Ep 48: Troubleshooting the Path to Success: From Vision to Victory [Courage Series Pt 4]

EPISODE 48

 
 
 

Imagine navigating your journey to success with ease, celebrating every win along the way, and bouncing back from moments of failure with resilience. In our latest episode, we complete the Courage series by discussing practical strategies to troubleshoot expectations for success. We deep-dive into the realms of lead generation, rejection, success anxiety, and the often incapacitating idea of expecting perfection. Drawing from my own experiences and learnings, I share valuable insights on anchoring your motivation and regaining momentum in your long-term goals.

Has rejection ever held you back? My father once shared a life-altering perspective on dealing with rejection that I will reveal in this episode. We also highlight the importance of rejoicing in short-term wins and committing to a strategy for at least six months. Peeling back the layers of my personal journey, we discuss the strategic timing of announcing a campaign and the power of celebrating every action, not just the 'yes'. 

Life is filled with 'sideways moments', those times when things don’t go as planned. So, how do we navigate through these challenges while maintaining our motivation? This episode equips you with the know-how to respond when things go awry and reminds you of the importance of kindness in your inner dialogues. We also delve into the world of intentional thinking and taking action, offering practical advice on overcoming overwhelm and self-doubt. Through sharing my experiences and cultivating a supportive space, I hope to inspire you to achieve your biggest, most daring goals. Tune in for a journey of insight, courage, and purposeful action.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here, ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go. Today we're going to do troubleshooting in the final installment of the Courage series. Like anything, you start and stop and you start building the muscle and getting better and better at. It's really easy to have some things come up along the way that feel a little shaky, a little wobbly and maybe want to get you back to the old way of doing things. But we're not doing the old way, so we're going to do some troubleshooting. I polled my followers on Instagram, I asked some friends on LinkedIn and did some research on some feedback of what was coming up for you in this series, whether it was the idea of just lead generation in general, which tended to be a big answer, or the idea of rejection or, for some of you, the concept of dealing with success. Anxiety, dealing with somebody who a client or customer or donor who says, yes, I'm in, and then having that feeling of like crap, now I have to do the thing, now I feel tied to him. Can I even do this? That's the imposter syndrome that comes up. So the first bit of troubleshooting let's start with is this idea of expecting perfection. Okay, so I was on a consulting session actually just a couple hours ago with an organization and we had several of their staff members on and we were basically doing a debrief of what worked in a recent campaign and some things that they might want to do differently in the future. One of the things that came up for them was this idea of basically people participating and engaging with their campaign being really hot and awesome out of the gate and then trailing off, and they were trying to troubleshoot that piece. The first thing that I wanted to do with them is normalize. It is when you have something that lasts longer than like a day or a week, that's normal, like that's human nature. We get out of the gate, we're super excited about a thing. That thing could be anything. It'd be like we're going vegan for a month, or we are I'm part of the 5am club, like any sort of thing. Right, you get super excited. You have a high, high, high motivation. You have high reward in the beginning. You're literally cheering yourself on in the way that you're talking to yourself throughout the day. Maybe you even have people in your corner friends, family, etc. An accountability buddy coming out of the gate helping support you, and then somewhere around like day 27,. It feels like a grind, it feels like sludge, it feels like you know that motivation and that excitement I had to start this new thing or to you know, whatever be a part of this. It's not as high. So the first piece is just realizing that like that is going to wax and wane. And expecting perfectionism, expecting that you know you're going to take daring, courageous action and be just stair stepping, improving, improving, improving the entire time 24 7365 is setting you up for two things it's setting you up for failure and it's setting you up for completely not enjoying the process. So we don't want either of those things. So the first piece is removing that expectation of perfection, expectation, that number one it's gonna go perfectly. You're always going to want to do this. You're always going to want to learn and improve. Like, let that go, allow it to wax and wane I've talked about on the podcast. Here we are now. In July of the year I started going to the gym to do strength training, like that very I think it was January 2nd, like beginning of January, and it didn't really become a habit until about May is when it clicked in my brain and my body where I was like, ooh, it's Monday, monday, I go to the gym. Even if it's a holiday still go to the gym. And what I noticed in the past maybe four weeks is, even though the habit has finally formed and finally taken shape, is I feel a little bored. I feel a little like you know the habits there, I know what I'm doing, right, I know how I'm talking to myself in the pregame and postgame pep talk. Go back and listen to the previous two episodes or three episodes if you don't know what I'm talking about. And yet that motivation piece is waxing and waning, and so one of the things that I've done is I've implemented two things. One is I'm like, oh yeah, that's fine, I don't always have to be like super excited and motivated in order to stick to this, so I sort of just let that go. The other thing I started to do just this week is try and figure out a way that I kind of almost like tricked my brain into it, feeling like shiny, exciting and new. So what are some ways that you can do that Like as you go through this process. What are some ways? When you feel a little bit like, all right, this is starting to feel a little bit like a grind, how can you make it seem exciting and new again? It could be a small shift If you make most of your donor or customer visits and calls at two o'clock each day. Maybe try it where you do it in the morning. Or maybe try it where it's habit stacked and you do that in the morning and then you have your latte thereafter, like there's some sort of ritual or habit stacking attached to it that just switches it up and just gets you out of a little bit of a funk. That can be really, really helpful. Maybe you decide, you know what, I'm gonna go to a different coffee shop and go sit and write these emails that feel a little heavy to write, and I'm just gonna go do it in a new backdrop, a new place. Next piece to troubleshoot is this idea of expecting big, big rewards in a short, short amount of time. Okay, so, for example, going through this courage series, doing the courage sandwich, implementing that, working on how you handle disappointment and rejection, working on success anxiety and then expecting that you're going to be the first across the fundraising finish line or experience that big win in, you know, just a couple of weeks or a couple of days. That can be another one of those like setting you up for success. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to be committed to this process For the long haul, for the long game. Okay, this is definitely A marathon, not a sprint, because what we're trying to do here in this process is we're trying to build your muscle Of asking for more, of taking more courageous action, of having those conversations with funders that feel Bold, that feel scary, and actually leaning into those, and leaning into those more often. You will get better at it, but you won't get better at it if it's just where you're looking for. Oh, I just want to do this for a few weeks and then I want to close the book, close the door, and never have to do it again until next year. Okay, like that white knuckling of it, that's, that's not it. That's not what we're looking for. So, commit to the long game. Whenever I teach like live cohorts Of my programs, one of the things that I tell them is typically I want you to commit to this for six months. So, before you know you decide air quotes, it's not working. I want you to commit to it for six months. That way it just calms your nervous system of instead of feeling like, ooh, snip, snap, snap, we got to try a new tactic Just calm your nervous system and say we're doing this for six months, okay, it doesn't mean, you know, you don't make small shifts along the way, that's not it. But for you to abandon the whole tactic, we're not doing that. Okay, so be there, committed for the long game. But this is the caveat to that piece. You've got to find the short term wins and you need to celebrate those short term wins, and let me give you a really important example of a short term win. A short term win that I want you to celebrate is the action you're taking, not just the yes. So, for example, if you email three funders and you ask them to meetings and you sit down for a zoom meeting with them or an in-person meeting with them and you ask them for a significant gift higher than their last gift, or maybe you're sitting down with a brand new funder and you ask them for a big, daring, audacious gift, that's a win right there, even if they say yes, no, maybe whatever, just the act of taking that action is a huge win. We're celebrating because if you're listening to the series, likely it's because you need the nudge to take that action. And you haven't been taking that action. You've been taking safe action. You've been asking for safe amounts of money. You've been asking for safe donation amounts and we're pushing you out of that comfort zone. We're pushing you towards the place that you want your mission to be. We were pushing you towards that next layer of revenue growth. So you need to celebrate that action, really really important. And that's an action you can celebrate weekly, right, so really important. Same like we were doing with the pregame and the postgame pep talk In the postgame. As you have some space away from whatever that action was, celebrate it. Maybe it's at the end of the week, maybe it's on Fridays. Write down a list and be like these are my wins for the week. And the wins for the week could be like sent the email I didn't want to send and made the ask, was in the zone, was in flow, was in, really felt my groove with this person. That has happened to several of my clients lately where they said to me Christine, I just felt like we were in a groove in a fund or meeting, in a prospective client meeting, and I knew what to do, like that's a win worth celebrating. So celebrate the short term wins. I want to share with you an example of dealing with rejection in a way that I didn't share in the previous episodes. So next piece to troubleshoot is this idea of when someone says no, right, you're on the receiving end of that face of like nope, some flavor of that and it's feeling really heavy. So one strategy I did not mention in a previous episode I actually learned from my dad. So growing up I used to sit. So he had a big antique store and in the antique store was an auction part of like a big what am I even trying to say? He called it an auction gallery, but it was just a big space, almost like with stadium seating but I bet, or like theater, movie theater seating. So there were those like little fold down chairs and then the main stage area would be where they would bring out the different cases, the different, the different items to sell live, like in a live auction, you know, with an auctioneer. That's like you know, like that it was actually really fun to watch because it was like very active, you know, engaging, like it was cool, environment, okay, and his auctions were big deals. They happened several times a year. I'm going to say maybe four to six times a year or something like that. That's what I'm thinking. And people would come in town. A lot of his customers would come in town for these auctions and they would usually be three days, okay, over the course of a weekend, and that's a lot of different antiques. So we're talking like paintings, furniture, collectibles that they're bringing out by item by item, maybe like you've seen on antiques roadshow or something like that, but way faster, right, and they're bringing them out item by item for people to bid on. Okay, and there's a catalog ahead of time. So the people who are interested in, you know, a certain piece of furniture knew oh, that's going, you know that's being sold on Saturday and may have it earmarked like they're interested in buying it. Okay, and he would have what I would call like pillar pieces, that he like the high value pieces he knew his audience wanted, right, he knew his customers wanted, and those would, on purpose, like go out at prime time. Okay, the same way just kind of take a little detour here. The same way that you would announce a campaign campaign at prime time, right? You would probably wouldn't announce a campaign to your audience at 3am, right? Not many people are checking in their email or online at 3am, so maybe Saturday evening would be prime time for him and he have a big piece and in the event he's got it out there. He's describing it. The bidding starts and I remember, here and there, and it was like a conundrum, it was like I didn't understand totally what was happening. But what was happening here and there is a piece that he thought would be a pillar piece Just wouldn't get a lot of traction, wouldn't get a lot of interest, wouldn't get a lot of bids, okay, so what happens in that case? What happens is it sputters out pretty quickly because if you don't have a literal live bidding more, whoever's got their paddle raised, whoever's got their hand raised gets it and that's it, and they move on to the next one. And here and there, what would also happen is no one had their paddle raised, no one had their hand raised. What does that mean? No interest, no bids. And that was awkward because of a couple different things. One I knew I'm like oh, this is this feels awkward, right, no one's really engaging with this thing, no one seems to want it. And I knew like, oh shoot, this is prime time, like what's going on? One of the things that he and his partner would do when that happened is, I remember like they both would say it like, not like they would. One person would say it or maybe another person would say it, but essentially they would say out loud to the microphone Next case, next case, next case was a literal queue to his team. Take this piece of furniture or collectible off the main stage, put it we're moving on and bring the next one out. Whatever the next lot is, next item number, go ahead and bring it out. But the other thing that it was, besides just a verbal cue to his team is I actually think that it was like a way of talking to himself, or a way for him and his team to talk to themselves and go. This wasn't it. Let's move on Right? Do you see the fork in the road? It's not, they don't want me, they don't want you. Know the value we offer in the world? It's huh. The customer wasn't interested in this. The client wasn't interested in this next case and we go and we go. So if we were, if I was on the attendee side of that and I wasn't, you know, coming from the lens of my father's daughter, but just an attendee, and I saw that it would be a blip on my radar it wouldn't be something I thought about Right, next case, move on, next case, and on they would go, they would keep their energy up, they would keep their enthusiasm up and they would just keep going. So that's the next piece Keep going. So when you find yourself in that place of troubleshooting and it feels heavy, it feels like the thing that you were working towards just hit crickets, or it just hit a spotter doubt, I want you to literally say out loud yourself Next case, maybe you got a clap. Next case, move on, keep going, okay. So that can be a really easy prompt. You can picture that antique rolling off the stage, that pitch rolling off the stage, okay. The last piece of troubleshooting I want to offer you is a video that went viral a few weeks ago and it's this woman. She's about to give, I think, some sort of commencement speech for University and she comes out and she cannot stop laughing, like she has the giggles that are the. I mean, I'm laughing watching it. It's like it's this most delightful set of giggles I've ever seen and she can't stop it At all, even just thinking of it right now, like it is completely uncontrollable. It goes on for way longer than anyone expects and it's it's just this moment of pure humanity, right of just like crap. This is just what happened and in that moment, I think she had two options. Right, we all have two options A complete, I feel like that is. This is an example of a complete like sideways. What you were working towards, that courageous action, went completely sideways. Whether it's a giggle fit, or you fumble on your words or you say the wrong name or the call to action is wrong, whatever, it is complete sideways moment. Okay, she had two options. One beat herself up, run off the stage. You know abandon, feel terrible, maybe even grind through it. But you know what it's like when you're grinding through something and beating yourself up. It's awful, or just go with it. Just go with it. And I actually feel in watching this, like you can see her energy. Try and include it in the post for this podcast episode so you can see the video. It's amazing. You can feel in her body language that she's like this is what we've got here. We go Like I'm laughing, it's almost like hiccups. That's exactly what it's like. It's like hiccups. You can't stop the hiccups. They kind of just go away. You can drink as much water, you can hold your breath, you can do all the things you can try, but if you're like me, they just go away. When they go away, you can't really force an eye twitch or hiccups to go away, right, so you almost have to accept it and then it goes away. And that's kind of what happens. Is you kind of see her just go here, we go, laughing fit. So if that happens to you and I don't mean a literal laughing fit, but the thing you know it goes sideways you need to work on in the moment instead of going beat red and maybe you go beat red, but instead of telling yourself I shouldn't be beat red, I'm sweating, I'm blah, this is a disaster, just going huh. Well, this will be a story to tell. This is what we've got. Or maybe even if you're feeling really self conscious, you're a human. Having a human experience like this happens. This happened to the person giving the commencement speech and this is the flavor that's happening to me. Don't forget that, for whatever sideways thing that you're experiencing, even if the sideways thing is embarrassing, or even if the sideways thing is just it going sideways, just you know, I've had my clients tell me that a donor's not mad at them. A donor has had a very abrupt conversation that was like whoa, I wasn't expecting that this is what we've got. Huh, I'm a human having a human experience. Right, you're not a mind reader and that's okay. You're not perfect and we don't want you to be. And just allowing for the fact that, like, whether it's physical, that it's coming out that way, you know, or it's it's it's outside of you, external meaning, it's you know, somebody, a customer, client or donor saying something that you were not expecting, instead of just going and beating yourself up about it, just leaning into it and just saying, okay, where can I get curious, or where do I need to accept this, or where do I just need to have peace with this, like something like that. So you really want to work on, if you're really in the moment or in the post game of it, how you're talking to yourself through it, to get on the other side of it. So here's what I want to challenge you to do now that the series has wrapped up, even if you just listened to today's episode, I want to challenge you to take one piece of daring action today, this week, and rinse and repeat and follow through on this action for at least the next few weeks Bonus points the next few months. So, for example, if you're like you know what I'm really going to, start making more phone calls and really reaching out to donor prospects. Or maybe you're like one of my students and you've decided it's time to get visible and you're going to show up and post way more often, at least once a week, and post videos on LinkedIn and Instagram, and you're going to talk about your mission, you're going to talk about your programs, you're going to talk about your services. Do that for three months, commit to it at least three weeks. But I really want to urge you to commit to daring, courageous action for three months. And here's why, when you do something for that long, you're giving yourself the opportunity to go through this entire cycle the pregame, the post game, the success, anxiety and you're building the muscle. It's really hard to go to the gym once or twice and have any real muscle gains, right. So give yourself the gift of courageous action and commitment. Go back to this series. If you get stuck, I can help you. Reach out to me, send me a message and let's talk. Let's talk about where you feel like the most sticky or the most wobbly in your courageous action. And remember, speak kindly to yourself in those inner dialogue moments. What is it? We think? 60,000 thoughts a day. I think I think like 600,000 thoughts a day, most of them skew negative. So this work, this series, is about thinking thoughts on purpose. Right, that's this podcast thinking thoughts and beliefs with intention, taking action with intention. You're not supposed to be perfect at it. It's not supposed to be rainbows and daisies and sunflowers all of the time. It's just about thinking thoughts with purpose, taking action and redirecting your brain when those wobbly pieces and parts come up. It's part of the deal. I'm here for it. I know you are too. That's why you're listening to this podcast, that's why you're doing this hard work, that's why you're committed to taking courageous action. Okay, virtual hugs and high fives, because I know this series was expansive and pushing you to those maybe belief edges, so that you can stair-stop your way to the next layer of not only your own personal growth, but the development of your mission and organization. I will see you next time. You know how they say you should enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Have you ever wondered how do I crack the code to do that? I can help you do that. I can help you not only achieve your biggest, most daring goals, but the journey to get there. No more overwhelm, no more self-doubt. I want to invite you to book a call with me. You can also book a splendid atlcom forward slash book.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impactComment