How Visionary Leaders Stay Motivated While Waiting for Success
What To Do When You’re Stuck Waiting
Very few people like waiting, and visionaries are some of the most impatient people around. It stands to reason. As a leader, you must convince yourself that you can make your will happen, or you wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. And yet, there are limits to how quickly your enthusiasm can advance your goals, and at some point, you will end up waiting.
Often this waiting will rudely show up when there’s the possibility of a major breakthrough. Your Golden Carrot may show up in the form of a big partnership, a dream customer, a key hire or even a wildly successful launch.
I remember when I first started People-Friendly Tech (at the time, it was known as Entrepreneurial Technologies). It was 2007, and I’d printed business cards and put up a website, gotten some early customers, and hired our first few employees. It felt like we were on the cusp of something special. And then, the economy tanked in what would later be dubbed the Great Recession. Every day felt touch-and-go. And despite having very little to do that would actually change our revenue, I worked more hours than ever. Making spreadsheets. Running numbers again and again. Sending email after email. None of it had any real impact on our sales.
The worst part was that I started to feel a drop in motivation, like maybe this wasn’t the right path. Maybe I’d messed up by bringing these people along for the ride. What had once felt inspired felt hollow and futile.
Then, something changed. Prospects started saying yes. Momentum surged again. Within a few months we were through the rough patch and growing quickly, and we’re still here today. What made the difference? Partly, the passage of time. Americans can’t stop themselves from spending money for long, and the economy recovered. But also, the less I wrung my hands and tried to force it, the more ideas–helpful, useful ideas–started to flow.
Here are my tips for getting through stuck periods:
Assess what you can control and what you can’t
Attack the controllable factors
Energize for what comes next
Assess what you can control (and what you can’t)
This is a moment of humility for many leaders. The reason I was up at midnight working in 2007 wasn’t because it made a difference - it was because it made me feel like I had control. Taking action feels good. Waiting feels bad because it makes a person feel powerless. The illusion of agency was worth something to me, even if it meant exhaustion.
The truth is, even leaders are powerless to change many things that influence their trajectory: macro factors like the economy, interest rates, unemployment rates; and more specific factors such as when a partner will say yes or whether a key employee will come on board. A leader can make calls and send messages and give their best effort, but the decisions are out of their control.
That isn’t pleasant to confront. As leaders, we place a lot of our professional identity behind our ability to get things done. Who are we when the cards aren’t coming up our way, or worse, when nothing seems to be happening at all?
The first step is to reel that ego back in. Things like the economy and other people’s choices were never within your control in the first place. When you’re winning every hand, it’s easy to convince yourself you influence the cards. But you don’t, anymore than you do when you’re losing or when the dealer is on a break and no cards are coming out (this analogy is wearing a little thin, but work with me).
While you don’t control the cards or when they’re dealt, you can control your strategy. Many times, something feels urgent because we’ve lined up other desirable things behind your Golden Carrot. So ask yourself: is the story you are telling yourself true? Can you really not have the things you want unless and until your Golden Carrot happens?
We once had a client who wanted to be able to say he was a fintech founder. He wanted that identity for himself so badly. And until the product was out, he felt he had to stay within the confines of his old identity, and he was positively itching to get out of it. So, he arbitrarily started telling people the product would be out in 6 weeks, without talking to anyone. When we finally did get him to talk about it, he realized what he was doing. He just couldn’t stand to continue to live his old life, so he was trying to will the launch (and his new identity) to get there faster.
In his case, a perspective shift solved it. We found a way for him to start moving forward promoting the product with a pre-sales lead capture website, and that helped him shift into his new identity right away while letting the build take the time it needed to take to get it done right.
Sometimes an even more drastic shift is necessary. What would you do if you knew for a fact that your Golden Carrot was never going to happen? What changes would you make? I’m not suggesting you need to give up on it, but thinking through what choices you’d make if you took your Golden Carrot off the table can help you see where you’re keeping yourself (and your business) stuck. It may not be as crucial as you think it is. There’s almost always another way around.
Nail the controllable factors
Once you’ve stopped expending energy fruitlessly, trying to influence things outside of your control, you will find yourself fidgeting around your office with an excess of energy. There is a perfect outlet for this: the things you can control.
These tend to fall into two categories: the first is building and acquiring assets that will come in handy once your Golden Carrot materializes. These assets often involve unsexy tasks like setting up systems and processes for your internal operations. Maybe you need to work on your support queue process or build a knowledge base. Maybe you need to put effort into your marketing materials or train staff to sell your new product line. Sometimes it’s even making sure you have content to populate your platform once it’s ready to go.
Although these tasks are hard work, they’re satisfying, and it may be an easy transference of your energy because it still feels like you’re getting closer to the thing you ultimately want: your Golden Carrot. That’s comforting, but be wary: how certain are you that your Golden Carrot will come to pass? Most of the time, it’s difficult to be completely certain. And therefore, some effort should go toward the other category of tasks: it’s the steps you could take that would make your Golden Carrot less crucial.
For example, if you’re waiting on a big deal to come through, you may have convinced yourself (as I have many times) that this deal is going to solve all of your problems. This sort of magical thinking is normal – many of the leaders I’ve worked with fall prey to it at some point – but it’s not helpful. It causes you to neglect other opportunities and hold your proverbial breath until that one special deal is complete. More often than not, tuning out the rest of the world to focus on a singular salvation prospect is unhealthy, but the pull is strong. It can seem so simple, like an answer to your prayers. And once you start thinking that way, your ability to negotiate effectively grinds to a halt.
Magical thinking can also overhype your Golden Carrot in your mind. One deal/partner/employee can only do so much, and it likely won’t solve everything. It also likely isn’t the only way to solve the things it does solve. It’s healthier for a leader (and their company) to hedge their bets a little. One effective trick is to think to yourself: what would make me no longer care whether your Golden Carrot materializes or not?
For example, if you’re focused on one big deal coming through, you may be ignoring other potential smaller deals. If you collected those smaller deals, would the big one still feel so crucial? Big deals have a way of seeming life-changing and inspiring a little obsession in leaders, but they’re not guaranteed wins. Over the years, many big deals have grown my company in very positive ways, while a few have caused negative side effects that took significant time to heal.
The best antidote to over-committing to one big deal is to focus on the things that would make that deal irrelevant to your organization. You’ll likely be better off whether it comes through or not.
Energize for what comes next
While action is motivating, you can’t give maximum effort for months or years on end as you build. Whatever the current big push is, there will always be another one after it. They keep coming like waves on the ocean. You can’t expend all of your energy on one push or you’ll burn out. Living for the future is exciting but also exhausting.
So take a moment to pause. Come back to the present moment. You’ve probably already accomplished more than you think you have. Look behind you and appreciate how far you’ve come. Then look forward again, but instead of seeing the tasks, see the possibilities again. The possibilities are what inspired you in the first place. Hope is energizing. Allow yourself to think creatively. What could exist in this wide-open, new world? What’s a Golden Carrot that you could create?
Then, set out to build it.