Running a business is full of ups and downs, sort of like a rollercoaster. Some months are great, while others can fall flat. If those less-than-stellar months leave you feeling like you want to give up and hide under a rock, you might be knocking on the door to resentment.
And to hear Kristen tell it, resentment is a stepping stone on the way to burnout. In this episode, she discusses how chronic disappointment from unmet expectations can put a strain on the relationship you have with your business. If you’ve felt less than enthusiastic about your business lately, you’ll want to tune in.
Here are a few key points from this episode:
- The warning signs of heading toward resentment in your business
- Why setting unattainable goals can lead to disappointment
- How to know if you’re in a toxic relationship with your business
- The importance of managing expectations
Just like in any relationship – feeling resentment is a warning sign that means something isn’t working and things need to change. The first step is to stop placing unfair expectations on yourself and in turn – on your business. Don’t let the status of your business define your worth.
The biggest event of the year is back again! Business Reboot for Social Sellers is the brand new, highly anticipated training series to end your 2022 with a huge bang. Join Kristen LIVE December 26-28 for 3 days of intensive training to help recession-proof your business and show you how to turn your social selling business into a real financial asset. Click here to join in.
Looking for a way to maximize your sales this upcoming holiday season? Then now is the perfect time to download your copy of Kristen’s new Monetize and Maximize Holiday Guide. Inside you’ll find simple and effective strategies designed to turn the last quarter of the year into your best. Click here to buy now.
Thanks for listening! Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https://Kristenboss.com/question
Connect with Kristen:
If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Do you have a business full of customers and almost no builders? You’re in need of a reboot! Learn the three skills you can learn that will completely change your recruitment game. Check it out here.
Transcript for Episode #140 Business Resentment:
Kristen Boss (00:05): Welcome to Purposeful Social Selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service-based industries. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller who is tired of feeling inauthentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business. In today’s social media landscape, in this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way.
Kristen Boss (00:48): Hey friends. Welcome to another episode of the show. I hope you all are having a really fabulous holiday season with your friends, your family, your loved ones. I also know this can be a particularly hard time of year for some people, so I also want this to be a gentle reminder to be taking care of yourselves. Remember to prioritize rest self care. Maybe that looks like therapy. Maybe it looks like naps. Maybe it looks like putting in some boundaries. So I just wanted to just add that little note Today as we are in the thick of the holiday season today’s episode, we are going to be talking about something I see quite often with a lot of business owners and how you can prevent it. And it’s the concept of business resentment. When you start to lose love for your business and it becomes this thing that feels like you’ll, they’ll ball and chain the thing you have to show up for.
Kristen Boss (01:43): When you stop finding joy in your business, it starts to feel like it’s sure when it no longer feels like something you choose to do, but something you feel you have to do. And I want you to notice what is your language like when you’re talking about your business? Are you saying, I have to go and do this. I have to go and show up for my business today, or I get to want to, I’m excited to work today. When was the last time you woke up with a sense of renewed purpose and joy and excitement to show up for your business? And what’s interesting is I realize that my podcasts drop on Mondays, and I think a lot of people like to joke about the Mondays, but if you aren’t hitting the ground on a Monday morning, excited for your week, excited to serve, excited to show up, I want to ask you, why aren’t you filled with a sense of hope and joy and vision for what you are creating in the world?
Kristen Boss (02:37): And maybe it’s time for you to get new vision. Maybe it’s time for you to realign yourself with your goals and your habits. Which by the way, if you haven’t already purchased your tickets for the three day live event business reboot for social sellers, you’re going to want to do that in the show notes. We’ll talk about that more in a little bit here. But I want to circle back to this idea business resentment and why it happens. And here’s the thing. I think resentment as the precursor for burnout, I actually think a large reason for burnout is high levels of resentment that can no longer be tolerated. It’s high levels of emotional exhaustion that suddenly becomes physical exhaustion, where you no longer wish to show up for your business, you want to take a break, you want to step away for a while, regain perspective. And I really feel like a lot of times it’s because the business has started to feel heavy.
Kristen Boss (03:28): It no longer feels like a choice. It no longer feels like something you desire to show up for. And I really believe resentment does play a large part in that. So I was thinking about why resentment? What does resentment feel like? What causes resentment? And I looked up a definition and the definition of resentment is bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly. There’s a sense of bitter bitterness and this feeling like I’m not being treated fairly in this, or in some way, this isn’t meeting the expectation that I have for this. I’m constantly disappointed. And when you’re constantly disappointed by the thing, maybe it’s a person, maybe it’s a relationship. But in this case, we’re talking about your business. When you’re constantly let down and disappointed, you start to become resentful of the thing that you think is continually causing your disappointment. And what I want to ask you is this bitter indignation at being treated unfairly is I want to ask you, are you treating yourself fairly in your business?
Kristen Boss (04:35): Meaning are you placing reasonable expectations on yourself? Are you your goals? Are they compassionate and kind goals? Or are they goals that cause you to stress out, spin out, go into confusion and overwhelm and throw yourself into a flurry of chaos? Like is setting a goal that’s causing you severe mental duress in the highest and best service to you? I think sometimes people do this. They think they need to set these big, huge, hairy, audacious goals, the b a g goals. But the thing is, is that people, I see people set such huge goals that they end up becoming paralyzed, it shuts them down, or because they think that’s a worthy goal, instead of like, okay, what goal feels most aligned for me? What goal fills me with energy and a desire to take action? That leaves me with a little bit of nervousness on how I’m going to accomplish it.
Kristen Boss (05:31): You want your goal to be challenging enough to still engage you in the goal, but if you find yourself disengaging, if you find yourself checking out and overwhelm it, you might be setting a goal that’s too big for you at this current season of your business or what’s currently going on. Now, am I saying lower the goal to the point where you’re not even being challenged? No, I’m not saying that. But here’s the thing with this concept of resentment and goals, I do do think what happens with people is when they set goals sometimes too big of goals, or they think it needs to be a big audacious goal and they miss the goal, or maybe they’re unkind to themselves when they miss the goal, the experience of disappointment they have in relation to the missed goal is what creates resentment. And eventually, what I see people doing as I see them, they stop setting goals because they don’t want to feel disappointment anymore.
Kristen Boss (06:21): Because eventually you get so tired of disappointment, you start to resent the feeling of disappointment. And in your mind, you think my business is causing me disappointment. But here’s the thing, what if it’s not your business that’s causing you disappointment? What if it’s your relationship with your business that is causing you this resentment and disappointment? Let me give you an example. If we stopped thinking about your business as an object, and we started thinking about it as a relationship, there is you and there is your business, and it is your relationship with your business. I want to ask you, how would you describe your relationship with your business? Would you describe it as codependent? Like, do you need your business in order to feel important in the world? Do you need your business to validate who you are? Do you need your business to feel good about yourself?
Kristen Boss (07:13): Does your business determine your mood? Does your business determine your outlook on life? What is your relationship with it? And another great question to ask yourself is what are your expectations of your business and how you expect it to show up for you? And if you’re like, I don’t have expectations, I would encourage you to check again, because we all have expectations. So you might be thinking, well, I expect my business to be giving me X amount of dollars per month. I expect my business to be doing A, B, and C. And anytime something does not meet our expectations, we often have to manage our thoughts and our feelings around the expectations that didn’t get met. And we have one, we can do one of two things. We can change the expectations or we can give up, or we can keep the expectations and continue to feel disappointed.
Kristen Boss (08:10): Really, I guess it’s three options. So really what I want you to ask yourself is what unfair expectations have you been placing on your business? What are you looking to your business to solve for you that really you should be solving for yourself? So let me give you an example. I know that some people, they feel like their business is what gives them a sense of confidence. Like, if my business is doing well, then I can believe I’m doing well, then I can believe I’m confident, then I can believe I’m successful, then I can believe I’m capable. But when my business isn’t doing well, I no longer feel capable. I no longer feel confident. I no longer feel successful because they’ve tied their identity to their business business, or they expect their business to fill an emotional need. And I want to ask you, what emotional needs are you expecting your business to fill for you?
Kristen Boss (09:06): Because that is a breeding ground for resent because no thing can provide for you emotional fulfillment. No, and no person, because think about it. Let’s zoom out from the business standpoint and think about relationships. Think about maybe if you’re married, your marriage. What is it like when you come to your spouse or your partner and you expect them to fulfill all of your emotional needs when you see it as their job to make you happy, to make you confident, to make you feel pretty, to make you feel loved? Like it’s your job to make me feel a certain way. What if I were to tell you it’s not their job? It’s your job to provide that for yourself. Because when you do that, when you have a strong sense of self, when you love yourself, when you understand your worth and it’s not assigning something else, a person, an object, or a thing to fill that need for you, suddenly you become a filled whole person and everything else in your life becomes gravy.
Kristen Boss (10:08): It becomes the cherry on top. Part of I know for me that really changed in my marriage is I was not that person before I met my husband. I was the person that was constantly looking to the other person to validate me, tell me that I was pretty, tell me that I was wanted tell me that I was worthy. And I constantly was looking to the other person for them to fill that need to fill that void I was filling because I never gave it to myself. And then finally, I got to the place where I truly loved myself and saw value in who I was and how I showed up in the world that I no longer needed it demanded it or expected it of others to provide that for me. What happened was it created a really beautiful relationship because I was no longer bringing expectations to that person to do something that I could provide for myself.
Kristen Boss (10:54): So how does this apply to your business and how does it apply to resentment is again, I want you to ask yourself, what do I need to provide to myself that will allow me to show up more whole, more authentic, more joyful, and more purposeful in my business that I have not been doing up until this point? What parts of my business have I been maybe outsourcing my worth to? Like, if that’s doing good, then I can believe I’m doing good. Right? What unfair expectations have you been placing on your business? And another one is, what unfair expectations have you been placing on yourself? Because that will create resentment as well. Are you expecting yourself to grow at an unprecedented trajectory? Are you expecting yourself to have a miraculous sales month, month after month after month? Are you expecting perfection of yourself? Are you expecting yourself to always be winning?
Kristen Boss (11:53): Because that’s just not how this goes. That’s not entrepreneurship, that’s not the game. You’re going to have bad days, you’re going to have bad months. You’re going to have, you know, down, down weeks your paycheck is going to flex. That’s how it works. This is business. You’re going to have up months and down months and static months and plateau months, right? But are you expecting yourself to always be growing in a linear trajectory? Because that’s an unfair expectation to be placing on yourself. And therefore, when your results aren’t moving in a linear upwards trajectory, you’re going to feel resentment. You’re going to feel disappointment. So what I want to offer you is, can you manage your expectations around your business in a way that serves you so that you’re moving from a place, from a place of resentment and disappointment and into a place of joy, of purpose, of peace, of certainty?
Kristen Boss (12:47): Pick whatever emotion you want, but just not one of unworthiness or resentment, because I believe resentment is what happens after chronic disappointments of unmet expectations. But here’s the thing. Your business, you can’t always control the outside circumstances and what happens to you, but you can absolutely control your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and how you treat yourself in those things. So in order to prevent yourself from getting to burnout and feeling deep levels of business resentment, instead of quitting the business, maybe you need to ask yourself, what expectations do I need to change? What unmet expectations do I keep looking for my business to fill, that I can provide for myself? In what way can I be less codependent with my business and really stand strong in who I am and treat my business as its own separate entity that has nothing to do with my identity and my work as a human?
Kristen Boss (13:49): And when you shift your expectations, when you shift your viewpoint and you stop looking to your business to fill that need, when you become a lot more kind with yourself and you stop placing unfair expectations on yourself and on your business, there’ll be less disappointment. And when there’s less disappointment, there’s less resentment. And when there’s less resentment, your chances of burnout go down significantly. So I just want to encourage you today, shift the expectations. Take responsibility for your own self and how you can provide that for you. When you do that, everything changes. We’ll catch you in the next episode.
Kristen Boss (14:31): That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you loved today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with a review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done a different way. And if you are ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the Social Selling Academy where I give you all the tools, training and support to help you realize your goals. In the Academy, you get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are new in the business or have been in the industry for a while, this is the premier coaching program for the Modern Network marketer. Go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.
