500: Finding Inspiration and Motivation
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What inspires and motivates you? To celebrate our 500th episode, we share some of our favorite quotes, reflect on their meaning and how they helped us. We share quotes on finding your priorities, setting boundaries, taking ownership of responsibility, as well as embracing a love of learning. Life of a dog walker and a pet sitter is full of ups and downs. While we look to our mission and our values to guide us and lead us through tough times, sometimes we need a little extra encouragement along the way. If you have a quote that encourages you to keep going, please share it with us!
Main topics:
Finding priorities
Setting boundaries
Love of learning
Finding motivation
Main Takeaway: Focus on getting 1% better everyday.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, clients, priorities, people, quote, learning, pet, confessional, mission statement, pet sitters, decisions, goals, focus, business owners, zoo, anxious, associates, stay, caterpillar, put
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan.
00:03
I'm Collin.
Meghan 00:04
And we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open an honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today on episode 500. Thank you also to pet sitters associates, our sponsor, and our newest Patreon supporter, Sarah schouler, whoo, thank you so much for supporting us. We are so thankful that you have found value in the show. And if you to listener, love the show want to keep it going, you can go to petsitter confessional.com/support. To see all of the ways that you can help out 499 episodes ago, we launched pets that are professional. Today, we want to share some of our favorite quotes that inspire us that challenge us. And that really helps motivate us to keep going. Even when this job isn't the most fun, or we have hard days or pets pass away. Or we have admin stuff that we don't want to do and taxes we need to file. These quotes really propel us to keep doing what we're doing. And our hope is that they help you as well. These are not in any particular order. Some of these, we don't exactly remember who said them. But we are very thankful that they said them. The first one is from Marcus Aurelius. He said only focus on getting better. This is especially important in business. In light of what I just said a moment ago up, things get hard. There are setbacks. In our business. Sometimes there are things that take longer, that banner that you needed to get to the event is not going to be done on time, or a client didn't tell you their expectations up front end, you mess something up, or you didn't know about something that you should have done. It's all about perspective, focus on getting 1% better every single day. Because when you focus too much on the past, when you live your life in the past and dwelling on the conversation that you had with that client that you should have said something differently, or a scenario that could have gone better, just know that you learned a lesson from it, and use that in cases moving forward.
Collin 01:55
Well, when I hear that, quote, I think of all the things that we can focus on that demand our time and our attention. We can decide to choose the things that are going to help us be better tomorrow that we don't have to listen to, we don't have to focus on the naysayers or the bad things that happen. But we can focus on the things that because what this is talking about, it's really focused on getting better it's focusing on myself, what do I have control over? What do I have agency over? And how do I then take those steps to move forward, because if I only focus on the bad things, well, I'm not gonna be able to show up tomorrow to do what I want
Meghan 02:31
to. Because we do need to focus on the important things, there are so many things in life, personal and business that pull us in so many directions, we can really get bogged down in the minutiae of, oh, I need to do this little task here. But if it's not lining up with my goals and my vision for my business, then maybe it's not something that I need to spend time on, we have to focus on the important things that get us to our goal that push us towards that thing that we really want. One
Collin 03:00
of mine is 10 years or one hour, those are the two timeframes worth prioritizing. This quote helps remind me that we have long term planning through short term work. 10 years is made up of a bunch of one hour increments, I don't get to the goals that I will have 10 years down the road without working one hour at a time, I need to plan for 10 years, I need to work in one hour, meaning that my work is sometimes short lived, I have to do little chunks, that from the outside, they don't really appear to stack up too much. But whenever you step back and look at them from a 10 year perspective, there's a lot that goes into that. It also helps me understand and put into relevancy, like, what is a priority? What is actually worthy of pursuing? How should I use my time throughout the day?
Meghan 03:48
A quote I heard the other day was he who cares? Less has power. And this is true, because when we focus on the little conversations that we have, or the opinions that people think about us, it can really weigh down our mental bandwidth and we can get exhausted, because in essence, we are allowing that person to control us with their views. But when we say no, I don't, it doesn't matter what you think I'm going to keep doing. You know, we often say you do you boo. When you keep doing you, and you go along with your mission, you retain that power, you retain that control, and it doesn't matter the opinions of other people. When you want to keep doing what you want in your business, you can let things go
Collin 04:31
well, and as you said that quote Megan actually wrote down one that I heard the other day, the person pushing for the meeting probably is the most desperate. And I'm reminded of how many times we as business owners are feel like we are beholden to to that phone call, or for that last minute request or for that potential clients banging down our door demanding us do something. And it's not that we don't care. We don't feel for that person. But that's not our emergency to deal with that person. And we have the power to say no, we've actually done an episode on one of these quotes here, it's says there's no such thing as a no risk niche. And I love this for the fact that niching down is so incredibly powerful in the animal world, as well as in a business, it brings so much strength to us and our marketing and our message and our mission, and our services and our focus. But it doesn't come without risk, there is a potential risk that you can niche so far that it's beyond your markets ability to support you as a business, or you can niche too far down, and you end up cutting off a lot of people who would have used your services if you were just a little bit more broad. But ultimately, we as a business have to decide if that risk is worth it. It's not saying that it will is completely detrimental. But it's not without risk. And as business owners, we have to understand, what is my risk management? How am I going to go about controlling this? Do I even fully understand the amount of risk that I'm putting myself in before make these decisions,
Meghan 05:59
that goes right into a couple of posts that I have about being anxious. The first one is, the tighter we hold, the more anxious we get the more rushed decisions we make. Think about when you are responding to a client and you get those jittery feelings, you get more and more anxious, you don't know exactly what to say you want to be professional, you want to stick to the facts, you don't want to get too emotional about whatever it is. And so you have to take a breath. You know, another quote I have here is poor choices come from being anxious. When you walk into a client's home, and you see something that is out of the ordinary or completely an emergency, you have to take a deep breath, you have to collect yourself because in that moment your body is is panicking. But poor choices come from being anxious. Take a moment to breathe.
Collin 06:47
How about this one? If you don't like change, you're going to like a relevancy a whole lot less. I put it another terms I hear often people say, oh, you know, it sucks getting old. But what's the alternative? Of if you don't change? What's the alternative for you, as a business, it means being irrelevant, it means you're no longer going to be serving your clients. Well, at the personal level, it means that we are going to miss out on learning new skills, adapting new mindsets that are going to help us set up for success for future endeavors, or maybe just staying up to date with what the market actually is. It's quotes like this that really helped remind me of the importance of going to conferences, seeking out additional education, speaking with other people in the industry, continuing to better ourselves and our staff as well and staying in tune with what our clients want. A quote
Meghan 07:39
I have that goes right into that is don't be afraid because it's hard. Learning is often hard, but it's worth learning it. And that's true. In order to keep our businesses going in order to reinvent our ourselves. In order to adapt with the times, we have to be constantly learning again, conferences, podcast, books, business, not just petsitting books, business books, learning from other entrepreneurs in other spaces, window cleaners, realtors, bakers, go talk to people go see how their businesses are doing, how they run them. And when they face adversity. How do they overcome that because you can learn from that. But the learning part is hard. It's very easy to be a couch potato and watch TV all day. But that's not really why we're here. We're here for change where you're here for making an impact on clients and their pets. In order to do that, in order to serve them, well. We need to be learning and we need to embrace that learning, because ultimately, it is for our betterment. It's for the betterment of our clients, and it's going to get you to your goals.
Collin 08:43
It's about having that learners mindset, I have a quote here, it is good for a professional to be reminded that their professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur a lover of the work. Meaning that your professionalism is a direct result from your amateur mindset from a lover of the work, which means the lover of learning and continuing to try new things because as soon the moment we become puffed up enough to believe that we know everything that we've got it all figured out that we don't need help from anybody. Because we've gotten all the certifications. We've gone to all the conferences, we've been in the industry for a billion and a half years or for whatever reason you haven't lost a client in so long or you haven't lost an employee you'll have any problems. The moment we think we're too good to learn. The moment we become irrelevant. Just leading back to my other quote earlier of when we think we've met the standard. We have now limited ourselves because we no longer pursue excellence in everything that we do. And
Meghan 09:51
just as I said a minute ago about going and talking with people. A quote I have here is you cannot talk butterfly language with Caterpillar people. This is important because you need to be bettering yourself. And that means continuing to elevate yourself and the people that you surround yourself with your network, they say your the, your net worth is your network. So think about your community, the people that come alongside you and ask you the tough questions. Do they challenge you? Do they say, Hey, how many books have you read this month? Or have you seen this new business tactic or marketing messaging? Have you tried that? Do you even have these people in your life? So think about this quote, again, you cannot talk a butterfly language with Caterpillar people. And this is not saying you're the butterfly, you're awesome, and the caterpillars are not yet beautiful or less majestic than you. This is simply saying, There are stages of business just like in personal life. And so when you go to talk to your network of people, make sure that there is a spread some baby business owners that maybe you can mentor, some that are right at your level where you are. And then obviously some way past you that are more successful, make sure you can learn from everybody. But remember that the specific stages of business that you are in won't be relatable to everybody. So make sure that you have that support system of people that are at your similar business level that you can bounce ideas off of. They don't necessarily have to be in the pet sitting industry. But it is important to have those people that challenge you.
Collin 11:21
Well, when I hear that I'm reminded of just the fact that sometimes you just have to learn through experience and no amount of describing what flight is like will help the caterpillar understand the caterpillar has to go through the metamorphosis process has to develop the wings has to learn how to fly and experience all of the gales in the rain and everything to know what that is no amount of talking to the caterpillar and using description or anything like that will help them really get a sense for the challenges that you're facing or that you will face and that we are both the caterpillar and the butterfly is through all stages of our life. As we go, I need more experience in order to actually understand what this next problem is going to be for me. Before
Meghan 12:05
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Collin 12:41
as you're interacting with people, you're not always going to jive with them. And so here's a quote if you're struggling to understand someone's behavior or motivation, understand that it's almost always because of money, fear, or both. Many times we can overcomplicate and honestly internalize somebody's bad behavior. And maybe this is just my Midwestern self. But believing that somebody's bad behavior is due to something that I did, that they're angry at me, when really it's an external thing that they are dealing with. And it has nothing to do with us. And that's kind of another quote of people think of us a whole lot less than we either hope or fear, right? Because we don't take up a general mindshare of other people's lives. But getting back to this, people are motivated by money and fear or both, and almost everything that they do. And as a business owner, we have to remember that, that people's buying decisions that their purchasing behavior is based on motivated off of those two things and a combination of them. And that's why it's important to speak to those pain points, so they can see how we can help them in that. But ultimately, even if we talk to people about their pain points, we hit on everything that we're supposed to do if it doesn't overcome their motivation of money, fear, or both. It's not going to go through that time. But it's still important to stay connected with them, because they may reach a point where you can speak to those pain points at their level. It just sometimes takes time.
Meghan 14:10
This next quote I have is a very interesting when it says don't clean your bathroom while your house is on fire.
Collin 14:16
Well, it's all about priorities. It's all about understanding what's actually important in the moment, that while you may want a clean bathroom, if you don't take care of the fire, there's going to be no bathroom for you to clean tomorrow. And so there come moments in our life and in our business where we have competing priorities where we've want to do something but we can't do that yet because we've got to solve this other problem.
Meghan 14:42
I think it's really about perspective, in that if you you know, there's the other quote, If you can't see the forest through the trees, it was sometimes we are so myopic on fixing our problems that we can't see. You know, you're so myopic on cleaning the bathroom, you can't see that your house is actually on fire. So in business there we We kind of have to operate at all levels at the same time. Sometimes we need to be the visionary that looks at the 30,000 foot view and goes, Okay, this is my five year goal or my 10 year goal, or this is when you know, the year I want to sell my business. But then there are times where we have to route plan. And we have to get our employees from place to place during a week, or we have to respond to client messages,
Collin 15:20
one on the priorities one, here's, here's what priorities are like arms. If you think you have more than a couple, you're either lying or crazy. I think about this one, all of the time. Because not everything can be the most important thing the most number one priority in your entire life. It's just physically impossible. Because you know, at the end of the day, I know at the end of the day, if something happens, I want you know what you're willing to drop and discard and let burn down. So you can save something else. I've talked about it before, I don't have to understand what my priorities are, don't have to get out a list or look at my notes app or look at what you know, my rank everything that I've put out here, my system, if I get a call from the school saying that one of our kids is hurt, I don't have to go, Well, where does that rank today? Let me go use an Eisenhower matrix to go put this thing together? No, I don't need to do that. And everybody has those priorities in their life where you know, if you got a call that said, four words, what you would do it or to take care of that. And that when we go around, trying to convince ourselves that we have all these priorities, we aren't we are actually limiting ourselves and our ability, and we're confusing ourselves, and we're not able to make good sound decisions, because we are not willing to admit to ourselves that we are going to have to say no to something. Because it gets back to a couple other things we've talked about if I may want to say yes to this, because the big priority for me to go to that event. Oh, but I can't because I have a sick family member. And we want to have both of those things. And we can't, and we have to admit to ourselves that it's okay, that we can let the event go. So we can spend time with our family. Because there's another quote here of the only mandatory thing in life is death. Everything else is optional. And it kind of is another one of your have in life, you are your options. Again, the only mandatory thing in life is death. Everything else is optional. You get to you get to make those decisions, and lead the life that you want. Working on your business and building the business that you want saying yes to those clients, setting up those policies and procedures, not setting up policies and procedures, not taking on that client not doing the dog walk. All of that is optional. And we have to be get to approach each one of those optional items with a sense of joy, knowing that this is something I am entering on under my own volition that I am allowing myself to take up this time to spend doing these things. And that when you invest in yourself, you become your options. Your business will depend on your ability to adapt, to grow, to educate yourself to get help, to bring on the right people to reach out to the correct CPA, to ask the good questions. As you do that, as you develop that muscle of learning and growing, you become your options.
Meghan 18:31
And to ultimately not depend on what other people think of you and your business, everybody's gonna have an opinion. And most of them are wrong, because it's your business. They're not running it you are. The next quote I have is people either survive in the jungle or exist in the zoo, you make your business unique, you are not just a regular dog walker down the street, you there are things that you can do to set your business apart. There are services you could offer that nobody else is offering. There are ways that you can make a dog walk super special, there are enhancements to your business that will delight and surprise your clients. Most of us don't want to be in the zoo. We don't want to be just another monkey that people are coming to see. We want to be free. There are reasons why we don't work nine to five, we work 24/7 sometimes, but there are reasons why we don't work the typical nine to five job with a boss, we want to be free and make the choices that make us happy.
Collin 19:27
Well, it's easy to live in the zoo, right? It's a controlled environment, your food and everything is brought to you when it rains you get taken into a shelter when it's cold. You're brought a heating pad and everything is taken care of. It's like staying in a hotel. Now does this build the muscles? Does this build the mindset necessary to survive in the wild? Absolutely not. And we can become convinced that we are in the jungle when we're actually in the zoo because we keep playing it safe. Right we were really we're getting destroyed acted by the painted murals of what the rain forest is supposed to look like, instead of actually living in the rain forest and taking on those challenges, that's actually what's going to make us stronger as a business owner is taking on those challenges, realizing that it's sometimes not a nice world out there. But we can have that control over how we respond to it, what tools, resources and abilities we bring into each of those situations, knowing I'm going to do that, but I'm, I'm going to be better for this the next time. And on your business. Here's what I heard recently, where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement. This really was a gut punch, to me as a reminder that mission statements aren't just pretty things that we go out that we put out there. They're not just marketing messages or ways of attracting potential clients. They're supposed to be important and meaningful to us that we actually live out. If our mission statement doesn't match how we live our own life, we are living a lie. And we are lying to people through that. And so not allowing your mission statement to become just something trite and silly or whatever, means that it will deeply impact everything that you do as a business, it will rattle it to its core, when you look at your policies, your procedures, your onboarding, your compensation, your pricing, your cancellation, well, everything should be linked back to that. And if it's nothing but weak sauce, don't even bother having one just exist without it so that you know, at least that you're not lying to people.
Meghan 21:39
Well, and with this quote, where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement. We don't really want to be chasing every whim and fancy that our clients want or maybe that we want, we want to be solid in our decisions, we want to have data that backs up, there are times where we want to go in a different direction of our business that maybe we don't have the necessary data for. Because nobody's ever done this. Nobody's ever offered this service before or never, nobody's ever done it in this way. But it's important to be intentional and not be flighty about it because your clients need to trust you. And so if you start offering this, and then a month later you change it or your service area or your prices or you say Oh, I'm leaving, and then I'm not leaving, you don't want to yank your your clients around. So have intention with your choices. And allow your attention to move in that direction. Because again, there's going to be a lot of people that don't agree with you that have many opinions to say about your business and your policies. And they may not use you because of what what you stick to. But the last quote I have here is Don't believe the hype. And don't believe the hate, you need to be right down the middle. Don't go on either side. If people start bad mouthing you on social media, just stay the course. Conversely, when clients rave about you and how awesome you are, don't get too high on that either. Because some people are gonna like you and some people don't that's just part of living on Earth. Gary Vee says don't get too high on the highs and don't get too low on the lows. It's true to stay the course. And it is hard. Because when clients say nice things, we go, oh, that that feels good. And when people when one person says something negative, that's what we focus on for the next month in our minds, and we lose sleep over it. But there are 8 billion people in this world and you're never going to be able to please anybody. So as long as you stay focused, keep your head down. And with your goals in mind, that is going to lead you to more success than anything else.
Collin 23:41
Because you're not going to be controlled by other people's opinions. linking back to earlier conversation about that of when you allow the good reviews to lift you super high on the mountain. And when you allow the bad reviews to drag you deep down to the dabs you are being taken on an on an emotional roller coaster that you didn't sign up to be on but you are allowing yourself to go for a ride on it's it's keeping you from your the attention that you need to be putting on other things. And now all of a sudden, you're going to make decisions based not on what not on what you need to do or what you want to be more in alignment with your mission statement with the values and goals that you have. But instead you're going to be making them out of fear from either the positive or the negative reviews that are coming along. People who have no should have no say in how you run your business. We'll be telling you how to run your business. And that's actually my last quote here. Never let the guy with the broom. Decide how many elephants can be in the parade. Never let the clients who are going to be impacted by your cancellation policy, tell you how to enforce it. If it's your policy, it's your policy. And don't allow people to take you for a ride by telling you how to run your business or when you should or when you should not enforce it, because they're going to be impacted on it, of course, they're going to have opinions on it. The guy in the parade, who's cleaning up the poop is going to have opinions on the number of elephants that should or should not be there. But that's not the point of the parade. The parade is to have animals and to bring joy to people, to show them off to bring attention to the you know, conservation efforts and things going on in the world. Purpose of your business is to serve people and serve them well and for you to have minimal headaches as possible. People have different priorities, and they're going to make decisions based off of those your clients have one set of priorities, you have another set, make sure that you're going with yours.
Meghan 25:37
These are just some of the quotes that we've been mulling over recently and we would love to know if there are quotes that help you in your business. What are some people or resources that you look to for inspiration, you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional or you can tag us on social media in your stories or on your posts at Pet Sitter confessional. We appreciate you taking your time listening to this today. We hope it's been helpful. Thank you also to our Patreon supporters and pet sitters associates for helping to keep the show going. We will talk with you next time. Bye
