There are are lots of reasons when you can find yourself feeling stuck with your business. It might be that you’re stuck with a particular task or challenge. Or perhaps you can’t choose between one direction or choice, or another. Maybe you just feel like you’ve plateaued, and you’re struggling to take things to the next level.
Either way, it’s important to deal with those feelings as soon as you can. Because feeling stuck with your business can lead to a loss of passion or interest. It can lead to procrastination or feeling like you want to give up.
So, when you’re feeling stuck with your business, what can you do to become ‘unstuck’?
1) Admit that you’re feeling stuck
As entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves suffering from high levels of stress and pressure. The pressure to succeed. To make a certain level of revenue. To present ourselves in a certain way and ‘be seen’ in certain places. This is a great article that explains it further. But what does this mean when we feel stuck? Well, quite simply, we don’t like to admit it!
When we don’t admit these feelings, and instead bottle them up, they end up going round and round inside our brains, and we end up with a snowball effect. Things get worse and worse, and that makes the chances of making positive progress even more challenging.
Therefore, finding somewhere where you feel you can admit to feeling stuck is the first thing to do. It might be talking to a trusted friend or family member, an adviser or professional colleague, or by engaging with a community like ours.
2) Take a breath
Sometimes we find ourselves stuck because we’re just feeling a bit ‘meh’. Like we’ve lost our mojo. Sometimes we can’t pinpoint a particular issue or challenge and even if there is one, it can be hard to articulate. So first thing’s first – the best thing here is to take a break. As the saying goes:
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.
3) Share your feelings
Again, this might seem like an obvious step, but equally it’s one that a lot of people find it hard to do. We end up feeling like we’re failing or letting people down. But actually, sharing how we’re feeling is a positive thing. Yes, we’re showing our vulnerability, and that no, our lives and businesses aren’t perfect. And that can be scary. But what you’re really saying is that you need some help. Some external advice. That you’re willing to learn and want to develop. That you’re ambitious and that you want to grow and move forward. And that is a hugely positive thing.
4) Reflect and Review
This point isn’t necessarily about being tidier as what it looks like depends very much on your individual circumstances. It might be that you’re feeling stuck with your business because you’re trying to do everything and spreading yourself too thinly. Perhaps you work from your kitchen table and find yourself distracted by your home life. Or maybe your systems and processes aren’t working for you, and instead of helping, are holding you back.
Either way, it’s worth taking the time to do a sort of ‘audit’. If your work environment isn’t helping, get a change of scene. You could either join a coworking group like ours, or go and sit in a cafe for a few hours. Delegation, or out-sourcing can solve your feelings of overwhelm or distraction. And just because an app exists for a particular reason, it doesn’t mean that you, personally, have to use it.
The same goes for your business itself. As a team, we constantly reflect and review our business both in terms of how it works and what we offer, and we encourage our clients to do the same. So if the reason you’re feeling stuck with your business is actually the business itself, it’s time to do an audit there too. Is your working pattern working? Are your prices up to date? Are your customers still wanting the same thing this year as they did last year? And so on.
5) Planning and Goals
Planning and goal-setting is at the heart of our coaching philosophy and runs throughout everything we do. It’s not enough just to identify a problem and chat it through, but if you want to make positive change (and in this case, get ‘unstuck’), you need a plan!
Again, there are lots of ways to do this. You could set yourself deadlines and track your progress in a diary or calendar. You could share your plans with an advisor or in a community like ours, so they’re ‘out there’ for the world to see. Or you could decide to work more intensively with a coach or a mastermind group to get some more focussed support and be held directly accountable for your progress.
And as a final note, the keyword there is progress. If you find yourself striving for perfection every day, you will eventually find yourself unstuck again. Why? This brings us back to the point about entrepreneurial pressure at the beginning of this blog. Perfection does not exist as there will always be something new to learn. Progress to be made and hurdles to overcome. So instead, focus on moving forward. One step at a time.