How to Use Boredom as Rocket Fuel to Build Your Business

You’re listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 94.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I’m your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic underearner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach. I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth, using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let’s dive in to today’s show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I have a very important episode for you today. I hope you have yourself in a quiet environment where you can sit down and focus. We’re going to be talking all about boredom, and how our brains have been trained, in this current modern era in which we live, to look for constant stimulation.

So, even when you’re listening to a podcast, you might be scrolling on your phone. You might be scrolling on your computer, swiping, you might be talking to your kids, doing all the things, and you may have convinced yourself that you are an expert multitasker.

But we’re going to talk about why boredom is a beautiful and useful emotion that you want to allow yourself to feel, and how it can be used as rocket fuel to grow and scale your business.

Before we jump into today’s episode, I want to remind you that my group coaching program Wired for Wealth is now enrolling members for the new academy. The Wired for Wealth Academy is a lifetime access program, which means you get to stay in there forever. I will coach your face off until you grow your business to $150,000 or more.

You can show up weekly for coaching wherever you’re getting stuck in your business. Whether it’s your mindset, you don’t like to be bored, you need new strategies, something is not working, you want to celebrate what is working, you’re bashing up against an income ceiling in your business and you don’t know how to break through and make more money. You’re going to get that all in my simple four-step process.

Where you’re going to become the CEO of your business. You’re going to learn how to market, advertise, show up, and be visible. You are going to sell your offer over and over again.

And you are going to change your relationship with money. That includes, how you feel about money, and how you take care of your money in your business and outside of your business. If there is any money healing that needs to take place, from your family of origin or other generational trauma, you’re going to be able to heal that as well.

Go over to my website now, DebbieSassen.com/wealth. You’ll see all the details there, and you can sign up for a sales conversation.

Alright, my friends, let’s jump into today’s episode, and how boredom can be used as rocket fuel to grow your business, when you learn how to contain that boredom and focus it in the right direction. So, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to define exactly what boredom is.

When I wanted to record this podcast, I went to my good friend Google. You know I love Google, don’t you? I looked up “boredom.” Good old Merriam Webster told me that boredom is the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest. We’re going to remember that word “restless,” because in our modern day and age we are so used to being stimulated.

We’re always swiping, we want to be entertained, whether it’s a music or a movie, or an Amazon Prime that we can click with one button; we can get things very quickly. That hard work that our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents back in the day were used to building. The resilience that they built through doing the same boring tasks over and over again, that is lost to us in this current generation.

Now, do I want to give up my creature comforts? Of course not. But we have to learn how we can offset what our body is experiencing when it is restless because we’re feeling bored.

The next dictionary definition is that feeling of being wearied by dullness, tedious repetition. That is something that you as a business owner, and we’re going to talk about it, want to be able to do over and over again. The same tedious work in your business. So, we’re going to get there.

The third definite notion of “boredom” that I think really nails it, I heard on somebody else’s podcast, and that is, boredom is the feeling that you have when there’s an absence of neural stimulation. This is really where I want you to focus and remember.

We have been so programmed, in 2023, when I’m recording this podcast, to desire neural stimulation. Whether it is the sugar that we get from the packaged goods… My grandmother, I’ve told you this before, my grandmother hand dipped chocolate.

She used to know by the weather, by how it affected the arthritis in her wrist, exactly when the weather changed and was perfect for her to dip her chocolates and let them set out, so that they wouldn’t set too quickly or too slowly. So, they wouldn’t melt in the heat or harden too fast. It was all based on the arthritis in her wrist.

I promise you… of course, we’ll never be able to figure this out, because my grandmother, may her memory be blessed, passed away already, nearly 30 years ago. But I still promise you that the candy bar that you buy in a wrapper that you rip off, to get a quick fix, a sugar high, will never in a million years compare to the deliciousness of my grandmother’s hand-dipped chocolates.

Or the seven-layer hazelnut torte that she prepared for my father every single year on his birthday. The love, the attention, and just all of the handmade stuff that she put into that cake is better than any bakery cake that you can get.

But our brains have been programmed, through the recent years of evolution, to desire. We have this over desire for neural stimulation. It comes in the form of sugar, being entertained, it can be alcohol or drugs, and buying things. Like, using money to get that high. We’re going to be spenders and just get that enjoyment of buying something.

Now, I also enjoy buying new shoes and new clothes and new whatever it is, and I enjoy vacations and life experiences. But in our modern age, we have been so programmed to desire lots and lots of things and experiences.

Back in the day, that desire for sugar or for food or for procreation was a human desire that God put into us so that we would continue to carry on the human species. We wanted to protect ourselves and we wanted to stay warm. We wanted to stay safe, so that we wouldn’t be attacked by neighboring tribes or wild animals.

So, our brain was always conserving energy in case we needed it to run away. But we had to be able to go out and conquer our fears in order to take care of ourselves, and plant our farms and take care of our families. But really, your brain wants to be lazy. It wants instant gratification. And we have that in spades these days.

It’s normal that we would desire these things, it’s just that in our modern age we have been conditioned for over desire. And all of the potato chips and Doritos and other things that you buy off the shelf, they have been chemically designed to stimulate areas in your brain that makes you want more.

That’s where we are today, in 2023, we want more and more and more. We want quick fixes and instant gratification. That tediousness, that repetition that you need to put into your business to grow big, to grow strong, to serve your clients better, it feels boring.

Boredom is a feeling that you feel in your body, and it is a normal feeling. We have negative emotions like boredom, like sadness, like anger, like frustration. And then we have positive emotions, like happiness and joy and love. Both the negative and the positive emotions are part of our human experience.

The more that we allow ourselves to expand the spectrum of human experiences that we can feel, that we can allow ourselves to feel, and we’re not numbing ourselves out and giving ourselves neural stimulation when we’re feeling negative emotion, the more we will become more human. And as business owners, the more we can grow and thrive and serve. And of course, the more money that you can make.

So, boredom is something that you actually need to harness in order to grow your business. You might ask me, “Well, Debbie, what do you mean I need to harness boredom?” First of all, there are two ways we’re going to talk about today for how you can harness or contain that boredom and use it as rocket fuel for your business to grow.

Number one, you want to be able to do the same things over and over again. Your brain is going to tell you, “I don’t want to do it. This is tedious. This is boring.” When you’re sitting in front of your computer trying to type out an email to your clients, it’ll be like, “No, I’m not going to do it this week. I’m going to do it next week.”

Or if you’re trying to think of how you can serve your clients better, like, “Did I do the best job when I was on my conversation, my coaching call, with my client? Did I do the best job when I built the website for my client? Did I do the best job when I did X, Y, or Z for my clients?”

Sitting down and analyzing and assessing the way you showed up in your business is going to feel tedious. It’s going to feel boring, and your brain is going to resist. It’s going to give you a push back, and it’s going to try to capture your attention with shiny objects.

Like, “Maybe there’s something out there in the world that is more interesting. Let me just swipe my phone and see what’s going on. Let me just jump onto the web and see if I need to notice anything. Maybe do some research. Maybe I’m just going to go and check my emails right now.”

Because our brain doesn’t want to be bored. It’s going to get restless, it’s going to feel resistance, and we’re going to look for that neural stimulation outside of ourselves, rather than doing the things in our business that we want to do.

One of the things that I always encourage my clients to do, and it’s really how you’re going to get better at sales conversations, is analyzing and evaluating how the sales conversation went with the client that you were just on the phone with or on Zoom with. Whether the client said yes, or the client said no, you want to assess what happened.

What worked? What didn’t work? What do you want to do differently on your next sales conversation? It feels very tedious. And I tell my clients, that tedious work is going to get you very far in your business. We have to be able to overcome the resistance that we feel to doing tedious work. We have to move beyond the boredom. We have to allow ourselves to be bored and feel like this is pointless, in order to grow our businesses.

Because there are little golden nuggets that you will uncover when you evaluate every single conversation, every single day that you showed up in your business. Did you have a plan of stuff that you wanted to get done today?

For example, you had three or four or five things on your to-do list. But then you notice that all of a sudden, your brain got sidetracked into doing something else. Where you told yourself that you were hungry, you needed to have a cup of coffee, maybe you’re going to lie down and have a rest.

We’ve talked about rest before. I like to rest in the middle of the day for 10-20 minutes in order to give myself that umph I need for the afternoon. But we really have to be onto ourselves. Is your brain just looking for some excitement and some stimulation? That it just doesn’t want to be bored and that’s why you’re going outside of yourself, and you’re not showing up for your to-do list and doing the things that you know you need to do?

You have to be introspective, and you have to be willing to do tedious things in your business. You have to be willing to be bored in your business in order to grow and thrive. So, that’s number one.

The second thing that your brain is going to tell you to do, is that it needs to do something different in your business. That’s why all of these shiny objects out there are just so enticing. Every time you find yourself reading somebody else’s email…

Maybe you’re working with a coach, or maybe you’re even one of my clients and you’re working with me as your coach, and you’re thinking, “Maybe Debbie isn’t doing it right. Maybe this program isn’t good for me. Maybe the strategy no longer works for me. Maybe the action plan that I’m doing, Debbie isn’t teaching me the right way to do it. Maybe you’ll work with a different coach.”

That’s okay. It’s all good. But our brain will naturally want to do something different, instead of repeating the same things that are working, and tweaking them and refining them over and over and over again. So, when you get an email into your inbox from somebody else, you might be thinking to yourself, “I really need to go and try that thing.”

So, you’re going to stop doing what’s working and you’re going to try somebody else’s plan. You might look for a new coach. You might look for a new mentor. You might look for a new leader. You’re going to go try something different rather than repeating, over and over and over again, the things that are already working in your business.

I love this quote from Steve Jobs, who said that, “People think that focus means saying yes to the things you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means, at all. It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done, as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

You and I both know how successful Apple is today, and how Steve Jobs was able to create a wildly successful company before he passed away. He was able to say no to 1,000 things. And what I want to offer you, is saying no to 1,000 shiny objects that show up outside of your business. It’s incredibly important. Because they will show up in your inbox. They will show up on social media.

They will show up by people in networking groups who tell you, “We did it this way. We did that way. Why don’t you try this?” And if you have a guide, a mentor, an advisor, a coach, or someone whom you are in connection with, who is guiding you on your business journey, stay with that person.

Now, am I suggesting that there is no other wisdom out there in the world? No. We learn, in the ethics of the Father: Who is a wise man? Somebody who learns from everybody.

Sometimes we can hear other people’s ideas and there is something that we want to incorporate in our business. Sometimes we can hear other people’s ideas, and I will say, “That’s a great idea. But I’m already focusing on the one thing that I’m doing, and I’m going to leave those 1,000 things out.”

That’s why you have to be incredibly introspective about what you decide to let in and what you decide to say no to. Because your brain will look for shiny objects. This is where it is imperative for you, if you want to grow a wildly successful business.

Now, I think that most people, when they stay focused on it, they will be able to grow a business to $100,000. I don’t want to belittle how easy it is, because it’s not easy. You have to show up and do the same tedious things over and over and over again. You have to overcome a lot of fears.

But if you want to grow beyond that, and you want to create a business that will take care of you and your family, and give you time off for vacations, for illness, for all of the unexpected events that are good, bad, or indifferent that happen in life, you want to be able to say no to a lot of things.

If you want to be able to grow your business to $200,000, $500,000, 1 million dollars, so you can actually take time out of your business, we want to do the same things over and over and over again on repeat, and we want to refine them.

It’s the same way if you want to grow your muscles. You do the same sit-ups, you do the same pushups, and you do the same squats all of the time, in order to make sure that you maintain the strength in your body. You do the same runs. You do the same stretches. And of course, if you go to a trainer, I go to a trainer, we do switch it up every now and again.

But basically, the routine is pretty similar. I show up on the same days of the week, the same times every single week. And you know what? It’s pretty boring. But as I age, as my body… thank God, I’m sixty years old… my body needs to be maintained if I want to maintain my strength. And so, I make this commitment to myself, to do the same thing over and over again.

What’s fascinating, I did a little bit of research on Olympic athletes, and when we look at five different categories of success for Olympic athletes, the strong coach/athlete relationship is the number one factor that impacts the success of the athlete in the Olympics. It’s not changing around doing a bunch of things, it’s actually the relationship that the athlete has with his or her coach.

There are four specific characteristics of that relationship, which include, closeness; how close you feel to your coach. If you’re always jumping around from coach to coach so somebody doesn’t know you, and you have to relearn that process over and over again, it’s going to impact the performance of the athlete.

There’s the commitment; the commitment to the relationship and the commitment to the goal. The coach and the athlete are also complimentary. It’s not like there is a ‘I’m better than you’ or ‘I’m on a higher level on the hierarchy’ and ‘I’m below you.” They are actually peers and they work together to meet the same goal.

Finally, there is something called co-orientation, which is we understand each other’s needs. It’s not a codependent relationship. I love this, that it is co-orientation. That there are agreed upon goals, and those goals are agreed upon by both the athlete and the coach. They work together for a long period of time, so that the athlete can actually win the gold medal, or the silver or the bronze or wherever it is.

But when you start searching around for shiny objects… “I need to do something else. Maybe I’ll do it on my own. Maybe this coach over there who has a bigger, better, successful, more well-known coaching business will be able to give me new ideas for my copy,” or something else.

When your brain wants to go for something new, you have to be onto yourself and realize that your brain is looking for neural stimulation. It’s getting restless where you are, it doesn’t want to do the tedious work, and that, my friends, is when you know that you are onto something in you, in your business, and generally, you are making a mistake.

Again, can we be better served by different people, services, and coaches in our business? 100%. The wise man learns from everybody; and we learn that in our sources.

However, we also have to realize when we are not willing to be bored; when it feels uncomfortable, we’re feeling restless, when we’re feeling weary; if you want to grow a big, beautiful business, that will take care of you and your family and give you time off in your business, so that you can have a vacation.

I spoke a few months ago about how I was able to take a day off to be the doula for my daughter when she gave birth, right? If you want to take off time to be with your children and with your grandchildren. If somebody, God forbid, is sick in your family, and you want to take off. Or you need to take off time from your business, if your business can run without you, you have so much more freedom in your life.

That’s what I want you to think about: What do I have to do over and over and over again? That simple plan. Doing tedious work. Our willingness to be bored is what is going to take us to the next level, and the one beyond, and the one beyond that.

My friends, this is what I have for you today. I’m going to remind you, again, that Wired for Wealth is currently enrolling new students. I have a handful of students from my previous cohort who are staying with me, because we realized that that coach/client relationship is important. We know each other well, and we’re going to work together to meet goals and take my clients’ businesses to the next level.

I invite you into that experience. Please go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/wealth, and take a look at what we’re doing in Wired for Wealth. There’s a link there, and schedule a sales conversation so that you and I can speak with each other and decide together if this is the next best step for you in your business.

All right, my friends. I will see you next week. Bye-bye, for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth.

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.