What Should You Let Go?

If you’ve been to one of my business success workshops, you may have been asked to answer the following questions.

What is it in my life, my business that I should:

1. stop doing?

2. start doing?

3. do more of?

4. do less of?

These questions are especially useful in helping us reflect on what it is we do that actually holds us back. I was forced to admit, “Hi. My name’s Cheryl and I’m an email-aholic.” Your addiction or habit may be different, but facing what you want to change in your life, your business, is extremely powerful.

Mark Victor Hansen suggests the following exercise that you all can relate to and some will even groan when you read it. Go to your closet with a pad of sticky notes. Label each item with a number 1 to 10 (1 being “love it, wear it all the time,” and 10 being “I’ll never wear this again unless invited to a retro party”). Then take all the items you labeled greater than a 3 and give them to charity (or burn them in a ceremony, as appropriate!). Your closet with seem bare bones and, that’s exactly what you have – the things you wear all the time, anyway.

What you will find – and, this is the magic of the exercise – over time, your closet will be filled once again, but this time with more 1s, 2s and 3s – clothes you actually wear. Until you make room for what you want in life, you won’t attract it to you.

If you’ve been hesitating to say goodbye to clients who aren’t your ideal client, are unprofitable, and suck the energy out of you – there is no room for your ideal clients.

Until you let go of tasks that should be delegated to others who are either more capable or are paid a wage appropriate to the task (rather than your rate), you will not have the bandwidth to focus on the things you should START doing.

A wise teacher once said, “Becoming a master means the willingness to let go of whatever isn’t working in your life.”

You can even do what I saw being done in Times Square days before New Years. Folks were writing on slips of paper what they wanted to put behind them from the past year, then feeding those slips of paper into a giant shredder.

You can do this with the things you should STOP doing. Write them on a piece of paper. Shred them, flush them, or burn them one by one. Get them out of your life.

You will now be free to focus on the things you want to attract into your life – the things you want to Start doing or Do more of.

Cheryl E. Cook, author of Small Business BIG RESULTS, publishes an ezine, “Small Business BIG Results,” conducts workshops, and speaks on topics related to small business success and growth. Get your free ebook, “50 Ways to Increase Cashflow” at http://www.smallbizbigresults.com .