Episode 177: How To Bounce Back When Feeling Discouraged
Do you ever get discouraged? Do you ever have those moments where you want to crawl into bed and pull the sheets up over your head?
If you have goals – and they don’t have to be hit seven figures … goals like losing five pounds, keeping your kitchen organized, being faster at replying to emails – and you feel like you just don’t have it going on. That is the feeling of discouragement.
For so many business owners this is almost a constant state of being. But it’s normal, and that feeling will creep up from time to time. This episode is going to be a how-to guide to break the cycle and bounce back into your zone of genius.
What to do when you're feeling discouraged
It’s time to create a new document. I want you to open that document and title it: Lessons Learned.
If you are currently in a state of discouragement, I want you to write down what you're currently learning. Isn't that such a different twist already? People talk about the feeling of failure right or having an experience that didn't go the way they want it. They always say, “Oh, it's not really a failure, because you're always learning,” and then you want to slap them.
What we're going to do here is actually have you learn something from this exact moment when you're feeling yucky. It's going to shift your state and this is not toxic positivity.
Do you feel like maybe you're not connected to the people that you love in your life? Do you need to learn that lesson? Perhaps you have the wrong people in your environment. You may need to learn the lesson that you're not taking good enough care of your environment, the people you hang out with, the conversation you're participating in, and the media that you're consuming.
Watch: Why Some People Fail
A little bit of care
Understand that a lot of the times in business specifically –we’re talking business discouragement -- what's missing is a little bit more care. I know that that might sound harsh. I'm not saying you don't care about your business; I’m saying slow down.
Does this email make sense or is it going to make people feel pressured? (I don't have a problem with a little bit of pressure if it's going to help somebody make a better decision, but then there's nasty pressure.) Was that in there could there be a little bit more care for the person receiving the email? Could there be a little bit more care for the person who's going to read the social media post? Could there have been a little bit more care in how I treated myself as I completed this task? Could there have been a little bit of care towards me and maybe a little bit of more humility that I might need to beef up my skills?
Get uncomfortable
Here’s the deal folks, discouragement can be one of our greatest points of opportunity. It can be the moment when you decide everything’s going to go differently next time. It’s like a calling to us that something needs tweaking. We've got a little bit more attention to pay over here so that we can cause bigger results over there.
Discouragement is not comfortable. Let’s be honest about that. It's not comfortable, and I think that's one of the reasons that people don’t talk about it, which makes me sad. I think we should talk about it more because it's easier to get out of than we think it is. The reason we say stuck in discouragement is we don't actively try to learn what the discouragement is teaching us.
Two reasons someone else is more successful
If you’re discouraged because someone is more successful than you and you’re looking at them wondering why, recognize two things are happening: Either that person knows something you don’t know, or that person is doing something you’re not doing.
Most of the time, what they know is how to pick themselves out of discouragement. What they know is how to learn from the times when they've felt discouraged.
So, when you open that document and brain dump what the lessons learned are you are going to feel amazing because you’ll move from discouragement to challenge. You are going to get so excited all of a sudden. You might still feel a little apprehensive and a little bit sad that you weren't able to cause what you wanted to cause right away. But because you're in action, that mindset will start to shift almost immediately.
As you're going over these lessons learned, and you start to see what you can do or what you need to know, the second challenge is to get those things on your calendar. Schedule your implementation. This is the key to success. Let's get to it!
