Momentum Podcast: 747

Have You Made Peace With Disappointment?

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

As entrepreneurial personality types I believe we learn how to deal with disappointment well.

Because we want more out of life, I think we experience disappointment more often.

Alex Charfen, a business growth coach who helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, gives practical, tangible, and actionable tips that you can implement into your business right now.

As we start to build a teams and have people working with and around us, we experience it even more.

I believe there’s a reason why this happens to us as entrepreneurs, and the good news is there’s a relatively simple solution.

Your business has the potential to change the world, and the only way to see that potential become a reality is to implement a strategic plan. If you're ready to learn more, go to predictableplanningsystem.com to get started.

Our entrepreneurial journey doesn't end here! Be sure to check out our Facebook Community filled with entrepreneurs just like you who are getting into momentum and building world-changing empires charfen.com/community

If you are an entrepreneur who is listening in and you can relate, then be sure and head over to momentumplanner.com/mps and gain access to one of the most requested business tools to grow and scale your business in any market condition, even in this one.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast. Wanted to jump in this morning and record this video that's going to become one of our podcasts on expectations and disappointment, you know, I think that entrepreneurial personality types, entrepreneurs like me and a lot of the entrepreneurs I work with, we have a unique relationship with disappointment. And I've been working with with a coach. Her name's Kylie Ryan. She's absolutely extraordinary, has completely changed my life. And over the course of the last week, we've been unpacking some of where this disappointment comes from for me and understanding why I think I've made peace with disappointment. And I've even started to expect to not starting to. I think for most of my life, I've expected disappointment.

Now, here's why I'm sharing this with you. I want to share what I've learned about myself with you. But I also want to share how, as an adult and as an entrepreneur, I've gotten to the point where I don't have a lot of missed expectations. I don't have a lot of disappointment. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution.

Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop. And we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. First, let me share with you where I think my, my my having made peace with disappointment comes from, you know, I actually feel like as a child, I learned how to trust in disappointment.

See if this if this resonates. Maybe it won't, but it might bring up something for you as to why disappointment has become part of your life. It's it's in your business. It's, you know, how many how often you disappoint and how often are you disappointed with with relationships. Here's the genesis of this for me. In doing a lot of personal work and a lot of inner child work and a lot of coaching and getting advice and reflection from other people, here's what I've learned about my life, is that when I was a child, I had a lot of disappointment because I was very frustrated. I had a hard time as a kid. Can you relate to having a difficult time as a adolescent? As a child? I didn't feel like I got along with other kids very well. I didn't get along with teachers very well. And as a result, I would go home and I would talk to my mom and I would say, you know, I tell my mom, like, hey, mom, this isn't working very well. I'm not doing well. You know, I'm not getting along with kids and my mom's way of handling it. I was the oldest child. My mom was an extraordinary human being. In fact, yesterday would have been her seventy fifth birthday. She passed away a couple of years ago. She just left this massive void for me.

But when my mom was younger, her way of encouraging or helping was to try and like look towards the future and try and and tell me what might happen next. And so I would say, Mom, I'm really having a hard time in school. And she would say, well, Alex, you've only been there for two weeks. Things are going to get better. You know, it's going to start looking up. But I would come home and say, Mom, the other kids aren't very nice to me. Well, you know, Alex you you've got a whole semester left to to work through those issues. And so my mom was always future pacing, always pointing to the future. And as a kid, you know, I don't think she meant it. I know she didn't mean to do this. I know my mom would have never done this on purpose. But what happened was because she was always telling me things would get better and I didn't really feel like they did. I started to understand that life was just about disappointment.

And I trusted in disappointment, actually, when I was like nine or 10 years old. I can remember now, like thinking, OK, well, I'm not going to be disappointing more. I don't want any more expectations. I'm not going to have birthday parties. I don't want to have any of those expectations. So I was the kid from a very young age who didn't want birthday parties, who didn't want surprises. I didn't want expectations. I didn't want to be disappointed. I didn't really love holidays. All of those things made it so that I you know, I'm one of those I became a human being who rather than have big expectations, I would rather just stay neutral rather than be disappointed. And when I got into business, this absolutely translated. You know what I got into business.

Here's what would often happen is I would expect to be disappointed. So when a team member disappointed me or a client disappointed me or I had something that didn't work out and I felt disappointed, I would just say, like, OK, this is how it's supposed to be. This is just part of doing big things. This is just part of making things happen. Like I'm trying to make things happen. And what I realized in working with Kylie and what I've realized also as an adult is that we should not make peace with disappointment. In fact, when we are disappointed, we should ask ourselves what role did we play in that disappointment? Now, that might be hard to hard to, like, put all together, but let me share this with you. Here's what I've realized. Working as an adult with entrepreneurs, I think a lot of us are accustomed to disappointment.

In fact, a lot of us, when something happens with a person that we're working with or a team that we're working with or something goes wrong, we just kind of blame it on ourselves. We expect it. It's like, oh, we did that. And here's the reality, because so many of us, his entrepreneurial personality types have been in this place where we had expectations. We were disappointed they weren't met. We fail to create clear expectations with the people around us. And so we are constantly disappointed.

And I watch this in myself. I have this pattern and I watch it. And the people and my friends, my friends who are entrepreneurs and I watch it and the people that we coach, you know, especially especially with with those who are in relationships, you know, I often hear like, you know, I'm just so frustrated with my spouse or my partner or my my significant other. And it's because they're doing this, this and this. And I'll just ask a simple question like, have you set clear expectations that that bothers you? Have you explained to them why this is frustrating? Have you told them what alternatives they could have? And let me break those down often I'll say, well, have you told him this bothers you? Yes.

Every time it happens, I get all angry. OK, well, have you explained to them why? Well, I've told them I'm angry. I don't know if I've explained why. Have you given them alternatives? If you told them what you would like it to look like? Well, no. So you you you've expressed disappointment. You haven't really said why and you haven't given an alternative. And so if we expressed disappointment and you're not clear why and we don't give an alternative, we are going to be consistently disappointed. And that happens often with us in our relationships as entrepreneurs. And the other reason that we are so frustrated and disappointed so often as entrepreneurs is we don't clear it could create clear expectations of what we want people to do. You know, entrepreneurs almost have like this. There's this, like, personality flaw where if we're really excited about a vision and we can see it clearly and we've done that magic trick that we do, you know, what I'm talking about is entrepreneurial. Up in the morning, we travel into the future, create a new reality, come back to the present, insists it becomes real. When we do that, it's so real for us. We actually expect the people around us to kind of feel it and see it. And oftentimes when I'm able to slow a client down or a friend of mine down and we talk through it, here's what we find. They're disappointed that something happened where they've never set a clear expectation. And oftentimes there's a pattern there from childhood that makes it so that we don't realize we can set a clear expectation there's a pattern there from childhood or from our lives that makes us expect disappointment so much that we don't even consider the fact, and this is a fact that we can walk our way out of it. Here's how we can walk our way out of having this feeling of disappointment. Well, first, we create clear expectations with the people around us. We create clear expectations with our spouse, my wife and I Cadey. We sit down, we align, we talk about what we're doing in the day.

We set up plans for the month. We agree on what we're pursuing, his goals for the year so that we have alignment as to where we're going. And neither one of us is disappointment, disappointed because we've had a meeting of the minds with our team members. We do the same thing. We sit down with each individual team member and they know three things. They know the outcomes they're responsible for. This is what you're doing. They know the scoreboards that show whether they're doing it well or not, we're moving forward or not. And they know what they're accountable to. They know what their role is. And so with team members, when we create expectations, we stop being so disappointed. We stop feeling that rage, that fear, that frustration, that anxiety, whatever disappointment does for you. And then we do this with our business in general. It's not just with my spouse. It's not just with the team. It's with the entire business. And here's how you eliminate disappointment in a business. Over time, you start creating clear strategic plans that you and your team can predictably execute.

You know, I use this word predictable. We want our business to become predictable. And what often entrepreneurs here is like, oh, I don't want predictability. I want excitement. I want spontaneity. I want fun. Well, you know what? In a business, when we become predictable, the business grows predictably and it explodes. And oftentimes when entrepreneurs hear predictable, they hear slow. Well, we don't help businesses grow slowly. We actually help businesses explode through creating massive predictability. Because here's what happens if you and your team get together and you set up a strategic plan and you go accomplish that strategic plan together, you actually create the muscles of not being disappointed and achieving as achieving as a team. And so the more clear that strategic plan is that the more clearly and more consistently your team can achieve it, the more you create this entirely new feeling on the team of achievement, not of disappointment, of moving forward. I'm clearly communicating what you want and getting what you want. And so many of us don't do it because we don't even think that this is part of what we need to do.

And so in your relationships, you I often hear entrepreneurs and we have a lot of a lot of I married entrepreneurs in our program. And I'll say, you know, like what is going on with you and your spouse because they'll say, we have this issue and then we'll start talking about it. They'll say, you know, well, they always do this thing. And it makes me frustrated. And I just I don't know what to do. And I'll say, have you clearly communicated this? Have you told them what's going on? Have you told them the alternative? Maybe told them that you'd like them to do? And oftentimes the answer is no. Why? Because we're used to being disappointed. We don't realize we can elevate above the disappointment, set a new expectation and create an entirely new reality for ourselves consistently. You know, it's interesting. This is something that I've worked on for most of my life on eliminating disappointment around me and making it so that I don't have expectations where I can be let down. And in so many ways, especially with working with Kylie this year, I've realized that in some ways I've actually lowered my expectations so I won't be disappointed.

And so this this reality of we can create a strategic plan, we can have a clear conversation, we can set expectations for someone. And once they understand it, we will eliminate that disappointment. It's kind of one of those things where you have to trust that if I do this, this will happen. But if you're willing to do that, here's what I believe happens. And here's what I know has happened for me. As I have stopped expecting disappointment and started setting expectations, the people around me have gotten a lot more talented and they frustrate me way less. And I actually have a lot more love for them and a lot more excitement that they're in my life as I have stopped just being disappointed and I've shared expectations with people on my team. I've actually grown to really enjoy running the company way more, and I'm way more excited with the successes that my team gets and and the things that we're moving forward and that the momentum that we're creating. And as I've gotten to this place where I am no longer living in this state of disappointment, I actually feel a lot more excited on a daily basis. And here's what's happened for me. When I am out of that state of disappointment, I'm in that place of achievement. Anything feels possible and the momentum is massive. And so I know that if you apply what I've shared here in this podcast, if you're willing to share with people clearly and congruently if you're willing to have a written communication. Written, communicated strategic plan to everyone on your team understands, and you're willing to stop living in this place of disappointment and give people clear expectations. It's hard.

I want you to know, when you start setting expectations, it feels vulnerable when you start sending citations and telling people what you really want. It feels difficult when you start setting expectations and telling people what you really expect. It feels like you're centering yourself or being self-centered. All of those things we can get over by consistently setting expectations, seeing them be met or being close to met and coaching and helping and then getting into a place of achievement and expecting achievement, expecting momentum, expecting that you will move forward. It's life changing for us as entrepreneurs. Thanks for being here with me today. If this meant something to you, please share it or tag somebody who needs to hear it. And if you are ready to start growing your business and you want a process, a system of virtual operating system where we can show you how to run a distributed company around the world, grow like crazy and understand what every member of your team is doing. Eliminate disappointment, create that expectation and start achieving. Reach out to us. Go to billionaire code dotcom billionaire dotcom. The billionaire Koch is a nine level framework that goes from startup all the way to 100 million dollar business.

And it shows you exactly what to expect at each level. So you will be able to understand exactly where you are, what you should anticipate next and what you should have already covered. It is a game changer for entrepreneurs who go to billionaire COCOM. Download the Billionaire Code Matrix, the ebook called Billionaire Code Decoded, and if you'd like, you can set up a call with a member of my team and we'll tell you how we help entrepreneurs grow like crazy without feeling massive disappointment. Get into the passenger seat of their company and drive growth without having to do it all themselves. Go to billionaire COCOM. I can't wait to see you there and thanks for being here with me today.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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