The Fastest Way to Grow Your Business While Also Dealing With Life

If life is feeling hectic and you’re scared that you can’t run a thriving business or scale it up while you’re parenting kiddos, managing school schedules, and juggling what life is throwing your way, there’s a technique that I teach my clients that will save the day and help you bring in cash flow in the worst of times.

This technique may seem super simple and/or obvious, but it’s slyly powerful. Do not underestimate it!

I call it “lowering the bar.”

For those of us who tend toward perfectionism and self-pressure, the only way to get it all done and make the money we want in our businesses without running ourselves into the ground is to truly look at our own standards and find out where we can lower them.

If this gives you a little heart palpitation, you’re a great candidate for this technique and it will give you so much bang for your buck.

In our heads, we carry around tons of different rules and standards that we think of as normal, set in stone, unchangeable, or important in one way or another. These rules come from childhood, school, friends, family, and the culture around us.

When you’re a really good, responsible human who might even have a wee Type A hint in your personality (not that I speak from experience or anything 😉) you just don’t think to question these rules. Also, you might not even notice them.

So, the fun part is actually taking some time to look inside your own head as you navigate through your day and see if you can notice standards and rules that are candidates for change. Where can you lower the bar?

For example, I used to pressure myself to fold my child’s laundry after I washed it. That’s a time-suck and a totally useless activity, because she just pulls the clothes off the shelf and leaves them flung about her room. I can lower that bar and drop the standard to simply washing and drying her clothes, putting them in a basket, and handing them to her.

This week, as a further example, I had extra stuff happening in my life. There was a flood in my house and now there are workmen galore and tons of noise.

I looked around at where I could lower the bar as soon as the flood happened. I changed dinner plans so that all the recipes are super easy. I didn’t worry about blow-drying my hair (a standard I usually hold because I love my hair curled). I didn’t try to plan any kiddo playdates.

You can lower the bar in your personal life and in your business. All it takes is a quick look around to see what’s causing you any level of tension. If writing six social media posts is making you feel tense, where can you lower the bar? Can two of them be one-liners? Can you skip three of them this week?

Whatever is making you feel stressed and tense is a perfect candidate for bar-lowering.

You may have to get creative, and you’ll most likely need to employ some self-talk to remind yourself that it’s ok to lower the bar. This is just a rule or standard that you’ve learned or set for yourself, and it’s not the end of the world to lower it. Maybe you’re just lowering it temporarily. Maybe you find that it’s one you can lower forever. Either way, it’s ok.

There are some places your standards simply can’t be dropped. So, don’t drop those. Keep them!

Only lower the ones that can go down without cause you undue stress. In fact, even if lowering them gives you a twinge of guilt, lowering them should actually make you feel freer, lighter, and like you have extra time in your schedule.

When you get really good at this, you’ll start spotting standards that can be lowered left and right throughout your day. This accumulates into lots and lots of time and energy that you end up reclaiming that can go back into your personal self-care and your business growth.

Pretty soon, you’ll only be expending energy when it’s really meaningful to you to expend it. That feels so aligned that it’s far less depleting to your system than expending energy when you’re doing it to meet an unnecessary standard.

The faster you can let go of standards, the more energy you’ll get back.

At first, it might feel like you have to do a little extra mental work for each lowered bar. After a while, though, you’ll be able to just realize that this is an unnecessary standard and you won’t even bat an eye.

There are so many standards that you can lower without anyone around you even noticing. That’s what’s so brilliant! Nobody really knows all those standards you’re holding in your head, especially when it comes to your business. Your business is, quite literally, your business!

I can help you spot the places you can create more efficiency and drop those standards in my 1-1 coaching and group program. I’ll show you my entire Slacker Magic System for creating income without the hustle. If you want to grow your business without running your body into the ground, this system will show you exactly how to do that.

You’ll be able to look at whatever you monetary goal is for your business, share it with me, and then we’ll create the plan to move you toward it through clear messaging, a program that really speaks to your soul and brings in clients, and a clear plan for your social media content that makes it easy and fun to create powerful, client-attracting content to send to your email list, grow your email list, and post on social media.

I’ll use my intuitive gift, which I call the Celtic Seer part of me, to see your money-path and help you articulate your message with language that resonates with your ideal clients and gets them excited to join your program.

You can learn more about this program and others here.