Caitlin Bacher:
It’s easy to be a great CEO when things are easy, but what about when things are hard?
What happens when life throws you a curve ball that you never saw coming?
Today, I’m going to share 5 things that you can lean into when things get hard so that you can move through it and come back even stronger than before.
Let’s get into it.
My name is Caitlin Bacher, founder and CEO of Scale With Success®, and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing revealing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. We are so grateful that we have the chance to share it all with you right here on Scale With Success®: The Podcast Built for Course Creators™. Let’s get started.
Thing #1 to remember is that every business has problems.
So one of the worst things that we can do as a business owner when we are experiencing problems is begin to get in this cycle of feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling like, “Oh, every everyone else has it all figured out. I’m the problem. I’m the only CEO in the world who doesn’t know what they’re doing in their business.”
And the reality is that even the most successful CEOs in the world, if they’re doing their job right, is experiencing problems.
And that’s because a growing business has problems.
If your business is never experiencing any single problems, then I guarantee that you are not growing and I don’t know what’s going on, but you’re not expanding, you’re not getting out of your comfort zone, you’re not setting goals that are really designed to stretch you.
Problems are everywhere, right?
And I think that as business owners, what we really need to start doing is reframing the way that we think about problems and assigning a different meaning to them.
Because for a lot of people, I think once they start to have problems in their business, which again, like problems are always present, but let me put it in another way.
Once we start to become aware that there are problems in our business, we start to feel this sense of fear sometimes of anxiety.
These thoughts of thinking like, “Oh, maybe I don’t know what I’m doing. Oh no, I’ve done something wrong.”
And if we can move away from thinking about problems in that manner and instead start to think about problems as just a part of doing business, then I think that we would be a lot happier, number one.
And I also think that we would kind of settle our nervous systems and that would benefit us because then we’d be able to make decisions from a calm, grounded place as opposed to a place where we are just kind of frantically throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Thing #2 to remember when things are hard is that leaders aren’t made when things are easy.
It’s easy to be great when things are easy, right?
It’s easy to feel like, “Oh wow, running a business is amazing. Oh, I’m the best CEO ever. I’m so kind and generous and respectful and all of these things.”
It’s easy to do that and to be that when things are easy.
But the true test of leadership comes from what happens when things go wrong, what happens when the stress gets kicked up a notch?
What happens when you have to pivot something in your business?
What happens if you had a plan and you’re going through the plan, but you’re quickly realizing, “you know what? This actually isn’t turning out the way that I wanted it to.”
In that moment when you realize that things are not the way that you expected, it’s time to really step into that position of leadership.
And I see a lot of other business owners really struggle with this.
And what can happen sometimes is if they find themselves in a position where they’re like, “My gosh, this wasn’t going as planned. I thought this was going to happen, but then that happened.”
Instead of meeting the problem and instead of identifying the root cause of that problem fully considering all the possible solutions and then choosing a solution and then moving forward with it, instead of that, they fall into this pit of either blaming other people, of making excuses for why they ended up in that spot of just wanting to throw in the towel and retreat.
But when things aren’t going well, right? If things are feeling hard, then that’s really an opportunity for you as a CEO of your company to lean into some of those leadership skills, to lean into resilience, to lean into your growth mindset.
That takes me to thing #3, which is be the team member you want to have.
A lot of CEOs feel like because they are in a position of power in their company that they can act one way while expecting all of their team members to act a different way, right?
Maybe they expect their team members to be resilient and to be courageous and to have a growth mindset.
But if you as a CEO are not embodying all of those things when things get hard, then how in the world can you expect anyone else on your team to do that?
And it’s a really weird dynamic, but I see it happen all the time where CEOs feel like, “Oh, it’s okay for me to scream and cry and berate my team members, blame other people, try to sweep all of my mistakes under the rug and not take any accountability for them.”
And yet, they hold their team members to a completely different standard, and their team members are not allowed to show emotion, to disagree with them, to think, “Oh, well, maybe this was actually a mistake.”
And that’s incredibly unhealthy.
And I get it.
It’s hard when you are experiencing tough times in your business.
Yeah, it would be a lot easier if you were just like temporarily anyway, not long term, but temporarily like stick your head in the sand and pretend that nothing bad is happening.
But I have found that in those moments of hardship, it can actually be a catalyst for your entire team to really come together and to connect with your bigger mission, be creative, and come up with solutions that frankly you’ll never come up with, if you have your head stuck in the sand or you’re spending all your time blaming or making excuses or berating someone and be the team member you want to have in all areas of your business.
I’ve seen some CEOs totally freak out on their contractors or their vendors, and I can’t help but think, I wonder if someone else on their team spoke to a vendor that way or spoke to one of their clients that way.
I wonder if they did that, how that CEO would respond.
Being a CEO comes with a lot of responsibility, and as your business grows, you don’t just have responsibility to your audience or to your clients, you also have a responsibility to your team.
Thing #4, to remember when things get hard is that it’s really important to find joy in the process.
And I know for a long time, I really struggled with this specific thing in my business where I felt like if things were going wrong, that meant that I wasn’t allowed to feel joy in other parts of my life, right?
I felt like, “Oh man, like, nope, I got to stay home and really get through this and figure this out and work harder than ever because I don’t deserve to go hang out with my family on the weekend, or I don’t deserve to go on this vacation.”
There’s always going to be problems in your business.
There’s always going to be things that are going wrong, and it’s just a matter of whether you are noticing them or not.
They’re always present, it’s always there.
But if it just so happens that you’re choosing to focus on those things that are going wrong, and in doing that, you are then telling yourself that you’re not allowed to feel joy in all of these other parts of your life, then you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure.
I know that one of the big things that really can get me through a hard time is this sense of internal motivation and that internal motivation to keep going, even when things are hard, doesn’t come from beating yourself up.
It comes from finding the joy in the little things, and through that joy that’s going to spark something creatively, whether it’s a new idea or maybe a solution you haven’t thought of before, but it also just improves your overall mood and energy.
And so I really encourage you, if you feel like you’ve had a really hard month or a hard week, or maybe just a hard day, I would encourage you to still look for those opportunities where you can experience joy, even if it’s something small, even if it’s starting a knitting project or if it’s digging into a new book or making a pot of tea for yourself, or spending time with someone that you love.
You don’t need to punish yourself just because from your perspective, things are not as they should be, and you know what, how should they be?
Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Why is it that we have all of these expectations in our head about how things should be?
And anytime that we fall short of those expectations, we use that as an opportunity to beat ourselves up, to be really hard on ourselves.
And if we are able to shift our beliefs into a place of I’m exactly where I need to be right now, and what can I learn from this situation that I’m in right now?
And yes, this is my goal, this is what I am working towards, and I know that I’ll get there.
I’m just not there yet, but I know that I’m going to keep taking step by step by step until I’m able to get there.
And the 5th thing to really lean into when things get hard is gratitude.
Gratitude is contagious.
And one of the things that my husband and I do a lot, especially if we’ve had a hard day at work or anything like that, we come home and we just start listing things that we’re grateful for, even the tiny little things.
And the thing about gratitude is that it starts small, but it snowballs fast.
And so even though you might start with those small little things, the gratitude is going to get bigger and bigger, and the energy that you have in your body and in your mind completely shifts when you are in this place of feeling grateful and cultivating this practice of gratitude, practice of appreciation, where we are appreciating what we have energetically puts us in a better spot to start working towards the other things that we want to achieve.
So what I want you to walk away from today’s episode with is:
- Every business has problems. You are not alone.
- Leaders aren’t made when things are easy.
- Be the team member you want to have.
- Find joy in the process.
- And number 5 – gratitude is contagious.
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I’ll see you next week.
Are you struggling to scale your online course business to your first six or even seven figures?
- You hate launching, but right now it’s the only way your course actually makes money.
- You can’t sleep through the night without waking up in a cold sweat, worrying about all the things you think you should be doing.
- All the sales and marketing strategies that used to work for you are completely failing. Maybe you’re feeling stuck, stressed, and confused about how to get things back on track.
- You wonder how in the world so many other course creators are able to generate predictable revenue month after month?!
It doesn’t have to be so hard.
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