When Yesterday & Tomorrow Consume Your Today

Meet Host, Mary Grothe

Mary Grothe is a former #1 MidMarket B2B Sales Rep who after selling millions and breaking multiple records, formed House of Revenue®, a Denver-based firm of fractional Revenue Leaders who currently lead the marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, they've helped multiple 2nd stage growth companies between $5M - $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months, resulting in an average ROI of 1,454% and an average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million.

Don't Have Time to Listen, Read The Full Transcription.

[Theme music plays]

Mary Grothe: Hey everyone, this is Mary Grothe - Founder and CEO - and you're listening to the Revenue Radio® podcast brought to you by House of Revenue®. Each week, we'll talk about common revenue challenges and how to get past them, share real-world experiences, and get a glimpse into my life as a CEO scaling my own business. If you're a struggling entrepreneur, or just an entrepreneur looking to be inspired, this podcast is for you. I'll give you honest, unfiltered, and practical insights into growing your business and getting past your revenue plateau.

[Theme music ends]

I'm reading a book by John C. Maxwell called "Today Matters." In the early section of the book, pages 10 to 12 have a really nice explanation of why today matters. As we look at yesterday's correlation to yesterday and tomorrow, as a CEO, this section of this chapter stood out to me. I digested the content here and actually, last week, shared my takeaways with our team during our all-hands meeting. I was really moved by their response, the way that they were able to immediately acknowledge it and look to implement this theory.

Let me break it down for you and why it stood out for me. Putting the words together for you. Today matters because yesterday is non-existent; it's gone. It doesn't matter. I mean, it matters, but it's not there anymore. Tomorrow hasn't happened yet. It's not guaranteed. There's so much outside of our control that can happen between now and then. Today matters. We can be intentional about today. Today, this moment in time, this is all that we have. All we have is the present, so we can't go back and repeat anything.

Whereas we can be prepared and plan for tomorrow. We honestly can't fully control the outcome. We're stealing from today while we worry about tomorrow. Worrying is like praying for the things you don't want to happen. Worry is based on fear, being without, or feeling a lack of abundance. It's no good, like more of that scarcity mindset. Worrying about tomorrow is a difficult place to be in today. What about the people who can't let go of yesterday, last month, or last year?

This is the visual I painted for our team to follow along with me here. I draw on the whiteboard, like a rectangle, or I guess a square. If this is today, this is the capacity you have for today. This is it. This is all the capacity you have. It's a blank empty canvas. You get to decide how much of today's capacity is taken away.

Then, I took a different colored marker and filled the left side in by yesterday. How much of your capacity today is being consumed by your thoughts of yesterday, last month, last week, last quarter, last year, or something that happened in your past? You're challenging yourself to realize that if you only have so much capacity for today, you are actively, knowingly robbing from today. You can't get out of the past. If that is a habit that you find yourself being, I guess a victim of you are stealing from yourself. It's completely unnecessary.

Then if you look at the other side of your blank canvas, I took a different colored marker, and I colored it. I ate into the blank canvas with a different color marker. I said this is your worry about tomorrow. Worry is just non-stop. You start creating this narrative and going down these rabbit holes. Your negative emotions feed off more negative ones. We are true artists as human beings. We can tell ourselves whatever story we want at the moment. It can become difficult to control those triggered negative emotions or negative feelings. Then it impacts our ability to do work. We were not focused on the task at hand.

The visual that I put up on the whiteboard showed everyone to say if your blank canvas for today if your full capacity for today was this, you have a third of it being eaten up by what happened yesterday. The third is being eaten up by what may or may not happen tomorrow. You have robbed yourself of two-thirds of what you're capable of doing today. You robbed yourself of the capacity, worrying about things or thinking about things that you cannot control that truly don't even exist.

We talked about ways to increase your capacity for today - being in the moment, being present, not having those negative emotions like fear, anxiety, scarcity mindset, or worry. If you can focus on having those thoughts about yesterday be non-existent or small as possible. The same thing with the thoughts about tomorrow, the worry about tomorrow, you can increase your capacity throughout the day. What can we do to remove that? You can't ignore your feelings. You have to work through them. Acknowledge them and let them be known, whether that's to yourself, a loved one, or significant other.

We heard a lot about authenticity. If you're carrying something heavy with you, it would have gone away if you could talk through it, process it, you have a coach, a counselor, or somebody that can walk you through it. Well, how can you process what happened yesterday? I think that's going to be essential. One thing I do, I told the team, admitted that at night, I lay down, and when my head is on the pillow, I do what is referred to as replay the tapes. What I mean by that is I replay the day. I go through the catalog of events of the day. I celebrate where I won. I will do a post mortem on things, situations, conversations, meetings, emails, whatever. I ask myself, "If I had a chance to do it over, I would have done it differently?"

I analyze the situation to get to the root cause of why I was triggered or why I reacted so quickly versus responding. If once I saw the outcome of my decision, I had that hindsight that I'd done something different. Okay, great. What could I have picked up on? What did I miss? So I challenged myself to go through and replay the tapes. Then, if I did something I'm embarrassed about, frustrated, feeling any guilt or shame. I have to release myself from that and forgive myself. I go through those moments of replaying the tapes. I'm a Christian woman, so my form of that is praying to God and asking him. I just lay it at his feet and asked him to take that weight off of me.

If I truly did something wrong, I repent. I'm genuine in that repentance. I asked for forgiveness. I'm really asking myself to forgive myself because I can't carry that into the next day. I am far from perfect, but this exercise works for the most part. Then I end my nightly routine with pure gratitude. That is the last thing I remember before I go to sleep. What I'm entering into dream time after I've forgiven myself is I go into just straight gratitude. I praise God for everything in my life. I acknowledge that I trust him, and whatever is coming to my path, His will is better than mine.

I'm also going through gratitude just finding the good in my day, all the blessings, all the things that I need to stop and realize. I have today what I prayed for a year ago, five years ago. I dreamt of, manifested, or spoken to the existence. It was a seed that God had planted in my heart. Now it has bloomed, and I am reaping the harvest. I never want to take that for granted. I want to make sure that I count those blessings. I'm full of gratitude, to the point where my heart is just so swollen before I go to bed. It just brings tears to my eyes. That is the state in which I enter slumber, and by doing that, I'm able to go to sleep light-hearted, full of love. I've forgiven myself I don't carry things into my sleep. I have better dreams and sleep better.

When I wake up in the morning, I will wake up refreshed. I wake up on my own between 4:30 and 5:00. I just let myself wake up. When I wake up. I don't say, "Oh, I have 20 minutes before my alarm goes off. Let me go back to sleep." That's not good because then you'll be in the middle of a REM cycle. That's awful. When I wake up, the first thing I do is not let myself get into a tizzy. I start with my cup of coffee. I read. I'm reading a devotional in the morning. It's amazing. It's like a workbook. I get to do some reading and journaling. I do that for about 10 or 15 minutes. I drink my coffee. I just allow myself to wake up and don't look at my phone.

This is something that I just started doing at the beginning of the year, so maybe eight weeks into this or so. It has been life-changing. By the time I look at my phone, I'm in a calm, zen state. I don't get triggered. I'm just working through each thing one by one, and it's awesome. Well, it's a shift. I used to look at my phone right away and enter into sheer panic. Everything set me off, and I was already in, get after it mode and solve all the world's problems. I could feel the anxiety, stress, and cortisol in my veins while in the shower. I was already in go mode. That would cause me to be short with my son or husband in the morning, trying to get out the door.

Not anymore. I can spend the first 10 or 15 minutes in this beautiful zen state. I set up my day, look at the calendar, prep for every meeting, and make sure my email inbox is zero. I tackle any big administrative items that I know I need to get done in the morning while I'm fresh. Administrative tasks require detailed work, especially writing, which I find very difficult. I cannot do them later in the day. I have zero ability to do it. Well, then I'm not triggered. I'm really prepared for today. My capacity for today is strong. I will look at what I have on the calendar for tomorrow and potentially the rest of the week.

Then what I do instead of worrying about tomorrow or the rest of the week, I make decisions on what I can tackle today. That will prepare me for tomorrow to get ahead of any of those obstacles or potential objections or scenarios that could lead to a troublesome outcome. I just get ahead of it. I manage everything proactively. With that, I have a tiny little bit of my daily blank canvas capacity for today that I might be thinking about yesterday. I may replay the tapes a couple of times if it's helpful for what I'm doing today. I really don't bring anything in with me because I have forgiven myself, moved past it, and ended that day with gratitude.

The beauty about it is I don't have to worry about tomorrow, because I've already looked at tomorrow. I've already looked at the rest of the week. I'm an organized and prepared person. Nothing is last minute. It's all scheduled into my calendar and all going to get done. I can be thoughtful, ready, calm, have a good vibe and good energy flowing through me. I'm calm. I'm just able to tackle whatever comes at me. It is the most beautiful way to get through the day.

I am so thankful that I've learned in my late 30s how to embrace this. I did not use to be that way. Even though I've always been a high optimist boy, have I been a worrier? Lots of anxiety, stress, worries, and woes are in me. Even though I'm highly optimistic, I still have some woes. It would really be hard for me to let go of the day before. As I get to the end of the day, I make sure before I leave work, if anything does not get done, I don't stress about it. I will communicate to the people or parties if it impacts anybody. Usually, it's just on my admin or to-do list. I carved things out. I have a daily to-do list. So whatever didn't get done today just gets moved to the appropriate day.

I don't get upset with myself if I don't get things done. I'm not worried about it. I am able then to go into my evening. Lo and behold, I'm not freaking out about the proposal that I have to get sent off if I've committed to getting it done at nighttime. I communicate with my family if I have a proposal I need to do. It'll take me about 25 minutes. I will schedule a time to get that done in the evening when it's not disruptive to my family. That's my process for ensuring I'm focused on today.

I hope that you were able to create the visual. It's different with me doing this via podcast versus you've seen the whiteboard. Think about that full blank canvas your capacity for today. How much of today is being eaten up by what you are still thinking about yesterday? What's consuming you? What about your worry for tomorrow or the days ahead? How much is that eating into today versus just being prepared in planning and just releasing yourself from the outcome? There are so many things that you can't control until tomorrow is today. Hope this frees you and brings in more capacity so that your today can matter.

[Theme music plays]

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being on our show or want to learn more about how we can help you scale your company, connect with us at houseofrevenue.com or with me Mary Grothe spelled G-R-O-T-H-E on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Connect with House of Revenue® on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

[Theme music ends]