Setting Milestones and Building Teams

This is only the beginning of something I started in October with Linda to get my writing business out of the swamp and at the very least, up on to dry land. I’m finding one of the advantages to working with a business coach is she holds me accountable; something I’ve had mixed results doing for myself. In all fairness, I am keeping ahead of the game with my blog posts for the most part. In fact, this is the first one I’ve written in a while which will publish within days of writing it.

For a long time, I was pretty loose about finishing and publishing Life Torn Asunder. Like so many writers, I either neglected it terribly, or edited it, then second-guess myself and had to forcibly prevent myself from going back and re-editing chapters before I moved forward. I know most of the edited chapters still need work, but with determination, I got through the last 13 chapters before going back over what I’d already done and re-done a couple of times already. I even managed to do it a week ahead of my revised deadline!

One of the biggest challenges for anyone who is self-employed is setting milestones and completion dates for our own projects. It’s easy enough to set, and meet or beat deadlines for our clients, but difficult to recognize and honor ourselves as clients too.

I’ve tried having accountability partners a few times, with limited success. I thought long and hard about hiring a coach, more due to a combination of the often exorbitant fees they charge, and uncertainty over whether they’d even be effective. I’ve learned a coach is like a therapist. You have to connect, and at least be somewhat on the same page for them to be effective.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the #HeartfeltMovement helps eliminate one challenge in making the decision to hire someone. They understand we can’t all spend thousands of dollars to get our business off the ground. Some folks will still argue you get what you pay for, and someone with 20 or 30 years of experience is worth the thousands of dollars they charge. Although I don’t dispute that, it doesn’t mean someone with a lot of experience isn’t willing to give a little back and take on clients like me who are either unable or can’t justify spending thousands on a coach.

I believe many of us, and especially creative types need something or someone who kicks our butt and gets us moving. In my case, it’s often someone who will help me set goals and create plans to get me out of my comfort zone. Because as long as I stay there, I don’t accomplish anything which moves me closer to my dreams.

Leaving our comfort zone is easier said than done sometimes. Yet I’ve learned the further behind I leave mine, the easier it gets. Perhaps it’s because at this point, everything is uncharted territory where, in the past I was still firmly attached to my comfort zone. These days, I don’t think I really have one, other than the physical comfort of my house/office and the requisite clowder of cats.

It occurs to me that freedom from our comfort zone can be either scary or invigorating, depending on how much you’ve come to depend on your self-imposed security blanket. The first steps are certainly enough to rattle your composure, but as you get used to testing each step a bit before you move forward, your confidence increases. You learn to recognize steps that will support you and those which have the potential for dumping you on your butt, or sending you crashing down in flames.

We learn from experience to recognize the red flags in our lives, and to take steps to mitigate our exposure. But we also learn when we can be less

cautious and forge ahead without testing every step first.

Building a business requires a certain amount of risk. Some of us have less aversion to risk than others. In my opinion, the more times you fall down and pick yourself back up, the weaker your aversion becomes. There’s something about realizing you can come back from a fall which makes it easier to take a chance on falling, not only repeatedly, but on a larger scale.

The person who built up a million dollar business, then lost it in a series of poor decisions or market fluctuations beyond their control learns valuable lessons in the process. When they pick themselves up, heal some of the wounds they obtained in the fall and go on to build another million-dollar business, they’ve proven to themselves they can and will recover no matter what. Falling may not be fun, but knowing you can pick yourself up and travel even farther the next time motivates you to keep trying better than any pep talk or safety net.

In the process, they’ve also learned how to set deadlines for themselves, create challenges to take them further faster, and have people around them who help clear roadblocks they might miss while focusing their attention on a point beyond what’s immediately in front of them. In other words, each time they fall, they see places where their team; their foundation needs further support.

Motivation may come from within, but left to our own devices, we either get mired in the details, or spend too much time looking at the big picture, overlooking important details. I’m learning we make progress at a faster pace, and lay the groundwork for even more when we recognize working in a vacuum doesn’t yield a very resilient or growth-oriented crop.

Sometimes, the first step in leaving our comfort zone is recognizing we can’t possibly have all the skills or knowledge we need to make our vision succeed. Allowing others to look things over, offer constructive criticism, and even take on part of the project is difficult for many of us, but a critical part of taking our dreams to the next level. One of the skills we may lack is setting milestones, so having someone to do so, and hold our feet to the flame could be exactly what we need to succeed.

Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming release of “Life Torn Asunder: Rebuilding After Suicide”.

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