The Grind

You have been working hard, and you don’t have much to show for it. The page doesn’t work. Nobody is hiring you. You’re learning something new, making mistakes, and wondering whether any of this is worth your time.

Welcome to the grind.

The beginning of a business can feel like this because you’re learning so much while dealing with self-doubt and risking failure. You may think the work isn’t valuable because the visible results haven’t arrived.

I want you to consider what the work is teaching you. Some of the hours that felt least productive early in my career became knowledge I rely on now.

The beginning didn’t look impressive

My first coaching business was called Futures Unlimited Coaching. The name was long, the URL was long, and the website wasn’t exactly beautiful.

I learned how to build the site, set up a shopping cart, connect things, and create videos. Those early videos had terrible lighting. You could tell I was watching myself in the reflection.

I spent hours figuring out how to move something on a page, format a blog post, publish a URL, or set up emails. Sometimes I felt as though I wasn’t moving at all. Sometimes it felt like I was moving backward.

I was learning coaching, marketing, and technology at the same time. There was so much I didn’t understand yet.

Looking back, I want to tell that version of me to keep going. Keep making mistakes. Keep learning. The knowledge is becoming something, even when you can’t see it yet.

One early skill helped save a later launch

Years later, I was selling a small, high-end training with Stacey Boehman called Selling Expensive Things. We had told people the order form would open at a specific time, and there was a lot of excitement.

At the announced time, the form wasn’t on the page. There had been a miscommunication, and we couldn’t reach the web team that was supposed to add it.

I was on a walk with my dogs, looking at my phone, trying to solve the problem. I told a team member to forget the original page and put the order form directly on the URL.

He knew how to do it. We got the form up, and the class sold out within four minutes.

How did I know that was an option? Because I had spent so much time learning those details myself.

An old problem with a URL that had taken hours to solve now helped me make a quick decision. What once felt like wasted time had become useful knowledge.

The grind becomes your body of knowledge

Learning the details helps you understand what you are creating and how it works.

I hire people to do many things now, but I can talk with them about the work because I have done it. I understand their explanations. I can give direction and recognize possibilities.

I did my own advertising. I wrote my own copy. I handled customer service and worked with clients one on one.

Not every technical detail I learned is still useful. But learning how to fail, solve a problem, and continue is useful everywhere.

If you took away my money and employees, I would still have what I learned through the grind. That knowledge gives me security and confidence.

Being in the details teaches you about your people

A client building a financial coaching business told me she was deep in her clients’ spreadsheets and budgets. She wanted to move toward groups and more general teaching.

I understood. But I also remembered how much I learned by doing detailed work with my own clients.

When I was a weight-loss coach, I spent my days looking at food journals and talking with people about food and their minds. That one-on-one work taught me about my clients and how to help them.

It also taught me how to communicate with them and market to them. The details were part of developing my skill, rather than something separate from the business I wanted.

Don’t compare the beginning of your work with someone else’s later stage and assume you should already be where they are.

The grind doesn’t disappear every time you succeed

I still do difficult work when I want to create something new.

In this episode, I described researching and writing a new marketing funnel for someone who had never heard of me or life coaching. I wanted to help her understand her problem and the possibility of getting help.

That meant pages of writing and rewriting, research, headlines, videos, and coaching on the marketing. I expected the first version not to work.

I knew I might have to make many attempts before it reached the person I wanted to reach. The fact that I had worked hard didn’t mean the message would automatically work.

If it didn’t reach her, I needed to change what I was doing. That was my responsibility.

Someone could later copy the finished funnel without having the same understanding of why it worked or how to change it. The learning comes from going through the process.

Take responsibility for what you create

A client once told me she couldn’t put sales in the result line of her Model because her customers created the sales by buying.

I challenged that. You create sales by selling and offering to help. Your customers create the results in their own lives. You create the results in yours.

If you hand all the responsibility to your customers, you lose the opportunity to look at what you can change.

During the grind, you may want to blame, complain, or feel sorry for yourself. Notice those thoughts. They are part of the experience, but they don’t have to be the place you act from.

Keep asking what you can learn and do next.

Know why you are willing to do it

The grind can feel like you don’t like your business, marketing, the internet, or even yourself. You may ask why you are doing this when you could stop.

You need an answer that matters to you.

For me, it is the person sitting in her house suffering who doesn’t know about this work yet. I want to find her and let her know I can help. That reason gets me through the doubt and failure.

Your reason may be different. Your grind may be a relationship, weight loss, or stopping drinking rather than a business. You are doing the work before you see the progress you want.

Unknowns, frustration, and figuring things out are part of that process. Feeling like an amateur makes sense when you are learning something you haven’t done before.

Keep doing the work. Let it teach you. The result you want matters, and so does the strength and understanding you are developing along the way.