Upper Limit: How to break your own damn glass ceiling!
Upper Limit-
What it means & how to stop self-sabotaging your success.
I like to think of the “upper Limit” as a two-fold problem.
Upper Limit- Two Scenarios
When you start to gain momentum in your goal and begin to self sabotage your efforts of reaching the full peak of your achievement
Upper Limit is also when you push yourself to reach a goal to the extreme of self-sabotaging your mental or physical health or relationships by overworking yourself.
Society sort of sets us up to believe that pushing ourselves OR becoming 100% fearless, ruthless and ballsy is the ultimate end-game of an entrepreneur. As if running ourselves into the ground to reach commercial success in business was the only option.
Upper limit can also be a combination of stretching yourself to a breaking point coupled with sabotaging beliefs that you’ve reached your glass sealing of what you can achieve.
Let’s put an end to the “workaholic” glorified “crushing it” (insert barf emoji) archetype shall we? It’s literally a tired and dated stereotype of what it looks like to be an entrepreneur. Although owning a business is hard work indeed and it does require the founder to wear many hats. It is also a lie that you have to do “all the things” to reap the rewards of your business.
Let’s address the first part of Upper Limit:
Upper Limit: The Glass Ceiling Mentality
What it looks like:
-You believe you are only capable of earning a certain amount of money so you let clients low-ball your services during negotiation. This results in working long hours for high-maintenance clients who nickel and dime your work.
-You believe that you can only achieve a minimal-level of success so you avoid taking risks or testing business ideas and just “stick to what you know”. Even if that means sabotaging your growth and potential.
What it sounds like:
“I don’t think I am qualified to land that client, so I am not even going to try”
“I’ve always done it this way, I don’t know any other way to do it and just want to stick with what I know
“If I beat all the other prices, I will win the client”
Upper Limit: The Burn Out
What it looks like:
-You are juggling e-mail marketing, outreach, design, social media, photographing content, sales, finance, a crashing website, customer service,etc. All on your own as a business owner and you just can never feel as if you got anything done.
-You mean to only work a few hours but those few hours turn into 14. There just isn’t enough time in the day.
What it might sound like:
“I’m just so tired of having a screen in my face all day”
“I don’t even have time to eat”
“I am so stressed that my health is starting to be effected”
“ I don’t know how I am going to finish this all”
“I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel”
Upper Limit: The Cure
Take a much needed Break:
I know it may seem easier said than done but making it a habit and a priority to take a much needed break, can help to shift the way you work. Not to mention that taking a mental pause can equal hours of productivity.
Stick with me. When we feel stressed or are dealing with burnout, our minds are too cluttered to see obvious solutions to a problem. Taking a break is just an efficient way to create space for clarity.
If you are a workaholic, perhaps you might ponder , “how does one go about taking a break?”
Take a walk in the middle of your work day
Take a quick dance break
Drop down and give yourself 20
Quick meditation
Take an affirmation break
Walk away to draw a picture or do something unrelated to your
work, something to help you relax
Take a few days off
Rent a cabin, get out of town or staycay for a few days and enjoy simple pleasures
Bake a loaf of bread
Try a breathing exercise
Do some of your tasks offline if possible
Build an Efficiency Plan:
Data is your friend. Data can help you build a game plan for your content and business plan. Sometimes we get caught up in busy work doing tasks that will never help us elevate our business. Using data-driven software, (I use UBERSUGGEST) can really help you get a granular look into where you should be focusing your efforts in your business.
Having an organized game plan can shave hours if not YEARS off your workload in the long term. We don’t have to do it all or be everywhere, it’s simply about aligning a niche with a large enough audience that is searching for your content. Creating the right keywords and strategy to make your content more visible and using the right tools to make the process simple for your to implement, is key!
Gone are the days when you have to blog all your content yourself, build a clunky wordpress site, manually input all your data, taxes, content, etc. We’ve got automation tools at our fingertips and let me tell you, spending a bit of mulla to save your sanity and personal relationships is well worth the investment of these programs.
Use Apps & memberships to help streamline your work and remove some of the grunt work from your plate.
To build an SEO plan:
I love Ubersuggest for it’s simple data platform
To create easy automated sales funnels and email campaigns:
There are sooo many to choose from. If you are just getting started and are on a minimal budget, I like the Squarespace Email Campaign add-on if you already have a Squarespace website.
You get simple automations, email templates that look great and some built-in email analytics to tell you who is opening and interacting with your email campaigns. It’s all on one platform which removes the need to connect your website, landing pages with email sequences.
For something a little more robust, like building complex sales funnels- Convertkit is great or Clickfunnels is said to be the holy grail of sales funneling.
To create Easier Websites & Landing Pages:
Squarespace, hands down my favorite.
I’ve worked with Wordpress (great for developers, not so great for small businesses unless they want to hire a developer for ongoing maintenance)
Wix was sort of a mess when I tried to build a Wix site, Shopify didn’t really give me creative control for designing a website a few years ago.
Cool Factor Lab is brewing up some really cool Squarespace Templates that will help you launch simple yet eye-catching website!
To create easier marketing content:
I love Canva for creating quick content or organizing my ideas and easily transferring images to Pinterest or via Dropbox or Google Drive.
To create a streamlined to do list:
-Trello is great for creating goals and to do’s, plus it’s free to start!
-Asana is great for project management with multiple clients or team members
To schedule appointments:
Adding Acuity to Squarespace.
I’m all for simple integrations. I really can’t stand adding another automated membership that requires a learning curve to connect all the damn tools. So naturally, I LOVE that Squarespace has partnered with Acuity for appointment scheduling on your Squarespace site or landing page.
To connect it all together:
Do you have a few tasks or automation tools that you need to connect together but don’t know how? Zapier sort of fills in the blanks and helps to remove some of the mundane tasks in your day.
Blog Writing:
Source ghost writers on Fivver or Upwork
Blog writing helps your SEO which is critical to your website's success. However, if you don’t have time to blog, leave it to the professionals and outsource your blog posts. On average, it takes 1-3 months for your SEO posts to rank so don’t wait until you “have more time” to post. Simply outsource the work.
I recommend heading over to Ubersuggest and making a list of keywords that are 1. Relevant to your industry 2. easy to rank for 3. yet optimal in terms of monthly searches. Once you have your list,
You can create a free Asana account or free Trello account to share the keywords with your ghost writer and make sure you are both on the same page in terms of content.
Bottom line, organizing and automating your efforts is crucial to curing yourself of your Upper Limit mindset. Ask yourself throughout the day, is this an essential task? If so, could you simply outsource it or automate it?
Once you’ve established a plan, you’ll realize your Upper Limit mentality may have stemmed from a lack of clarity. When we gain clarity in life or in business, it becomes much easier to pave a path to our own success. Removing an upper limit mentality can allow you to dream and expand your business in ways you may have not imagined while under the weight of your own limiting beliefs.
Trim the fat, keep the essentials, create more freedom with automated systems and outsourcing, stay organized and focused, DREAM WITH EASE.
Cheers!
The Lab