Entrepreneurial Boredom

Well, hello. Let's talk about entrepreneurial boredom or laziness or unmotivated-ness. Is that a thing? Let's talk about it.

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Kris Plachy. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for tuning in here. We talk about all the things for female entrepreneurs and this is the Leadership Is Feminine Podcast. So welcome, welcome.

A couple of episodes ago we talked about when you wanna burn the whole fricking thing down, how to CEO your business through those moments, and I know there's a lot of us who are at these points in our business. We all have inflection points and those inflection points can produce all sorts of interesting responses for us. So I am witnessing that in a lot of people and including myself.

And for those of you who've been longtime listeners, you're gonna start hearing that we're not doing the How to CEO program anymore. We started our final live, How to CEO on February 16th. That program will be retire. There will be support that we will be announcing here in the future for CEOs on how to lead and manage people.

But as a leader and as a business owner, I too hit an inflection point and a decision that had to be made, and so I made it. So here we sit today, and if you're like a lot of the people that tune in, you've been running a successful business for some time. You do struggle from time to time with people on the team. You struggle from time to time with decisions on how to lead and manage and figure things out. You struggle from time to time with customers and clients and products and services, and you just are looking for general support.

I want you to know that the truth is that so many women are really operating on islands. You're all out there doing your thing in the world, and you are not necessarily getting the level of support that you need. And you're also not in a community of other women who have similar issues.

The reason I'm starting here is that, by nature, in my experience, a lot of women who are entrepreneurs also are lone wolf. You like to be an island. You don't cavort people all the time. Other people maybe bother you a little bit. You're probably a lot like my clients, especially my sage clients who will say, "It's kind of hard for me to make girlfriends cuz I have a hard time relating to other women who aren't CEOs or aren't entrepreneurs and there's not a lot of 'em around where I live."

All this is to lay the groundwork for the fact that we all hit these inflection points in our business where a few things could happen. One of those is that you've been in business a really long time. Your business is operating relatively smoothly. The systems, the processes, the practices, the products, all of that is working, and the team is really making it go. And so for you as the business owner, as the entrepreneur of this business, you are finding that you don't know what to do with yourself. That you're a little confused, that you're a little lost.

In that inflection point, that's when a lot of my clients start to feel restless. They start to feel bored. They start to feel, and maybe even indulge in, what they call laziness. They don't have much planned during the day. So as a woman who's been tremendously successful and has had to work really hard for that success, it's natural that that feels very odd to now be static, like, not pushing, not driving, not making things happen in the world.

There's other women who might have a successful business. I think actually that's sort of a qualifier. You have a successful business, but what your business does does not align to what you wanna do in the world anymore. You've started to take some turns in your own knowing, your own ideas, your own passions, and the business is no longer fulfilling for you, you're no longer feeling it from your company, and yet now it's too big to fail. You've got too many people working for it. You can't find a way to just walk away.

And so this is when you also start to feel trapped, tied down like you have a job. And that is not something you wanted ever, but you feel like you can't escape your business. Which, of course, is so much of what makes being an entrepreneur so fun, is we can do whatever we want.

So you can also start having these feelings of dread, restlessness, itchy. You might feel unmotivated. You might start to resent your business. You might start to resent your employees who keep asking you to do stuff, and you're like, "I don't wanna talk about this". And then there's those of you who, this is where I sit, I think for myself, as I look at these inflection points, I have a successful seven figure business. There is no reason for me to wanna change it other than I have been working in the space that I'm in for almost 30 years, since 1996.

The good news about that is there is literally nothing you can't bring to me, when it comes to the leadership of your team, that I can't help you with. There's nothing, after almost 30 years of doing this, are you kidding? I can help you figure this out because the thing about being an expert in leadership and managing people is that people don't change. Technology changes, innovation changes, platforms change, companies change, industries change, trends change. All these things change. You know what? The people don't change.

People are still people and managing them it's still very basic stuff that you could learn and that I can help you with. But I honestly have hit these points where I recognize I actually am not the best person to be helping you here. There's these steps that we go through in learning.

So there's unconsciously incompetent. This is when you don't know what you don't know. This is what we call ignorance is bliss, right? I don't know what I don't know. So when we first get started in something, we don't even know what we don't know. Then we start to learn it, and then we become consciously incompetent, which means, we know what we don't know. That's where I meet a lot of my clients. They're like, "I now realize there's a lot I don't know about managing people, hiring people, organizing people to get work done. I, I don't know how to do this."

And then, there's consciously competent. Conscious competence is that perfect sweet spot where we are in our zone, we know what we're doing, and we know why we're doing it. These are also people who make really good teachers because they are consciously competent, so that means they're anchored in what they know and they know how to explain what they know.

The last phase of this is unconsciously competent. Unconscious competence is when you just know how to do something and you don't even know why you know how to do it. It's like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, for example, like you just do it. You don't even know why you're good at it. You don't even- and to slow it down and try and teach it actually makes you sometimes not be good.

There's a lot of us who are unconsciously competent in our businesses, which means that we've reached a level where we transcended knowledge. We went from learning to knowledge to wisdom, and wisdom is ethereal. It's like in the water. It's like in your bones, and to come out of that place and then step into teaching, is complicated. It's harder, and I believe we're not as good at it.

I actually believe that women in who come into my world should learn the fundamentals that I have built, the methodology on how to manage people. I actually think they should learn that from someone else who's better at teaching it.

You know what I'm good at? I am incredibly good at helping you access your own wisdom, your own voice. I'm incredibly good at helping you identify the truths that need to be told to yourself. I'm incredibly good at identifying where you don't see the gaps that are preventing you from your own growth and your own joy and your own success. I'm incredibly good at helping identify roadblocks that you don't see. I'm incredibly good at inspiring you and helping you dream, and helping you envision, and helping you call in through strategy and magic, the very things that you say that you want most.

But what I'm not so good at anymore is telling you how to have a conversation with Joyce in the marketing department about why she keeps being late. So that's the inflection point that I'm at, that my growth requires business growth. And I have to really think about how to build this business so that it aligns with what I know clients still need and what I know I'm here to do. There's gotta be an alignment between what I want to do, what I am best at, and pursuing that instead of just doing what everybody else wants me to do.

And I would say the same to you. So I'm putting together some ideas for something that I'm gonna be probably calling a Sage weekend, which are gonna be these intimate, smaller round tables. Because I was just actually talking with my website designer and strategist Brandy Brunski, who is also a former client, and we were talking about something that she said I said to her a little while ago that I had forgotten about, but that we get to these points in our business where it is absolutely critical that you're very thoughtful about who you let into your brain to collaborate, to advise, to whisper wisdom, because a couple reasons.

First of all, there's a tremendous amount of noise out there, and if you lose sight of your own compass, you will just follow everybody or no one at all. And secondly, as women, I think we have to be really honest with ourselves about expanding how, and we learn and who we learn from, and that we can't maintain connections with people out of loyalty. We have to maintain or grow connections that inspire us to become the better version of ourselves.

So I'm envisioning these sage weekends, these round tables where we meet to work together through a shared current experience. And I think, I can't promise, but I do believe that the first one I'm gonna do will be around this restlessness, this desire for change, this gap that you can't fill and want to work with women through how to address and move through that to whatever the other side is.

Because what I will tell you for sure is that when you hit these inflection points in your business, for whatever the reason, whether it's one of the three that I already said or your own, what has to happen is it has to all get on the table. You can't say everything needs to be different except. You have to be willing. You have to be willing to go there. And those are the clients I work with. Who are willing. In the world of, of magic and strategy, we have to be willing to play with all the parts. Doesn't mean we're locked in while we're playing, but playing we will play. We've gotta have that room where there's no limits.

And I want women in a room together who are willing to hold that space for each other, that we will do some very deep coaching, some very deep exploration into where you are, and what you want, and why you don't have that, and what's in the way. And also allow you to listen to the journey of other women who are in a like inflection point, but probably a very different business and very different reasons. So that's what's on my mind today.

I know that this is normal. And so the last thing I wanna say on this podcast is, there's nothing wrong if you. I had a client come to a call, she and I have been working together for a long time. She came to a call a couple weeks ago and she's like, "I just, I feel like I'm kind of bored. I don't know. I feel unmotivated. I can't get excited about anything in my business anymore." I'm like, "Right, it's time. We've hit a point. For me, you've hit the point where it's time for Sage CEO. It's time to really invest into this next level of your identity. Are you ready to do that?"

Every woman is a sage, but not every woman invests in getting to know that part of who she is. But these inflections, these moments where you feel incredibly at dis-eased, very uncomfortable in your own business, this is what we've gotta pay attention to. Why? You're curating a story with that's either true or not and it's not advancing you. You're staying in a spin cycle. We've gotta break that.

That doesn't mean you have to quit. It doesn't mean you have to sell. It doesn't mean you have to start something new. It just means let's figure out what's going on here for you cuz you're spinning. And I know how difficult that is and it's not an overnight solution. But I do think there are things that we can do to help.

So, okay, so the Sage weekend, this is my team's gonna kill me cuz they're like, what are you doing? We just started talking about this stuff, but I always do these things, so we're just gonna put out a page that's gonna say to put your name here if you're interested in a Sage weekend.

So just go to krisplachy.com/sageweekend. That's easy enough. That way we know if you're interested, we'll send you more details. As soon as we have those figured out, it's likely gonna be an application so that we know a lot about you because we wanna really curate the women that are in the room together.

And I don't know where it will be. I don't know how much it will cost. These are all things we need to work out, but I think it will be amazing to do this work together. And in the meantime, I want you to think about what I've said. And I want you to really sit with where are you? What's the inflection point that you're at? If any of the three resonate, maybe there's a different one for you, but why? What's happening? Get to the bottom of it here, because that's the beginning. Yeah. You have to be honest with yourself.

Okay, krisplachy.com/sageweekend, and we'll take it from here. Thanks for being here today. Bye.