Disappointment carousel

Ever had this experience? You create a new program, a new product, or a new service, you open it up to the world and one of two things happens:

• Hardly anyone buys it
• Or lots of people buy it, but every other time you offer it less and less people buy it.

In the first example, your soul is sometimes so crushed, you feel like never offering anything again, so you might throw that thing in the trash and never look back.

In the second example, over time, you get bored with it as less and less people sign up, move on to something else and then create something new. And then you repeat the cycle — either it lets you down and disappoints you or it declines in interest over time until you scrap it altogether.

I used to have this experience in my business. I’d constantly be offering new things because I thought people would get “bored” with my same offerings over and over again. Or I’d get bored with it and want to try something new, hoping it would “do better” and that I’d finally hit the jackpot.

Except this created a feast or famine cycle in my business. Until a mentor told me “your business is not here for your entertainment.”

When she first told me this, I had a mini-temper tantrum internally. If my business is not here for my entertainment, then what’s the point of having a business? Aren’t I supposed to be fulfilled by what I do? Aren’t I supposed to be satisfied with what I offer? If everything is kept the same then what’s the point of all my creativity? I’m a creative person! I need to be creative in my business!!

At the peak of my burnout, having tried a MILLION things to figure out how to get my business to the revenue I wanted and how to do it in a way that wasn’t going to kill me, I heard that sentence and thought it meant there was no hope. Might as well quit. I’m killing myself and I don’t even get to ENJOY my business????

But after I calmed down, I realized she was right. And that not treating my business like it was here for my entertainment WAS what was going to help me enjoy it more.  Let me explain…

The need to constantly hustle and create new things as “one offs” etc… is a CAPACITY ISSUE. Yeah, you knew I was gonna say that.

It’s a capacity issue because of one or more of these things:

• You have a worthiness issue and don’t believe that your offering is solid enough on its own to be the one thing you can offer over and over again and still be of so much value. That’s both a Money Capacity issue AND an Embodiment Capacity issue.

• You aren’t doing enough to grow your audience (structural capacity) so your current audience gets bored with the same thing. Instead of going out and getting new audience members you keep trying to placate the existing audience members, who never seem to be happy with what you’re offering or who need new things constantly. Doesn’t that sound like a toxic relationship to you? That’s an embodiment capacity issue as well – if you get swayed by every whim and opinion of some of your audience members, you are going to have a very unstable business that will never go as far as you want it to go.

• You think that you can ONLY be creative by offering new things and don’t know how to channel your creativity into more powerful ways that will actually grow your business (like marketing, how you serve your clients or how you manage your team).

• You’re looking at all the “trends” in your industry and you keep thinking you have to follow them in order to remain relevant. That’s a Visibility Capacity issue.

• Or, you keep offering things that fall flat, then go back to reinventing the wheel to see if this next creation will be what people want.   If you keep doing this, this is a deeper Capacity issue– you’re either not fully aligned and keep looking outside of you to “copy” what others are doing, so whenever you offer something it doesn’t work because it wasn’t aligned with YOU it was just a slightly different copy of someone else’s energy signature.  OR you’re subconsciously looking outward and too influenced by intitial results, so you don’t test things enough to give them a chance before chucking it and doing something else,

I had a client with all of the above capacity issues once. She had about 17 different offerings. She had noticed they all did well at first, then declined in revenue. And now she was noticing her overall revenues were declining.

So she started offering “one off classes” for things that were trendy at the time. She saw other people doing $99 offerings, so she did that hoping it would work. She saw other people doing virtual retreats, so she did that too, hoping it would be the game changer.

But none of it was REALLY working.  Because she was creating all of this from a place of NOT HAVING WORKED ON HER CAPACITY.

When you don’t have capacity, you can release the most powerful offering in the world…but it doesn’t work. No matter what strategic experts you hire. No matter how on trend your offering is. 

When you have capacity, what you pffer is so aligned, the graphics could be not as good as someone else’s, the copy could be not as good, and the marketing not as sophisticated, but the ENERGY behind it is so powerful and aligned, THAT is what sells it. And because you’ve worked on your capacity, it’s so unique to you that it looks like NO ONE else’s thing.

That’s what happened with my client. As we did the capacity work with her, she pared down 17 offerings to THREE. She worked A LOT on her Visibility Capacity and that meant she started allowing some of her other gifts to come through in her work. She worked on her Money Capacity and let go of the belief that people only want to spend money on business coaching and not on internal work.

Her revenue went to a million dollars that year. And she wasn’t selling ANY business coaching. She was doing all the WOO stuff in her business that she thought “no one would pay for.”

Before capacity work, she was making less than half of that. After capacity work? 7 figures. Not bad, huh?

You might notice right now there are even more ‘trends” going on with how COVID-19 has impacted our lives.  You might be tempted to start going on that same chase, creating new things just because someone else is doing it.

I’m not saying NOT to pivot and offer your community help during a stressful global time. I’m asking you to take a moment and actually work on your capacity so that the way you DO show up is so powerful, and what you offer is SO aligned for you, it’s an easy yes for those who will buy it.

I’m asking you to pause and ask yourself this: 

Do you really want to go on another disappointing cycle of offering something that either no one buys or that declines in interest over time?  

Or do you want to fix the ROOT of the problem that keeps creating this experience for you so that your business FINALLY grows at the rate you want it to and you’re never disappointed again?

A strategy doesn’t fix the root of the problem. A strategy helps you accelerate your results once your ROOT is fixed and aligned. In that way, capacity and strategy are powerful bedfellows.

But a strategy applied over and over with no time and attention given to your capacity will only have you disappointed continuously and in a loop of buying more strategies, wasting more money and time on a problem that can’t be solved with a strategy.

Capacity can solve it, though.

If you’re showing up as a leader in the ways I’ve described above and you’re not happy about it. AND you’re ready to make some real, root-level changes in how you operate in your work, so that you CAN show up in a way that feels really good and aligned,…

Then my Capacity in Crisis workshop is for you.

It’s only $99 so it won’t hurt your wallet to try something different.

It’s only 90 minutes so it won’t waste your time.

And in that workshop, I’m going to ask you four really powerful questions that no one ever asks you, that you really need to know the answers to during this crazy time. They will become the four pillars you lean on during any turbulent times in your leadership.

We’re closing enrollment in just two days now. It’s now or never.