Have you ever heard the phrase “too much of a good thing can become detrimental”? A chapter in the book, Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, that I’ve read before, years ago as I was growing and scaling my direct sales team with BODi. Anytime I read a book twice, it hits me differently because I’m wiser, older, and more experienced, I’ve got more going on.
Simon Sinek was talking about trends. He was talking about generations of people, and how our grandparents, my grandparents, were born into the time of the Great Depression. When they became of working age, World War Two started. All the men were off to war, almost everybody knew somebody who was going off to war.
The country rallied together, and if they weren’t serving in the war, they were helping create supplies for the war. They were doing the war bonds, helping to create whatever materials that were needed to send off the war. After the war ended, the baby boomer generation began. There was an influx of babies that were being born, and the baby boomer generation is my parent’s generation. That generation was much more carefree and things were fun, with an all about me mindset.
Today, as I watch how the pendulum swings from left to right and then left to right again, it made me think about where society was in 2020. We’re in the workforce, hustling, building businesses, achieve, achieve, achieve, accolade, accolade, accolade. Then we went into the pandemic where life stopped.
It was this stark realization of what I needed to do to survive. We saw people start to say, I need more joy in my life. I need more unplugged time. I’m working too hard.
I always say that anything taken to an extreme can become an unhealthy thing. There’s always this balance, right? When you swing a pendulum too far to one side, let’s look at exercise, for example. Working out four to five days a week, with a mix of cardio and strength training is a good mixture. It’s good for your health, it’s good for your heart, all the things. Now look at it from the other point of view, exercising multiple hours a day, seven days a week, with no rest can be a detriment to your success and body.
This underlying sort of narrative in the back of my mind has been playing about seeing on social media is anti-hustle and not working hard because I need to enjoy life.
What I don’t see as loud is, that you still have to work. That too much of a ‘good’ thing can be detrimental to your success.
That fallout of that is going to be is that 18 months from now, your paycheck’s going to be diminishing, it’s going to be a slow diminish. You may not see a big change, maybe even right now you’re still growing. But in two months, it might start to plateau. Then in three to six months, you might start to see a small decline. It will feel detrimental.
Now you’re looking at your business thinking to yourself “Do I want to pursue this, go back in, grind it out or do I want to do something else?”. Personally, I caution a lot of you who are in this season where you’re not grinding, and maybe you are even looking at your week and your days, thinking I’m slacking.
I see the detrimental caution signs and yellow lights because it’s not necessarily detrimental today, but it can be. I want to walk through, how we find a balance so you can be more successful.
We’re trying to make sure that we’re spending enough time in our business so that we’re gaining momentum and moving forward. We’re spending enough time in our relationships to where they’re healthy and thriving. We are creating enough space where we are. We are detached from work that is allowing us to do creative things, that allow us to come back to work refreshed.
Healthy pressure is what allows us to grow, achieve, and rise to the next level of success. So what should that look like? I am not going to tell you what I think everybody should do, so I’ll share my experience because that can help you shape and give you food for thought about what you should do.
I’m an achiever.
I’m an enneagram three.
I respect achievement.
I love accolades and walking across the stage and being the best at the best of whatever I do.
My passion is leading from the front.
There is that need to achieve or I feel like I’m slacking. So how have I worked through that?
I look at my current business goals and look at what I want my personal life to look like.
I will go into my calendar, plug in when I’m going to get my nails or hair done or I’m going to meet my mom for lunch, whatever it is, I make sure I know that I am booked for that time and day.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do the extra things that need to be done. It means that when I look at my week, I am saying what needs to be done to exponentially increase my income. I am focused on those key performance indicators. I know what drives the needle forward and I’m focused on it. If it’s growing the foundation of your business, you’re posting social media content cultivating a community, and getting people to see that you are the expert in your area.
I am having conversations intentionally and making new connections.
I’m going to dedicate more time to that specific area of my business if that is what I need to move it forward. I’m going to have to get a little bit more creative. Additionally, I am aware that if I don’t fill my pipeline, if I’m not nurturing relationships, if I’m riding the wave of what I’ve done for the past ten years, eventually that is going to come to a screeching halt, and be detrimental to the success I’ve worked hard to achieve.
It is way harder to start an engine that has come to a complete stop and cooled down than it is to get a warm engine just moving again in the right direction.
So if this has been a wake-up call for you, you might be thinking “What can I do to start back up?“. My 1️⃣ first tip here is: to set the alarm again and get up when it goes off.
2️⃣ Secondly, I sat down and started printing off pictures of the events that I loved. In this season of life, I need to stay focused on what I want and the feeling, how I want to feel as I achieve those goals. I am saying to myself, Melanie, are you acting as if you’re already that?
Get up early, create those affirmations, have those visuals, and then make sure that you are working from a to-do list. The basics are never beneath you. 3️⃣ Third, it may cause some initial anxiety, but setting boundaries with your family members, yourself, and the team that you run.
As I mentioned before, over the last few years, I believe we’ve created a culture of people who don’t want to work.
Have you recruited those people over the last 24 months? People don’t want to work, and would rather have more fun and partying. They want to be a part of a community, and it’s okay to want to have fun at work, we should. Again, anything taken too far to an extreme because a detrimental thing to your health and success.
You might be saying to yourself, “I don’t want to do it the way I did it five years ago.“
I don’t want to grind or miss out on key parts of my life, or I don’t like the way I built my team, or I don’t like the person that I was. Nobody’s telling you you have to do it that way. You learned from that, right?
That learning experience you’ve gone through is going to improve you. You’re not going to do it the way that brings you more pain than joy. You have this data from how you did it once before to use to build it differently.
If you’re looking at your direct sales business, what are the things you can do now?
Where are you not using your time wisely?
Where did you say yes to things that you should have said no to before?
How can you use your time more appropriately?
What can I do that will not be detrimental to my business, but also make me feel like I am living my best life?
Think about all the ways you used to be, and who you want to be now, and build that business for you.
I am permitting you to redefine the way you work and the meaning that you attach to it. I want you to show other people that you can thrive and you can succeed no matter what.
Let’s stop living in excuses.
Let’s start by saying:
I need to be gritty.
I need to be disciplined.
I’ve got to be consistent.
I can do hard things for future me.
If this blog spoke to you, would you mind taking a screen shot, post it on your social media, and tagging me letting me know your biggest take away and what action you are ready to take?! My Instagram is @melaniemitro or click here.
Let’s crush the summer season.