Your First Test As An Entrepreneur

Hey, what’s up guys? This is Julie. It is actually 3:00 in the morning and I am recording podcasts because I can’t sleep. One of the things that kept me up tonight that it was making it really hard for me to go back to sleep was this idea of, you know, I have a lot of students and clients and they all come to me with this question. Yes, but what about my business?

And what I mean by that is as a course creator, as a coach, I’m constantly trying to figure out where the patterns are and the themes are in online business. If you want to start a coaching business or if you want to start a course business or an agency business or a software business, what are the themes and the patterns in that business to follow? This is important for me to know because I write books because I build courses and I create curriculum that is aimed to help people on that journey and yet no matter how many times I go around this merry go round and no matter how many times I say, this is the process, this is the way you do it.

I get people that come to me and they say, yeah, but what about me in my business? And I find this so fascinating because I think intrinsically as humans, we want to be unique, right? We want to think that our idea, our business, our life circumstance is somehow unique and that other people don’t experience what we experience. In fact, I had someone the other day join my program The Digital Gangsta and it’s basically a comprehensive digital marketing program designed for most online business types, right. It’s designed for agencies and course creators, coaches and consultants, even software businesses, blogging businesses. The only kind of business that Digital Gangsta doesn’t work as well for is a physical product, e-comm business or a local business.

So anyway, the point is it’s a big curriculum. It’s pretty comprehensive and it is going to give you digital marketing fields for all those businesses and yet even with learning paths and welcome modules and step by step instructions on kind of where to go and how to get there, I still get the question all the time, yes, but what about me? What about business? I’m trying to start this type of business and then they proceed to tell me this same type of business I’ve been helping for the past three years. Or they say, yeah, but what about me? I’m a single mom, or what about me? I don’t have money or…

I guess my question, one of the things that are tumbling around in my head is in your business, in your journey to a laptop life, how many times do you think that you’re unique? Do you think that the problems that you’re having getting started or the tools that you can’t figure out how to use or the customers who are hating on you, on your Facebook ads or whatever that happens to be. You think, yeah, but this is unique like this happened to me and this doesn’t happen to other people.

I can assure you $10 thousand, million, billion, bajillion percent that it is not unique. You are not as unique as you think you are and that it is happening over and over and over again to other people. That shouldn’t be a discouragement to you. That should be an encouragement, which means number one, you’re not alone. Number two, there are a lot of people who start their online business life. Maybe they buy a course or they sign up with a coach and what happens? They feel overwhelmed. They feel like, well wait, this isn’t like. It doesn’t say, Susie, step one, go over here and do this, step two, you know, let your cat out and then do this over here. And so people then they panic, right? Because they’re looking for that spoon fed step by step, this is what you do, but maybe because you’re scared, maybe because you’re not sure you’re overwhelmed and then you think to yourself, well, but what about me?

Right? And I see this happen all the time with Russell where he’s like, I’ve given you the blueprints. Like Russell Brunson has written Dotcom Secrets. He’s written Expert Secrets. He’s created courses. He’s hired coaches like me and Steven Larsen and other people like this to help walk the path that so many people have walked over and over and over and over and over again. Right? And so one of the things that, that as a coach I do in, in both of my business and over with ClickFunnels, is we coach people. We help people and it never fails even after the path has been laid out again and again and again. People come to us and say, well, this isn’t working for me because I have a unique situation or my funnel has to be unique because of X, Y, and Z and it somehow our drive to be unique or to be like the exception to the rule and, I guess what I want to do is I want to flip that on its head and say, listen, I know it may feel like saying, hey, you’re not the exception to the rule like everyone else, you know, 8,000 people before you have gone through this, but I want to flip that to be an encouragement to you. That if you trust in the fact that there are a lot of people who run this path before. There’s a lot of people who’ve signed up for courses or signed up for programs or embarked on the laptop life and then all of a sudden felt like they were drowning drinking from a fire hose and completely unable to see the forest through the trees. That’s normal.

I’m reminded of a story when I started with WordPress. So I back in my journey. I applied for a job with WordPress, which is a company called Automatic and, they give their new hires a six week trial and at the time I was just applying for like a customer support role or was it applying for anything exciting and I remember them telling me that they were going to throw me into basically into their entire system with very, very little in the way of instruction.

And that that was kind of the point in that the idea was that they would figure out who is best for the job based on how they fared in the ocean of Automatic. And I remember the first day that like I got my account and the first day I got access to the software and it was just like, holy crap. There was like this whole underworld of things happening. I remember entering and being like, oh my gosh, look at this, look at this Slack Channel, look at this, this and look at this whole forum. And there was just like this massive society of WordPress team members that was living right underneath my nose. And I didn’t know it and I felt like I was drowning. I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose. I didn’t know which way was up, which I was down.

I didn’t know who to ask. And I remember them saying to me like, that’s the point. That’s the whole point because you’re never going to be ready for this job if you can’t navigate this landscape. And so I want to say to you, if you’re starting an online business and you’re feeling that overwhelmed, that firehose, your instinct is to be like, well, this isn’t for me. Like this isn’t unique to me or my business is different or my. My situation is different than the actual thought that I think you should switch it to is actually, no, this is normal. This is my first test. This is my first test to see if I can survive this feeling of overwhelm. This feeling of the firehose. This feeling of I’m not sure what to do next, but you know what? Dammit, I got to just take a step in a direction I gotta try.

I gotta fail. Because of that very, very first feeling when you create that laptop life for the first time and you’re just freaking out, that’s actually a part of this journey. Like everybody goes through that you’re not unique. You’re not alone. It’s not a problem with your, uh, your mentor or your course, you know, we want to look for something to blame. Like, oh, well, if I just had a different way of looking at it, it would be easier. Better. I would figure it out. No, actually this is normal. This is how it feels. This is what you’re supposed to feel in this stage. This is actually your first test. How are you going to fare overwhelm? How are you going to fare the firehose feeling?

And so my encouragement to you is if you’re starting your laptop life and that’s how you feel. If you feel like the person who joined the Digital Gangsta, and said oh my gosh, but what about my business? Like, I’m totally overwhelmed. This doesn’t seem like I don’t know how to figure it out. The reality is that it is exactly for you. That feeling is normal and it’s your first test.