One of the best books I’ve read recently is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. This book is so good that I facilitated a discussion session amongst my Inner Circle community on deciding what each of us was going to be unreasonable about in our businesses. And I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I can book a table at Eleven Madison Park during my visit to NY in May.
My book is covered in Post-it notes and highlighted paragraphs and one statement that stuck out for me was:
“Nobody knows what they’re doing before they do it.”
This resonates so much because every week I see women in business who are stuck in a rut simply because they are afraid that now is not the right time to take action. They don’t feel ready, they don’t trust in their expertise, and they don’t realise that up until this point, every decision they’ve ever made has been an uncertain one.
The truth is, things may work out, they may not, but you’re never going to find out if you don’t take action. You will never find the path to achieving your goals by refusing to take the first step.
I understand that trusting yourself can feel scary, but what’s scarier is the idea that you’ve put in all this hard work to get to where you are, and this is where it ends. There is more to your story, there is a legacy ready to be built, but you need to trust that even if you don’t know what you’re doing right now, that one day you will understand it perfectly. As Will puts it, “A black diamond is scary if you usually ski blues. But you’ll never advance if you always turn around to find an easier trail” The same applies to your business, and choosing to do things in a way you’ve never done before.
And guess what? Every inspirational person in your life is in the same boat.
The people who make millions in revenue had to go through stages where they didn’t know what they were doing. I remember going through one of these phases myself when Covid struck. At that point, I was ready to launch my book Be Brilliant, and in barely a moment’s notice, we had to completely change how we were going to do that. I didn’t know if it was going to work out, but now I’ve learned that there is more than one way to successfully launch a book. Throughout that year I also had to completely evolve and reshape my business model. It was a full twelve months of doing things that made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. In the first few months of Covid, we lost 80% of our revenue overnight and, like so many I had no idea what I would do to navigate the uncertain times. But we faced our fears, we asked for help, we stumbled through our business rethink plans and tactics, and recently posted the best annual figures ever in our business.
If we focus too much on what we don’t know at any given moment, it’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole and feel like an imposter.
But you aren’t an imposter.
You’re constantly learning.
And to grow a business you need to constantly be learning and experimenting for more.
So what can you do to stop focusing on what you don’t know and start relying on what you know for sure?