What to DO When Everything Seems to Go WRONG

Today is a Hit splits episode for Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

I have had a couple days of tech issues. We can always have issues this side of heaven. We live in an imperfect world and today I'm going to talk about what to do when everything seems to go wrong. And I'm actually someone that's fairly proficient with technology. And yet there are still things that are going to happen to us when we have an online business or an online presence, a website, social media, when we're doing anything online, we are potentially going to have issues. So I was thinking about this today. Yesterday Leadpages had an issue. I've never heard of them having an issue, but they were down yesterday. So all of my opt ins, my sales pages, all of the major things I use to grow my business.

Offline, done. I was getting emails from people who are like, your thing is down. I can't get this. And it gets stressful. And then today I went to update WordPress. It totally shut down my site. It crashed my site. There was some sort of conflict with a plugin or my theme, and I'm still working it out. I had my host just roll it back to before the update so I could have time to get it fixed. But it was just like, ah. Do you ever feel like that when you have technology problems, you just want to pull your hair out? Sometimes you just want to scream, right? You know, like 2 year olds can get away with it, they do their temper tantrums. But as adults, we have to find other ways to cope. So I have three ways that we can handle these days that we're all gonna have when things just seem to go wrong. The first, I believe is to pray. Now, a lot of times I don't always do that first. I don't know if you do that or not, but, you know, sometimes it's just I go into fix it mode. How do I fix this? How do I get through this? What do I need to do? Do, do, do, do, do. I'm a doer, but sometimes I just need to stop, take a deep breath, breathe. Because sometimes I find myself holding my breath too when I'm stressed out over technology problems, especially when my website is down. And so breathe. And just to say, okay, Lord, I just pray that you would work this out. Show me what to do. My mom is a person that it was inevitable, like she would lose something and then she would say, oh, let me just, you know, let me pray about it. She would pray about it and she would find it. It was amazing. It was like, you know, just stop and to pray. The second thing is do what you can. So have you guys heard of the Serenity prayer? The Serenity prayer I'm gonna read. It says, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. There will always be something that happens in our life, certain circumstances that we just cannot change. It doesn't matter like what we do, how we do it, I mean, it's just the way it is. And so it says, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. But this is the important part. Courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference. So. So when something goes crazy, when something goes wrong, there are certain things that we can do. There are certain things we can do to take action and then there's certain things that are just out of our control. So think about what is it you can do. So when leadpages went down yesterday, I thought, what can I do? And I developed a backup plan so I could take my getresponse opt ins and put it on a different page on my website temporarily. I was thinking through what could I do. It ended up coming back up before it became too much of a problem for me. I wasn't thankfully in the middle of a big promotion. But think about what is it you can do and what is it that is out of your control? And ask God for wisdom to know the difference. And then have you guys seen that quote by Charles Swindoll about our attitude? Our attitude is something we can control in these circumstances. I, I love this quote. So I'm going to actually read it to you and this is the quote. It says the longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than facts. It's more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day, day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have and that is our attitude. I'm convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes.

Now, that's sometimes a hard pill to swallow, right? We are in charge of our attitudes because sometimes we want to put the blame on someone else. Sometimes we want to get angry, sometimes we want to get frustrated and we want to blame something else.

You know, we just want to vent and be angry and point the finger. But guess what? When we point the finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at us, right? So we can control our attitudes. That's something we can do then. The third thing, when we have one of these days where things just seem to go wrong is we can reach out for help and support. So when we have technical issues, there are certain people we can contact for help. When my site went down today, I opened a support ticket with my hosting company and they worked it out with me and they were able to roll back my site until I can figure out what was causing the issue. And so there are times when there are people that we can reach out to for support. There are people that have an expertise that we don't have an expertise in. Maybe it's coding, maybe it's blogs and WordPress and all of that. Maybe it's something else. I have a paid membership in authoraudienceacademy.com and I. I have a forum there. The forum is for that support. It's for that place where people can reach out and say, ah, I don't know what to do. What do I do in this instance? What do you recommend? And it's a place to reach out for support. But we can also reach out to other people. We can have a community. We can have support. And I started a community earlier this year of Christian entrepreneurs. It's@godlygain.com and. And I would love for you to join us. It's a free Facebook group and it's just a place to have some support. So what are some things that you do when you have a day where everything seems to be going wrong? I'd love to hear your feedback and you can tweet me. Elliehits. Here's a recap. The first one is to pray, and the second one, do what you can do. And I talked about the Serenity prayer, the quote by Charles Swindoll. We can control our attitude. And three is to reach out for help and support. Because many times there are people that are experts in whatever you're struggling with, whatever is happening. A lot of times there's support staff for the companies that you use for your hosting or you know, like for lead pages and different things like that. You can contact their support and then I encourage you to join us@godlygain.com you can sign up to join my free Facebook group for Christian entrepreneurs to get some support and to have a place, a safe place, you know, to support one another and to work through some of the things that you're going through in your business.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.