are you a 'susan' or a 'sammy'?
if you’ve ever wondered why what you’re building isn’t growing in the ways in which you’ve hoped, there’s a pesky culprit that could be at play.
join me for a quick imagination exercise?
scenario 1: sammy has a lot of great ideas. she decides that the safest option is to test all of them at once to hedge her bets. her mind is always spinning and she has trouble focusing on one task for too long before another one pulls at her. her office and home environments are physical manifestations of what it’s like in her mind: quasi-chaotic.
as time goes on, she’s feeling worn out but driven to see how things pan out. so, she keeps pressing forward. she’s seeing some successes and lots of stagnation. since nothing is a runaway hit, she holds on to many of them and continues to spread herself thin to switch hats and execute. she’s working a lot and seeing meager results, secretly wondering if this entrepreneurship thing is really all it’s cracked up to be.
scenario 2: susan and sammy have one thing in common: lots of great ideas. where they differ is that susan treats her ideas more like science experiments where she dedicates time to test each hypothesis one by one. she focuses her efforts to get an idea off the ground and makes a plan for how to execute it. because her attention is focused, she’s able to pick up on subtleties that expose themselves as she rolls out her idea and can make iterative changes to improve the execution as she goes. she’s able to step back from the work to get a thirty-thousand-foot perspective as well as to take breaks to recharge and come back with a clearer, more creative mind. she can quickly see that her idea is taking hold so she continues to build it.
as time goes on, she has systems in place to help that idea to flourish without the same amount of effort. so, she pulls out one of her other ideas to test that excites her and goes through the same process. idea 1 continues to perform well and she is energized by being able to try this new thing, too. this one isn’t such a hit, so she moves on to the next one and repeats the same process. she ultimately hits a point where she has a few ideas that turned into sustainable offers in her business that help her to generate her freedom number (the amount of money she needs to live the life of her dreams) and she’s happy to keep watering those and not planting more idea seeds for the time being.
what’s the major distinction between these scenarios? focused versus scattered energy.
what you focus on expands. when you scatter your energy, you scatter your results.
i often find the root causes of scattered efforts are:
fear (of missing out on a great idea, not having enough financial resources, how others will perceive you, etc).
a misconception that hedging your bets and having more options available will reduce your risk. (this, too, is rooted in fear.)
while we certainly don’t fall into clear-cut boxes, in which of these hypothetical scenarios do you see yourself (even if just a bit)?
if you’re more a ‘sammy’, might you take a moment to ask yourself why you’re scattering your efforts? if your knee-jerk reaction is, ‘that’s how i’m wired’, i welcome you to sit with that even longer and remember that you have the choice and power to shift any story, habit, pattern, or otherwise about yourself that you choose.
regardless of whether or not you identify with ‘sammy’ or ‘susan’, it’s worth doing a quick audit of your time and energy:
where are you spending it?
how much time are you allocating to the thing(s) that are your top 3 priorities?
does the amount of time you’re spending seem to demonstrate that those are, in fact, your true priorities?
what fears might you need to release to become a little more ‘susan’ than ‘sammy’?
if you had to choose one thing in your business on which to focus for the short term to see if you can grow it exponentially, what would that be?
if fears are keeping you tethered to being more like sammy, what could you do to lessen them?
who can be a support and/or accountability partner for you to stay the course?