Women in Consulting Need To Know When To Pull Away From The Pack
This was originally posted on my Seven Figure Consultant LinkedIn Newsletter. Subscribe today to get insights about how women are building powerful and impactful consulting businesses.
Is the current crisis an opportunity for your consulting business to pull away from the herd?
If you want to experience more success, more income, more satisfaction than is typical for the average person, there comes a point where you will need to pull away from the rest of the pack.
Some of us will need to do this multiple times.
You probably already experienced this once when you left your corporate job to start your consulting business.
And originally you felt totally alone, until you found a new crowd to fall in with – a group of people who started out at around the same time, who you can grow alongside.
But as you progress your business, you will find that the people in that group start to move at different speeds.
Maybe someone in your group gets a big opportunity and suddenly their business is moving at a completely different pace. They’re suddenly flat out with work, or they’re on a much bigger stage, or they have contacts at a much higher level.
We often advise one another to ‘stay in your lane’ in business – and this is almost always something that we say to the person who is moving slowly when everyone else is moving fast.
But it applies just as much to the person who is accelerating forward and leaving their ‘gang’ behind.
For some consultants, the current situation has led to growth in their business. And that feels out of step with their peers, friends and colleagues.
They feel alone in their celebrations.
They feel distance.
It can feel lonely in a way you haven’t experienced before.
And if this applies to you right now, I need you to know that this separation, this emotional distance, would happen with or without the Covid crisis.
The distance you’re experiencing is as a result of you pulling ahead of the pack.
And there can be the biggest temptation to ‘dull your brightness’ in those moments.
Stop celebrating.
Get back in your box.
Don’t ruffle the feathers of those who are having a difficult season.
Make yourself smaller so you don’t upset other people.
And I want to say to you, please – do not do this.
If people aren’t happy for your success, if they aren’t cheering you on, if they’re jealous of or threatened by the good things happening to you – the solution isn’t to make yourself smaller.
The people who aren’t cheering you on, aren’t the people who will have your back for the next chapter of your business. It may be time to leave them behind.
If you’ve seen huge change for the better in your business since the start of March, please don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t be making progress ‘at a time like this’.
By keeping your business going at all, you are doing a great service to the economy. And to also be making progress at a time when the pressures facing many businesses are mounting up is an amazing achievement.
If you’re suddenly finding that you’re beyond capacity in your business, and you know that something has to change in your business to make it sustainable for the long term – because at the moment we are once again feeling the ground shift beneath us as we start to move onto the next stage, and I know for some, the thought of things picking up pace again might be massively overwhelming right now.
If you need some help making a plan for scaling your business and starting to switch to a business model that frees up more of your time instead of just demanding more from you – I’d love to speak to you.
Get in touch via my website – jessicafearnley.com and let’s explore how we might be able to work together.
And I’d love to hear from you – are you ‘running with the pack’ in your business at the moment, or have you felt yourself pulling ahead?
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It’s the framework that helps consultant women like you find their feet and get back to leading the business, rather than being buried in client work and back-end business operations.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your feedback and future topics you’d like me to feature. You may also enjoy The Seven Figure Consultant Podcast, the show that takes you from booked up and burned out in your consulting business to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure enterprise.