During these lockdown conditions it can easily feel like we don’t have any big completion points to report/celebrate at the end of a week in our property businesses. For instance Chris and I have a commercial property that’s been sitting, waiting to be refurbished for an incoming tenant but there has been no progress for weeks due to the restrictions and the contractor not being able to work.
Every now and then I like to revisit previous posts I’ve written, to see what I was writing about in the same month but a few years ago. The key message in this post jumped out as one to share again – it has served as a great reminder for me this week and I hope it does the same for many reading it now. Here’s an extract from that post 3 years ago to provide the context,
“When I sat down to write our weekly post, at first I felt deflated that we don’t have some exciting new achievement to share, then I realised that’s not reality, the journey is made up of hundreds of little steps. The reality is that whilst there have been no big milestones hit or new deals done, Chris and I have been working steadily on our business goals…we’re analysing new build development sites, in discussions about leasing blocks of apartments and continuing to manage operations of a successful SA business.”
The feeling of “we’ve got nothing big to share this week”, that I was writing about back in 2017, got me thinking that there are likely many other property investors/entrepreneurs out there feeling like their goals are distant and things aren’t happening fast enough, especially with the constraints of lockdown. So I wanted to share some helpful mental reframes that I’ve learned over the years from a business psychologist mentor. This post is a bit of a deeper dive on understanding the quirks of our mind to help on our way to wealth, freedom and sanity.
An intro to entrepreneur psychology self-diagnosis
There are four ways entrepreneurs typically trip themselves up:
- Hesitation and self doubt – it’s the #1 form of self sabotage
- For productive people, they can get the sense of never feeling finished or good enough
- Getting distracted by new opportunities/what others are doing
- Questioning your own vision/goals i.e. am I even working towards the right thing?
I’m referencing these because it’s key that we understand our psychology so we don’t get caught out by any of these.
The other common pitfall for ambitious entrepreneurs is to fall into black or white thinking (called “splitting”). In other words we can hold ourselves to impossible standards and when we inevitably fail to meet those, we write ourselves off/mentally beat ourselves up. An example might be pushing yourself in all areas of life but still not feeling like you are winning, like the ultra entrepreneurs you might read about or hear on podcasts.
On a smaller scale it might be as simple as putting in a solid week of action taking towards your goals but not feeling like you’ve achieved enough at the end of the week (I used to get this a lot, but I’ve worked on how to manage it).
HERE ARE SIX WAYS TO HELP COMBAT THIS ALL OR NOTHING THINKING
One big antidote to this is to re-frame our thinking to recognise that incremental progress is the ONLY progress. The reality is that the titans we read about were not overnight success stories.
Splitting (or black and white thinking) happens because we fail to plan for incremental progress. The journey HAS to be rewarding for us to be congruent about our ambition.
If you can relate to any of these mental pitfalls then use these 6 exercises below:
- Journal and plan out your goals – figure out what it would be like being in the trenches working towards your goal, with all the in between steps, and brainstorm how you can make the journey itself feel better (i.e. more fulfilling and fun). This kind of thinking helps us prepare for the opposite of black and white thinking, it shows us that realistically there are many steps involved.
- Ask yourself, what would it feel like to be 50% done? What would it feel like to get started? (think- what can I do to make the answers to these questions feel better?)
- Write out baby steps building towards the much larger projects (ie this can be straightforward with a refurb on a BTL but also more straightforward than you think on a larger conversion project).
- Commit to three specific actions that you are 100% in control of completing each week.
- Always set your commitments to the most courageous and important work (i.e. not just the easy stuff you would do anyway- THIS IS HUGE)
- Get used to celebrating incremental (week by week) progress.
These exercises will help you understand that getting into the thick of things and being ‘in the process’, rather than at the destination, is the fulfilling thing. For property entrepreneurs, and indeed any entrepreneur for that matter, this is key as big goals aren’t achieved every week.
Ultimately the goal is to be comfortable working towards things. Success is a practice not a destination.
I hope posts like this serve to help you through the slower periods and encourage you to keep taking meaningful action. It’s not purely about the end destination, it’s about continuous steps in the right direction and reflecting back every few weeks to see how far you’ve come, and feeling good about that.
When you look back on the last seven days, what did you progress with your own focused efforts that you can recognise as a win for the week?