Your Irritants Can Be An Accelerant!

Sometimes in life, things that irritate, annoy, and/or anger us can turn into catalysts for real change.

Key topics:

✔️ Irritations can motivate us to dream bigger and aim higher.
✔️ Money is not the only factor. Your time and energy are finite.
✔️ More than likely, you started a business or became self-employed to be FREE, not to make yourself miserable.
✔️ "A hard lesson is a good lesson."
✔️ Instead of getting bogged down in negative emotions, consider what you can do to make the situation better. What can you do to feel better?


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Transcript

Unknown Speaker : 0:15

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. Today I want to talk about how irritants can become accelerant. Sometimes in life, the things that we find annoying, irritating, frustrating, can actually be catalysts that motivate us to something better, or to dream higher and to strive for something different than what we've been settling for. I was having a conversation with a friend on Friday and one of the things I said to him was, sometimes it's not about how many hours we have that we could be working Well, theoretically, I could squeeze in this project, I probably could work X number more hours per week. Should I be doing this? Is this a project that I will genuinely enjoy? If I do this? Am I going to be overextended? Am I going to be living on coffee and Red Bull and burning the candle at both ends? Like, you have to also consider your own personal health as well as whether or not you think you could do a good job for that client. It's not just Well, yeah, technically, I guess I could do the work. Do you want to do the work? I think for those of us who take the plunge and we start our own business, or we leave corporate america behind and become self employed, we want to work on projects or gigs or assignments that we find rewarding. I mean, you can lob a lot of adjectives out there, but so often when you really distill it down, it's about words like freedom and autonomy. I want to work with clients that I want to work with, I want to bid on projects that I find genuinely rewarding and exciting. I want to set my own hourly rate. I don't want a boss telling me that I have to work for less because she's scared, we might damage your relationship. If we raise our fees, like, you want to be able to set your own rules of engagement, and do things that you find stimulating, rewarding, exciting, and so on. And I fully admit we've all had times in our lives where maybe money was tight, or we got hit with an unexpected bill or unforeseen expense and said, Okay, well, I'm going to pick up some extra work or I'm going to take a job I don't particularly feel great about because I need the money or because I need the benefits. But I think when we take that plunge of self employment or business ownership, we're not doing it as a foil. I'll hold my nose and do this like no, you're doing it because you want to be free. You want to call your own shots and really and truly be your own boss. work that out. that you want to work take on the work that you genuinely enjoy doing and not be beholden to someone else, or all the time jumping through hoops and playing office politics. Naturally, with all of that being said, it's not like every day is going to be paradise on earth. And it's really important to have that time to test and beta test and be willing to conduct some experiments and collect data. Earlier this morning, I was thinking back to the early days of my business, testing and beta testing, sorting, sifting, figuring out well, who do I want to help? What kind of projects do I want to work on? What kind of coaching clients do I feel like I would be best suited to help? What kinds of like HR business related projects where I want to tackle Where do I shine the most? And in those early days, you may have some ideas and some hunches but instill until you really go to market and start testing the ideas out. You just simply Don't know, sometimes the results can be really surprising. But as I was thinking back on this topic earlier, I was like laughing a little at myself because after the initial influx, it was like, Okay, I need to really make sure that I put a good velvet rope around the club. And then it was okay, I need to get a good velvet rope and a big muscular, scary looking bouncer. Okay, now I want to just go full on fortress, like I want to be in a fortress, with a deep and wide moat full of angry dragons and like Knights in shining armor and archers and a Canon like, I really have become Fort Sara. And I'm being a bit silly about it. But the truth is, that revelation came from irritants that I used as accelerants. I think for most of us that owned a business or become self employed. You have like a convergence of things that happen. You know, you're getting older and hopefully wiser you're learning from life lessons that have happened to you. And you're also learning from business lessons. And you get sharper at being able to set your own boundaries and your own values and just really lining out Okay, here's what I'm willing to put up with. And here's what I'm not willing to put up with here are the projects that I enjoy the most. Here are the personality types and the clients that I genuinely enjoy working with. And that I know that I know that I know I can get an awesome result for and then here's the stuff that I don't want to have anything to do with. So to use myself as an example, like from a consulting perspective, one of the things that makes me crazy is like just weird, random disorganization and a flat out unwillingness to learn from that disorganization. So like if I build out a system or I build out a funnel for somebody, and then they're constantly coming back to me going, Yeah, you know, the awesome thing you built for us. We screwed it up. Again can come back in and fix it. I that makes me want to tear my hair out. And so I've gotten savvier about being able to identify signs of trouble and saying, Okay, this is probably not a project that I want to put a bid in on or if someone solicits me, and they give me some backstory, and I'm like, ooh, I think this is probably going to be me building something, and then constantly breaking it and getting super disorganized, and then I'm going to break out into hives, like, probably not the best idea for us to work together. From a coaching client perspective, it could be someone who wants to stay trapped in victimhood. Someone who wants to wallow in their own misery, someone that wants to just stay stuck and self pity. You know, they're looking for a buddy to get on the phone with them and let them play the martyr like, that's not me. I want to help you accelerate the growth of your business. I want to see you succeed, like, so if you're just looking for somebody to get on the phone and go on. I'm sorry. Sorry, poor baby like, not not me. I'm not the one for that. My friend Bill used to always say, a hard lesson is a good lesson. And I really believe that's true. When we look at these things that irritate us or annoy us, and instead of just getting trapped in Well, this was unfair. He shouldn't have said this, and she shouldn't have done that. And why didn't they tell me that up front and Damn it? I feel like I've underbid what I should have charged, like, take a step back from anything that's like supercharged emotionally. And just think about what is the lesson that you can learn from it. And my friend, Sue, Sue Guyer, who was on the program not long ago, as she taught me years ago, like, always try to find something to be grateful for, and some days may be really rotten. And it may be that the only thing you can find to be grateful for is at least this day is over with crawling into the bed, and I'm done. I get to go to sleep and just kind of like hit the reset button in the morning. It's good when you can look at something that you can use as a gratitude point, or a lesson that you can learn. Oh, yes, the situation may have been unfair or man, this person really annoyed me, whatever the case may be, and then use it to catapult yourself to more growth. I'll again use myself as an example. Over the years, I've noticed more and more suburban sprawl. And as someone involved in farming and agriculture, there are times when you have this kind of collision or clash between two different worlds, you know, yuppies that want to have their yards looking a certain way and they like, Oh, I'm so offended by the smell of cow. You know, or conversely, on the other side of it, you may have people that think Well, all right, if I live in a suburb or somewhat suburban area, You know, like there's sometimes there's that hinterland that's right between the suburbs and a truly rural agrarian area. And they think, well, if I live in this kind of hinterland, then my kids and my dogs should just be able to run roughshod over everything. And they should just freely be able to trespass on everyone else's land. And nobody should say anything to me because well, we don't live in the city limits, like this should just be a no man's land of anarchy. And it's super frustrating. So I've watched this happen over the years, and I've gotten more and more fed up with it. And so I'm like, Alright, well, you know, what can you do? You can't control other people. You can't just like, yeah, I'm thinking of I Dream of Jeannie. You're like nod your head and and close your eyes and make all of these weird people that you don't like disappear. If only I guess we would all be doing that. So I'm like, Well, what can you do? Well, in my mind, I've started really thinking about a long term game plan. And, and deliberate creation like well, maybe the solution is to just move to a more like truly rural agrarian area where the nearest city is 30, 40, 50 miles away. Maybe I need to be like Jeremiah Johnson and just go up to the mountains somewhere. And even just thinking about it, even just contemplating it, even just looking at different options has made me feel so much better. You know, I read a study one time That said, it's actually good for you to just plan vacations. Even if you are not sure when you would ever take the trip or when you'd ever have the money to put towards the vacation. Just the simple act of like looking at beautiful beaches or hotels you'd like to stay at or the food that you'd like to eat while you're there has a really like positive soothing aspect on your brain. So you know, as I'm sitting at my computer looking at beautiful pictures of mountains and snow On top of pine trees and elk and moose, bear, I'm like yeah, yeah, man. I'm gonna sit here I don't know when this is gonna happen that's in God's hands. But, you know, I'm sitting here having my my Jeremiah Johnson fantasy of like how I'm going to go off in the mountains and just live this wonderful, you know, transcendental, isolated, calm, peaceful life with just myself and my animals. And it just it makes me happy I am even right now. I have such a sense of like ease and tranquility, thinking about it. So again, you turn your irritants into accelerants instead of me saying, All right, well, I want to I want to be the one man fighting City Hall. Like it reminds me of a time when my friend Tina and I were in college and she said a one man Riot really sucks. So instead of me trying to have a one woman Riot again suburban sprawl and you know city slickers who don't understand anything about animals, but yet they move out to an area of like horses and cattle and you're like, maybe you should have gotten a clue before you did that. Instead of trying to find all of that and be a one woman Riot or a one woman warrior. Thinking about what I can do to lead a better life for myself, is really making all the difference. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it. If you haven't already, take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai