Designing a business you’re stoked about starts here—welcome to The Monday Muse, your weekly guide to business, branding, and creative strategy. 🤸🏼‍♀️

For the past week I’ve been in the tiny beach town of Ölüdeniz, Turkey (think the European version of Cabo), in a paragliding course. In this course, you practice how to control and manage all the things that could go wrong while paragliding. All those viral videos you see that make the sport look exceptionally scary? We’re practicing how to not find yourself in that situation and if you do, how to get out.

I did the same course last year and was rather scared for a particular maneuver called a stall (a similar concept to stalling an airplane). In the simplest of terms, this is where you ‘deflate’ your paraglider while in the air and descend toward the ground at a speed of about 4 meters a second – it’s physical, could go wrong, and important to learn and perform. Last year, I got through three of them. It’s all I had in me, both physically and mentally.

This year, I got through thirteen stalls and even learned a new technique to performing them – the same thing that I was honestly horrified by a year ago.

In business terms, I 3x my outcome all because I worked up the nerve to do the big scary thing that first time.

The same is true in business.

As soon as you do the big scary thing – doing the big scary thing becomes easier and easier. Whether it’s posting to social, starting your newsletter, launching that website, or hitting a client benchmark, as soon as you do it, it becomes easier and easier to do again and again and again.

Not only will getting over the hump of doing the big scary thing allow you to do it more but you’ll come back ready to jump feet first with a hunger for more and a feeling of, “this is now second nature to me”.

Earlier this year, I read “The Power of One More” by Ed Mylett (a great book that’s worth a read). In this book, he talked about your ability to expand your capacity if you just do something one more time. It’s not dramatic, it’s not overwhelming, it’s not comparative to the people around you, it’s just doing something once more.

This mindset came up a lot for me this week. I approached my flights with the mindset of “I would be thrilled to do this thing 3 times”. I did 3 and had one more in me. So I did one more. Then I had another in me, and I did it again. I didn’t approach the flight trying to keep up with other people – I worked within the confines of what I knew I was presently capable of doing, and kept doing one more until I knew it was time to call it quits.

The same mindset brings big results in business – posting once more this week, spending one more hour developing an offer, checking one more box on the want to do list. In doing this – your capacity expands and your ability to do more gets easier and easier.

The next time I take this paragliding course? I’ll likely find myself doing thirty stalls. Or maybe I won’t spend my time on it anymore because the work I put in now, won’t call for more practice, it’ll just be easy to perform and I’ll begin implementing something new.

The takeaway? Do the big scary thing and starting doing it once more. You’ll probably find yourself less afraid to keep doing the big scary thing on repeat – bringing big results and allowing yourself to implement something new.

Catch ya next Monday,

Bri