I figured if I couldn’t suck you in to read an email using a New Kids On The Block song title then nothing was going to work!
But the title is more than boy band clickbait I assure you.
Today I want to talk a bit about mental toughness.
Building an online business while working full time is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve spoken to a number of women who’ve said the exact same thing about building out a business while being a stay at home mom and running a household.
To have success at something like this takes a level of persistence that most people can’t conjure up. You have to be able to look past short-term failures and long periods where it seems like you aren’t getting any traction at all. That’s hard and it challenges you at a deeper level.
Anyone who’s done this has found themselves wondering if they’re good enough or smart enough to make it work. It’s those times where you’ve put in the effort, you’re not really seeing any kind of progress or payback and you just think, “Man, this is a colossal waste of time, I can’t do this.” That’s when you’re hardest on yourself.
As you know, for the last six weeks or so I’ve been travelling for work two days a week up to Brisbane. I’m not going to lie, it’s been pretty hard. I’m having to wake up one morning at 4:30am and I don’t get back to my place until around 9pm the next day. The last few weeks I’ve been doing it on Monday and Tuesday which makes the rest of the week really long, so when the weekend comes I’m shattered.
However, I still have my online businesses to run as well. Each day I’m in Brisbane I still have to churn out an email, I have done a couple coaching calls from my hotel room, I’ve spoken to SEO clients during the evenings and on weekends I work on the Casual Marketer Monthly Newsletter getting the next issues ready.
The easy thing to do would be to let these daily emails go and if I’m tired or it’s late, just skip a day. To me though, that’s the difference between being mentally tough and being soft – I know that this is an important part of my routine, that doing it is valuable, so I push through and do it. I’ve not missed a day of these emails in over six months – my goal was to write and publish over 300,000 words this year and with nearly five months to go in the year, I’m already up over 200,000. That’s just hard work and bearing down.
The take away from today is easy. If you want to succeed online, then you simply have to be willing to put the work in, accept that it takes longer than you could probably imagine and commit yourself to doing it even when it gets hard. You need to be mentally strong.
I’d suggest that you use the New Kids song as your anthem, but that’s just going too far.