How to Recover from a Sahara Desert Dry Spell

Have you ever experienced a dry spell in your business? Well it can feel pretty depressing – especially when you are used to having an abundance of clients knocking on your door. If you’ve been in business for more than five years, chances are you’ve encountered a dry spell at some point. If you aren’t careful your dry spell can become a Sahara Desert – a long, debilitating experience of painful longing to feel the good life again.

Desert SOSI experienced one of the most challenging phases of my life two years ago. I lost my mojo – the feeling inside of knowing who I am in my work and how to effortlessly attract the opportunities to serve my tribe.
Instead what I felt inside was an overwhelming feeling of desperation and despair. Being the bread winner for my household I felt the pressure to figure it out – and fast – because without opportunities I knew that handling my financial obligations would quickly become problematic.

Day after day the pressure mounted. More and more fear began to surface. My opportunity faucet felt as dry as the Sahara desert and I didn’t see water on the horizon.

The worst possible reaction to a dry spell is to panic. But panic is what I did and my dry spell lasted longer and longer.

Finally I had an epiphany. Feeling desperate was only going to make things worse. No good idea is ever born out of state of despair. If you have fallen into a well then you certainly aren’t thinking about how to have a good life – you just want out of the frickin well!

What I discovered is that you have to recognize why you got into the dry spell in the first place before you can turn your Opportunity Faucet back on.

Here’s what I discovered:

- If you build a business based on the success of others (versus being aligned with your own personal blueprint for success) eventually it will implode.

- Prospects have an uncanny ability to sense your desperation so if you are really attached to an opportunity to “save you” then they will most likely be repelled by your energy.

- It’s OK not to know what it all should look like when you are scared about how you get through today.

- If everything is falling apart it probably wasn’t put together properly in the first place.

My own journey through the Sahara desert was one of the most powerful experiences I ever had. I discovered that I had departed from my passion factors in order to feed a machine I had built for other people to be happy. It was my own fault – I was blindly following the road map of my peers instead of listening to my intuition.

Today my business has been re-energized — its more in alignment with the best of me which makes me operate like a magnet. The opportunity faucet has been turned on. The magnet effortlessly pulls in amazing people who deeply desire what I do best.

So if you are feeling like the Sahara Desert, it’s time to turn your Opportunity Faucet back on. Here are 3 of my 25 Tips to Re-Energizing Your Business to start with:

1. Reconnect to your bigger why. If you are doing work just to make money or because you feel trapped inside your obligation, you’ll feel depleted. Think back to why you wanted your business in the first place…was to help people? To have freedom? To accomplish a goal? Reconnect to your why to get back your mojo.

2. Fire the monkeys. That monkey chatter in your head is a big part of the problem. The story you tell yourself about being a failure or how you missed out on the opportunity of your life. Or any of the other crap you feed yourself – it’s causing your opportunity faucet to dry up. Negative thoughts create negative emotions which cause you to do JUST ENOUGH to get by (and you’ll not even see the opportunities right in front of you.)

3. Activate your Passion Factor. To get your Opportunity Faucet flowing at full blast, you must commit to spending 80% of your day doing ONLY what you love. This might feel tough at first because we all have to do things in business that we are not good at. But start somewhere — and be ruthless with yourself.

When you do what you love most and are good at, your confidence increases. Many of us are taught to do what makes money — and after awhile the part of us that wants to enjoy life will rebel. That’s when all hell breaks loose! By spending more time in your passion factor your enthusiasm becomes contagious. Your energy becomes magnetic. And you will effortlessly attract in exciting new opportunities.