Today was a good day. I spent a wonderful afternoon at Canada’s Wonderland with a very dear friend of mine and two of her daughters. I took most of the wild rides that appealed to me and oh wow, the drop zone did a number on me.
It has been a long, long time since I last took a whole day off and I just realized that this is something I should do more often. Rest. Pay attention to things that are not only work and/or money driven.
I have to admit, for a total of 30 minutes or so out of the day I did cheat. Through the marvel of iPhone and 3G Internet I replied to a two client emails, four posts on Link Dozer forum and one private message.
I live about an hour away from the “Drop Zone” that inspired me to write this post. So while driving home and having my friend and her kids sleep, I wondered off in thoughts and an interesting and rather accurate analogy went through my mind (I promise, I’m a safe driver.. I did watch the road).
“The Drop Zone” … It is a lot like “out of the comfort zone”. You approach the platform, you sit in the seat, you buckle up, the contraption lifts you unexpectedly high up in the air and then it stops. All of a sudden the contraption releases the grip and you are in an incredibly fast, a mere few seconds to the ground, state of free fall and the body and mind do a series of the most strange, unique things you can imagine.
Your thoughts start racing, you don’t quite know if you are thinking “Oh help me God!” or “Am I going to die now!?” or “What the fuck was I thinking!”. Now that I think about it I am pretty sure my thoughts were along the line of “Oh God! I’m going to die! What the fuck was I thinking!” by the time the thought formulated I was already down unbuckling the safety stuff.
The body on the other hand goes into a strange state of “clenching” if I can describe it accurately. Your breath locks (you don’t need to breath, you feel like you are going to die anyways), you close your eyes (like that’s going to make any difference) because you don’t want to see your death coming from down below and your abdominal muscles go rock hard. You even feel the two missing abs above the desired six-pack..
And that like all of that wasn’t enough, I decided to go again. I figured, now I know what to expect, I will surely be able to control my thoughts and my body better. And guess what!?
“What the fuck was I thinking!” lol.
You see I progressed from one drop to the other. I did not call for divine intervention to help me save my life and I was pretty sure I’ll be able to survive it. Even my hands shook somewhat less the second time.
So while droving home and thinking about it. Thinking about the difference between how I thought and how I felt differently only between the two drops it occurred to me that what happened is simply a process of adjustment. The first time I did it I was a newbie. Didn’t know what to expect and the result was a thrill but a very hectic one. I was all over the place. The second one however came with familiarity. It was still a thrill, still my body had a natural reaction to a free fall (I did not close my eyes the second time either) but mt thoughts were more composed.
In Internet Marketing there is a place that you can also consider to be a drop zone. At first this may seem odd as an analogy but it’s all about the comfort zone.
Most new becoming Internet Marketers dream up a scenario of making great money online. It is most certainly a viable aspiration. However coming from a background of not “knowing” what it is to make significant money and to also assume all the responsibilities that come with it, all the new coming and most of less successful marketers are repeating the very first drop in “The Drop Zone”.
What I’m actually saying is that most of what I see in IM is persistent failing due to lack of ability to observe and adjust.
The observing goes in both self and others direction. If you are persistently not doing as good as you think you should, are you repeating the same approach? The same feelings and thoughts every time? If you are, that’s where all your problems are.
If you are observing other successful marketers and you are not adjusting your observations onto your marketing attempts, what do you think you are doing wrong? Do you ever stop to actually observe yourself in your process of building your online business? If not. You truly should.
More so. Did you ever actually do something twice without being repetitive about it? Did you do something once observed the result and then went on to repeat it but with a different mind set (with more confidence).
If not…. you should.
Mistakes don’t have to be bad things. They can be a great platform for learning. This is much how I treat my drop zones.