Some of you might know Edward… or maybe you might be Edward.
He’s a client of ours, and he was sharing a story the other day that is worth sharing with you. You can interpret this story two ways. And I’m choosing one of those two today.
Edward was getting ready to paint his family room. He went to the store and bought two half-gallons of paint… red paint.
He got up early on Saturday, gathered the paint, mixing sticks, and drop cloths. He shook the paint, and headed to the family room with a half-gallon in each hand, a drop cloth under his arm, a paint brush tucked under the other arm, and a paint stirrer in his mouth.
This is what happened next. “There I stood, trying to open the door to go inside. I was teetering because I had too much to carry… obviously. But I was stubborn. I did not want to put anything down. I had the door almost open… and then I lost my grip, stumbled backwards, and you can guess what happened next. I have a gallon of red paint all over me!”
Amazingly, we all do this, don’t we? Maybe not with red paint. We do it in other ways.
Point of the story -> (In case you weren’t sure I would ever get to it.) We all overburden ourselves with something. We all have something we will not put down in order to make something else happen.
Perhaps it’s how we overburden ourselves with our “story” that we’re not good sales people. Or perhaps it’s the way we stress about how to get customers. Maybe we wig out about making time to market with social media because we are carrying a half-gallon of unsuccessful activities in each hand, with SEO tucked under one arm, a website under the other and networking gripped between our teeth.
Perhaps we’ve piled on so many activities to find customers that we can’t open our door to the real opportunity.
We refuse to put down what we carry in order to open the door.
Gather, prepare, put down, enter.
Time has come to put down something you are carrying to enter your opportunity—to find more customers, master how to market, increase business sales, and live the life you want.
Go forth and do great things,
Martha and Chris