Can You Create New Habits Without Discomfort or Sacrifice?
Posted on September 19, 2023 by Meg Young, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
As you build your business you will go outside your comfort zone. These things are not a known pattern in your brain and set off alarm bells. Anxiety!
You are amazing at what you do and decided it’s time to get out of the grind and build your own business. You come to realize this means you will need to market your business. In other words, you have to be a salesperson. What?! You weren’t taught how to be a sales person in school. You just want to do the fun stuff; the stuff you’re good at.
Selling or marketing isn’t a habit yet; it isn’t a known pattern, thus you will end up feeling some level of discomfort. Here’s the thing – your clients do this every day. You tell them to go out of their comfort zone and sit with discomfort. Are you able to take the same pill?
When you’re trying to create a new habit, just look to the science in the brain to understand why it isn’t easy to create these habits. Peter Hollins mentions in his book “The Science of Self Discipline” that imaging shows a part of our brain responsible for emotion, patterns and memory (the basal ganglia in particular) light up when we do something habitual, but when we do something new, a different part of our brain responsible for thinking lights up (specifically the frontal cortex). You are using a completely different part of the brain to make the conscious decision to market your business. At the same time, the part of your brain responsible for survival – “if this, then that” or identifying patterns is seeing a problem with the pattern and freaks out. This causes a lot of discomfort within you, and the way out of the discomfort is to go back to old behaviors.
He also states that we don’t necessarily need more self discipline to create a new habit, but more ability to tolerate discomfort. The survival brain just wants the “known” patterns as they are considered “safe”.
So, as you’re working on making marketing your business a habit you enjoy, keep this in mind.
Marketing will get easier with practice, but it has to be stored in the part of the brain responsible for patterns, memory and emotion for it to be easier. This happens from repetition; pattern creation.
Marketing in a way that fits your personality will make it easier, but no new habit creations are easy and will always come with some level of discomfort or sacrifice.
Accountability partners can be very beneficial to creating new habits. A coach is a great accountability partner. Not only will they hold you accountable, but they’ll teach you new things along the way as they can see your strengths and needs from a distance.
If you are ready to get out of the grind and be your own boss, schedule a consultation with me to see whether we are a good fit to work together.
