 House cleaners who hit rock bottom. Is that you or somebody that you know? Is it possible that you were at a phase of your business where you hit rock bottom and you were able to pull yourself out? I know I was and have been multiple times. Many of you know my story. I've been a failure many, many, many times as a house cleaner over the last 30 years. I've fired myself five times only to rehire myself when I got my head back on straight and I was thinking clearly again. And I say my head back on straight because in my head I have to be able to run a business before I can be successful. And when I felt like I was a failure and I hit rock bottom, I said this is not for me. Why am I doing this? And I got out of the business. Okay. I had rehired myself because of all of the things that the cleaning business has provided for me. And when I compared it with other avenues of my life, I figured out that's where I needed to be. All right. So what happens when you hit rock bottom? We talked about a lot of different opportunities on this show and different ways that you can avoid burnout and stress and ways that you can manage your business so that it runs smoothly based off of systems. But what happens if you just feel like you're going to throw in the towel, employees are quitting right and left, you have more money being spent than you have money coming in and all these chaotic things that happen as a business owner? I don't know if it was 25 or 35 years ago, but I remember at the time we didn't have search engines like we do today that were available just to search answers and you find the answer online and boom, you're good to go. I know that what happened for me was I would go to the public library and I found a book. It was a new book that had just come out called The Artist's Way. And The Artist's Way, if I remember correctly, because it's been about 25 or 30 years since I went through this process. But if I remember correctly, it was a program where you get up every single morning and you take a yellow legal pad and you take an ink pen and you start writing as fast as you can. And you cannot reread the information that you just wrote and you cannot judge it and you cannot edit it. The whole purpose is to get the thoughts out of your brain and onto paper. So at the time I was really discouraged. I was going through some really difficult times in my life and I didn't have solutions that I was looking for. I was trying to run a business. I was super stressed out. I was maxed out on my money, on my promises. I was at rock bottom. And so I had nothing to lose. When you have nothing to lose and you feel like you're at rock bottom, the only place to look is up, right? So I said, I got nothing to lose. There's nobody judging me. I can sit down and I can write whatever I want. I'm going to try this because I have nothing else to lose. So I sat down and I started writing and I wrote and wrote and wrote and I would write every single day. It became a habit that I did every single day. And for the first several weeks that I wrote, the ideas that came out of my head were all victimization thoughts. Why me? Why is this happening to me? Why are employees leaving my company? Why do I have so many bills? How come it's so expensive to grow a business? Why didn't people teach me this? Why did my parents do this? How come I was raised in a situation like this and I was blaming the entire world around me? And it's interesting when you blame the entire world around you because what you're doing is you're blocking the solutions that can come back to you. And so for days and days and days, I did what I call angry writing. I was angry on the inside. I was a victim. And so as I started writing, all this stuff was just spewing out onto paper. It was awful. But what happened was as I started spewing all this stuff, it got to a point where I kind of spewed it all out, okay? Nobody was listening. It was just on paper, but I was just puking these thoughts. And I was about three weeks in, when all of a sudden it hits me, did you just want to continue spewing or did you really want some answers? And I was like, wait a second, I really do want some answers. So I started writing questions. If I were going to change, what would that look like? If I was going to have more money, what would that look like? What would I have to do to get more money? What would I have to do to get more employees that would stay? What would I have to do to be a better manager that could manage the employees that would inspire them to stay? What could I do to inspire my customers so that there's not this constant churn of doing walkthroughs and evaluating customers' homes and then them firing us after a period of time? What do I have to do differently? And I started asking different questions. Now, what's really peculiar about this situation? Because we're not rereading, we're not judging, and we're not editing what we wrote. But what happens is by writing every day, there's something about the cognitive process of putting a thought from your head all the way through your hand and onto paper. And by doing that every single day, what happened is it started unlocking creativity in my head. As I was out cleaning during the day, I'm running these questions through my head. Instead of these broken tapes of negativity and why me and I'm the victim, I was running tapes through my head that were like, if I was going to be a better boss, what would that look like? And I shortly thereafter enrolled in an evening college class where I could learn about leadership and management so that I could be a better business owner and I could be a better team leader for the people that I was hiring. If I could inspire them to want to stay and I could create a better company culture, maybe they would then stay and they would want to be a part of my business. If I could understand at a better level my customers and I could learn to read the subtext and read between the lines, would I be better at understanding the homes that I'm going into? We go into people's homes and we're bringing with us our own filters and our own information and our own knowledge and our own backgrounds. And so what we're seeing may not be what we're actually seeing at all. All we're seeing is that family's home through our eyes, not through their eyes. And what's interesting about this is when you go to someone's house, they hire you because they're seeing their home through their eyes, not your eyes. And so I started taking classes and I started reading books and I started studying about what do I have to do differently. But back to the morning pages, it was a process of writing and just putting it all out on paper so that I could understand my own thoughts. And what's really peculiar about that is a lot of us want to just throw in the towel because we're looking at exterior things around us. We're blaming the world around us. We're blaming our parents. We're blaming our employees. We're blaming our customers. We're blaming our mentors or whomever it is because we don't actually know what our own thoughts are. I know that sounds really peculiar that you would hit rock bottom and think that it might have something to do with you, right? Of course, it's everyone else's fault. But what really turned around for me and where I really went from struggling as a business owner to being wildly successful was when I started taking responsibility for the stuff that was happening in my own business. I started saying, wait a second, the buck stops here. I am responsible. I am the boss. I am responsible for making sure my customers are happy. I am responsible for making sure that my employees are satisfied in their job and that they're well paid. I am responsible for my own personal physical well-being. I am responsible. And the minute I started taking responsibility for what was happening in my life and the thoughts that were running through my head is the day that my business changed. So if you have hit rock bottom and if you're really, really frustrated, this is a good sign. This is a pendulum that has swung completely to one side and there's only one place for it to go. And that's back to the other side before it settles somewhere in the middle, right? So if it has swung and you just feel like, ah, this is it. Why am I doing this? This is crazy. I want to quit my job. You can quit your job. Like I said, I've quit five times in the course of my career. I quickly rehired myself back because I discovered that I was better working for myself than I was working for other people and that's just the way that I personally operate. And so you can rehire yourself and if you need to take a time out, that's fine too. You might consider the morning pages. You might consider doing a deep dive into what's actually inside your head and the thoughts that are going through your mind because once you figure out what it is that's in there and what's happening, then you have choices. And we say when you are aware, you have choices. You can keep doing it the way you've always done it. And then if you have choices and you are aware, you can do something different. And so my recommendation is that at least you become aware. All right, I hope that helps. If it does, give us a thumbs up. If you've got questions or comments, those go in the notes below. If you have a question, go over to askahousecleaner.com. In the corner, there's a blue button. If you click on that, a microphone appears and you can ask your question right here at the show. We want to help you and we're here to help you as you go through your cleaning journey. Until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.