Often, we lose ourselves doing the day in and day out humdrum stuff we need to do to meet the minimal needs of our business, keep money coming in, fix the things that are broken, handle emergencies, answer the phones, answer emails, and all the other things that grab our immediate attention. And, when that happens we forget all the opportunities that hide behind those day to day tasks…we forget all the work that desperately requires our attention if we ever want to grow. Why do we forget those things? The simple answer is, lack of immediacy.
What happens is, we find ourselves in survival mode. Our world gets compressed into dealing only with our most pressing needs. We fall back into just getting through each day. Once we are in that mode, we turn a blind eye to everything else. We forget about long term plans, goals, ideas for improving our business, hiring new staff, completing the training of a new hire, addressing the less than stellar performance of a particular employee, paying attention to marketing, giving our technicians more sales training…all of it gets put on hold. All of it.
And once we get into survival mode, it’s very difficult to extract ourselves from it. We learn to push aside the vision and the dreams we once had for our business. We kid ourselves into believing we will get them back eventually. But the more we put it off, the more they fade from our awareness along with our enthusiasm and hopes for this enterprise we began. In fact, it becomes easy to succumb to taking the path of least resistance, the easy way, the way that places the fewest demands on our attention. And, before we know it we have forgotten all the ambitions and dreams we had when we started all this.
Here’s how to know when this is happening to you: your work gets boring, you lose your enthusiasm for it. You no longer look forward to the work you once really enjoyed. You feel trapped by a business you created that now is running you instead of the other way around.
This happens. It is a common feature of businesses everywhere. And when you find it happening to you the best thing you can do is get away for a while. Get your energy back, retrieve those ambitions and dreams you put aside, get an outside perspective if you need to and get back up on that horse and ride it like you stole it, the way you did when it was all brand new and every day was an adventure!