Be Passionately
Curious

A LESSON IN LETTING GO.

You are quite experienced and the way you do things has been shaped over years or decades, and it’s the best way you’ve ever known.

People will come to rely on your wisdom to make sure they do it right, or will expect you to do it for them, because that’s what you tend to do most of the time. 

You might feel like you are helping, or doing it out of frustration, but many of the tasks you perform in the business, instead of on the business, are preventing others from being fully included in the process.

You need to decide if you want your business to stay the same size that it is, or if you have a vision of growing much larger. If you want it to scale beyond your own capacity, you will need to get over yourself.

You will need to let go of doing it your way, or document systems that enable training others how to do it your way. 

Let’s find out where you’re at right now in your mindset.

What to do:

❶ Think about the ways you like to control the business, processes, quality of product and service. 
❷ Consider your vision and dreams of a much larger company and creation of wealth.
❸ Now, try to think about your past and recent actions, decisions and behaviour. Based on that, decide how someone else, watching you like a fly on the wall, would plot you on this tool. If your actions lean towards controlling others, processes, the product or service, you will be closer to the left. If you have others performing all tasks and making day-to-day decisions, and you are focused mostly on expansion, you are over on the right.
❹ Plot the spot you believe reflects your current position.
❺ Now, plot your future state: where you want to be 2-3 years from now.
❻ If they are not on the same spot, identify what you can do differently to move yourself toward your target state. Think about how you might be able to include other people in this plan. Identify who you can delegate accountability, responsibility and authority to right now.
❼ Consider who you could coach or hire to take on something you still do that you shouldn’t be spending time on.
❽ Set yourself realistic and measurable milestones by month or quarter to keep you on track to close this gap.

Make sure to communicate to others why you want to make this change, and that you believe in them. You want them to feel included in the vision, and they are a part of the solution. There will be times that things don’t go as smoothly as you think they would have if you were still hands-on. You need to let them experience the growing pains you felt the first few times you did anything – that’s part of the total experience.