How to balance impulse with structure in your business

On Pancake day just past, I had the house to myself. I’d remembered that it was Pancake Day a few days earlier and had intended to get prepared for some flipping fun. And then promptly forgot. Meaning that on Pancake Day itself I was none the wiser. 🥞

Instead, I worked too late and ended up in a rush to start start dinner prep dinner before the silence was abruptly interrupted by everyone getting home. Which it was! 😛 

Just as my husband went to get changed I remembered about the pancakes. It felt like a sign that all the ingredients happened to be in the cupboards already and so I took that sign as an indication to go for it! As these things go, my two year old also choose this time to start taking every other item out of the cupboards, then moved his paw patrol table so that he could climb on top of it, and proceeded to cause chaos wherever he could.

We eventually sat down to a very haphazard dinner, of the actual dinner, with pancakes on the side. The boys declared that they didn’t like pancakes, my husband said he’d had enough at work, and I scoffed one because they were there and in an attempt not to sulk. 😋 

All in all, the pancakes were not a roaring success.

Pancake Day comes around just once a year (thank goodness 😆) and yet the feeling was familiar! I realised afterwards that pancake-gate can happen in my business too, when I get into a mood for continually trying new things and getting distracted by new ideas. I’m all for following nudges and mixing things up a bit, in fact I think that is a large part of what makes business a creative outlet. I love this quote that sums up just that.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

~ Mary Lou Cook

I’ve found that the problem comes when this flowing outlet of creativity isn’t appropriately balanced with some structure. When your whole business is based on impulsive ideas, it can easily result in lots of unfinished ideas and not a lot of action. When I’ve been in this place myself, I’ve found it to be exciting - full of optimism and opportunity, while at the same time deeply unsatisfying being focussed on thoughts of the future at the expense of the present moment.

It’s what I’ve seen described as shiny object syndrome. And while I can relate to the phenomena of being repeatedly torn away from the project at hand, in favour of something new and exciting, I think it goes a bit deeper than just being ‘easily distracted’.

I think that first of all we have to remember that we live in a society that throws distractions at us at every possible opportunity. On top of that there is this notion that doing things ‘better’ means doing them bigger and faster. I know for me that when I’ve been working on something for a while, I can get thoughts creep in that ask “Why am I not better at this?” and “What’s taking so long?”.

The other thing to remember is that distraction can be a really helpful way to avoid doing the hard thing. Maybe you dip out of projects after the initial planning phase so that you get to avoid actually doing ‘the thing’ that feels a little bit scary. I know for me, it’s been much easier to abandon an offer I have created in favour of going on to create the next one so that I don’t have to risk having people say no to the original one.

And so I think that in this place, there is the opportunity to go easy on ourselves, to offer a little compassion. Rather than see ‘shiny object syndrome’ as a disease to be cured, see it as one approach to calming our fears and explore alternatives!

To finish, I’d like to share an analogy that I find both beautiful and helpful. I’ve found it really supportive to let the ideas come, but see them as a little seedling. To give them time to sprout and flourish and see how they get on. Some will bloom and others will wane. You don’t need to spring into action straight away on every one. Take time to play around and experiment and see where you would like to take them. This might look like, writing the ideas down somewhere, talking with someone about them - finding someway to nurture them gently before taking them out into the world. Do this enough times and you turn into a gardener of your own ideas! You’ll have some ideas that are robust and long lasting and take care of themselves and others that blossom along with the seasons.

What do you think? Do your recognise yourself in this? Or how about the other way with too much structure and not enough flow? Leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.