Are You Dealing With Your Dark

Deal with what you are not clear about, as a lack of clarity is stealing your results. I refer to anything in this space as being in “darkness” and guarantee that everything you rescue from this darkness will make you feel empowered, purposeful and motivated!

We can all get bogged down with responding to the continuous requests from everyone around us, never prioritising ourselves.

Knowing what you want and moving towards it, requires daily discipline, a little bit of time, energy and focus. You might view, “knowing and achieving what you want” like making a three thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, as a continuous process of tiny incremental decisions, focus and effort.

You may have heard people talk about being in the moment or in the “now,” these are rooted in the same thing. This is when you are in a relaxed state, have an overriding objective without contradiction, total trust in your goal where you attract success effortlessly to you.

When I write my monthly article for M2, I know exactly how well I am living this advice by how easy the story flows from me. I think we can all apply this measure in everything we do, when things happen easy you are living with “Clarity” and when they don’t, you are living with too much of “The Dark”

When you are clear, decisions are easy, you communicate better, you find others around you easily inspired to help. But when you are not, everything feels like it is stuck together, nothing comes easily, making every move and decision exhausting.

These are classic symptoms that show you are not dealing with the underlying cause of the problems, even though you might be telling yourself you are.

Let me give you an example:

You own a small, 7 day a week hospitality business and have the equivalent of 12 full time staff. Even though you are managing it very well, your labour cost has risen by $43,000 p/year in April this year. This was due to the changes to the minimum wage legislation, together with a few other changes legislation required you to make.

Every business needed to have a strategy in place to address this increased cost because if they didn’t, it would come directly off their next year’s profit. We are now 3 months on from that change and there are large numbers of businesses that have told me they couldn’t put their prices up to cover this adding cost.

Unless anyone in that situation stops right now and prioritises finding an alternative solution, they are going backwards week by week, inching further into “The Dark”.

In most cases you know you are moving to “The Dark” when your lack of clarity is causing you not to take action, the incremental compounding effect making it harder to act.

I would describe “The Dark” in this example as a predictable negative effect caused from lack of clarity in the actions to be taken.

A quick checklist of what “The Dark” might be:

• Not spending your marketing budget because you are trying to reduce costs.
• Not engaging a new staff member because you are not confident you will continue to be busy enough.
• Not training your staff properly because you are worried they will leave.
• Not managing your staff engagements to fit within your current level of affordability.
• Not having clear specifications for what you sell. Even if your product is customised for each client, such specifications still need to be written down and agreed upon.

In a state of clarity, you will know you have an objective and will be committed to taking the required action to get there. You will know what is working in your business and life and be committed to taking action to stay on track. You will know at least two of the following 5 key drivers: what, how, why, when and by who?

Clarity and honesty are essential for great results but they must be supported by the need to act.