Lets Celebrate your Problems!

Lets Celebrate your Problems!

Many years ago when I first got into to the world of personal development I trained with a mentor who used to say:

“Successful people don’t stop having problems.  They just have better quality problems”

What he meant was that life and business are never going to be easy and smooth and we are always going to have problems.   But the more success you’ve created (whatever that means to you), and the further along the path to your dreams you get, the better “quality” your problems will be.

So you lost a client because you ran too many programmes at once and the quality of your work started to slip.  That’s a much better “quality” problem than not having enough clients to fill a programme in the first place.

Or you ran a webinar and it bombed, only a handful of people responded to your offer.  That’s a much better “quality” problem than being so afraid of putting yourself out there that the idea of doing a webinar feels like a distant dream that is only for “other people”

Or you’ve got no clients and you don’t know where the next one is coming from.  But hey, you wouldn’t have this problem if you hadn’t got really passionate about something and decided to turn it into a business.  If you’d stayed safe in the job doing the “same old, same old” this simply would never have been a problem.

You see – you still have problems – but now you have better quality problems!

Take my client Louise for example:

It was a conversation with Louise (name changed) that inspired this post.  She came to one of our mentoring calls the other day with a Really Big Problem.   The sales person she had recruited and trained wasn’t working out.  He had an attitude problem, was undermining her and wasn’t bringing in the results she hoped for despite his 15 years experience.  This was costing her money, and also emotional energy as she grappled with the decision about whether to let him go.

She came to the call very despairing and beating herself up for having “made a mistake” in taking this person on.  But I thought this was fantastic!

You see I could clearly remember where she’d been when she started working with me, less than a year before.   At that time she had zero clients, a huge amount of self-doubt and was questioning whether this was even the right business for her.   She had realised that not being able to sell was the missing piece standing in the way of her winning business but she was terrified.  During our consultation call (aka sales conversation) she was in tears as she told me she didn’t believe she could ever learn to sell and therefore could never make her business work.

Fast forward a year, and here she is a force to be reckoned with.  Not only does she love sales but she’s pretty darned good at it.    So much so that she’s won so much new business it no longer makes sense for her to do the business development – hence the new sales person.   So she’d gone out and advertised, interviewed, hired and trained this guy in how to sell her particular products and services.

So her sales person not working out?  Yes, that’s a problem I don’t deny it.  It’s costing her money, peace of mind and lost clients.

But compared to having no clients at all and being distraught at prospect of ever being able to sell?

Well, it’s a completely different level of problem isn’t it?

So what did we do on that call?  We took time to celebrate!

We celebrated her having got her business to the place where she even needed to hire a sales person.    We celebrated her having become the sort of business woman who is bold enough to go out and interview, hire and train new team members, with no guarantee of the outcome.  And most of all we celebrated her having got so good at sales that even someone with 15 years experience couldn’t match her results.

And it got me thinking…. It’s not just Louise.   It’s all of us.

Here are a few problems I’ve faced in the years since I started this business

  • Bullying from a team member that caused me to lose so much confidence that I dreaded turning up to work every day
  • The venue for a live event telling me with only a few weeks to go that they’d double-booked and so I could no longer have the room
  • A Facebook Ads agency who merrily consumed £4,000 of my money and left me with practically nothing to show for it.
  • Bold investments in people and systems designed to support the business to grow that didn’t do what they were intended to and left me with cashflow problems instead of growth
  • Every single tag  (if you know Infusionsoft you’ll know that these are very important!) getting deleted from my email and marketing system right in the middle of my biggest launch – which could potentially have cost me most of my sales for the year

Now, I’m not going to pretend that when these things happened I cracked open the champagne every evening to celebrate!  Because like everyone else when I’m stuck in a problem I’m stuck in a problem and it can be all consuming and devastating.

But would I swap problems of this quality from the problems I used to have?

Long-term chronic illness,  a deep sense of my life lacking meaning and purpose, an idea of a business but no idea how to make it work to be financially viable, money pouring out on training courses with no sign of any of it coming back in, a lack of self-belief so crippling that even if I’d known what to do I probably wouldn’t have done it.

No Way!

Because I only had these problems at this magnitude because I had a business that was “working” at a level that allowed me to hire team members and consultants and invest in systems.   I had clients who loved me and referred people enthusiastically, programmes that add genuine value and I know how to sell, and a growing reputation for doing business with integrity.

So while given a choice I’d rather not have any problems at all (who wouldn’t?)  I far prefer the quality of problems I have these days to the ones I had when I was starting out.

What about you?
What problems are you struggling with today that are actually symptoms of your success?   That you simply wouldn’t have if you hadn’t shown great courage, grown as a person or achieved a dream?

What problem can you Celebrate today because it’s a sign of just how far you’ve come?
Pat yourself on the back and then post in the comments to let me know – I’d love to hear from you!

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"THE 7 STEPS TO YES" Watch these short videos and start to fall in love with sales

Please leave a comment as I would love to hear your thoughts

16 Comments

  1. Lihle on November 17, 2022 at 2:22 pm

    Love this! Huge perspective change. Thank you for sharing

  2. Irene on July 14, 2017 at 1:57 pm

    My problem is starting my business. Literally just getting started. I know what I want to do. When I consider that I used to be in a job that I didn’t want to be in any more and so I bravely left it, my problem feels very small. In fact, it feels like a journey of discovery, which is what I want my life to be from now on. Thanks for the blogpost, It really resonated xx

    • Catherine on July 14, 2017 at 3:38 pm

      I’m glad you liked it Irene – yes sometimes to appreciate where we are we have to look at where we used to be. So much better to be on a new path even if unsure of the next step, rather than stuck in a job you didn’t like. Well done for taking the leap!

  3. Gillian Hunt on March 22, 2017 at 4:14 pm

    I do like the idea of growing into better quality problems. It seems that problems as you have said in your blog will continue to arrive but that we will get better as finding the solutions. My problem last year was going outside my own comfort zone online and now here I am commenting on your blog.

  4. Carol Hanson on March 16, 2017 at 10:31 am

    Catherine I love this post it’s so true. We get caught up in the drama of issues that seem to be weighing us down and fail to see the positives. Perspective is everything and recognising our own achievements is so important.

    I was giving a talk yesterday at a networking meeting and afterwards the best feedback I received was: ‘Carol I love to hear you talk. You’re an inspiration you always find a positive spin on something which I would simply see as a problem’.

  5. Bev Tighe on March 15, 2017 at 6:58 pm

    Hi Catherine, so I met you about 3.5 years ago at an Animas Discovery Day. Now I have my Diploma in Transformational Coaching and am setting up my Coaching practice. My ‘nice to have’ challenge (actually I can’t bring myself to say it’s a problem) is deciding what to write for my website content! And choosing a strapline! I’m facing it all head on with excitement, enthusiasm and sheer determination. I am launching my website by the end of March ?

    • Catherine on March 16, 2017 at 5:08 pm

      Hi Bev
      Yes I remember you of course. Congratulations on qualifying as a coach and good luck on the exciting and at times bumpy new road you are going down setting up your practice! Exciting times!

  6. Jacqui Christie on March 15, 2017 at 10:31 am

    Excellent blog Catherine, so motivational, thank you/1

    • Catherine on March 15, 2017 at 10:53 am

      Thank you Jacqui for your comment – I’m glad it motivated you and hopefully any woes you have now have a slightly more exciting tinge to them as a result.

  7. Rosie Slosek on March 15, 2017 at 10:23 am

    Thank you. I needed this.

    I’m changing my business to helping female entrepreneurs feel clear and confident about their business finances so their creativity flows; I am creating new packages, new branding, new website, new books, new programmes. The hour by hour emotional upheaval (who needs Alton Towers!).

    My website formatting has broken in the middle of a launch and my tech team can’t fix it and the new site isn’t ready. So new website is coming very quickly and in a different form and my tech team are good and reliable and unflappable. I’m surprisingly calm about it and now I know why – it’s because I’m being forced to birth the new site much faster than I would have done before, it almost feels like support that it’s broken!

    Breathe in success 🙂

    • Catherine on March 15, 2017 at 10:53 am

      Wow, Rosie, that all sounds amazing. That’s a huge bit of upleveling and a big vision – and yes, there may be some hiccups along the way but you just wouldn’t be on this rollercoaster if you hadn’t decided to make the stretch to something new. Yay! Another Celebration!

  8. Chris on March 15, 2017 at 9:45 am

    Thank you for your interesting post. Yes it is good to look for the positive in all situations. I have been presenting my customer and employee satisfaction survey services to some high tech, high growth companies recently and although I have not won the business on these occasions I appreciate that I am now getting the opportunity to compete with some of the big market research agenices who offer similar services.

    • Catherine on March 15, 2017 at 10:51 am

      Hi Chris
      That’s great progress. yes, no business = problem. But making presentations to companies and getting yourself known and taken seriously in comparison to the competition = cause to celebrate. You are probably closer than you realise to seeing the results you want – keep going!

  9. Pete on March 15, 2017 at 9:21 am

    Catherine

    I have built huge potential client base, but my problem is converting them to quality paying clients. I find it hard to celebrate when I’m not able to convert them to clients.

    • Catherine on March 15, 2017 at 10:49 am

      Hi Pete
      You should totally celebrate! So often clients come to work with me on their sales and they don’t have any potential client base at all, so they have the whole of the mountain to climb whereas you are near the top already. When someone comes to me with a large network, database or email list, even if it’s not quite working for them yet I get very excited as I can usually see how close they really are and what’s not working for them. So yes, this is cause for a huge celebration. Then all you need to do is identify why they are not becoming clients, make a few tweaks and hey presto – I bet you are closer than you think!

      • Vicki Raven on March 15, 2017 at 8:41 pm

        Hi Catherine/Pete

        I have exactly the same problem! So I’ll be thinking about what I need to change in order to convert them into paying clients too

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