Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT)

Keystone habits are life-changing. They're the habits that mom we add them to our lives, they help create momentum everywhere, and they don't cause constraint in any way. When you add one keystone habit, it can be life-changing and you will feel momentum. When you add several Keystone habits at once, everything in your life will feel like momentum. Your business will grow faster, you will feel better, and you will create the outcomes you want to in the world. In this episode, I discuss with Annie Grace how her life and business had changed since she started adding keystone habits to her life.

This is one of the most difficult, but most critical, lessons to learn as an entrepreneur. It took me forever. I got caught up in the same traps that most entrepreneurs do, fake it until you make it, never let them see you sweat.

For most of us, it's near impossible to see the correlation between vulnerability and momentum. How can something that makes us feel so exposed and precarious move us forward?

Entrepreneurial panic is real and it can come out of nowhere. As evolutionary hunters, we are compelled to go forward, achieve, and create new outcomes in the world. We are hardwired to create momentum and anything else makes us feel like we are standing in place. When we don't create the momentum in progress we want in the world, we can feel the panic of the motivation we naturally have, not having anywhere to go. If you are an entrepreneur and you've never felt the panic of not knowing where to go next, you are fortunate. Use the strategies in this podcast to make sure things stay that way. If you have, you will be shocked at how easy it is to take the feelings of entrepreneurial overwhelm and turn them into confidence.

The fourth quarter is a time of year where either due to tradition, habit, or excuse, the crowd has already predetermined that it will lose momentum.

Most people make up their mind in advance that they are going to overeat, drink more than they normally would, and exercise less during the fourth quarter.There is no other way to look at this than pre-determining that you will lose and lose momentum.This is insanity because the fourth quarter is a time of year where there is a huge opportunity. The fourth quarter allows you to exponentially outpace your confrontation.All you have to do is step out of the crowd.

Many entrepreneurs grow teams and yet each day their lives get harder. For some growing the team, which was supposed to help them, only feels like it has slowed everything down and made everything take longer. It is common for entrepreneurs with million dollar plus businesses to feel like they should just go back to doing it all themselves. Things felt so much easier back then, there was so much less complication. We dream of being responsible only for ourselves and getting rid of everyone. Each day that goes by, you have less hope of making your life easier as everything around you feels harder. Almost immediately animosity towards the team sets in. Each pay period grows more frustrating as you write checks bigger than you used to pay yourself to a team that isn't doing everything you want. This is when some entrepreneurs actually do fire everyone, hit the reset button, and try to figure out what went wrong. There is a better way.

The most important asset in building your business is your time. The challenge we all have as entrepreneurs is that the second we start building our business, everyone wants our time. There is an endless stream of requests that lower the time we have available to grow the business. If you aren't careful, these requests can take over your schedule. It is subtle at first… You accept a meeting request from a sales rep that has been really persistent. You set up a call with someone from Facebook, in a similar situation to yours, who asked if they could pick your brain. You join in educational membership and almost immediately other members want to connect and get to know you. Before you know it, these requests for your time have taken over your schedule and you are fighting for productivity.

As entrepreneurs when we are growing our businesses, we must to do everything. In order for an entrepreneur to successfully start a business, by definition, they have to do everything. The challenge with this dynamic is that if we successfully grow a business, we become conditioned to doing everything. Most entrepreneurs do far too much in their businesses. They don't slow down enough to look for areas where someone could help. Here is a simple rule that I share with entrepreneurs… If your days are getting tactically harder, you are building a house of cards. There are no exceptions to this rule, only brief periods where we get away with it. Eventually, if your days continue getting tactically harder you will have a breakdown.

When we travel we get to see new places, have new experiences, and meet people who don't live near us. Travel has provided our family with some of our most incredible adventures ever. My daughters have been traveling since before they were six months old and they love it. Traveling can also be exhausting, trying, and let's be honest it can break you down. Most people are overstressed when they are traveling, on a hair trigger, and preloaded ready to explode. I can feel this when I get to any major airport, the energy is always tense and accelerated. Here are some of the ways we travel with momentum, get to our destination safely, and have an incredible time even when we are on the road.

Every one of us has made a mistake. If you are like me you have made many, public, avoidable, gruesomely embarrassing mistakes in your life. We all know how it feels, the second you recognize that you did something wrong and it is going to cause a problem…

Your heart jumps into your throat. You instantly feel accelerated. And pressure annoys goes up immediately.

This is how you feel, and you are in charge. Imagine what it feels like for a team member when they make a mistake. They feel all those same things, and then the pressure of having someone that holds them accountable.

When someone on my team makes a mistake, or a mistake appears to have happened, I do everything I can to protect my team member from that mistake.

This is one of the most valuable leadership strategies I have ever learned.

The reason that you should hire true believers is that empires are always taken down from the inside. You can do everything to guard your culture and put the right people in your organization but sooner or later a non-believer will sneak in. At first, they are tough to see, they might act and talk like everyone else. They did enough to get onto your team and now that they are there, they are ready to cause disruption.

I have never understood why some people just like to be disruptive. They are the first to object, gossip, they're not transparent with those around them, and they can rob the momentum of an entire team.

They don't actively want to be on your team, they are putting up with it. They're not excited about moving your organization forward, they're with you for a paycheck. They lack excitement for the work and do the absolute minimum they can get by.

I call these people mutineers.

There is a reason that when there was a mutiny on a ship, mutineers had to walk the plank…