Success is just as “hard” as failure

As we have wrapped up 2020 well and truly, I'm going to be sharing all of the lessons or some of the big lessons that I learned in 2020 as it relates to running a business, but also the rest of my life.
Because as I've been learning from working with my coach, all the patterns that show up in our business show up in other areas of our lives as well. Whether that be our health, our relationships, our family, anything like that, the same patterns show up over and over again.


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How to handle success when it feels hard

Today I'm going to be looking at this first lesson that I learned. And that is that success is actually just as hard as failure. A few years ago when I first started out in business, I thought the hard part would be getting to the success and then once I achieved that success, it would be smooth sailing from there. And I realized this year, that actually getting to that point of success, once you're there that's where the hard work starts.

 

The worry that it would all disappear

In 2020 in Feb, I had a $10,000 month. March was a $60,000 month. And then April was a $357,000. So that's success for me happened slowly, slowly, slowly for five years or four years and then very quickly in three months. And a few of the things that I realized were a lot of the issues I had around worthiness of success so that really started to come into play. And I also became paralyzed by the fear that everything was going to disappear. That if it took three months to get the success, that it was going to disappear just as quickly. And I spent probably most of April and May curled up in a ball on the couch, worried that I would make the wrong move and break things.

 

Being worthy of the success

I was also very afraid because I didn't feel like I was worthy of that success because I felt like it had come too easily. Something that I've learnt in the last year is worthiness has nothing to do with how hard you've worked for something or how difficult it's been, just because it's easy, doesn't make you any less worthy of it. And I think something we do far too often is we overcomplicate, we try and make things as difficult as possible for ourselves, so that we feel more worthy of them when we're successful. And I know for sure that I did that, I really tried to sabotage my own success just so I could feel worthy of it.

 

Reaching out for help

Another thing that I really realized was that I would have to start asking for help and not just asking my team to do more, but also talking to friends and saying like, hey, I'm actually finding this really hard and being honest and vulnerable, which is not something that comes naturally to me. But I feel like in 2020, it really pushed me into relying on my friends a lot more and as a result that made my friendships a lot deeper.

 

Fear becomes a normal feeling

I realized also that fear kind of is my baseline, it feels very familiar to me. And it felt a lot safer than this newfound feeling of success, which by the way, objectively my business was successful, objectively I was successful. Did I feel successful? Hell no. And I think this is really interesting because everyone talks about like, oh, when I'm successful, when I'm successful, but do we ever really feel like we're successful? Because I still don't feel like that. And it's only because now I've taken that step back and I started to look at it objectively that I'm like, actually, you know what? Yeah, cool. I'm a success. I'm going to own that. But I still don't feel like that a lot of the time.

 

I hope this helps for those of you who feel like you're stuck in struggle street and that everything's going to be easy when you're successful. I really want you to start thinking about, okay, how can I make things easy now? Because if everything's hard now, when I'm successful it's going to be just as hard if not harder.

 

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