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Today’s talking point:

Today we're talking about a habit I still struggle with and one you might experience too. That is: watching what other people are doing.

And it's the number one habit that's slowing down our business growth. Keep reading (or listen to the podcast episode above) to find out why – and what you can do about it.

The habit that’s keeping you sidetracked

I’ve been hearing some similar things online lately, among friends and clients. This theme has been recurring over and over again, so often in the last few weeks that I figured that my clients are not the only ones that are going through it.

In fact, I used to feel this too and it’s a habit I’ve fallen into many times since I started my business. Honestly, this is probably the thing I struggle the most with today. I definitely felt it while I was off on my maternity leave!

I have always been so curious to find out what other successful people are doing, what their offers are, what their email lists are like, what their social media looks like, what they do. Way back when I first went full-time in my business 4 years ago, I got so caught up in watching other people's highlight reels and so sidetracked by everyone else's lives and businesses. It got to the point where I started to waste a lot of time and slow down my business growth.

This habit? It’s watching what everyone else is doing and letting comparison take over.

What’s wrong with watching everyone else?

The issue with watching what everyone else is doing is that it can make you feel like you’re not good enough. It can also make you feel pressured by other people's highlight reels, other people's systems, or other people's techniques and strategies.

I know that I'm not the only one who in the past has felt pressured to do things like everyone else because it is working for everyone else. We might launch based on what other people are doing because we see someone try this tactic during a launch period and we think ‘their system is what I need to be doing’.

For example, my students in the Busy To Boss Academy sign up to work with me for 12 months. A good handful of the students in the academy are new business owners and really want to see their businesses take off. What I've noticed amongst a lot of them is that they have been feeling a lot of pressure.

They’ve felt pressure to…

Write a book
Start travelling the world
Live stream
Create an e-book
Make courses because everyone else is doing courses
Create a membership site because everyone else has membership sites
Do group coaching because their idol or someone that they look up to is doing group coaching programs
Create subscription boxes because other people are creating subscription boxes

And they're getting so caught up in the should do, and must do and these templates that they're creating in their minds of what success looks like and what the strategy to become successful looks like.

Why you need to break the habit

Around the start of the first UK lockdown in March 2020, I realised that every time I went online or on Instagram, I would get lost in other people’s stuff. I went there with the intention to inspire people and the intention to share my life lessons or share something that I learn or inspire or motivate someone. But I found myself unhappier and unhappier every time I logged on.

I would always leave Facebook, Instagram and all the other social media apps feeling like I was not good enough. That I was behind everyone else and that I was not doing the right thing. I would get so lost and I would lose sight of my own intuition. Sound familiar?

When my intuition was telling me, ‘Holly, you need to focus on your one-on-one clients and focus on creating this programme that you've been dying to create’.

Then I would go on Instagram and of course, follow all these other successful coaches and follow all these other successful business owners. And I would see that they're all doing webinars, and they're all doing challenges and they're creating planners and writing books. I would see their success and automatically think, 'well, I'm not doing that, maybe I should be’.

I created Shiny Object Syndrome for myself. Can you relate? I started to do everything all at once, all the time. I walked away from social media feeling unhappy, comparing myself to others, and feeling all this pressure from other people's highlight reels. I was essentially starting to lose my voice and myself.

And I started to sound like everyone else because when I kept reading everyone's posts and going on their websites and seeing their offers and doing what they did, I started to get lost in the sea of other successful coaches.

Here's the thing; what sets you apart in your business is your unique personality and your unique life experiences that create your message.

When you are trying to be like everyone else you start to sound, even unintentionally, like everyone else. You start to become or model somebody else. And guess what? You can't do them as well as they do themselves and they can't do you as well as you do yourself.

We are all so unique. If we stopped watching other people, stopped following half the people that we follow, stopped looking at other people's offers and opt-ins and product ranges, and what they're doing and their sales funnels and all this stuff, we would find so much more success and so much more of our voice within ourselves.

And we would differentiate ourselves from the competition, from other people. We would stand out and we would finally impact people in the way that we were meant to impact them in our unique ways.

remember this when you’re comparing yourself to others

Oftentimes when we're watching other people boss it in life, when we’re looking at their posts and wasting all this time on their profiles, what happens is we forget how long they've been doing it.

For some reason, we think that everyone started at the same time as us and we feel behind.

We also don't realise the size of their team or how much help they have. Honestly, some of the people that I look up to have teams of 10 to 50 people in their company. (And you know, team ABOH, is a much smaller team than 10 to 50 people).

Sometimes when I feel this pressure, that this person has a podcast and they have all these videos and they have this going on and they have that going on, I forget that they aren't doing all of that alone.

They are just the creators, the CEOs, the leaders. There are people on their teams who are editing and uploading their podcasts, editing their photos, creating graphics for them, writing copy for them, putting things up on their website, linking their sales funnels, doing all these things behind the scenes. It's not just them.

We cannot compare ourselves to other people until we have a team that big or we have been in it for that long. You know, a lot of successful people have been in this game for decades and they have teams and they have experts and they have access to these resources that we perhaps might not have yet.

When you start watching other people and seeing what everyone else is doing, you put so much pressure on yourself. One day, that pressure will make you crack. One day you're gonna find yourself depressed and you're gonna find yourself not feeling good enough and like you have nothing to give.

And when you're watching what everyone else is doing and you're following everyone else, you forget about the reason why you're in your own business in the first place. And the reason why you're in your business is to serve the people that you love to serve. It's to deliver your message. It's to give back hope to people, it's to inspire, it's to make an impact on the world.

We're wasting the precious time that we could spend on inspiring other people. If we waste our precious time just watching what everyone else is doing and feeling like rubbish about ourselves constantly, then we're not going to get anywhere.

We start to lose our unique voice and our way of explaining things because no one else can explain like us. We start to lose our way of creating, and the way that no one else can create like us. If we waste our precious time just watching what everyone else is doing and creating things like everyone else, no one's going to find us. We're just going to get lost in this sea of other people.

You want to stand out because the people who are relying on your information and the way that you do things are going to feel so left out. They're never going to get your message and the world is not going to be impacted in the way that it would have been.

So you need to stop watching what everyone else is doing. Get into your tunnel. Look forward, don't look to the sides. Don't look behind. You don't look at the car behind you. Just look at your road ahead and just focus on you.

How to stop watching other people

The best thing that I've ever done in my business was unfollowed a lot of people. Now, you might be thinking “but Holly, I rely on other people for inspiration. I want to follow other people to stay inspired and to see other people bossing it and being successful because it keeps me going."

I get it. Because there are people that I follow purely for inspiration. There are several accounts I follow because I'm not comparing myself to them. I'm in that mindset that ‘these people are just here to inspire me and show what's possible.’

But I'm not watching them so closely that I get mixed up in their message and get distracted and then feel all this pressure. I'm very intentional with people who I follow. As soon as I feel a little twinge of jealousy or a little twinge of something like, ‘I wish I was as advanced of this person’, or ‘I feel like I'm not good enough’, I will actually unfollow that person. I will maybe unfollow them for a week, maybe for a month, maybe I'll never follow them again.

It's not because I hate them or I don't like them or that they did something wrong, it's just that I value my people. I value my audience enough to not be distracted by anyone else.

If I’m having a particularly bad day, if things are triggering me and I say to myself ‘why not me?’, I’ll flip it. Instead, I’ll say to myself: ‘this is proof that it is possible for me’.

tip 1: Clean out your ‘following’ list

I want you to do a social media cleanout. If you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else, or if someone is unintentionally making you feel less than, or you're constantly feeling pressured by someone, it's so much better to just push the unfollow button.

It doesn't mean that this person is doing something wrong by sharing their life on social media, it's just that if it's affecting you in a negative way. By unfollowing, you can focus on your own thing. Instead, follow people who don't make you feel that way and people who inspire you and people who push you forward in the right way.

tip 2: Do a social media detox

The other task I have for you is to go on a social media detox. It doesn’t have to be for long, maybe for just a weekend or even 24 hours.

You'd be surprised how much time we spent on social media. It's ridiculous. Even the busiest people somehow find an hour to five hours a day to spend on social media, just scrolling around.

So maybe put your phone on airplane mode, and just not focus on social media for 24 to 48 hours. This will help to push the reset button.

You are in charge of your own life. You are in charge of your own schedule. You're in charge of what you put out there in the world. You can reconnect with the universe, with God, you can reconnect with your intuition, you can journal for that 48-hour period. You can ask yourself, ‘what do I actually want to create? What is my voice? What is my authentic truth? What is the message that I want to give out to the world?’

When you have that clarity and there's not all that noise around you, you can come back to social media and use it with a purpose. You actually have your voice again. You can be your authentic self and you're coming forward and spreading your message in a completely different way from everyone else.

A final thought

The habit of distraction is going to slow down your business growth. And you don't want that to happen because 2021 and 2022 are the years of getting shit done. It's the year of moving forward. It's the year of becoming the boss of your life. So you haven’t got any time to be slowing down. You have no time to be slowed down by anybody.

And so once you limit your distractions you can find that clarity again and you can start using social media with a purpose.