Did you start a project, all excited and full of ideas, only to lose your passion for it? If you’ve been procrastinating on finishing an important project because you’ve lost your fire, this episode will help you get your passion back so you can get it done.
I share why advice like “just remember why you started” or “give yourself a change of scenery” doesn’t help. And I share the practical advice that will actually help you. If you’re a perfectionist building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so today I want to talk about a really, this just feels like a really timely topic to be talking about because I have just coached a PGSDer on this and I have also just been through personal experiences lately in my business that make this such a great time to talk about. What I’m going to talk about today is the discomfort of being seen and contrasting that with or versus the discomfort of having no clients. And why it is that I choose the discomfort of being seen and when there have been periods where I haven’t chosen that, why the discomfort of having no clients or for me fewer clients than I otherwise would when I was willing to be in the discomfort of being seen, why that was so much harder than being seen.
And I really feel like, I mentioned this in last week’s episode as well, I’m really feeling willing to be seen again. And I’m thinking about the future of my business instead of thinking about trying to get back into the past and into past times where I felt more successful or I had more revenue in a 12-month period. And that kind of thinking when I was, like when you’re getting, trying to get back to the past, like this PGSD-er, she had a month where she made $11,000 and she was asking me about like how do I get back into that but also I kind of like burned out in that so I don’t actually want to be back in that but I want the result of that.
So I did coaching on that and it was my bone for her and it was so, so, so helpful. So what I want to do in this episode is share just one piece of what we talked about and if you’re a PGSDer, you can listen to the replay on the private podcast. But I want to share just one piece of it which is what we identified or what I identified is that when she was in the month where it was easy to sign clients, there was a willingness to be seen that when she’s been in the months of not having clients, that willingness to be seen hasn’t been there and she has been in the discomfort of no clients.
So I say that as well about discomfort because our brains like to think that there’s either the discomfort of being seen or the comfort of not being seen and that putting myself out there whether it’s going on YouTube or a podcast, connecting with people in real life like there’s so many different ways we can do it that if I do that, that’s going to be really uncomfortable and I was sharing about how for me, my brain is always like don’t do that and we should just stay at home that’s so much easier and it like all of these thoughts to try and compel me not to go out and put myself out there. And I enjoy doing it but my brain will always offer me like here’s why we don’t want to actually do that and so there’s always that willingness I need to generate to do it even though I don’t feel like it. So I’m not saying any of this as someone who’s like oh my god I just love going out all the time and like being seen and I’ve just always naturally been like that.
I have not but I am someone that loves connecting with people and seeing other humans in real life and so many things even as an introvert, I love that like I recharge by myself in my own energy and I love connecting with others, having great conversations. A lot of my clients do, they really build their businesses through connection even though they might not have seen it in those times before that’s what they’re doing and so when this PGSDer when she was in the willingness to be seen, the discomfort of being seen, she was also in the comfort of having clients, of having her business gaining momentum, of having there be higher revenue months like she was in a lot of comfort whereas our brain just sees that’s the discomfort of being seen and essentially like that’s going to be so much and like nothing else good will come of that or the comfort of not being seen and no bad will come of that instead of recognizing it’s uncomfortable to be seen and it’s uncomfortable not to be seen. It’s uncomfortable to as someone who believes in your own potential intelligence and abilities, it is really uncomfortable to see yourself playing small, stagnating, getting your own way, making plans and not following through on them, having goals and then forgetting about them or not achieving them.
It is really uncomfortable to know what you’re capable of and then see yourself not achieve it and be with yourself as you don’t achieve it every day and it’s so important to get present to the pain of that because it is uncomfortable to be seen. If you’re anything like me and you can relate to what I talk about, if you’re a perfectionist building a business for most perfectionists not all but most will find it uncomfortable to show up and share and do that in the way they actually want to do it in a way that feels very connected to them and very real to them. It might feel comfortable to be seen when they’re polished and put together and everything’s like professional and exactly how it should be like if you’re following all the best practices then it feels comfortable to be seen but the kind of people that I work with want to build their business in a way that feels true to them and like a self-expression no matter if they have a coaching business like me or a completely different kind of business I coach all kinds of entrepreneurs that they want to feel more themselves in their business not less of themselves in their business which means there’s a vulnerability in that.
There’s a discomfort in being seen because when you’re being seen you can be rejected, you can receive comments, positive comments too we tend to forget that but you could receive comments from people that then exacerbate your own insecure thoughts that you’re having we think of all those downsides and all the discomfort of it and what we forget is the discomfort of not being seen the discomfort of not feeling wanted and not feeling connected and also the discomfort of feeling like you have gifts even if you have especially like I had in the beginning so much self-doubt and so much belief of like what was possible for me but so much self-doubt and what people call imposter syndrome like doubtful thoughts and thoughts like the all-or-nothing thinking that creates imposter syndrome of unless I know everything then I know nothing so it’s very common for perfectionists to have the imposter syndrome flavor of thinking because it’s that all-or-nothing thinking that we forget the discomfort of not being seen and how it’s actually more painful to not be self-expressed and to not be seen than it is to be seen and then it is to be self-expressed.
And to show up whatever that looks like for you there’s something probably on your heart that you’ve been wanting to do that you haven’t been doing because of a story that will be so much more uncomfortable than not doing it but if you can notice and how we’re wired as humans is to seek pleasure avoid pain and conserve energy that’s how our brain works and where most of all why we we would rather avoid pain than seek pleasure we really go into pain avoidance and if you have a story that being seen is more painful than not being seen you won’t do the things to be seen you might have a goal I want to be on YouTube and I want to post a YouTube video every week but then you won’t do it because your brain is doing its job of helping you avoid the pain of that.
But if you can reconcile like how might it be true ask yourself this how might it be true that it is more painful to not be seen than it is to be seen and to look at what are all of the downsides of not being seen what are all of the downsides of staying in the comfort of my home and not going out there and connecting with other human beings and showing up and sharing and putting myself out there and it feeling maybe a little bit awkward or uncomfortable or embarrassing but what are all of because we can look at like well here’s all the upsides that can come from being seen and putting myself out there but you might have noticed you haven’t been motivated by that because the pain story about how uncomfortable it is to be seen is greater than your story about how uncomfortable it is to not be seen.
So I just want to offer to you if this if this is what you’re currently to find all the reasons why being by not being seen and not making progress and staying small and stagnating why that is actually more painful and more uncomfortable than leaving the comfort of your home or recording a video and posting it and then doing that again the next and then doing that again the next week and so for me it’s just because I always love sharing my own experiences and stories and and yeah just the stuff that I’ve lived that can be really helpful for you is that I went like in the beginning of my business 2013 I started my business as a blog and I was really scared really like crippling fear of being seen and for me when I started my business it felt like the first time.
I was really expressing myself in the world that I was a uni student doing law and finance as a dual degree a diploma of French and I was someone that I was just like blending in knew kind of like what to say in certain situations and how to be and was successful at it and people liked me like all of that which you’re probably familiar with but I didn’t feel like I could be the real me and I think side note for introverts part of like I just wonder for me if part of the introversion versus the extroversion because I love connecting with others but I feel safer in my own presence and when I’m not like when I feel like I can just be myself because of the thoughts I have that I can’t be myself around others as much as I can be myself around myself so even like things as small as like just to paint a picture like when I was in high school I remember it must have been year nine I’m thinking of where my locker was that year that I had an iPod and I listened to like indie rock music but I didn’t know anyone else who did and so whenever anyone would come to talk to me I was listening to music.
I’d like try and like hide what I was listening to and it wasn’t anything embarrassing but I was just like oh I’m like doing something different I need to like hide any differences that I have with anyone else and even like things like style and getting dressed it was like okay what like I could see myself at the shop being like hey what is everyone else looking at that they like and then I’m gonna like that too and always just wanting to blend in from like a just like the mindset like the perfectionist mindset of just like if I could just be perfect to be perfect means like liking what I should like and doing what I should do that I will be loved that and be safe like all of that and so when I started my business it was really the first time that I was sharing not even stuff I was sharing other people’s blog posts and YouTube videos about personal development but to be like to put myself out there in the world as someone who liked personal development when I’d never expressed or even knowing about personal development as a thing before that but I hadn’t been the person who’s like here I am reading the self-help book and then to start being that person and showing up in the world as that person that turned on my perfectionism handbrake like nothing else had ever before I was a perfectionist when it came to uni and school all of the things but it wasn’t as severe as when I started my business this is why I’m so passionate about helping perfectionist entrepreneurs in particular because entrepreneurship and for me the flavor of entrepreneurship that I love the most is the self-expressed do it your own way kind and that brought up so much perfectionist fear for myself that it took a while to develop the willingness to be seen but it was there like I had this desire to listen to all these podcasts talking about online business and blogging and I was like maybe I could do it and I just kept listening and listening and listening and every time I listened it seeded a little bit more that I could be that kind of person to have a blog and to to talk about things and to be able to have that be one day a business and an income for myself which was insane to think about at the time.
And over time I developed a willingness to be seen even though it was so uncomfortable and part of that was I just knew that if I if I gave up on the dream that I had even though I didn’t really know specifically what it was I just had like a general vague direction and other people that I admired that I was like that would be cool but I wasn’t ever like I’m going to be like the number one this or the it was just like that felt way too insane to ever think about I was like I remember I had a goal like I want to get within a year a hundred people send me an email say that they love my content like that was like a massive goal that I had that felt so insane to ever even think about but I knew for myself that if I gave up on my dream that I have for my business that it would keep nagging at me and pestering me and I would still have that desire to do it and it would be more uncomfortable not to do it than to do it and even though it was so uncomfortable to do it and to be posting on YouTube and a blog and all these things while I was in workplaces with colleagues who I was so scared if they read it they’d be like oh my god what is this that you posted like I was so scared of that.
So I like hid it from everyone especially in the beginning for as long as I could as I built up my willingness and my belief and my desire to do it and my really like my tolerance or acceptance or allowance of the discomfort of it but I knew if I and this was just like I’m trying to think how did I know this it was essentially I feel like a deep knowing that I had or just like a belief that felt so true which was if I don’t keep going at it and just putting one shaky leg in front of the other then I will always have the discomfort of having a desire that I’m not actually fulfilling and I will always have the discomfort of having and knowing that I could do it and then seeing myself be scared every day like seeing myself be a coward about it seeing myself know that I could do it and then not just felt more painful and more uncomfortable and so it kind of felt like I don’t have a choice because like we’re we’re wired to move away from pain when the pain of not doing it felt more painful than the pain of doing it I did put one foot in front of the other and put myself out there more and shared more and I’ve always from the beginning shared my own experiences and like that’s what I love seeing from other people is them telling stories and sharing things about like what is actually going on for them?
So that is what I’ve always loved creating and putting out into the world and I also find it very satisfying personally to do that like to have an outlet for that as well and essentially what happened I’m trying to think of like when to pinpoint it so I had a willingness to be seen and I would say that grew like continued to grow over time and then at some point the willingness my willingness to be seen and the the pain how do I say this the pain of being seen felt more painful than the pain of not being seen.
So it shifted. So I started pulling back I didn’t show up as much on Instagram whereas in 2022 I was posting and 2021 I was posting on stories a lot and in years before that I was posting on stories a lot I was posting like just sharing stuff and it like I had a lot of perfectionist thoughts about it so it would often take a while to do it but I was still doing it it was like this it was uncomfortable and I was still doing it I was posting on my podcast and I was sharing like all the behind the scenes stuff that I love sharing like and felt with the episodes in that period of time like I was really I felt free to share and connected when sharing and I wasn’t trying to like get it right or do it a particular way I was very connected and willing to be seen even though it was uncomfortable.
And then it became more uncomfortable to be seen than to not be seen when I started thinking that I was failing and I was thinking that I was failing because my revenue in 2022 was six hundred thousand in 2023 it was three hundred and something thousand and it’s actually wild to think that my brain thought I was failing because I was if you look at the circumstance the circumstance is I was making three hundred thousand dollars in my business and I had three kids under the age of two so I had my daughter who was 19 months when the twins were born Jack and James so I and I was like also navigating like recovering postpartum like from having a twin pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding the twins and so much and such a massive life shift which I’ve talked about before on the podcast but I think it I thought that I had that relates to this that was really painful was this idea of like having kids particularly like three kids under two which was the circumstance shouldn’t impact we hear the should shouldn’t impact my business and I was essentially doing that thing of where you are trying to parent as if you’re a full-time parent and then you’re trying to work as if you’re like that’s your full-time thing and trying to do both as if you’re not doing the other one.
And instead of actually how does being a mom, and now we have four, how does being a mom of four actually make me show up more of how I want to be in my business and how is it helpful and vice versa instead of like trying to pretend like the other side of my life doesn’t exist. So I went through, and there were other things that happened as well, I had a story that, and I hope this is helpful to just like hear what contributed to me going from being willing to be seen to then not being willing, and then now being willing again, like being more willing to be seen than to not be seen. So, because I never had zero willingness, I was still being seen, but it just wasn’t in the same way.
And I’d say from like 2023 to 2025. So that’s a significant period, that’s three years. In 2023, so that Jack and James were born at the beginning of that year, and Liam was born in 2025.
And his pregnancy was high risk, a lot of uncertainty around it. I had CMV during the first trimester of the pregnancy, which can have lots of impact on baby and you don’t know what the impact will be until they’re born and even then it can carry on. And it turned out he didn’t have, he wasn’t infected at all with the CMV.
We found that out after the birth, but I had like all of that uncertainty plus a story that I was failing in the business, made it feel like, what’s the point of being seen? Like it’s like, I kind of just feeling like I kept like wanting to feel like, like I want to go back to 2022 and I want to like go back to being successful and like how do I get back there? And like, instead of earlier on in my business, just being very future focused, I went to being very past focused and thinking about all the things that weren’t working and all the ways that I was failing and all the ways that I should be doing better and how to get it right and how I wasn’t getting it right. And just like so much of that perfectionist thinking, like my perfectionism handbrake was on and it was in a different way to before, because in the beginning, and I think this has just been like such a valuable experience for me as a coach, coaching entrepreneurs who are perfectionists of like, there’s one thing to develop the belief that success is possible for you when you haven’t yet succeeded in business before. And then like what, how do you handle it when you have circumstances that like rattle your confidence? And are you able to bounce back? Are you able to move forward? Or with the perfectionist thinking, we just got into this, like, I should be more successful.
I’m failing. I should be more successful. I’m failing.
And being in that kind of thought pattern for three years, also during that three year period, I made, maybe I’m just thinking $700,000. So it’s still pretty damn good. But this is the point as well, like my brain, while also having, so when Liam was born, we had four under four.
So having like the pregnancies, births, recoveries, breastfeeding, weight loss every time, like all of the different things that navigating that while continuing to have to build my business, even though I didn’t feel like it was building, but it was, I was getting more skilled. I like everything about myself as an entrepreneur was improving. It just didn’t feel like it because it wasn’t yet showing in my results.
But during that period of time, having that story that essentially like, I didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be demanded. Like I already felt so in demand personally, especially relating to breastfeeding and needing to be available, like on demand, demand feeding that it really just felt like I don’t want any, anything extra.
And I also, this sort of like, essentially like what’s the point because it’s not going to work anyway, because it hasn’t been working. But what I was going to say before circling back is I also had a story relating to this, that in, at the end of 2022, I made a decision to hire a marketing manager position on my team from the thought that I’ve gotten us as far as I can go. I’m not the person to lead the marketing and sales.
So like, I don’t know how to essentially this sort of like, I don’t know how to sell PGSD, even though we had 125 PGSDers sign up that year. Just like, oh, I just love seeing how my brain has got it so twisted. But anyway, we had 125 people sign up for PGSD in 2022.
And I had personally a big year, toddler, pregnant with twins, getting married. We finished our renovation the Christmas before. So like finishing, moving into the house and starting to sell it and like, like helping friends with certain things.
That was just a lot going on personally, which I think was part of what worked about it. Like I had a full personal life. I wasn’t just needing every need to be met by my business.
And at the end of that year, I then decided I didn’t know how to market and sell. And from that thought, I hired a marketing manager and I took myself out of the marketing and sales. And also I had the twins, so I had time off.
I had a couple of months off and then got back into things and partly got back into things quickly because I felt like everything else had changed. So I wanted something where I just felt like me and like I, things had stayed the same, but then I didn’t know where I fit into the anymore because I had taken myself out of marketing and sales. And I also had a PGSD coach.
I think two PGSD coaches at the time, which are PGSDers always love having PGSD coaches and getting their perspectives as well as hearing how I say things. But I, all that meant I wasn’t coaching PGSDers. Like I, I just got very disconnected from the business and from my clients.
And like, I was, all the ways that I connect and express, I didn’t have them available and it just got really hard. And then I made that, like, I thought that what was actually, how do I word this? What was actually a story, which was that I’m failing. I thought that was the fact that I’m failing.
Like that was the circumstance of it when actually I was doing really well. But my perfectionist story was like, I should be doing so much better. And I have learned, I have so many lessons I need to do episodes on from like the last three years.
So many, so many incredible lessons I have learned during this three year period. I feel like I learned things in three year periods. Anyway, side note.
So I really, during 2023, 2024, 2025 felt like I’m failing. I like, I stopped doing a lot of going out and seeing people. I saw my friends and things like that, but business wise, I didn’t go to events.
I didn’t go, I mean, I went to some, doesn’t mean talking at all or nothing. I went to Nashville. I’m in Brisbane.
I flew across the world. When the twins were a year old, they were 11 months and Lydia would have been two and a half. So I went to a mastermind event with my coach, Stacey Boehman,.
So that was amazing. But then everyone I connected with lived in the States or elsewhere in the world. And I previously had done like lots of peer coaching, like in 2022 in the mastermind I was with of Stacey’s, I organized like peer coaching.
I like reached out to people. I was like, Hey, like let’s coach each other. And I’d be peer coaching with someone every week, just doing like a lot of connecting.
And I went into this like thinking of it’s so hard to connect with others. And like, it’s not worth the effort. And that actually gives me a lot of fuel when I connect with others.
So there was still stuff happening, but just not nearly as regularly as in previous seasons. And on the call today, we were also talking about like, what are the intangible things that like when you’re signing clients or getting customers or sales, like there are often intangible things that are happening at the same time that don’t feel related. So like for this PGS-CRS coaching, she was doing a lot of in-person networking, but all of her new clients that were coming really easily were coming from referrals.
So she’s like, well, actually the in-person networking didn’t create the referrals. So it felt helpful, but it actually didn’t create it. But I was like, but it actually, you putting yourself out there and networking in the world with real humans is a symptom of your willingness to be seen.
And the willingness to be seen is part of the equation of you signing clients easily. So for me, like, and I know that because that’s true for me that I’ve been able to see like, there’s things that feel directly correlated to me signing clients, like recording an episode and doing a launch and someone signing up. But like, I’m at my most magnetic and attractive as a coach when I’m doing lots of self-coaching, having lots of breakthroughs, connecting with others, getting coached, when I’m using all my own tools that I use as well, growth goal, power planning, clean rest, like when my clean rest is on point, when my power planning is on point and doesn’t mean I’m doing it perfectly, but when I’m really connected with it, like that is a symptom of me being willing to be seen, to put myself out there, to be connected to my goals, to be connected to myself, to be connected to my week.
And I’m thinking about now, like literally thinking about it as I’m recording this, what, I feel like there’s so many things that have had me shift out of my willingness, like me wanting to not be seen to me wanting to be seen again. And a big piece of that was recently deciding that I’m just going to return to doing things how I want to do them instead of trying to do it right and how things I think would work best, so to speak. So deciding I’m not going to post on Instagram, I’m going to return to YouTube, I’m going to return to writing.
There’s like a perfectionism quiz that we had and I decided I don’t want to do that anymore because I actually want to promote the planning series that we have instead. I’m actually going to be doing a live workshop about power planning. So I will let you know when that becomes available.
You can sign up and learn from me live and ask questions. I just love teaching live and connecting. No shit, like I’ve been talking about.
So I’m really excited for that, but just being like, what would I, if I could do it any way that I actually wanted to do it and it could work, how would I do that? That’s how I built the podcast is asking that sort of question and then trusting myself to figure it out. So that has been really helpful because I just felt like I’m now not trying to do it right. I’m just trying to do it the way I want to do it and then applying first principles of business and then also applying what I know about mindset and personal development and how your thoughts and feelings and self-image create your results and perfectionism and noticing my perfectionist all or nothing thinking, all the different things like that.
When my perfectionism handbrake is coming on, like applying everything I know, like it just feels so great to be in my, in like what I know works and I’m not like with Instagram as well. Part of it was when I was on Instagram posting, I would find myself scrolling and even if I was looking at positive things, I just, it was kind of like, I just wanted to not, I don’t, I don’t like consuming short form content. My brain loves it.
Like, like, yep, give me more, give me more, but I’d never feel better than before I started scrolling and so I don’t, I don’t have it on my phone at all. I haven’t for maybe a month now or since I posted that I’m not going to be posting and that alone, like then just consuming different things instead of that has been so amazing to kind of like to be out of the noise of like, you should be thinking about this and that and all of that kind of thing. To me, I just love long form YouTube podcasts, books, talking to real people about things like all of that deep kind of stuff.
So that also Liam is turning one in a few weeks and I think just like being at towards the end of the breastfeeding and having demand because once he turns one, even if I continue breastfeeding, which I likely will for a little while, that I’m not the main food source anymore. So there’s that, just like so many little things. I also did a lot of work at the end of 2025 to really reconnect with my business and like, I had to notice first how disconnected I had been from like all areas of the business and then reconnected.
I let go of someone who was working with me, who I loved working with so much, but I just was like, I need to, I need to be the only one in my business and like reconnect with every aspect of the business and every process that we have and like how the business works. I just felt so disconnected from it and just so many lessons from all of it. So many lessons and it has been a process, but also like each week I have built up a little more and a little more my willingness to be seen by like the discomfort of not being seen getting greater and greater and also connecting.
I did an episode at the end of last year about connection first, strategy second. That has really been like core principle that I now coach on, think about, use as a tool that essentially the antidote to all of my perfectionist thinking is found in connection. Like perfectionism is us trying to disconnect so as to create safety and kind of keep ourselves at arm’s length and what we crave is connection and when we connect it, like it, it’s the thing that we’re most afraid of that we want the most that actually holds the answer to the struggle we’re having.
So just solving this issue, if you will, through connection and figuring out like reconnecting to my business and then reconnecting to my clients. I think that was the first thing I really reconnected to was my clients and really like just like feeling so much more connected and then reconnecting to my business and all the ins and outs of my business, reconnecting to my goals, reconnecting to my tools of power planning, which I continued to do but I hadn’t been doing it fully, reconnecting to my growth goal, just like reconnecting to my self-trust and building up that willingness because it is still uncomfortable. Like this morning I wanted to have a one-on-one call in six minutes, so I’ll wrap this up very shortly but I had the PGSD call this morning, so that finished at 10.
I went a few minutes over and I wanted to have this episode recorded by 11, which is when I had my next call and my brain was just like, no, it’s going to take like we need to have more time and like like all of these reasons essentially like don’t be seen, don’t do that, maybe do like do a best of the podcast episodes, you don’t need to share and I’m having next week off, so I should just like spend my time doing other things and I had to like build up my own willingness and desire to be seen and to let it be easy and to be thinking about you, the person watching this who’s like this is great, this is so helpful, I love hearing about this, anything that Sam shares is so helpful for me, like I had to think about you, the person who finds anything I say helpful instead of my brain can think about the person who’s like, well, that doesn’t make sense, that’s not true, like my brain was thinking about the person who won’t like it and then try and please them and that never works and never feels good and doesn’t make me, doesn’t help me create great content.
If I think about the person who’s like, oh my god, anytime Sam releases a video I want to watch it and I already know people like that from PGSD, they become PGSDers and so to just picture more of them in the world, more of you in the world and they like, how much I love watching YouTube while I’m doing stuff and I’m like, oh my god, this person just released a video, I want to watch it and just have it on, so all that to say my brain still is like, it’s not comfortable to be seen and I’m willing to do it because it just felt like, I felt through that period one of the most painful things was I didn’t feel like me and I didn’t feel like me because I was telling myself a story that I was incapable when I was actually more capable than ever in my life and it was just like painful to not see myself, it was so painful to be unseen by myself and now I feel so much more seen by myself and like being on YouTube again particularly because I’m like physically seen instead of just writing emails and podcasting and like, I don’t know, there’s just been something about allowing myself to be physically seen.
I still need to actually get the videos recorded onto YouTube and like convert them across but just the act of recording it and it allowed, I’ve been allowed to be long form instead of for Instagram and having to like make everything I do the soundbite version of it to just allow it, allow myself to be verbose and to share the long version, it has just been really freeing and I find I have a lot more willingness to be seen when I allow myself to do it in the way that I actually want to do it and in a way that where I feel seen by myself as I’m doing it, it tends to like my willingness to be seen and this is probably like the crux of it to be honest.
My willingness to be seen is a lot less when I feel like I can only be seen as someone who isn’t me, like I have to be someone else to be not like worthy of being seen but I have to be different to how I am or better than how I am so that it, to be seen like for it to be worthwhile to be seen, I feel so unseen by myself and now that like my desire to be uncomfortable is so low but when I’m in the like I’m however I want to be seen is valuable just in and of itself, I’m trying to think like how do I actually like word, how do I actually think about it but like kind of this vibe of like I can do whatever I want and trusting I know enough about first principles of business and how a business works and like because we can kind of be in this like but if I just do whatever I want.
It’s not going to work but like I know business first principles and I know mindset with that alone like I can’t go wrong and it’ll always be a journey like that’s entrepreneurship as well so I just feel like if you are, I will wrap up if you are like wanting to be seen but not allowing yourself to be seen to get present to the pain of not being seen and I coached a PGSDer on this last year and she said something that was so amazing which is she’d had a year of being seen and showing up and then a year of not being seen and she was returning to being seen again after since joining PGSD, and she’s like oh it’s actually so much harder to to not be seen it’s like the anticipation of being seen is actually harder than being seen and I found that as well like the anticipation of like returning to being seen actually emotionally is harder than the emotions that come with being seen so all of this is an encouragement to be willing to be in the discomfort of being seen rather than settling for the discomfort of having no client so I hope it’s been helpful and I will talk to you in the next episode.
Outro
If you want to learn the basics of power planning, then I invite you to sign up for the video series that I’ve put together for you on how to plan properly as a perfectionist. By the end of this series, you’ll be in a position to start using power planning to get your perfectionist mindset on your side and get out of your own way. So to sign up, you can go to samlaurabrown.com/planningseries. The link will be available for you in the show notes as well.