How To Stop Stopping Yourself
What to do to grow your business when your biggest hurdle is in your mind
I have a confession to make: My top limiting belief I still have to work on. My mentor calls it your “core story.”
It’s super annoying. 😂
I thought I was going to conquer it and check it off the list. I like for things to be DONE. But it’s like exercise. You can’t just do it once and be done with it.
We all have limiting beliefs. And mine is that it needs to be hard.
I’m the oldest child in my family — and I got a lot of positive attention by achieving. I was a school nerd, and I worked hard, did all the right things, colored in the lines, and I learned that applying yourself gets you positive attention.
When it came to marrying that with my desire to start my own business, I thought it has to be hard and complicated. It has to be 40+ hours a week, overly attached to your phone, unable to delegate…. so that’s what I did with my first business that got me out of my 9–5.
I worked all the time, no one could do it as well as me, no one else cared (as much — which is probably true), and it was never enough to “feel safe.” There was a lot layered into that about identity and self-worth and what it means to attach your work to those things. I know now that BEHIND that belief that it has to be hard was my fear of not being worthy.
If I haven’t worked really hard then I am not worthy of receiving it; I don’t deserve it because I haven’t worked hard enough for it.
Losing my daughter Maeve in a full-term stillbirth was pivotal in starting to challenge my limiting belief and the fear behind it. Before I had Maeve, my online marketing business was humming along.
Even though I knew deep down that there was something else I should be doing in the world, I was comfortable enough in my routine, I wasn’t going to push through the fear to figure out what it was.
Then Maeve died, and I pretty quickly realized that nothing could be harder than this. This is the worst possible outcome. I would have much rather it be me than her.
If I was going to pick up the pieces of what I thought my life was going to be like, now was the time to get over the fear of it being too hard, the fear of failure, the fear of what people will think of me, and to do that for myself and create a legacy for my daughter.
For some of us, it takes a super crushing tragedy to wake us up. Sometimes clients come to me going through a divorce or being laid off from a job and their world is totally shaken. That moment when you feel like you’re standing at two diverging roads of either making it or nosediving. It’s a big wake up call.
But in my business as a coach I take a stand for helping people making that decision from a more proactive stance than a reactive one. You can make that choice today. You don’t have to wait for something tragic or horrible to wake you up to a better possibility.
I can remember a time that I went all in on a launch and did way more planning, thought and strategy, and really effort than I had ever done before on a launch. It was so exciting going in because I just knew it was going to be the most successful ever — I was giving it my best.
And at the end of the launch it was a devastatingly low number of sales. To the point that I wasn’t even sure I could cover my expenses. It shook my confidence for weeks afterward. I had to start delivering a program to just a few people, when I had envisioned it being this huge thing that would change my business.
As I was attempting to claw my way out of the pit I had thrown myself into, I realized how I’d been telling myself that it has to be hard and that hard work guarantees results.
That’s what we’ve been told and taught and frankly that’s what’s been true for humankind… we are living in an age when it’s not true, but we are still behaving like it is.
Business building doesn’t have to be hard, but we are making it hard. We create that self-imposed difficulty. It was really uncomfortable for me to sit with that realization that I had created exactly what I believed. My work was to start unraveling that, excavating it and unlearning it for the sake of my clients, myself, my family. I wouldn’t have come face to face with that, if it wasn’t for someone who really saw me, who saw all the work I put in, and was all up in my biz (literally!). She saw why it went the way that it did, helped me turn that around and release that so that I didn’t keep banging my head against the wall ready to give up.
So, I keep at it. All the time. Like an addict who now knows not to let my guard down, I don’t stop exercising that mindset muscle to beat back my limiting beliefs.
It doesn’t have to be hard, and I don’t need to make it hard to prove my worth.
The truth, and what I work to embrace, is that when you build a business around your personality, preferences and passions (I often refer to these simply as your 3 Ps), you can build something that feels easy and that serves the life you want to have.
The life you’re worthy of attaining.
What’s your top limiting belief? Have a question for me about how to discover what’s been holding you back? Comment below!
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