What We Don't Understand About Urgency

This is the Momentum podcast. Hello. I hope you do them all the time. I am jumping in here to share some recent stories I have about how we are as entrepreneurs about what kills our business as entrepreneurs. You know, one of the big issues that we have as entrepreneurs is urgency. And I think I think for us as people who run businesses, we want everything that I always joke with entrepreneurs and we want everything done in one time frame all at once and right away. And I had a couple of experiences recently that I want to share with you that have reinforced just how dangerous it is for us as entrepreneurs to drive our lives through urgency now. And I'll share with you. Over the last few weeks, I've been doing some traveling actually and speaking at real life events with real life people. It is so good to be out in public again, to be up on stage again, to be able to share again. And a few weeks ago I went to a good friend of mine, a friend of mine's event. I was able to speak at George Brian's event, and George is just an amazing human being. He's the guy who coined the phrase Relationships beat algorithms, and we become really good friends. It was so much fun speaking as events and one of the things that he brought up that, you know, I share with entrepreneurs all the time. George has been there. He's done that. So he he knows a lot about working with entrepreneurs and he mentioned that, you know, his quote was and I actually wrote it down on one of his sheets we got from his event that the number one gift an entrepreneur can give themselves is space. 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. And here's the challenge with being an entrepreneur, we are driven to get everything done all at once and right away. And when I heard George say that, you know, it reinforces so much of what we coach to entrepreneurs and reinforces so much of what we talk to entrepreneurs about is that as an entrepreneur, once you start building a team, once you have your business off the ground, the more you can give yourself space for what's coming next. The more that you can lower the noise for yourself, the more that you can acquire space and time and spaciousness, the faster your business will actually grow. And I know this current counterintuitive, because here's what happens to us as entrepreneurs. When we start our business, we have to do everything in order to be successful. But doing everything in our business conditions us to do everything. It's actually like psychological conditioning because we actually got successful in the startup stage. We feel like now we have to stay in that place where we do everything, where we get everything done, where we're like pushing to have everything done. And here's the story that you're not story. Here's here's what George shared when he was talking about this, he said, You know, an entrepreneur in entrepreneurship and we try and get everything done all at once and right away. We try and hurry through things we try and like, do the second step before the first step. We don't prioritize, right? And George has a history in the military he's super proud of. And he said, you know, when he was leading people in the military, what he realized was when people treat anything with a sense of urgency, people die like in the military. He actually said, you know, one of the projects he was involved in, he had twenty two months of planning, seven months of deployment and execution. And so I'm not suggesting you do that as an entrepreneur, but that ratio shows you when you are in a real situation where people can live or die. There's a tremendous amount of planning and then you execute. And as entrepreneurs, we have this this like lack of planning urgency around everything, and I know this so intimately. I mean, for most of my career, I've driven through the all at once and right away plans like when you want something done yesterday. And for most of my career, I had a hard time prioritizing for most of my career. I had a hard time telling people what order they needed to do things and because I just wanted everything done. And the more I have allowed for space and spaciousness, the more I have given people enough time to actually get what they need done. And that's when things have gotten done. That's when that's when projects actually get knocked out of the park. That's when we really do extraordinary well as a company. That's when people are stressed out and things move forward and things happen for us. And you know, that was that was one experience I had with this subject lately, recently and then at another event I was at, I actually sat down at lunch to have lunch with a table of entrepreneurs, and I started talking to a woman sitting next to me and she said, Hey, you know, I heard you're like the scale guy and you help people grow businesses. You know, I've got my business to a million dollars and I'm I'm having this feeling like I'm just totally overwhelmed and I and I don't know how to grow to the next stage. And so I've just been adding things. And she told me she's and she, she said, and I said, What do you mean by adding things? She goes, Well, I recently signed up for this program. I signed up for another program that is going to get me speaking gigs and stages. And I signed up for this other coaching mastermind and I've added three or four projects in the company. I'm like, Whoa, whoa, time out. It sounds like you're trying to do everything all at once. And she's like, Well, you know, we got to a million and I know we can get higher and I want to grow the business. And I'm like, Why? Where's all this urgency coming from to do everything all at once? I said, You know, you've just named three or four outcomes that would take the average entrepreneur or an entire quarter to achieve and would probably be like anything they could focus on besides just running the business and you're doing them all at once. And she said, You know, I just I had this drive. This need to grow the business. I said, you know, I think you need to understand something about that. This is what I found and this is why I I'm working with entrepreneurs when we have urgency that we place on everything, when we overwhelm ourselves, when we make it difficult on ourselves, that's often a trauma response. And she looked at me kind of funny. She's like trauma response. I don't have trauma. And then we say I got into a brief conversation with her and I asked her some things about, you know, her life and her childhood. And like, is there periods of time she didn't remember? And is there things that you know when she thinks back to you, they make her uncomfortable? Are there periods in the present today where she's reactive in a way that she didn't want to be? And that, you know, is there the symptoms of having trauma? And her husband was sitting on the other side of me and he said, Well, you know, I don't think I have trauma either. And I said, you know, I think one of the big issues that we have as entrepreneurs is we think of trauma with a capital T. You know, we think of, well, my opinion, none of my parents died. I wasn't sexually molested. I've never had any big, massive issues. A lot of entrepreneurs have. But the ones who don't feel like they've had any type of trauma are usually ones who are thinking about it and being some big, huge thing. And oftentimes, you know, when I've worked with entrepreneurs, especially one on one, it's traumatic to have an absentee parent. It's traumatic to have a parent and express way too much from you. It's traumatic to have periods of your childhood where the stress level was so high that you couldn't remember it. And that trauma that we've had as children, that trauma that we have as entrepreneurs is why we can be entrepreneurs. And I know that sounds like a weird way to look at it. But when you look at this? Less than an average entrepreneur goes through on a daily basis. It's more than a typical person employed somewhere would have in weeks or months. And here's what I mean by that. We're deciding our own outcomes. We're determining where things are going. We're investing our resources. We're casting a vision for our team. We're driving an entire business, an entire enterprise forward. We're, you know, we feel some or have some responsibility for the people working in their company and being able to feed their family and pay their bills. And the average person just can withstand all those things. And the reason we are able to do it is because in by and large, because we are and we are physiology is accustomed to being in a high level stress. Our physiology is become accustomed to being overwhelmed. Our physiology, our bodies, our minds are accustomed to having way too much going on. And a lot of that comes from our childhood. A lot of that comes from growing up. And so what we don't understand about urgency is that when we apply urgency to everything like George said, you have high urgency in an emergency situation in the military, people die. Now that doesn't mean you don't act purposefully. That doesn't mean you don't act quickly. But when you treat things with a sense of overwhelming urgency, like so many entrepreneurs do, people actually die? And so for us as entrepreneurs, the thing for us to understand is the greatest. Like George says, the greatest gift we can give ourselves is space, space, space and spaciousness. Time to think preparing ourselves for what's coming next because there's always something coming next in our business. And here's what I've seen happen over and over again. See if this resonates for you. If you're an entrepreneur who's actually built a team and run a company as entrepreneurs, we will grow the business to the point where we need help. We hire help, but we're still doing as much as we were before. Then we grow the business a little more and we get more help. We have more people and we're still doing as much as we were before. And the dynamic happens in our business is that no matter how much help we need or how much help we get, we are always working as hard as we were before. If that's where you are, if that's what's going on for you, there's a better way to do this. There is. There's a better way to look at it. You know, here's what I suggested to the woman I sat down next to. I said, You know, I think you need to look at your business and actually analyze what the business needs said. Why are you signed up for this thing where people are going to get you speaking gigs and you're going to want to speak? Do you have a lead generation problem? She said. Now we have a lot of leads, we can barely handle all the things we have. So you can go out and speak and give yourself more leads. She's like, Yeah, that doesn't really make sense, does it? And so I ask the more questions I asked her. It was clear she had put projects on that on the table on. She brought projects into her company. She brought outcomes into her company because they felt like the right thing to do, and she was chasing shiny objects and for us as entrepreneurs. The more we bring projects in than we don't need, the more we chase the shiny objects, the more pain we cause ourselves and the more pain we create for our team. And so if you're an entrepreneur who's built a team? My suggestion is you analyze a company and you ask yourself, What is this company really need right now? Because if there's too much going on, you're going to overwhelm yourself. You're going to overwhelm your team and you keep yourself in that place of not being able to make better decisions when you're in a place of urgency, when the world is tactically overwhelming, that's when the pressure and noise goes through the roof for us as entrepreneurs. And so the more we can prioritize and actually pick exactly what we need to move us forward, that's when our companies grow. That's when we create the highest level of momentum. And when we, as entrepreneurs are constantly clearing space for what comes next. You'd be surprised at how quickly your company grows. In fact, I've coached hundreds of entrepreneurs. We worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs in the business that we have today showing people how to operate their companies. And when we can get entrepreneurs to pull back, stop overwhelming themselves, create spaciousness and space and stillness around them. That's when the company actually grows. And I know that feels paradoxical, that you do less to get more out of your business. But it's kind of like in racing where you have to slow down to go really fast. Same thing in a business, when you do less, you execute at a higher level, you get more done and you create way more momentum. Thanks for being here with me today. I appreciate you showing up. If you know somebody who needs to hear this message, please tag them or share this with them. And I appreciate your time.