March 1, 2010
I was speaking with an inner circle client last week and we were talking about being stuck.
This client has a great idea, and is steadily working on her positioning within her target market. She’s focused on educating them, selling them, and on creating unique positioning for herself and her company.
In short, she’s doing everything she needs to be doing to build momentum.
But, as sometimes happens, you’re going along really well, and then, all of a sudden, you get stuck.
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You start to second-guess your marketing. You wonder if your tagline is really just right. You fall back and away from moving forward, and, instead, just try to hold ground.
This happened with this client of mine.
She called me in a panic, saying, “Glenn, I don’t know what happened, but I’m really stuck.”
When we talked about the costs of being stuck, we determined that, for her, these were both qualitative and monetary. Qualitatively, she felt stressed, worried, and upset- she wanted to get back on track and to not lose any time. Monetarily, she felt like she was missing out on some business opportunities because she couldn’t make herself move ahead with the next stages of her marketing plan.
The great thing, in her case, was that she had the foresight to sign up for business coaching. Since you never know when you’ll get stuck in building your business, I think it’s wise to have a business mentor and advisor on tap to help you when you do.
In any case, as I coached her around being stuck, it became clear that the main reason for her stuckness was that she had sought some advice from a close friend, and this friend was actually pretty negative about my client’s progress so far. The “friend” criticized my client, and encouraged her to slow down, because she was moving too fast.
(Now this goes against *everything* I stand for- I believe speed to market is the essence of building momentum) and the conflict between what her friend said, and what I was saying was just enough to make my client stop in her tracks and not be able to move forward as we had planned.
Unfortunately, this type of situation happens all too often; where we share our dreams and goals with people who get scared for us and encourage us to slow down.
The problem with slowing down is that it keeps us from building momentum- or reduces the momentum we’ve already built.
I would always say it is better to keep moving, and to fail forward- than it is to not doing anything and sit around being stuck.
Although the friend meant well, she unknowingly sabotaged my client’s confidence, and that is much worse than any “mistake” my client might have made. Losing confidence is much harder to recover from than stepping back and trying another way.
So, the message of this post is really two-fold. First, if you are working on your dreams, don’t let others sabotage them. And, if someone asks you for advice or support, find a way to support them without criticism or disapproval.
The costs of stuckness are much too high.
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