Do you often feel like your entrepreneurial journey is a rollercoaster of anxiety and uncertainty, despite all your efforts?
By the end of this episode you will know:
- Why making more money as an anxious entrepreneur is really all about (not doing more/or doing things right).
- How to respond to the thoughts of “nothing is working because I’ve tried it all”
- An embodiment practice to hold regulation even when clients complain, you’re afraid and/or hopeless
Listen to episode 130: Why Money Security Requires More Than Just ‘Thinking Abundant Thoughts’ – Nervous System and Somatic Training for Financial Freedom (click here to listen)
Sign up for How To Sustainably Make Money As An Entrepreneur, a free embodiment practice on August 12. DM me FIERCE for your personal invitation. www.instagram.com/_sheridanruth_
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] There’s absolutely no way to get entrepreneurship right. And you cannot perfectly plan anything and you will fail. Here’s how to do that with more ease. By the end of this episode, you will know why making more money as an anxious entrepreneur is not So I’m going to talk to you today about how to respond to the thoughts of nothing is working because I’ve tried it all, and what to do when you’re thinking, I’ve heard this advice before, I’ve been practicing it, and how is this different?
[00:00:45] For a lot of us, we can, particularly if you tend towards anxiety or you’ve had some type of trauma in the past, there’s a large part of you that’s internalize this. I do. This belief or this hope that
[00:01:00] if you make the right decisions, you can avoid pain and failure. On some levels, this is really true. If I do X, I can probably create Y and avoid Z.
[00:01:12] And sometimes it’s not so true. True, especially when we enter into realms that involve things outside of our control and even outside of our knowledge. Entrepreneurship involves relationships with other people, involves the way that other people perceive you, the way that they respond, it involves their lives.
[00:01:32] You know, all the stimuli that they’re dealing with, what it involves, what’s happening with their grandmother. It involves what’s happening in the U S election. It involves economics. It involves so many things. And yes, it is our job as entrepreneurs to look at numbers and look at your marketing analytics and look at your profit and loss statement and like all of these things, yes, that is true.
[00:01:54] Yes, we want to focus on the things that we can control, but you know, my dear, beautiful, anxious
[00:02:00] entrepreneur, that there is a part of you that looks so hard to get things right and to do the right thing that when things start to feel like they’re not going in the way that you were expecting, you start falling into that place of this is hopeless.
[00:02:13] Nothing has worked. I keep trying. I feel like I’m getting nowhere. Oh my God. I’m really tired. I’ve heard this advice before. I’m bored. This is just like, I I’m done. Right. You probably kind of rollercoaster through that. And then maybe the next day you wake up and you feel lighter and you keep going, or maybe it takes you a little bit longer.
[00:02:31] Maybe it’s a place that you’ve been for a couple of months. What I want to introduce you today is that Successful entrepreneurship, particularly if you tend to be a little bit more of an anxious person and overthinks you’re maybe a bit of a perfectionist or prone to burnout, it is less about what you do.
[00:02:51] It is specifically about being and holding. It’s not even about how you think it’s about being and
[00:03:00] holding in some ways this is kind of vague and it is intangible. I’m going to get as clear as I can. And I’m also going to share a couple of steps of how to. Be at the end of this podcast so that this doesn’t end up being another piece of fluffy feel good advice. And actually you can take what you learn from this podcast and apply it immediately to what’s happening inside of your inbox or your next sales call.
[00:03:25] When you’re so focused on doing or on the actions, it’s usually a sign that you are in a fight or flight response, which is a stress response saying that your body is perceiving some level of. You might be aware of that threat consciously, so it might feel like a deadline or a conversation with a client that is really important to you.
[00:03:44] Or it might be a less conscious threat of like, you actually have an underlying fear of failure running throughout your nervous system, giving you thoughts and emotions and sensations that make it feel like you just have to keep going and doing more. I have a client, I have a, not a sorry, a client, a [00:04:00]friend who we’re recently talking about this and she was kind of noticing it play up.
[00:04:05] She’d been working on this stuff in different ways for a couple of years, like with her talk therapist, et cetera. And we saw her dysregulation and her fear of failure. around a specific environment interaction with a client where she was really just focused on doing. So she’s walking out through her day in her life and she’s like focusing on like, I’ve just got to get this done.
[00:04:28] I’ve just got to get this done. I’ve just got to get this done. I’ve got to do the right thing. I’ve got to make the right decision. I’ve got to, I’ve got to, I’ve got to make, I’ve got to get it right. And so what did it happen is that it actually led to her. Staying up and like feeling a little, a little bit depleted.
[00:04:43] You can kind of tell that she’s just like a little bit depleted because she’s feeling a lot of pressure in her business at the moment. She’s got to reach certain milestones soon. And, and it’s. It’s just feeling like a lot for her. However, she has this wonderful client that brings in a lot of revenue and she [00:05:00] had a project with them and she had a meeting with them.
[00:05:01] She’s been focusing on doing all the things. She’s re she’s one of those people similar to you. She’s just really focused on getting it right. So she’s worked really, really hard on this project for this client. And she’s like, okay, I think we’ve got it right. I hope we’ve got it right. However, she walks into the meeting room and she can immediately see a Her client’s face.
[00:05:21] Her heart starts beating, her palms start getting sweaty. She is immediately activated into a fight response. Oh no, something has gone wrong. Her client says something about the work that is not great. She’s not happy. Client is not happy. And, uh, it, it, because for the client, it felt like certain things had kind of been rushed over probably because my friend was so focused on doing, um, and that it wasn’t to the creative capacity that she was expecting from the agency.
[00:05:55] Not great. So my friend actually starts getting [00:06:00]really defensive and defending all of her decisions. That makes sense. She’s in a fight. nervous system response. However, this defensiveness isn’t what the client needs at the time. And it just escalates the client interrupts my friend. Now my friend is feeling helpless.
[00:06:19] Oh my God. No, this is never going to work. And so she just starts offering like doing more, like we can do this other thing. We can add on this other thing, but it’s, it’s not helping get anywhere because the client is, it doesn’t need that. It doesn’t need you to do another thing. She needs you to remedy and be with her in the discomfort of the fact that she was expecting something that wasn’t delivered.
[00:06:42] She needs to. She needs you to connect with her first, human to human, and then find the solution. So, the whole thing escalates, the client basically is like, you know what, like, I don’t want to deal with this, and actually walks out. My friend cannot stop thinking about it, she goes back to work, she messages her
[00:07:00] friend, she messages her partner, she messages, like, the group chat, and she’s like, this thing happened, oh my god, um, and she’s like, um, I can’t stop thinking about it.
[00:07:07] She’s analyzing it. She’s getting angry. She’s judging herself. She’s judging the other person and it ends up keeping her up all night and her whole rest of her week is just bad. I’m going to share with you what would have happened if she was in a regulated space. So if she was coming to this space from a place of being and holding a place of regulation, what would have happened is she would.
[00:07:31] Kind of held that position of I’m, I can fix anything. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not failing. I’m safe. I’m provided for I’m protected, which means that she would have seen the scowl of her, her, the bad kind of uncomfortable face of her client. And her shoulders kind of would have pulled down her back.
[00:07:52] She probably would have softened and she would have kind of maybe opened her. It sounds really kind of, uh, esoteric, but. Kind of opening her cart a little bit
[00:08:00] and she would have maybe slowed the way that she walks and sat down and looked at this client and said, Hey, I’m noticing, um, Um, and then when the client said, I’m not happy because of X right there, she would have softened a little bit more without going into the client’s, um, dysregulation and anger and soften a little bit more.
[00:08:23] I probably asked a question and gotten curious. Okay. Yeah. There would have been some level of understanding validation. It’s firm though. She’s not taking on all of her clients. Uh, sometimes the complaints are not fair, but she would have been able to connect with that client, make them feel seen and heard and, and important.
[00:08:41] And probably they would have walked away saying maybe there’s not a solution in this moment, but we’re kind of going to figure this out. She probably would have walked away. Maybe her heart is like beating a little bit fast. , it’s not that she’s not affected by this. She might be annoyed. Maybe there’s a little bit of tension in her shoulders, but she walks away from that.
[00:08:59] She [00:09:00] immediately calls her team and there’s an action and she kind of just lets it go. And it becomes more about, okay, how, like, this is a thing that’s happening. Let’s remedy it. We’ll figure it out. Maybe she replaced certain parts of the discussion inside of her head, but in a way of, okay, cool. What did I learn from this experience?
[00:09:16] And how do I move forward? She might think about what went wrong and then address it next week in a meeting. She might call a friend or just go to the gym and just kind of like work through it. It doesn’t rob her of a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t rob her of the rest of her work day. It doesn’t rob her of her self confidence.
[00:09:38] There’s no overwhelm. This is something that I get to teach you guys inside of group programs or inside of my one on one. It’s a little bit more difficult to teach in a podcast, but I’m going to try and introduce it as best as I can. To go deeper into this, I would ask you to look at the following, , advice.
[00:09:59] Number [00:10:00] one, what is holding regulation feel like in my body? And what are the things that take me outside of regulation? So for example, yours might be a fear of failure. And so it’s not about looking at things from a fear of failure and trying to make the right decision or to do enough so that you can avoid failure.
[00:10:21] It’s what does it feel like in my body? Two. Not be concerned about failure or to know that if I fail, that means I’ve learned a lot and I’ve done a really good job and I can move forward from that. And failure is actually maybe a, one of the ways that I actually work towards success. Failure is a part of the process.
[00:10:43] There was a great article I read that was like, , the best entrepreneurs are the ones that fail the most because that’s where we learn the most. So. What does it feel like in your body? Where do you go out of that? So what does it look like when you go out of that? What are your specific triggers? Is there an [00:11:00]inner child part?
[00:11:01] Or is there a sensation in your body that needs a little bit of love? That would help you hold that energy of like, Meh, failure is not a big deal. Like, cool. And then how do you hold that in the moments where the rubber meets the road? In your client conversations, when you are creating your content marketing, sometimes it’s like a breath adjustment.
[00:11:20] Sometimes it means that you only engage in those activities when you can feel really regulated and you get really protective around those things. So you don’t put yourself in triggering situations or you don’t have heaps of coffee before you write. Sometimes we need to look at things, um, Through the energy of it, all the trauma of like, why are we so afraid of failing?
[00:11:41] For each person that’s going to be different, but I’m here to help you hold and be more in the, yeah, that makes sense that I would have fear of failure. And. I can move through entrepreneurship with resilience and regulation. And as a result, I’m going to reach my goals quicker. [00:12:00] One of the really great ways to practice this is by going and listening to the episode, why money security requires more than just thinking abundant.
[00:12:09] Thoughts. This is number 131, and I will make sure that you have the link down below in the show notes. The other place to do this, which is going to be the most effective is in a side of your body. So I’m hosting an embodiment practice on August 12th, where you’re going to learn the embodiment practice that all intuitive entrepreneurs need to learn so that they can make money sustainably through entrepreneurship.
[00:12:34] This is a really. Intimate, um, embodiment practice. I’m treating it as if it were a paid container, which means that I’m making sure that every person who walks in there is the perfect fit. Go ahead and send me a DM on Instagram so that you and I can have a super quick conversation to make sure you are the perfect fit for how to sustainably make money as an entrepreneur.
[00:12:56] If we fill you out, I will extend an invitation for you to sign up for [00:13:00]free. I’m looking forward to speaking with you.