MBA2295 How to Discipline Your Disappointment

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show because no one builds a business alone. We're here. We got your back every single day with our daily 10-minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co-founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson, you will learn how to discipline your disappointment. This is a concept I learned back in the day when I was playing sports full-time, when I was in high school, when I was in university. And it's the idea that when you're down, when you're not happy with the not going your way, when you're disappointed, how much does that keep you down?

0:49How long are you staying in that place? Or do you know how to discipline yourself and discipline your disappointment to get back up and be productive and be your best self as soon as possible? Listen, I get it. Business is hard. Business is competitive. It's tough out there. But this is more of a reason because of that. It's more of a reason for you to not waste time being in a rut. In today's list, I'm going to share with you why this is so important to you as a person and as a business owner. I'm going to share with you how by getting this right, it can greatly impact your business and your bottom line.

1:26And I'm going to share with you the strategies that work for me to discipline my disappointment and get back on track as soon as possible. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. This episode is sponsored by Time Doctor. Measure and improve productivity wherever your people work. With accurate and employee-friendly time and activity tracking, you can enable staff to work from the office, at home, or anywhere else with total peace of mind. Time Doctor gives you a detailed, up-to-minute picture of you and your team so that you can manage productivity, engagement, and staff attrition in your business.

1:57Your business will have total peace of mind with Time Doctor in your tech stack. How do I know? We are avid users of Time Doctor. We've adopted Time Doctor ever since we took on them as a sponsor, and we absolutely love it. I'll share a little bit later on in the episode why. Join Time Doctor today by starting a free trial and achieve up to 30 % more productivity and unlock the power of visibility and accountability in your business. Visit the Time Doctor website at www.timedoctor.com to get started. Again, that's timedoctor.com to get started. They say in sports, the difference between an amateur and an expert is the ability to discipline your disappointment.

2:36You see, the amateur, when they are having a bad game, when they miss a few shots in a row or make a few errors, those disappointments keep them down. They're so consumed by screwing up and they're so angry with themselves, it kind of puts them out of action. They're almost like a waste of space during the rest of the game or the match. And it's all because they couldn't move on. Some people call this taking fast action or next play mentality, meaning let's just move on to the next play. Don't worry about the last play. Some people call this having a short-term memory, meaning you just forget about the mistakes or the tough time you just went through.

3:13Now, the expert, on the other hand, has a short-term memory, moves on quickly from a doozy, from a mistake, from something they did wrong, and gets back on track really quickly. Tiger Woods is really known for this. the famous golfer. Tiger can have a really tough shot or really bad shot or make a mistake, and he'll be angry in the moment. But he composes himself really quickly, knowing he has another shot he's got to take very soon. He knows he's got to be his best self. He knows he has to be composed. And he can't let that last play, that last mistake affect his next action. This is so important in business and in life, by the way.

3:52But let's focus on business right now. Sometimes we have a bad day at work or something bad happens. Like you don't close that sale you wanted or you get a bad review or a customer blasts you in customer service. And it just makes you feel horrible. You feel like maybe I'm not doing a good job. Maybe my business is not as good as I think it is, or maybe it's not as good as it used to be. Doubts start creeping in and it just starts getting you to spiral further and further down. And if you look back at these times in your life, you'll probably notice that that day was kind of a write-off. You didn't really do much or you didn't really do your best work.

4:26The best of the best that understand how competitive business is and that you can't work against yourself, that you need yourself to be on your side, understand that they have to bounce back quickly. They need to discipline their disappointment. Hey, yes, I'm disappointed. Yes, I'm upset. And this is why I'm upset. And they allow themselves to be upset for a moment, for a few minutes. Okay, I get it. You're angry. They take a moment to think about what they could have done differently. They try to learn from that situation. They don't just totally forget about it and think like it never happened.

4:56No, they try to learn from the situation so they don't repeat that mistake. But once they've done that, once they've, you know, spent 15 minutes or something like that going through that whole situation, they got to put a line in the sand. They got to say, okay, that's done. I can't think about that anymore. I got to move on. I got to switch gears and I got to be even better now. I got to actually be fully committed. I can't let that affect the rest of my day because my day is so valuable. Every minute counts. There's other customers that need me. There's other sales I need to close. There's other changes I need to make to my pitch or to my website or to my funnel or whatever it might be.

5:33You got to be disciplined enough to say, yeah, I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to let that disappointment ruin my day, ruin my week, ruin my month. And sometimes the bigger the problem is, the bigger the downfall or bigger the disappointment that you're experiencing in your business. Because sometimes, you know, you'll have big challenges in business. The bigger they are, the more this is important, the more that it could bring you down for not just a few hours or a few days. It could bring you down for weeks if you let it. I know people that have been sitting in disappointment for years before they snapped out of it and realized, whoa, where did the years go?

6:09Why did I waste so much time dwelling on my flaws and my mistakes? Your business, your life, your family, the people around you, they need you. And they don't just need you to just be alive or present. They need you at your best. Now, here's some strategies to deal with this because you're like, hey, Omar, this is easier said than done. I totally get it and agree. So here's some strategies that I use to discipline in my disappointment. I've realized that when you get disappointed, when you get angry, when you're upset at something that happened in your business, there's a power there, right? There's an energy there.

6:46I'm not trying to get woo-woo here. I'm just being really honest. There's a power in that disappointment. And most of the time that power is used against you. It makes you feel bad. It makes you feel lazy. It makes you feel deflated and demotivated. And what is this all worth? That kind of situation, right? But there's another way to use that energy. And I'll go back to sports. One of the greatest basketball players of all time, if not the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, did this all the time. Whenever he got bad publicity in the press, people told him he's not as good as he thinks he is or he can't win a playoff series or he's not a great shooter.

7:21He used it as fuel. He used the disappointment, the anger, the losing as fuel to say, hey, I'm going to come back stronger. I'm going to prove to myself and to others that I am legit. I am great at what I do. Use that energy as fuel as much as possible. Even if you have to tell yourself a story, Michael Jordan used to do this. He used to make up stories to himself, tell him, oh, that person thinks this about me. They never said anything like that. But he used it as fuel to get better. And you need to use everything at your disposal to get an advantage in business. Obviously, you want to do the right thing, the ethical thing.

8:00and in this case, you are using disappointment, down times, tough times as fuel for you to be like, I know it's rough right now, but these are the days that are gonna help me get better. I'm gonna come back from this and I'm gonna look back in this moment and say, I was victorious. So use it as fuel. I know that in the beginning of the drama or the problem you're going through, it's not easy to do this. This is why I allow myself to be upset for a bit. It's okay. Be angry. Be upset. Feel the emotion for a few minutes. But then soon after, I got to say, what do I do with this emotion? What does this mean for me and my business?

8:41Well, it means it's time for me to get to work. It means that I have to prove that me and my team are worth success. I'm going to earn this. So use it as fuel is strategy number one. Strategy number two, remind yourself in the moment of disappointment of times in the past where you overcame difficulty, overcame adversity, have been here before. I've been here before. I've been down in the dumps. I've had failures in the past and I was able to recover. I'm still standing. I'm still going. My business is still here. This is proof that I can sustain these blows, that I can still keep going. I can still keep growing, that I'm made for this and I can do this.

9:22Remind yourself, you've been through tough times before and you've been through them. It's not fun. We don't like it, but it doesn't mean it's going to break you. You're still alive. You're still standing. One of my favorite quotes from a book was a quote from the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. It's the memoir of the founder of Nike. And he says, the cowards never started. The weak have died along the way. That leaves us. And I remind myself of that quote anytime I'm going through a tough time because the fact that I'm just still standing, that I'm still alive, that I'm still trying, that I'm still pushing means I am strong, that I've done this.

9:59I can do this. I'm not a coward. I'm not one of the weak people that have died along the way. I've made it and I'm going to continue to strive. Now, strategy number three, change your environment. I can't tell you how much this helps change your environment. If you're feeling in a rut, if something bad happened, you get bad news, something, you got off a phone call and you know, the deal doesn't close. You didn't get the funding you're looking for. You have to fire an employee or an employee quits. You're in your office. You're in a funk. Get out of your office. Go for a walk. Go to the gym. Go visit a friend.

10:31Go grab lunch. Get out of the space you're in. Why? Because as human beings, we remember everything about a bad situation, including the environment we're in. And by removing ourselves from the environment, from the room that we were in when this happened, we start to actually remove ourselves from the actual situation and the feelings attached to it. It's easier for us to start getting some perspective and start moving on and getting out of the disappointment and bouncing back when we give ourselves the advantage of changing our environment. I know that sounds really weird, but it's true. Leave your physical space.

11:07I found a 10 minute walk just getting out of my house and going for a walk makes a huge difference. Go for a drive if it's raining or heck if it's raining, go for a walk anyway. So what? You get wet. Go home and take a shower. It's fine. Go to something that gives you hope, that gives you light, that gives you direction, that reminds you why you're doing this, whether it's your journal, writing your journal, reading your journal, whether it's a book that you love to go to, whether it's an audio book or a podcast, maybe it's a song that always lifts you up. Don't sit in what you're in. Get out of there, change your environment, change your inputs.

11:41It's going to make a lot of difference. This episode is sponsored by Time Time Doctor, measure and improve productivity wherever your people work. We've been using Time Doctor for well over a month now. A part of them being a sponsor on the show, we said, hey, we want to try Time Doctor in our own team, since we have a remote team, and share our experience with our audience right here on the podcast. I want to share with you why I'm loving Time Doctor. Recently, we were on a call with our customer success team, and they showed us how to set up projects and tasks in Time Doctor. Basically, this amazing feature allows you to create projects and tasks for each department in your team.

12:17So, for example, right now, I have chosen the project podcasting and the task recording the podcast right now. So this is what I'm tracking. I'm tracking how much time I spend recording the podcast. Now, this is not just me. Everybody on the team have their own projects and tasks. This allows us to get a huge amount of visibility about how much time are we spending on each task, on each project. More importantly, as a manager, you get to see, are we actually spending time on the right things? The things that actually make an impact on growing our business, on helping our business get better, supporting our customers, improving our product.

12:54It's almost impossible to do this without Time Doctor, because it allows you and your team members to track everything they do as they're working on it, so that you can then reflect and say, hey, we need to spend more time on this or that or the other, or we're doing great. For example, last week, I took a look at what I was doing and realized that me and my marketing team need to spend more time on outreach and partnerships. This week, that's exactly what we've been doubling down on. But listen, don't take my word for it. Go ahead and join Time Doctor today by starting a free trial. Achieve up to 30 % more productivity and unlock the power of visibility and accountability in your business.

13:31Visit the Time Doctor website at www.timedoctor.com to get started. Again, that's timedoctor.com to get started. To wrap up today's lesson, we will always have disappointments. We will always have rough and tough times in business. It's just a cycle of life. It's guaranteed. You're going to have ups, you're going to have downs. It's easy to get up and go to work and do what you have to do when things are great, when things are up, when things are fantastic, when you feel like doing the work, right? It's hard to do it when you're not feeling it, when things are tough, when things are not working out, when you're in a tough time, when you're in a crisis.

14:08You still gotta get the work done, right? You still don't need to make smart decisions. You still need to do your best and show up every day. This is why disciplining your disappointment is so important. When things are down, this is the differentiator between amateur and expert business owners. The experts know how to rebound, know how to go to the next play, next action. Don't sit in it forever. Do me a favor. If you're going through a tough time right now, use some of the strategies I shared with you today and let me know how it works out. You can email me personally at omar at 100mba.net. Thanks so much for listening to the show.

14:45If you love what you hear, do yourself a favor and hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Just hit those triple dots, whether you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or any podcast app and hit follow or subscribe. So you get our next episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It doesn't matter how good your business idea is or how much funding you have or your team or any of that. If you don't have the mental fortitude to withstand the blows of business, to be able to ride out tough times, to be able to have your own power to make lemons out of lemonade, to use that negative or that tough time to your advantage.

15:22This is what makes people great. This is what makes businesses great. This is what makes founders great. this is what you'll be most proud of at the end of the day. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Q &A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

15:56Thank you.