Do you ever find yourself feeling under pressure to try to be all things to all people within your business?
There’s probably a huge range of products and services that you could offer.
Maybe face to face services, perhaps online services, possibly one-off products, or long term retained products; all sorts of different things.
Maybe you really want to deliver exclusive, high priced products, but you might still love the idea of offering some entry-level products to make it more accessible to people.
And perhaps you’d also love to be offering some freebies to get people involved and to give away lots of value.
And there are all sorts of marketing options as well aren’t there? Let’s be honest, there are a bazillion different marketing channels that you may well want to be on these days.
So there really can be a huge amount of pressure to very much try to be all things to all people in all places.
And I do feel that this links to a change in expectation around life these days. I think there’s a greater pressure to believe that we should be striving to ‘have it all’ as they say.
But this takes me back a couple of years to a discussion I had with somebody over on LinkedIn who wrote an article that was something along the lines of ‘The 10 tips for how to have it all’.
They defined ‘having it all’ as things like … having an amazing career or a phenomenally successful business; a perfect home life with 2.4 immaculate children plus a fabulous golden retriever. And a stack of holidays every year; a wonderful, glamorous lifestyle. Everything, just absolutely everything you could possibly imagine working perfectly!
But the reality of this person’s advice was essentially to spread yourself as thinly as possible.
And that’s the huge challenge whether you’re looking to ‘have it all’ in life or to ‘be it all’ in your business.
The moment that you are trying to have everything or be everything, it’s absolutely inevitable that you are just going to end up spread really, really thinly.
For instance, if you’re trying to be constantly present on six different social media platforms every single day, then you are either going to end up absolutely run ragged or you’ll just end up incredibly inconsistent and not doing any of them very well.
With that in mind, what I have for you today is one really very simple piece of advice and it may well sound ludicrously over simple. But then many of the best ideas are, aren’t they?
So, look at it this way …
The next time that you find yourself under pressure in your business – perhaps from clients asking you to deliver lots of different things. Or perhaps there are new opportunities, but you can’t quite decide whether they’re the right ones or not. Or there’s simply too much going on.
Just take a step back and ask yourself what it is that you truly want.
Because you don’t have to want it all. You don’t have to be it all. The thing you have to do is get really clear on what success looks like for you and then stay focused on that.
Success for you could be a phenomenally successful business. It might be a business that involves a huge amount of your time or attention.
But then again, your definition of success could be having a lifestyle business that works around your family.
Neither of those are right or wrong, and it’s not for anybody else to tell you that they’re right or wrong.
But it’s very easy to get drawn into what we see online and what we hear from other people and what social media tells us about what we’re supposed to want.
So my advice to you is take that step back, get really clear on what your priorities are, and then focus really diligently on making those priorities happen.
You don’t have to be it all, you don’t have to have it all. You just have to get really clear on what’s the most important thing for you to achieve in your business and stay really super focused on that.
Hopefully that has been helpful and is going to put you onto the path that leads to being really, really focused.
If you know that you just have too much going on in your business and you really need somebody to help you narrow that down and really get focused on the right priorities, then get in touch and let me see if I can help you.
I would love to hear your comments and feedback on this blog below. And of course, please share this with anybody else who you think it might help.
