Learn : Day 7 March Meet The Maker
Today's prompt is "Learn" - suggestions include "What was the best thing you learnt since running your business?"
This is easy. Best thing I learned, that is at the core of everything I do in life:
• Always trust my gut
• Never 'should' on myself
Sounds simple. Is simple. When my gut niggles that something isn't right for me, I don't do it. Even if my head says that I 'should' do this or that, if my gut says no, it's a no. When running a micro business, there's a million different things you have to do. Need to do. Want to do, choose to do. And it would be easy to get sucked in to trying to do every single thing you see influencers and advisors posting about. Marketing avenues, sales streams, events, you name it. But as soon as I notice myself thinking "I should do that" rather than "I want to do that"...I just don't.
That includes a myriad of wee things, and some major things. I remember, a few years back, I think it was 2017? Might be wrong. I'd spent a couple of years working myself towards doing the Royal Highland Show with NoBooksOnTour. I was already constantly on the road and had done a few hundred events, including other very large events. The RHS dates had clashed with other things for 2/3 years in a row, so I was excited when 2017 (or 18? doesn't matter) came along, and I sat down in the January and started booking my year, including filling out the application for the Highland Show. Then my gut said 'no'. I was like "EH?", and carried on filling in the very detailed application booklet. Something wasn't sitting right. To this day, I don't know what it was. But my gut kept telling me that I shouldn't do it. I pushed the paperwork to the side and started filling in another application. Similar show, similar distance, similar price etc etc etc and my gut was back to "yay, yay, yay". So the next day, I went back to the RHS paperwork, having forgotten how I'd felt yesterday, and the same thing happened. Just this ball in my stomach, saying "No. Jo. I said no". Made no sense at all. A few days later, I gave it another bash. I'd booked and been booked for most of my year over those few days, and the final thing I really had to get in the diary, was the Royal Highland Show. And once again, my gut dug its heels in. So I listened. And I chucked the application in the bin.
I can't explain it. I really wanted to do it! But, perhaps as I've got older? I've realised that nothing is worth a feeling of unease in my gut. Because when I've pushed through that gut feeling, overidden it and gone ahead with whatever it wasn't happy with...nothing bad has ever happened, but I do get a weird internal feeling of unease or resentment. It's really peculiar. This is only one example, but it highlights the internal struggle of 'shoulding on myself', and when I remove the obligation of 'should', all is well.
I will do the RHS one of these years. I've done longer events, more expensive events and similar events and they've all been fab haha So there's no practical reason that I haven't done it...except for the fact I know my life is more serene, when I learn to listen to my gut,
I'm taking part in this year's March Meet The Maker. It's primarily an Instagram thing, with the focus being on telling your story via photos. You might have noticed, I take shite photos, but I can ramble on in type for ages haha So I'm going to mostly take part, right here, on NoBooksBlog.co.uk