124. Fear of Wasting Time: Why Withholding Effort Holds You Back
Do you ever find yourself holding back in your interior design business because you're afraid of wasting time and energy? You're not alone. Many designers struggle with this fear, but what if I told you that withholding your effort is actually what's holding you back from making confident decisions and taking productive action to reach your goals?
In this episode, I dive into the dreaded fear of wasting time and energy and explore why it's not actually possible to waste your time if you have the right approach. I share how this fear manifests as withholding effort and how that ultimately keeps you stuck, preventing you from learning and growing.
Join me as I reframe the idea of "wasted" time and effort and discover how to drop the resistance, stop withholding, and start moving forward with more efficiency and less effort. By the end of this episode, you'll have a new perspective on how to approach challenges in your business and feel empowered to take action without fear.
If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why withholding effort due to fear of wasting time is more detrimental than actually "wasting" time.
How to reframe "wasted" time as essential progress towards your goals.
The importance of evaluating with curiosity and using learnings to inform next steps.
How to identify where you are withholding time and energy in your business.
Strategies for dropping the resistance and taking action with confidence.
Why learning from decisions and actions is crucial for growth and success.
How to become more courageous and confident in the decisions you make and strategies you pursue.
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118. Enough Chances to Succeed: Staying Committed to Pursuing Your Goals
#784: Dr. Becky Kennedy — Parenting Strategies for Raising Resilient Kids, Plus Word-for-Word Scripts for Repairing Relationships, Setting Boundaries, and More by The Tim Ferriss Show
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 124. In this one, I'm gonna be talking about the dreaded fear of wasting time and energy. Why it's not actually possible to waste your time if you have the right approach and how this withholding of your effort in your interior design business is actually what's holding you back from making confident decisions and taking productive action to reach your goals.
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 hope you are having a wonderful week as you listen to this. Well, maybe you're listening to this on a day other than it releases, but wherever you're at in your week, I hope it is going well.
I was just listening to this really fantastic podcast episode with Tim Ferriss and Rebecca Kennedy. Rebecca Kennedy is the good inside woman. And I think probably a lot of you know her. She's a parenting expert, but a psychologist who actually works with adults, which I think is really interesting and how she has essentially used what she has uncovered through her many private practice years with adults and kind of rewinding what those adults needed in childhood and using that as part of what she teaches parents to do. Anyways, it was a great interview. I'll make sure I link it in the show notes.
What she had said was she was talking about her membership program called Good Inside. And she was talking about how often when she talks to people about their experience within the membership, they are starting to talk about how, oh yeah, through this I asked for a raise or I decided I am going on that girl's trip and my partner can feel the way they feel about it. And then she's like, yeah, but how's the parenting going?
And I had to laugh because she called the tantrums, right? A lot of people come in, I think she works with a lot of parents of younger children and of course tantrums are a huge thing. And she's like, tantrums are the gateway. And it kind of made me laugh because I was thinking about how, just even like the coaching sessions I've had with my private clients this week, yes, of course, we're talking about business. We're solving that more immediate fire. And through solving those problems that are kind of in your face right now that you know need to be addressed.
That is where all of this opportunity for growth comes of looking inward and seeing what growth needs to happen inside you as a person from your mindset, from your emotional capacity, and then also just that ripple effect. So one of the things I always say is being an entrepreneur, aside from being a parent, is one of your greatest growth opportunities you'll ever be handed. And it was just kind of fun to hear her reflecting that in what she was talking about her experience with her clients. So anyways, that's kind of a tangent I just went off on, but I'll link that, it's a great interview. She's of course great to follow on social media, all of that.
Before we dive into the topic of withholding or fear of wasting energy and time, I have a quick request and that is to leave a rating and review for the show. If you find value in these episodes that I'm bringing out weekly, I would really appreciate it if you would just take a moment wherever you listen to these episodes, if you could just pull up that platform and leave a rating and review to share what you love about the episode. That would be so appreciated and I would really thank you. And for all of you who have left ratings and review, just know that I have so much gratitude for you as we continue to build the show and get it in front of more designers. And that is part of how I do it, is through telling the algorithm that this show is valuable and other people should see it.
Okay, so now all of that, I wanna talk about this really interesting dynamic that I see play out in clients. And of course, I notice it in myself as well from time to time, is this connection between wasting time or this fear of wasting time and energy, and then withholding the time and energy, trying to not waste time, and how that's actually something that really holds business owners back.
I'm gonna go into exactly what I mean by withholding and dive into how this might be showing up and why the distinction between the two is so important and the awareness of how you're engaging in these behaviors is the actual limitation and is the thing that you should avoid much more than try and avoid wasting time if you approach it in the right way. And I don't want to say the right way. I don't like using that phrase.
But if you use the approach that I'm going to be giving you today, often a designer client of mine will come to me with a problem that they want to solve in their business, right? That's why you hire a business coach. And the problem is going to require them to take new or different actions and choose a path to pursue to solve the problem that they're currently experiencing, right? Isn't that expression, if you keep doing the same thing, but expect different results, that's the definition of insanity, right? So if you have a problem and the way you're doing it isn't working, we have to choose differently and try different things.
Maybe this designer's goal is to attract a higher level of projects, bigger projects, higher level clientele, bigger budgets, so they know they need to invest in a new type of marketing or further leverage current strategies in a different way or amplify them. This requires change in the marketing approach. Or maybe they want to be more in control of their process to increase their profits and streamline timelines. And that means they're going to have to implement some new system or create a new system or change the current one. Change is necessary.
Maybe they want to take on more projects to scale the business. And so the changes that they need to hire another employee. They're gonna have to take steps to think about what that job entails, write the job description, find the person, potentially run them through some trials, and then hire and onboard and da-da.
Or maybe they just wanna end work at a certain time during the day and eliminate the night and weekend work. And I shouldn't even say just because this is just major in and of itself. But if you wanna do that means you're gonna have to use some kind of time management and calendar system, which you're probably not using.
All of these examples require effort, time, and energy directed through action. And definitely you're gonna take some time, whether that is the time you're putting in or time that is across a span of weeks or months to create a new outcome. And of course, with any new direction we had, none of the outcomes are guaranteed. As with any problem we wanna overcome in our business, it's a process of exploring options we think might work. Maybe we ask some trusted friends or a mentor or a coach, and then eventually deciding which path to pursue.
And that is gonna mean taking some action, seeing how it goes, and then using what you learn to determine the next steps. There's this quote that I love, and I believe it's attributed to Dan Sullivan. The quote is, you either win or you learn. And more often than not, it's not that cut and dry. You're learning until you win. And if you want more of my take on this, definitely check out the recent episode. It was episode 118, Enough Chances to Succeed, where I dive into that a little bit more.
But what I want you to hear is that you can do your research, you can get advice and coaching, and no matter how much due diligence you do, ultimately you don't know how it's going to work until you do the thing and those things are done and you have some kind of outcome.
And this is where I see designers get stuck. Because the outcome is not guaranteed and the time and effort put in isn't necessarily guaranteed to work or create the desired results, you stall. You procrastinate on a decision or you avoid taking action or you continue to pull the audience on what you should do because of a fear that you don't want to waste time or effort.
And I think this really makes sense with the types of clients that I work with. Often, they are feeling very stretched thin, they already feel like they're juggling so much, too many things on their plate. And so there is this fear of wasting time and effort. And for these designers, the wasting is to be avoided at all costs, right? Because we have this belief, I don't have enough time.
So if you believe you already don't have enough time, then of course, it makes total sense that you're like, if there's not enough time there, I can't waste any of this. So many times when I prompt a client, we're talking through a problem and they're like, well, I could do this or this. And I ask them why they haven't made a decision. It's because they don't want to decide to do the thing and then realize it wasn't the "right" thing, because then they make that mean that they have wasted time.
I bet a lot of you can relate to that where you've done something, you've went down a path, you've started researching something and you realize, oh, this isn't the thing I want to do or the path I wanna take. And then you tell yourself, I wasted all this time. Which if you think about how that feels when you tell yourself that, it's full of judgment, it's full of regret. I mean, it feels awful.
So not only are you wanting to avoid wasting time in terms of like the actual time spent that you could calculate in your weekly hours, you're also trying to avoid that emotional experience of telling yourself that you did something wrong. Now, here's the thing. When you fear wasting time and effort and the associated emotional experience, you start to withhold your time and energy, which I see time and time again.
I have evidence of this for myself from the work that I do with my clients, that the withholding is the thing you need to avoid, not the wasting. Withholding is time and energy intensive. If you think about what it means to withhold or even just the energy behind that, it's refusing to give something that is due or required by your goals.
And like I started off the episode saying, if you want to create a new goal in your business, you're going to have to do things and spend time doing things differently in order to reach that elevated goal. That's just what is required. And so when you withhold, you're refusing to give your business what it needs.
It's this idea of holding back like one foot on the brake and one on the pedal. I have this goal, but I'm not going to try too hard or I'm not going to give it too much because I don't want to get it wrong. If we follow the car analogy in a car, you know, you have to press on the gas pedal in order to drive the car. You know, if you need to get to the store, you're not going to try and get to the store pushing both the brake and the accelerator at the same time. You'd go, yeah, that's nonsense, Desi. That is absolutely not how I get to the store. And yet we often approach moving towards our goals that way in our business.
Now, if you're a client of mine or even just a listener of the podcast, you know that around here, we make intentional decisions and take action toward a defined result. And we evaluate with curiosity along the way until you reach your desired outcome. That is how we do things. Of course, the evaluating with curiosity is key here. If you're always learning from what has happened, going back to that quote, you either win or you learn, and you use your evaluations to decide your next steps, there really is no such thing as wasted time and effort, because these learnings are what create the win. One lucky shot sure could create a win, but most often it's the learnings that create the win. And learning takes time and effort.
The learning and doing things that go okay, maybe not as planned. Those are the deposits you're making in the win. So actually what you might be thinking of as wasted time and energy are actually acts of investment in your future results and future success. And I absolutely do not think that is wasted anything.
Let me give you an example of this. Maybe you decide you are gonna go all in on Instagram strategy to bring in new clients. This might be on your own, it might be hiring someone. And after three months of testing out this strategy, trying some different approaches, evaluating along the way to tweak your approaches, you see that there's no notable difference in your website traffic, or your inquiry form submitted, or whatever metrics you're using to indicate that movement towards a goal.
You could say, all right, well, I just wasted three months of my time. I put in all that effort, it was such a waste. I wasted financial resources if you outsource this. Okay, no, don't blame yourself like that. You've actually made progress. Now, instead of spending time wondering if Instagram could work in the way that you want it to work for your business, or spent a lot of mental spinning, telling yourself you should be doing it, or downloading free PDFs that clog up your inbox with step by step instructions, but you're not doing anything with it, you actually know something now that you didn't before. You have specific strategies that you tried, different methods you used, and you know now what didn't work from that.
And so if you can eliminate some of those things that didn't work, you now can look at how can I use that to decide something new I think might work or try different approaches? You have something real and tangible versus imaginary to leverage as you move forward. This is so, so key. If you think about it in terms of a design project even, you probably wouldn't design an entire project without ever checking in with the client. You wouldn't use your imaginary feedback to decide how you're going to move forward throughout the different phases and eventually SPAC and purchase and build.
It's the same thing. You have to get feedback. That's what this is. Data is feedback. And once you have the data, you can decide to test further changes, try another method of marketing or anything in between based on what you learn. Yes, time has passed. Energy has been expended to get those learnings. But don't tell yourself it was wasted time or that you shouldn't have wasted that time or done it that way.
What I want to remind you is that not taking any action from this fear and from a place of withholding from your business would mean you'd be in the exact same spot as you were three months ago, versus farther along having learned something. You would have no new information, no new feedback, no new insights about how you could use Instagram to grow your interior design business. Being in the exact same spot when you know you have a goal you're actively working towards, that is the waste.
When you drop the resistance and stop withholding your energy, you actually start moving forward with more efficiency, less effort, and you save yourself time in the overall timeline of reaching an outcome because you're not staying stuck on that timeline for an extended period of however long it takes you to get moving.
I feel like I'm giving all the analogies today, but here's another one. I want you to think of an image of a maze, the maze of the problem or obstacle you're overcoming in your interior design business, right? The maze is the problem. You have to get out of the problem. And you're plopped in the center of this maze. You know you need to get out. And I'm going to ask you, designer, what should you do next? My guess is that you'd tell me that you're going to start walking.
You're going to start searching out the paths and seeing where they take you. You'd probably agree that getting out of the maze will happen more quickly if you go down a path, find out it's a dead end, and then try another path, rather than sitting in the middle of the maze, thinking about which way to go. I'm not saying you run frantically through the maze, but you start walking, you're thoughtful. You think about, oh, I went that way, that didn't work. Okay, well, that kind of looks like it might lead somewhere.
Sitting there, not doing anything, thinking about the maze is just withholding effort. If you wanna get out of the maze, if you wanna get out of the problem you're trying to solve or the goal you're trying to achieve, you have to make a move. In the maze, you don't consider the steps taken wasted time. You consider them essential progress towards finding your way out.
And I'm really encouraging you with this episode to start to think about the way you approach. And I really want to encourage you with this episode to start thinking the same way about how you use your resources in your business in the exact same way. I'm gonna say it again. There really is no such thing as wasted time if you take what you learn and move forward with purpose.
This week, I want you to pay attention to where you are fearing wasted time and effort. What decisions and actions are you withholding from yourself and from your business that are actually draining you instead of moving you forward? Identify what those are and then I want you to fast forward to the future. And think about, if I continue to withhold time and energy in this way, where's that gonna leave me three months from now?
And with that awareness, I want you to decide what you're going to do next. If it feels hard to drop this withholding energy, I also want to encourage you to think about some times where you didn't get the outcome you wanted, but learned exactly what you needed to learn in order to move forward. This is a way for you to show your fear-based part of your brain that learning was what gave you what you wanted eventually, and was not actually any waste of time at all. Once you get in the practice of noticing when you're withholding your efforts due to fear and start taking action instead and learning from how your decisions unfold, you'll find that you become much more courageous and confident in decisions you make and strategies you pursue. And ultimately the great things you'll be able to create, not just in your interior design business, but your life too.
My recent episode, 119, Taking the Leap: Risk &Reward When You Invest, would also be a great companion episode to this topic if it's really resonating with you. And of course, I'd love to hear what you think of this idea of wasting and withholding.
As we wrap up, I wanna remind you that if you want my personalized support, be sure to add your name to the waitlist for private coaching so that you can be the first one to know when a spot opens up. You can head over to https://desicreswell.com/coaching to learn all about design to thrive private coaching partnerships and add your name to the waitlist.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. If you're not already subscribed, please do that now so you don't miss an episode. Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week and we'll talk again soon.
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 hope you are having a wonderful week as you listen to this. Well, maybe you're listening to this on a day other than it releases, but wherever you're at in your week, I hope it is going well.
I was just listening to this really fantastic podcast episode with Tim Ferriss and Rebecca Kennedy. Rebecca Kennedy is the good inside woman. And I think probably a lot of you know her. She's a parenting expert, but a psychologist who actually works with adults, which I think is really interesting and how she has essentially used what she has uncovered through her many private practice years with adults and kind of rewinding what those adults needed in childhood and using that as part of what she teaches parents to do. Anyways, it was a great interview. I'll make sure I link it in the show notes.
What she had said was she was talking about her membership program called Good Inside. And she was talking about how often when she talks to people about their experience within the membership, they are starting to talk about how, oh yeah, through this I asked for a raise or I decided I am going on that girl's trip and my partner can feel the way they feel about it. And then she's like, yeah, but how's the parenting going?
And I had to laugh because she called the tantrums, right? A lot of people come in, I think she works with a lot of parents of younger children and of course tantrums are a huge thing. And she's like, tantrums are the gateway. And it kind of made me laugh because I was thinking about how, just even like the coaching sessions I've had with my private clients this week, yes, of course, we're talking about business. We're solving that more immediate fire. And through solving those problems that are kind of in your face right now that you know need to be addressed.
That is where all of this opportunity for growth comes of looking inward and seeing what growth needs to happen inside you as a person from your mindset, from your emotional capacity, and then also just that ripple effect. So one of the things I always say is being an entrepreneur, aside from being a parent, is one of your greatest growth opportunities you'll ever be handed. And it was just kind of fun to hear her reflecting that in what she was talking about her experience with her clients. So anyways, that's kind of a tangent I just went off on, but I'll link that, it's a great interview. She's of course great to follow on social media, all of that.
Before we dive into the topic of withholding or fear of wasting energy and time, I have a quick request and that is to leave a rating and review for the show. If you find value in these episodes that I'm bringing out weekly, I would really appreciate it if you would just take a moment wherever you listen to these episodes, if you could just pull up that platform and leave a rating and review to share what you love about the episode. That would be so appreciated and I would really thank you. And for all of you who have left ratings and review, just know that I have so much gratitude for you as we continue to build the show and get it in front of more designers. And that is part of how I do it, is through telling the algorithm that this show is valuable and other people should see it.
Okay, so now all of that, I wanna talk about this really interesting dynamic that I see play out in clients. And of course, I notice it in myself as well from time to time, is this connection between wasting time or this fear of wasting time and energy, and then withholding the time and energy, trying to not waste time, and how that's actually something that really holds business owners back.
I'm gonna go into exactly what I mean by withholding and dive into how this might be showing up and why the distinction between the two is so important and the awareness of how you're engaging in these behaviors is the actual limitation and is the thing that you should avoid much more than try and avoid wasting time if you approach it in the right way. And I don't want to say the right way. I don't like using that phrase.
But if you use the approach that I'm going to be giving you today, often a designer client of mine will come to me with a problem that they want to solve in their business, right? That's why you hire a business coach. And the problem is going to require them to take new or different actions and choose a path to pursue to solve the problem that they're currently experiencing, right? Isn't that expression, if you keep doing the same thing, but expect different results, that's the definition of insanity, right? So if you have a problem and the way you're doing it isn't working, we have to choose differently and try different things.
Maybe this designer's goal is to attract a higher level of projects, bigger projects, higher level clientele, bigger budgets, so they know they need to invest in a new type of marketing or further leverage current strategies in a different way or amplify them. This requires change in the marketing approach. Or maybe they want to be more in control of their process to increase their profits and streamline timelines. And that means they're going to have to implement some new system or create a new system or change the current one. Change is necessary.
Maybe they want to take on more projects to scale the business. And so the changes that they need to hire another employee. They're gonna have to take steps to think about what that job entails, write the job description, find the person, potentially run them through some trials, and then hire and onboard and da-da.
Or maybe they just wanna end work at a certain time during the day and eliminate the night and weekend work. And I shouldn't even say just because this is just major in and of itself. But if you wanna do that means you're gonna have to use some kind of time management and calendar system, which you're probably not using.
All of these examples require effort, time, and energy directed through action. And definitely you're gonna take some time, whether that is the time you're putting in or time that is across a span of weeks or months to create a new outcome. And of course, with any new direction we had, none of the outcomes are guaranteed. As with any problem we wanna overcome in our business, it's a process of exploring options we think might work. Maybe we ask some trusted friends or a mentor or a coach, and then eventually deciding which path to pursue.
And that is gonna mean taking some action, seeing how it goes, and then using what you learn to determine the next steps. There's this quote that I love, and I believe it's attributed to Dan Sullivan. The quote is, you either win or you learn. And more often than not, it's not that cut and dry. You're learning until you win. And if you want more of my take on this, definitely check out the recent episode. It was episode 118, Enough Chances to Succeed, where I dive into that a little bit more.
But what I want you to hear is that you can do your research, you can get advice and coaching, and no matter how much due diligence you do, ultimately you don't know how it's going to work until you do the thing and those things are done and you have some kind of outcome.
And this is where I see designers get stuck. Because the outcome is not guaranteed and the time and effort put in isn't necessarily guaranteed to work or create the desired results, you stall. You procrastinate on a decision or you avoid taking action or you continue to pull the audience on what you should do because of a fear that you don't want to waste time or effort.
And I think this really makes sense with the types of clients that I work with. Often, they are feeling very stretched thin, they already feel like they're juggling so much, too many things on their plate. And so there is this fear of wasting time and effort. And for these designers, the wasting is to be avoided at all costs, right? Because we have this belief, I don't have enough time.
So if you believe you already don't have enough time, then of course, it makes total sense that you're like, if there's not enough time there, I can't waste any of this. So many times when I prompt a client, we're talking through a problem and they're like, well, I could do this or this. And I ask them why they haven't made a decision. It's because they don't want to decide to do the thing and then realize it wasn't the "right" thing, because then they make that mean that they have wasted time.
I bet a lot of you can relate to that where you've done something, you've went down a path, you've started researching something and you realize, oh, this isn't the thing I want to do or the path I wanna take. And then you tell yourself, I wasted all this time. Which if you think about how that feels when you tell yourself that, it's full of judgment, it's full of regret. I mean, it feels awful.
So not only are you wanting to avoid wasting time in terms of like the actual time spent that you could calculate in your weekly hours, you're also trying to avoid that emotional experience of telling yourself that you did something wrong. Now, here's the thing. When you fear wasting time and effort and the associated emotional experience, you start to withhold your time and energy, which I see time and time again.
I have evidence of this for myself from the work that I do with my clients, that the withholding is the thing you need to avoid, not the wasting. Withholding is time and energy intensive. If you think about what it means to withhold or even just the energy behind that, it's refusing to give something that is due or required by your goals.
And like I started off the episode saying, if you want to create a new goal in your business, you're going to have to do things and spend time doing things differently in order to reach that elevated goal. That's just what is required. And so when you withhold, you're refusing to give your business what it needs.
It's this idea of holding back like one foot on the brake and one on the pedal. I have this goal, but I'm not going to try too hard or I'm not going to give it too much because I don't want to get it wrong. If we follow the car analogy in a car, you know, you have to press on the gas pedal in order to drive the car. You know, if you need to get to the store, you're not going to try and get to the store pushing both the brake and the accelerator at the same time. You'd go, yeah, that's nonsense, Desi. That is absolutely not how I get to the store. And yet we often approach moving towards our goals that way in our business.
Now, if you're a client of mine or even just a listener of the podcast, you know that around here, we make intentional decisions and take action toward a defined result. And we evaluate with curiosity along the way until you reach your desired outcome. That is how we do things. Of course, the evaluating with curiosity is key here. If you're always learning from what has happened, going back to that quote, you either win or you learn, and you use your evaluations to decide your next steps, there really is no such thing as wasted time and effort, because these learnings are what create the win. One lucky shot sure could create a win, but most often it's the learnings that create the win. And learning takes time and effort.
The learning and doing things that go okay, maybe not as planned. Those are the deposits you're making in the win. So actually what you might be thinking of as wasted time and energy are actually acts of investment in your future results and future success. And I absolutely do not think that is wasted anything.
Let me give you an example of this. Maybe you decide you are gonna go all in on Instagram strategy to bring in new clients. This might be on your own, it might be hiring someone. And after three months of testing out this strategy, trying some different approaches, evaluating along the way to tweak your approaches, you see that there's no notable difference in your website traffic, or your inquiry form submitted, or whatever metrics you're using to indicate that movement towards a goal.
You could say, all right, well, I just wasted three months of my time. I put in all that effort, it was such a waste. I wasted financial resources if you outsource this. Okay, no, don't blame yourself like that. You've actually made progress. Now, instead of spending time wondering if Instagram could work in the way that you want it to work for your business, or spent a lot of mental spinning, telling yourself you should be doing it, or downloading free PDFs that clog up your inbox with step by step instructions, but you're not doing anything with it, you actually know something now that you didn't before. You have specific strategies that you tried, different methods you used, and you know now what didn't work from that.
And so if you can eliminate some of those things that didn't work, you now can look at how can I use that to decide something new I think might work or try different approaches? You have something real and tangible versus imaginary to leverage as you move forward. This is so, so key. If you think about it in terms of a design project even, you probably wouldn't design an entire project without ever checking in with the client. You wouldn't use your imaginary feedback to decide how you're going to move forward throughout the different phases and eventually SPAC and purchase and build.
It's the same thing. You have to get feedback. That's what this is. Data is feedback. And once you have the data, you can decide to test further changes, try another method of marketing or anything in between based on what you learn. Yes, time has passed. Energy has been expended to get those learnings. But don't tell yourself it was wasted time or that you shouldn't have wasted that time or done it that way.
What I want to remind you is that not taking any action from this fear and from a place of withholding from your business would mean you'd be in the exact same spot as you were three months ago, versus farther along having learned something. You would have no new information, no new feedback, no new insights about how you could use Instagram to grow your interior design business. Being in the exact same spot when you know you have a goal you're actively working towards, that is the waste.
When you drop the resistance and stop withholding your energy, you actually start moving forward with more efficiency, less effort, and you save yourself time in the overall timeline of reaching an outcome because you're not staying stuck on that timeline for an extended period of however long it takes you to get moving.
I feel like I'm giving all the analogies today, but here's another one. I want you to think of an image of a maze, the maze of the problem or obstacle you're overcoming in your interior design business, right? The maze is the problem. You have to get out of the problem. And you're plopped in the center of this maze. You know you need to get out. And I'm going to ask you, designer, what should you do next? My guess is that you'd tell me that you're going to start walking.
You're going to start searching out the paths and seeing where they take you. You'd probably agree that getting out of the maze will happen more quickly if you go down a path, find out it's a dead end, and then try another path, rather than sitting in the middle of the maze, thinking about which way to go. I'm not saying you run frantically through the maze, but you start walking, you're thoughtful. You think about, oh, I went that way, that didn't work. Okay, well, that kind of looks like it might lead somewhere.
Sitting there, not doing anything, thinking about the maze is just withholding effort. If you wanna get out of the maze, if you wanna get out of the problem you're trying to solve or the goal you're trying to achieve, you have to make a move. In the maze, you don't consider the steps taken wasted time. You consider them essential progress towards finding your way out.
And I'm really encouraging you with this episode to start to think about the way you approach. And I really want to encourage you with this episode to start thinking the same way about how you use your resources in your business in the exact same way. I'm gonna say it again. There really is no such thing as wasted time if you take what you learn and move forward with purpose.
This week, I want you to pay attention to where you are fearing wasted time and effort. What decisions and actions are you withholding from yourself and from your business that are actually draining you instead of moving you forward? Identify what those are and then I want you to fast forward to the future. And think about, if I continue to withhold time and energy in this way, where's that gonna leave me three months from now?
And with that awareness, I want you to decide what you're going to do next. If it feels hard to drop this withholding energy, I also want to encourage you to think about some times where you didn't get the outcome you wanted, but learned exactly what you needed to learn in order to move forward. This is a way for you to show your fear-based part of your brain that learning was what gave you what you wanted eventually, and was not actually any waste of time at all. Once you get in the practice of noticing when you're withholding your efforts due to fear and start taking action instead and learning from how your decisions unfold, you'll find that you become much more courageous and confident in decisions you make and strategies you pursue. And ultimately the great things you'll be able to create, not just in your interior design business, but your life too.
My recent episode, 119, Taking the Leap: Risk &Reward When You Invest, would also be a great companion episode to this topic if it's really resonating with you. And of course, I'd love to hear what you think of this idea of wasting and withholding.
As we wrap up, I wanna remind you that if you want my personalized support, be sure to add your name to the waitlist for private coaching so that you can be the first one to know when a spot opens up. You can head over to https://desicreswell.com/coaching to learn all about design to thrive private coaching partnerships and add your name to the waitlist.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. If you're not already subscribed, please do that now so you don't miss an episode. Until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week and we'll talk again soon.
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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