Survive The Transition And Thrive

Alex Charfen: As an entrepreneur, you have committed to a life of constant and never-ending transition. If you are going to continue to grow and scale a business longterm, and you're committed to actually doing it, to getting to multiple six figures, then seven figures, then multiple seven figures, then eight figures, then multiple eight figures, and then getting through nine, you are an entrepreneur who will always be in transition. Don't try to avoid the feeling of transition. You have to learn how to survive the transition and thrive.

I have some of the most amazing clients on the planet. It is so fun to work with entrepreneurs who are growing and scaling their businesses fast because they think different. They have unique perspective on things, they give incredible feedback. What's really amazing is the way that they support each other. I have this belief that we all go forward faster together and I get to watch it every day in our groups.

Today, one of our members put in ... I haven't asked for permission to share this but she put in that she's been having a really, really hard time, that she's having one of those weeks where it's easier to just go back and do it all myself. Every single day is a new challenge. She just feels exhausted. Then, another one of our members answered and said ... A bunch of them replied but this one is interesting. He says, "The bigger the team gets, the more I'm relying on people, the more rejuvenating, freeing, and exhausting it gets. Interesting."

When I read that, here is what I can tell you he's referring to, here's what I can tell you she's referring to, is that, as entrepreneurs, we are in constant transition. Why is she feeling like it's easier to go back and do everything herself, by herself? Well, because she's in one of the transitions of the billionaire code. We actually talked on the call and she is in that place in builder where she hasn't really documented everything, she doesn't have everything really spelled out, the processes aren't there in where ... The builder level of the billionaire code. You need to build systems and process around what you do well. If you don't do that and you hire people and you don't have systems and process there, it makes it really hard to have those people execute that system or that process.

You have to go through the steps of the billionaire code and go through each transition, but here's the challenge. As you butt up against a transition, as you start to get to the place where you really need to make major changes, like sit down and start documenting and getting the processes in place and really have clarity in all your systems and your structure, you will run up against tons of psychological challenge. You're going to have a hard time with this. You're going to feel massive transition. There's going to be a ton of pressure and noise. You're going to want to regress.

When you start feeling the feelings of regression as an entrepreneur, something big is about to happen. When you start feeling like, "I need to take my toys and go home," I want you to see that as a sign in your business that you're going through a massive transition because, as your business grows, each new step you go through, each new thing you have to learn is going to feel like it throws you off. We need to recondition ourselves to almost lean into it and figure out what those things are. What the second person is expressing when he says, "The more I'm relying on people, the more rejuvenating, freeing, and exhausting it gets," he's referring to this.

I want you to just think about this. The more you rely on people, the more you have to make increasingly important decisions with less and less information. I've gone through that concept before. That task, that critical CEO requirement of making increasingly important decisions with less and less information is incredibly exhausting. See what he said? He said it's rejuvenating, freeing, and exhausting. See, we have five currencies. We have time, effort, energy, focus, and cash. The focus that it takes to make increasingly difficult decisions with less and less information is massive. Getting the right systems and the structures in place and all of those things takes a ton of your attention. You can be in momentum, feel rejuvenated, like you're building more freedom, and be exhausted because we're going through transition. We are always going through a transition.

This is why I coach all of my clients that, one, you have to figure out what is the thing that's going to move you forward the fastest and focus on it exclusively because that's what's going to get you through the transition. For the first client, it was really documenting her systems and processes and understanding where she needed to go so that she could get clarity and understanding what she really needed to solve, which for her was lead generation. She's going to document lead generation and get really clear.

Then, here's the other thing that's going to get you through surviving the transition. One is focusing in the right place, because then you're actually going to get through it, but then it's just onto the next one. The second part of surviving the transition is radical self-care and really taking care of yourself. That means eating extraordinarily well, like you would feed an athlete. If you're eating anything that you don't think an athlete would eat, then you should stop and ask why. You have the earning potential of an athlete, you have the income potential.

I know you believe you can have a million dollar business. That makes you a million dollar racehorse. If you were a million dollar race ... If you owned a million dollar racehorse, people would know it just by looking at how it was taken care of. You would not be dehydrating a million dollar racehorse, you would not be running a million dollar racehorse without feeding it, you would not be giving it junk food.

Take crazy self-care. Diet is massive for surviving the transition. Eating a whole foods, mostly organic diet where you're not eating a lot of processed food so your body doesn't have to do any extra work because the human body has been processing whole foods and an organic diet for millennia. In the last hundred years, we have shifted from whole foods to almost exclusively processed foods. That throws off so much and takes so much of your energy. You're going to feel exhausted.

Instead of feeling exhausted, adopt a diet that is radically healthy and treat yourself like an athlete. Get up every day and move and breathe and hydrate and eat the right nutrition and take incredible care of yourself. Work out and get to the point where you're actually feeling good about yourself. Here's what is so hard to understand as an entrepreneur. When you do that, your business will actually get better.

One of the practices I tell all of my clients, and once you've figured out what you need to focus on in your business and you start taking really exceptional care of yourself, that, every morning, part of that care should be getting up and going on at least a 20-30 minute walk. There is so many reasons you should be going on a walk as an evolutionary hunter. First, let's just replay that. You are an evolutionary hunter. You are someone who, for millennia, would have been in a tribe that moved every single day, and probably distances that we can't even fathom today. It's believed that early humans actually chased down prey like deer and then finally wrestled it to the ground from exhaustion, sometimes for days. There are still tribes in the world where they do just that. As modern society today, sometimes we don't walk at all in a day. We do less than 2,000 or 3,000 steps sometimes.

Every single day, you want to be getting up and doing at least a 20-30 minute walk, if not more, because there's so many benefits to an evolutionary hunter. This is crazy. There's been research that actually shows that the bilateral stimulation of walking, it gives you the same type of trauma release that EMDR therapy can, and that, if you walk, you can actually change the entire chemical composition of your body. You can ... You calm down. You calm the right things and you stimulate the right things by walking. You take your body out of an adrenal-thyroid reaction and you actually kick your body out of fight or flight.

Now, if you go speed walking or anything like that, it might change it. It might overtax you. Walking between three and four-and-a-half miles an hour and breathing in and out through your nose, no electronics, bilateral stimulation will calm the mind, help you offload pressure and noise, put more gas in the tank so you can survive the transition.

Today, I have the privilege of coaching some of the most amazing businesses on the planet. If you want the exact same advice I give those entrepreneurs, you're hearing it right now. When you decide that you're going to take radical care of yourself and lower the pressure and noise, put more gas in the tank, increase how you see or the clarity with which you see things, and offload the noise of challenging diets and not moving and not drinking enough water, you will see just how capable you are as an entrepreneur, just how capable you are to become a CEO, and just how capable you are to lead people.

One of the challenges with not taking care of yourself is that it increases the pressure and noise in your body. That physiological reactivity makes it harder for us to make decisions, to lead people, to see the next steps clearly, and to understand what we really want. The more you're willing to take care of yourself, not only will you survive the transitions, but there will be times where you thrive and you get into momentum that is unreal. That's really the state of where we should all be.

Here's what's interesting. If you're willing to put these systems in place and take care of yourself, and if you're willing to run your business predictably through a system where you can predict the future, you won't have to have the day where you just want to stop and maybe go back to doing it all yourself. You're just going to have the experience of growing a business where the more rejuvenating, the more freeing, and exhausting it gets because, let's be honest, you're an evolutionary hunter. You go until you're exhausted anyway. You're not going to turn it off. Even when you're taking radically good care of yourself, when your business is growing, it's going to take a ton of your focus. That's just who we are. We have a hard time diverting that anyway, so let's lean in and take incredibly good care of yourself so that the time that you put in ends up getting you not only through the transitions, but scaling an empire.

Sometimes I might get accused of painting a rosy picture for entrepreneurs. I don't want to do that. Major transitions are going to be really difficult for you. What you do day to day is going to have to change consistently so you will have to be in a constant state of behavioral change. Over time, you will have to get better at making decisions, and you will have to do what normal people wouldn't be willing to or even think of doing. You will have to make decisions that would make normal people call in sick. If your business gets big enough, you'll start doing those several times on a day to day basis because you'll be making decisions that affect people's careers and affect who works with who and affect what direction your company goes and affect an increasingly larger number of people who are relying on you to make the right decisions, to do the right things, and to move them all forward, and who are placing their trust in you to move the company forward.

When it comes time to eat processed foods or processed sugars or fast food or anything that's not a whole food product, that's not moving you forward, that's not good for you, I want you to know that you put that entire structure in jeopardy. If you're not getting up and walking and moving and offloading trauma, you're putting that entire structure in jeopardy. If you're not hydrating, if you're allowing yourself to dehydrate, which is proven to actually decrease IQ over time. There's been multiple studies that show that dehydration decreases IQ and critical thinking. Those have been studies a lot of times done on doctors and nurses who, at the beginning of a shift and the end of the shift, are dehydrating. It shows just how little they can think.

I don't coach these things just because I know that they're good for you, I don't coach these just to sound like a health coach, in order to sound like a health coach. I coach these things because, over a long career of entrepreneurs, I have watched this direct correlation between those who are willing to take radical good care of themselves and those who grow massive business empires. Are there outliers? Sure, but the fact is go look at most entrepreneurs. They look like they're getting healthier over time. A lot of entrepreneurs actually put on more muscle all the time. Successful entrepreneurs tend to look better and better over time because they start realizing the more they take care themselves, the more they get out of their business, and the more they get out of their life.

I don't want you to just survive the transition, I want you to thrive and grow the biggest business you can. If you're ready to start getting some coaching and understand how to do this better and get some tools and resources that will help you show your team where you're going, help you communicate to your team exactly how you are all going to get there, and understand what to prioritize and do next on a day to day basis so that you can grow your business as fast as possible, go to billionairecode.com/apply. Answer a few questions and you'll end up on the phone with one of my team.

We help CEOs get to a place where they are predictably running their business, growing it over time, and setting up the conditions for massive periods of momentum where revenues go through the roof and so does profitability. We help entrepreneurs scale opportunity fast and, if that's the situation, or if you're in a situation where you've created more opportunity than your team and your business can fulfill right now, and you know you're leaving money on the table, and you know you could be doing more, and you need a better team and better processes and systems around you and for everyone to work together easier so that you don't feel like you have to tell everybody what to do every day, we can help you get past that feeling because that's one of those transitions where it doesn't get better with time and it will make you feel like you want to take all your toys and go home. We have built the systems and the processes that we can help you past all of that.

Go to billionairecode.com/apply. I promise just the application itself will show you we're different than other coaching companies.