Episode 429: When you feel like you're failing at business
In this quick tip episode, Fiona explores the idea of hardships in business. Drawing inspiration from the Netflix show "One Day," we reflect on the journey of overcoming challenges and finding hope. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Overview and praise for the Netflix show "One Day"
A personal reflection on grief and its parallels to business challenges
The concept of overcoming difficult tasks in business
Encouragement for listeners facing current hardships
Get in touch with My Daily Business
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Welcome to episode 429 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today's one that I've had to come to grips with myself, let alone teach other people. I don't think that you ever fully arrived at a place where you don't have to learn this again, but I just thought it was such a good one for a quick tip episode. But before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and the traditional owners and custodians of these lands. And that for me in North Warrandyte is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. I also wanted to let you know that group coaching is open. This will be the last round of Group Coaching that we run starting this year in 2024.
If you're reading this in other years, you can always just go to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and see when we are next launching it. But this is a 12-month program. We work with you, myself, and a small group of other curated small business owners. It's such a beautiful environment to be able to connect, to share, to have a community around you. I know that so many people work by themselves, or maybe they've got a team, but the team's completely remote, or maybe they've got a team and they don't feel that they can be completely open about all the stuff that is going on behind the scenes in the business. This is a safe space for you to do that, to connect and to share and to learn and all the things. If you're interested in joining that, you can head on over now and join, apply, and then you and I sit down and do a Zoom call together so you can join from anywhere in the world. We've often had people from the US, Europe, New Zealand, from all sorts of places that join, in addition of course to many Australians. If you're interested in that, head on over and apply at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. We will link to that in the show notes as well. But you can also just go to mydailybusiness.com and find a whole bunch of things including Group Coaching in the shop menu. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
I was recently watching one of the best shows that I have watched by myself, I should say. I didn't watch it with my husband, although I think he would've liked it, but I just started watching it and I was like I don’t know if this is for him as well. It is honestly one of the best shows I've watched in ages. It is the perfect blend of lightheartedness, drama, romance, comedy, nostalgia, and all the things it is called One Day. I know I'm late to the party. If you are ever on TikTok, you probably would've seen One Day making the rounds eight months ago. I believe it's based on the book by David Nicholls and it's been made into a Netflix show and it is worth watching.
I have to say, I tend to watch these sorts of shows on YouTube or whenever I mention that I'm watching things often, I'm doing that at the same time as something else. I didn't watch it in one day. I watched it over a couple of months, and I did it mainly while I was cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry or folding 10,000 towels or putting together socks. The point is, it's a good show. It's romantic, it's all the things. As somebody who is in their forties, I also found the soundtrack incredible. I now listen to the soundtrack on Spotify a lot because I just love every single song every time. I was like, perfect song choice. The point of this is that there is a scene in either the last episode or the second last episode, can't remember which, and the main character is narrating and saying, without giving too much away, that life can seem incredibly hard and that every day can feel as hard as the next day.
Then there's a note, and I guess this is where the whole subject and the title come from, but there's a note at the end. She's saying, you can sit and you can be in this head space and you can feel that everything is crap, and it'll be like this day after day after day, and then until one day you wake up and it's not as hard, and then it progressively gets less hard as you go on. It made me think about so many things in my life. I paused the show because I was so moved by that narration and by that poignant way of summing things up that sometimes things feel so incredibly hard and you wonder how you are ever going to make it through. And then one day somebody asks you about that, or you have to think about that particular thing or person or experience, and you're not consumed with tears or emotion because you have almost somehow passed into that next phase where it's almost like you've got to the pinnacle of a mountain and now you're going down the other side.
I have to be clear, I wasn't thinking about business originally when I heard it and I paused it, I immediately thought of the grief that I went through after my mother passed away very suddenly in 2017. I thought, I can talk about her and remember her and remember happy moments or remember something funny she would've said, and I can talk about it right now, and I have no tears coming up. I have no shake in my voice and I've got to that point. And of course that doesn't mean that every time I think about her, I don't cry or I'm human. I think once you experience that, and if you've had a great relationship with a loved one and then they pass on, it's always going to be sad to some degree.
But there will be a moment, there will be a day, there will be that one day when you realise, I'm coming out the other side of this and I can go through it. And then it made me think about business and about how often we sit with tasks or have to confront situations that we've never had to do before. Because when you run a business, you are constantly coming up against things you've never had to do when you were employed by somebody else. And it's hard. It can be hard, and you can think, I am never going to get the hang of this. I'm never going to feel comfortable on camera. I'm never going to freak out before I have to do a public speaking event. Or I'm never going to figure out the tech behind editing a video or editing a podcast or putting myself out there, or I'm never going to get going to it's never going to get easier to let somebody go.
I'm not saying that any of those things get easy necessarily, but they can get easier because you get more comfortable with them, and you have more practice doing them. Today's tip is to remember that one day, in terms of what I've just talked about and this series on Netflix narration will come and it can feel incredibly difficult when you are in the thick of it to think that that will just, it's incredibly difficult to even imagine a day when it's not as hard and as difficult, but it will come. And what I would love you to do is if you are thinking like that right now, maybe something is hard. Maybe you're going through a real hardship when it comes to finances right now and perhaps thinking back to another time in your life when you were in that same position or a similar one and you got through to that one day where that pinnacle starts going downhill instead of always uphill can be hugely beneficial.
I have had many experiences in business where I've looked back and gone, that thing that I was so worried about or that used to freak me out or that I used to sweat buckets about is just a part of business now. And it's not something that I get super freaked out over or worried about, or that causes me to wake up at 2:00 AM stressing over. I know that everyone who's reading this has gone through those same things, whether even if you've just started a business, maybe you haven't gone through that in business, but you've gone through it in an employed role, or maybe you've gone through something in your life, in your personal life that has shaken everything like I was talking about in terms of my mom's sudden passing. And you think at the time there will never be a one day where this doesn't feel as heavy and as full on as it is right now.
But I guess that reminder that came from that great Netflix show was that we all get to that point where you reach the pinnacle of the mountain and all of the hardness starts getting a little bit easier. It's not like you just come sliding down that mountain and everything's fine again and and that mountain will come back up in your life inevitably and in your business. But today it's about thinking if you're in that space right this minute, what are the one days that you've gone through previously, whether in business or your personal life? And then remind yourself that you will get through this just as you've got through everything else. That is it for today's quick tip episode. If you want to go through it in text format or you want to see the link to the Netflix show that I'm talking about, you can find the podcast show notes for this over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/429. If you want to join Group Coaching, it is open now and interviews will start very soon. You can find all the information at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
