Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Every week, you enter the same loop. You have to pull the stats, sample the calls, file the reports. One week goes by. Nothing happens. You didn’t miss a goal. You missed a phase.
As a result, your business ultimately doesn’t grow.
It’s not because you have a discipline, motivation or procrastination problem. You’ve got a flow problem, and you’ve never been taught how to solve it.
As a business owner striving for growth you look for two things:
- The activities that truly move the needle in your business.
- A productive state where you execute at a high degree.
However, you can’t grow a business with just the activities. You need the state. The most productive state a human being can experience is flow, that state of optimal consciousness in which you feel and perform at your best, where you’re fully immersed in a task and time seems to distort.
However, people rarely reach this state, because they’re not aware of the flow cycle, and the initial phase that most get stuck in (and how to overcome it).
Why working on growing your business feels like a snake in the room
If you’re a practice owner within the medical space, for example, you’re probably a great dentist or a skilled surgeon. You’re good at what you built this business around. But despite your professional skills, your business stalls because you don’t do well with the development side.
Business development has abandonment and rejection woven into it. For many practice owners, the uncomfortable activities that have nothing to do with the actual deliverables can feel like facing the snake in the room.
That is why you recoil.
Specific business development tasks have higher resistance than others because of the conditioned angle or previous experiences. Maybe your family fought over money so nowadays you hate quarterly budget planning and refuse to look at spreadsheets. When you see this task, your brain sees a threat. What it should be seeing is an opportunity.
A destination called flow with a gate in front of it
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that true flow begins when the challenging task matches your high skill level.
But when it comes to business development activities, the challenge is there, but your confidence leaves the room. That’s the reason you can’t reach the flow.
People who don’t know that the flow is a cycle, not a single event, never achieve it.
And most business owners never go past stage one.
Stage one is called the struggle, and it’s supposed to feel exactly like this
The flow starts with the struggle. It starts with the queasy stomach feeling when you have to sit down with the numbers, and a sudden urge to pick up your phone or eat something arises. You will do anything that relieves you of the discomfort of doing something you don’t feel like doing right now.
The feeling and the discomfort are confirmation you’ve started the cycle, not a stop sign to quit and move to something else. For business development, how you feel is completely irrelevant.
The chemicals confirm it: During the struggle phase, stress neurotransmitters are released, cortisol rises and serotonin drops. This is just a common biochemical reaction, not a signal to stop. So, next time it feels bad, the correct response is: Brilliant. This is exactly how this stage is supposed to feel.
The reset nobody talks about
You can go through the struggle phase and embrace the flow. There is no shortcut through it, but there is a shortcut to the flow: Don’t pick up your phone. Don’t eat a donut. Don’t do anything else except that activity for 23 minutes.
You’ve done this a hundred times without realizing the clock reset each time. And you keep telling yourself you just aren’t cut out for it — false.
There is something you’ve never considered: You’ve never liked certain activities because you have never sat in the discomfort of the struggle phase for 23 minutes without distractions.
The 23-minute rule: What marathon runners understand that sprinters don’t
Business growth doesn’t happen in 100 meters. It begins at the 10th mile of the 26-mile marathon. Sprinters exhaust themselves. A marathon runner keeps going long after it feels hard.
If you don’t feel like doing it, run it past 23 minutes to get in the flow. Everything will align from there. This applies to everything from difficult conversations to numbers reviews and performance discussions.
In practical terms, apply time-boxing. Schedule your day in 30-minute blocks for each activity. The activities remain the same as yesterday, but you are the one who changes.
Each time you sit through those 23 minutes, something shifts. And according to Dr. Andrew Huberman, it matters because the brain releases its reward signal, unlike anything else, after sustained effort through discomfort.
How to use the 23-minute rule to grow your business
Don’t let your emotions run you. Ignore them. That is what’s pulling you out before you enter the flow.
Unsuccessful people are driven by their emotions; the 23-minute rule is the first step to stop being one of them.
You want to grow. The activities aren’t hard. Your ability to sit there and build an intimate relationship with them is what you need to work on. Now you know where to start.
Every week, you enter the same loop. You have to pull the stats, sample the calls, file the reports. One week goes by. Nothing happens. You didn’t miss a goal. You missed a phase.
As a result, your business ultimately doesn’t grow.
It’s not because you have a discipline, motivation or procrastination problem. You’ve got a flow problem, and you’ve never been taught how to solve it.