The Myth of the Perfect Time (and What to Do Instead) | 044

Sharon Galluzzo: 00:00:00

Welcome back. Today, we're going to talk about something that happens a lot during this time of the year when I'm recording this. This is the end of the year. This is November, December timeframe, fourth quarter, and it's the time that business owners put the brakes on. They say, Wait,

Sharon Galluzzo: 00:00:21

I'm going to wait until the holidays are over. I'm going to wait until things slow down. I am going to just wait until things feel a little bit better. This happens all year long. Honestly, the waiting until the next thing. It happens a lot at this time of year. It happens a lot when there are economic

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pressures around it happens when we start thinking, I need to wait for the perfect time. I need to, you know, just just, it's, it's not quite right. Let's just put it off a little bit longer. And here's the truth, you don't need the perfect time. You only need a starting point. Go ahead, start

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imperfect, keep moving, because here's the truth, whatever you're doing now in your business is going to determine how your business rolls out for the next month, two months, three months. So if what you're doing now is waiting in your business, then the waiting pattern is going to follow you

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for another month, two months, three months. So a quarter of the year you could be losing by sitting around waiting for the perfect time. Here's the thing, there is no perfect time. There is no time that's going to magically just appear and be, oh, that's it. It's time for me to step through the doorway and

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do that thing. It's time for me now to start promoting my business. It's time for me now to reach out to those clients. It's time for me now to fill in the blank. There is no perfect time. The perfect time is now putting your efforts, putting your focus, doing the things that need to be done in your

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business need to be done now they they aren't things that that you can wait on. And this is, it's just it. This is a universal experience, so I don't want to come out of the gate. I came out of the gate kind of hard, like, don't wait, stop putting brakes on your business. And this is something that every

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business owner experiences, unless you've been in business for a really long time and you've clearly understand all of the patterns that happen throughout your year. What are your when are you busy? When are you slow? What's going on in your business on a regular basis? Unless you have a really

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clear picture of that, you don't really know what's going on. And even when you have that really clear picture, you know all of your seasons. You know your busy times. You know when it's going to be slow. You know when you work. Need to work on this thing in your business. You need to know. You know when you should

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be, you know, educating and building in more more things, even when you know that things shift, things change, so the waiting until the perfect time is what's going to cause you to stop. And I don't mean that you you're not doing anything, but here is the price of that fallacy of waiting for the

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perfect time, of putting off the things that you should do in your business until later. My kids crack me up because they started saying this thing that's, that's, that's a, how do they say it? That's a problem for the for my future self, ah, it is a problem for your future self. That that's what happens.

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And here's the other thing that happens when you're waiting, things don't get easier when you are resisting what you know you need to do in your business, you actually erode your confidence. Because as time passes, doubt enters, questions come up, things come into your space that actually erode your confidence.

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If you had made the decision and stepped forward into that decision when it was presented to you, you would have you might have had some Yeah, is this the right decision? Decision to make. However, the confidence of knowing that making this decision, taking that step, moving your business forward, is

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actually, is actually much stronger at that moment. And the longer you wait, the longer you ponder, the more analysis paralysis by analysis. The more analysis that you do, the more doubts creep in, and the more that you actually pull away from the things that you know you need to do in your business. And

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and there's, you know, this is sort of human nature. This is kind of the a thing that's been built up. You know, whenever we were surviving in the wild, you know, waiting to make sure that all of the crunching in the forest is gone, that there's no one creeping around that's going to eat you right? There's no

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saber tooth tiger outside the the the entrance to the cave. It's like the wall of the cave, the entrance to the cave, right, so that they're, they're, they're reasons that that we pull back, that we're waiting for the perfect time, that we're, you know, anxious and careful about taking the next

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step. Because it used to mean that it was, it was our life, that was a life and death, choice and those things cling to us, and they it. When it comes to business, it actually creates a dynamic where you become stuck, where you become so entrenched in that waiting mode, in that perfect time, in the

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it'll it, I'm just gonna put it off until when you get stuck in that it's like, it's like the tar pits. I recently went out to California and we visited the La Brea Tar Pits. I had heard about them my whole entire life, and I was so excited to go. And my friend was like, Well, I don't know if it's that exciting. We

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went, and it was actually really cool. So go, if you get a chance. The coolest thing is that those tar pits are still bubbling. That same tar that trapped the dinosaurs 1000s of years ago is still bubbling. It is still trapping critters inside it, if they happen to land in that tar and that's what

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waiting, that's what waiting for the perfect time. That's what putting it off until. That is the environment that you're putting your business in. It's it's stuck, it's mucky. It's not moving forward. And the effort that it will take you to pull yourself out of the waiting mode is so enormous that in it, in

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and of itself, creates an overwhelmed feeling. I've waited so long, I just don't know how to begin. I've waited so long, maybe it's not the right thing anymore. I have put this off, and now it's a Herculean effort to move forward. So what we do? We cling to later, right? So there's a number of reasons why

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we do this. I talked a little bit about, you know, the saber toothed tiger outside of the cave opening, but more practically for us is the fear of doing it wrong. How many times have you thought, I'll wait till I'm better at it? I need to get more information. I need more training. I need to

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make sure that what I'm doing is what I actually need to be doing, and the fear of doing it wrong keeps you in stasis. It keeps you in place, and it keeps you from moving forward. That fear is often not actually valid. When you move forward, right? Sometimes you're you're procrastinating on something. I

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know this has happened to me, and I procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinating. When I finally do it, it takes me 15 minutes, and I've been procrastinating on it for six months.

Sharon Galluzzo: 00:09:18

I could have had it done in in 15 minutes. It's okay to do it imperfectly. It is imperfect action. Trump's perfect planning. Every single time your business will move forward with imperfect action. Yes, you have to make adjustments. Yes, you may have to, you know, scooch it this way, or do that thing

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differently, but by actually doing it, you find out what works and what doesn't. So the fear of doing it wrong actually keeps you stuck, because you stay in that fear of doing it wrong. And so in order to not do it wrong, you do nothing. And the actual result of you doing nothing. It is worse than had

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you stepped out and made, made a wrong step, or done it imperfectly and figured out how to do it right? Another thing that comes up in this area is overwhelm disguised as planning. Right? We are just going to, I'm just going to plan it out. I'm just going to think about it some more, and I'm gonna, I'm

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gonna write a chart, I'm gonna go to chat GPT, and I'm gonna have it, give me a plan, and I'm gonna keep, keep digging, and I'm gonna keep planning. And honestly, that planning mode for a lot of people is a safe space, right? That's where we kind of hide. We hide out in the I'm just gonna keep planning it. I'm

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going to work it out, I'm going to do some more I'm going to do some more research, I'm going to look at a few more things, and then, as we're doing that, planning, it actually creates an overwhelm, because now you've looked at all of the angles of ways it can go wrong. You've looked at all the ways that you

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might not know or have all of the information, and all of that information can create an overwhelming experience that will also keep you stuck. The third thing is, I'm just going to say it the illusion of control, if I am in control of it, I can determine when the perfect time is to move, and I

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am in control of everything. And the piece that we get stuck on when we think that we're in control, but we're actually keeping ourselves stuck is that it's not it's not real. The thing that you're actually in control of is moving your business forward, actually taking those steps, actually

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doing the things that your business requires you to do for you to be successful. So there it the control. Actually, you're not really in control of moving your business forward. If you're holding yourself back by trying to say that you're in control, the control piece that you really want to do is the control

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of the confidence to take that next step and move into the new version of yourself. Move into the new version of your business. Move into that tool that's going to help you hire that coach, move into mentoring other people, whatever that looks like in your business. The the control that you think you

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have actually is an illusion. What you do control is your actions. So make the decision to go ahead and take the action. And the other thing that comes up is absolute and complete burnout and fatigue, because when we are we are putting so much energy into staying right where we are, that we actually

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are burning ourselves out. It is really, really hard sometimes to to stay where you are, to keep fending off all those things that are going to help our our businesses grow, whenever we we we are using that as a coping mechanism that is keeping us stuck in our business and unable to move forward. And like I

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said, these four things we run into all the time, we have conditioned ourselves to look at it from the from that point of view, so that it feels okay, it feels safe, and it actually that feeling of I'm keeping myself safe is also that the the result of keeping myself safe is that we do not move, we do not grow,

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and we do not become more successful because we can't. We have restricted ourselves to staying exactly where we are. And the fact of the matter is that when we do that to ourselves, when we have dreams, when we have things that we need to accomplish, when we have a business that we know that we

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can grow and a difference that we can make, and we are holding ourselves back. We're actually eroding our confidence. We're eroding our we're eroding our values. We're eroding the mission that we have to help other people. When we hold ourselves back, and we stay in, in a place where we feel safe

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because it's not safe to step outside the cave walls, the cave door, when that's not safe, we stay in, and that actually has the opposite effect of what we want to have in our business. Is another thing that happens whenever we are sitting in that waiting until later pattern is that we're waiting for things to

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calm down. We're waiting for the chaos to stop. And here's the thing, the chaos doesn't disappear, and most of the time it grows, it becomes even more chaotic around that decision that you're not making because it you're opening yourself up to allow doubts and fears and thoughts and all of those things

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to come into your mental space, and then in the physical space as you're, you know, in your actual business, there are things that are changing. There have been times whenever I was like, Oh, this is such a great idea. I should do this in my business. And then I went into waiting mode, and I waited, and

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I thought about it, and I thought, I pondered it, and I did some research, and I waited some more, and eventually that opportunity went away completely. There no longer was an opportunity because I didn't grab it when it was available to me. And had I stepped in with confidence, into to new things,

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I would have been further ahead in my business. But because I waited, because I wasn't I wasn't sure. I let, I'm like, it's not the right time. I don't understand. I i Let all the chaos in wait till I get all the cobwebs out of the way. Then I'll do it. And once I got to the point where I'm, oh, I get

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it. Now the cobwebs are gone. So was the opportunity. And that happens very often.

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And the other thing that happens is, I love this. I love this example from the book, Good to Great. It's the flywheel principle. I've talked about this before that this is there's this big, giant heavy flywheel, and it takes enormous effort to get it around the first time, and then enormous effort to get

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it around the second time and the third time and the fourth time. However, the more that you do it, the more momentum builds up, and the more momentum builds up, the easier it is to move. And eventually it will actually be moving on its own because it's created its own momentum. It's kind of like that whenever

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we go into waiting mode, when we're in waiting for that perfect time, because the lifting becomes so much heavier. It goes from having a having an opportunity and stepping into it. The longer we delay, the longer we put it off, the heavier that first lift is, the bigger that first step becomes

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because of that long delay. Later is not a time, it's a pattern. And I encourage you to look at your business, look at your life, and see where those things are coming up, where you are waiting for later. You're waiting for the perfect time. You're not taking action, and just see, is this a pattern in

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more than just your business? Very often those patterns show up in everything that we do. If you wanted to go and start a new hobby or join a new social group, and you put it off and you put it off and you put it off because, oh, you're not sure it's not the perfect time. I don't know how I feel today, I

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want to do a little more research. Is this really the right thing for me to be doing, if it shows up whenever you are making plans with your family, are there times when you are just keep putting it off and waiting for the perfect time, or even more, picking up the phone and calling someone, picking up

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the phone and calling your friends and family? Oh, it's not the right time. They might be busy. Oh, I don't know what they're doing. Oh, I'm busy now. I forgot about it. My sisters have this thing that they say to me all the time. They're like, I didn't want to call you. I thought maybe you'd be busy. And

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no matter how many times I tell them, if I'm busy, I won't pick up the phone, they still say to me, I thought you might be busy. So if it is showing up in different areas of your life, this pattern of waiting, this pattern of it's not the right time I'm waiting for it to be more perfect. If it's showing up

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in more than one place in your life, then this has become a pattern, and I encourage you to confront all of those things and recognize where you are actually holding yourself back, not only your in your business, but in your entire life. So here we, here's what we here's what we can do. Right? I've talked about

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the challenges. We know what's happening, we're recognizing. It, we see the pattern. So what can you do? You know, I am all about micro strategies. Small things lead to big changes, making one small change, taking one small step, doing one small thing differently, will put you on a path to doing the next

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small thing and the next small thing, and those small things actually create an enormous impact in your business. So identify the smallest next step that you can see, and that next step really step back and look at it. If that next step is, well, I need to do more research on it, or I need to do some more

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analysis. I need to research a bit if your next step is a holding pattern step, then that's not the next visible step. The next visible step is an actual action you take towards that goal, towards that next thing that you want to do in your business, so identify, not the whole plan, everything

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that you need to do, because that's another thing that happens is, oh, I need to start a podcast. Well, let's see. I need to research what kind of guests I can have. I need to get a microphone. I need to I need to get a somebody to edit my videos. I needed a million tiny little things that have to be

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done. Yes, there are a lot of steps to starting a podcast. However, you just need to identify the next step, not all of the steps that need to be done. You don't need to figure out everything from the first moment you need to identify the next visible step and then take that action. So here's my

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challenge for you. I want you to set a mini micro commitment for the next seven days, something that's so small it that it's possible for you to do it's not impossible, and do five minutes, five minutes a day. So pick a task of one small thing that you can do over the next seven days that's going to take you five

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minutes a day towards the next goal that you have micro strategies. So take that next small step. Day one, take the next step. Day two, the next small step. Day three, and so on, making one week of tiny changes and see how that moves you forward. See what that does to getting you closer to your

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goal. Because this is what I know. When you are in action, things change. Nothing changes until you move. Every time you stay where you are, you stay where you are. I watched the movie who What's Eating Gilbert Grape, years and years ago, and there is a character in What's Eating Gilbert Grape his mother,

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and his mother is in mourning, and she cannot move on from her loss, and she stays on the couch all of the time. She does not move off the couch, and because she never moves. The character in the movie is stuck for nearly the entirety of the movie. She literally cannot move past where she is. That is what happens

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when we when we stay stuck, making small changes, even if they're tiny, little changes will actually get the energy moving, the process going. And you actually can step forward into the next thing. So seven day commitment, five minutes a day, one next visible step, and it can be very, very tiny. And

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then the third thing that I want you to do is I want you to celebrate, celebrate progress, not perfection. I like to say, we celebrate all wins around here, especially tiny wins, small wins. I got out of bed and got in the shower without scrolling on social media for 45 minutes. That's a small win. So

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for some people, that might be a pretty big win. Whatever you are thinking about your life, about what's going on in your business, identify the small wins. You picked up the phone and called a client. Congratulations. That's a big win. It feels like a small win, and it's a big win. And you

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know, you read, you replied to an email, instead of just, you know, putting it down at the bottom of your of your laptop and and looking at it a week from now, every small. Small thing that you do needs to be celebrated. Because what we do see, here's what we do as human beings. We go, oh, we can

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celebrate when it's done. Well, I'll celebrate when I get there. I'll celebrate when I cross the finish line. Instead of celebrating every step that that you took to get to the finish line, every mile post that you passed along the way, because all of those things are important. Because if you didn't

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do anything and you stayed stuck and you stayed waiting for perfect there would be nothing to celebrate, because you wouldn't be moving. So go ahead and celebrate those small wins. Celebrate every day the things that you accomplished, even if it was you were already planning on doing it, it's still okay to

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celebrate every small win.

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So the the thing that I want you to take away from this is that we need to be in action. And the other piece is we need to be consistently in action. So doing the small things and doing them consistently. That's why it's a seven day challenge. One thing every single day, one small thing, because what happens is,

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when we start doing one thing every day, we build up that momentum, the flywheel starts to move, even if it's on a different thing than you're working on. Did you know that if you will focus on getting things done in your business while you while you're doing everything else, but you say you

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procrastinated on something and you start working on that area of your business. As you're making positive progress towards those goals, everything else improves as well. It's a really interesting dynamic. I found that in my business, if I'm doing the things that I need to be doing, then clients find me,

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if I'm doing the things I need to be doing, then I am getting back the, you know, the sales. I'm getting back the consistency on the other end. So being consistent in running your business actually creates an energy where the things that you need come to you because you're doing the things that you need

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to do. So imperfect action today is more powerful than perfect action someday, because let's be honest, there will never be perfect action that you can take. Go ahead, make the imperfect action. Move yourself a little bit every single day towards those goals that are going to make the difference in

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your business. And thank you for joining me for this podcast. As you know, we have a club. It's called the profit connectors dot club. That's the website profit connectors dot club, because you're the ones making the connection. If you go to the profit connectors dot club page, you can get all of, of course,

Sharon Galluzzo: 00:28:10

all of the recordings of our podcasts and all of the gifts from our guests. You can find out if you if we had a guest that you really enjoyed listening to and you want to get in contact with them. Their information is there. If you want to find out more about our guests, if you want to find out

Sharon Galluzzo: 00:28:25

more about me and what I do, all of that information is available on profit connectors, dot club. That's profit connect doors, dot, C, l, u, B, and you can go into the club. It's free to join, and you can get all of that information there. Thank you so much for joining me. You keep showing up your future self

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will thank you, and remember it's your impact. Go. Make it matter.