Writing a business plan is the easy part. You add up how much it costs to run your business, then you set targets of how much more you want to make each month. You separate your many income streams and figure out how many units of each thing you need to sell each month.
The math will always math. But the person who executes this plan? That’s the unpredictable factor. This month I’m sharing my go-to books to keep me motivated and build the business of my dreams - on my terms.
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks
The only other book I’ve read as many times and studied as closely as "The Gap and the Gain" is “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. In fact at the time of this writing, I am studying a single chapter for the second month in a row.
The focus of this book is on clearing the mental blocks that get in the way of us hitting our next level - whatever that level looks like to you. It could be making more money, achieving celebrity status, winning an Olympic gold medal.
For Hendricks, one of the major blocks keeping people from achieving more is the “upper limit problem”. You might think of this as “self-sabotage”.
It’s that feeling when things are going well, the other shoe is going to drop. It’s those negative thoughts that creep up and bring us back to where we are now. The negative thoughts aren’t always destructive, but they do keep us in place. And they definitely keep us from living our full potential.
The chapter I’m currently on explores the negative thoughts that tend to pop up when we’re hitting the upper limit. Once you can process these negative thoughts, your fuller potential is on the other side. I want to share with you a passage on worry that really helped me through a challenging time.
Like many business owners in 2023, cash flow was not exactly flowing. I had monthly money worries that were starting to affect my performance: how I market myself, how I sell my services, who I sell my services to.
For a full month, I wrote out the following passage on worry. And I reflected on the worries that took up space in my brain. By the end of the month, not only did the worries subside, but the cash flow started flowing again - in expected and unexpected ways.
“One moment the thoughts have a grip on you; then you suddenly realize it’s you who have the grip on them. You release the grip, and the thoughts disappear. They come back again, and you release them again. With practice, they disappear and don’t come back, if you give your mind a more productive thing to do. The productive thing to do is to look for the positive new emergence that’s trying to happen. In other words, when you find yourself worrying, know that there is something positive trying to break through. Your worry thoughts, particularly if you find yourself recycling the same ones over and over, are flag waving at you from your Zone of Genius. Something is trying to get your attention. Look beyond the worry-thoughts, and you will often find a new direction that’s being laid out for you.”
Whatever worries are holding you in place, I invite you to write out this passage every day for 30 days. Reflect on your worries and see what comes out the other side. Over time I started to notice a pattern. Every time I worried about not having enough money to pay for upcoming bills or expenses, I would realize I do have enough. It just needs to be moved from wherever it is right now.
This practice guided me to a place of seeing money as energy I get to move around. Money is always coming in from different sources. I move it around to where it needs to be. I don’t need to force its arrival. I only need to receive it when it arrives. Keep watch on where it’s coming from and where it needs to go.
The money worries were stories I made up in my head. Every time they arrived, I remembered a new source to move money from or to receive money from. Every day was an opportunity to realize “I’m not having a cash flow problem or shortage. I’ve just lost sight of where the cash is flowing from”.
I touched on the money piece with Profit First. The Big Leap and the section on releasing worry specifically also help keep me in the right mindset to build my business. I was so accustomed to working for a pay cheque, the idea of creating revenue was completely new to me. As a business owner you need to be creative and open to where you’ll receive your revenue. The options are plentiful and limitless, if you know to keep your eyes open to it.
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