Entrepreneurship is hard. 

Whether you're doing it full-time or alongside working a 9-to-5, it's hard. 

In this blog, you'll learn the challenge that the high-performing employee turned entrepreneur faces as they build the life and business they desire & how the tool of decluttering can help.

Continue reading or check out the video replay from Instagram above where we discussed this topic live.

The Challenge of Entrepreneurship

Ever noticed how entrepreneurship like parenting?

Your business is much like a child.

• It needs your time and attention.
• It cannot do for itself (and as such it always needs you).
• It requires you to regularly make decisions for its growth and development.
• It doesn't come with a manual. 

These facts create the challenge we face as we transition from high-performing employee to entrepreneur.
We have so many decisions to make and we're trying to figure out what choice is the right choice.

The High-Performing Employee

Before we were high-performing employees, most likely, we were an academic high-achiever. Our perspective on what's right is often shaped by someone else's definition of success.

We have done what we should to achieve success - study these topics, complete these assignments, follow this formula, participate in certain activities, add them to your resume, get into a corporate role, work harder than everyone else, be the first to come in and the last to leave, get more education, climb the corporate ladder, continue until retirement - feel like a success.

We learned that if we follow a track, "success" will come.

Knowing what to do becomes a safety net.

Entrepreneurship challenges us by giving us freedom of choice.
Rather than focusing on right and wrong, it provides the freedom to choose what we want or what is most aligned with the life we desire.

Navigating our own desires and building our own path is a skill we're still learning to develop.

How Choice Becomes Clutter

What no one told us before we became entrepreneurs is how paralyzing freedom of choice can be. The stress, anxiety and frustration that we feel creates often clutters our lives.

Clutter is any habit that keeps us from our most fulfilling life.

We clutter our lives by:

• overthinking
• overcompensating
• overworking
• overspending
• overeating
• overcommitting

When we clutter our lives, it keeps us from meeting the expectations and commitments we created for ourselves.

• We work instead of spending time with friends.
• We overthink instead of execute.
• We Netflix and scroll instead of workout.
• We commit even more to our 9-to-5 instead of building our business. 
• We eat out instead of meal prepping.
• We go to happy hour instead of committing to our hobbies.
• We commit time to others instead of dedicating time to care for ourselves.

How can we create the life or business we desire when our time is overwhelmed with activities that move us further from what we want?

How Decluttering Helps

To free our time and create space for what we desire, we must learn to declutter.

Decluttering is the selection of habits that will help you create your most fulfilling life.

The mainstream media tells us that decluttering is a tool for the minimalists and organizers, but this is untrue.
In these realms, we see decluttering as a removal tool - toss this, donate that, sell that, trash this.

 
Decluttering is a decision-making tool that supports us in designing our lives.

That is a skill that benefits every entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship doesn't provide a manual, but decluttering provides a guide as our business (and life) demands that we make decisions about how to proceed.

It allows us the opportunity to make a selection between two alternatives - what serves us and what does not.

What's more important than what you choose to let go is what you keep and why you kept it.

As you use the tool again and again, you will develop your own handbook.
Decision-making will become less overwhelming because you will learn how to confidently and consistently choose what is aligned with your goals.

When you learn how to choose you will stop being frustrated by the fact that you know what you want but not how to get there.

When you learn to declutter, you will:

• stop thinking that you have to quit your job in order to launch your business and instead identify how to choose time for your business over time for your job. You will shut your laptop at 5, take on less projects and create boundaries around your 9-to-5 so you can shift your focus to building your business after work.
• stop feeling like you don't have time to devote to the people you love and start truly enjoying life again instead of feeling bogged down or guilty for not working on your to-do list. 
• stop feeling guilty about taking time for yourself and start saying no to the commitments that keep you burnt out and overwhelmed.

Decluttering will help you build a business that fulfills you without feeling like you're dropping the ball in your life.

Learn to declutter.

Do you know how you clutter your life?
Have you identified how to break free?

If not, join the 'Achieve Any Goal' email community to learn more about our upcoming workshops that will teach you how to identify the habits that clutter your life and how to utilize a simple 3 step process to clear the clutter and launch and scale the business and life you desire.

Click here to join.