Let’s not forget, where ever you are in your entrepreneurial journey, at every stage of your business growth, you will face challenges that block your progress. This is true for those at the beginning of their success journey, and for those whose established business has reached a plateau.
Growth and expansion is a journey of a lifetime wherein every new success eventually becomes a plateau. Linger too long on a plateau and things will begin to entropy. It’s nature’s way. Anything that stops growing starts dying.
Nature has equipped humans with the ability to “acclimate” to our surroundings. We naturally get used to what we know. Being familiar with our surroundings is necessary for our safety. In the days of eat or be eaten, hunter gathers needed to acclimate to their new surroundings so they could know, over time, what was safe and normal in their environment and what was not.
This acclimation principle also applies to your frame of mind as you build your business. What was once a big customer or client win for you, eventually becomes a routine client. Your excitement working with talented employees becomes an overhead burden. Your once innovative products and services become commodities.
Inevitably, you’ll get acclimated to every level of success you experience. When fully acclimated to your circumstances, you begin to operate on the premise if it’s not broken don’t fix it. You get comfortable and stop taking risks. Eventually you’ll find yourself on a plateau. Sound familiar?
Plateaus are life’s early warning system –indicators that you’ve stopped growing. Time to step up and move to a higher level. Of course, this is much easier said than done. We can get stuck and often we do. It’s difficult to gather the momentum to leap off your own comfortable perch.
The journey to freedom and prosperity is an endless journey of plateaus. The key is maintaining your upward momentum, never lingering too long in the comfort and safety of your accomplishments.
When you step up, you’ll immediately notice bumping your head against the “ceiling of complexity”. This is where you experience the dynamic tension and friction of breaking free from the gravity of your current circumstances. With passion, purpose and creative energy, you can break free. Moving up from a plateau will require you elevate your thinking beyond the status quo of your familiar position. As you expand your capabilities into new territory, you can innovate higher value for customers that result in higher value relationships.
Higher value relationships are the source code of your freedom and prosperity–not money. As you offer more to the world, you become more to yourself. To have more, you must be more. There’s no free lunch in the marketplace.
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