EP62: Promise: Cultivating Unshakeable Commitment in Entrepreneurship

Commitment is nothing more than a promise you make... in this case, to yourself.

This episode is all about the transformative power of self-promise—it's the self-made commitment that keeps your business vision alive and thriving.

Over the last 3 episodes, we talked about the combined strength of purpose, priorities and your 5 capacities (aka power) in relation to consistent success.

But none of them work if you don't commit. 

For an entrepreneur, promises are more than just words; they're the lifeblood of our commitment to success. It's the promise to stick with it, to follow through, and to get support when you need it. To promise yourself you don't HAVE to go it alone.

It's a short and sweet one this week, but it's the one that makes it all mean something.

If a transition from non-stop hustle to a life-serving business is what you're after, remember, my door is always open for those who want to weave these 4 Ps into the tapestry of their own business ethos.

Looking for the Business Time Optimizer I mention in the show? Check it out here:
https://getcorporaterehab.com/timeoptimizer

Chapters

• 0:03 Four P's of Success in Business
• 6:25 The Power of Self-Promise for Success

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the Business Blasphemy Podcast, where we question the sacred truths of the online business space and the reverence with which they're held.

Speaker 1: 0:09

I'm your host, sarah Khan speaker, strategic consultant and BS busting badass. Join me each week as we challenge the norms, trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers. We have been on a very fun journey the last three weeks. We've been talking about the four principles of success in business, and if you haven't listened to the last three episodes, I would highly recommend that you do so.

Speaker 1: 0:55

I talk about the first P, which is purpose, and purpose is all about your why. It's your anchor, your North Star, it's the thing that keeps you grounded when everything else is trying to send you into a tizzy. And the thing I love about purpose is it's not something that has to be super grand or world-changing. It just needs to be impactful for you, right? So it can be something as grand as I want to change the world. Or it can be something as simple and heartfelt as I want to have enough money to take my family on a holiday once a year, like it really comes down to what you want to do or be able to take myself out once a month for a spa day and lunch with myself, or whatever. It really comes down to what you want. But the question is, what do you want and why is it important? And that forms the crux of your purpose. And the reason, again, why that is so important is because it keeps you from having your attention pulled into different directions. It keeps you from second guessing why you're here and when you have been struggling, like I think a lot of people have, with just a lack of belief in yourself lately, because I've seen a lot of people struggling with that right. Like I don't know what I'm doing, I don't have what it takes, I'm not cut out for this. I've made so many mistakes. You blame yourself. This helps remind you that you were actually a really freaking huge badass and you took a massive leap of faith on yourself in becoming an entrepreneur. And your purpose is the reason why and if you can consistently remind yourself of why you chose this path. It gets easier to come back on the path when you fall off it. So go back and listen to the episode about purpose. That's principle number one.

Speaker 1: 2:38

Principle number two is about priorities, and this was about not just checklists and to-do lists and checkboxes. It's about understanding your specific level of business growth, your stage of business growth and what priorities you need to focus on to get you to the next stage of growth. So it's not about being busy. It's not about throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. It's about really having a laser focus, and when you're able to focus on very clear priorities, your time invested in the business actually goes down. You get to stop working so freaking hard, and isn't that what we want? We want to be able to. We didn't come into creating a business for ourselves. We didn't leave our nine to five to start a 24-7, but that is what so many of y'all are doing. So priorities help you figure out. Here's what I actually need to work on, and everything else is a nice to do, not a must do.

Speaker 1: 3:31

Last week we talked about power and that's the third P, and that's all about honoring your capacity in four different areas your time available each week and I shared with you a really cool tool called the Business Time Optimizer that I'll put in the show notes. Your energetic capacity on a day-to-day basis, like sometimes your brain just isn't there, sometimes your body doesn't cooperate. We get to honor that and still move our business forward. I talked about resources and supports and I talked about a bonus one money how honoring your money, your financial capacity, actually empowers you to make really smart investments. All of those things come together to form what I call like the pre-foundation of your business. We talk about strategy being important and goal setting and operations and marketing and visibility and client experience. All of those things are critical. They are the pillars upon which business is built. But those pillars need to rest on a solid foundation and that is the four P's of success in business. Those four P's purpose, priorities, power and the fourth one today, promise.

Speaker 1: 4:39

When I was coming up with this framework, I thought about a lot of different words for this final P and the word that kept coming up for me was commitment and I was like well, first of all, it's not a P word, so it's not going to fit, because I love alliteration, but also it kind of fell short a little bit of what I was trying to really convey with this word, so I came up with the word promise. Now, promise centers on the promise you make to yourself, and this is really, really important, because when you became an entrepreneur, you did make a promise to yourself to believe in yourself, to trust that you knew what you were doing, to know that you had what it takes to honor whatever calling is on your heart, to believe that this thing that you deserve and that you want is important enough to take the risk on. We tend to forget that sometimes. The promise that we made, that you know what I'm actually putting myself first now and I'm doing this thing that allows me to create something that is uniquely mine and that I get to make the decisions on and I get to call the shots on my nine to five was never able to allow me to do the promise that you made to your purpose. For me, it was my kids wanting to be able to be there when they needed me in the room in person to go to their things, to take the day off and take them out, to really stop missing all of the firsts that I missed when I was working in the nine to five. So it's reminding yourself consistently of the promise that you made to stay the course, believe in yourself.

Speaker 1: 6:25

But it's not just that. There's more to it. It's also the promise that you should be making to yourself to seek out supports that you need to help you stay accountable. One of the things especially super ambitious type A women do is we take everything onto ourselves. We don't ask for help and then we get pissed off when nobody helps us. Well, why would people help you when you're a fucking superwoman and you can do all of these things yourself?

Speaker 1: 6:54

A lot of us grew up feeling like asking for help was a weakness. Grew up feeling like asking for help was a weakness, and it's not. It's actually a superpower, because you're honoring the limits of your capacity, and capacity is something we talked about last week. Right, your power it's honoring the limits of your power. You are not infinitely powerful. You are a human being and so you get to honor your power by seeking out supports. You get to honor your power by seeking out supports, whether that is from mentors or coaches or biz besties or investments, or having someone just hold you accountable for something.

Speaker 1: 7:30

You put skin in the game, so to speak right, and it's the promise that you make to yourself to do that, because you and your purpose are important enough to do it. When you make that promise to yourself, you're able to cultivate resilience, you're able to grow in community, because that's another thing we tend to forget Women. We thrive in community. We grow when we have a support system, and so it's the promise you make to yourself to never feel like you have to go it alone or it doesn't count. It's the promise you make to yourself that when you figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it, you stay the course. You do it long enough for it to actually bear fruit. You promise to follow through and do the thing that you've spent all this time and money and investment in figuring out. That's what promise is, and too often we give other people our power because we refuse to hold that promise, that commitment, to ourselves.

Speaker 1: 8:34

So that's the final P and, if it hasn't been clear throughout the last four episodes, all of these things really rely on each other. When you're clear on your purpose, you're able to understand how to spend your time and what to spend it on. It helps inform your strategy. When you're clear on priorities, you know what to focus on every day and you're not stuck in busy, when you are able to devise a business plan and a strategy for your launch or this is an offer that I've come up with that really aligns with why I'm doing this and how much time I have and who I want to serve sticking with it, the promise that I'm going to stick with this for a full 90 days minimum to see that it actually takes root and bears fruit. All of these things work together and when you have that solid foundation to build your business pillars on, everything gets so much easier. And I want you to notice how none of these things prioritize the things we so often get stuck in Creating content, engagement, building funnels, lead generation, marketing yeah, those are all super important, but unless you have clarity in these four Ps, unless you understand and are clear on your purpose, you're clear on your priorities, like your actual day-to-day actions unless you're clear on your capacity in the areas of time, energy, resources, support and money, and unless you are strong enough to hold that promise to yourself, nothing else matters.

Speaker 1: 10:11

Nothing else is going to create the ease and simplicity and abundance that we all search for and hope for as an outcome in our businesses. So that is what I want you to take away today and over the last four weeks. You do get to do this how you want. You do get to honor all of these things as critical, because they're going to make everything else easier. And when I've implemented this with my clients, it gets easier for them to talk about who they are and what they do and why it's so important. They're clear on the value that they offer to clients. They stop competing on price alone right, because that's what a lot of us do. We default to like, well, I'll raise my prices or I'll lower my prices or I'll throw in the kitchen sink.

Speaker 1: 10:57

Right, when my clients implement these four Ps as a critical part of the foundation building of their business. And it doesn't matter how far along you are, you can always come back and work on these things. But when you're able to do that, it just makes everything so much simpler because you're not second guessing, you're not guessing period, you know where you're focusing and you get to create realistic timelines. Because I think that's something that jacks people up a lot too right, this idea that I've got to create 10K in 10 days or six figures in six months, or that person got there in so much of a shorter time span than I'm able to, but their reality is different, their capacity is different, their ability to invest is different, and you stop feeling bad about the fact that your shit is different. It keeps you focused. It puts blinders on so you're not constantly looking at what other people are doing, you're not rubbernecking and you're staying focused and in your lane, and that's what creates consistent success. That is what creates that ease and abundance in your business. So, four Ps.

Speaker 1: 12:05

Now, if you've listened to this and you're like Sarah, this sounds fantastic. I just I don't know how to implement any of this stuff. I don't know how to get started. This is when you book a call with me. This is when you book a call to work with me and we figure out how do we implement these four Ps into your business, whether you are just starting out or whether you have an existing business. How do you implement this stuff so everything else feels easier and supported on a foundation that honors who you are, why you're doing this, how you want to do it and why. Because that's what's going to weather the storms.

Speaker 1: 12:40

We don't get to choose the ups and downs in business. We don't get to choose when the market's going to fluctuate or how much people have to invest or all of the other things that we're constantly worried about. This keeps us grounded and it weatherproofs your business, and that's what you want. And a bonus, it weatherproofs your resolve, too. You don't get thrown as easily, and even if you do, you come back to your center much, much quicker.

Speaker 1: 13:10

So all the links that you need are in the show notes. Connect with me on Instagram, corporaterehab, hop into my DMs, ask me whatever questions you want. That's what I'm here for. As always, you do get to truly have success without the BS. That is my mission, that is my purpose. I will talk to you soon. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blasphemy Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help a sister out by subscribing and, if you're feeling extra sassy, rating this podcast, and don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to businessblasphemypodcastcom to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening and remember you can have success without the BS.