As you grow your business you will eventually have to do things differently than you are now.
- Maybe you'll network more
- Maybe instead of selling only products, you'll add more services.
- Maybe you'll raise your rates.
- Or hire employees.
- Or delegate something that right now would have to be pried out of your cold, dead hands.
Whatever these things are, they'll represent a substantial change from your status quo.
It will probably take you longer than necessary to make these changes, because change feels scary. People are good at adjusting or adapting to things that are forced upon them. If the power goes out for a week, you figure out how to get by, even if it sucks and is chaotic. If you have to take care of your niece for three months because her mother's in the hospital, you figure out a way to step up to the task. These represent fairly sudden and high-impact changes. Yet, with only a few exceptions, we handle it and find our way through.
But somehow, when we have to bring the change on all by ourselves, the impact seems bigger, more painful, more dangerous. To initiate that change by our own hand feels like cutting. We can't do it. (Even for those who happen to be literal cutters.) Change feels as though it will be too hard to handle, and so we delay until something forces us to change.
Here's something to take with you over this Halloween weekend:
You aren't really afraid of "change." You're afraid of what change personally means to you. What you'll have to do differently, what you'll have to stop doing, where you'll have to move out of your comfort zone. To take it even further, what you're experiencing isn't technically fear. Fear is based on something that's happening now. If you're running to a plane while the final call announcement blares from the speakers, that's happening NOW. When we worry about what would happen in the future, it's called dread. That means we think the experience is going to be too much for us. That it will overwhelm us, or that we will fail.
But you have already handled a lot of experiences that took you out of your comfort zone.
- You have already tackled things that were hard and managed to do it.
- You have already taken failure and turned it into success (or success enough).
- You have also experienced failure and survived.
Change becomes a lot less scary when you compare it to a previous experience.
I don't know what makes you feel uncomfortable about growth and change. For me, the worst part is having to admit to someone else that I should have done it sooner and I knew it. In addition to all of your Halloween festivities this weekend, think of a big step you want to take with your business. Think of what worries you and scares you and fills you with dread. Giving all those things names, putting them in words, takes a lot of the edge off. Then think of the ways you have handled things like that in the past. How you managed to get through it and how you're still here alive and kicking. That might give you the confidence to take that next leap sooner (rather than later) and with a whole lot more peace in the process.