Stop Tolerating and Create Momentum

This is the Momentum podcast.

I recently had a couple of conversations this week that reminded me of a challenge we have as entrepreneurs. We are almost hardwired to tolerate too much and tolerating too much can take us out of the game, take us away from our goals and cause us to have challenges getting to where we want to be. I want to help you with this podcast. If you've been tolerating too much and if you don't feel like you have. Listen. And you might discover what you have been.

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. Should 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.

So this week I had a couple of interesting conversations, one with some friends of mine that run a business and one with James Nielson, one who I recorded a podcast with him for his podcast. And, you know, in the first conversation with a friend of mine who run a business, they were telling me about somebody that they brought in to help them run their company. And they we had a conversation and I asked a bunch of questions. And basically, here's here's here's what they told me, that they have a person on their team who's helping them run their business. And she came in having been from another business and started working with them. And here's here's what they told me in a nutshell, that it was interesting because it took about a half hour to get to all of this. But then when I played it back to the two of them, the the female, and I'm not using their names because I don't have permission yet. But the the they're husband and wife team and the wife started crying because what they realized through our call is that they have someone helping them run their business that is not bought in that they run. An events company won't show up early to events to make sure that everything is done. They're the husband on the team is actually in there. They're at customer service software making sure that everything's getting done because he doesn't trust that it will be. They're having repeated issues, repeated mistakes, repeated challenges. And they this person is also fighting any type of accountability, any type of structure, any type of process, and wanting to just do things her way and. When I heard all that, I played it back like I just did for you. And that's where I got the emotional response, because here's what happens to us as entrepreneurs. See if this makes sense to you. Every one of us has been in a period of our lives where we see an outcome, where we see a destination, where we see somewhere we want to get to. And it's that tiny light at the end of the tunnel. And the people around us are saying, hey, you don't have enough time, you don't have enough money, you're not old enough. You're too young. You know you're too old. You don't have enough experience. You're over experience. Whatever the objection is from the world around us comes at us. And, you know, we're saying, Hey, but I see this light at the end of the tunnel and the people around us are like, Hey, that light might be a train, but if you think back through your history, you've been in exactly that situation. You've propelled yourself towards that light, you've compelled it towards you, you've stepped through that light. And that's exactly where you became who you are today. And that pattern of having done that, that pattern of having been through that pain actually sets us up to do it again. And I'll explain that in just a second. But first, I want to share what we talked about on Jamil's and Watch podcast. So he works with practitioners to help them grow businesses, and there's actually a lot of overlap in what the two of us do. And, you know, I've had a ton of practitioners come through our program chiropractors, functional medicine, doctors, alternative types of healers. And, you know, he was telling me, you know, do you see practitioners putting up with too much? Do you see? He asked me, Do you see practitioners who put up with too much who, you know, don't get the help that they need, and who just stay in a place of tolerating what they don't really want. In fact, you know, he said he was a chiropractor and he said that it took them like 5 to 7 years into his career before he realized he wanted to be doing something else. And that's why he's doing what he's doing today. And he said it took me quite a while. Well, you know, in the practitioner space and this is the same for some entrepreneurial spaces, I've seen practitioners in the same position for ten years, 15 years, 20 years, as much as 30 or 40 years, knowing that they want to do something else, but staying in that place of tolerating and hoping things will get better. And here's what I shared with James, is that, you know, we look at these stages of how much you're tolerating and these stages of kind of changes of feelings that you go through, these stages of animosity you go through to see if you stay in a place where you're tolerating too much. And this is this is kind of a litmus test for you. Are you tolerating too much in your business today? Because what happens is if you're tolerating too much, first you start developing animosity towards your company. You start thinking like, Oh, I just don't want to do this. And and maybe even the people working in the company in frustration with who the people are. And then you might even start to develop animosity for your industry, like chiropractors who get frustrated first with their chiropractic business, but then with the chiropractic industry, like, oh man, there's just, you know, I'm frustrated with everything. And then you start getting frustrated or you start getting developing animosity towards your customers or patients. I see this with practitioners all the time. First, they're frustrated with the practice, then they're frustrated with the industry. Then they finally crossover, being frustrated with their customers, with their patients. And then the fourth level and this one is the big one, is you start developing animosity towards yourself, you start developing negative self-talk, and you start having frustration about yourself and you start feeling bad about yourself and you start thinking that, you know, you're the one that's at fault, that you're not happy and you you're frustrated, and you you kind of stay in this place of tolerating way too much. And here's why. You know, when you look at that equation that I spelled out earlier about how we've all been through this period of time, where we've tolerated where we put up with things, where we finally broken through that conditions us to stay in that place of tolerating that actually conditions us to feel like if there's too much going on, if we're frustrated, if there's too much happening, then something good is about to happen. But here's something I want you to really think about. If we stay in a place that we're not happy, if we stay in a place where we're not in momentum, where we're feeling constrained. And remember, I define the entrepreneurial personality type as physiological, physiologically sensitive, momentum based beings that are highly reactive to constraint. I know that's me. And if you're listening to my podcast, it's probably you. Whether you're an entrepreneur in charge of a business or not, it doesn't matter. You are probably in that entrepreneurial personality type. And what I mean by physiologically sensitive is we feel things as entrepreneurs, we feel them in our bodies. In fact, when you look at entrepreneurs who are in constraint, you run that place of not being in momentum or not excited about what they're doing. We start to be fatigued. We start to have symptoms, we start to have diseases that you can label like chronic fatigue and Hashimoto's and Lyme disease and all kinds of other stuff that has come up, you know, autoimmune issues and autoimmune disorders and and A.D.D. and ADHD and Aspergers, so much more. And when we're in that place in momentum, it's amazing how those symptoms seem to just go away. And not only are we physiologically sensitive, we are momentum based beings. We live for momentum. We want momentum like the rest of the world wants oxygen, like we need to have it. And when we're out of momentum, we don't just feel it in our bodies. We feel a physiological, a cognitive and a chemical depression. So it's in our bodies, in our minds and in the chemicals, in our bodies, we actually feel that depression. And we are highly reactive to constraints. So that's the whole definition of the entrepreneur. No personality type physiologically sense of momentum based means that are highly reactive to constraint. Here's what I mean by that. When we feel constraint in our lives, when we feel held in place, when we feel like we're not moving forward, we're not doing what we want to do, we become reactive to that constraint. It shows up in everything we do. It shows up in how we treat other people. It shows up in how we look at our business. It shows up in how we look at our industry, shows up in how we look at our customers or your practitioner or your patient. And it shows up in how we look at ourselves. And so if you've been tolerating too much, if this resonates, if you're you're hearing flashes of how you've been feeling and what I'm saying, then I would suggest to you that maybe this is a time for you to do some thinking, maybe take a 20 minute walk and really think about what's going on and come back to a desk or a table or somewhere where you can write and write down everything that's been frustrating. You write down where you're feeling that constraint from. And if you if you write it all out, you will feel when you finally have it all down on the sheet of paper, because it's going to feel like relief. It's going to feel like a deep breath. It's going to feel like you finally have achieved a level of clarity. And if you don't if you don't feel those that relief, if you don't feel that level of clarity, then get up and go do it again. Go for another walk and then come back and keep writing. And here's what will happen for you. And what is happening for so many entrepreneurs that I've worked with is when you can take a step back and look at that sheet of paper and see all the things that you're tolerating. And I'm talking about tolerating the people around you, tolerating the places that you're going, the time that you're spending, the things that are in your life. Like what is it that's frustrating you? And I know it doesn't matter if it's something as huge as you don't really like your business right now or something as minor as the light switch in your office is broken, get it all out on a sheet of paper. It's all pressure and noise. It all affects us. We can't compartmentalize as entrepreneurs. We can pretend like we do, but the reality is we feel it all. And so get it all out on a sheet of paper, feel that relief, and then ask yourself the question What on this sheet of paper do I really need to tolerate? Want to tolerate what is getting me to hold to an outcome that I actually want? And what am I just putting up with? And be ruthless because this is binary. The things in your life are giving you momentum or they're taking them away and. Tolerating too much is a massive form of constraint that affects us everywhere. Once you have this sheet of paper written out, start marking things off. What are you going to eliminate from your life? What are you going to stop doing? What are you going to stop allowing in your life? What barriers and what boundaries are you going to put up so that these things don't affect you like they do anymore? And you will see your life and your business shift in a massively positive direction. And if you're in that place where your business has gotten frustrating, it's too much pressure and noise. Your team's gone to the place where you're frustrated with them. You're starting to develop that animosity towards the industry, towards your customers, maybe even towards yourself. Do not feel like it has to be that way. Reach out to us. Go to simple operations dot com. Fill out the short survey on our website and jump on a call with a member of our team so that we can show you how we help entrepreneurs overcome these feelings. Create the business that you really want. Get the help you need, and get back into momentum. It is my goal in life to help as many visionary entrepreneurs as I can get into momentum and stay there so that you can go out and make a massive impact in the world. So go to simple operation. Second, connect with us and we'd love to talk to you. And if this podcast meant something to you, do me a favor. Share it with another person that needs to hear it. Because in my experience, almost every entrepreneur out there who's doing incredible things in the world is also also tolerating way too much. And I want to help you. And I want to help them. Simple operations dot com. Thanks for checking us out. And if you end up getting on a call with us, we can't wait to talk to you.