One Bite of the Elephant

How a Frozen Business Owner Got Moving Again

"I have seventy people I'm supposed to reach out to, and I haven't touched a single one in almost two months."

A woman I'll call the Maven, because that's exactly what she is, said it on our Zoom yesterday, and her voice cracked on the word "single." If you've ever stared at a list that you know would grow your business and felt your whole body go stiff, pull up a chair. What broke Maven free is the same move that’ll break you free, and it takes one bite.

Now, here's something worth knowing before we go any further. Overwhelm wears a different face on everyone, because your nervous system has its own factory setting for handling too much at once.

·Some people freeze and go still, the way she did, staring at the whole mountain and touching none of it.

·Some people bolt into busywork, scrubbing out an inbox at 11pm while the task that really matters sits there ignored.

·Some people run hot and snappy, barking at everyone in range because the pressure has to escape somewhere.

·And some people pour every ounce into everyone else's needs, the kids, the clients, the husband, until their own list is the one that never gets served.

Every one of those is your wiring doing what it believes keeps you safe. You're human, and an overloaded human grabs for whatever quiets the noise the fastest.

The business owner who runs everything and forgot how to run herself

Maven has owned her digital marketing agency for six-plus years, and she built her agency from ground zero. She's got clients who adore her, a husband she loves, and three kids all under the age of eight who are home for summer break and treating their home like a small, sticky amusement park.

Maven's the entrepreneur every one of us claims we want to be, right up until this summer-breaklanded on her like a piano.

All at once she was managing multiple full-time jobs - the day-to-day of her business AND the entire summer for her whole family. Three young kids home for the summer means - camp schedules to coordinate, summer learning programs to enroll them in, activity registrations to chase after, and transportation to and from every last one. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner needed a human being to conjure them out of thin air three times a day, every day, forever. Her calendar, her husband's, and the whole family's all needed managing, the trips needed booking, and the outings, events, and get-togethers all needed planning. Underneath all of those extra family demand, she has a thriving business she still needs to run.

So, Maven did what a lot of brilliant people do when their plates runneth over. She kept spinning the plates with other people's names on them, and she let her own plates drop.

By the time we got on Zoom, she was somewhere past tired. She told me she felt stuck, depressed, unproductive, like she was moving all day and getting nowhere. Then she said something that told me exactly where she was: "I have this list of seventy ideal clients I need to reach out to, and I just haven't. And honestly? I don't even have the right message for them."

There it was. Seventy warm, perfect-fit prospects were sitting on a list, and she couldn't make herself send out a single outreach call, because she had gone completely frozen.

Freeze mode has a reason

Here's what I know about that feeling because I've lived in it myself. When everything is urgent, the brain stops picking and just locks up. You get so much coming at you that the smallest task, the one you could usually finish in ten minutes, starts to look like climbing a mountain in flip-flops. So you do everything else except what you need to be doing –

you doom-scroll,

you reorganize your inbox,

you make another cup of coffee, and

you call it a day while the important tasks sit there untouched.

Your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do when they get overloaded, locking up to protect you. The freeze itself is normal and it passes. Staying stuck in it is where the damage is, because a business that stops moving - stops making money, and a business owner who stops moving starts to believe the freeze is who they are now.

So I stopped our Maven right there on the Zoom call.

What I told her (steal this)

I said, "Okay. Let's just stop. Before we do anything, I need you to be kind to yourself. You're running a company, raising three little humans and feeding an entire household while your, normally peaceful, workday has been sucked in by juice boxes & camp drop-offs. Of course you're overwhelmed. Give yourself the grace that you would hand any one of your clients in a heartbeat."

Then I asked her one of my favorite questions. "How do you eat an elephant?"

She half-laughed. "One bite at a time."

"Right. You're stuck because you're staring at the whole elephant and your brain has no idea where to bite first. So we're not going to touch all seventy prospects today. We're going to take one small step, and that's it. Deal?"

So…what does any of this have to do with business? Everything, because the fix for overwhelm is always a smaller step. Here's the exact sequence I walked her through, and it's the same one I'll walk you through right now.

Motion creates results, and one bite of the elephant is enough to start the engine.

1

Step one is to drop the shame. You can't strategize from a puddle of self-criticism, so you talk to yourself the way you'd talk to your best client on her worst day. Kindness comes first, because a calm brain solves problems while a panicked one just spins.

2

Step two is to decide on your first bite. You look at the mountain and find the single smallest next action, the one thing you could finish in one sitting. And this is the part a lot of people skip - the bite has to move you toward your GOAL => busywork doesn't count. For the Maven, that one thing was getting her offer clear enough to say in one sentence. So I sent her my Offer Statement Worksheet and I told her, "Fill this out. That's your whole assignment. We're not doing anything else today.”

3

Step three is to give yourself a deadline/stopping point.We booked a follow-up Zoom for Monday before we left the call. An action step with no deadline is just a wish, and wishes don't move pipelines. That scheduled follow up call gave her something to move toward and someone to be accountable to.

Then something happened that made me smile. Maven sent the worksheet back within hours.A couple of boxes were still left blank, and I told her that was fine because, 80% and accelerating is way better than 100% and stalled. Movement was the whole assignment, and she had moved. The freeze period was cracked. I followed up with her again today to keep the wheels turning, and here's the plan for Monday: she finishes out the three questions she left blank on her Offer Statement worksheet I sent her.

Once she finishes the first action step, the second one gets easier, and the third one stops looking like a mountain and starts looking like a Tuesday.

The whole game is baby steps

I want you to hear this the way she heard it. If you're frozen, don't wait to feel ready, because ready isn't coming to rescue you. You need to do one small thing, any small thing at all that will get you closer to your goal.

Send the one email,

Fill out the one worksheet,

Make the one call.

Motion equals results, and a body in motion keeps moving while an entrepreneur in motion keeps building.

It's so easy to get stuck. Life keeps piling on, your list keeps growing, and the voice in your head says you'll get to it once things calm down. They rarely ever do, so you get better at taking the next small bite while the noise keeps coming.

Maven reaches out to one prospect on Monday. By August, I'd bet she's worked through a good chunk of those seventy, because that's what motion does - it compounds.

Your elephant is sitting right there, and you already know what it is. You just need to take one bite today.

When you're ready to carve the whole elephant, not just take the first bite, I mapped out the full three-step method (the brain dump, the AI prompt, all of it) in The Elephant in Your Dreams. Start here to get unstuck, then head there to build the system.

I'd love to grab a virtual coffee with you, because clarity happens faster when we talk it through and find your one bite together. Book a time here: https://queenkongbiz.com/meet-with-jo-rawald

Download the QueenKong Offer Builder Worksheet Here

With Grace & Grit,

Jo Rawald