As a busy small business owner, there are likely to be some things you hope to achieve in life or work, but always seem to put on the back burner.
These are certain things you always think you should be doing, but just never quite find the time for.
Examples might include:
- Making time in your schedule for exercise
- Tidying up or sorting filing
- Not pushing yourself to build relationships with certain clients, believing they don’t want to work with you.
- Organising the outsourcing of parts of your business to others, but telling yourself it is too difficult or time consuming
But tackling these tasks can be as simple as changing your mindset – and making them priorities.
On the Flying Solo website, Madeleine Shaw, a personal and executive coach, argues that when your priorities shift you become resourceful and the action you’ve been delaying just happens.
Citing the ‘finding time to exercise’ example, Ms Shaw acknowledges that someone working nine to five in a day job, commuting two hours on top of that, taking care of a family and starting up a business at night, can find time to fit in a workout near impossible.
“But if I said I would give you $10 million in eight weeks’ time on just one condition – that you spend an hour of each day between now and then sitting in a small room doing nothing but staring at the wall – would you do it? My guess is you would find the time. You would move other things around and do whatever you needed to do to get that hour. The stakes would be high enough for you to get really, really creative about finding ways to succeed,” she said.
So it comes down to motivation.
And there are simple steps you can take to overcome your delaying tactics and tackle these obstacles head-on.
- Acknowledge beliefs, other than the one that creates the obstacle, are possible
- Consider how a shift in priorities would lessen the power of the obstacle
- Write down all the benefits you would gain by overcoming the obstacle
- Make a decision to act
- Consider your best course of action – and then take it.
Whatever it is that’s been holding you back, you have the ability to change it. And once you make the change, you’ll free yourself to take on even greater challenges.