89. Are You Willing? (CEO Summer School)
When you think about where you want your business and life to be one year from now, what do you need to be willing to do and feel to make your vision a reality?
This is your prompt for our CEO Summer School episode this week. Now that we’ve set the vision for your life and interior design business, I’m introducing you to the idea of willingness. Being willing is an essential ingredient to your success because it's how you’ll create new results and grow with your company. So where do you start?
Tune in this week as I invite you to grow your willingness as the CEO of your business. You’ll hear why doing new things will require a certain level of stretching outside of your comfort zone, how to increase your capacity to hold the discomfort of being willing, and what happens when you grow your ability and desire to be willing.
CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why willingness is a key ingredient to your success.
How you’ll be required to do new things if you want to create a new result.
Why your personal evolution and the evolution of your business will sometimes feel uncomfortable.
The differences between being willing and hustling.
What willingness in your business looks like.
How willingness helps you grow your business in ways that support you creatively and financially.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 89. I'm bringing you the second episode in the CEO Summer Series, and today the topic is willingness. One of the key elements necessary to building your dream interior design business that's going to support you creatively, financially, and personally.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am here with episode two of the CEO Summer School Series. If you're new to the podcast or just haven't had a chance to sign up, you can absolutely still join us in CEO Summer School. If you are new, a quick recap, this is a special podcast series I've created just for interior designers so that you can intentionally use these summer months to reset, reflect, and keep your business goals moving forward, even if you're busy.
Because let's face it, you probably are. I'm in that same boat. There's so much we want to do and so many things scheduled in summer and CEO Summer School is a low lift, low time commitment way to keep moving forward and not just totally ignore your business over the summer.
If you haven't already signed up, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and then head over to desiid.com/summer school so you can sign up. This is how, and also the only way, you're going to get the bonus resource guides that are going to help you integrate what I'm sharing on the podcast, but it's only available if you sign up. So you have to go to desiid.com/summerschool.
And then once you're enrolled, you'll receive one sheet guides that you can use over the course of this special series to create your very own business playbook. Whenever there's a new episode for this series, you'll receive an email the day the episode airs. And for those of you signing up past the initial start date, which was June 19th, you'll still be able to access all of the past guides. So make sure you get yourself signed up. One last time, that's desiid.com/summerschool.
In our first episode of this series, we were really setting the vision for your interior design business and also for your life. We were thinking about where you wanna be one year from now. And the topic that really is in support of that last episode that I wanna bring to you today is the idea of willingness. Willingness or being willing is a key ingredient to your success. It is how you get from where you are today to where you want to go. It's how you create new results and how you grow with the company as the owner.
One of the things that I'm always working with my clients is that you as the designer, you the person behind the business have to grow in order for the business results to grow. So that's internal growth, you as a person. It's also external in terms of increasing your skillset, but so much of it is developing a greater self-concept or a greater way that you see yourself and developing the willingness to stretch yourself as the leader of the business. And that is how you get your business results to grow.
Whether that's making more money, working on higher profile projects, managing a team or a storefront, allowing that team to do their thing so you can step away and take the time off that you really wanna take off. Those new results, those circumstances you want to create, anything that you don't currently have in your interior design business but want to have, requires willingness.
Before we get to the question that I wanna pose today in CEO Summer School, I wanna talk a little bit more about what willingness is and how you can begin to think about it because I would say it's probably not a business concept you've heard from other people. When I looked up the actual definition of willingness, the definition online was ready, eager, or prepared to do something. I actually don't think eager is required to be willing. Often I find we're anything but eager, but we can still be willing. We can still be ready to do something. We can be prepared to do something. We can still ease into it, to wade into those uncharted territories to create new results.
Because most often, when you wanna create a new result, you're going to have to do new things. Sometimes this is fun and exciting, but I would say more often than not, it's hard work. You're stretching yourself out of your comfort zone and having to take action or invest resources without knowing if that plan's going to work the way you want it to.
I think we could also all agree that in creating new results in your business, you're being called to evolve in this process, you, yourself, the business, your team members, the whole machine. And that doesn't always feel great. It can be pretty uncomfortable. And even if it is exciting at first, even if we have that fun of the new fresh start, go getter kind of attitude, leading yourself through the messy middle of going from where you are today to where you want to be requires sustained effort and focus.
The way that our brain is wired is that we're trying to avoid effort, avoid pain, and be comfortable and maintain our homeostasis and survival. And so going against that requires willingness. You need to be ready to do the work, and that requires that you are willing to do the work. I think there's a big difference between being willing to do it and knowing what you need to do, and then not being willing to do it or resisting doing it.
Willingness in your business is like creating the desire to run the training miles leading up to a marathon. That's very different than just having the desire to have run the marathon and be on the other side of the race. The medal at the end of the race, the photo of you crossing the finish line, you get to tell people you've run a marathon forever forward and they get to be all impressed. That's fun.
But if you aren't willing to run mile one, and then train so you can run mile two and mile three, if you aren't willing to take care of your body, feed it well, foam roll, get some coaching or follow a training plan, none of that fun stuff, all those end results of crossing the finish line and having run the marathon would have happened. This is why willingness is so important, and it's one of the key ingredients to your success.
The question I want to pose to you today is, when you think about where you want your business and life to be one year from now, what do you need to be willing to do and feel to make your vision a reality? And just to be clear, this isn't what you're willing to do at any cost to you or others. This is what are you willing to do that stretches you, but is not such a stretch that you're going to be paralyzed in inaction or strain yourself.
Going back to the marathon example, you don't run the marathon on your first day of training, you build up to it. So what I want to be clear about is this is not hustling. This is willingness. There's a leaning into it versus a rapid trying to sprint to the finish.
I want to give you some ideas of what it would mean to be willing, because this probably is a new concept for you. So you might need to be willing to try new things, things you've never done before, or new ways of doing what you've always done because the old way isn't working anymore. I think that's when willingness is really stretched.
You might need to be willing to fail and have something not work at first, or maybe even on the second or third try. You have to be willing to embrace emotions like uncertainty and doubt, or actively create emotions for yourself such as determination and commitment. You might need to be willing to invest in yourself and others, or be willing to be a beginner in an area. You might need to be willing to ask for help, or be willing to think differently about yourself and your business.
You might need to be willing to introduce yourself to new people, even though you're intimidated by them or don't know how they're going to receive you. There are so many ways to be willing, both in the actions you take and the emotions you need to embrace or generate on purpose in order to be able to take those actions.
As you practice being willing, the skill of willingness and your capacity to hold the discomfort of being willing will grow and it'll grow you as the leader behind your interior design business. This internal growth, as a result of increasing your ability and desire to be willing, will grow your business in ways that support you creatively and financially, which then goes on to make so much more possible in your personal life.
I wanna give you the prompt one more time. And of course, if you sign up and enroll in CEO Summer School, it's totally free, but you do need to sign up. At desiid.com/summerschool, you'll get the bonus resource guide where you'll be able to put pen to paper and answer this for yourself and really explore this concept of willingness a little bit further.
I want you to imagine what you want your business and life to be like one year from now. And then ask yourself, what do you need to be willing to do and feel to make your vision a reality? Take this question to your bonus reflection guide, plus I've got two additional bonus prompts to help you increase your capacity to be willing, and therefore your capacity for great results and success personally and professionally.
When you enroll at desiid.com/summerschool, you'll be able to print these one sheet guides one at a time as the weeks go on through summer, and then experience the cumulative effect of regularly tuning into yourself and your business and creating intention behind your next steps.
I'd love to hear from you and know where this question takes you and what willingness means to you. Next week on the podcast, you're gonna have an episode that further supports your exploration of this question that I posed. And the week after that, I'll be back with a brand new episode of CEO Summer School. I am excited to bring you that one. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week and I'll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I am here with episode two of the CEO Summer School Series. If you're new to the podcast or just haven't had a chance to sign up, you can absolutely still join us in CEO Summer School. If you are new, a quick recap, this is a special podcast series I've created just for interior designers so that you can intentionally use these summer months to reset, reflect, and keep your business goals moving forward, even if you're busy.
Because let's face it, you probably are. I'm in that same boat. There's so much we want to do and so many things scheduled in summer and CEO Summer School is a low lift, low time commitment way to keep moving forward and not just totally ignore your business over the summer.
If you haven't already signed up, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and then head over to desiid.com/summer school so you can sign up. This is how, and also the only way, you're going to get the bonus resource guides that are going to help you integrate what I'm sharing on the podcast, but it's only available if you sign up. So you have to go to desiid.com/summerschool.
And then once you're enrolled, you'll receive one sheet guides that you can use over the course of this special series to create your very own business playbook. Whenever there's a new episode for this series, you'll receive an email the day the episode airs. And for those of you signing up past the initial start date, which was June 19th, you'll still be able to access all of the past guides. So make sure you get yourself signed up. One last time, that's desiid.com/summerschool.
In our first episode of this series, we were really setting the vision for your interior design business and also for your life. We were thinking about where you wanna be one year from now. And the topic that really is in support of that last episode that I wanna bring to you today is the idea of willingness. Willingness or being willing is a key ingredient to your success. It is how you get from where you are today to where you want to go. It's how you create new results and how you grow with the company as the owner.
One of the things that I'm always working with my clients is that you as the designer, you the person behind the business have to grow in order for the business results to grow. So that's internal growth, you as a person. It's also external in terms of increasing your skillset, but so much of it is developing a greater self-concept or a greater way that you see yourself and developing the willingness to stretch yourself as the leader of the business. And that is how you get your business results to grow.
Whether that's making more money, working on higher profile projects, managing a team or a storefront, allowing that team to do their thing so you can step away and take the time off that you really wanna take off. Those new results, those circumstances you want to create, anything that you don't currently have in your interior design business but want to have, requires willingness.
Before we get to the question that I wanna pose today in CEO Summer School, I wanna talk a little bit more about what willingness is and how you can begin to think about it because I would say it's probably not a business concept you've heard from other people. When I looked up the actual definition of willingness, the definition online was ready, eager, or prepared to do something. I actually don't think eager is required to be willing. Often I find we're anything but eager, but we can still be willing. We can still be ready to do something. We can be prepared to do something. We can still ease into it, to wade into those uncharted territories to create new results.
Because most often, when you wanna create a new result, you're going to have to do new things. Sometimes this is fun and exciting, but I would say more often than not, it's hard work. You're stretching yourself out of your comfort zone and having to take action or invest resources without knowing if that plan's going to work the way you want it to.
I think we could also all agree that in creating new results in your business, you're being called to evolve in this process, you, yourself, the business, your team members, the whole machine. And that doesn't always feel great. It can be pretty uncomfortable. And even if it is exciting at first, even if we have that fun of the new fresh start, go getter kind of attitude, leading yourself through the messy middle of going from where you are today to where you want to be requires sustained effort and focus.
The way that our brain is wired is that we're trying to avoid effort, avoid pain, and be comfortable and maintain our homeostasis and survival. And so going against that requires willingness. You need to be ready to do the work, and that requires that you are willing to do the work. I think there's a big difference between being willing to do it and knowing what you need to do, and then not being willing to do it or resisting doing it.
Willingness in your business is like creating the desire to run the training miles leading up to a marathon. That's very different than just having the desire to have run the marathon and be on the other side of the race. The medal at the end of the race, the photo of you crossing the finish line, you get to tell people you've run a marathon forever forward and they get to be all impressed. That's fun.
But if you aren't willing to run mile one, and then train so you can run mile two and mile three, if you aren't willing to take care of your body, feed it well, foam roll, get some coaching or follow a training plan, none of that fun stuff, all those end results of crossing the finish line and having run the marathon would have happened. This is why willingness is so important, and it's one of the key ingredients to your success.
The question I want to pose to you today is, when you think about where you want your business and life to be one year from now, what do you need to be willing to do and feel to make your vision a reality? And just to be clear, this isn't what you're willing to do at any cost to you or others. This is what are you willing to do that stretches you, but is not such a stretch that you're going to be paralyzed in inaction or strain yourself.
Going back to the marathon example, you don't run the marathon on your first day of training, you build up to it. So what I want to be clear about is this is not hustling. This is willingness. There's a leaning into it versus a rapid trying to sprint to the finish.
I want to give you some ideas of what it would mean to be willing, because this probably is a new concept for you. So you might need to be willing to try new things, things you've never done before, or new ways of doing what you've always done because the old way isn't working anymore. I think that's when willingness is really stretched.
You might need to be willing to fail and have something not work at first, or maybe even on the second or third try. You have to be willing to embrace emotions like uncertainty and doubt, or actively create emotions for yourself such as determination and commitment. You might need to be willing to invest in yourself and others, or be willing to be a beginner in an area. You might need to be willing to ask for help, or be willing to think differently about yourself and your business.
You might need to be willing to introduce yourself to new people, even though you're intimidated by them or don't know how they're going to receive you. There are so many ways to be willing, both in the actions you take and the emotions you need to embrace or generate on purpose in order to be able to take those actions.
As you practice being willing, the skill of willingness and your capacity to hold the discomfort of being willing will grow and it'll grow you as the leader behind your interior design business. This internal growth, as a result of increasing your ability and desire to be willing, will grow your business in ways that support you creatively and financially, which then goes on to make so much more possible in your personal life.
I wanna give you the prompt one more time. And of course, if you sign up and enroll in CEO Summer School, it's totally free, but you do need to sign up. At desiid.com/summerschool, you'll get the bonus resource guide where you'll be able to put pen to paper and answer this for yourself and really explore this concept of willingness a little bit further.
I want you to imagine what you want your business and life to be like one year from now. And then ask yourself, what do you need to be willing to do and feel to make your vision a reality? Take this question to your bonus reflection guide, plus I've got two additional bonus prompts to help you increase your capacity to be willing, and therefore your capacity for great results and success personally and professionally.
When you enroll at desiid.com/summerschool, you'll be able to print these one sheet guides one at a time as the weeks go on through summer, and then experience the cumulative effect of regularly tuning into yourself and your business and creating intention behind your next steps.
I'd love to hear from you and know where this question takes you and what willingness means to you. Next week on the podcast, you're gonna have an episode that further supports your exploration of this question that I posed. And the week after that, I'll be back with a brand new episode of CEO Summer School. I am excited to bring you that one. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week and I'll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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