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SO HERE WE ARE at the beginning of a new year. The Earth has set off on another trip around the sun. Over the next 365 days, it will travel some 583 million miles. You, too, are beginning a journey. In your case, though, the goal is to not find yourself in the exact same place at the beginning of next year.

To be sure, you may be perfectly happy, operating your business in a way that feels natural and easy. But it’s also likely you yearn for more, to change how you typically approach one or more aspects. Being just a little dissatisfied regardless of our accomplishments seems to be wired into us — an evolutionary adaptation to keep us developing, striving and on our toes. You can reach the low-lying fruit with your natural abilities, but to get to higher, riper, larger fruit, “you need to add more steps to your ladder,” marketer and business author Roy H. Williams notes. “You’ve got to start doing things you’ve never done before. You have to identify your limiting beliefs and practices. You have to go outside your comfort zone.”

Change usually involves doing something difficult, scary or that just feels disagreeable. As productivity guru David Allen says: “What we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.” There is nothing new in this understanding. From Zen Buddhism to the Stoics (the “obstacle is the way”) to Carl Jung, there’s a long-held appreciation that resisting a task is usually a sign that it’s meaningful to us in some way.

Indeed, “Do whatever you’re resisting the most” makes for a pretty good philosophy in business. But there’s usually a valid reason why we hesitate to act, why we aim, aim, aim and don’t pull the trigger. Taking action involves dealing with uncertainty and anxiety, and it requires relinquishing a sense of control and security, all while facing the looming possibility of failure. The instincts that urge caution are often the same ones that have driven positive development up to this point. Motivational literature urges you to lean in, feel the fear and do it anyway. “Seek the discomfort zone,” as management guru Tom Peters put it. “Master your fear of discomfort,” blogger Leo Babauta writes, “and you can master the universe.”

Yes, inspiring advice that’s hard to argue with. Fear does keep us small; growth requires discomfort. It’s something drilled into us from that first prick of a needle in our heel in the maternity ward, the first time we crash our tricycle, or get crushed romantically as a teenager. Suffering is part of showing up. But ultimately the motivational invocations are not all that helpful. Knowing doesn’t count for much when it comes to behavior change. “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking,” spiritual author Richard Rohr writes, summing up the challenge that faces us.

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In the 2023 bestseller Atomic Habits, author James Clear asserts there are Four Laws of Behavior Change: “To form good habits, make them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.” To break bad habits, he says to invert those laws: “Make them invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.” For example, if a business owner aims to improve her social media presence for marketing, she could create a content calendar a quarter in advance, limiting the effort needed each day. By preparing and scheduling posts in batches, she reduces the friction of daily content creation, making it easier to stick to the habit. And by rewarding herself for completing the task with her favorite coffee, she makes it attractive to do.

Of course, there is no avoiding some pain. Growing a business brings to mind Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s insight on long-distance running: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” There’s no escaping the grind. But how much you put up with is up to you. To achieve anything worthwhile, including behavioral change, discipline and effort are required. The dumbbell has to be heavy enough to make the effort uncomfortable if you are to gain anything.

In the following pages, we provide ideas, tips and shared experiences from business experts, fellow pet pros, and authors in fields from productivity to psychology to hopefully allow you to break free from the constraints of your comfort zone and achieve an important goal.

“We are all living in cages with the door wide open,” George Lucas once said. In 2025, take that first step out of the cage.

1. SET THE RIGHT GOAL

In line with your overall goal to act in 2025, don’t spend too much time preparing or doing the aforementioned aim, aim, aim routine. At the same time, you need to have an idea where you’re headed. Best practices for goal-setting suggest you:

  • Put pen to paper. There’s evidence you’re more likely to follow through, and while it’s not real progress, it can feel like it and get the ball rolling.
  • Set an ambitious goal. But be happy to settle later.
  • Keeping a goal vague sometimes produces a higher rate of success, but being specific can help to prevent procrastination.
  • Set a process goal, not an outcome goal (more on this later).
  • The ultimate goal is to grow in some area of your business, not turn your daily existence into an uncomfortable grind. Think about how to make progress toward your goal fun.

2. MAKE A DECLARATION

Shout it from the rooftops! Establishing accountability with a friend, mentor or even your favorite business magazine like our Brain Squad members have, can be motivating — even if it’s a little negative by exploiting your fear of having to confess that you never did what you said you would. If you’d rather not pester others with your goals, goal-publicizing websites such as mysomeday.com let you enlist random internet strangers to act as witness to your commitment.

3. CHANGE YOUR MINDSET

To overcome discomfort and move your business forward, develop a growth mindset, where you view challenges as opportunities to learn rather than as obstacles. Mattie Thacker of Paws Stop in Indianapolis, IN, takes this approach. “I like to lean into every day being an opportunity for learning and growth, regardless of my storytelling mind holding me back.” Such a mindset can lead to “failing forward.” In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries writes that “little bets,” or experiments, are critical to moving a business forward. “If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.” Tech writer Steven Johnson adds in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: “Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.” And Victor Santucci of Garden State Pet Center in Audubon, NJ, reminds that failure isn’t the end, it’s the lesson. “Failure isn’t permanent — it’s an opportunity to learn and improve. When things don’t go as planned, I remind myself that failure is just another part of the journey. Whether it’s a marketing campaign that flopped or a new product line that didn’t sell as expected, I’ve learned that every setback offers valuable lessons that make me a better business owner.”

4. LOWER THE STAKES

Putting things off has a bad reputation in the fields of productivity and self-improvement. But what if you were to postpone the mental pressure holding you back rather than the task? Let’s suppose you suffer from perfectionism. If you can’t get rid of the notion that the task must be done perfectly, can you suspend that requirement, resolving to revert to your perfectionism at some predetermined point in the near future? Essayist Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, calls this the principle of “shitty first drafts,” but like so much of her counsel, it applies beyond writing. Lowering the mental stakes lets you get around the paralyzing thought that this task is so important that you can’t even begin.

5. DO SOMETHING

Your uncomfortable self will insist you need to be in the right state of mind, your life arranged sufficiently to accommodate this important task, with long stretches of uninterrupted time in which to do it. End result? It doesn’t get done. But the fact is, you don’t need to feel good to get going. It’s often the other way around. In the late 1970s, “behavioral activation” research showed that action doesn’t depend on motivation; instead, motivation follows action — and therefore one key to boosting mood is to take the small steps to simply get started. 4 Hour Work Week writer Tim Ferriss calls it the “Do Something Principle” — do anything, no matter how trivial or menial, that gets you moving in the right direction, and then “harness the reaction to that action” as a way to build momentum toward that change, he says. Heidi Bailey of Palm Beach Doggie Bags in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, agrees: “Find small steps you can take that move you in the right direction. Never feel like you have to accomplish the entire goal with the first step.”

6. TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

Track your accomplishments on a chart. Do anything to see progress because as Harvard professors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer showed in their book Progress Principle, nothing motivates an individual more than seeing progress on a meaningful task. And if you fall off? Similarly, get back on the horse with a lower target. “Really, all you need to do is focus on having five good minutes. You can do a lot with five good minutes. Five good minutes of exercise can reset your mood. Five good minutes of conversation can restore a relationship. Five good minutes of writing can make you feel great about the manuscript again. And so it doesn’t take much to feel good, to get back on the path, to continue to make progress,” author Clear says.

7. MAKE IT ENJOYABLE

“Come up with three new sales lines every day” won’t work unless you get excited about devising salesfloor approaches. And no improvement regimen will last long if you don’t at least slightly enjoy what you’re doing. The habits that stick tend to be those that are fun — and indeed you can turn something you like doing into a chore if you add enough compulsion. Pursue your goal or new habit with another pet pro. Gamify it. Make it a fun competition. And don’t forget to celebrate, to reward yourself for even the smallest wins. Clear told the Brene Brown podcast: “So find some way to add some additional positive emotions to the experience because if you feel good about it, you’re going to want to repeat it. And this is something that in Atomic Habits, I call the cardinal rule of behavior change, that is behaviors that get rewarded, get repeated, and behaviors that get punished, get avoided.”

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8. EMBRACE THE PROCESS

In the book Driven to Distraction at Work, author Edward Hallowell recounts the story of Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun. Talking with novice nuns at her convent, Chittister would ask them: “Why do we pray?” Their pious answers were all about praising God. “No,” the older nun eventually answered. “We pray because the bell rings.” You can talk lofty principles all you like, but it’s structure — designating time for something, then doing it — that gets things done. Similarly, set process goals, not outcome goals, think quantity, not quality — i.e. “Make four phone calls per day” not “build a killer business network.” Paying no attention to outcome runs counter to prevailing wisdom: Business gurus preach “outcome-oriented thinking” to visualise the desired end point in detail, then work toward it. And yet, sports psychologist John Eliot writes in his book Overachievement, “Nothing discourages the concentration necessary to perform well … more than worrying about the outcome.” One of the key points in Atomic Habits, Clear says, is that “you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” It sounds pretty dull. But that’s exactly as it should be: It makes behavior change non-intimidating, and thus it makes behavior change actually likely to happen. “If you want your results to change, the habits that proceed them are the things that actually need to change. Fix the inputs, and the outputs will fix themselves,” he says.

9. SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT MATTERS

It’s something you’ve known since junior high: Social norms and peer pressure are incredibly powerful, perhaps the most powerful and direct way to influence behavior change. The trick then is to surround yourself with people whose normal behavior is your desired behavior. “When you want to create a habit, think of who already does it, interact with them, and ‘catch’ their habit,” Joshua Spodek, a lecturer at Columbia Business School and columnist for Inc., writes. Then add to your circle others who can positively push you toward meeting your goal. “Surround yourself with people who can either help or cheer you on. We need both helpers and cheerleaders,” Dana Julian of Furbaby Boutique in Holly, MI, says.

10. AT THE BOTTOM IS DISCIPLINE

You may have noticed a pattern to many of the tips cited here: Make it easy to do. Make it easy to show up. And make it fun, or at least satisfying. They are all valid strategies, but there is also no escaping the fact that behavior change or getting things done takes some grit. Joseph Campbell, the mythologist perhaps best known for his invocation to “Follow your bliss,” on the grounds that pursuing what brings you joy and a sense of purpose can lead to a more meaningful life, acknowledged later that “Follow your blisters” probably would have been more realistic advice. The bottom layer of any pyramid of success is discipline. And it can be imposed from the outside or inside. Faced with moments requiring that grit, standard psychology is to try one (or all) of these tactics:

  • “Recognize that the event isn’t causing your dread — your interpretation of the event as dreadful is.”
  • “Repeat a short, somewhat positive statement about the event, such as, ‘It wasn’t that bad in the past.’”
    For Laura Burton of Lollypop Farm in Fairport, NY, it’s “I can do hard things,” she says. “And I’ll repeat this to myself before and during the task I’m avoiding or that seems overwhelming.”
  • “Realize the event is transient. It won’t last forever.”

11. AND HOW’S THAT WORKING OUT FOR YOU?

According to British author Oliver Burkeman, one of the most powerful ways to get out of a rut, drop a self-defeating habit or trigger a similar positive change is to pose the question: “And how’s that working out for you?” “The genius of AHTWOFY?” he writes on his Imperfectionist blog, is in the way it acknowledges that the secret emotional payoffs we get from procrastinating, people-pleasing, holding ourselves to perfectionistic standards or living an overly cautious life are real. “But then it prompts you to wonder whether your current strategies are really helping you avoid the awful thing you feared to any significant degree anyway.” The sense of liberation to be found here is the one best encapsulated in the splendid Americanism: “Here goes nothing,” he adds. “Your changed approach might not work either. But you’ve no reason to believe that not attempting it — holding back and continuing as before — is suddenly about to start working any better.”

12. FORGIVE YOURSELF

According to some estimates, 80% of the chatter in your head is negative. It is something to watch out for: When you’re needlessly hard on yourself, it blocks your ability to institute change. “Self-blame shuts down learning centers in the brain,” Tara Brach, clinical psychologist and author of Radical Acceptance, says. “Actively offer yourself forgiveness by, for example, whispering ‘forgiven’ or putting a hand on your heart,” she says, adding that research shows that self-compassion is related to the pursuit of important goals, lower procrastination and less fear of failure.

13. SWITCH TO YOUR OWN CALENDAR

Despite the “new year, fresh start” premise of this story, there is nothing that says you need to be bound by the traditional calendar when setting goals for change. For consultants Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, thinking of life in 365-day units isn’t not only arbitrary, it’s detrimental. A year’s too big to get your head around, they argue in The 12-Week Year, and there’s too much unpredictability involved in planning for 10 or 11 months in the future. Besides, it’s awful for motivation: The New Year surge of enthusiasm fades rapidly, while the feeling of racing to the finish line — that extra burst psychologists call the “goal looms larger effect” — doesn’t kick in until autumn. Jettison “annualized thinking,” Moran and Lennington insist. Their proposed alternative is to think of each 12 weeks as a stand-alone “year” — a stretch long enough to make significant progress on a few fronts, yet short enough to stay focused.

14. BE COURAGEOUS

We also asked the PETS+ Brain Squad to share how they overcome fear and get out of their comfort zone. The theme of courage ran threw a few of our favorites:

  • “My motto is: Be scared and do it any-way.” — Molly Lewis, Dog River Pet Supplies, Hood River, OR
  • “I frequently remind myself of the Winston Churchill quote, ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ If running a business was easy, everyone would do it. The ability to navigate the scary, icky stuff is what separates successful business owners from everyone else. So, the only way out is through!” — Katherine Ostiguy, Crossbones, Providence, RI
  • “Sometimes you just have to rip off the Band-Aid and go for it. Ask what the worst-case scenario is, and if it’s tolerable, just do it!” — Jennifer Guevin, Holistic For Pets, Bradenton, FL
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CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

We asked the PETS+ Brain Squad — our reader survey group of 1,700-plus independent pet retailers and service providers — to share one smart but hard and uncomfortable task that they will commit to doing in 2025. These pet pros accepted our challenge:

  • “I have great management in place, but I find it tough to confront them when they’ve missed something or need to make an improvement. I will be better at that so I don’t sit silently in frustration. — Erin Paitrick, Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming, Summerville, SC
  • “It’s time to take a hard look at items that simply aren’t moving. I will implement a more aggressive inventory-review process, where I’ll identify slow-moving items and make the difficult decision to discount, liquidate or discontinue them. This will free up valuable shelf space, reduce storage costs, and allow me to focus on higher-performing products that better meet customer needs. It will be uncomfortable to say goodbye to products I’ve invested in, but I know it’s necessary for long-term business health.” — Victor Santucci, Garden State Pet Center, Audubon, NJ
  • “Posting videos on Instagram, preferably with my face, is something I need to do, but it is so outside my comfort zone. The thought makes my stomach hurt a little. I will post at least two Instagram Reels per month.” — Lisa Degloria, Good Dog Gallery, Portsmouth, NH
  • “We need to be more profitable in 2025. We will be better about asking for ISO deals or promotional items.” — Pat Schiek, Lucky Dogs, Skaneateles, NY
  • “Join the Chamber of Commerce. I’ve avoided joining because I have to host a luncheon and speak in front of a group of people. I avoid doing public speaking like the plague, and this is why I haven’t joined even though it can be really good for business.” — Kirsten Puhr, The NW Dog, Poulsbo, WA
  • “Let go of control. I feel if I’m not in the shop, then it won’t do well. This is foolish, as I know my staff are well trained. I will commit to working on this for 2025.” — Roxane Cann, The Dapper Hound in Mount Airy, NC
  • “Learn to ask for help. I have to fight the feeling that I’m bothering someone or putting them on the spot when I do.” — Keith Henline, Asheville Pet Supply, Asheville, NC
  • Make sure every employee generates revenue beyond the cost of their payroll. Our goal is that every employee reaches this benchmark by the 90-day mark, and with payroll being our largest expense, it’s critical that we dial this in. — Katherine Ostiguy, Crossbones, Providence, RI
  • I am going to launch an online nosework class. This is brave, as I suffer from imposter syndrome. — Lisa Kirschner, Sit, Stay, ‘N Play,
    Stroudsburg, PA
  • “I have great management in place, but I find it tough to confront them when they’ve missed something or need to make an improvement. I will be better at that so I don’t sit silently in frustration. — Erin Paitrick, Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming, Summerville, SC
  • “It’s time to take a hard look at items that simply aren’t moving. I will implement a more aggressive inventory-review process, where I’ll identify slow-moving items and make the difficult decision to discount, liquidate or discontinue them. This will free up valuable shelf space, reduce storage costs, and allow me to focus on higher-performing products that better meet customer needs. It will be uncomfortable to say goodbye to products I’ve invested in, but I know it’s necessary for long-term business health.” — Victor Santucci, Garden State Pet Center, Audubon, NJ
  • “Posting videos on Instagram, preferably with my face, is something I need to do, but it is so outside my comfort zone. The thought makes my stomach hurt a little. I will post at least two Instagram Reels per month.” — Lisa Degloria, Good Dog Gallery, Portsmouth, NH
  • “We need to be more profitable in 2025. We will be better about asking for ISO deals or promotional items.” — Pat Schiek, Lucky Dogs, Skaneateles, NY
  • “Join the Chamber of Commerce. I’ve avoided joining because I have to host a luncheon and speak in front of a group of people. I avoid doing public speaking like the plague, and this is why I haven’t joined even though it can be really good for business.” — Kirsten Puhr, The NW Dog, Poulsbo, WA
  • “Let go of control. I feel if I’m not in the shop, then it won’t do well. This is foolish, as I know my staff are well trained. I will commit to working on this for 2025.” — Roxane Cann, The Dapper Hound in Mount Airy, NC
  • “Learn to ask for help. I have to fight the feeling that I’m bothering someone or putting them on the spot when I do.” — Keith Henline, Asheville Pet Supply, Asheville, NC
  • Make sure every employee generates revenue beyond the cost of their payroll. Our goal is that every employee reaches this benchmark by the 90-day mark, and with payroll being our largest expense, it’s critical that we dial this in. — Katherine Ostiguy, Crossbones, Providence, RI
  • I am going to launch an online nosework class. This is brave, as I suffer from imposter syndrome. — Lisa Kirschner, Sit, Stay, ‘N Play,
    Stroudsburg, PA

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