The Trust Rope

The topic of letting go is universal across all business and family and relationships. Have you ever heard the rope metaphor in parenting? We use this with our kids. "Hey son, I'm giving you a rope. In the beginning, it's very short so I can pull you back in quick. As you take responsibility and ownership and make good decisions, I will give you more rope or trust. When you make poor decisions that put yourself or others in harm, I take away some rope. When you blame others and shirk responsibility, I take away some rope. My goal is to eventually give you the rope so you can pull me whenever you need me." As I just read this, I get a little emotional as my oldest son is 18 now and is close to getting his rope. This concept of the rope has helped us raise our kids and I fully believe it helps with our employees as well. In "You Must Let Go of Your Control", I shared the breakthroughs that allowed me to emotionally let go of perfectionism and control. It was a therapy session for me. I have a follow-up episode to further help you breakthrough your deep, dark emotional control over your business.

I solo cleaned for 16 years. I was my business and my business was me. If I got a new customer or made one happy, it made me feel great and raised my confidence. If I lost a customer or broke something, I took it personally. I was an emotional yo-yo at times. Can you relate? My business rises and falls on my effort, performance, and abilities. Therefore, I needed to control every aspect of my business. I also profited over 85% from the revenue my business created, so obviously more control equaled more money! Do you see the danger in the solo mindset that I had? I believe this is a cause for many solos struggling with perfectionism. At this time in our entrepreneurial journey, I couldn't conceive of a company where others would clean and I'd manage or even step away. Why not? Here's my therapy session, part 2. I used to work for GE, which was at the time one of the 5 most admired companies in the world with over 300,000 global employees. Thomas Edison wasn't running the business. He was dead. Yet his creation outlasted his life. I worked for an entity (GE) and earned an income based on my contribution to that entity. If GE had a bad year, I didn't get upset as I was just a small piece in a large machine. But I also knew that if I messed up, I'd be out! GE had a high-performance culture and my mess up would impact my contribution to the entity. I did, in fact, mess up and was fired in 2005. I've already covered that story. GE's culture created a need to do perfect because I was fearful of making a negative contribution and losing my job. I was unable to trust others and preferred to do every aspect of the engineering job myself as only I could do it right. I brought this into solo cleaning in 2005 and it remained until last year.

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website