Friday Afternoon and Time to Cut the Payroll Checks

It’s Friday and you’ve got a pile of bills in the office, 3 employees waiting for their paychecks and leaking tiles in the main warehouse.  Small business challenges are tough, and if you’re waiting for payment from a major customer account, lack of cash flow can put a stranglehold on your optimism and leave you gasping by Friday at 4 pm.

Banks. Buds, and blessed family many not have the answers you need.  In this economic environment, you would be better off finding solutions that don’t include the traditional lending solutions.

To discover new opportunities your mind has to somehow LET GO of what isn’t working now, and become OPEN to something new. Although it’s said with easily, “becoming open” (when you are internally shutting down against unyielding pressure), is not as easy as implied.

I have been here time and time again in different business situations and learned a creative strategy that has rearranged how I deal with the stress of small business:

The number one strategy - Look Away.

Do you remember when the 3-D paintings or pictures were so popular in the 1980’s?  Hidden within the complex work was and entirely different picture from the one your eyes saw using your normal vision.

I remember being one the folks who would stand looking at the picture for 10 minutes saying, “ I just can’t see it!.” Kids would come stand next to me and within a minute or so exclaim gleefully, “Kewl! Man that looks awesome!”

The longer I stood the more frustrated I got.  Until one day, I walked away.  I quit starring at it and went for coffee, not intending to return.  When I did happen to walk by the painting in the lobby, I had forgotten my frustration, and felt relaxed after chatting with my friend over java.  Unwound now, I took a lingering look at the picture and noticed a slight flash of a different design.  I quickly observed that if I forced my stare into it I lost it, but if I consciously relaxed my eyes and allowed the image to distort in ways my preconceptions didn’t dictate, slowly a new image materialized and I could no longer see the old one.

I have a note to myself on my refrigerator with a picture hand-drawn that says this:

LOOK AWAY.

Stop starring at what you know.  Go play a game of golf, run a mile or two, visit an art gallery, go to a café and play solitaire on your computer: Change what you are looking at!

You can’t come up with the money to pay your employees starring at the cheque book and swearing at phone every time it rings.  You have got to see beyond what you are staring at.

I found that I needed to relax my eyes quite a bit to allow another dimension to present itself.  My eyes are trained to look a certain way.  Your mind is trained to see lack of resource a certain way: BAD. In true fact, your mind may be saying you have a lack of resource when you have hidden gems all around.

It Can Get Brutal Before it Gets Better

A client of mine went through this recently. Lack of resources drove them to do something drastic that they would have put off for years due to the inconvenience – they moved location.  And in doing so, they saved money, found a much more appropriate space, and enabled themselves to attract a whole new “dimension” of customers because of the new resources available.

Here’ the kicker though:  IT GOT BRUTAL BEFORE IT GOT BETTER.  And as long as we are looking hard, starring madly, engaged with fierce determination, it can remain brutal.

It’s no mistake today that out of the billions of words said in papers and blogs and books and videos and songs and so on and on….that you read these words – Look Away.

Don’t stay focused where there is no solution.

I close today with a list of ideas offered from various students over several years of teaching.  Here are ways people have found to look away.

1. Play the piano
2. Dance naked (they didn’t say where!)
3. Cook something new
4. Play with kids
5. Do a puzzle
6. Paint anything
7. Take a country drive
8. Stare at the ocean and eat sunflower seeds
9. Wash the car
10. Clean the house

You may find that picking up the phone and calling a friend to suggest a coffee would be a great start.  Get out of the business and into life.  New ways of approaching your financial pressure abound – it’s YOU that needs to SEE new solutions.

Look Away.

To our success,

Harmony

PS. 30 Minute Money may be just the ticket for you!