Recognizing Trade Offs: It's a Choice | Ep. 148

Hi, everybody and welcome to the Dogco Secrets Podcast. My name is Michelle Klein. I am your host, and I am also the founder of Dogco Launch, where pet care companies come to grow in scale. For today's episode, I want to talk about something I've been sitting with pretty heavily inside of my own journey as a business owner, and I know a lot of my clients really wrestle with this as well, so I think it'll be helpful. No matter where you are in your business, I really think today will apply to both people who are just starting out, who are maybe coming into their journey, who are looking at this potentially really long road ahead, assessing if they want to start this journey, all the way up to people who have been on the road of entrepreneurship for quite a while, and I think we'll resonate a lot with what we're going to talk about today. So let's get into it. What I want to talk about today is this idea that there is always going to be a trade-off for whatever you are trying to achieve inside of your business. I think part of what I have spent a lot of time thinking about, I've always struggled with this idea that there was an assumed trade-off with success. I think that that can be a real limiting belief. I think that people oftentimes can kind of amp up this feeling of like this is going to be hard, it's going to require sacrifice, that puts them into the position where they then approach whatever project it is very differently than they would have. If they had come in challenging that assumption, like what if this were easy? What if it didn't cost as much for me? And I really think there is merit to that. I remember when I was going into graduate school, so you may or may not know, I have my master's screen so short, not that I'm in that field anymore, though I actually use that degree a lot more than one might think. So when I was going into graduate school, I remember having a conversation with my roommate at the times. This was quite a while ago. And I was asking her what to expect. And I remember she looked at me and she was like, you know, I see a lot of people go through this program because she was getting her own degree and such work, probably important context. She made the comment, I have seen a lot of people in my program have a really, really, really hard time. And I've thought about it a lot. And looking back, these are all people who came in assuming it would be hard. I really believe your experience this year will be whatever you decide it to be. If you decide to frame something as this is going to be really difficult and really hard, it's going to take a lot from me. You probably will end up having that experience. If you go in believing, I am capable of this. It is not actually that hard and I can do it. That will more likely be your experience. I really took that to heart. And to be honest, I brought that into entrepreneurship. And there are ways in which that has served me really, really well because I do think my first framing is like, how hard could it actually be? Like we could throw a conference. How hard could it be? Turns out pretty hard. Pretty expensive. But like we could do that. I tend to jump in because I don't overthink the cost. Just how hard could it be? That's been a mindset I have had for forever. Again, that serves me really, really well. But I also think that there are trade-offs. This obviously a very in progress thought for me. I believe there are trade-offs. I still believe that we should not assume what the trade-off will be. We should not assume what it will cost. I have gotten to the point where we should assume that it will cost. It will either cost, focus, comfort, money, time, relationships, not necessarily in the sense of like, you have to have this really heavy-handed, like either with me or against me. Like I think people can take that in a really toxic direction. But it will cost your presence in relationships. Like if you're building a business, you're going for big goals. And it takes a lot of time, effort, and attention that pulls from somewhere. I do want to protect this belief. I want to protect the inherent assumption that I see people make of what exactly the cost will be. Because I think they oftentimes then use that as a justification to not try or to not reach. But I do think it's really important for especially business owners to understand there is a trade-off. And the further I get into this, the more I realize that that trade-off, most often, the most expensive "currency" of that trade-off is my own comfort. It's the ability to say, okay, like to get to this goal, it's going to require me to learn something that's really uncomfortable, or to have like a really uncomfortable conversation with someone because we're not headed in the direction I need us to be. Sometimes it's going to be someone telling me this direction isn't where I want to go, and me having to say, if I still want to go this way, that produces friction. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I think I've come to the place where I see friction as really healthy and also part of legitimate relationships often, not like conflict, but like healthy friction. Like we are both showing up authentically. No two people are the same. That is going to have a piece of friction as part of it. But I do think we have to acknowledge there's a cost or you don't have to. I am finding it at this point in my juncture with entrepreneurship more uncomfortable to pretend there is not a cost than to acknowledge there is a cost in this season. And I think that always has been there. It just has been at various points and times challenged me in different ways. I think we all go through that cycle with entrepreneurship or at least if you've been in it for a while. We go through cycles. I like to think of it as the metaphor of kind of like your underwater and then your head kind of pops up out of the waves and it's like, oh, I can see this shore. Look, I'm a lot closer than I was before. Like that's pretty cool. And then the next round of waves come and it's like you're kind of fighting for your life underneath it, doing like cartwheels underwater. Then you pop back up again. And you're like, wow, look, it's a beautiful day. And like the sun is shining and there's a breeze and then you're underwater again. I think about this metaphor a lot if you can't tell. And I think the cost is that period of time where we go under the water and we have to fight our way back up. But from my experience, we always come back up closer to the shore. There are a lot of different ways to get there. I do want to emphasize. I don't believe there is one right way to get where you want to go to achieve the goals you want to hit. I don't think there is an assumed currency of the trade-off that you will experience, but it will come out of cost. And that is worth thinking about. And I think deciding for yourself, what are you willing to pay? And that's a very legitimate question. I've had several conversations and this could be a whole episode, a whole thread. So I won't pull it too deeply here in this episode. But I've had several conversations in the last couple of years with business owners who are like, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. And I think in that moment, they're expecting me to jump in with this raw raw energy of like, you can do it, don't give up. Nothing's worth giving up. I do not see choosing a different path as giving up. Now, I think if you're doing out of burnout or I think if you're doing out of fear, that is worth pausing. I have talked to very few business owners who have been like, I confidently made a fearful decision two years ago to stop or shut down my business. And I feel really good about it today. I don't believe that is the direction to go. I will be very honest. But I do think if you find yourself out of alignment with what you want your life to look like and the trajectory you want your business to take, that is worth pausing and evaluating and asking the question, how could this look different? Because there will be a trade-off and it is worth evaluating is this truly what I want. So I hope this was helpful. I hope it gave at least some things to think about going into this weekend, the shopping on a Friday, so some good talking points for you. All right, I will catch you next time. (upbeat music)