The DS Mess

I got myself in a pickle. I talked about it briefly in my Saturday Rant. Today, I’m sharing a little more in depth about my DS mess.

I found something that I love and yet at the same time, I couldn’t stand it. I knew what had to be done and I kept trying to make myself the person that would do it. Notice that I didn’t say could do it. Of course, I could do it, I’m a grown woman, I can do what I want. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to leave my family on Saturday and Thursday evenings to go out and sell jewelry. I love them! I love spending time with them. No amount of goodwill towards others or cash was going to make up for that lost time. And then I thought that the internet would be my answer!

Yes! The internet!! I love the internet, it’s been my friend for over thirty years. Dial-up is one of those sounds that makes my heart squee. I love those notification dings and message requests! My friends live on the internet with me, no matter how far they are I can reach them and leave them messages and hellos and funny memes. The internet could definitely help me with my pickle. I loved it at first. The gathering of knowledge in how to market on the web. I got out of my warm circle, started having parties with strangers meeting in the evenings to show them my stash. It drastically cut down the amount of time I was spending away from my family. But still, I was away. I’d go and put on my stage makeup, prep my script, go live and say hello to the world, turn off my camera and crawl back into my little burrow with my family and try to pretend that I didn’t just lose an hour of time with them all in the same place.

The more reality set in the more it weighed on me. I began to wonder if this was really what I was called to do. I mean I LOVE all the people! I do I love every single person that purchased and hosted and laughed and watched and I want to be their friend. I made some real connections. That part was amazing and beautiful and it’s been such a very long time since I’ve made friends that were based on me.

Hmm, maybe that’s another post for another day. Anyway, there I was in the middle of winter, not spending time with my family, scouring the internet for sales and looking at everyone as a potential party host, because honestly, you can’t do a DS party system without parties. And I started to struggle. My depression started to flare up. I was down and I was done.

I started to look for ways out. I became highly critical of the company I was representing and they could do no right by me. I felt myself falling further and further away from my true self. I lost sight of my passions and kept pursuing what was right for a direct seller. I kept coming up with new marketing schemes, following different gurus, watching free webinars. I wanted to be successful and do what was required of me. And I was, the only problem was that I was still bleeding out money, time, and energy without being in love with my work. I was becoming more and more disgruntled with my work in fact. I would drag my feet and spend all day trying to get things done that should have only taken a matter of minutes once a week. My wheels were spinning and my heart shut down.

I kept going on, mainly because I loved my customers and I loved the idea of helping the artisans that are out there working to keep their families together, but in the meantime, ⅓ of my own family was checking out and drifting aimlessly. I started asking all the right questions which were painful and hard, especially since I didn’t know the answers, but I was also being encouraged to persist. I was intent on making my business what I knew it could be and saw other women accomplishing.

I knew that I needed some more help and so I signed up for a course to help me figure out exactly who I should be selling to. Because I had made a lot of friends around my DS company but the sales were still pretty sporadic. I knew that if I could figure out exactly who I should sell to that everything else would fall into place. So I started thinking through all the questions and old ones popped into my mind, especially the one that I was asked by my business mentor “Is what you’re doing taking you where you want to go? Just think it through.” I started getting the image of someone in my head.

This ideal client was very different than the women I had been selling to already. She had different thoughts and habits. And then I realized that I didn’t want to go find her. She is in her peer groups, listening to her friends, she wasn’t on the internet searching for things on google or looking for a solution to her pain points on Instagram. She was someone that would have to hear about my product by word of mouth. And I didn’t want to go beat the bushes for her. In fact, I wasn’t certain that I even liked this lady. She seemed a bit uppity. And then there was this decision that had to be made. If that’s my ideal client for this product, I can either go get her or I can change my product and find a new ideal client. Guess which I did…

In the end, the mess was easily taken care of. It was a matter of setting down all that wasn’t me in order to pick up exactly what was me.

Simple in concept, simple in execution, not so simple in discovery. I’ve found that’s true of many of life’s great messes. It’s not the cleanup and the recovery that is nearly as difficult as pinpointing the mess itself. I could easily have kicked the can down the road and continued on that path that I was on. No one was going to stop me, though I would have complained and whined and wondered and tried to figure out what I was doing wrong. Once I said yes to me, I saw exactly what I was doing wrong. Could I have come to this discovery with less exploration? Maybe, but it would not have been nearly as clear and I would not have gathered nearly as many journeying companions if I had. It’s a great relief to see the mess being tidied away, shutting down the monthly fees for a website, tossing the business cards I haven’t shared in months, stop looking at friends as potential customers and just be myself. Enjoying my family, my friends new and old, stop being “that girl.” I hated being her more than you did, I can promise you that.

That’s my mess for this Monday. It was a personal one that I’m sure many of us have found ourselves in and wondered how long. And the answer to that is just long enough.