From Catherine: Hopefully you got some nice gifts during the holidays. But what about your business? Here is my gift to you and your business – a technique that works like magic. I think you will agree that some of the biggest blocks we face are ones that we create for ourselves.
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If you’re a regular reader of Business Unplugged™ I’ll bet this is the LAST place that you would go to look for a quick fix. We are all about doing the work, showing up, and achieving mastery, but there is one technique I’ve been using lately that is as effective as a magic wand – or a Staples Easy button. And it is something that anyone can use at any time.
Here it is. (Ready?) Repeat after me:
“It’s not that freaking hard.”
Insert whatever expletive you want. I like my bourbon on the rocks with no sugary stuff, so I tend to go with the real deal, but flipping, farking, bloody, or fracking (I just made a Babylon 5 fan smile) can work too. The important thing is that you pick one that feels like a bad word and gets an emotional and visceral response.
Why? Not unlike that scene in the movie Risky Business, this exclamation will give you power, freedom, and possibility. Let’s go through a real-life example. 
Have you ever been in a hurry to get somewhere and all of a sudden you can’t find your keys? You know that you JUST had them, you are late, you get flustered and anxious – and then you finally see them. They are on the table right in front of you. But you were agitated so you just couldn’t see them.
OK, so this can happen to you as an entrepreneur a zillion times a day in your business. Every time you need to do something new or uncomfortable (which is pretty much all the time), you run the risk of going blank and not being able to see the thing that is right in front of you.
Recently I had a client call me so excited she could barely get the words out. She had a great opportunity to submit a proposal to a company that was bigger than she normally works with and was listed on the Nasdaq. The company also asked her for a contract, and she knew she would need to send something with more legal language than her standard contract. (They had lawyers on retainer!) How was she going to find something like that and get it to the prospect by tomorrow?
So I jumped in. I consulted with “Lord Google” and in about 15 minutes of clicking links I found a contract that was perfect – valid in the right state, for the services she was offering, and downloadable in a Word file for $20.
Why did I do that for her? She could have searched for it as easily as I could, except for one thing – I wasn’t attached or anxious so I would be able to see it easily. It wasn’t MY project, and I had invoked my magic phrase, “It’s not that freaking hard,” waived my magic wand over my laptop, and voila!
I went into this project with the right mindset. You rarely need to come up with anything from scratch these days. Developing her own contract would have been time-consuming and cost her a fortune back and forth with a lawyer. (She did pay a lawyer friend to review it but that was just an hour or two.)
As an entrepreneur you are often in unchartered territory. Every time you create a service or product, learn a software package, or change a process in your business, you are doing something new and doing something that could potentially set off an anxiety or fear response. Before you dive in, I urge you to take a deep breath and say, “It’s not that freaking hard.”
I think you will find that your life just got a whole lot easier.
