Episode 83: Small Business Tips: A Quick-Tip for Overthinking - Apply The 5-Second Rule from Mel Robbins
If you’re the type of small business owner who has a tendency to overthink, it can feel challenging to run a business or to contemplate doing do more when you’re blocked by hesitation and doubt. In this quick tip episode, Fiona shares how the 5-Second Rule has helped her become more productive at work and why everyone should try this method by Mel Robbins in their business!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Mel Robbins - 5-Second Rule
How Fiona applied it
Conclusion
Resources mentioned in this episode
Episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to Episode 83 of My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today, it is a Tuesday. That means it's Tip Tuesday and now I kind of just sit it like that tip Tuesday. But it is a short podcast episode. This is where I share a tip tool or tactic to really help you with your small business.
Now, if you are just tuning in for the first time or maybe, you know, this is episode two that you're listening to. Thank you so much. Please make sure that you hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any of the other future tips or my longer coaching episodes or my interviews with just the most incredible small business owners across the globe. And as always, if you'd like to connect, you can do that via Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach or drop us an email. Be old school – hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. All right, let's get stuck into today's tip tool or tactic.
All right, so what do you think is the hardest thing about running your own business, just, you know, give yourself a second answer that I feel that the thing that's hardest about running a business is literally just doing the work. Like, it can't get much more simple. And, you know, that is calling people, you know, calling the people you need to call, following up customer queries, feeding the content based, showing up to meetings, managing sometimes difficult staff, cultivating a great culture in your team, getting out of bed when it is dark and cold and you just can't be bothered working on the tedious parts, tracking the numbers generally, you know, just doing the things that need to get done today so that you can have a business tomorrow. But the other kind of flip side to that is what's the biggest thing that gets in the way of doing the work?
I believe and after working with so many small business owners, it's overthinking things, you know, am I right? #AmIRight? Do you feel this way? I know I'm not alone because I've talked to so many small business owners and we really can overthink things instead of just sort of getting on and doing it. And I know that I suffer from overthinking that then turns into procrastination and that old “I'll think about it a little bit more and I'll get to it sometime later today”.
But then, like the ten minutes that you gave yourself to think turns into an hour and before you know it, you're like sidetracked because now you've gone down a YouTube rabbit hole or you're sidetracked by emails or customers or just that absolutely amazing Instagram feed that you needed to suddenly go and have a scroll on. And I've discovered that one quick way to kind of beat that procrastination and kind of beat that overthinking. And I thought I'd share it because, you know, today is a quick tip tool or tactic. And this is definitely a tool that I used. And I have seen real results in my business after using it. It is something I should actually call out my friend. Faustina was the one who put me onto this using years ago, and it's a book called The Five Second Rule by US Author and Personality (I think she has our own TV show now) Mel Robbins, and that came out in early 2017. And of course, we'll link to that book in the shownotes.
But the basic premise of the book is that by counting backwards from five to one, so five, four, three, two, one, we can trick our brains into switching gears from kind of anxiety or procrastination into taking action. And Mel Robbins kind of came up with the idea during one of the darkest periods of her life. She talks about it in the book and she's shared it many times. You can just YouTube Mel Robbins 5-second Rule and you'll find it.
But basically, she was 41. She was unemployed. She was facing significant marital and financial challenges, and she was unable to kind of get up in the morning to get her kids to school on time. And at the end of every day, she'd sort of say to herself, tomorrow, I'm going to do it, tomorrow, I'm going to be better.
And she wouldn't. The same thing would happen to alarm would go off. She'd just press snooze and she just really couldn't be bothered. And she saw an advert on TV one night with, like a rocket kind of launching. And she promised herself, the next day I'm going to launch myself out of bed like, you know, like the Rockets and NASA. And so she said, I'm going to do it in the next day. She got up and she counted five, four, three, two, one, and she stood up. And just that simple act of not overthinking it, not thinking, “oh, my life's a complete mess right now. What's the point?” That simple act like five, four, three, two, one. Just do the action. In her case, getting up out of bed was enough to lead to significant changes.
So I have been using this in so many different ways. I remember early on I was getting ready to drive to Daylesford. I was doing a workshop there and I was doing kind of it was very early in Instagram story days and I hadn't really done an Instagram story with my face to camera. And I kind of thought, “OK, it's six a.m. in the morning. But you know what? I've got up. I've done my hair. I feel good. I'm in a dress that I love. And I'm just going to, you know, just go on. I'm going to what can I say that's valuable to people? Because I don't want to just be doing stories for the sake of doing stories.” And I literally counted down five, four, three, two, one. And by the time I got to one, I had my phone camera turned on. I hit the record button and literally just put it up. And I remember turning my phone off because I was like, damn, it's out in the world, dun dun dun. And when I turn my phone back on, I had seventeen direct messages. It had more than three hundred and forty views and two people had contacted me directly to begin work. And today that was one of the the scariest stories that I've put up because it was my first time.
And, you know, no one wants to be on camera looking weird, especially somebody who does what I do. And I work in the marketing space. But yeah, I just went five, four, three, two, one, and I did it and I didn't overthink things. And a fellow business friend reached out to me another time and she kind of. Relaying some work issues she was having and I asked if there was anything I could do, and she kind of replied that, well, maybe if you could help me set up an email platform and like, I could have just sort of gone off. That's going to take ages and, you know, do I have the time and blah, blah, blah, blah? Literally, I was like five, four, three, two, one. It took five minutes to set it up. I sent it login details and yeah, I could have sat on doing that for like a week or more, but I chose to just sort of take action there. And then and the five second rule helped me be a friend to my best friend and help my friend get on with, you know, her business goals.
And so there's so many elements in business where I've applied that five second rule and I've literally, you know, when I'm sending emails to people that I'm a bit feeling a bit nervous about, or perhaps I'm putting myself forward for something and I've just gone five, four, three, two, one, send dun dun dun.
And sometimes I close my laptop, then blue like dun dun. So something else I should point out here is that Mel Robbins doesn't think the five-second rule applies to absolutely everything. And I'm not saying that as well. I'm not saying, oh, you know, you should never stop and actually think and consider stuff. But I know that I'm not alone in procrastinating on stuff that doesn't necessarily need you to sit there and ponder it for five hours. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about using the tool, which is the five second rule she also talks about in the book, kind of that there's two sort of camps where we have problems or challenges.
This kind of two camps that these problems, the challenges can be divided into. One is permanent and one is temporary. Temporary problems are those that we can fix, you know, losing weight, changing jobs, moving house or living in another country. Permanent problems are those that we can't change. You know, we can't change somebody else's personality. We can't get time back. We can't wish that we had started our business at a younger age. I mean, we can wish it, but we can't go back in time and start the business at an earlier age.
And so I spent time kind of reviewing the problems that I dedicate energy to in my business and life and kind of removed those that come under permanent because, you know, I can't change certain people. I can't change certain circumstances. I'm learning to accept those. But in life and business, getting that time and energy back is invaluable.
And then using the five second rule for the problems that I can have some impact on, you know, I can sort of stop myself going into an anxiety spiral and just send the email, just do the thing that needs to get done instead of procrastinating and wasting time worrying about it and spending energy worrying about it.
So the five second rule isn't going to magically transform every single business challenge into child's play. But it will if you put it into practise, and this is what I've learnt, allow you to kind of stop the overthinking and the procrastination and start doing the work, because after all, good business isn't about working harder, but working smarter. So that is it. For today's Quick Tip episode, of course, we'll link to the Mel Robbins YouTube videos and her book, The Five Second Rule in the show notes. And you can find them over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/83 as this is episode 83.
If you have enjoyed this, please share it with a business friend so they can learn this tactic as well. All right. Thanks so much. See you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
