On one of my recent coaching retreats we discussed the stories we create that explain away our current situation, and how dramatically those stories affected our financial results.
To be honest it started out sounding like one of those fluffy topics to me. Stories? Really?
But when I got it, I realised I had loads of stories going on. And that I had stories for just about everything that was going on in my business!
So what is a story?
It’s something we’ve made up to explain either a current situation, or to justify why we’re not doing something. You might recognise some of these stories:
- Ah well, they’re probably really busy – they won’t want to hear from me.
- They’ll be in the middle of something – they won’t want me bothering them.
- As soon as we finish our marketing strategy everything will be ok.
- If I call them now I’ll probably catch them in the car and it will be difficult to talk, I’ll drop them an email instead.
- They reason that prospect hasn’t come back to me is because they’ve decided they don’t want to go ahead or they’ve found someone else to go with, or because I was too expensive.
- I can’t charge what I really need to do make that project work because they probably can’t afford it.
- My sales aren’t high enough because of the state of the economy.
- I can’t increase my profits because that’s just how this industry is.
- I’ll never understand finance; my mind just doesn’t work that way.
But of course we don’t see our thoughts as stories – to us they’re just the way it is.
So the way we distinguish between a story and the truth is to ask ourselves, is this a fact, or a story?
A fact is observable, verifiable by data, and most people would agree that it was true. Whereas a story we’ve added judgement to the facts.
We did an exercise where we wrote out all the reasons why we hadn’t taken action on something important. Then we had to cross out everything that wasn’t absolute verifiable fact. Out of half a page of writing I was left with one line “I haven’t called Richard for 3 months because…..”
Every single reason why I hadn’t called him was just a story!
Our stories are usually based in fear, on the things we’re worried about, and we chose to believe them even when we have no way of knowing if they’re true.
Stories hold us back. They stop us making calls we should make, or suggesting brilliant new ideas to our clients. We create the reasons why something isn’t working or why it probably won’t work, and the stories become self- fulfilling prophecies.
The stories about our finances
Since learning about stories I’ve become really aware of what stories my clients are telling me about their finances. Many of the stories are about why sales are lower than expected, about why cash flow isn’t great, about why profits aren’t higher – and believe me there are some brilliant stories out there! By creating those stories we’ve made it not our fault, and so of course there’s nothing we can do about it.
And I’ve become hyper aware of the stories I tell myself. I can honestly say I’ve quoted more work in the few weeks since that retreat than in the last year! There were so many people in my client and prospect list who really wanted our help with their finances, but I’d made up all sorts of mad stories about why I shouldn’t bother them! And they were all routed in the fear of rejection, the classic sales problem.
When we take the story away, we take away the fear too.
So I wonder, what stories are you telling yourself about your business?
How much are your stories costing you right now? And how much have they costed you over the years?
Something to ponder… and next time you find a reason not to follow through on something, just ask yourself, is this a story? It might just change your financial fortunes