If you feel like you've been stuck for longer than a year, watch this.

We have this like, romantic idea of what it means to be stuck. We imagine being trapped in a dead end job or a failing business, like really fucking desperate for a way out. But that's not where most dog trainers live. Most dog trainers live in a much more dangerous place. The land of just enough. You're making just enough money to pay the bills. You have just enough clients to keep you busy. Your business isn't growing, but it's not dying either. It's moving sideways. This is what I describe as moving sideways. And you could move sideways indefinitely. You're just in a state of comfortable stagnation. And it's the most dangerous place a business owner can be. Because comfort allows you to suffer chronically without ever reaching breaking point. It's a slow, quiet death, really. It's that mediocrity that you learn to tolerate. And it is the prison you don't even realize you're in because the bars are made of. Well, good enough. I see this all the time when I do consult calls with people and I do strategy calls with my mentees, like they're not uncomfortable enough to take action to genuinely improve their life. Acute pain, however, is a gift. When you truly have a terrible month, when you have zero clients, when you have 300 quid in your bank account and the rent is due, that's the type of pain that creates energy, a level of urgency and focus that is impossible to manufacture. It forces you to take massive, uncomfortable action because the alternative is complete failure. Your back is against the wall and you have no choice but to fight your way out. And I've seen it time and time again. The students in my mentorship who make the fastest, like, most dramatic, almost like often unbelievable progress are usually the ones who come in at their lowest point, like the. Where they're liked, right? They are the ones for whom failure is not an option. That fucking Well, I guess desperation becomes their fuel. But what happens when you're not desperate? What happens when you things are just okay? Well, you lose that fuel, you lose your edge. You start to make excuses. You say, I'll start posting on Instagram consistently next week. You say, I'll raise my prices just after I get a few more clients. You say, I'll build that online course when I have more time. And you are negotiating with your own fucking sad potential. You are trading your future ambition for your present comfort. And this is a trap. The comfort of just enough is more insidious than the pain of not enough, because it doesn't force you to change. It allows you to drift again sideways. It allows you to spend years in the same place wondering why you're not getting ahead without ever realizing that you are the one holding yourself back. If you are in this place of comfort, you have two choices. You can wait until fucking shit hits the fan. You can wait for the economy to turn. You can wait for a new competitor to move in your area and just eat up all the fucking business you can imagine. You could wait for your landlord to turf you out. You could wait for external circumstances to force you into action. Or you could manufacture your own urgency. You can decide that good enough is no longer good enough. And you can create your own crisis. So how do you do? You set goals that absolutely fucking terrify you. You might commit to a level of investment that makes you uncomfortable and you put your own back against the wall. When I was growing the Yorkshire K9 Academy, these were times when the business was doing its best. We were comfortable. And that's when I knew I had to do something to shake things up a little bit. I would sign a bigger lease on this crazy facility we're sat in right now. I would hire a new member of staff before we might have even had the revenue just to justify it. I would invest in a mentorship program that cost more than I had in my bank account. I would create artificial pressure. I was raising the stakes. I was forcing myself to take that aggressive action because of I created a situation where I had no choice. And that standing down meant I would literally drown. This is the mindset and it's a very common mindset of all the entrepreneurs that I know that are doing incredibly well for themselves. Like not just hobbyists. A hobbyist, they seek comfort. An entrepreneur that wants to do well for themselves, they seek growth. And often that growth is required for us to projectile out of a state of discomfort. It does not happen inside the comfort zone. So look at your business right now. Are you comfortable? Is income predictable? Is your client load manageable? If the answer is yes, you might be in danger without realizing it. You are on a plateau. And a plateau is just a flat place where businesses go to die. How might this look like for you? Practically it might mean quitting your fucking part time safety net job. Of course, like I'm going to be biased here might mean like invest in your rainy day fund into a mentor like me. To the point. Then you have to make the education you receive from that mentor work. It means announcing to your audience that you are launching a new high ticket program in the next 30 days before you've even created it. It just like will act as the fuel under your ass to to get things going. And it might mean setting a revenue goal for next quarter that seems completely fucking unrealistic. And then reverse engineering the actions you would need to take of even having a chance of hitting it. It means choosing the harder path on purpose. It means embracing the discomfort of uncertainty. It means understanding that the feeling of being slightly out of your depth is the feeling of progress anyway. Comfort is a sedative. It numbs you to your own ambition. It makes you forget what you're truly capable of. And you need to wa the up. You need to look at your comfortable business and see it for what it is. Potentially. A cage. Sorry if that offends any of you. A very nice, pleasant cage, but a cage nonetheless. Your potential is on the other side of that discomfort you are so carefully avoiding. So I'm asking you to make a decision here. Are you going to tolerate your comfortable mediocrity or are you in a light of fire under your own ass? Stop waiting for the external crisis to come and get you. Go out and create it.