The Number One Thing You Need to be Doing to Have Success in Your Online Business

In this article, I want to talk to you about something that has been playing in my mind, and it's about discomfort. We all know that to be successful in our businesses, we have to go through discomfort, but I was out running the other day and I was in particular discomfort because I'm not very fit at the moment. And this thought just popped into my head:

Growth comes from actively engaging in discomfort.

Now I don't know if I've read that somewhere or if I just created it myself, but it was the active engagement in discomfort that I hadn't ever considered before. We actually have to embrace the idea of discomfort and welcome that idea to actually have success in our business.

So, I was thinking about it a little bit more, and I thought it's a little bit like, you know when you go to the beach, and you'd put your toe in the water and it's a little bit colder than what you had anticipated, and the sun's beating down on your skin, you're really really hot and you want to go for a swim but the water is icy cold. And there are three things you can do about it: One, you can just not go swimming. Two, you creep into the water, little by little, and, you never get used to the water temperature and it's just really excruciating the whole time.

Or the third thing you can do is just run straight in and dive through a wave and be embraced by that cold water. 

Now, what happens when we go in and we dive in the water and it's like we're icy cold all around us, it's like, gasping for air, because it's so cold, and you come up to the surface and you're breathing and you're panting and you're gasping and you think “What the hell did I do that for”, “I'm so uncomfortable.” And then something weird starts to happen. All of a sudden, it becomes less uncomfortable and more invigorating. And then what we realize is that the water is actually not that cold anymore, all of sudden it just feels really good, and you feel really alive. And that's exactly what it's like within our online businesses if we embrace discomfort.

One of the ways that I know our clients get really uncomfortable in their online businesses is looking for clients online. And so we talk about push and pull techniques, we teach them strategic organic techniques to be online looking for their perfect clients and they get really uncomfortable with it.

There are three things that they can do: One, they either don't do it at all; two, they kinda half-hearted do it and they never really get good at it, it's always really uncomfortable; or three, they just dive straight in, and they immerse themselves in that discomfort. They get in there and then they get better at it. And then, all of a sudden it's not uncomfortable at all. They realize that what they're doing is helping people. And the people who are out there that are looking for them, are finding them and coming to them, and all of a sudden they're booking people, into their calendar, and booking people into their program. So that's what happens when you embrace discomfort.

Now I want to talk about what happens when you don't embrace discomfort, okay? So Ray Dalio, who wrote a book where he talked about something called the “Order of Consequences”.

According to his book, when you do something or you choose to do something, there's a series of consequences.

There's the first order consequence, the second order consequence, the third order consequence and so on.

For instance, the first order consequence of deciding not to go swimming at all, or not to do what you need to be doing to find prospects online for your business, is that you feel really good. Okay, the thought was stressing you out and you just felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. So you decided to not do it at all. And then you felt really good, it's like “Thank God, I don't have to do it”.

Second order consequence, probably, is positive as well. You wake up in the morning, you turn your computer on, and you don't feel stressed.

However, the third order consequence is that you don't have people to talk to, you don't have people on your calendar, you don't have people finding you, because you're not out there, right?

Fourth order consequence is that your bank balance is going down. Bills are starting to pile up and then you're starting to get stressed now for a totally different reason. You are no longer stressed about having to talk to people. Now you're stressed about the fact that you don't have enough money.

Fifth order consequence, your house is being repossessed. You can't look your family in the eye because you know that you chose not to do the hard thing, and that's why you're in this mess.

Now let's reverse that. Let's look about the Order of Consequence. If you do number three, you dive right in and you embrace that discomfort. Yeah, you're going to feel like crap, initially. It is uncomfortable, that's what embracing discomfort is all about, getting outta your comfort zone. So you get a bit, “Oh my God, did I say the right thing?”

I remember when we started out, I did three comments. And then, I got blocked from posting on Facebook for 24 hours. To this day, I don't know what I did. Really, I felt like crap that night. I was like, “I can't do this!” But, as soon as I got unblocked, I got back in there.

The first order consequence is that you don't feel great. You're awkward, you're uncomfortable, you're not sure what to say. Second order consequence, you don't want to get on there and do it. But you make yourself do it because you know that that's how you're going to find your perfect client. Third order consequence is that people start coming to you and asking you for advice. People start messaging you and asking you what you're doing.

By putting yourself out there, by diving straight in, you're putting yourself out there as the person that could help them, they're going to start to come to you.

Fourth order consequence, people are booking on to your calendar. All of a sudden you're really busy. Fifth order consequence, you got a thriving business, you're too busy. You're having to outsource, bring other people in to help you. Sixth order consequence, you got more money than you know what to do with. You're taking your family on fantastic holidays, you upgrade your house. You get a beautiful new car for your wife or husband, and they don't have to work anymore if they don't want to. That's what happens when you actively embrace discomfort. So, don't think about the short-term consequence, think about the long-term consequence.

Some of you reading this might be thinking, “You know, I want to do that.” “I want to embrace discomfort, but I just don't know what I'm doing”. Or you've been actively embracing discomfort for so long but obviously what you're doing isn't working.

If that is you, I wanted to let you know that Steph and I have recently launched our Boomers Membership.

Now we're in the Beta Member phase. We've got some content in our course. We're working more closely one on one with people because we haven't finished producing our content to videos and things like that. It also means that, obviously, our pricing is lower. If you are looking for someone to show you what to do online, it's a perfect time to get into that. But even without wanting to get into Boomers membership with us, we are offering free strategy course. We look at your business and help you. And that is like a no pressure situation.

What we do is we go through your business. We look at what you currently do now,.and just give you some pointers. It goes for 45 minutes so we can't give you everything that's in our membership but we can give you some pointers on what you're doing and point you in the right direction, sometimes that's all people need.

I hope you got some value from this article.

At Social Media Bomb, we specialise in teaching coaches how to build the online-marketing machine that will allow them to grow a predictable, sustainable and scalable income. If you would like to talk to me about how we can help you, just click this link so you can choose a time to have a chat: https://go.oncehub.com/DonnaJoy