What To Do When it All Falls Apart
I get it.
There’s all those chipper background messages out there that say, “Set those resolutions. Set those habits. You can do it!”
From the advertisements on loop on the radio to the promo at your gym to the emails from your favorite women’s empowerment coach.
*raises hand guiltily*
But what do you do when the picture-perfect vision of your goals hits the reality of messy, messy life?
And sometimes — when in spite of your carefully laid plans — it all falls apart?
I had to answer this question for myself recently.
Marketing activities are always on my list of goals. They’re essential to the growth of Build Yourself, so year after year marketing-related goals made it on my to-do list…..
…and they were the ones that didn’t get achieved.
So in 2018 I decided to pull out the big goal-setting guns.
I know that women and creatives — that special intersection I serve — often think that they can do it all themselves.
That they should be able to do it all themselves.
I recognized this in myself and didn’t want it to get in the way of growing my business. So I decided it was time to make the investment I needed and hire help.
And after some rough starts I finally had a breakthrough. I hired someone who seemed like the perfect fit for my business and my goals, and we were off to the races.
And things were great at first.
This woman was experienced. She knew how to do all kinds of techy back-end marketing things like automations to create a seamless experience for the people who joined my email list. She would turn my vague agendas into incredible executable plans.
And then….it wasn’t so great anymore.
With the confidence and support of my new assistant, I had decided to do some big things.
I took on big marketing partnerships with two other online entrepreneurs. I launched my first major online challenge — Defeat Self Doubt, a workshop that I reformulated into a live challenge for my online subscribers.
But one week, after missing a few deadlines, I got an email from her: her internet was out. Could we reschedule?
Sure, I said, but can you give me a call to strategize about those missed deadlines?
No response that day…and then on and on.
I knew she wasn’t dead. She cancelled a meeting invite.
She sent a cryptic note saying she’d refund my payment (which she didn’t) and then stopped responding.
My assistant had ghosted me.
No, really. Ghosted.
Assistant Apocalypse 2018
This wasn’t just a bump in the road. We’d been leaning in together, initiating complex high-profile marketing projects and working towards my Build Yourself dreams. She left many of these projects half-completed, I didn’t have the technical capacity to fix them.
People were signed up for my challenge. Partners were waiting for my materials.
I found myself one night after I realized she was just gone with the kind of panicked breathing I hadn’t had since my first semester of design school, when I felt so incredibly overwhelmed by how much there was to do. I was frozen. I didn’t even know where to get started.
“I’M FAILING. I’M LETTING EVERYONE DOWN. I THOUGHT I COULD PULL IT OFF AND I COULDN’T.”
That was all that I could process. I was failing.
I hired someone for a quick (and expensive) fix, but she could only fix so much with the last minute hustling. Even with this band-aid things fell through the cracks. Automatic emails were being sent off unbeknownst to me (the assistant had left some of the nifty automations she’d half-built on) and people were confused.
I was confused, too. It wasn’t pretty.
I was totally embarrassed and ashamed.
In addition to confusing and potentially scaring off my online followers, I had to cancel a program I was planning on launching later that season. I wanted to run the program, but I knew that without the marketing groundwork in place — a job for my ex-assistant — that the program really wouldn’t be what I needed it to be.
First there was panic. Then there was anger.
It felt to like I wasn’t even back at square one. I was square zero — no, I was square negative something…something really far from where I had expected to be.
And I was pissed.
It’d been six months since I’d made my resolution to be better at marketing. I had invested thousands of dollars in her and other help, and none of it panned out.
And then came the self-doubt.
I’d been through three assistants. One had dropped the ball, another had left me to attend to her personal life, and the third had ghosted me like a bad date on Tinder.
Was I the common denominator here? Was there something wrong with me?
Was I doomed to never grow my presence because I was some kind of flawed manager?
In the book Grit, author and Angela Duckworth shares her research demonstrating that when it comes to success — grit, which she defines as a long term commitment to a goal and the perseverance to try and try again — is more important than natural talent.
So after crying a little (it’s okay to cry as a business owner) I decided to make a plan.
I reached out and polled a few people who had worked with me and tried to get the most honest feedback I could on my management style. I checked out a stack of books on management. I reached out to trusted advisors and other business owners in my network asking for help and in-depth insight on how they hired and managed.
I even added humor to the mix (one of my favorite coping tools).
I began calling it “Assistant Apocalypse 2018.”
I boiled down all I was learning to a few options of how to move forward, and chose one of them.
Deliberate Practice
I had a plan, but something else had changed. This was subtle-but oh-so-key.
I decided that the option I’d chosen was yet another experiment. And just like I learned from the last ‘cycle’ of choices, no matter what happened, I’d learn from this one.
In Grit, Duckworth identifies a key component to perseverance which she calls ‘deliberate practice.’
Deliberate practice is trying something, looking back on your performance and then trying again, focused on implementing that feedback. So for example an Olympic swimmer might swim a lap, getting feedback on it from their coach, and then implement that feedback (e.g. work on more strides between breaths).
This might sound simple, but there’s a radical idea at the center of this — that you’re not a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ anything. The olympic swimmer isn’t a “bad” swimmer…they are swimming, after all.
We can apply this idea to business and work; you’re not a bad manager or a bad designer, or bad at time management.
What you are is sometimes distracted. Focused vaguely on what you’re trying to improve, which is often a whole bunch of things. Implementing half-formed strategies and stuck in the day-to-day of it all, rather that zooming out and spotting patterns and progress.
And you’re also beating yourself up for everything you do wrong, instead of recognizing each cycle as part of a process of learning, and honing in on your new craft.
As my anger cooled and the panic subsided, I could see the silver lining — a bigger learning I needed to know in my business life and beyond in this season.
I’d been trying to build because I’m a bold, ambitious lady. The feedback that I received (through the actions of others) made me realize that I’d been building *just* a little too fast. So I made a decision to hire more slowly, to hire a systems coach who could help me get my house in order.
This became the season to teach myself how to live and work differently.
Slow & Steady: The Habit
I’m the coach who helps women think bigger and bolder. I help you take your goals and ‘supersize’ them.
For me, supersizing my goals was strangely paradoxical: it meant moving slower.
So I emailed the business wingwoman I’d been doing a weekly email challenge with (to do something big and bold that scared us each week) and I told her that my Friday update would shift slightly to include one thing I did, one choice I made to build slow and steady even if it means slowing down.
I created a habit around checking in with my business wingwoman on my progress. Each week I sent her a list — sometimes just one thing, and sometimes as many as four or five — that demonstrated how I was incorporating the feedback into real changes in my strategy. And I watched as slowly but surely I started to rebuild and move beyond where I had been before my Assistant Apocalypse.
Dropping the Ball
There are some hard lessons to take away from this experience.
During Assistant Apocalypse 2018 I dropped the ball. I caused some damage to some marketing relationships because I was trying to build too quickly.
I left some potential clients very confused, and probably turned them away with all those emails going haywire and by not delivering on my challenge.
And I also survived and so did my business.
My business survived.
It didn’t implode, and I still had some of my best coaching engagements ever while digging myself out of the mess, and making a move from Boston to New York.
As a reforming perfectionist I needed to learn this:
1. It’s ok sometimes not to save face.
2. It’s ok if it doesn’t all go perfectly. Odds are I’ve complicated it anyway and my B-game is actually pretty good.
Coach Denise Duffield-Thomas writes about getting over perfectionism in her business, and how her self-published book — errors and all — was part of the fast growth of her business, and got out into the world and helped people.
3. Your A-Game, when improperly applied, can actually hurt you.
It’s even one of the coaching exercises I give women. I ask them to find items in their lives to do at only “80% Perfection.”
What would it mean to write that funder report at 80% perfection? To prep for the staff meeting at 80% perfection? To clean the kitchen at 80% perfection?
With my new team of support staff, dropping the ball has actually made me a better manager.
When I got so busy that I couldn’t over prepare in giving my assistants work, I left space that they were able to fill, solving their own problems and beginning to collaborate.
My admin assistant now runs our recently instituted team meetings and my marketing assistant is building out new systems in the business.
They both have permission to tell me to ‘drop the knife’ (as in the chef’s knife, as in to get out of the kitchen and leave it to the other cooks.)
In my recent team meeting, we celebrated a ‘deliberate practice’ milestone. We have gotten closer to our self-imposed deadline for our marketing events. We’re closer to our goal than last time around. We’ll get better each time. We are becoming the team we want to be.
Life After the Apocalypse
I learned a lot through my assistant apocalypse. I learned firsthand how it feels to watch the tasks that I hold so dear — that I consider essential — fall through the cracks.
The biggest lesson of all is that things aren’t always going to go according to plan. But success comes from having grit through it all, and recognizing that everything is an opportunity to grow.
And I learned how to survive it, and come out thriving.
I could have easily pointed the finger at everyone and everything in my life, taken things out on my clients, my partner, and myself.
I could have quit.
I chose to learn from it instead. And it means that I’m a better coach, business owner, employer, and a more experienced human because of it.
I certainly don’t want to make a habit of falling on my butt. It was not a pleasant experience.
But I know that sometimes hitting the lows is a part of the process. And I trust myself (and my new team!) to work through it in the future.
I’m learning to step back wherever I can. I enrolled in a ceramics class that meets during the day, the kind of perk of being in charge of my own schedule that I almost never took advantage of before. I have a new habit (that I am deliberately practicing with some difficulty, mind you) to leave work at 6pm every day. I am insisting on lunch break, refusing to work through it.
Sometimes an email doesn’t get responded to or an invoice is late.
Sometimes I don’t save face. Sometimes it falls apart a little.
But living in the mess is making me a better coach, a better collaborator, a better designer.
Sometimes the only way out is through an Assistant Apocalypse.
Here’s to the process, to growing pains, and to the humbling and beautiful world of running your own business. I still love it and it’s still just where I want to be.
