Encouragement for When Your Dreams Begin to Sprout

The Delicate Moment of Late Spring

What To Do When Business Growth Isn’t Happening Fast Enough…

I’m in a precarious moment in my business right now and I want to share it with you for two reasons:

1) You might be here too, or will be here, and it’s important to be able to recognize it, and

2) It’s always good to bring our fears out of the shadows and shine the light on them… it makes them smaller and easier to deal with.

All right, so here’s what’s going on:

In the language of the Seasons of Success – the goal setting and goal getting program I’ve been building this year – I’m in late Spring.

The shoots are starting to appear. The fields are turning from seemingly empty dirt to a delicate dusting of green.

Late Spring: When Your Dreams Start to Sprout

If you’ve ever had a garden, or driven by fields just as the crops begin to grow, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a beautiful, ethereal moment in time when the green tips begin to emerge from the black soil.

Here’s what it looks like in my business, right now:

I’ve been planting seeds for the past several months. Most notably, I’ve been actively creating content for my YouTube channel for the first time and I haven’t missed a Monday since I started back at the beginning of April.

(building that consistency muscle over the past few years has been no small feat and it’s exciting to see it paying dividends!)

Babe, I’ve gotta tell you: It has been a slog.

My subscriber base has been slowly growing – very slowly! – my watch time and other metrics have been slowly improving – at least most of the time! – and I can see the quality of my videos getting better.

To me, these are little sprouts. They’re tiny little indicators that things are moving in the right direction but they are SO easy to miss.

There have been more: my videos have started to appear in the Suggested Videos sidebar and I’m starting to rank for some of the long tail keyphrases on YouTube Search.

I mean… it’s happening. These are all good things.

The crops are growing. The shoots are starting to appear.

And this, for me, is the most delicate time – the most precarious time.

Why? Because it would be so easy to stop.

It’s So Easy to Stop at the Beginning When You’re Building Your Business

Y’see, if you neglect your fields in high summer for a few days, your crops can take it – they’re maturing and strong and they’ve established their root system. If there’s a storm, they blow and might take some damage, but they can handle it.

But not in late Spring. 

All it takes to wipe out an early crop is one good hail storm. One late frost. A few days of burning heat.

When the new shoots of our dreams start to appear, it is so easy to discount them, ‘this clearly isn’t working’ and to dismissively wave our hand toward the new crop and say, ‘this isn’t good enough’ and ‘this isn’t what I wanted’.

Why? Because we’ve been trained to expect instant gratification. We want instant fields of mature crops. We don’t want to deal with the GROW cycle – we want to PLANT and then HARVEST right away.

We live in a culture that tells us that we can ‘blow it up overnight’ on social media and go from zero to 100,000 followers in a few days.

And some people do.

But not most people. For most of us, it’s a long, slow, steady build – the crops DO grow and it will take the time that it takes. Most YouTube creators take years to reach monetization and a sustainable income, if they ever get there at all.

Most people never get there. Because they start thinking that it’ll be fast and then, when they get into the discipline of it, they can’t maintain their pace. They fall off.

They neglect their fields.

It’s So Easy to Give Up When It Feels Slow

I’ve gotta tell you, I can hear the demons chirping these days.

“You can skip a week.”

“It’s not that important.”

“Nobody will notice.”

“It’s not really worth it anyway.”

“You don’t have anything worthwhile to say.”

It would be so easy to quit. So easy.

Do you feel me on this one? If you’ve been building your coaching or soulpreneur business for any length of time, you’ve gone through this, right? This phase when you’ve been planting, planting, planting, and the growth hasn’t appeared or it’s so slow that you just want to give up.

In this moment, I just want to take you by the hand, walk you over to your fields, and say, ‘Look! Look out there! See that delicate shimmer of green? It’s happening! There is life out there! Stay with it! Nurture your fields! Your crop is growing!’

You’re doing better than you think.

We all are.

New Content for Your Soulpreneur / Coaching Business

I’ve got some exciting content planned for you on Facebook and YouTube – and, of course, in here! – as we move into 2020. I’ve listed 3 of the upcoming events below.

If you have any questions, please let me know. 

I’m here to support you as your grow your dreams.

Let me know what you need and what questions you have.

Upcoming Events

#1 On Thursday, November 21st, I’m opening the doors on a very special training:

3 Essentials to Build a Successful, Profitable – and Sustainable! – Coaching or Soulpreneur Business

I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned about what to focus on – and what not to focus on! – when you’re building to your first six-figures in your soul-based service business.

Go here and register to save your seat.

If you just know, deep in your belly, that your business isn’t living up to its potential, this training will shine light on your path forward. It’ll lay out your next steps and how you can get moving toward the success you yearn for.

Register for the 3 Essentials to Build a Success, Profitable – and Sustainable! – Coaching or Soulpreneur Businessright now – before the day whisks you away – to save your seat.

#2 From November 18th to 22nd, in the PowerHouse, I’m leading:

The 5-Day Nail Your Marketing Message Challenge

You can register here.

#3 From January 1st to 15th, in the PowerHouse, we’re doing a…

15-Day Pyjama Planning Party + Virtual Retreat 

It’s a full 15-days of organizing to get you ready for a solid and profitable 2020. 

Right smack dab in the middle of that Planning Party, I’ll be running a 3-day virtual planning retreat, exclusively for everyone who has joined the Seasons of Success.

(click here to see the special introductory offer before it expires on November 15th)

That’s right! For the first time in 8 years, I’m not going to Ste. Anne’s in January to run my luxury retreat. This year, I’m bringing the strategies and planning straight into the comfort of your home.

I’m excited for the magic that we’ll create. Stay tuned… I’ll be releasing more details as we get closer to the date. Just make sure you block off January 9-11 on your calendar so you don’t miss a thing.

Vanessa Long

Vanessa Long is creator of the Seasons of Success and author of Discovering Your Passionate Purpose. Focused on providing straight-forward, no b.s. solutions, strategies, and support to move you from where you are to where you yearn to be. It’s time to tap into your purpose and build a life that expresses all of who you were designed to be.