck at this. Like, I'm starting this new marketing thing. I started this new program. It isn't really working. I feel like I'm doing the right things. Obviously, I'm not, or I haven't put enough time in and I'm bummed out. And just getting to have that reflected back at you. Like, oh, yeah, that sucks. And. Or if you don't have any friends or colleagues, journal to yourself. Something like that. So number one is avoid the shame spiral. Number two is to stay the course. We talked about, like, the worst thing to do is to start renovating a new, you know, room in your home. You already did half the work. By the time you're at the Valley of Despair, you're, like, halfway there. And so you want to get something from all that suffering. So one thing that can be helpful is just lowering the bar of success for yourself, like, getting some quick wins. Just being like, this is my to do list for the day. This is what I can do. Getting it done and getting that satisfaction of feeling like you did it. Focusing on the process instead of this external outcome you're gunning for that you can't really control. Okay, so stay the course. That's number two. If you are struggling with expectations, that's why you're feeling burnt out. The third thing, this is maybe not as helpful right now for you, but in the future, expect it to suck. Once you go through these cycles enough times, you realize that you keep underestimating the work that's required. You keep having unrealistic expectations, and you just need to expect it to suck up front, because then the value of despair won't be so bad. You'll be like, oh, yeah, I knew this was gonna happen. I knew I was gonna have to put, you know, for YouTube, for example, I was like, I'm probably gonna have to put six to 12 months of work just to figure out what's going on. Like, never mind getting leads from YouTube or, like, monetizing YouTube just. Just to understand it. And if you can lower expectations up front, you can actually stay more motivated, which is weird than if you were optimistic because you don't have. I think Christine Hassler has this term expectation hangover. You don't have an expectation hangover. Okay? So that is, number one, you might be demotivated in your business because you're demoralized you had the wrong expectations and now you're realizing, oh shoot, my expectations weren't correct. And you feel like you're putting in work and not getting a reward from it. So that those are the three things to help with that. Number two reason why you might not feel motivated about your business, you might feel like you lost your passion for your business has to do with your energy. So a few years ago, my wife and I fostered a six year old girl. It was exhausting, it was really tiring. And I could actually see in my bookkeeping, just my revenue, just my sales going down. Like when she came into our home and then when she left, like that was just. The sales just were low. And for a while I couldn't figure it out. Cause I'm like, well, I'm not working that many hours in my business. I don't feel that tired. Like, I'm not like I didn't do a big launch or something. There's no reason to be tired. But I didn't realize energy all draws from one pool. Like, it's not like you have a certain amount of energy at work and then a certain amount of energy for family. And of course, because she was in the foster care system, she had experienced trauma. So we were in the house with her with that energy, with that vibe and trauma. And of course that's going to impact your energy. So entrepreneurship requires a lot of energy. And there's other things in your life sometimes that go on that influence your energy too. Even if you don't feel like you're in a hustling phase in your business or that you deserve a break, but your business doesn't exist in a vacuum. So it's worth asking if you feel demotivated, has something happened outside of my business that might be impacting my energy? Or the obvious thing is like, is something happening within my business? Have I not taken a vacation for three years? Or I just had a big launch, you know, I'm just gassed, I just need a break. And if the problem is energy, one thing you might realize in this phase where you're demotivated is you don't want to work on your business, but you're actually doing other things and you're motivated to do other things that you don't always do. So like, you might notice you're meditating more, or you're sleeping more, or you're exercising more, or you want to spend more time with friends. That's your wiser self saying, I want to do things for you that Refill your tank. But a lot of times entrepreneurs were like, well, but that doesn't really count. I don't really want to do that. I need to be putting in more work on my business. Remember, we're seasonal creatures. Your energy is not going to be consistent throughout the year, throughout, even each month or each week. Sometimes you're going to have a lot of energy for your business. Sometimes you won't. And part of that is what's going on in the rest of your life. So if this is the reason why you're demotivated or you think it might be because you have low energy, then I have got three recommendations for that. So the first is just obvious. Take a vacation. Doesn't matter if you feel like you deserve a break or not. Just taking a break is sometimes the fix. Taking a week off, not working on your business, if that's the solution, then that's sick, right? I mean, like, I would easily trade just taking a week off for getting motivated, feeling passionate about my business. Again, you're gonna make that up when you have high energy, you know, whatever lost revenue or whatever happened in that week. So business is a marathon, not a sprint. Sometimes we have to take a vacation. And if you feel like I can't take a vacation, like, for example, let's say that when you work with clients, it's like you work with them every week. That's part of your agreement. It's going to be hard to take a vacation, like a true vacation, where you don't have calls. So it might be an opportunity to look at your offers and your agreements and say, like, I need to restructure this so I can actually take a break when I want to take a break. Okay. Number two is add in things that give you energy. So it's one thing to go take a break, it's another thing to say because you might not have time to take a break, or you might have a vacation schedule, but it's a couple weeks out. How do you get energy now? And this speaks to the thing that we said about your system trying to give you energy. Exercise, meditation. Sometimes your business isn't meant to give you energy. Your business is just meant to make you money like it is. It is a job. So sometimes you need to go get energy outside your business that you can bring into your business, not expect that business to give you energy. One of my past clients, her name's Grace Broder, and she supports people with procrastination. And she recommends doing basically what I would call like an energy audit. Go make a list of things that drain you and things that energize you and make sure that you as much as possible can delegate the things that drain you or just get rid of them. And then make sure that you add in consciously to your to do list the things that, you know, give you energy. Okay, so that was number two, add in things that give you energy. The third, and this is another proactive one, sort of for next time, is schedule deload weeks. In strength training. Deloading is basically where you've been, you know, lifting hard for several weeks. And then let's say on the fifth week, you're taking a plan to deload week. You lower the weight, like you cut the weights you're using in half, or you cut the volume, like the number of sets in half, or you just take the week off completely. The idea is to take a de load week before you need it so you can keep training hard so you don't get injured, burnt out, you're not over training. And you can do this in your business too. You can say, for example, for me, I realized I kind of need one week off once a quarter every three months on average. I need something that's a trip or something like that to zoom out from the business disconnect, come back fresh. So I started scheduling those out every quarterly review. I'm like, when is the break going to be? This quarter. And if you're proactive about this, I think it can help you recover quicker than if you let yourself get to the point where you're totally demotivated and you're like, I need a break. Because sometimes you really need time when you hit that point to get back to neutral. So the more times you go through the cycle of feeling demotivated, then getting motivated again in your business, the more you'll rise. Your energy is limited and you've got to take care of that. Okay, so that's two of the three reasons. Maybe you've had unrealistic expectations, you're feeling like a failure because you're not meeting your expectations, and that's demotivating you. Maybe you have low energy and you need to go take a break, add in things that bring you energy, etc. Number three reason why you are demotivated in your business now is evolution. What does this really mean? So the analogy I would use is every relationship goes through through a honeymoon phase, right? There's a year, a year and a half. And in psychology, they call that the passionate love phase. You're always thinking about the person you're infatuated, you're super excited. In the first one to two year mark, you're going to transition into what people call companionate love or compassionate love. This is when it's less of that infatuation excitement and more of just like, this is a partnership. Like, we have trust. I care about this person. You might still have passion, but a lot of people break up at that point, crossover point, because it's confusing. It's like, well, it used to feel this way, now it feels this way. Is something wrong? The same thing can happen in your business. You have a relationship with your business, right? And so as that relationship changes through the years, and it's not just the first year, obviously the startup phase is going to feel exciting and then you're going to move into a more calm, grounded phase. Hopefully, if your business starts working, even eight years in, your business is evolving. You're evolving and changing. So sometimes you got to make little adjustments. And so the key is to not assume that you're in the wrong business now. In the same way, you wouldn't be like, oh, I have to break up with this person. No, it's like, we're in a new phase. If you were married to your business, what changes would you make? If you couldn't get a divorce, what changes would you make to get that spark back? So if you are feeling demotivated or not passionate about your business because you're bored in some way or because the spark isn't there, I have a few suggestions for that. The first is to embrace boredom. Sometimes what feels like boredom in your business is just stability. Like, maybe you're not used to your business being stable. You're used to the adrenaline of, like, needing to hustle really hard. And it doesn't. So it doesn't feel exciting anymore. It's sort of like, you know, if you've ever been in a stressful or toxic relationship and it's not healthy, but it is providing some sort of excitement. So then if you get in a healthy relationship after that, you're like almost not attracted to it. You're like, is this. This doesn't feel right. But no, that's the healthy relationship. That's what you want. So sometimes boredom's okay in a business. You know, it's easier for me to go mountain biking or snowboarding and get my excitement and adrenaline that way than having to start a whole new business or, you know, put myself in a position that's scary in my business. That's just the thing that provides for me and my wife. And like, I don't, I don't need that to be exciting all the time. So I think normalizing the boredom is important so you don't create new problems for yourself just to keep things interesting. But number two is to set a new goal. So sometimes you might be in this phase where you're demotivated. And if you ask yourself, well, what am I really focused on? Like, is there anything I'm trying to learn or achieve? Do I know what I'm going for right now, or am I just in this sort of maintenance day to day mode? Same thing in a relationship, right? You're just going through the motions, but you don't really have a shared purpose that you're working towards. And if you don't, if you don't have a clear focus, then it might be helpful to get one. Sometimes that's what energizes you. Creating a game for yourself, a challenge, a new project that you want to work on, but you don't want to force it. You don't want to create something just because you're uncomfortable with stillness or just because you're uncomfortable with boredom. You want to be listening for opportunities that really pique your curiosity. This was another question from my client, Grace Broder, because I was talking to her about this. She said, is there something that is piquing your interest but doesn't feel worth it to pursue? Those are often the exciting things, right? Giving yourself permission to follow those. Again, this is if your business is evolving and you think that's the reason why you're not motivated. And the third is, this is sort of self serving in a way, because I'm a coach. But this is what's worked for me is to hire a coach or to take a course to. To do something where you are investing in your business can create some energy. And also it gives you new perspective, it gives you new information to work with. It's sort of like if you were in a relationship and you went to couples therapy, couples counseling, just so you had an outside perspective. You feel like maybe you're in the same patterns and you're just hitting the same wall. And you need a fresh perspective and you need a new way of looking at it. So coaches can give you that. You know, certain courses can provide new ideas to kind of work through as your business is evolving. How do we grow together? That's the big question with this part. I think this is probably the hardest one. It's different from just taking a vacation or just letting go of Your expectations and continuing to move forward. Like, you really have to figure out, okay, what's my business asking of from me right now? Which is so much different from what we usually want to. Like, I'm not getting motivation. I'm not getting passion from my business. It's like, what do I need to give to my business right now to bring life into that relationship? The final thing, I would say we've gone through these three main reasons why, you know, these are. For me, these are the. It's usually one of these three reasons or it's a combination. It's not always as clean as just one. Through the years, the main thing I want you to remember is this will pass. This will eventually pass. Even if you don't figure out what the reason is and, like, address it with one of these points, it'll basically take care of itself. Something's going to change and it'll pass. That's been my experience, at least. But I think the discomfort of staying in something that feels like it's lasting longer than usual, it sucks. So I want to validate that it does suck. But remember that it's easy to show up for your business when you feel motivated. Everyone wants to do that, right? It's just like in the hobbies we do. We usually only do them when we feel like doing them. The difference is with your business, with your work, you've committed to showing up even on days that you don't want to show up. And that's discipline, right? That's like you just doing the thing. You might not do it at the same level. You might say, hey, I'm not going to force myself to sit in this chair and stare at the screen if I'm not doing any work for eight hours. Like, it's better for me to go for a run and try to get 30 minutes done just to show up. Just to show up. But it's sort of like in. If you're a parent, you don't just parent on days you feel like parenting. There might be days you're like, I'm bored. I don't like my kid today. And you'll still do it because that's the commitment that you made to your kid. So the quote I want to leave you with is from Elizabeth Gilbert. I love this quote. She says, you can measure your worth by your dedication to the path, not by your successes or failures. So if you keep showing up, if you stay on the path, this will eventually pass. Your motivation is going to come back and you'll forget about this. Whole phase where you weren't motivated and you'd be like excited about your business again. Until the next time that you're in this. And then you can come back to the video and watch it. If this is helpful for you, click the like button. Subscribe if you want more videos like this, about entrepreneurship, about coaching, about peak performance, whatever. I feel like sharing. Or don't. Or don't click the like button. But I'm experimenting with a bit more of like a looser delivery of just kind of looking at my notes and running through them. So if this is helpful for you, leave a comment, let me know if you like this style and see you in the next one.
