Letting go

Often the biggest thing holding you back as a leader or business owner is yourself.

You place a ceiling on yourself that, in some cases, never goes away. You are firmly pressed against that ceiling, you’re trapped, held captive, and over time a type of Stockholm syndrome creeps in and you begin to love your captor.

Your captor often feels like it is your job, or the business, or your customers. Let’s be real, it is you.

You look around at all these things that you “need” to do.

You look around and see all these things that only you can do.

You have been let down before. “That’s not happening again” you tell yourself. “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” Right? (Spoiler… wrong).

No-one understands. How could they? They aren’t you.

Well, I am here to tell you that I understand. And I want you to take comfort in knowing that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people who understand you too. The best part is that many of them have managed to break through that ceiling and they haven’t looked back (me included).

Before we get into it, some bad news and some good news. I always prefer to start with the bad news.

The bad news:

• You may be the only one who knows how to do something at the beginning.
• It may take other people longer to do that ‘thing’ at first.
• There will be breakage from time to time.
• The outcome may look a little different to what you had in mind.

The good news:

• You will eventually have others who can do ‘it’ too.
• Over time, they will get faster and more efficient.
• You were probably breaking stuff, but you called it collateral damage.
• The outcome may be better than it was before.

There are four steps that you take that will begin to set you free. This is just the beginning, but it is a start and only takes an hour or so the first time.

Here they are:

1. Get clear on what it is that you do. People love lists, well most people do. Make a list of all of the things that you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. If you don’t know where to start, then open your calendar/planner, your email, your notepad. Scan these and make a list of all the different activities – Client calls, billing and invoicing, installations, supplier meetings, documentation, quoting, inbox management, coffee with staff, zoom meetings with vendors… Everything needs to go on this list.
2. Get clear on what it is that you love. Take that list and highlight the things that you both love and are uniquely good at. Be honest here, make sure that you genuinely love the activity and that you are genuinely and uniquely good at it.
3. Turn this into a plan. Now flip that list, gather all the things that you both loath and are bad at. All of these things are doing you and the business harm. Once you have this, choose your top five. Take that top five put three columns next to it, then in the first column put a name next to each of the five, this name is the person whom you are going to delegate this to. Put a date in each of the other columns, the first date is when you are delegating it, the second date is the deadline for complete hand-off.  
4. Let go. The hardest part is starting. If you don’t have someone in your team that you can delegate to, then think about outsourcing. There are heaps of fractional experts out there who can help you for a monthly fee – HR, finance, technology, legal, marketing… the list goes on.

Simple!

Don’t give up! If you regress, then go back to your list. I recommend that you review this list and process every 90 days until you start to feel like you are breaking through that ceiling. Hopefully after some time you will just do this process naturally and unconsciously.

Don’t give in to the head trash!

“what will I do with my time?”

“I’m going to become irrelevant”

“people will think I am past it”

This is just head trash. You will elevate yourself to the things that you love. You will have more time to think, and your captor will become a true friend and you will enjoy hanging out together, just like you used to.

Have fun.