Pain line

In yesterday’s newsletter I mentioned hitting a ‘pain line’, which I - like all my friends in business - have and will experience at some point.

Sorry for keep referring to this particular book ‘Buy Back Your Time’ but Dan Martell describes it so well and I’m finally piecing together why I made certain moves in the past.

He wrote (summarised shorter version):

“When you hit your own Pain Line - where the daily pain of working on tasks and projects you hate it too great - you either change or you stop growing. Your growth halts because of an emergency, or, more likely, you subconsciously stop your own growth by doing one of three things:

1 Sell

Entrepreneurs can grind so hard that their drive and passion for their business diminishes to extinction. If you truly want to sell, sell, but on your terms. Don’t just sell because you feel desperate to get out of a bad situation.

2 Sabotage

• You suddenly decide to launch a new product or line of business.

• You urgently feel the need to overhaul your website.

• You keep replacing key team players for small mistakes.

• You drag your feet on business decisions until the opportunity slides by.

Entrepreneurs don’t usually recognise when they’re self-sabotaging. Every time they reach their Pain Line, they sabotage their company’s growth until it gets back to a level they can safely oversee. They make sudden unnecessarily dramatic decisions.

3 Stall

Stalling is what happens when you confess, I’d rather have a smaller company. It’s making a conscious decision not to grow. When you’re so overwhelmed managing your current company’s size, growth can feel downright exhausting.

Here’s the dirty secret about stalling: a decision to not grow is a decision to slowly die. Growth isn’t just necessary for expansion. Growth is necessary for survival.“

Looking back on my almost fifteen years in business, I have experienced and done all three…. Not a great score.

My reasons for getting stuck multiple times were because I tried keeping too much control on what everyone was doing, involving myself in every project and considering myself more important than I actually was.

Yes, I have earned a bit of cash, built a team etc. but it’s not a sustainable way for me to keep going and actually achieving what I envision.

I’m glad that I now finally understand why I felt and acted this way in the past so I can prevent this from happening again and continue working on what I love!

✅ 6/100

PS have you experienced hitting your pain line in business before?