When Do Auto Repair Shop Owners Need a Fresh Start?

Fresh Start by Rick White, President 180BIZ

I hear people all the time talking about how they're so stressed out and so overwhelmed and so drained. Well, I want to talk to you about a fix for that. It’s when you wake up tired and you finally ask for a fresh start. When you’re waking up stressed, overwhelmed, and wishing for that fresh start means that you'll never get a fresh start. When you're dragging yesterday into today, you'll never get a fresh start. When you're dragging yesterday into today, you are reliving yesterday over and over again. And that doesn't help you. This is what we mean when I use the term baggage. I have this vision of people dragging all the pain and what they think is failure and setbacks from yesterday into today. All I can think of is Marley from Scrooge with all the chains he’s carrying around forever. But I'm telling you that you can have a fresh start. I’ll give you a few thoughts.

The first thing is to let go of all the baggage. Let it go. How do you do that? Step back and learn from it. Don't just push through your setbacks. Don't push through what you call failures. I don't call them failures. I want you to stop calling them failures. They're not failures. They're lessons. Where on God's green earth did you get some revelation that everything you did was going to be done right the first time? That just doesn’t happen. The first time you will fall down. You're going to make mistakes. And that's where you learn to get better. It doesn't mean give up. And it doesn't mean get guilty. Just step back and learn. My three L’s for the past is Learn, let it go, and never let it Linger.  Encompass and embrace the lesson.

If we want a fresh start, the first thing is to learn from yesterday, let it go, and allow ourselves to be a perfectly imperfect human being. Perfection is not possible. Just do your best and stop thinking about right done wrong. Just do your best. If you can go to bed at night and say, “Wow, I did my best. High five!”. That's a virtual high five right there. So, the first step in a fresh start is to learn and let go of the past.  The second thing to work on to get a fresh start is to not live in the future right now. And trust me, I know people who are so anxious and filled with worries about everything that's going to go wrong, and it doesn't help us. It doesn't serve us.

I love that fear and faith have the same definition. They both are a belief in the future that hasn't happened yet. Remember, the focus you bring to today has a really big impact on what you get to realize in the future. If you are worried today, you won’t take the actions or see the opportunities that you could be seeing. If that happens, then things don't go as well as they could. You start moving toward that fear destination. But instead of living in the future, you plan for it. And then every once in a while, like digging a trench, you stick your head up and just look around and make sure you're still heading to where you want to go. That's what we call feedback.

So, two things… Stop dragging yesterday into today and stop living in the future. It’s that simple. What I would much rather you do is I learn from yesterday. I want you to plan for tomorrow, but then I want you to live today. Be present today.

My wife is sitting right there and there are times when I'm not happy about things I check out. If I'm going through something negative and I don't want to feel it, I just shut everything down. That's what I do, and it drives her nuts. So, now we're to the point where she says, “Rick you're shutting down.” And when she says that I think about what's going on inside of me. I used to fight her on it. I’d say, “No, I'm fine. I'm fine. There's nothing wrong. “ What do I do now? What am I avoiding? That's what I ask myself. What am I really avoiding? And I do a temperature, self-check. And it really works. Now I'm able to, within a minute or two, say, “Okay, this is what I'm unhappy about or what’s bothering me.” Instead of dealing with it, I'm just shutting down.. And it doesn't work.

So, what I want you to do is work on being present today. The opportunities that will help you create the tomorrow you want are here today. If you are staring at the past or focused on the future, you’ll miss the opportunities today. We all do different things. We have coping mechanisms that we deal with when we're not getting what we think we want, or things aren't going the way we want or there are feelings we don't want to deal with. But we're so much better off just understanding where the feelings are coming from because it's so much easier to deal with. And then you can let it go instead of letting this stuff keep building up inside. It doesn't have to be that way. It takes energy and attention to live in the present.

I do something that drives Brenda nuts, but I have an alarm that goes off every two hours and it says breathe. And every two hours I take a breath and I just say, “Okay, where am I at?” I do a self-check and then I say, “Okay, I'm here now.”

We look for these major milestones for fresh starts. But I will tell you that every single month, year, week, day, every single breath is an opportunity for a fresh start. All you need to do is learn from the past, let it go, plan for the future, and then live today.

Thanks so much for being here. God bless, stay safe, take care, and go make some money.