Building a business can seem SUPER scary, overwhelming and intimidating. But in reality, it's just a big giant experiment!

If you want to start a business from home (or grow an existing one), today I'm teaching you how and why to alleviate a whole bunch of pressure off your business, how to react when things go wrong AND how to have a whole lot more fun!

Let's gooooo!

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Maybe their friend.

Welcome back today.

I have an awesome episode about fun and humor and making sure

business does not get too serious.

But before we dive in, I want to let you know that I am running a really

fun giveaway for two Amazon gift cards.

They're each worth $50 a piece.

When I get to 10 reviews, I think we're at three or four right now.

So if you have a minute, pause, this episode, run over to apple podcast.

Leave me a written review.

So not just to start rating, but write some words down.

It can be short.

And then take a screenshot of it and email me@infoatbonniewiscon.com

and then everyone who sends me a screenshot will be entered to win

one of these two $50 gift cards.

And when we hit 10 reviews, we give them away.

So that gives you a one in five chance of winning 50 bucks.

So go take a minute, leave me a review.

I would so, so, so appreciate it, especially if you're getting

some benefit out of this podcast.

Okay.

So now let's dive into our content today.

First of all, let me just say that.

I know sometimes business feels like a big deal.

Especially when we talk about answering this call, that God is

sending us, it sounds so serious.

And admittedly, even my intro for this podcast is a little heavy.

I'm thinking about redoing it.

But made it this way simply because I want moms to understand what a

privilege it is to be able to build a business from home in your pajamas.

Put it under the world.

And, and feel fulfilled and make an impact for good and make some

money and help support your family.

While we simultaneously shine our light into the world.

It's a beautiful, wonderful thing,

But I also don't want any moms to freak out because they feel like it's this

big, serious deal and they cannot fail.

In reality.

It's so not a big deal.

It's just not, it seems scary.

I know.

And it seems like there's a lot on the line.

But in reality, it's just a path.

If you're not ready or you get cold feet or you start a business and it

loses all its money in three months.

It's all.

Okay.

It's all just a trial, just an experiment.

We'll talk about the experiment aspect in a minute, because I think it's so

powerful, but I just want you to realize that the truth is it's just a path like

any other, do you guys remember those old books choose your own adventure books,

where you would read a chapter and then you get to choose what the character does.

And then you flip forward or backward in the book.

So fun.

That is what this is.

It's just a choice and it's going to take me to this chapter

and I'll see how that goes.

And maybe I'll flip back and make a different decision because

sometimes you regret your decision.

You think actually that taught me some lessons, but I don't want

to go down that path anymore.

Great.

That's totally possible.

But just don't go into this thinking it's all or nothing it's do or die.

You have to succeed or else it's not, it's just a fun path.

And it is actually a, one of an infinite number of paths for your life.

You can choose anyone you want.

And among those paths, there are countless choices that have nothing to do with

owning a business that are equally good and worthy and amazing for you.

You could choose to turn the other way and do something entirely different and still

create this amazing life of your dreams.

I promise.

That's true, but because you're here, I have a feeling

that the business feels like

uh, good right next step for you.

And if so, let's do it, but let's have fun doing it.

Okay.

As I've mentioned in previous episodes, there is no right choice

when it comes to a business.

There is some that feels good.

There's something that feels scary.

There's something that feels overwhelming, but they're all just choices.

And when we make one.

We get to just aside.

That we want it to be the right one.

Really truly.

And we also can decide early on that there's not a right business type.

Or right business niche or structure or ideal customer or ideal product

that you're supposed to sell it.

It just doesn't exist.

It's all what you get to choose.

There are actually a million different ways you could choose

to build your business and get the same results that you're hoping for.

So just let me just say that out.

The.

Outset.

There is no right way.

There is no wrong way.

There is just a way and you get to try it and see if you like it and

continue going down that path or come back and try a different way.

Not only is building a business, really a fun thing to do, but.

The more, we embrace fun and the quicker we get there.

The easier the business building will be.

There are days where I feel exhausted or overwhelmed or kind of tired.

And I have an excuse to not coming to my office and work on

my business, but I want to why.

Because it's so fun.

It's enjoyable for me.

I built a business that I really, really love.

And because of that, I come back to it over and over again,

even when things get hard.

So that's what I just wanna remind you of.

It's not life or death.

It should be fun.

And when the fun comes, the ease comes as well.

So if you're feeling yourself constantly butting up against a wall or like,

This is just too hard and it's not fun anymore.

Maybe shift a few things.

See if you can tap into that fund again.

Okay.

Now I want to share a quick story with you.

When I was a kid and tempers were flaring at my house, I had four

younger siblings, so a bunch of us yelling and fighting all the time.

My dad would often say, don't lose your sense of humor.

Remember don't.

Is your sense of humor and admittedly in the moment usually drove us

crazy, whatever dad shut up.

You know, But he had a point and the point was none of this matters in the long run,

especially when it comes to relationships.

Right.

And I would say the same is true of your business.

It's a great reminder that life is very rarely as serious as we want to make it.

And sometimes that heaviness can just create all this unnecessary drama and

it weighs us down and it makes things so much harder than it needs to be.

So a business that is built under that kind of enormous

pressure is bound to fail.

I'm telling you.

It's like a garden.

The analogy I like the best is it's like a garden.

That needs to feed your family immediately.

I don't know if you've ever grown a garden, but it's not a great

way to feed your family tomorrow.

It takes some time.

And some nurturing and some patients.

If you needed your burden to feed your family tomorrow, you would be out

there just desperately planting and sowing and watering and fertilizing.

Let's go.

Let's go.

Let's go.

We need to eat.

You know, that's not going to work.

You would have no patience for those little sprouts to come up

and gradually grow and create these amazing vegetable plants.

Right.

And as soon as anything popped up, you'd be out there going, come

on, come on, come on, come on.

Not big enough.

Let's go.

Let's go.

Let's go.

Your poor little plants would just suffer under that kind of a care.

But a business that is instead built on curious possibilities

instead of enormous pressure.

Allows for fun and enjoyment to just flow easily.

And it allows for this leisurely watering and patient fertilizing.

And even if I might go all the way there with this metaphor, A relaxing

afternoon spent in the hammock, watching your tomato plants grow, right.

It allows for fun and enjoyment along the way.

Does that sound so much better than sitting there desperate

to make money tomorrow or for your business to grow today?

Just let it be easy and let it be slow if it needs to be, because chances are good.

It will be.

Okay.

So now I've convinced you that you want to let go of some of

that pressure and lean into this enjoyment, but how do we do that?

Well, The first step is your thoughts and your words, you know, I'm gonna

come back to this every time we have to eliminate that all or nothing thinking and

vocabulary that comes out of it sometimes.

Please, please, please stop saying things like this has to make money.

Or this has to work.

I don't know what I'll do if this doesn't pan out.

Of course, you know what you'll do.

You'll just go choose something else or you'll get a job or he'll just go back to

being a stay at home mom and enjoy that.

Think about getting your kids to do something you want them to do.

If you ever get really worked up and get in their face and say,

you have to do this right now.

How well does that go over for you?

Does that work with your kids?

Usually not so well.

Right.

They get rebellious and everybody's angry and it doesn't go over well at all.

So think of your business for a second.

Like this living, breathing entity.

It does not like feeling stressed out.

And it does not like being told it has something to do.

And that there's all this pressure that it has to succeed.

So just stop with the thoughts like, oh, this is my last chance to make

something work from home or, oh my gosh.

If we don't make extra money, things are going to be desperate.

No, none of that is necessary.

We're going to give our business plenty of time and patience and love to grow slowly.

Like that tender little burden that we want to grow.

Now, I'm not saying that you don't expect your business to make money.

I highly recommend you do.

But don't set it up for failure by giving it arbitrary deadlines or by not allowing

it to come about slowly and patiently.

Just embrace the same language you would for growing that garden or a child, right.

This is hard sometimes, but it's going to turn out beautifully in the end.

Don't we say that about raising our kids?

Gosh, there.

They're just going through a phase right now.

It's making me a little crazy, but I cannot wait to see what they grow

into, or this is the beautiful part about this phase that I'm loving.

Or this will turn out exactly the way it's supposed to.

I can't wait to see how this is going to help support my family someday.

Just this slow patient.

Joyful language and thoughts is going to set you up for so much more success.

In addition to watching and managing those thoughts and words that come out of us.

Be aware of decision fatigue.

So starting a new business.

Requires a ton of decisions.

You have to choose a website and a platform and branding and a

niche, and you have to choose your elevator pitch for how you're going

to present yourself to people.

What kind of products or services or offers you want, how to deliver it?

How to price it.

Sorry if I'm freaking you out.

But these are just choices that come up for us, right.

And decisions we have to make.

It can be very easy to allow ourselves to drown in these decisions and not.

Be able to come up for air.

We're just so overwhelmed because of all the things we have to decide.

I have a really simple and easy strategy.

I'm gonna teach you if you tend to get overwhelmed by decisions.

And even if you jump into decisions and tend to, , regret them a little

bit later, or I think maybe you should've thought a little bit longer.

This is a great strategy for everyone.

The impulsive and the ones that can never make decisions.

And I call it one, one, one.

Super easy.

Right?

You give yourself one day to gather all the necessary resources.

So let's say for example, you're learning about how to build your own website.

So day one, you're going to go and ask your friends how they built their

websites, and you're going to go do some Googling, find different platforms

to build a website on you're going to,

Read testimonials read some tech articles, just gather information.

Then the second day, that's the second one.

You give yourself a day to read through it all.

So the first day is just gathering.

The second day is reading it.

You're going to read the testimonials, you're going to read the articles.

You're going to maybe even play around with some of the software,

see how hard or easy it is.

And then on the final day, that last one.

You make the decision.

Where do you feel prepared or not?

Whether you feel like you could spend more time researching.

It doesn't matter that third day is the day you make the decision.

What I have found, I tend to be the one who jumps into decisions and

doesn't always take plenty of time, but this strategy makes me move a little

bit slower, allows me to sleep on it and keeps me from making impulsive

decisions that I regret later.

And for those of you who maybe take forever to make a decision, this will

keep you on track to making those decisions in three days or less.

Okay.

So try that one out.

Now if you are at the very beginning stages of building your business or

stuck work somewhere in the middle and you're still not up and running online.

. Then I highly recommend you check out the show notes for a link to my 30 day

calendar for building your business

I've created this really comprehensive guide to get you up and running

in just 30 days, you don't have to do it in three sequential days.

You can take two months and just, you know, take a day off every other day.

But it's a really, really great resource that has just taken all the guesswork

out of it and made the decisions for you.

It's under $30 and I'll include the link in the show notes

if you want help doing that.

But once we take a lot of that pressure off, it helps us make

these decisions quicker as well.

Because it doesn't matter what platform you use for your website.

It really doesn't.

I mean, if a year down the road, you've made $10,000, $50,000 and you're like, oh,

this website is not working so well now you have capital and more resources to put

into your website, but at the beginning,

It just doesn't matter.

Making the decision is the most important thing.

Once we've taken away all this unnecessary pressure and the decision fatigue kept

ourselves from drowning in that we get to commit to looking at our business.

Like this experiment that I mentioned before.

Right.

And a really enjoyable experiment.

I don't know if you liked science growing up.

If you didn't, maybe you can't relate to this, but I did some really, really fun

experiments in my high school career.

And when you look at it like an experiment, then there is

no wrong way to do something.

It's just a trial.

It's just, let's try this thing and see what happens.

Ooh, that was an interesting result.

I didn't expect that one.

Let's tweak it a little bit and see what result we get.

Oh, is that getting us closer to our goal or farther away?

All right.

Let's tweak it a little bit more.

It's just all a trial.

So not only can experiments be really fun, but hopefully they

will be low pressure and exciting.

. This isn't an experiment to find the cure for cancer.

We're just figuring out what to do next in our business.

Okay.

So totally low pressure.

And exciting.

They involve trial and error.

Brainstorming creativity.

And like I said, when an experiment fails, Quote-unquote, it's not a failure.

It's just an experiment that we choose to adjust because it yielded a result

that wasn't closer to where we want to go, which is, you know, whatever

your goal is for your business to make money, to feel fulfilled, to

help as many people as you can.

You're just tweaking the variables.

You're putting into the experiment to yield the result that you're looking for.

Now let's talk about the humorous part again.

Okay.

A key component to being a successful experimenter scientist in your

business is being able to laugh when things do not go as planned.

Are you able to laugh at problems in your business?

Let's say you paid thousands of dollars to a manufacturer to

create this brand new product.

And then the wrong product shows up at your door.

Or it doesn't match the sample that they sent you where your

website comes back from the designer and it looks like garbage.

Or you do a live video and you look like an idiot.

Or your kid comes in and takes his pants off in the live video.

I don't know.

You know, as a mum, anything is possible.

Can you find the humor in that?

Or do you just turn to shame and blame and wallow in that misery?

And think I should give up I'm a failure.

No.

It all has a humorous aspect to it.

It just does.

And if you're a mom, you've already learned this.

You can sit in the pantry and drown your sorrows and chocolate

and cry, which is totally okay.

Sometimes.

Or you can just laugh.

One thing that has been a huge lesson to me as a more experienced

mom is how much funnier.

I find things when my kid says things that he really shouldn't be saying.

It's so much easier for me to laugh at it than it wasn't those first years.

And those first few years I made it mean something about me.

I made it mean that there was something wrong with me and I was a terrible mom.

My kid was never going to turn out.

What are you making these quote unquote failures in your business mean about you?

Do you expect it to go off without a hitch?

Because here's your spoiler alert.

It's not gonna, things are gonna go wrong.

So when they do, what do you think about that?

What do you make it mean about you?

How do you look at that failure?

Is it something kind of humorous that you get to learn from and move on?

Or is it something that is going to cripple you and keep

you from making progress?

It's all in your head.

It's all up to you.

How you think about it.

So taking your business too seriously is a surefire way to kill it.

I promise this pressure of perfection.

Doesn't do anyone any good, especially not a growing business.

Your business will not be perfect and it will not even be close to perfect.

Ever.

Not even when it seems successful, not even when people look at you

and go, oh, I want to be successful.

Like you.

You will still know all the flaws.

And you will still think you mess up all the time would you will.

And that's totally okay.

That's part of life.

It will get better and better and better as you learn.

But the sooner we can learn.

To laugh about what's going wrong.

The more successful we will be, because we know none of it actually matters.

It's all just for fun.

It's all just to see what we can build and see what's possible.

So again, The main reason we want to keep our sense of humor around

our business is because it means working on our business will be fun.

Taking that pressure off means that we don't have to feel it all the time.

It means that we don't have to feel so serious all the time is that we

don't have to feel so disappointed.

When things don't work out as we expected.

I personally love working on my business.

I get to use my creativity every single day.

I get to help people learn really cool things and make money.

It doesn't get any better than that.

But anytime I let myself put too much pressure on my business,

the fun factor gets killed.

And all of a sudden I find myself feeling sorry for myself, that things

aren't working out as expected.

And what's wrong with me and I'm never going to be successful.

It's all nonsense.

So, how can you keep your sense of humor surrounding your business?

What thoughts do you need to adopt to ensure that we're

hearing your business stays fun?

Is, are there certain things that you think about every

time you sit down at your desk?

That makes you feel like a Debbie downer?

Can you change those thoughts to, what am I going to do that

I'm going to enjoy this week?

What am I going to learn about myself?

That is going to be fun this week.

What am I going to learn about my potential customers or clients?

It doesn't mean that there won't be hard work or that it won't

sometimes drive you crazy and make you want to pull your hair out.

Just like any aspect of life, just like parenting,

but if you allow excitement to be the driving factor behind it all, it will be

just so much more enjoyable and you will make a much bigger impact on the world.

Okay, friends, go out there and have so much fun with your business.