Welcome back to the podcast! I am really glad that you are here. I know this is a busy time of year, so just know that I appreciate you giving me a few minutes of your day.

Today I’m gonna talk about something we’re all pretty familiar with - that moment in life when it all hits the fan. That moment when it all goes haywire, when if one more thing goes wrong you’re gonna lose it.

You’ve been there. You’re probably thinking of a moment or two right now. Or maybe you’re in the middle of one now.

Whatever your situation, I’m sure you’ll be able to relate to what I’m going to talk about today.

Challenges in business

There will always be challenges in business - the grumpy client, the missed payment, the reschedules, the damaged shipment, the launch or the marketing campaign that didn’t turn out how you had hoped. How we perceive these challenges & how we react to these storms will ultimately determine how we get through them, what we learn from them & the rate at which we improve.

Now, I’m a mom of boys. And in this house there are video games. Lots of them. So I’m pretty familiar with how these go. If you have kids, I’m sure you do too. Or maybe you had an Atari growing up too or were one of the lucky ones who got a Nintendo for Christmas. I could play a really good game of Donkey Kong & I was a beast at Super Mario Brothers.

As you go through a video game, you are going to face obstacles & challenges. Someone is always trying to knock you off the tower or run you off the road. The villains are always there waiting to attack you, to hit you over the head with a hammer or throw a banana in the road to make you spin out. Another driver is trying to wreck your car. You hit a wall or run up a ramp & somehow end up in the ocean.

See? I told you there were lots of video games in this house!

What do you do when you hit an obstacle? Just quit? Say “I’m not meant for this”? No, you hit play again. You learn where those obstacles are in the game. You get better. You get so good that you finish that level & then you go on to the next one.

It’s the same way in business. There is always another level. New level / new devil. Obstacles will always be there. There isn’t this moment that you arrive & everything becomes easy. If you’re looking for that, I hate to burst your bubble, but it just doesn’t happen.

Or maybe in the game you run off the road & it slows you down. Now you’re behind everyone else. What do you do? Quit? No, you get back on the road. Except this time, it looks a little different. Now the road is open. It gives you a whole different perspective. Now you can see into the distance. Sometimes you have to get knocked down. Sometimes you have to spin out. Sometimes you need get slowed down to be able to see clearly.

I can’t even count how many times that has happened in my businesses over the years. Here’s what that does for the ones who don’t quit - you get more & more resilient. You welcome the storms, the challenges, the failures. You’re here for the lessons.

The ones who are willing to learn those lessons, try new things, take the chances, risk it all are the ones who see the biggest rewards.

I’ll tell you about one of our recent challenges. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that Brian & I flipped a 1950’s house. We took it all the way down to the studs & created the cutest little house. We had it under contract in 3 days. We went through due diligence & right at the end of that, our buyer backed out. We were heartbroken, of course. But we were confident that we would get another buyer just as fast.

Little did we know that the fed would raise the interest rates right about the same time. And they did it not once but twice. And while that might not seem like a really big deal, in the real estate world & for people trying to qualify for a mortgage, it is. So that wiped out a big portion of our buyer pool immediately & we had to drop the price to sell. It took us another 4 months to find a buyer & it just closed last week.

We could have let that stop us, because those are big numbers on the line. We could have said “nope, done with real estate”. But we kept moving forward in the middle of that storm & all those challenges & we bought another one. This one isn’t a flip. It’s a rental, but we are actually looking at another one to flip right now. Let’s just say that lots of resilience was built in the last 6 months. And I couldn’t be more thankful for all those scary moments.

It took me a little while to get there though. I had to reframe my thoughts & build the belief that “This is happening for us, not to us.” There’s no telling how many times I said that & wrote that over the last 6 months.

So, what are you up against right now? What’s your biggest challenge? Are you gonna let it whoop you? Or are you going to face it, learn from it & get better?

Listen. You are magic. You were made for so much more than you give yourself credit for.

You know how it feels when you go through weeks of hot summer weather & then finally a really good thunderstorm comes? It’s good, right? Life would be boring without the storms.

So, my hope is that you start looking at your storms, your business challenges, a little differently. Welcome them. They are there to make you stronger. They are part of your story. You may never know why, but I believe it’s because someone else in your life needs to hear about it or see you go through it.

The ones who face their storms head on & don’t let them take them out are the ones worth watching. That is you. You are the one we learn the most from. You are the one who can trust that “this is happening for me”. You are the action taker. You are the one who will make the biggest impact in this world - whether that’s in your business, in your family or in your community.

So, welcome the storms, my friend. You got this!

Thank you for hanging out with me today. If you got something good from this today, share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it too. My goal is to help you build a more profitable, productive & purposeful business so that you can spend more time doing what you love with the ones you love. I’ll see you over on instagram! Have a great week y’all!

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