Word of the Day: Restraint

Word of the Day: Restraint from Blumer CPAs on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Word of the day, class. This word of the day is a weird word, restraint. Entrepreneurs love to talk about freedom. They love to talk about freedom, run your own business, be free, but entrepreneurs are particular kinds of people. Often, when you feed them piles of what they would call freedom, which means no guidance, that’s what they want, do what you want, do whatever you want, and whenever you want, that actually is the thing that hurts them in serious ways. Long-term entrepreneurs can tell you that that’s true.

The gift sometimes that you can give yourself is the gift of restraint, holding yourself back, not allowing yourself to be in situations where you get to do anything, all you want to do. These kind of things are what give guidance and clarity to entrepreneurs whose minds typically are high-level vision, moving fast, just trying anything and everything. Giving them this no-restraint mentality actually opens up every avenue to them, and sometimes, every avenue opened up to an entrepreneur is a thing that hurts them pretty directly.

How do I know? Because I am the self-confessed entrepreneur without guidance, without things that direct me in certain healthy paths. I will go off the rails, and I will not do things even that are healthy for myself in our businesses, so restraint and guidance, and I particularly with my partner, use calendaring in an amazing, intense way for restraint. That’s a huge guidance to me to know what can and should be done.

Restraint is a bad word sometimes to an entrepreneur, but it’s actually a gift to yourself if you can find that. Again, calendaring is a huge way to be strategic. My partner and I, we calendar our work calendars out a whole year in advance. We don’t allow any white space to be on our calendar. We have a very specific process that I teach at conferences called Strategic Calendar Work Blocking. It is very strategic, but it is a type of restraint that allows me to focus, do the right thing at the right time in the right order with great intensity and priority so that anything that I want to do that’s vision-related is typically going to take place because of that guidance and this thing called restraint. It’s actually a good thing. Entrepreneurs don’t need to be blowing in the wind with all hopes of doing anything they want because the entrepreneurial mind is not often doing the thing sometimes that can be executed and pulled off long-term.

That’s just a little hint to restraint. If you think you’re struggling with that, you can actually reach out to us, and we can help you. We do coaching and consulting with people who might be struggling with just complete autonomy to do anything they want versus the value and gift and the benefit of restraint. Let us know, and we can help you too. I hope that helps. Take care. We’ll see you.