← My Digital Farmer Podcast
My Digital Farmer Podcast
288 How Much Longer?... The Value and Purpose of Waiting in Business
00:53:20
Ever feel like your farm business goals are taking too long to materialize? In this episode, we explore the often-overlooked value of "waiting" in business and why those seemingly stagnant moments are vital for growth. Drawing from my own journey...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Corinna Bench
What are you waiting for in your business? I want you to think about that question today. Waiting is a big part of the entrepreneur's journey, and it's not something that's talked about enough. I've been going through my own season of waiting this past year, so I have a lot to say on this. What is the value in waiting? And maybe you're right where you're supposed to be. Let's get started. Hey there, this is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more competent at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 288 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers get more confident in their marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to my regular listeners and everyone who's been binge listening. And if you are new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show. Go check out some of my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an onboarding ramp into the marketing space and that's a great place to go to learn the lingo. Another great thing to do is to get onto my email list. If you haven't done that yet, you can subscribe@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe when you do, I'm going to send you an email like every five days for the next three months to train you up into a marketing maven. Like, you're going to get some really good tips. I'm going to share with you who you should be following, what the key principles are, free resources. It gets really good reviews. It's good stuff. So mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. Imagine all of your farm sales under one roof. Localline is the most comprehensive sales software built for farmers and food hubs, selling direct to restaurants, schools, wholesale buyers, running a CSA and more. Features include E commerce, automated inventory management, a box builder, subscriptions, point of sale, and more, helping you increase your sales, save time and streamline your processes. Are you looking to switch to sales software that does it all subscriptions start as low as $49 a month with no setup fees or sales percentages. Plus, if you join LocalLine today, your onboarding manager will migrate your storefront at no cost to you, so you'll be up and running in no time. You can even pause your subscription in the off season. And bonus, as a podcast listener, localline is also offering a free premium feature for one year with your subscription when you use my coupon code. So so head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and enter the coupon code MDF2024. Our farm uses localline as our E commerce platform. I can't say enough good things about it. We love it. Make the switch today and now back to the show. Before we get started today, I feel like I need to warn you this is going to be a little bit of a woo woo episode. I'm breaking from my normal format where I teach you some kind of practical marketing tip and instead I'm doing some mindset work with you. This is coming out of my own journey this past year and I feel like I have a lot to say about today's topic. We're going to be talking about the process of waiting and its role in the entrepreneur's journey. I want you to take a look at your life right now and identify what is something that you have been waiting for. So you can scan your business, but you could also scan your personal life. Or maybe it's your own personal development, something you want to become. And what is it that comes to mind? Maybe it's that next big income goal you've been trying to reach and you just can't seem to get there. Or it's a collaboration that you're hoping will come through. Maybe it's your partner going full time into farming or when your kids get out of school or finally get to go to school and you have some freedom. Maybe you've been waiting to be taken seriously by your family or your peers. Or it's that new you pick flowers marketing thing that you want to go viral and it just hasn't gone viral yet. Or maybe you can't wait until you can leave the market for good and that's what you've been waiting for just a little bit longer. What is something you've been waiting for? For as long as I can remember I have always followed a mantra of slow and steady wins the race. You've heard this, right? The old fable from Aesop. And I'm really good at following this. I learned this at a young age. I remember saying this to myself when I was in middle school when I valued certain things that my peers around me didn't seem to value. And I just kept telling myself, you know what, Corinna, don't worry. Just follow your heart and keep doing what you know is important, even though it's not the cool thing to do. Because one day this is going to pay off and I would have this long term view of my life. Hold on, make the investment. One day it's going to pay off. And that's made it a lot easier for me, I think, to be disciplined and persevere through the required passage of time to acquire big things in your life. I remember my first job as a youth minister and having to build this huge youth ministry program. That was sort of the mission that I was given. And I knew that in order to do it well, so that it would have staying power once I ultimately left one day, that it would have to be done a certain way and that that would take time. And rather than just, you know, poof, something together to make everybody happy and just have it ready in six months, I chose to deliberately build it slowly, one brick at a time. Slow and steady wins the race. And every year I would add on another layer until by year five, when I left, like, it was a strong and stable ministry and I left it in really good hands and it didn't fall apart. And now I find myself in another season of waiting. For those of you who've been following this podcast for a while, or maybe you're inside of farm marketing school, or you've been in my accelerator program, you know that I have been dealing with a health issue since last November. So it's been almost 12 months that I have been trying to figure out how to heal myself. And I am so close, you guys. I am so close to being completely symptom free. I can't, like, call it yet and say I'm in remission. I'm completely healed of this gut thing, whatever it is. Like, I can't say that yet, but I'm getting really close. But I have had to really deal with this question in a very personal way of waiting, waiting for the healing to come, waiting for answers, waiting for tests, wondering and waiting. What is this all for? What does it mean to be Corinna if I can't Be producing. What if I'm, you know, not doing the things I used to do all the time? I'm not as busy. I'm just sitting here feeling useless, really having to do a lot of mindset work on what does it mean to be Corinna when I can't produce and when is this going to go away? Will it go away? Right? And so, man, if you could just read through. I have been journaling through the last year. It's been very helpful doing that. I've also had a coach kind of working with me for some of that time. I'm so grateful for Rebecca to just kind of keep me on perspective, but I wanted to do an entire episode on the topic of waiting because I have just discovered some beautiful truths along the way. Here I am still waiting, technically, and yet I have found such blessing in this time. And so I want to spend the next 30, 40 minutes with you sharing some of my thoughts about waiting. And my hope is that you will take some of these questions that I pose to you, some of these mindset shifts, and that you will actually go and journal on them in the next week or two. In fact, I'm going to leave these questions in a PDF in the show notes at. @mydigitalfarmer.com 288. You'll be able to go and download them and work your way through them. Spend some time thinking about them through the lens of your own particular desire that you are waiting on. And I hope that it will kind of transform you and empower you. Because I want you to finish your race. I want you to persevere and endure and keep going. Push through the waiting period and find the gems that are hiding in here. Today. I'm going to have you hopefully see that you are right where you need to be and that there is purpose and good coming from this season. And when we choose to look for it, we'll see it. And one day in the future you will look back on this time and you will say, ah, I see now why that happened. I see why I had to wait. It all makes sense now. Can you trust your future self now? The first question I want you to think about is, what are the benefits to waiting? Because I think it's really easy to go negative here. We make an assumption that waiting is bad, that there's no value in waiting, that we should be productive, creating value all the time. Usually waiting makes us stop. We can't continue to do what we wanted to do, or we associate it with losses and we don't like losing things. And yet sometimes those waiting periods, those losses, actually create opportunities for new life later. They may take something away from us for now, but it ends up creating a gap, a vacuum, where new can come in, new thoughts can come in, new opportunities, new resources, new people, and a whole new pivoting moment happens, and you become a completely different person. So the first question I just really want you to think about is what could be the benefits of waiting right now? And just try to imagine a few reasons. This is going to be hard, but push yourself to come up with, like, three ideas of what good could actually be happening in this interim time. Now, waiting is a pretty common human experience. I want you to reflect on that for a moment, too. I just jotted down a few ideas here of where you see waiting in the natural world. So gestation, right? Like when we are forming a new human in our wombs, like, that's nine months of waiting. I thought about all these developmental milestones that my children went through, learning how to read, potty training. I remember trying to force my kid to potty train as early as possible. And I learned by my second child that they're just ready when they're ready. So those of you who are parents with the first kid just. They're just going to be ready when they're ready. You can't push it any sooner. Don't try. It really does just happen one day. That's just a waiting period. As a parent, you look in Mother Nature and you see the seasons depending on where you live. You just have to wait. And there is a season for spring, a season for fall, a season for winter, in my case as well, and summer, right? And they just naturally happen, and you can't rush them. There's this whole idea in our, in our society of paying your dues. I'm watching my son, who's 16 years old right now. He's been going through this aviation program and he's so eager to get to the fun work, right, of actually working on the planes and working with tools. And unfortunately, they don't actually get into the hangar and start teaching you that until your junior and senior year. And you just have to, quote, unquote, pay your dues the first two years of school and do the boring stuff, you know, learn all the textbook things, pass that really first, that first major test, the general for general aviation. And if you can get through that, then you get to do the fun stuff. And that's just something that you just have to deal with, you know, you Got to pay your dues. You could say that for a lot of things. With your first job, you don't often get your dream job right out of the gate. If you are, you are super, super lucky. Um, I also think about what I call cathedral moments, like doing a great work. So I look back at my life. I've always been sort of under this idea that I have a great work in me. There is something that I've been called to do that is going to leave a mark on, on the planet. And I really want to make sure that I meet that mission. And those cathedral works, those. Those projects that are worth doing, that last, they take a while. Like cathedrals aren't built in a year. They took lifetimes. There would be sometimes two architects working on a cathedral. Somebody would start working on it, he would die, and then the next architect would take over. Like he wouldn't even see the cathedral come to completion necessarily. Great works are like that. You just have to wait. And then there are these testing moments, these trial moments that you've seen in your family and friends life and you've seen in your own. Right. I call them crucible moments. The moments that are. That are just really hard and you don't know if you're going to get through them. I feel like I'm in one of those right now. And you feel like you are being refined in the fire. But this is the great crucible moment. Will you kind of break out of it and like a phoenix and have a new life? Right. So there are just seasons in our life where waiting is a common human experience and it's just part of the gig. So why wouldn't we expect there to be things we're waiting for as we build our business? So what I want to do for the rest of this episode is I have some notes here where I have some kind of either key concepts or it's a mindset breakthrough that I sort of had at some point during the last eight months. And then I have some sort of general comments under each of those. I'm going to go through these notes with you. Like I said, it's going to be a little woo woo. This is more just for you to hopefully be encouraged and reflect. Not label your waiting period as a bad thing, but to see it in a different set of eyes and to perhaps think, wow, this is maybe a good thing that I'm going through right now. Maybe the waiting isn't bad. Maybe there's something happening right now for me because of the waiting and I shouldn't rush it. That's my hope. So just let this wash over you. And if you feel like you need to spend some time really reviewing this, either on your own or with your business partner, then go back to my show notes and grab that PDF and you can kind of journal through some of this stuff over the next few weeks. Okay. So the first thing that I wrote down here is that waiting can feel stagnant, like there's no movement, Right? That's one of the reasons, I think, why we discount waiting, why we think it's a bad thing. It feels like we're not moving, that we're stuck. And I have been challenged to realize that something is always moving, even in the waiting. And there was a metaphor that was shared with me that I just found really helpful. It kind of helped me kind of break through this. And it was this idea that everything in the universe is in motion. Even this cup of coffee that's sitting right here on my desk and looks like a stagnant object. Like, it's not moving. It's a solid. But if you were to get down at the molecular level of this ceramic cup, you would actually see the atoms or the molecules slightly jiggling. Even the molecules themselves are moving at a molecular atomic level. So everything in the universe is shaking and moving. Some things are really moving, right? So even when we feel like we're stuck, we're not actually stuck because we're living in a fluid environment. There are things happening around us to us. There are people interacting with us, and things are happening in their life. There are the proverbial, like, domino stack, right? You line up a bunch of dominoes, and then you. You hit one, and it just starts to fall. Like there are domino trains falling all around us. And sometimes those dominoes line up with our dominoes and affect our lives, right? So we have to remember that there is always something moving. And part of the challenge when we have this thought, like, oh, I'm stuck, there's nothing happening, is to actually challenge that and say, no, that's not true. What is actually moving in this quote unquote stuck situation? Right? It's really easy to skip the signs of progress, to skip the signs that motion is happening within your situation. So what I want you to do is consider your particular situation where you feel like you're waiting. And I want you to say, where do I see motion? And I want you to catalog it and write it down. Have you learned something? Did you try something? Did you talk to somebody about something? Did someone give you an idea, even though you might have discarded it and decided, no, I'm not going to do that. Did you get a no? When you tried something, did you get a yes? Was there a new piece of information, a new piece of equipment, a new hire? Where is there any kind of energy present in the situation? This exercise was so helpful for me when I was going through the worst of my recovery. Man, there were days when I just felt like it was the same. I felt the same symptoms. It wasn't getting noticeably better. And I'm just like, I'm going to be here forever. And I had to keep reminding myself, no, it's not the same. Because yesterday I tried this and this. I tried eating this and I had a reaction. I tried eating this and nothing happened. Right. Like, I could document that I was doing things and there were results and I was learning from that, or, oh, I discovered this new potential solution. I'm going to explore that in a few days. Or, oh, I scheduled this exam with my doctor and we're going to get this test. Granted, I have to wait two months before I can get it the test, but it's in the works, right? So I was writing down all the things that I was actively doing, actively learning and reminding myself that there is progress being made. You are getting information. You are meeting people. You are reading up on things. You are learning. You are practicing perseverance. You are getting stronger mentally. Right? So I want to encourage you to look at whatever your situation is and challenge that idea that there's no movement. When I'm stuck. Waiting feels stagnant. Well, it can feel stagnant, but that doesn't mean that there isn't something happening in the waiting. In reality, you are in motion all the time. And one day, I want you to think about this. One day that log jam is just going to break. Think about this log jam, all this energy building up, right? This energy waiting to be released. And because of these actions that you've been taking during the waiting, one day there's going to be one final little straw that breaks the camel's back and that log jam is just going to break. All of that work that you've done in the waiting is going to pay off. Okay, so that's sort of like one thought that I wanted to encapsulate there. Okay. My next thought here that I wrote down is, what if your waiting is happening for you? I really want you to explore that. This is a big mindset shift, because sometimes we say because we look at waiting as a bad thing, we Talk about it as if it's happening to us. Like we're a victim of waiting. And I really had a breakthrough around this, where I'm like, oh, maybe the waiting is a gift. What if it's working for me? So here's just some possibilities why you may still be in the waiting phase. Do you need to master something here first before you are ready to graduate to wherever it is you want to go? Maybe, God knows, the universe knows that you won't be able to succeed on the other side unless you have mastered whatever it is that you're working on right now. And so we're just waiting for that to happen. Maybe you just need more reps. Do you need to discover a person? Maybe there's a connection that needs to be made in order for whatever it is that you want to have happen to really shine. I love this image of the domino train. And if your life is a series of events and transactions and experiences, they all kind of represent dominoes that you line up. Okay. And that the universe kind of lines up with you, and your dominoes sometimes intersect with someone else's, and their domino in your train matters, or you don't go where you need to go, right? And so sometimes the waiting is because that person hasn't lined up yet. Just consider that possibility. I can think of certain people in my life. As I look back, hindsight is 20 20. I can see pivotal moments in my life where it was a person that caused something to happen, a connection that I had with a person, and if I hadn't met that person, we wouldn't be where we are now. My life would look very different. And so we don't want to discount the importance of how collaborations or meeting up with certain people, sometimes even randomly, could really change the course of your life. So I know you have examples of that. So consider that there are more of those to come, and that may be why you are waiting. Maybe the waiting is happening for you because you have to make a mistake still. Like, in order for you to get there, you have to make a mistake. You have to go through a trial or learn something, because that's going to be really important for you later on for you to master the next thing kind of goes back to learning a lesson. So what is this moment teaching you? Could this waiting period be teaching you something instead of, again, looking at it like, I'm a victim? Like, maybe it's. Maybe it's got something valuable to show you and it will not let you move forward until you have seen that lesson? And really embraced it. So this is a question. What if your waiting is happening for you? I really encourage you to journal on what if you're just not ready yet, right? What if the universe. What if God is protecting you from something suddenly that makes this whole situation look a whole lot different, Right? I think about, with my own health journey, I actually thought about this idea of being protected, that this period of waiting is actually protecting me. And this is getting a little bit personal. But like, my mother, she passed away when she was 70 from a digestive disorder. And I have always had a fear that I would have that as well. And so that was something that was going through my mind as I was getting ill. I'm like, oh, no, is this the beginning of that? I'm like, it's way too early, but what if this is the beginning of that? And then I eventually changed my mind and I began to say, what if this is actually a warning? What if this is, hey, an intervention? Like, get your gut in order, change your lifestyle, make your. Your healthy eating habits, make your health like a huge focus of your life. Because if you can do this now, then you might actually subvert that whole possible future story that your mother went through. And I have chosen to claim that as my story because I don't want to consider the alternative. And I went through all the tests. I, like, have gotten a clean bill of health on all the things that were wrong with her. Like, I'm clear, I'm good. And that is a huge relief. So I feel like, okay, I'm a clean slate right now, so I don't have to worry about any of those things right now. And maybe this is actually the universe. God. In my case, I say this is God intervening and saying, I'm going to help you break this cycle right now. This is your moment. Take advantage of it. So I have chosen to look at this experience of waiting as a time where the universe where God has been protecting me. And waiting can be a gift if we choose to look at it this way. I want you to imagine, like, waiting fits inside of a container of space and time, right? There is a starting point and there is an end point. And within this container, all kinds of stuff can happen. It forced me to innovate and get creative and look for ideas. It created what I call white space. There was a lot of time here in the. So far, in the nine, ten months that I've been dealing with this, where I couldn't do a whole lot. And I had to just sit there and figure out how do I handle white space? What am I going to do with myself if I can't actually produce value? And I had to get comfortable with defining myself and my value in a different way. But even having white space was a blessing. I'm one of these people that's always on the go, that's always doing stuff. Are you one of those people, too? I have a hard time. I had a hard time with white space. And I have gotten much more comfortable with it now of just being present, of allowing the clock to run and not doing anything with it because I can hear things, I notice things. I just feel like I'm living more because I'm not just always thinking about what's happening in the future and how I need to prepare for it. I can actually be present right now because I have to feel the white space. I have to feel the presence within that container of waiting. I've also learned how to set boundaries. I had. I can think of specifically within Digital Farmer. I know I've been asked by so many people, you guys have been amazing, to come and speak at events or do a webinar. And normally I would see those as great opportunities to expand my reach. But I purposely told myself I'm going to say no to any request to speak until at least December. Like maybe early November. I'll rethink it. But I just knew that I needed to give my space, myself, space to heal. And so I had to get comfortable with saying no to people. I had to give boundaries around my own business with shared legacy farms. I used to do a whole lot more. I was out in the pack shed. I was working with the staff a lot more. I was doing a lot more even just on social media and writing my newsletter. And this past year, I. I had to cut back and set boundaries and say, I'm doing the newsletter at 70% of what I used to do, because I just need to set a boundary, and it's going to have to be good enough. And you know what? Nobody even noticed. That was a lesson in itself. But the moral of the story there is I learned how to practice setting boundaries. I'm not sure I would have ever done that unless this had, quote, unquote, happened for me. That was one of the gifts that came out of this, learning to set boundaries for myself. There was physical rest. Oh, man. I think my body just really needed me to rest and slow down. And this was a cry for help to stop moving and take care of my temple. And I have honored that. And I continue to honor that, yeah. And just in general, this has been a trust fall. I call it my trust fall into God's arms. A huge surrender, really releasing my future. What I imagined for my future, like still having goals and dreams, still wishing and hoping for xyz. Right. But also realizing that it's going to happen on maybe on a different timeline, not being so attached to that and trusting that I'm going to eventually get to the end of this. And do I trust my God to get me there? Do I trust my future self to know what to do next week, next month, at the next trial, at the next challenge in this journey? Because she's always come through for me and helped me figure it out. I'm like, you know, 90% there and I'm so proud of myself and I know that she will continue to do an amazing job as I finish this race. So as you look at your waiting period, this container of space and time, will you look at it as a gift? How can it be good for you? Where do you already see it producing good for you? Can you decide right now that it's going to be something good for you? Because that intentional decision is going to make you show up differently and make you respond differently. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School. This is my monthly membership program that helps farmers build their marketing systems for their business. If you are a farmer that doesn't really have a good machine in place that's helping you collect leads, attract your ideal customer, deliver your offer, nurture them into super fans, and learn how to continue to make revenue off of them, then this is a program that you might want to join. This is a monthly membership which means you pay month to month. And inside I have over 10 to 12 different marketing projects that are 30 day project builds and farmers can come in, they take an assessment to figure out where they are in their business, what elements they might be missing in their marketing sales system, and then you build the different pieces of the machine month by month. You get to decide what to work on first. I have projects about the website makeover. I have a project about building your email nurture sequence, writing a weekly email, building a promotion calendar. This coming month, the month of November, we're actually doing a live book study on building a story brand by Donald Miller and you will be building a brand script for your farm, getting clear about what your marketing message is. So that's the live project going on right now. And in the month of January, I'm going to be releasing a new project all about marketing metrics and we're going to be doing a deep dive on the key. It's kind of a short list of the metrics that you need to be tracking and I'll teach you them one by one. And then your homework is going to be to go find that metric for that week and build it into your workbook so that you can be tracking it. It's going to be super good. So if you want to join this community, head to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/fms to learn all about it. It includes a host of project builds. Each project has a teaching workshop, it has a project planner, it has templates to help make the process of building your own version a lot faster. And we also have a monthly zoom meetup where we talk out our questions. So I hope you decide to join the community. I'm super geeked about it this winter to work with my members and work one on one with them and help them. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS to enroll now. And now back to the show I want to offer here. Something that's helped me is to focus less on the outcome, focus less on the importance of getting to the destination. Because I think that the temptation is to make the destination everything and instead really try to celebrate the process of getting there. The journey itself. That sounds so cliche, but if you have ever been on, on a tough road, you know the truth behind this, that, that goal, that destination, it's really there to just motivate us to evolve. That's. That's the goal, the reason we have goals, that's the reason we're staring at the destination with such desire. Because it's motivating me to evolve and grow. But it's the actual journey, the actual evolution of myself, the making of Corinna, the making of you, that is actually the real gift. That's what life is living, is the becoming, right? And so I want to offer you, like, focus less on the outcome and try to be present to what you're actually going through right now and appreciate that it has its place and it's doing something beautiful right now. It's necessary for you to become the next version of yourself. And do you trust your future self to be able to do, to know what to do? I mean, do you? Because if you do, then you will be able to release the fear and you'll be able to be a little more present and enjoy the process. I don't want to say enjoy the process, but appreciate the process. Like if I Know, if somebody could come here right now and say, you are going to be completely symptom free on December 22nd of 2024, oh my gosh, that would be amazing. And I've actually started getting to that point now. Like, I don't. When I first had this illness, I couldn't. I couldn't even imagine. I was like, this is never going away. And now I'm at the point, I feel like I'm so close to the finish line where I can actually imagine that happening. I can actually believe that there is a day in the future where it will be officially over. And I sometimes will journal. I'll be like, it's December 22nd or whatever, you know, And I am completely symptom free. Like, there is a specific day in the future where this happens. And that's the case for you, too. There is a specific day in the future where the waiting ends, the container ends. So start acting as if it's coming. Come up with a day, make it up, and start imagining that it's arrived, here it is, and you know that it's. It's going to happen. Because it's that certainty that allows us then to be, I think, more comfortable in the present waiting period, to be okay with whatever the feelings are right now, the discomfort that I might still be in occasionally with my symptoms, I can manage that when I believe and know that this is ending on a specific day. It's just the fact that we don't know exactly when. That's what makes this hard. Right? So trust your future self and know that you can find joy and fun in the becoming, in the journey. And you will look back on this waiting period and you'll almost look back at it like, wow, those were the days. I probably wouldn't want to do it again, but I'm so glad I went through it. Because only in that process would I have become what I am today. And I needed to go through that feeling to appreciate who I am now or to learn the lesson that I am now. Okay, that one was a little hard for me to explain, but I hope you got the gist of it. My next point is this. Waiting makes you get still so that you can hear and sense what you are supposed to do next. This one has been huge for me. I've always considered myself fairly intuitive. I think it's one of my gifts. So if you look at my Myers Briggs, I'm an enfj, so I've always been good at sort of sensing the feelings in the room. But I have really noticed that because I have all this white space and I haven't been able to do things and I've been forced to get still and just sort of notice the world around me, that I've used that time to read, to reflect, to journal, to think and to be quiet. And I have been getting so many ideas. I feel like God's talked to me and encouraged me. I get creative ideas for how to explore my healing and I've been getting ideas for digital farmer and for my farm business. So I think that there's something to be said here. For sometimes we, we probably. Our souls probably need to wait. We need to have a time of quiet and rest and that this may be the way that God makes sure we get it, that we have these moments of waiting because we know that good ideas and creative thoughts can come to us when we create time to think. So I just want to challenge you to look at your season of waiting perhaps as a blessing because it may be a time where you're invited to get quiet and explore the radar and see what's coming up for you. What do you see ahead? What are some ideas and. And just let your mind go blank. You don't necessarily have to be looking for them and just wait for the ideas to surface. Your brain just might be tired, your body might be tired and it needs to rest before it can come and refuel you and re energize you. One of the other thoughts I explored under kind of this topic here was there you have so many possible good paths ahead of you and you will see them when you get quiet and when you wait. At first, all I saw was more of the same. I felt trapped in a corner. And the more I have waited and have begun to appreciate the motion that's present in waiting trying things. I have seen paths opening up and I've really come to appreciate that there isn't just one, one road to follow. There's probably many roads that I could explore and they will all lead me to a slightly different place or perhaps get me to the same place in a different way. But they are all good paths in their own way. And I appreciate how the process of waiting has shown me that. Okay, my next thought is this isn't rocket science. You've heard this before, but it's really true. I need to remind you that good things take time and quality is a long game. It takes time to build a customer base for your business. Did anyone tell you that? Yeah, it takes time. If you're like kicking yourself and you're like, my email list only has 40 people on it. Well, you know what? That's okay. If you're still at the beginning of your journey, that's probably a decent number. It takes time to grow that. It takes time to learn how your soil works. It takes time to heal your soil. Amen. It takes time to build systems in your business so that you can be running an efficient, profitable machine on your farm. It takes time to find the right people. You're going to go through a lot of people before you find the perfect match. It takes time to build a reputation as a business. It takes time to raise a child into a beautiful human. Maybe you are building something lasting and beautiful right now. Quality. A quality program, a quality business. A quality child, a quality marriage. Take your time. Because good things take time. Don't rush it. Okay, I have one more thought I wanted to share with you here. If you're one of those people that has been waiting and waiting and waiting for a long time for whatever it is, maybe today you need someone to give you permission to let it go. Now, I want to make a distinction here. Notice that I didn't say give up on it. I said to let go. And what I mean by that is, I think sometimes we are so attached to the way in which we want this goal to work out. We have a very limited idea of how it should be manifested, when it should happen, where it should happen, and with whom, and how much it should make us. That our imagination is very small. And I want to challenge you to surrender your attachment to how that goal manifests. You can still have the goal. You can still be waiting for something to happen. But maybe it means you need to let go of trying to micromanage the way it works out for you. If you can't find joy in the process and your heart is just dead, it's okay to explore this idea of redeciding. This is something my coach and I worked on a lot many months ago when I would start to not be excited about something anymore. But I felt like I had to keep doing it because it was, you know, it was the goal that I was chasing. And she's like, you can redecide. You know, you can always redecide. There is no one best right way to do your life. There isn't one way to define success. If you've been chasing this one version of success for so long and you feel like you've got to keep. Keep doing it because you're. You're all in now you get to redecide. You get to change your mind if you want. You get to decide how you will feel about it, too. And that may be the breakthrough that the universe wants you to see. Today. I want my waiting period to be over, guys, as much as you do. I want to be fully healed. And I am so close, I can taste it. I know what I want. And you know what you want. And for now, I am relentlessly asking for it, praying for it, getting down on my knees before God every day. I am doing things to partner with him, expecting that that future will one day come. But I am learning to release my attachment to the timeline, to the exactly how and when. And instead, I'm learning to see what I have right now. I'm learning to appreciate the fact that I am 90% better and that I'm able to do most of what I used to be able to do before. I'm able to podcast without chewing gum. I'm able to sing again. I'm able to walk my dog for more than 10 minutes without losing my breath. I am able to run errands and go grocery shopping. I'm able to eat steak again. I'm able to have. I had pistachio pie for my birthday and I was okay, right? Like, I'm able to sleep in my own bed again. There are all these wins that are huge. And so I'm learning to see the progress, the things I do have. And this constant, always looking to the future, scanning my horizon to see if what I want is coming. Like, that's exhausting. It's keeping me from seeing the present and living and being in the present. So I want to encourage you. If you're one of those people that's been waiting and waiting and waiting, I want to give you permission to let go of your attachment to the how and the when. Surrender that and trust that the waiting process is right where you need to be, that there is something good and valuable moving right now. And when the time is right for you to exit this container, you will. And you have a glorious future waiting for you. For now, keep your eyes on where you are and appreciate the progress you are making. See the motion that is happening and be excited and anticipate the life that is coming and that it will be good, it will be great. Trust your future to your future self. You are right where you need to be. All right, that's all I have today. I want you to journal and think about. What are the benefits to waiting in your situation? What did you learn from today? What. What thought really struck you and I want you to go talk it out with your business partner or pray about it or journal on it. And don't shame yourself for being in a waiting period. These are powerful, powerful moments. These moments of waiting are all over the place in the stories of the great heroes who would go on these quests and often would be found wandering in the wilderness for months at a time being made ready for their great adventure and their great final battle. And so you're in this wilderness moment right now, and it's not a bad thing. It's right where you need to be. You're being made ready for something beautiful that is yet to come. All right my friends, have a wonderful, wonderful week and thanks for going woo woo with me. It was fun. If you liked today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review or share the episode with a friend. Don't forget, if you want to get onto my email list, I have some awesome free stuff to send your way. It will be about marketing, I promise. Maybe a little woo woo stuff to challenge your mindset, but you can get that by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe. Don't forget. I'm also now on Instagram ydigitalfarmer. I'd love to connect with you there, especially inside of Stories. And thanks for joining me today. Have a wonderful week. Happy Thanksgiving to all of my friends in North America and the United States. Next week is Thanksgiving. I will be at Mommy Bay Resort with my family. Hopefully. Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Having green beans, turkey and mashed potatoes with everyone else. I am so grateful for all of you. I believe in you. Have a good week.