250: The Beauty Of Persistance In Business Even When Things Get Hard - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and in this podcast we talk about ways for you to grow in your life and your business, to reach your goals, to make more money in your business. And something I want to just talk about here today is something that I see that comes up a lot when I'm coaching people, when I'm working with them. And it's one of the areas that I think that we can grow past, is if you're somebody who has experienced where things come easy to you or maybe like you get results very quickly in other areas of life, it will convince you that the struggle that it takes to grow your coaching or course business means that either you're doing something wrong, you're following the wrong path, or things aren't working right. And I, and I would say I was actually somebody who dealt with this for the longest time, is that I thought that if things take a while, it means that I'm doing something wrong or I'm being taught the wrong way on how to do it. And so the truth is that when it comes to a coaching or course business, it's a lot more like the process of gardening to where the results that you get are a lagging indicator of the work that you do. You don't usually do the work and then, ding. Instantaneous gratification. Usually you'll do the work and you won't see anything for a little while. And that is normal. The problem is, is most people don't have the ability to continue doing the work that actually produces results because they're not seeing the instant gratification happen. And, and, and then they jump to a new idea or they jump to a new strategy. Shiny object syndrome, as far as this goes. And I think that this, this behavior, this becomes almost like an addictive behavior where we're seeking after the instant gratification rather than realizing that if we consistently did the thing that maybe isn't producing result, as long as we have a mentor or a coach or somebody that's helping us, that it will eventually come together to do this. Now, I often work with a lot of people, they're in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, and they say, well, Jeremiah, you know, I've been, I've been wanting to be successful for so long. I need this to happen right away because I don't have time to wait for things to take the time to come together. And I'm just like that. Thinking right there will by definition make things take longer for you because you will constantly still be hopping from thing to thing to thing. And so realize that if maybe you've been building your business and you want to find new people that you can reach online through Facebook ads, through social media campaigns, and you want to attract new business to you, that sometimes the process takes longer than we expect. Now, of course, I have seen success happen in 30 to 60 days. I've also seen it take six to 12 months before somebody does the consistent work and sees things start to come together because they run into either roadblock or they've tried things, or they've done that. And really it's all about the trial and error and the testing and doing what we call an alpha release approach. You and adopt an experimentation mindset, which is a scientific strategy where you're testing, you're seeing, how does the marketplace respond? How do things come back to me? What are those results? And so I think one of the biggest things that I, that we need to train ourselves on is to not jump from idea to idea to idea, thing to thing to thing, looking for the immediate gratification, and rather accept that things taking a while to come together sometimes is the fastest way that they're going to come together for us. And it also just depends on your niche and the market. Some niches have different restrictions on them. When it comes to advertising, it can take longer to do certain things. And learning to develop the resilience and the patience and not have the unrealistic and unreasonable expectation of instantaneous results is one of the things that's going to help you be successful. It's going to help things come together for you more often. Now, this is an area where when I work with people, when I coach them, oftentimes they get the most emotionally charged because things they say, it feels like it's one step forward, three steps backwards, and things just are not going how they want them to. And usually the person who gets up, frustrated, disappointed by this, is used to experiencing things working right away for them in most other areas of their life. And so they feel like, okay, well, because that's a success strategy that they've developed and they've realized, okay, when I do the right things, things happen quickly for me that they think that they're not on the right path. I bet I've been in this, this business of coaching corporations, courses, training, online training long enough to know that I've been in the industry for 21 years. If you, if you wonder how long I've been in this industry is that the people who are most successful Often times struggled in the beginning to gain the traction that they're having. For me, it took me 18 months of pretty much break even or, you know, like, not the results that I expected. I was getting with clients that I would work with 20 times, 30 times the ad spend we would spend. And so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna launch these offers and I'm gonna get. I'm gonna make millions. And, and, and I barely scratch the surface of. I talk about my story on this. I barely scratched the surface of making 5,000 or even 10,000amonth, or even $500 a month sometimes, because I had this expectation that, okay, I know how to do all this stuff, but it wasn't working out for me. There's two things that really changed everything is when I started promoting offers, growing my email list, getting better at sales and selling, and then simultaneously I also worked on what was the mental blocks that were stopping me. What were the things that were. That were preventing me from taking action. What were the perceptions that I had based on my life experience? See, I had these 21 years of experience successfully, I guess it wasn't 21 years at the time, but 18, 19 years of experience and success. And it wasn't translating to my own business. And it wasn't happening as quickly as I had seen. Like, nearly every campaign I ran for clients that I'd worked with and companies I'd worked with worked right away, right away, right away. And even people that I was running their ads for were working right away. But I couldn't get this working for my own business. And it actually correlated to that. I was overthinking. I was way too attached with perfectionism. I was not being assertive in my communication at all. Very passive, very much concerned about appearing nice to people, being too nice to people, worried that they were going to not like me if I was direct about things. And this is often what, what had stopped. I was way too concerned with people's approach. Approval was a big part of it as far as that goes, making people happy with me and, and concerned with that if I did anything wrong that people didn't like, oh my gosh, though, everything, this just wasn't going to work out. And that effort to do everything perfect was preventing me from actually seeing success. Okay. And so then as I got past that, I still didn't see success right away, and that became frustrating. And I would have one successful campaign, and then things didn't work out as well. And so it was like I had to really figure out what was going on beneath the surface. What was really stopping me from being able to reach people. One of the number one things was that I was not being direct with people was one of the big things. And again, this might not be the case for you. You might be a very direct person, but maybe you're struggling with technology, or maybe you're struggling with your landing page, or maybe you're struggling with running the ads, or you're struggling with getting team members that you're hiring to do the things that they're going to help you out, or maybe, you know, you're going through learning, but it's not really. You're not understanding it as quickly as you would like to understand that. We all have our own limitations. And I think that when we can embrace our limitations, it's actually a huge benefit to us. Instead of running away from them, instead of being like, oh, my gosh, this is not working out well, that we embrace both our strengths and our limits, and we become very clear and very honest with them, and we actually start to appreciate them. You know, I actually appreciate some of my limitations today. And I've structured my business, Even if it disappoints certain people that I have certain limitations, I've come to appreciate them, and it's helped me structure my time, my boundaries, and create the kind of life that I want to live and the business that I want to have as far as that goes. And so that's. That's. That's been very successful, but I've had to also grow in a number of different areas. You know, I've been around the personal development and personal growth space for years. I got started in that space, and yet I've had to learn that, like, to ever think that we have arrived and that we know everything that there is to know based on our experience or our education or how long we've been doing something. That's a very. There's a mentor that I had. She used to say this. If you. If you are ripe, you're rotten. If you're green, you're growing. And it's actually better to see yourself as green and growing consistently. And I still, to this day, I see myself as that. Now I. I've found the balance of having the confidence in myself when I speak these messages, because otherwise, if I, you know, if I wasn't confident, nobody would respect anything that I had to say. And that's just. That's not helping anybody to not have confidence in what we talk about. But at the same time, I'm always Open to. Okay, what are new things that I can learn? I was just listening to two incredible audiobooks today. I mean, they were, they were amazing. That unlocked new things. The Disease to Please is an incredible audiobook by Harriet Breaker. Love that one. And then another one that I was reading as well. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz was an incredible audiobook that's all about the hard stuff of building a business and how pretty much he lost everything multiple, multiple times. And yet that was actually what got him to building a company from zero to $1.6 billion during the hardest time to build a tech company. Between the years 2001 to 2007 when everybody said that it was virtually the stupidest thing in the world to build one of those businesses. And so I thought those, those books were amazing. I'm constantly learning new things and new strategies. I don't want to go off on a tangent on that. I just wanted to just encourage you that there's always areas that we can grow in. There's always areas that we can become better. Even if we're an expert in a certain field, even if we feel like we know everything about what it takes to be successful and that we don't have to learn anything. Taking personal ownership of, if something's not working out in my life, how am I able to take responsibility for that? And it's not that it's your fault, right? It's not that it's your fault. But for instance, if you hire people that they don't respond to you or they don't work well with you, take responsibility for the fact that you hired those people and you can always hire other people. And, and, and, and instead of complaining and wishing that people were different except how they are, you listen, you're not gonna really like, change people by complaining, by whining, by saying, oh, they should be different, they should be doing this differently, they should be offering this or they should be doing this, and this isn't right, and I don't feel served in this way. And things like, like that instead of focusing in on what you're not getting from people, realize that one of the number one ways that you can grow is to learn how to take personal responsibility for what you can control. And listen, we can't control other people no matter how well we are at manipulating them or talking or persuading them that they're, that, that there comes a time where, especially if you're working with good people that are actually high quality people, that they're, that they're not going to be able to be pushed around by you saying certain things that you're used to using to get people to do the things that you're used to doing. And here's one of the biggest things that I'm just going to say is that most of the time, a lot of the coaches, trainers and mentors that I meet, they're very good at manipulating other people into some parts of their life. They're very good at getting their way, managing, maintaining, controlling the feelings and emotions of others. And it's one of those areas that you got to learn to let go of that. That for us to get the kind of sales that we want, we actually have to let go of trying to make the result happen. We control what we can do. The marketing, attracting the right client, doing the most confident sales pitch, sales message, which by the way is a form of serving people. It's not sleazy, it's not slimy, it's not a bad thing at all to be able to learn how to get people to buy your coaching and buy your courses in a way that gets them to make a decision and get off the fence to do something with you. But the truth is we can't control other people and we got to accept that fact. Here's what I found is in my own business, sometimes it takes people 2, 3, 4 months of interacting with me, listen my podcast, things like that before they come around and they become a client. Now I have people who sign up right away, but there's a nurture process as well and the more consistent we are. And this is the final piece of advice that I'm going to share. Consistency, continuing to show up to do the actions even if you don't see the result. If you consistently do show up, it's a snowball that actually builds upon itself and the results start to come in sometimes a few months down the road. And then because the snowball effect is going and you've stayed consistent, consistent that compounds and grows and you start to see these crazy results where it's like, wow, I'm getting like 30 times return on this because the snowball effect started to happen. I noticed that in my own business that if I take a month or two off of marketing, the numbers drop and it's like not that that I took the months off of marketing that necessarily caused that, but it's that I'm not been consistent at showing up with the people. And now I have to start from square one oftentimes. And so I actually found for me to work less, because that's what I was doing. I was taking breaks, pulling back to work less, and not showing up as consistently. And I found I was having to work 10 times harder because of that. That actually me staying consistent, shoring up and simplifying what I'm doing, but being more consistent at it actually compounded far more in the long run. And it was, and it was a powerful thing that me taking this big old elaborate strategy and instead of doing it every quarter, simplifying it down to one tenth of the effort that I was doing, but doing it every month actually compounded and produced the kind of results that we're getting. And, and that's what we. That's. If I look back at every single coaching and course business that we've built that's been successful, it had an element of that where things really started to grow is consistently showing up, attracting new people while serving and simultaneously nurturing the, the, the existing ones and putting them all into this bucket where we're serving the new people and the existing ones and we're removing the ones that are not a good fit for what we're doing. And that compounded over time and compounds and becomes a successful online course or coaching business. Okay, so realize the results don't always come in one single sitting, but the more consistent you are, the better they are to compound over time. Because you end up building trust with people that they may not have signed up with you right away, but they might next month or the month later or the month after that. And when you can learn to connect with new people and you make a deep connection with them, that it's not about just giving them information, regurgitating information, but you're actually making a deep connection with the people that. That's what builds the trust, and trust is what turns into sales in your business. Okay, so hopefully. Listen, I get it. This message is not sexy. I doubt very many people listened all the way to the end of this podcast episode because it probably triggered a lot of different areas in people that they are dealing with that they are avoiding. They don't want to hear. But it's, It's. It's so important that you grasp this, that you understand that the results you're actually seeking come from consistent patience and consistently showing up and not being sporadic or not jumping from idea to idea to new idea to new strategy to new platform, to new way of doing things, but that it's rather sticking with one thing that's proven and even if it's not producing the results right away that actually the art of sticking with that thing. And what we usually do is we adjust slightly the ad copy, the words that are in the ads, the words that we're saying in the ad, and the words that are on the landing page. We adjust that based on the feedback that we get from people. So we're adjusting that. That becomes fuel that goes in our fire. And then we're able to train the ad algorithm to attract the right people that will end up ultimately becoming our clients. And when you put all these pieces together, they create an incredible coaching or course business for you. And so, listen, I want to see you succeed. And the reason why I'm sharing this is because I believe that if you start to apply this, maybe you've been struggling to see the results for a while. That if you start to apply what I've just shared in this episode, first and foremost, taking personal responsibility of what can I do to improve things things, instead of becoming disappointed by having unreasonable or unrealistic expectations of other people of what you think they should do, look at what can I do? What can I adjust? What can I tweak? What can I take charge of? How can I ask better questions? How can I be a little bit more resilient when things don't work work out as well? How can I learn to realize that success isn't an overnight thing and that it does take time? Those are things that are actually going to compound and produce great results for you. So I'm excited to see what happens from those of y' all that are listening to this episode. And I cannot wait to see you be successful. Successful. Grow your life, everybody, and we'll talk soon. Have a good one.