business building Archives - She’s Got Systems

Cheer Lessons

January 26, 2022 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

This weekend I caught up on Season 2 of Cheer from Netflix and had so many thoughts and memories from school.

I was never a cheerleader but in college I joined the debate team and it had a similar sense of competition and camaraderie and intense dedication. Instead of backflips and flying, our time was spent perfecting arguments and flows.

Less risk of breaking your ribs, higher chance of getting into inane arguments everywhere you go.

In addition to my totally unqualified thoughts on the cheer routines, as I watched the series I saw many lessons we can apply as entrepreneurs.

Watching these young men and woman care so much is magical. To paraphrase one participant, “I hope everyone has something they love the way I love cheer.”

In your business it helps to find your people, the ones who care like you do and devote their lives as you have. The ones who stay up late waiting for a video game drop or geek out over new tax law implications. Your business or passion may not be as flashy as flipping in the air or as dramatic as a stumble on stage but when you’re with your people there’s common ground.

I also learned a whole shared language for cheer: hitting zero, full out, hitting it, stumblers and so many more. It’s why documentaries and series are so cool, there’s something new to learn as an outside that makes you feel part of the community.

Insider language can also be frustrating when you’re on the outside wondering what the heck someone is talking about so make a point to bring others (especially newcomers) into the know. Giving context and definitions to common language shows you are a leader and inclusive in your space – gatekeeping is so 1990s.

Watching people do what they love should inspire strangers to learn more and it was clear how much the coaches, choreographers, cheerleaders and family members care about cheer.

That dedication and passion is why it was so hard to digest season 2 episode 5, which covered the legal case against a Season 1 fan favorite, Jerry Harris, who is awaiting trial in jail for charges related to production of child pornography. As I watched the episode themes of reporting, trust, celebrity and accountability all came up.

If your community hasn’t faced a reckoning over inappropriate behavior, it likely will. It can be horrifying and heartbreaking and challenge our faith in each other. So I was grateful to see that Jerry’s friends, teammates, supporters and even his victims, did not allow such horrible actions to ruin their love for cheer.

You too might have a hard time in your field or industry because of the actions of a few. Addressing it all head on and digging out the rot is essential to moving through it. As we’ve previously seen with Penn State athletics and US gymnastics, the alternative is allowing abuse to continue for decades.

There are so many themes I could discuss: teamwork, goals, incentives, practice, dedication, resilience, but there’s one line from the show that has stuck in my head since I heard it.

Cheer Season 2 followed two Texas schools competing head to head at the 2021 Nationals. Each school does their routine twice and the scores are combined.

During the first performance, one school experienced a few major fumbles in their routine. Afterwards in the hotel, the coaches review the scores and noted that they still received very high scores considering the faults.

One coach tells the team, “the judges want you to win.”

While I can’t give too much credence to an unrehearsed line in the heat of competition, I have to think that there’s a big difference between believing the best will happen and things will work itself out versus thinking the game is rigged for me.

I have 3 thoughts on this statement:

Historically, our institutions and programs are “rigged” for certain people to win. This is neither equitable nor likely to change without focused activism. Believing that others want me to win is not just self-centered but assumes personal supremacy not granted by effort.

Second, I’m someone who loves to win but I’d rather win because of my talent than be the recipient of nepotism. Knowing that a judge wants me to win and may judge me less than fairly doesn’t make me work harder, it actually tells me to be lazy, after all, I’m gonna win no matter what.

Third, there’s a big difference between trusting something will work out for good and winning. These students face careers and lives that will be full of losses, learning to grow from those moments is more powerful than another trophy or ring. Seeing the lessons in losing is as important as the pride that comes with winning.

I don’t fault the coach for encouraging his athletes in the middle of a major competition, but I do disagree with his belief that their win is guaranteed.

Trust me, one day you’ll have a box of your trophies and cups and a clock for some unknown reason, and it’ll stir up some good memories at least. What sticks with you after a winning or losing season is the friends you spent time with, the coaching that supported your growth, and the resilience you developed along the way. Everything else is just hardware.

Are you the bottleneck in your business?

November 2, 2020 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

When you hear “bottleneck” it very rarely refers to the neck of a bottle, instead the term has become useful imagery for a narrow point that impedes the flow of anything from traffic to information.

I’m sure you’ve experienced the annoyance of 4 lanes of traffic going down to 2 – usually on a busy weekend when you just want to get out of town! Now imagine that frustration is a daily or hourly occurrence for your team.

You might be the bottleneck in your business without ever realizing it.

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Do you love your business?

February 7, 2018 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

It might feel like an odd question to a community of entrepreneurs and business owners but I’m really curious: Do you love your business?

I was thinking back to the days sitting in an office downtown, hating my life. It was a crappy little office and the company I worked for paid little more than minimum wage and were obsessed with saving money. At one point they asked us to recycle our soda cans so we could use the money in our office budget. Later, they canceled the cleaning service and bought us a vacuum.

I hated it and I assumed that owning my own business would be 100% better.
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Overcoming the “I don’t know hows”

January 23, 2018 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

When I launched this website (first as kellyazevedo.com), way back in 2011, I’ll never forget how anxious I was about learning WordPress. I didn’t know code, was worried about uploading and then losing all my content and, frankly, I didn’t want to look like an idiot figuring it all out.

So as I complained and worried to my friend Patrick, his repeated assurances that I could “figure it out” were of no help whatsoever. Finally, I just asked, “if it’s so easy, can you show me how?”

And in the days before zoom and virtual classrooms and 783,000 YouTube videos on every imaginable thing, we got on Skype and Patrick showed me how to blog on WordPress.

It was, embarrassingly for me, super simple to do.

But I can see a world in which I let “I don’t know how” stop me from making progress and hitting publish on that first post.

It really annoys me when someone says to learn something you just need to “fix your mindset.”

It’s not in your head.

There are things that you legit do not know how to do. Yet.

So how do you get over that roadblock and keep going?

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How to Reach Your Business Goals

January 16, 2018 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

It’s already mid-January so it’s just about time that those goals you wrote down December 31st are being shoved to the bottom of a paper pile, the realities of client work and responsibilities are showing up and that voice that sounds suspiciously like your mother says, who has time for all that nonsense, just stick to what you know!

Before we know it the year will be yielding to tax time, the long, hot summer, back-to-school, another hectic holiday season and 2019.

So today I want to share how I reach my business goals and inspire you to quit quitting and actually achieve those dreams for your entrepreneurial life.
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How hustling can hurt your clients, community and yourself

November 14, 2017 Personal Development by Kelly Leave a Comment

Every single day I see entrepreneurs who are hustlin’ and, honestly, it warms my heart to know that there are people out there doing the WORK. For some reasons we’ve allowed the slick-talkin’, slimy marketing gurus convince a generation of inspired entrepreneurs that all you need to make a million online dollars is:

a cool idea
slick photos in an exotic location
to “be yourself”
alignment with the universe

And while all that is fine, it patently does not HELP the clients you are taking money from. Now. Those tactics might “attract” a community and make you feel that you’re alignment but people are waking up and no one – no one smart – is going to pay you again and again for promising the world and delivering dirt.

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Finding the missing piece

October 24, 2017 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

Have you ever set out, energetic and excited, for a new year, the start of another month or even just a Monday, full of anticipation and expectation and then found by lunchtime you’re completely worn down and have lost all that energy?

There are so many things that can contribute to a motivational crash but I’ve observed that it usually comes down to a failure in one of three areas:

Inspiration: there’s not actually a clear idea of what you want so you’re excited, for something…

Expert Guidance: you know what you want, you’re ready to do the work, but you don’t exactly know how to do this. You need some support, preferably from someone who has actually done it successfully in the past.

Feedback/Community: you’re doing the work, you know what you want but you’re doing it all alone and it doesn’t feel great.

If you’re missing one of these pieces then you might find your motivation has left the building. Luckily, there’s something happening next week that I think can help.

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Falling into Autumn

September 5, 2017 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

When it comes to the pace of a year, Autumn always feels like relief after the hot days of summer and yet, the most hectic as families prepare for the upcoming holidays, children settle into school and businesses work toward their last quarter goals.

There’s something new and fresh about January but we’re still over 100 days from ringing in the New Year.

>>> Join me in a new Facebook community to set your goals, get productive and finish 2017 strong! See all the details at the end of this post <<<

Here are 3 ways you can make the rest of 2017 count:

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Where hard work and working hard meet

August 16, 2017 Business Building by Kelly Leave a Comment

It occurs to me that entrepreneurs do not want to work hard anymore. In a world where you can be famous for singing badly, a sex tape or random viral videos, why should anyone strive to do anything difficult?

And for every born into poverty or immigrant success story of someone working their fingers to the bone to pick tomatoes under the heat of the August sun or working 20 hours a day in a kitchen restaurant, entrepreneurs will be the ones sipping lattes and insisting that without half-day Tuesdays and weekly massages they’re just not balanced enough for meaningful output.

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