232: Holly Worton ~ What to Do When You've Fallen Out of Love With Your Business

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today I talk about what to do when you’ve fallen out of love with your business. This can be hard to admit, but sometimes it happens! And that doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world, or even the end of your business.

Listen to this episode

What You’ll Learn

Why we sometimes fall out of love with business
Why you don’t necessarily need to quit and get a job (and what you can do instead)
How to rekindle the love for your business
Questions to ask yourself to understand why you don’t love your business anymore
Once you’re clear on the situation, what specific actions you can take
How to get the mindset you need to create a business you love

Things I Discussed

Questions to Consider

What do you love doing (both in business and outside of business)?
What do you dislike doing?
Why do you want a business?
Why are you dissatisfied with your business?
How can you do more of what you love? How can you integrate the things you love into your business?
Are you out of integrity somewhere in your business?
Do you need to set new boundaries or reinforce existing boundaries in your business?
Do you need to improve your time management in any way?
Do you need support in any area of your business?

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello, hello and Happy New Year. Happy 2018! And welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast 232. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today I am going to talk about what to do when you have fallen out of love with your business. This is a topic that was inspired by some recent posts that I have seen online; a couple of fairly well-known business owners who have decided to quit their business and find a job, one of whom did that several months ago and is happily seven months into a new job, and was just formally quitting business and announcing it to people.

So, as we are going into a New Year, and we are setting New Years resolutions and we are setting goals and planning business for the new year, probably you have done that by now, if you haven’t now is a good time, I think it is important to stop and think and evaluate how we feel about business: Are you still in love with your business, or have you fallen out of love with your business? This is also inspired by the fact that I haven’t fallen out of love with my business, but I fell into a kind of subtle burnout towards the end of 2017. And, it was really, really subtle. It was like: I didn’t feel like creating stuff, I didn’t feel like writing any of my books, I didn’t feel like doing videos, I didn’t feel like writing blog posts; I just was really tired of creating, it was like my creative juice had run out. I went to the States for about three-and-a-half weeks to see my family, and I thought: well, do minimal work stuff during that time, and then when I come back I will be rested and refreshed and and ready to get on with the rest of the year. And…I wasn’t.

And I came back from the trip and really needed to catch up on some things, so I was doing that, but I just wasn’t jazzed about the stuff I had to do. And, if you have listened to this podcast for the last year, or seen any of my videos, you know that I have really fallen out of love with old school marketing, not that I was ever necessarily in love with it; but I have just really been disappointed and annoyed, and just tired of the whole online business world. And that’s really, really confusing for me because I recognise the fact that I prefer doing business online, and I prefer marketing online, than having a brick and mortar business, which I have had in the past. But there are so many things about the online, business, coaching world that just really annoy me, and I am just tired of it and I am tired of that crap. So, without delving too much into that, I have been feeling like I need to reevaluate my business, and so I have been asking myself some questions about how I can revamp my business, keep doing what I am doing, because I love doing client calls, but I really have fallen into dislike of all this stuff that comes with my business. I have just really fallen out of love with marketing my business. When I am on the client calls I love it, and I love the way I work with clients but I am not in love with the other stuff that comes with having a business and I think part of that, as I said, is from that subtle burnout. So, when I say subtle burnout, I wasn’t burnt out in the sense of just totally exhausted, needing to sleep 12 hours a day, it was really subtle. And that’s why it took me so long to figure out that that’s what it was.

So, let’s get into the topic, so what to do when you have fallen out of love with your business? So, let’s start by talking about why sometimes people fall out of love with business. So, it could be burnout, like it was for me, so it could be subtle burnout, or intense burnout, where you have just been hustling, you have been putting all that energy into your business, you have had some really exhausting launches, whatever, the stress of running a business has led you to burnout. That’s a possibility. Or, maybe, you are not quite doing what you love? We recently heard from Louisa Whitney in episode 231 who used to be a lawyer and then she became a mediator because she wasn’t really in love with being a lawyer as she thought she would be. So, maybe you are not doing exactly what you love? Maybe you are not getting the results from your business, maybe you have marketing like crazy, you have been hustling (and I know I just used that word for the second time and you know that I hate that word); maybe you have been really working hard but you are not seeing the results in your business. You are not getting the amount of clients that you want, you are not getting a steady stream of clients, maybe you are still in feast or famine mode? That could be another reason why you have fallen out of love with your business. Or, maybe you have just been pushing yourself too hard, and not respecting the natural cycles, and rhythms of your body and your energy. So, you may have heard how I have talked about in the past how I try to plan my business around my monthly cycle, and that really works for me. So respecting those natural ebbs and flows of energy throughout the month has really been useful in helping me manage my energy and be more respectful of myself when I am in low energy, because when I am in those low-energy periods, if I take care of myself, that means I have got extra energy to get tons of stuff done during the weeks when I am naturally more focussed. So, maybe you have not been respecting your natural cycles? And that’s led to falling out of love with your business because you just don’t have energy to do it. So, for whatever reason, if you are feeling like: urgh, my business I don’t know what to do with it! Do I quit? Do I get a job? Do I try a new business? What do I do? I am not in love with my business anymore, and I am sick of it.

If you are feeling that way, let’s talk about some questions, what can you do, some questions that you need to ask yourself. So, I think that with any situation it is really useful for you to stop and evaluate the situation, so you can get more clarity on what it is that you are experiencing.

Question #1 So, one question you can ask yourself: what do you love doing? And that’s in your business, outside of your business, just in life in general, what do you love doing? So, for me, it is: I love this podcast, I love doing client calls, I love walking. So, you probably know by now that I do a fair amount of walking when I am not in the office, I have been doing the #Walk1000miles challenge in 2017, I am doing it again in 2018. I have written three books on walking long distance trails. I love walking. So these are things to pay attention to. What kinds of things do you enjoy both in your business and outside your business?

Question #2: What do you dislike doing? What are you just sick of? What do you cringe at the thought of doing, what do you procrastinate on, what do you put off doing? What are you tired of doing, both in business and in life? And for me that’s the online marketing stuff, I am really displeased with the online marketing world and I still haven’t found a way forward that’s different. So, what do I dislike doing? Marketing. Which is really disappointing to me, because I have always really loved marketing. So, take a look at what you dislike doing, both in life and in business.

Question #3: Why do you want a business? And this is really important, because not everyone is cut out to have a business, or run a business. Not everyone wants to have a business. But in this online business world we have really been fed the dream that the way to get the lifestyle you want is to have an online business. So, stop and think: do you really want a business and why? Now for me this is an obvious thing because I have been in business, I have been self-employed since 1999. I really can’t go back to working for someone else, because I just do not like working for someone else. Back in 2012, after I trained as a coach, but before the business was really up and running and working, it was a four-month contract position basically a job where I was working in an office and I did not do well in that environment. So, that just confirmed to me the fact that I really cannot work for other people after 18-years of working on my own. Setting my own terms, my own hours, everything, I need to do things the way I like to do them. So, being in business is not negotiable for me, I really cannot imagine having a job and working for someone else. I cannot even imagine working outside of the home. So, evaluate for you, do you want a business and why?

Question #4: If you are dissatisfied with your business, if you have fallen out of love with your business, why are you so dissatisfied with your business? What’s wrong with it? And, again, for me it’s the marketing side of business, I love the client calls, I love the time when I am on the calls with people I just don’t love the stuff that goes around it. So, ask yourself that question, why are you dissatisfied with your business?

Question #5: How can you do more of what you love? How can you integrate this into your business? So, for me, the things that I love were: this podcast, doing client calls, and walking. So, the podcast, as I said in the last episode, if you haven’t listened to it I will repeat myself, I am changing up the format again. That’s something that I have done over the last four-and-a-half-years that I have been doing the podcast. So, I’m not doing interviews for 2018, I’m doing two episodes a month, of solo episodes; I am doing one co-hosted episode a month, with Jo Casey, as I have been.

And the new thing, that’s replacing the interviews, is that I am going to have quarterly co-hosts. So, I will have a special business person, from the online business world, to join me in the same way that I have been doing co-hosted episodes with Jo Casey. I am going to be doing them with this new co-host who will join me quarterly. So, that will be three episodes with each person, four people in a year. So, I am looking forward to that and I look forward to hearing your feedback on that, but that sounds really fun to me, because I really enjoy the co-hosted episodes with Jo Casey, because I feel like we can dig deeper into the topics than I often can when I am doing an interview. Sometimes I do interviews with people that I am new to speaking with, and it is kind of hard to go deep sometimes. This is an experiment, as always, and I hope you find it interesting and useful. With client calls I am just going to keep going the way I am doing with that, because like I say, I love my clients, I love the client calls, I enjoy all of that.

So, walking, how I am going to do more of what I love in terms of walking? How can I integrate this into my business? Well, not last year, but the year before, 2016 when I released my first walking book, I set up a website called: http://SheWalksinNature.com and I posted there that I was offering transformational walks for women. And the idea was kind of to do coaching walks, or to just help women do their first long-distance walk. And, I put it up there, didn’t market it, and as you can imagine, nothing has come of that. So, I have had a lot of people express interest, but nothing has actually happened. So, for 2018, I want to focus more on that, focus more on bringing these walking experiences, and bringing more of the outdoors into my work with people. And I still don’t know what that’s going to look like, aside from the transformational walks that I have put up on my http://SheWalksinNature.com website, I expect to get more clarity around the coming weeks on that. It is very clear to me that I need to bring more of the outdoors into my business.

Question #6: So, bringing this back to you, how can you do more of what you love? How can you integrate this into your business. Some other things for you to explore: are you anyway out of integrity with your business? Is there anyway that your business just doesn’t feel right for you? Maybe it feels off, something is out of integrity? If you don’t know what I am talking about, go back and listen to 229 of my podcast where Jo Casey and I talk about how to operate your business from a place of integrity. And of course that means a different thing to every individual person, so that’s going to be different to you than it is for me. Another question, so that was question 6.

Question #7: Do you need to reinforce any boundaries? Or do you need to set any new boundaries? And, in episode 225 of the podcast, Jo Casey and I talk about setting and upholding boundaries in business and a lot of people found that useful. I think boundaries are something that are a big issue for a lot of entrepreneurs. So, if you feel like you are having issues with your boundaries, take a look at that episode again and see what you can do about your own business boundaries.

Next Question #8: what about time management? Is there anything that you need to do to improve your time management skills? And if you suspect that might be the case, go back and check out episode 222 with Amber De La Garza, where we talk about time management techniques. And, if you feel like time management is a really big issue for you, sign up for Amber’s own podcast, which is the productivity straight talk with Amber De La Garza Podcast. Do check that out, it’s really, really good, she has got really practical tips that can help you with time management

Finally, Question #9: do you need support? Maybe there is some area of your business where you just need to hire out and get someone to help you. And that can be less expensive than you think. So, get in touch with other entrepreneurs, to get recommendations for people that can help you and support you in your business. But, if certain areas of your business are really feeling heavy, sometimes it is because you just need to get support in that area. And it could be as simple as freeing up your time to do the things that you need to do to get more clients, and then that makes it easy for you to get the money you need to pay for that person. So, ask yourself if there are certain areas where you need support in your business, and that could be in marketing, it could be in admin, it could be bookkeeping, it could be helping you wth content. Where might you need support in your business?

So, once you have answered these questions, and I really recommend that you spend some time journalling on this, really getting clear on these answers. What can you do instead? So, what can you do next? First of all, reconnect with what you love. So, I am continuing the podcast because I love it, I am continuing with client calls, because I love them; and I am planning to spend more time outdoors this year. Like I said, I have signed up for the 2018 #Walka1000Miles challenge again, because that really did ensure that I get outdoors to do some walking on the days when I wasn’t necessarily feeling like it. So, I do know that helped me stretch and meet my goal for walking. And I plan to do more long distance walks this year, so I plan more to do more walking and adding that to my business; I think the more time I spend outdoors, the more walking I do, that’s going to help me learn how I need to integrate that into my business. So, reconnect with what you love, even if that thing that you love is not related to your business. Whatever it is do more of that, find a way to fit that into your schedule and see if that helps you rekindle your love for your business; because that might actually help you see where you can bring more of that into your business, or how to bring more play, more fun, more joy, into your business.

Finally, think about whether you need to pivot in some way with your business. So, as we talked about with Louisa, on episode 231, and she was talking about basically pivoting in her business from being a lawyer, to being a mediator; so she is helping the same group of people but in a different way. And, do check out the episode, she has got a great story that I think is really useful; you can tweak your business in a way that helps you to either help the same people but in a different way, or help a new group of people in the same way. Or, add a new product or service to your business; or, operate your business from a slightly different perspective. And you may have seen me recommending a book called: the Pivot Map, which is written by RM Harrison, who is a guest on this podcast, back on episode 143. So, RM Harrison, with his book called the pivot map, which helps you get clear on how you can pivot in your business. It is a short book, it will probably take you about an hour and a half to read, and it is really actionable, it comes with some free downloadable worksheets that you can use to figure out how to pivot in your business. So, I really, really, recommend that book

I know I said finally, when I mentioned pivoting, but really it all comes down to mindset. So, finally, look at how to get the mindset you need to fall back in love with your business:

What do you need to believe about your business?
What do you need to believe about you as a business owner?
What fears, what blocks, what limiting beliefs, what mind crap might be getting in the way of you having the business of your dreams? Of you having a business that you love?
What is the mindset that you need to have a business that you love?
What is the mindset that you need to really just feel great joy in your business?
What do you need to believe in order to be in love with your business?

Write this stuff down. And once you have got this vision of what your ideal business looks like, what do you need to believe in order to make that happen? What do you need to believe in order to make that a reality.

So, I talked earlier about integrating more of what you love into your business. What are the beliefs that come up when. Say that? What are the fears that come up? What are the blocks that come up? So, if I say: you can integrate more of what you love into your business, what are the buts that come up? You think: yeah, but, no one is going to pay me for that; yeah, but I don’t have time for that; yeah, but, I am not good enough for that. What comes up, what are the limiting beliefs that come up when you think about integrating more of what you love into your business? What are the limiting beliefs that come up when you think about pivoting something slightly different in your business? And what do you believe about your ability to have a successful business that you love without burnout, do you believe that’s even possible? Write this stuff down.

I know I always say this but part of making mindset work a habit, which is what I talked about last year, in episode 230, is that you have really got to write this stuff down. It is not enough to just listen to this podcast, or other podcasts, and think: oh yeah, that was interesting. Write this stuff down. I ask you questions because I am trying to help you dig up your mind crap and bring it to the surface so that you can do something about it. It is not just: this is really fascinating stuff to explore, we are exploring it so wee can do something about it. So, once you have dredged all this stuff up and brought it into the light, and you have written it down so you can see it and you don’t lose it, because it is really easy for this stuff to slip out of your conscious mind, once you have written down and recorded do something about it. So, again, that goes back to shifting beliefs yourself, shifting beliefs with someone else, getting help from someone else with that. And then taking the actions that you need to take to make this a reality.

So, to summarise, ask yourself those questions that I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, there were nine of them, and I will add them in the show notes so that you can look at them and more easily answer them; but ask yourself those questions, reconnect with what you love, spend more time doing what you love. See if you can add more of that to your business. Think about how you can pivot in your business to do something differently and do the mindset work, get clear on the beliefs that you need to have, and the mindset that you need to have, in order to create a business that you love and then do the work to change those beliefs, either with yourself, or with someone else and take action, even if it is just baby steps. Take action towards creating this business that you love.

That’s all for now, I hope you found this useful, I am realising that perhaps this might have been a good topic for the end of 2017, but I do know that a lot of people wait until the New Year, to actually start planning things and thinking about things so there you go. I hope you found this interesting and useful, I hope the timing was good and please drop me a line and let me know what you thought, about this week’s episode. You can, as always, email me at: [email protected] or you can find me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and get in touch there. I would love to give you a shout out on the show if you send me your comments.

I would also love for you to join me in my private Facebook group: Business Mindset Alchemists, so we can continue the conversation there. As I always say, podcasting is really a one-way conversation, and I would love to get some feedback from you in the group. Business Mindset Alchemists is dedicated to exploring business mindset and how you can get the mindset you need to build the business that you want. I would love to see you in there, just go to https://www.hollyworton.com/group and you will be redirected to the Facebook group.

Finally, whether you have been listening to the show for a while, or whether you have just hard your first episode, if you are drawn to learning more about mindset work and you would like to learn more about how you can work with me, please get in touch or head over to: https://www.hollyworton.com/call and you can book in a call with me to learn more, I would love to work with you and help you transform your mindset using heart-centred-energy-work. Thank you so much for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, please leave a quick review on iTunes it would mean the world to me.

Remember to visit hollyworton.com/232 for the show notes on this episode.

And tune in next week, for episode 233, which is another co-hosted episode wth Jo Casey where we talk about transparency. We talk about what is transparency and how it shows up in business, why transparency is important in business, what lack of transparency looks like in the business world, how you can be more transparent in business, and how to know when you are being transparent and when you are not. We talk about some practical real life examples that we have experienced and what we think about lack of transparency in business.

So, I really hope that you find that one useful, remember to tune in next week. Thank you so much and have a lovely day and a fabulous 2018.

232: Holly Worton ~ What to Do When You’ve Fallen Out of Love With Your Business