Lyle: Hello and welcome to Optimize Profitability. Today you’re with me, I have no guest host, I have no co-host today, and that is on purpose.

Look, before we even get into this, I’m feeling heavy in my heart. Everybody stop for a moment. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. 

The reason I’m telling you that is because there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are going through some rough times right now. We’ve had the whole start of 2020 with all this covid stuff. And then all of a sudden it’s coming back and things are changing again. 

And it’s really stressing out alot of entrepreneurs, and they find themselves lost. They find themselves overwhelmed. If you’ve used any of the words and you felt overwhelmed, anxious, you felt depressed even, if any of those words are happening in your business, you need to pay attention to this podcast.

Number one, I’m going to share a little bit of my story on my show, about what’s going on in my life. But number two, as we go through this podcast, we’re going to see if we can just take a breath, take a moment and heal together. Let me talk about why we do Optimize Profitability. You would think Optimize Profitability is all about the money, but it’s not. Optimize Profitability is all about you. It’s about you as an entrepreneur.

And I want you to understand you’re not alone. I’m going to say that again, as an entrepreneur, you’re not alone. There are many entrepreneurs that are doing business, just like you going through the exact same thing you’re going through. Don’t ever feel like what you’re going through, you’re going through it alone. There are other people out there going through the same thing, whether it’s in your industry or a different industry, whether it’s in your town, or different town.

I don’t know your situation, but I know that somebody has overcome the exact same situation you’ve overcome and they’ve been a success.

Do you hear me, entrepreneur, if you’re in business, you were put on this earth for a purpose and that purpose was to be in this business, God created you for a specific purpose. I want you to take that purpose and live it out when frustrations, and worries, and stress just pile up.

That’s because our purpose is not being fulfilled in the way we feel like it should be fulfilled. Maybe bills are piling up like I’m trying to fulfill my purpose, but bills are piling up. Yes, that happens. But I’ll tell you when you’re in the valley of the shadow of death, push through, because on the other side of the valley is the mountain, the mountain peak. Now, I’m getting a little preachy here and I don’t mean to be preachy.

I just want you to understand you have so much to give this world. Don’t give up. Just these last two weeks, and I’ll try not to tear up here, but seriously, I’ve had two really good friends pass away.

Both these people I knew individually and both these people, we helped them with their marketing, so not only do I deal with the loss of this individual person, but now I have another person who has to overcome those steps of recouping from the passing of their partner. They’ve got to carry on past that moment. And it’s in those moments when you feel so frustrated and so just wrapped up in worry that I want you to  just step back. Take a deep breath. And just be grateful, and grateful for where you’re at. 

Being grateful of where you’re at in this moment for yourself, now, you may say I don’t have anything to be thankful for…. wrong. It’s when we focus on the negativity and not talking about just being positive to be positive sakes, but when you focus on nothing but the negative, and all the things that are going on, you miss the opportunities that are coming ahead of you. Now, I’m going to turn around.

If you’re watching the video, you’ll see me turn around. And if you’re not watching the video, just give me a second. I got to look this up on the board. I shared this with somebody I’m mentoring personally. The word was focus, awareness and opportunity. You follow me, focus, awareness and opportunity, where your focus is, is where your awareness goes, and that’s where you find your opportunities, if your focus is on the negativity, your focus is on the problems.

That’s where you’re going to find your opportunities and problems. Instead, step away from the problem, focus on the opportunities, before you focus on the positive things, here’s an exact exercise I did with this young person. I’m mentoring him. He’s stressed. And I don’t know if I can make my bills. They’re all piling up on me. You just don’t understand what I’m going through.

That’s what he was saying to me. And I said, look, do me a favor, once you go to the white board, I want you to write down every one of your bills coming up and how much they are. He wrote all those down. And you can see as he began to write those down, that his countenance just started to drop, his shoulders began to drop. His whole posture dropped as if he’s Mr. Droopy Pants, I don’t even know, I’m just being silly.

He was just, his whole countenance, who he was…. Faded away because of the overwhelm inside of his life. I said, I want to do something different now. On top of what you just wrote. I want you to write the possibilities of money coming in, I want you to write this number, and I want to write this number, and want to write this number. What if he had one more customer come in? What if he had one more client come in?

What would that number be? And I wrote down actual numbers and I know his life well enough to know what to write down. I told him what to write down and he looked at me. He’s like, wait a minute. You mean all of this is coming? And I’m worried about all of this. And I looked at him, I said, absolutely. Where your focus is, that’s where your awareness goes and that’s where your opportunity comes from, if you focus on the possibilities of doing more, you focus on the possibility of getting more. You’re going to have better results.

Too many times we get overwhelmed because we think of all the things going on, all the things we have to do to get it out of your head, write it down, talk to somebody, a mentor, something.

Contact us here at DFWTOP.com or DFW TOP Business on Facebook. Chat with somebody here. If we’re available, we’ll chat with you. I’m not offering coaching services that could be really expensive, but if you need help, you need a specific help.

Yeah, contact me. Let’s talk. That’s not what this purpose is. The purpose here is to help you realize you’re not alone.

You know, our whole goal on this podcast and the reason I’m stepping out here and doing this individually instead of having a co-host and having the whole shabang going is because it’s just been really heavy on my heart because every person I’ve talked to recently, every entrepreneur, those words come to.

As a matter of fact, this morning I talked to an entrepreneur, a couple, and the first thing out of the spouse’s words was simply, I think I’m just going to go to sleep and take a day off. I need it.. I’m worn out, do you feel like that as an entrepreneur? I know you do, and I’m talking to an entrepreneur. I wish I could talk to you individually and personally because we get so much more going in it.

But I want you to realize you’re not alone. Every time I go and look at my bills, I get overwhelmed. I wonder why I’m not making more money, I wonder where I’m at in life. I look at somebody else on Facebook or I listen to another podcast and how successful they’re being and I start comparing myself to other people. And that’s where the problem comes. Do not compare yourself to other people, compare yourself to where you were a year ago, where were you six months ago?

Are you doing better or doing worse? If you’re doing worse? It’s your fault.

You need to take actions to take different actions. You may needto hire a coach. You may need to hire somebody to help you in your business. You may need to hire somebody just to bounce off or join a mastermind or join an online group or something to get you out of your rut. If you are further along than you were six months or a year ago, then you’re on the right path. You’re going the right direction, keep going that direction, keep pushing that direction, look for those successful moments and bring those successful moments with you.

Does that make sense? When you find a successful moment, write it down, jot it down, create a blog post, create a video to yourself every time you’re in a high moment. So when you get into those low moments, you remind yourself where you want to go. Now, Simon Sinek has a really cool post about Find Your Why. But I’m telling you sometimes as entrepreneurs, I’ll just be honest when you’re in the middle of being an entrepreneur, your why seems so far away.

Your why gets lost in the muddled mess of day to day working your business. It’s rough, it’s hard, it’s life. Nobody said it’d be easy if you chose an easy life, if you want an easy life, you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I’ll just be honest. If you can’t handle a challenge, you can’t handle changes in your life. Entrepreneur is not a good job for you, not a good opportunity for you.

But I’m betting if you’re taking time to listen to this specific podcast, I know you’re here for a reason.

If you’ve listened this long, you’re paying attention to this, I know that something in your heart says I need this message today. I need encouragement, I need somebody to tell me I’m doing better.

Let me tell you another story and I’m going to be honest and I’m not an emotional person, so I’m trying not to tear up and stuff because I really do get upset. One of my friends who passed away recently in the last two weeks, one of the last things he said to me.

And I’ve never shared the story with anybody, so this is kind of weird for me, but it’s ok. He said, you’re a Barnabus, you’re my Barnabus.

Barnabus is a biblical person, and he was known as the son of encouragement. He was an encouraging person. I’ve never considered myself an encouraging person. I really haven’t. I’m a challenging person, I will challenge you and take you to the next step, that’s what I do. But when he said those words, it pierced my heart because I began to wonder, maybe people are seeing something in me that I don’t even see in myself.

Maybe you need to see something outside of yourself. Somebody outside of yourself needs to look into your life and see what value you’re bringing. You are valuable as an entrepreneur. You’re bringing value into the world and the value you bring into the world is what brings opportunities. It’s what brings people into your business. Now, I’m not going to know what business you’re in. I’m not going to pretend to know what you’re going through. I can’t.

There’s way too many people in the world, way too many situations. But I will tell you, that in my years on this Earth, I have lived many different lives, many different stages of entrepreneurship, a business of success, a failure. Failures are always a step toward success if you take and learn from them. Now, if you’re in the middle of stress, you’re in the middle of anxiety, you’re in the middle of overwhelm, again, start with taking a breath.

Why do I do that, I do that because I want you to realize when you take that breath, your oxygen, your brain, because when you don’t, when you’re stressed and you’re overwhelmed, your brain literally locks up and doesn’t allow new information in. Because he’s thinking about that one specific thing. Your brain gets thought up, and when you take that breath, your brain says, oh, it’s not stress, something else is going on. What is this, and your brain begins to realize it can relax a little bit.

Now, it’s rough, it’s tough, we all have bad days, we’ll have good days. I understand that. I understand this may be the worst time of your life, but I also understand. There will be a better day. The worst thing you could do is quit. The best thing you could do is push through it, push through to the next level, push through the next step. Now, what is the next step? What could it be?

Let’s kind of go down this path for just a second. The next step may be changing directions. Maybe they change directions in your marketing to get a better result. Maybe you need to change products. Maybe they change your audience. Maybe you need to change your focus. There’s only a few things in life that you can change in business specifically to help your business grow. You get your pricing, you get your products, you get the way you presented or your marketing, those are the things you got to pay attention to.

What is it you need to pay attention to?

I talked to a couple this morning and they focused their marketing on a specific topic. And I don’t want to discuss topics right now because it’s their business. They can discuss it if they want to. And when we looked at the demographics of their audience, of who it is they’re focused on, that topic they were focused on did not fit that audience. So one adjustment you made it to look at is, am I talking to the right audience?

One adjustment you made, look at you, look at your product, how does your product compare to other people? How are you presenting it? Are you presenting it in a way that somebody wants it and somebody wants to get more of it? Because that’s a good thing to do. That’s a marketing thing. Talk to a marketing consultant.

You have business consultants and you have marketing consultants, business consultants tell you what to do in your business, they’re going to tell you to change your prices. They’re going to tell you to adjust this or move here or do that. Marketing people are going to say, here’s your message. Here’s how you communicate to those people so you can sell more of that or less of that, whatever the case may be.

All right.

So talk to a marketing professional, somebody who knows what they’re doing is going to take it to the next level, because that’s going to help you ultimately. Those are little steps you can start to take, you may need to step away from your business for a day or two, you may need to do that this morning. So I’m just going to go back to bed and take a nap. That’s OK to go ahead. Take a break. Look, I’m going to give you permission right now to take one day off.

If you haven’t had a day off in the last seven days, I’m going to pretty much demand sometime the next seven days you take a day off.

Listen to me, your coach Lyle telling you, take a day off, you need it, and you spend time with family and you spend time with friends and you spend time with something that enlivens you. We don’t work to work, to work, to work. We work so that we can have a fulfilled life. We have fulfilled life by the relationships we build, not just the profit we make, if you’re on this podcast, you just look at profit and profit.

That’s all you want to focus on.

You’re going to lose family. You’re going to lose friends. And sometimes not the ones you want. It’s OK to step away from friends that are a bad influence for you totally. You need to do that. You may need to step away from social media for a while. You may step away from podcasts. There may be so many podcasts you’re trying to keep up with all of that. You’re overwhelmed by podcasts or learning stuff. I’ve got a list of about 16 different things that I need to be learning right now.

And I should have chipped away at them one at a time because I want to get better at what I do.

I’ve got a stack of books over on the shelf. You could see the shelf right over here if you’re on the video. I’ve got a stack of books that I want to go through. I want to complete them because I want to always be improving myself and making myself better. Take time, take a step away, get away from social media.

Learn something new, even outside of your category, because you know, you can learn something from it, from outside of your category. So instead of just focusing on your business or focusing on marketing, learn something that’s interesting to you, something that’s outside of that. Because when you learn something different, your brain thinks differently and it may help you in your business again. What do you focus on? Are you focusing on success or are you focusing on the troubles?

Is your awareness going to the success and the possibilities or is the awareness going to the problems? And then other opportunities. Are they showing up or are they running away because of where you are mentally, capably? Now, look, I’m going to continue this conversation. I’ll just be honest, I don’t know if I’m going to type up something. I don’t know if I might have a check sheet. I don’t know if it’s a worksheet. I don’t know if I might do another video with processes or whatever it is.

I just know that it’s got to happen and it’s going to have the time this comes out.

So excuse me if you’re listening to this right now, you’re online, you’re listening to this, go to OptimizeProfitability.com. You can also go to dfwtop.com/podcast at the same place. Look for this episode. Now, I wish I could tell you what it is, but I don’t have the numbers in front of me. That’s not important to me right now. You’re important to me right now. But go find this one and it’s going to say, do you need encouragement, that’s the title of this one.

Do you need encouragement?

Go to that one. What we’re going to do is take this step by step. What do you do if you’re stressed? What are some actual steps you can take? What do you do if you feel overwhelmed? What are some actual steps you can take? What if you’re overwhelmed with marketing here, some steps you can take?

And so it’s probably going to be a video, but I may type it up. I don’t know. We’ll see what I can accomplish here in a little bit.

But my goal is to help you line your life up with your purpose so you can fulfill your purpose in life, which will help you fulfill your purpose in business, which will help you be more profitable. Look, I’m Lyle if you’ve listened this long, I appreciate you listening. If you don’t have time to go do the other thing, that’s fine. Take a day off, take a moment, separate yourself from your business for a little bit. Love on your family.

Allow them to love on you. And be a success. This is a little snippet from my journey, a little snippet from what I’m going through right now myself. And I’ll be sharing more in the next video or the next little mini series that I’m going to do on our podcast page, our bonus section, so go listen to that.

And if you’re struggling, if you’re having a hard time, comment on our page, go to DFW top business on Facebook. Leave some comments on this video or below this video. And one of the things, at least some comments, let’s start the conversation. You don’t have to be overwhelmed. You’re not alone. You don’t have to be stressed alone. You’re part of a bigger community. By the way, DFW top. It stands for Designed For Winners to Optimize Profitability, that’s where the word Optimize Profitability came from.

There it is here on our podcast.

It’s because that’s part of the name Designed For Winners. You’re a winner for us. You’re a winner with us. We’d love for you to join us.

We’d love to talk to you more, I’ll maybe pop in and do some live videos pretty soon. So make sure you subscribe to that channel on Facebook so you can see those live videos, because there’s a lot of little things that are happening right now that I just really want to help people take that next step.

And if I could be that encouragement to you, if I could be that Barnabus, too, I’ll be there. If I can be that challenging person that steps up and makes you realize where you’re headed in the wrong direction, I’ll do that.

I know you can succeed if you take the proper action, if I can help holler at me. In the meantime, take a breath, relax and be successful. Talk to you later. Bye.