What does the second half of your year look like?
When you put off starting your side hustle, you shrink your capacity to live the life you want.
Don’t wait for the perfect moment to start living the life you desire and deserve.
There is no perfect time, and there is no perfect moment. It’s time to ditch the starts and stops and start accumulating real progress by going all in now.
Listen to this episode and find out how you can tap into your motivation and why now is the perfect time to start your side hustle.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Full Show Notes (Transcript)…
Hey, risers. Welcome to episode 114 of Empathy Rising. So I have a serious question for everybody, and that question is: do you like music with your fireworks? I guess this question is going to really pertain to more of our US listeners. Or maybe you have firework shows in your country for certain celebrations. And do you like those to be set to music?
We just had a super fun 4th of July. We went to a local lake and they set it up as a beach. There's beach chairs and they bring in, like, beach sand and stuff, and it's fun. And so the girls spent the whole day swimming and there was a jungle gym and food trucks. And it was a whole day. I got to take my paddleboard out.
Last episode, I shared how that's my new hobby that I was definitely influenced to take up, but I really enjoy. So I took my board out. We ate fair food. We got really flashy lightsaber toys at the end, and we spend this whole day building up to the fireworks.
I have to go on a tangent real fast and say, the 4th of July is probably my favorite holiday. Not necessarily because of like American independence or anything. I really don't care about that, but summer's my favorite season. And then fireworks and just the whole ambiance of the whole day.
Plus my hometown has the world's oldest rodeo, which they celebrate over the 4th of July. So it's like a big thing that I grew up with. We're having this fabulous day. We're just really getting excited. It culminates in this firework show, people have driven. We went to... it's a place that people drive from south Georgia, north Georgia, Alabama. It's a place people drive to, to go watch these fireworks.
And so we're sitting there and they're like, alright, everybody turn off your lights and everything like that. And it gets real, real quiet and your... this anticipation comes up. And then all of a sudden, the most terrible music ever comes on and the fireworks show is set, supposed to be set to this music.
I will say, I have seen some fireworks shows, especially when we watch them on an army installation where they might have like the army band playing along with the fireworks. So it's more like orchestra music, and that still bothers me. I don't enjoy it, but at least it was like, set like, there was slower songs in the beginning. And then like with the grand finale, it was like a faster, like more intense song. No, this was literally every American arena rock, born in the USA song that you can think of.
They took the chorus of each of those songs and splice them together. And then in the middle - I can't even make this up in the middle - John Wayne said the pledge of allegiance. And then it went back to other choruses of other songs and it was this terrible mismatch. It made me feel like I was at this independence day cheer competition, where it's like the music, like just switches and goes to the next song. And it's really choppy and that's exactly what it felt like.
And it was horribly corny and it ruined my whole fireworks. It turned me off to the whole fireworks display. I was let down, it was like this whole wonderful day. And then it culminated in this disappointing, like a minute and a half. Probably more like five minutes, but I don't know, maybe 10, I don't know how long the fireworks show, but it was just bad.
Like I really love to enjoy fireworks as a sensory experience of its own, right. It has the noise and it has the sparkly flashes of light. And then there's the slow buildup where they release like one and two. And then again, it culminates in this grand finale, and I do not need hokey music distracting me from that.
And it wasn't like it was set to the music, it wasn't like the explosions were happening in time. It was just really fast upbeat like tempo music. And then the songs just jump from one song to the next. And it was just bad. It was just bad. So I'm really bummed because it was a wonderful day. And then this is how it ended.
So I'm really curious. I really, if you're listening, I want you to go to the Facebook group and leave a comment and let me know am I way off base here? Is this a normal thing? Is this how you've always enjoyed your fireworks? Do you like music with them in the first place? And would you like this kind of upbeat rock, chorus, type of thing to go with it, or would you prefer no music?
I told Josh, I was like, if they had played that song when everybody was packing up their chairs and walking to their cars or songs that compilation that would have made sense. I would have maybe even enjoyed it a little bit more. Not all of it is so corny, but I would have enjoyed it more if that would have been when it was like leave my fireworks quiet, and then play that music as we're all like, walking to our cars and packing up and stuff. That would have been totally different. So I want to know A, is this a normal thing for you and B, do you enjoy it or does this sound fricking weird to any of you guys?
So I'm going to get into the episode, I promise. Here in the US, as I've been like ranting for the last five minutes, we are coming off of the 4th of July holiday which puts us pretty much smack dab in the middle of 2020. I didn't do the math. I don't know exactly what is the midway day, but let's just, go with it and say, we're pretty much in the middle of the year here.
And a lot of us, myself included, I get to a point where I just write off the rest of the year oh, okay we're halfway through now. So what's the point in doing anything in the second half. It's like we get all this momentum and this motivation to start something. And then the follow-through tends to fall off, which I'm just, as I'm speaking this out loud, connecting this to my cold.
My Colby index, which is high in quickstart and very low in follow-through. So if you haven't taken that assessment, I totally recommend you do it. I've mentioned it on a few other podcast episodes. It's 60 bucks. So it does cost money, but you can write it off. You can write it off for your practice or write it off for your Side Hustle.
But it measures how you manage projects and how you make decisions. And even just saying this out loud, it really resonates with my Colby. I do get to a point where I have a lot of motivation in the beginning to start something, and then I lose motivation to see it through and to complete it. And I think that a lot of us approach things the same way we're gung-ho in the beginning. And then that perpetuity is what we struggle with. It's summertime and we're already talking about getting to something next year. We've gotten to this point where we're like, okay if I haven't done it yet, I'm not going to do it.
And when we look at it, realistically, we still have a solid five and a half months, a solid five months to be making progress. So whether you've already written off the second half of the year, or maybe it starts to happen to you in August or September. I know a lot of times towards quarter four, when October, November, December rolls around, people are just like, oh, whatever, I'll just do it and come January.
But we're writing off literal months of time to make progress when we approach things that way. And I know that this shows up in other areas of our lives too. Not necessarily business or side hustle stuff, it's oh, it's Thursday. I want to start working out rather than going to the gym tomorrow.
I'll start on Monday, right? I'll start on Monday or I'll start on the first of the month because it's the 22nd. Now I'll just wait until the first of the month. It's literally four days of exercise you're putting off before because you're waiting to start at a certain date. And in our case, wanting to create a more creative, fun, leisurely income, it could start today.
Or it could start next week, next month, next year. And we could be just delaying that so that we have a specific start date. Now, when I was researching for this episode, I was trying to figure out if this is called something, I feel like this has got to be called some kind of thing. A law of something or whatever that people wait for a certain start date.
I couldn't find it when I was looking around, but if anybody knows, let me know because it's so common for us to put something off until there's like this initiation period or this permission almost to say, okay, now is the time to start rather than literally starting in the next minute, the next hour, the next day. Why do we have to wait for this starting gun, almost like this big signal that we can go?
Cause I think when we wait for a certain time or a certain day to begin something, it's almost as if we're killing our progress before we've ever even had the chance to make it a habit before it ever gets any sense of oomph or momentum or steam behind it. We're basically saying, nope, we're not going to start. If you started every Monday you'd be like, oh, I'll start on Monday. I'll start on Monday. You have 50 chances within one year to make something happen. If you wait to the first of every month, that goes down to 12 chances, you get 12 chances a year.
And if you wait until the first of the year, you're giving yourself one chance to start something and to keep something going. And it's just like when I look at the numbers, I look at the metrics like that. It's just silly. Like why are we shrinking our ability or shrinking our capacity to live the life we want, or shrinking our capacity to have the business that we want when if we were to start now start today, not wait for some external signal, then we wouldn't be keeping these we wouldn't be cutting ourselves off at the knees. We wouldn't be shrinking our chances every single time. It makes me think about the fact that the truth is that entrepreneurship is starting all over again every day.
Right? Talk about marriage being this way or relationships being this way, right? You wake up every day and you choose to be with that person and you choose to keep that relationship going. I almost see the same thing as with entrepreneurship. Every day you're starting from a certain point, but if you're always delaying that start point, then you're never starting with any progress made.
Once you've got momentum, you get to get started at a further point than the day before, but every time you put it off, you're basically picking up at the beginning again and not ever making any progress, not making any forward movement. But if you decide to take the advantage of starting immediately or starting sooner than later, you get to have small progress every day or small progress. That adds up, right?
We are accumulating progress rather than starts and stops, or rather than even delaying the progress until we choose at some arbitrary time to go ahead and start. By starting sooner or by not waiting. You get to be one step ahead of where you are today instead of waiting for the perfect moment to take that first step because there is no perfect moment.
I will stand up and say right now that you're never going to be a hundred percent ready. In entrepreneurship, an online business, and having another income stream, you're never going to be 100% ready. You've got to be really comfortable with taking action at 85%. And that's just a made-up number that I quantify in my head because that's when I feel like I'm quote-unquote, ready enough is 85%.
That number for you could be 70. That number for you could be. Over 85, but I'm encouraging you to have a lower number than a higher number, because if you're like, no, I don't have to be a hundred percent ready, but I got to be 92% ready. You're still going to get to that point where you just never start.
I really think that it's intentional action that creates results, not the date when you've decided to change. Not the date when you've decided to make it. A difference or doing something different has nothing to do with, again, that arbitrary, not a number date, timestamp on some calendar. And it really has everything to do with you standing up or looking in the mirror or taking an honest account and saying, am I going to start? Now do I really want this and when do I want to start working toward it? And preferably that is before you're ready. And preferably that is sooner than you think.
I've mentioned this already, but it's almost as if we are waiting for a signifier of significance. A signifier of significance. And those two words come from the same root, right? To signal, to signify. We're waiting for some kind of external sign, I guess that's really the root word. HereI am trying to be all like intellectual and stuff. We're waiting for some kind of sign external outside of us to show that it is a significant time. That it is important enough to get going.
But it's meeting this outside sign that actually is what holds us back. There is no external indicator that it's time to start working toward our goals or time to start cultivating the lifestyle we want. I think we look for this external validation, which has been a theme in several episodes now because what's holding us back, may be some internal things.
Of course, the first internal thing that might be holding us back is the idea of fear. We're afraid that if we start putting energy toward a side hustle, that we're going to stop paying as much attention to our practice. If we try to build an additional income stream, then our current income stream might start to collapse or something like that. That's one type of fear.
We might be afraid of taking time away from loved ones, from family members, from things that are important, and dedicating that time to something else. What will they say about us? What if my kids get upset or they feel like I'm not giving them enough time and attention? What if my partner feels like I'm not giving them time and attention?
So there's fear, and then there's also this "what if" thinking, this worry, some thinking, this anxiety thinking. I think those are two things that are actually going on internally that we're waiting for some kind of external signs, some external dates, some arbitrary number to tell us, oh, those fears don't matter or those worries aren't that big of a deal because it's Monday, because it's the first of the month, because it's now January 1st, 2022.
Logically, rationally, we know that's not the case. That date is not going to make our internal fear or sometimes our irrational worries go away to other things that I think come up. Sometimes our lack of belief. Imposter syndrome. Who am I to do this? I don't believe that this will ever actually happen for me.
It's "I see it happen for other people. It's awesome. And it's cool that it happens for other people, but I don't believe it'll happen for me". So there's a lack of belief there. Lack of trust in oneself, lack of trust in one's ability, lack of trust in one's own experience or one's own expertise.
So I think that is another reason that we're looking for some external sign that it's okay to start. And I think lack of motivation also happens, and it's not lack of desire. It's lack of motivation. And I think those can be separated out. I think they're often lumped together, desire and motivation. You can want something with your whole body, your whole soul, your whole mind, your whole spirit - with your whole fill in the blank. You can want it, but are you motivated to do it?
There is a translation that needs to happen between desire and action. And that I think is that motivation piece. This we can look at though, this we can make some plans around. Lack of belief, anxiety, worry, fear - those are things that probably need to be dealt with a different type of professional that we all know, but this lack of motivation, this is where you and I can start to have a conversation because this, I think really comes from that why. We have a desire.
We have a strong yearn, a strong want, a strong desire for something. Can we attach that to a why? Can we attach that to a value? I think once desire and a value are paired that unlocks the motivation. I have a strong desire to build our forever home in cash. And that is something I really want. What's the value behind it? The value behind that is leaving a legacy for my kids so that my kids do not have to make decisions based on money like I did.
That my kids don't have to major in something in college that they aren't interested in because it's the key to getting a job that my kids don't have to not play sports or not pursue extracurriculars and hobbies because they had to get a job. Like those are the decisions I do not want my kids to ever have to make. And so that financial legacy, that financial stability, that's a value. That's the value. When I tie this desire to this underlying value, I'm fired up. I'm ready to start making that happen.
So can we dive into the why behind the desire, then we can key into a sense of motivation. Something else to think about is that for the last year, right? Or a lot of us, I don't even want to say a lot of us. I'd say all of us were faced with this idea of uncertainty. And just because on the surface things look like they're going back to "normal", which I don't really like that phrase, but things are lightening up. There's less heaviness. People have more freedom to move. People have more freedom of choice.
Now it doesn't mean that there's any more certainty there. It's actually a veil. It's not a lie, but it's something that we were choosing to see that there's a sense of certainty when all along there's always been uncertainty, but when we didn't know what was going to happen in the next couple of hours, let alone days or weeks or months.
I think it was really safe for us to not want to have a plan, to not want to have a vision, to not want to dream of bigger dreams and bigger goals, because it was scary. And it was "well if I take one step towards this and then my kids have to come back home from school, how am I going to maintain it? If I take one step towards this and we've got another quarantine or another lockdown, or we've got" whatever.
There was too much uncertainty and too much to think about in kind of our security zone. I'm thinking Maslow here, the bottom of the pyramid there, that was too tumultuous for us to start thinking about mid pyramid and top pyramid. So now that things are a little bit more stable or we can have the appearance of being more stable.
The bottom of our pyramid is a lot more solid foundation. We're at a place now where we can start to think about these higher top, these higher fields. What can life look like now that this is in place? What's next? What's more fun? What's more creative? What's more leisurely? What's something that I want to do different? How can I expand? How can I evolve?
And those can happen now that we have a sense or a belief in some certainty around us. I think we can start to dream again, and we can imagine what-ifs we can entertain possibilities that a year ago we weren't entertaining. We were just like that's gotta be for later. That's gotta be when the world opens up again. When things go back to normal.
Here we are looking at some sense of normal again, and we can start to make a plan again. We can make room in our schedules. We can design days that are specific for side hustle work, and we can start to shift things around and talk about what dreams, what plans, what goals, what aspirations are there for us?
We do not have to wait till Monday. We don't have to wait until the first of the month and we certainly don't have to wait until the first of the year. As we settle into this second half of 2021, I really would love for you guys to do a little bit of reflection. And I want to ask, what does July through December look like for you?
Is it more of the same, which is that too-full schedule, the burnout, the heavy caseload, the inability to scale without spending more time with people? A lot of you have talked to me about wanting to take a vacation this summer, but you couldn't figure out how to do it with your caseload.
You couldn't take the time away and sacrifice the income you wanted to have another income stream. So that money was still coming in. Even though you were away from clients. The second half of the year can look much the same. Are you going to be able to take a vacation at Christmas or at Thanksgiving?
Are you going to be able to take time off for the holidays? Are you going to be able to have the leisure time, the connection time with your family when you want it? Or can the second half of the year start looking different for you can in the second half of the year, can you be working toward another income stream?
Can you be taking the steps and not having to wait until that signifier of January 1st? Can you be looking at a more scalable business? Model one that's more sustainable over time that doesn't drain you, that doesn't lead you toward burnout? That you can disappear from life for a month and still have income coming in? Could that be what you're working toward? Can you be cultivating that lighter lifestyle? Can you be working towards more fun, more creative work, lighter work, where you get to maybe still have an impact on people, but it's a different type of space that you're holding?
Those are certainly possible with the next five months that are left in this year. So I know I threw it at you, but I really just wanted to have this reflection type of episode that asks you, are you waiting for some external sign to be ready? Are you waiting for an arbitrary date or time to signify that it's okay for you to start? Or can you use these next five and a half months and start making progress? Think on it. Let me know what comes up for you. I want to hear your stories. You can always share them in the Facebook group.
If this episode has fired you up and motivated you, you will definitely get value from my mini-course. Side Hustle Schedule is only 47 bucks, super-duper affordable, but is jam-packed with value and it is designed to help you evaluate where your time is currently going. Audit it to ensure that it aligns with your values and move it around in a way so that you don't have to wait until some date on a calendar that gives you permission to build your side hustle.
You can move time around now and you can open up pockets of your day that you can start thinking on this, start making progress, start taking action to building your Side Hustle. This mini-course is my proven system for making room for something new, without eating into or sacrificing the things that truly matter to you.
So you can have your family time, you can have your self-care time, and you can have your side hustle time all the time. You just need to find how it best lays out for you. Okay, you definitely don't need to write off the rest of the year and you definitely don't need to wait until January. Just head on over to Marissalawton.com/schedule.
So you can start auditing your time and finding those pockets for your side hustle today. Alright, guys, we'll be back again with the show next week, and until then keep on rising.
And check out these related posts!
