We’ve got an epidemic on our hands. It’s the waiting game, and it’s running rampant among us.

This week alone I’ve surrounded by people’s really damn good reasons for waiting. But here’s the thing. Every thought and action has an energetic consequence. When we wait in one area, whether we have a really good reason or not, we are telling the Universe we are willing to wait in other areas.

The waiting game always has a root cause – things like fear of being wrong, being pushy, being demanding or bitchy, fear of success, fear of failure, or a desire to manipulate an outcome with our action or lack thereof. (If I call them now, they might now buy later, etc.)

This epidemic is exhausting. Every person I talked to this week who told me they were tired was able to isolate the exhaustion to the energy lost in waiting on someone or something.

Remember our old friend Circumstance Cindy? Waiting for stuff to happen is depleting, and sometimes it’s downright self-abuse.

So we aren’t going analyze the cause today – let’s look at how to make it stop. I’ve captured the action to take to combat the 5 main places I’ve seen people stuck in waiting.

1. Put Your Paycheck on Autopay

Oh my goodness, I’ve done it too. You wait to see how much money you have left at the end of the month and pay yourself what’s left. The problem is that you are letting the Universe know that your needs are negotiable, and you are willing to wait. “Once I get to… then I’ll pay myself.”

Now, I didn’t pay myself early in my business. I was willing to re-invest everything and I would do that over again because my business needed it to grow. What I would do differently is set a firm goal by when paying myself was non-negotiable. When I got to this point I put my paycheck on autopay. I was essentially declaring that money WOULD be there. It changed everything.

2. Call, Don’t Email

When we send requests or inquiries via email, we’re essentially building in 1-2 extra days for whatever outcome we are looking for. And, Truth? The other person may not, and doesn’t have to, respond at all!

It can be challenging if you are working long hours and want to get some extra stuff done in the evening via email. But if you notice yourself playing the waiting game, carve out some focused time and hop on the phone to get the answers you need. The sense of urgency and intention that comes with a phone call in today’s world of email will create results.

3. Fire, Quit, or Get Fired

If it’s not happening, let it go. It may sound harsh, but sometimes we have to stir things up. You’re not a bad person. If it’s not working for you, there is a reason. Let it go. Stop analyzing what you could do differently to make it work. Sure, sometimes we sabotage, and sometimes our unhealthy expectations create issues and we have a hard time discerning it. So what? If you’re in a relationship that’s not working – whether it’s with a client, a team member, a vendor, or a coach, if it’s not working let it go.

This assumes you’ve already had direct conversations about what you want and need. If you have, if you’ve come to the table fully present and real, and the situation has not shifted, you’ve got to move on. Sure, you may find out that you missed something and could have done it differently. But if you can’t see what to do differently RIGHT NOW, you’re simply playing the waiting game.

You might worry that people will judge you and think you are rude or bitchy. They might. You’ll live. You’ll be afraid of the consequence of the closed door. Do it anyway. The new door that opens will create a whole new adventure.

4. Stop Manipulating

One of my favorite quotes is by Vernon Howard. He said “Never suppress yourself in an effort to influence, hold, or win someone. When we are unreal, so are our rewards.”

Often the reason people wait is, at the core, a manipulation technique. They keep their mouth shut and don’t do what they know they need to do because they are afraid that if they do it will negatively impact someone else’s actions or perceptions. Often, they are worried someone – a client, a spouse, a team member – will leave.

Some people will leave. Some people will judge. It’s better than sitting around waiting for them to get comfortable with where you’re going. And, the Truth is, you can’t ever really predict how others will respond. So you might as well take some action and find out!

5. Spend Some Time and Money

One of the biggest things we wait for is to make decisions to invest in the things we know we need or want because we think eventually we’ll just have the extra money sitting around, or an abundance of time to have fun.

For some people, they just need to spend on ANYTHING in order to shift out of the waiting. Buy some new shoes, spend a day in the garden, take someone out to dinner. For most people, they know the things on their list that they are waiting to move on out of fear. Just do it. Often, many small businesses have programs on they would be willing to give you flexible payment plans if you are willing to make an initial deposit. It pays to inquire about options as once you commit with a deposit it moves you from waiting into action.

6. Be supremely willing to be wrong, but act as if you know you are right

Often we wait for confirmation of the rightness of our position, point of view, or plan of action. We want to meditate for clarity. We wait to see if people are going to finally change before we make a decision to change because we’re terrified to be wrong.

Here’s the deal with this. The actual result, or whether you are right or wrong, is of minimal importance as compared to your experience of life in the moment. When you are worried about being wrong and steeped in doubt, it permeates everything. And all we have in life, really, is our experience in the moment. There’s no guarantee about what might happen next, so you might as well make decisions and make yourself right about them. Because it feels so much better to feel right, even if you’re completely missing the boat. Right?

In “Working with the Law” Raymond Holliwell talks about the Law of Receiving.  He talks about giving your substance where it can do most good, and about specific behaviors that would indicate you are out of harmony with the law.

One such behavior is delighting in something that is received for free.  He asks, “Do you look for a deal or a bargain?” and “Does it make you happy when you get something for nothing?”

These thoughts are out of harmony with the belief in the abundance of the Universe, and that you will receive exactly what you need when you need it. It’s operating based on fear.

I’ve seen this recently. I received a free bonus with a program I purchased.  It wasn’t really something I would have bought and paid for on my own and I was a bit uncertain about accepting it because it wasn’t something that was really in alignment with my current set of priorities, even though it was great.

But it was FREE.

And we are trained to be excited about stuff that is free in our culture.

You SHOULD take something free, right?  It’s like a lucky opportunity, right?  When will you ever have the chance again, right?

Or, perhaps it’s out of alignment.  In my case I attempted to talk myself into believing that it was right, and I resisted outright saying, “I don’t want this free thing.”  Energetically that behavior was coming from fear… “maybe I SHOULD take it.”

Rather than just say no, I took it, but without real energetic commitment on my part.  It was a bad idea.  The whole thing became steeped in fear and scarcity based energy, and didn’t work out very well.

Scarcity Thinking is the Root of Fear

Scarcity thinking is the root of all fear-based decisions.  There is not enough to go around, I am not enough if I don’t do this, etc.

I write this article from Juror Lounge 100 at the Denver courthouse.  I’ve been traveling pretty extensively recently, and I could definitely be in a scarcity thought-process around my time, and resenting jury duty.  I’ve chosen to embrace the opportunity to experience a part of our society that I’ve not experienced before.  I’m staying positive and looking for what’s right about the fact I was selected for this part of the process (and powerfully intending on not spending much more time here!)

Many people have offered me ideas for ways to get out of jury duty and talked about how ‘it’s not fair’ and because I’m self-employed I shouldn’t have to go.

Where is that coming from?  Is there a belief that self-employed people have a scarcity of time and money and should be pitied over their J-O-B-holding counterparts?  Why would I want to buy into that idea?

Taking something free because it’s free is rooted in fear and scarcity as well, and fear begets fear.

Regret is a Form of Scarcity

We could say that I might regret my decision not to say “no” to the free thing.  In Truth I took it because I didn’t want to regret not taking the opportunity.  The definition of regret is:  feeling sorrow or remorse for an act, to think of with a sense of loss.

Why would we worry about the loss of something in the past?  Because we don’t believe that there is an abundance of opportunity in the future.  The moment we notice ourselves entertaining thoughts of regret, we must catch it and stop it in the act.  Instead, ask yourself, “Of what am I now aware that will help me to make a different decision in the future?”  Own the new awareness and release the regret, it never serves you.

Make a Decision and Make it Right

Early on in my business I invested $15,000 in a coaching program.  The program was a group program that did not include individual attention.  I felt crazy for making the investment.  I’d never done anything like that in the past, and I wasn’t making anywhere near that in my business, so I was somewhat terrified.

But my gut told me it was the thing I needed to do (I couldn’t sleep the night before making the decision).  And I went for it.  And I never for an instant looked back.

OK, maybe for an instant or two I would think, “Shit, can I really make this money back?”  Then I would let it go.  Immediately.

Any time I was with others in the program who began talking about how they weren’t getting what they needed, I either declared that I was or I walked away.  I refused to buy into any conversations about regret about the decision, or not honoring my commitment to be all-in.

The people who talked about the problems with the program, who focused on regret… many of them didn’t complete the program because they didn’t make the money, and some are not in business today.

I made the decision and made it right – with no doubt that I’d make the money back.

What if You Go Out of Resonance?

What happens if you made a decision to participate in something, and you either evolve and grow and it no longer resonates for you?  Or, if you recognize you made a decision out of fear and scarcity, and you can’t align with it?

Pay for it anyway.

If you are in business and you have signed a contract, honor the contract.  Period.  It is not a sound business practice to not honor your agreements.  Just do it.

I have participated in a program in which I paid for the entire program, and only took advantage of part of the program.  I could get my undies in a bunch about how I didn’t get the full value from the program, or force myself to do all parts of it even though they aren’t parts that are aligned for me.  But the Truth is I got exactly what I needed from the program.  I made the decision and made it right, and participated powerfully on my terms, and the terms of the contract I signed, with no regret.

If you are the type of person who views contracts and agreements (or jury duty) as things to get out of, that is the energy you will bring to your business and your clients.

Love making your payments, be empowered by your decisions to make and spend money, and don’t spend time spinning in doubt and regret.  All that says is that you don’t think your time is better spent being of service and making more money, and I don’t think you want to believe that!

I sprained my ankle last weekend at an event. I’m not usually one to get injured, and I was highly uncomfortable being wheeled around in a wheelchair (even by the handsome security guard who was enjoying all of the good looking women at the conference!).

I did my best not to let the injury get me down, and I made the most of it. However, I must have been giving off some victim energy because I had a lot of people ‘helping’ me!

I have to start by saying that much of the generosity showed by people was welcome and lovely. And some was downright intrusive and a great indicator of why some people are not doing well in their business.

In Raymond Holliwell’s book, Working With the Law, in the chapter on the Law of Receiving Holliwell says, “Jesus gave his substance always where it would do most good… he cautioned against unwise giving.”

Unwise Giving

Unwise giving is giving your substance, your gifts, your genius, or the details of your inspired mission, to someone who is not prepared to use it or do good with it.

With my ankle sprain, an abundance of people offered me a variety of healing approaches, some in person, others via email or Facebook. Some people had a background of relatedness with such that it was a welcomed gift that they suggested that they might be able to help me. With others, I didn’t know them at all, or wasn’t aware of their unique gifting. I didn’t value the offer, and the interaction left both of us feeling uninspired and even depleted.

Specifically, I had people who wanted to coach me on the deeper emotional meaning of the sprain, which I believe in of course, but I have a coach that I pay for that stuff. I also had people offer me free energy healing, and paid energy healing, and a myriad of other advice.

The solutions that resonated for me I ASKED FOR and appreciated. The other was unwise giving.

Unwise Receiving

Here’s what else I noticed. Lots of people are complicit in the unwise giving by practicing unwise receiving. Because we want to be polite, because we don’t have our own boundaries, we let people give us their substance where it is unwanted. We allow people to give us unsolicited feedback, spewing opinions like they have no value, and we take them.

I see countless entrepreneurs get off track because they met someone networking who told them they didn’t think their business could make money and they believed them. I have a client who tells the story about how she gave her elevator speech at an event and a coach told her that her niche was terrible, and in one 5-minute conversation the coach gave her a new niche. She worked on the new niche for several months before going back to the one that was in her heart.

While I was in my wheelchair last weekend waiting for security to wheel me to my cab to urgent care, a woman who appeared to be a business coach asked me what I do. I gave her some half-hearted answer as my focus was elsewhere, to which she responded, “Are you open to feedback?”

I almost said yes as an automatic, polite response, then quickly said, “no, thank you.” Can you imagine? I don’t know this woman and have no idea whether or not she is successful. She doesn’t know me and has no idea what is working or not working for me, and she thinks it’s a good idea to give me feedback on what I do?

Stop the Madness

Please, don’t accept feedback, or healing, from people who you haven’t requested it from, or who you don’t know or respect. They may be just great and amazing, but you don’t know, and they just may derail you. Not to mention you are reinforcing a behavior that will keep them broke!

And please, don’t give your gifts to people who haven’t asked for them, or who don’t know and value you and what you do. That is why you charge people, because you can be certain at that point that they find your stuff juicy.

I am sure your gifts are fantastic. I’m certain a lot of the people who broke boundaries with me last week are also highly talented and gifted. And there is nothing more diminishing than offering that which is most important to you to someone who dismisses it. Please don’t put yourself in that situation.

If you’re not sure how to tell when it’s appropriate and when it’s not, take a good sales training. I include a whole module on this in my Biz School for Aligned Entrepreneurs. There are lots of other business coaches that teach authentic selling in a way that honors the Law of Receiving. We always get what we need when we need it, get the training you need now!

I am the first to say that moving past where you typically stop requires a ‘come to Jesus’ sort of moment.  To decide to change your life will always come with a brief (or sometimes more than brief) moment of panic as you break through your fear.

If it doesn’t, you’re probably not upleveling yourself enough.

That said, it shouldn’t cause you to feel like crap!  In fact on the other side of an aligned decision (which in my world often means putting down a ‘burn-the-ships’ type deposit on something) there is freedom.

True, peaceful, freedom.  Not a “oh-thank-God-someone-will-save-me” idea of freedom, because that doesn’t exist.

Yet too many people make decisions from that place.

Much of the coaching industry is built on decisions made from that place.

I have made decisions from that place.  I learned a whole lot from it, but it didn’t grow my business.  I have worked with clients who have made a lot of those decisions from a place of fear, and in their work with me finally get to tap into who they really are and what they love… what works about them.

Cycle of Proving in Action

I watch it happen.  A perfectly capable, confident business owner puts themselves in a situation to learn, without a clear awareness of who they are and what they are there to accomplish.  They learn all of the latest tools, tactics, and trends that they COULD be using to grow their business.  And they forget who they are and where they are, and the current skills and resources they have that work for them.  They lose track of everything they already know and all they have learned before that day, and they turn themselves over to the person in front of them to give them an answer to who they should be.

And they start to think they need it all right away, and feel bad for not having it.  They forget that while organic search may be dead, and paid search may be where it’s at, learning how to buy paid search will make no difference because… they don’t even like their website!

They want to prove they are good at that this thing called business, that they are enough, and they create an agreement that they are not enough if they don’t have paid search.

The Hype Can Win Out

A guru paints a picture of hoards of people being led right to you!  And you think you need that right now.  But you don’t, you wouldn’t know what to do with them if you had them!  It’s not a problem to learn paid search.  But aside from taking your precious time, here is where it really doesn’t serve you.  If you buy into the idea that you are somehow doing it ‘wrong’ if you don’t learn it right now.

In any given day in a business seminar you could learn HUNDREDS of things you’re not doing at a level of excellence:  Search, social media, email marketing, webinars, videos, follow-up, networking, finding speaking gigs, converting your audience to paying customers, sales, website copy, design, business cards, taglines, guest blogging, etc., etc., etc.

We always need to learn and grow as a business owner.  But the moment you buy into the idea that you are not enough because you’re not doing these things, you are sunk.  Energetically you just became the insecure provider trying to sell something.  And when you make a decision to get support from a place of feeling inadequate and hoping someone – some program, some technology, some guru who knows more than you – can fix you, you are confirming the energy of inadequacy.

Every decision has an energetic consequence.  

Love begets love, and fear begets fear.

Don’t buy into it.  

You can move past your leading edge of growth, and I am a huge proponent of getting the right support for you to help you do that.  And it will feel scary.  But getting support doesn’t need to make you feel as if you aren’t enough to begin with.  The best business decisions come from focusing on creating more of what you love, and focusing on the good within you and your business, and getting help to grow your unique genius.  What we focus on, grows.  Buying from fear grows fear.

The best thing you can spend money on is something that will teach you how to think, and how to make decisions that are in Alignment with the Truth of who you are, not ones that make you doubt all of the ways in which you are successful already.  Own your value, damn it, and choose and invest from there!

It’s a story I can’t stop going back to.

I call it my 10 years in the self-help aisle.

I was aware of this thing called coaching, and I was pretty sure it had something to do with what I was meant to do with my life.

And I would get moments of divine inspiration about how I could put my gifts to work in a business.

And I would tell the people around me, and they would wrinkle their nose or give me one ‘solid’ reason or question that suggested I was wrong and I would quit.

And this pattern went on for a good 10 years.

So lets talk Truth. Were the people in my life hell bent on keeping me stuck? No. And yes.

See I now know that who I was being during those years was someone who was secretly saying with my energy, “someone please stop me from this madness because I’m really afraid I might fail.” This is true, even though what I was actually saying was, “Don’t you think this is exciting? Come on, agree with me!”

Love and Support

I titled this, “He Loves Me, He Supports Me Not,” and ‘he’ can just as easily be interchanged with ‘she’ as we’ve all got friends, family members or significant others in our lives that just don’t get this whole entrepreneurship thing.

It’s time to get really real on the dynamic of love and support around you. This is arguably THE hardest thing that an independent business owner faces. It’s making the decision about who is going to be in your life, and what you require in order to keep them in your life.

Do they have to support you and your dreams, or is it OK if they just love you ‘in spite of’ your dreams? This is a personal decision that each person needs to make, but let’s explore each side here.

What is Love?

The first thing to ask yourself is what it really means to love someone. A common definition of love is as follows:

Love (n): a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

My favorite definition of love is simply, “accepting another exactly as they are and exactly as they are not.”

Here’s the thing about my definition of love. You don’t have to be in someone’s life to love them by this definition. They may have behaviors and thought patterns that simply don’t work for you, even though you can accept that they are true for them. But you don’t have to be around them.

When someone in your life tells you they love you (even if they don’t seem to support you), the thing to ask yourself is, “Do they really accept me exactly as I am, or are they secretly hoping I’ll change?”

Oh, and by the way, ask yourself the same thing about THEM!

What is support?

I recently created a list of 10 Lies We Tell Ourselves in Business, one of which is “I need the people in my life to understand and support me in order to succeed.”

So I looked at the definition of support.

Support (v): to bear or hold up; to sustain or withstand to undergo or
endure, especially with patience or submission; tolerate.

Now, do we really want the people in our life to support us by this definition!? Ha! We want the person we love to endure and tolerate us? Really?

What do you really want?

It’s worth stopping to ask yourself, when it comes to the relationships in your life, what do you really want? If you can stop focusing on needing other people to support you, you can give them the freedom to give you what you really want. And, you can give yourself the freedom to choose what you really want as well.

Most likely, if you’re a “my people” type of person, you’re not looking for someone to support, or tolerate, you. You want to surround yourself with people who love you. In the definition that says they accept you exactly as you are and exactly as you’re not. Even when you grow. Even when you have ideas that seem like hair-brained schemes from their point of view.

How do the people in your environment respond to you when your intuition, or personal Truth, gives you signals about what to do, and they just don’t get it? Do they accept it as what you need to do, or do they question you and suggest you might be wrong?

But, what if you’re right?

If the people in your life don’t believe you when you are stepping out in alignment with your Truth, what is really going on? What are they really saying when they ask you, “What if you’re wrong?”

We like to justify their responses by saying, “Well, they just love me and want what’s best for me and they are helping me to think it through.” I know I’ve said that. But what if the Truth is that they are really meaning, “It makes me uncomfortable when you change, and I’m afraid of what would happen if you are right, so I’d rather have you doubt yourself and stay the same than believe yourself and actually grow.”

People who question and doubt your decisions, they aren’t concerned about you. And in that moment they certainly aren’t loving you. They simply don’t want to be inconvenienced by the outcome that happens on the other side of your decision when you are right. They are saying “What if you’re wrong?” but they really mean, “I sure hope you aren’t right!”

Who gets on your bus?

I teach in my programs that when you invite a client to work with you, you are letting them “on your bus,” and that you want to be really clear about who you invite on your bus. The same is true with the people in your life. There is no right formula for determining what is really going on. Are you are busy pointing fingers at the people in your life so you don’t have to grow? Or are in a place that you’re ready to move away from the people in your life so you can attract a loving environment?

It’s different for everybody based on your own personal subconscious programming and degree of growth and awareness. The one thing I can say for certain is that you are teaching people how to treat you, and the surest way to retrain your environment is to begin honoring your Truth without fail every time, being completely willing to accept the outcome of your actions and decisions. Stop looking for and waiting for support and start living in love, and watch what happens!