How to Fall Back in Love With Your Business
It can be incredibly disheartening to fall out of love with your business. And it happens quite a bit. Here’s how it can go down. You launch your dream business full of energy, excitement, and a major spark for the overall feeling of possibility. You’re moving towards freedom! (Creative freedom, financial freedom, and freedom with your time.) You may have a little bit of fear, but it’s the good kind of fear that propels you, rather than the scary-feeling fear that paralyzes you. You launch, you do the thing, you’re feeling good and proud. And then at some point, whether it’s months or years in, you look around and realize that you just aren’t in love with your business anymore (or gasp!, maybe you never were?). Things have fallen flat.
That out of love-ness can look and feel like:
You still like your business in theory, but something feels off.
You're no longer inspired by the work.
You dread opening your inbox.
You feel disconnected from your customers/clients/audience.
The energy and excitement you had when you first launched your business is pretty much nonexistent.
You wonder “Is this REALLY the business of my dreams?”
You've been fantasizing about doing something else.
You wonder if you should close up shop.
You have to convince yourself to work. And when you do… meh.
You still love your craft, but the actual business makes you want to cry.
You may feel some version of these and/or have a totally different “out of love” feeling. But when you know, YOU KNOW.
It truly happens more often than you may think. So if you’re there, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to stay there.
There can be a ton of reasons why people fall out of love with their business. From doing work they don’t want to do, to doing the work in a WAY they don’t want to do it, to feeling a disconnect with their clients and customers. The reasons can be personal and even unknown to you. Self exploration may be needed. Reflection with a trusted entrepreneur friend, a coach, your journal can be helpful.
Action to fall back in love is also needed. Keep in mind that each business is unique, as is each business owner. So there is not a “one size fits all” step-by-step guide. There is, however, an overall approach with 4 strategies that can more than get you on your way. So let’s get to that actionable goodness. As you go through the strategies below do some reflection on when the opposite of the strategy was true and you’ll likely shed some light on the reasons you’ve fallen out of love. Let’s get to it.
How do you fall back in love with your business?
Connect with your intuition and inner voice and make decisions from that space
To know what you want your business to be you have to be connected to that intuitive, gut space within you. I’ve said it a hundred times, if you’re not connected to your intuition and listening to your own voice you’ll end up creating the business of someone else’s dreams. When operating from a head space only, you’ll do what the books tell you, what other people tell you, what you think you should do, what you think the industry expects, and what seems smart on paper (even if it feels not-quite-right in your gut). You’ll make decisions that feel off in a way you may not be able to put your finger on. You’ll have an overall disconnect between yourself and your work. You’ll be misaligned. And it’s hard to be in love or fulfilled amidst disconnect and misalignment. To begin to fall back in love with your business, you have to genuinely know what YOU want the business to be. Then you can make aligned shifts so you and your business are back at it.
Reconnect with your business why
Maintaining a strong connection with your why, and keeping it top of mind, will help you fall back in love. If you’ve been in a go-go-go mentality focused on tangible outcomes only—like money and sales and vanity metrics—you may have forgotten the core of why you started this business. So reconnect with that why. Maybe it was to… bring beauty into people’s homes, bring sustainability to your industry, create cherished family heirlooms, help small businesses thrive, write stories that touch lives, etc. Remind yourself, often, of the meaning behind the products and services you offer.
Stop doing work you don’t want to do
There will always be less than desirable tasks as a business owner. So if the work you don’t want to do is a necessary task (i.e., paying your taxes, accounting, stocking your inventory) consider ways to outsource it. If the work you don’t want to do is a product or service you offer, let it go! Do not offer services or products or store hours or whatever that you don’t want to offer. Simply, do not. It is not sustainable to offer something you don’t love. I tell my clients all the time, “It’s not selfish, it’s sustainable.” Offering what you enjoy is sustainable for your business. If you feel like you HAVE to offer a particular service at this time to pay the bills, then give yourself a timeline to find another solution. I have some clients who are doing work they less than love this year to make up for losses due to COVID. That is necessary for some business at this time. And that is more than okay. You may need to do that. But begin working on your plan to ease and flow into what you LOVE later this year and into next year.
Start doing the work that’s been pulling you
Once you stop doing work you don’t want to do, you’ve created space to do the work you do want to do. You may have an idea for your business that keeps coming up that you keep pushing down. For example, maybe you’re a product-based business and you continue to have this subtle idea that you want to teach your craft. Maybe you have a brick and mortar and you want to move completely online. Maybe you want to write a book! You hear it from your internal space, and you keep ignoring it or thinking you’ll get to it later. If an idea or direction for your work is pulling, and that idea is coming from your own intuition (back to number one up there), follow the lead.
As you think about falling back in love with your business and making aligned shifts so the love and fulfillment is sustainable, you may have stories come up that you allow to get in your way. That could sound like, I’m not talented enough, that will never work for me, the industry is too saturated, that’s too scary, and on and on. You can work through those stories! There are many story types that trip people up. After you work through the strategies above, you can head hear to learn about a sneaky story type that is very likely holding you back.
You can absolutely make shifts so that your business is all you hoped and dreamed when you launched. It’s not magic (you have to act), but taking aligned action to get there is magical! Best, my friend, fulfillment and that in love-ness is just around the corner.
