Stop Hesitating to Avoid Disappointment
Many marketers will hesitate to take action or take advantage of an opportunity because they’re not sure about the outcome. So, they wait because they think doing so will help them avoid being disappointed.
But hesitating doesn’t mean you won’t be disappointed. You can be just as disappointed after you’ve hesitated to take the opportunity or start that project. Doing this is a big way of self-sabotaging your goals and your future success.
When you’re hesitant about something, you need to do a quick self-check to make sure you’re not trying to avoid disappointment. Ask yourself, “Does this bring me closer to my goal?”
If the answer is yes, then push the hesitancy aside and go for it. If the answer is no, then discard whatever you were on the fence about and keep going. Another way to avoid hesitating is to train yourself to start immediately.
Procrastination is just hesitancy all polished up. When you put off doing something, it could be because the thought and planning of doing that project makes you feel a lot more secure than actually getting started does.
But marketers who never leave the starting line are stuck. They see others achieving their goals and having their efforts pay off financially and wonder why the same thing isn’t happening for them.
Hesitation is caused by your mindset. Instead of thinking about everything that could go right, you wait because you think about everything that could go wrong. Or, you don’t believe that you have the necessary knowledge, skills, or people in place to accomplish your goals.
Just remember that no one ever won a race or reached their goals by hesitating. When you have an opportunity or an idea, go for it. As the Nike slogan goes “Just Do It”. When it’s time to begin a project or make a change in your business, go for it.
If you find that you’re hesitating on things and that’s your biggest issue when trying to avoid disappointment, then have something that you can come back to later. This prevents the problem of hesitation.
An example of this is if you’re writing an eBook, don’t end the day by finishing a chapter. Break in the middle. That way, you have a place to begin that has already been started. Look at the goals in your life that you have accomplished because you just made a move.
Everyone has accomplished something. Hesitating is no guarantee that you won’t have to deal with disappointment because you can end up disappointed down the road once time passes and you realize you missed out on something by not taking action.
Quit Overthinking Every Step of the Way
By overthinking, you’re wasting time. You’re carefully checking every single option you have over and over again and then choosing the direction that you think is best. The problem is that when you think about the same situation or project over and over again, it can lead to hesitancy or even quitting because it prevents you from making a decision in a timely manner.
An example of this is if you have a business blog, but you have no idea what to blog about. So you sit for days trying to think about what kind of content you could post that will best appeal to your audience.
Or, it could be that you’ve been in business awhile and it seems like there’s nothing new under the sun. So you fall into the habit of overthinking what you should do – or which direction you should take.
You don’t feel like you have any valuable and original content that you can deliver. It feels like you’re saying or doing the same thing over and over again. What you don’t realize is that valuable content is still valuable whether a month or a year has passed.
You can waste so much time overthinking that it starts to hamper your business and you won’t accomplish your goals by either your own self-imposed deadline or at all. Some ways that marketers overthink is they read everything they can get their hands on about the business, but take no action steps to put the advice into practice.
Or, you set up meetings and go to conferences because you’ve been overthinking what success is all about. You’re trying to make sure you know everything before you start a business or before you take on a new project.
That type of overthinking is for people who are busy, but not productive. At some point, running a business calls for you to take a step forward. You might fear failure. So that’s why you constantly overthink.
Not making a decision or not doing anything is already a form of failure. Stop listening to your brain giving you worst case scenarios and go for it. You need action steps because action steps multiply and turn into accomplished goals.
If you sit around overthinking, you miss chances that can level up your business. You don’t have to know everything. It’s not even possible because there are always variables that are completely outside of your control and no amount of thinking is going to change that, so you might as well make your move.
Set a deadline for your goal and outline the action steps that you need to take to get there. Understand that sometimes, you’re going to make a good choice, but other times, you’re going to mess up. That’s simply human nature.