Today I want to draw your attention to the spaces between your pendulum swings. The space between where you push forward and you pull back.

I’m now in my 14th year of business so I know what it takes to make a business success out of selling expertise and talent and working from an office at home.

I learnt very early on that the practical side of marketing and selling oneself was only one half of the equation. There’s often a huge inner battle going on whenever any decisions are being made on pricing, positioning, making yourself visible – generally putting yourself “out there”.

So no matter how amazing your product or programme is – how beautiful your website is – some days you simply don’t feel good about your marketing because you’ve created all sorts of stories about whether you are going really up to the job of following through with your business plans. 

One day I’d wake up and give myself a good talking to and realise I just need to dig deep and get on stuff. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you don’t do it. And a lot of stuff you do in your business feels hard the first time you do it because you’re new at it.

Whether that’s writing email copy. Or planning out a blog series that you want to position your latest thinking about an important topic within your industry. Or getting yourself up on a stage at a large conference. I get that a lot of this stuff is scary.

There’s a tonne of stuff I’ve pushed myself through on and got done. I’m sure you’ve done the same.

But sometimes all it takes is one crappy email. Or read a comment on someone else’s Facebook post. Or you overhear a friend or relative say something negative about you.

And if you’re tired. Or pissed off with something that may not even be work related … it’s easy to shut yourself down and you pendulum back again as you let doubt creep in and fear strangle your boldness.

These swings can happen daily. Sometimes the swings are weeks apart. You feel in flow and everything goes great for a while. And then you get tired of pushing through and you get in a funk and you pendulum swing back for a few weeks.

It varies from person to person. From season to season.

But how often do you feel the space? That space right in the middle when you’re not pushing forward and you’re not pulling yourself back.

A pendulum has momentum. If you swing yourself forward hard into pushing and it’s easy for that pendulum to swing back in the same force and wipe you off your feet. You push forward and it swings back again. It’s exhausting – particularly if this is happening every day!

So space. Time to reflect. Time to breathe.

I find it incredible that in my first 6 or 7 years in business I don’t think I breathed much at all. It was go go go and then retreat. I don’t remember breathing into anything. Feeling space and energy to be more strategic about what I was doing.

I was just doing.

So space.

The point in the day where you kick off your shoes and shake out all that sitting.

The point in the day where you breathe – big belly breathes – to fill your brain with oxyen.

Perhaps even a whole day where you take off and work in a local coffee shop or hotel reception area.

It’s the proverbial helicopter – seeing the woods for the trees. This space between the swings that allows us to reflect, review and connect with our bigger vision – our mission – our desire to grow and play bigger.

So what can you do this week to create this important space?

5 minutes is sometimes all you need. Perhaps you in serious need of a whole day.

But without space, you’re stuck in the trenches. And that’s no fun when you’re working hard and not seeing the results you really want.

If you want to grow and take your business forward, you have to create the space to do this. You can’t wait for that space to be created for you … it starts with you

Until next time.

Do Less. Be More. Play Bigger.