If you’ve been avoiding taking action towards your business goals, it might be because there’s an unspoken goal that you need to acknowledge. This is simple yet powerful work that will have you feel more aligned with your goals than ever before. Plus it will give you permission to work on the essential things that you’ve been feeling bad about working on.
Tune in to learn how to tell when you have an unspoken goal, examples of how this shows up in business and what to do about it. You’ll also learn how to be ok with leaving some goals for the future so you can calmly focus on what matters right now. If you are struggling to get behind your goals emotionally, it’s likely this is work you need to do.
Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode485.
Other ways I can help you:
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- Watch the free training: How To Plan Properly As A Perfectionist with Power Planning
- Follow me on instagram for more perfectionism advice: @perfectionismproject
If you’re ready to get out of your own way in your business, I invite you to join my program called Perfectionists Getting Shit Done. Enrollment will be open from 18 to 25 October. To find out more about PGSD and join the waitlist today visit samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project, a podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionist Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business. You can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.
Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so today I’m sharing with you something that came up on a recent pgsd coaching call that I know is going to be incredibly helpful for you. One of the benefits of the way we do coaching calls in pgsd, we have a weekly call, and you can get coach yourself on that call. Or the main thing, the main thing that PGSDers love, is that you can listen to other perfectionist entrepreneurs getting coached, getting coached on things you didn’t even know you needed help with, or you didn’t have the self awareness around or you just didn’t have the courage or willingness to ask. And so this coaching is something that came up, and I just want to bring it to you and share it with you. So many PGSDers said it was such a relief to hear about this, and I think it’ll be the same for you.
So what came up on that call, this PGSDer was saying, so she has a growth goal, and we teach you how to set that in pgsd and how to break it down so it works for your perfectionist brain, and you don’t make all the goal setting mistakes that we make as perfectionist because if you didn’t know we can’t follow the same goal setting advice and productivity advice and productivity advice to everyone else. It just triggers that all nothing mindset and makes us get in our own way. So the growth goal is designed to support you with getting out of your own way. So this PGSDer had a growth goal and her quarterly milestone, and then her two mini goals for the quarterly milestone.
And so as I was coaching her, and she was getting some coaching on avoiding taking action, on the two mini goals that she had. So one of them was, she’s an artist. One of them was creating a series of 10 pieces of art that would be sold as prints, and another one was pitching her art to businesses that would buy it. And when we went through it, and I was coaching her, I was like, So tell me, like, what you are doing with your time, and where that’s going into saying, Well, I have commissions and client work that I’m doing as well, so a lot of my time has been doing that, and I wanted to show up again on Instagram, and I’ve done that. And what I was saying to her on that call, and what we did coaching around is essentially turning your unspoken goals into spoken goals.
So in her instance, she had goals around getting commissions and doing client work and marketing that on Instagram, but she hadn’t actually formulated that into her growth goal. And so what was happening was that she was making herself wrong for doing the right thing, doing something that she knew was important for the business. And even though she wants to have a different business model in the future where she wouldn’t be doing commissions or client work, or she would be but it’d be very exclusive and just in a slightly different way that right now and for the foreseeable future. Client work and commissions is an important part of her business. It’s something that she is doing well at and so what we can do when we want to achieve a goal that we haven’t achieved before, our brain says, I need to be doing completely different things, or I need to be doing it way bigger and way better.
And we like to find a really complicated answer to the problem of, how do we achieve this goal? And part of that, I think, is just protecting our identity that we’re like, oh, I just haven’t had the right strategy. And if I just get that, then I’ll be able to do it, versus our perfectionist brain being like, Well, maybe it’s just because I’m not good enough and I’ve had the right plan all along. It’s not because you’re not good enough, but what we want to have you do is actually have your unspoken goals be reflected in your actual goals that you’re working towards. Otherwise you will make yourself wrong for doing the right thing. You will decrease your self trust. And in this instance, it’s such a great example that this PGSDer had been making such progress in her business to be able to create the emotional capacity to be showing up and marketing on Instagram again, to be able to be delivering her client work and her commissions, and have a list of people that she’s working through who wants to work with her that because of the way she had set up her goal, that she wasn’t allowing herself to actually make time for the things that matter and she had for herself, like these other things, pitching and creating the art series, they’re things that she wants to do, but she doesn’t have to prioritize them completely and de prioritize completely everything else.
And so what I suggested to her is, let’s make her unspoken goals for the quarter, her actual spoken goals. Let’s make those unwritten goals that she has the ones that when she’s planning out her week, she’s thinking, I want to go back on Instagram and be regularly posting there, and I want to do the client work and commissions. Let’s have that actually be your goal. And then also, you can have your other goals that you have for a future quarter, you can still do those things, but allow yourself to actually do the things that you know you want to do, and have that be part of your actual plan, not just this sneaky plan you have in the back of your head that it just creates this incongruence with our goal, because we have this goal that we’re consciously working towards. But also unconsciously. We’re not working towards it because we have a different goal, and we want to get those in alignment.
We want to have you have your conscious goal be in alignment with your unconscious goal that you have, or your unwritten or unspoken goal, or however you want to think about it, that goal that you’re like, I really, actually do want to do this thing. Have that be part of your actual plan that is the best way to be able to achieve your goals and to create a business that you love and that is also successful, and is also profitable as well, and actually supports you and your life. That when we are in this situation, and I’ve done it many times, when we’re making ourselves wrong for doing the right thing, because we think we shouldn’t be doing that thing anymore. We should be past it. We should be beyond it. We should have a different business model now.ow.
This isn’t scalable the way I want it to be, so I shouldn’t be doing anything related to this. And I was saying to her, like, when it comes to new commissions and new client work, like, is she allowing herself to welcome this in? And she wasn’t, because she doesn’t have the capacity in her brain to do that, because she should be busy pitching, and she should be busy creating this new art series, even though she wasn’t doing those things either. And this is how it really shows up as well, is that sometimes with these spoken goals, we won’t even be making progress towards them, because we’re busy working on the unspoken ones, and then we it’s just seeing that that’s going on can be really helpful, because it feels like, well, if I actually let go of the spoken goals, particularly in this case of any goals, if I actually let go of that, then I’m not going to make any progress.
But you’re not making progress anyway. You’re not working towards it. Or if you are, you are probably just going through the motions with it, you are probably just showing up and doing your job, checking in, checking out. Yep, I posted today cool versus really having a goal that you can emotionally get behind. And yes, it might bring up fear and doubt, because that’s what happens when our brain is perceiving that we are doing something that is going to be uncertain or unfamiliar, and there’s a lot to be spoken for or said about supporting yourself and getting like emotionally on board, and having the willingness to experience that like we don’t want to drag ourselves along and force our way through things, but also expecting that there will be some fear and doubt that is normal. And if you can with yourself and notice that you have the desire to do the thing, let yourself do the thing and let it play out, and let yourself have the space and the capacity for that.
So I just wanted to talk about that and know as well that when it comes to examples of this, just to help flesh this out a little bit more that I made myself wrong for spending time posting on Instagram, even though that was a very powerful part of not just the business, but also my content creation and me having a way that I could show up and share and then get feedback, get comments, get people DMing me and saying, can you talk a bit more about this or what about that? And in the podcast, I don’t get that. I get to just imagine what you’re thinking about and that you like the episode. And it was helpful. But there’s no comments under podcast episodes. I get very little information about whether anyone’s liking it or not liking it, or anything like that. And there are some upsides to that, because I get to imagine the best case scenario, but my brain can also imagine the worst case scenario too.
But Instagram was something that was really helpful and has served a great role for me in being a coach and developing tools and interacting with people and expanding my emotional capacity, as well for visibility, for putting myself out there and all of that kind of thing. But I had made myself wrong for showing up on Instagram, because I shouldn’t be doing that, because I want to only do things that are sustainable and scalable all of the time, and I want to be able to have the freedom to have months off of my business if I want to. We want to have another baby. So being able to do that and not feeling like I need to be on Instagram stories or whatever, but to actually be like, well, I can be on stories, and then I can update my decision not to be on stories. But if I want to be on stories, now I can be, and I have been making myself wrong for doing something that was really helpful, and then for the business and that I enjoyed doing, and then it stopped me from actually creating. But I had this desire to create, but I wouldn’t let myself create.
And so a couple episodes ago, I talked about untying your hands from behind your back. So if you resonate with that, listen to that episode that I had just tied my hands behind my back because I had made myself wrong for doing the right thing, so to speak, quote, unquote, the right thing, that I wasn’t allowing myself to pursue my unspoken goal that I want to create publicly, and do that in a forum where there is feedback, and I had that in PGSD, there’s literally the pgse forum. There’s also coaching calls where I’m givingiving the coaching and seeing how that is received and adjusting it like I love that, but because I do one coaching call in pgsd per week, so that’s one hour of time that I get to have that. And there’s a PGSD forum, and I can obviously spend as much time as I want in there, but I also love interacting with people who aren’t yet in pgsd and getting that feedback and increasing my emotional capacity around that too, as I mentioned, being seen, putting myself out there, feeling those feelings that come with creating publicly that I talked about in the most recent episode.
So if you have unspoken, unwritten goals, and let’s just zoom out for a second, because in this case, for the PGSDer, that her unspoken goals related to the same thing. They were in the same kind of realm that it was, instead of doing the pitching and the art prints, that part of what she wanted to do is also be showing up on Instagram and be doing commissions and client work. But zoom out. That might be really helpful as well. So after that call, one of our PGSDers posted in the pgsd forum and said, Thank you so much for that coaching and for that call. And what came up for me was for her, she is a performer and has been creating content around that, and she also has a pet setting business.
And what came up for her is that she wants to make money from the pet sitting business and give herself more time to begin making money from her business that she has as a performer and content creator, and that unspoken goal that she had about wanting to make money from her business, and she’s already making money as a pet sitter and providing those services, But being able to help other people have pet sitting pets, eating businesses, that is something she has a skill set around, that she has a desire to do, but it hadn’t been her spoken goal. Because her spoken goal, her written goal, had been specifically around making money from her business as a performer, that she hadn’t allowed herself to give herself the time and the space and the opportunity to explore that idea and then to act on that idea.
And so that might be the case for you, that your unspoken goal might be in a completely different realm to your spoken goal. It might not be related to the same business, it might not be related to the same niche. And I know it can be really scary when that kind of stuff comes up. You’re like, oh my god, is this me just distracting myself or self sabotaging? You can trust yourself to know the answer to that. Also bring it to a PGSD coaching call post about it in the forum. We will support you with that. But when it comes to this, giving yourself the permission to not have to act on anything that you notice when you were thinking about this. But is there an unspoken goal or an unwritten goal? Maybe, if you haven’t started your business yet, is that you want to start a business, or you have an idea within your business for a project? I love this idea. I thought about it for years. I feel like I heard on a podcast, like a decade ago, like, what are the dreams and ideas that don’t leave you alone and they keep bugging you.
So there’s that, like, what is that idea that it just keeps popping back up? Like, you just want to actually execute it, but you’ve been stopping yourself and making yourself wrong for doing it. What would it look like to not do that and actually allow yourself to take action on that and explore that and give it a go? Like, back in the day, I had a baking blog, I did one post, I was like, Oh my God. I could not care less about talking about food, but I allowed myself to act on that desire and to play it out. And then once I did the post, it wasn’t this fear and doubt and I’m not good enough. It was like, I just actually do not care about food and about making a recipe. I love baking. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about other things like personal development. So it’s so helpful to just play that out and to notice when that is going on. So that might be the case for you, or it could be the case for you that an unspoken goal you have could be continuing to do the thing that’s working, giving yourself time and space to actually do the thing that works for you.
And so this is another thing I’ve noticed, especially with my power planning. This has been very clear. Has been made abundantly clear to me through the self awareness that I get from just really seeing what my plan is, and then I adjust the plan, and I can see when I’m changing my plans, or when I’m not giving myself enough time for something, or squeezing it, and all of that kind of thing. And what I’ve noticed is that I will want to squeeze in the most important things in my business, and I will be more willing to make a lot of time for things that are less important. So to put this into context for me, specifically when it comes to recording podcast episodes, showing up on Instagram, writing emails, I want to just like, squeeze that into the corners of my week. And I’ve gotten very good, I would say, at prioritizing needle movers and that kind of thing.
But also my brain is still like, Oh no, we shouldn’t be doing that. We should be busy trying to be the CEOand trying to be more professional and like all that perfectionist thinking that’s like, you’re not doing a good enough job, and you need to do it better, and you need to focus on this thing, and you can’t just do the thing that would be easy and enjoy doing it, because that just can’t work. So I noticed myself deprioritizing and trying to squeeze in the things that are really important for the growth of the business, and that also fuel me as a creator, as a coach. Like, just recording this episode is such a big thing that my brain can just be like, oh, we need to do that really quickly and give myself barely enough time to do it, or, like, not enough time, especially with Instagram, this is how I really noticed it, and being able to get myself out of the Instagram drama that I’ve had is I wasn’t even giving myself nearly enough time to even do anything. It was just kind of like, okay, you should just be able to do it like so quickly.
When I didn’t have a system that supported that, or I didn’t have the emotional capacity to do that, but I didn’t allow myself time to self coach on it, or get support on it, or to even like allow myself to think about it and explore it and investigate what’s going on. I would just have in my calendar, like an hour to create and publish seven posts when I didn’t act like I knew ahead of time that I I wouldn’t have time to do that because I didn’t have the emotional capacity and self trust to do that task in that time, and yet I felt like I should do it, but I felt like I shouldn’t spend too long on it, because I should be doing other more important things for the business, so I wouldn’t give myself enough time to do it.
And that really includes like, I think the time for that task could be like, say, an hour and a half or two hours, but then the time to self coach, to explore, to just like, let myself be in love with sharing on Instagram and showing up and thinking about the person on the other end, and thinking about my future client for pgsd who is out there right now scrolling is like, oh my god, I’m so sick of myself scrolling all the time and having these business goals, and I’m not working towards them, and I know what to do, and I’m not doing it like I’m not allowing myself time to get present to that and to speak to that, and to let myself create. And so when it comes to allowing yourself enough time, it’s a very important part of this, because if you have an unspoken goal that you haven’t allowed yourself to actually pursue and you’re just trying to, like, squeeze it around the corners of everything else, then you’re not creating emotional safety for yourself and self trust.
We want to be able and work on and continually develop emotional safety and self trust that makes it so much easier to make decisions, to move forward, to navigate mistakes and bounce back from them. The same with failures, when we trust ourselves and have emotional safety, we don’t even fear making mistakes nearly as much, because we trust that we can navigate it, and when we’re not scared of making mistakes, we are less likely to make them because we’re not tense. We’re able to be relaxed, focused, do what needs to be done, have it go out into the world when it’s sufficiently done, gather the feedback without getting overly emotional about it and going into fight or flight about it. Learn from that try again when we’re so scared of making mistakes, because we don’t trust ourselves to support ourselves through that, and we don’t have emotional safety around being imperfect in the reality of being a human and we think that we’re only safe if we’re doing everything perfectly, and we’re successful all the time, and our business is doubling year after year, whatever that looks like for you, it’s so much easier to make mistakes, and then when we make them, we have such a harder time recovering from them.
And I know this from experience, from a lot of personal experience with that thought and feeling pattern. So you just want to be looking at, especially with your power planning, you want to be noticing if there is something that is a needle mover for you that you haven’t been allowing yourself the time to prioritize and you’ve just been trying to do it quickly at the end of your work week, you constantly push it off. Or you just know you don’t give yourself enough time to actually do it, and just knowing that that is not only impacting your business in an unhelpful way, but also your own relationship with yourself, which, of course, that impacts your business, because if your relationship with yourself is really contentious and conditional on you being perfect, you’re not going to let yourself do anything. You’re not going to let yourself innovate. You’re not going to let yourself take risks.
And so in PGSD, we’ve actually recently added a bonus. It’s called the needle mover master class. And if you sign up for pgse In our next enrollment in October, you will get access to this instant access when you sign up for pgsd, it’s within the 12 week power planning challenge, but you don’t need to take that challenge in PGSD to be able to benefit from the masterclass.lass. So in this master class, I teach the needle mover matrix, and how to prioritize and determine what’s essential, what’s so nice to have, and what is everything else. Rather than thinking about if you are familiar with the Eisenhower matrix, which is like, what’s urgent, what’s important. And if something’s urgent and important, then you should do it. If something is urgent but not important, then you should delegate it or whatever, to actually have a really helpful way that’s contextual to your goal, because what’s important depends on the goal you’re working towards.
So to have a really helpful, practical way. So when you’re doing your Power Hour, and it comes to the point where you are determining what your needle movers are, because your perfectionist brain will want to tell you you need to do everything yesterday, because you’re not good enough. And doing all this will finally make you good enough if you can manage to do it perfectly, which you probably can’t, but you should at least try. So instead of that, if we look at, oh, I actually only need to do what’s essential, I can trust myself to know what’s essential. And the needle mover matrix is a tool to help you with that within your power hour that you can work your ideal hours or less, have a lot of ease, a lot of joy, a lot of fulfillment when you’re working through that approach.
So I say that because part of that matrix is looking at what your mini goal is for the quarter, whether you have one or two of them, what those mini goals are, and then also the category of running your business, or like business operations. Because, of course, you still need to pay your taxes, pay invoices, that kind of thing. But in terms of the goals that are actually going to add up to your bigger goals, those outcomes that you focus on, whether it’s sign five clients at $2,000 for example, if your quarterly milestone is to make $10,000 and you’re a service provider, having your quarterly mini goals actually add up to your quarterly milestone is really important, and we really support PGSDers with this inside the program, in the forum and on coaching calls, but we give you a lot of support to really make sure your goals are actually going to support you, and you’re not just working towards a vague like post consistently, or like put myself out there and market, because we want to be specific with the outcomes, otherwise our brain doesn’t have the opportunity to solve for it.
So that’s all for another day to talk more about that, and definitely, if you don’t know what your goals are, like, what are the PGSDers on this week’s call, will say, like, I am so glad, like, just from having a growth goal alone, I am so much clearer on my business. I am able to actually, just through that act alone, have made so much progress from having the clarity that comes with actually having a financial goal for the business. So there’s that. But when you were doing that needle mover matrix, you will notice, if really important things end up in the everything else category, because you have your essential things for your quarterly what’s it called quarterly mini goal number one, your essential things for quarterly mini goal number two, your essential things for running the business. Then you have your nice to haves for each of those categories.
And then you have everything else, all the inspiring ideas that you have that don’t fit within that, the things you want to do and want to work on. If you notice when you do that, that important things are coming up in the everything else category or the nice to have category, and you have a feeling in your body that you actually need to be spending time on that thing. Trust that feeling, listen to that feeling. We can be like, no, no, that’s not important, and we should all over ourselves. And I have done a lot of that, and it does not help me trust myself. It does not help me build a successful business when I’m in that I shouldn’t be spending time on Instagram. Well, hey, this keeps coming up, so let’s actually explore it. Maybe I should, maybe I should. What if that’s true? I want to, I have the desire to, I have the skill to, I keep coming up with this idea. It keeps coming up as important to me.
And so instead of being like, no, no, I shouldn’t be like, hey, what if that is actually important? What if I stop making myself wrong for doing the right thing, and I open myself up to the possibility of this is something that could be really helpful for me. This is something that could move my business forward. And I keep having this idea, and I’m gonna let myself, like, give myself the time and space to explore. Is this something that is essential for me? Or maybe it’s the case that for you, you just actually need to adjust, and I helped this PGSDer with it, you need to adjust the mini goals that you have for your quarter, because they aren’t actually reflecting what is essential for you. And so then when you spend time doing commissions and client work, you feel like you’re being avoidant, even though that is actually something you don’t want to avoid. You want to do that, but because of the way it’s set up in your brain, it feels like, Well, I’m just avoiding and putting off my mini goals and the things I want to do. But like, Hey, if you actually need to be spending time on this other thing, it is a needle mover, it’s, it’s s contributing to your revenue. It’s the foundation of your business.
Let’s actually have you carve out time and feel great about that. So if there’s something that you feel bad whenever you carve out time for it, and yet, you know it’s important that is probably an unspoken goal that you need to turn into a spoken goal, that you need to allow yourself time to do that thing, especially if, like, for me, one of the things that came up when I’ve been doing this work is around the finances of the business. And I say last year, when I was in like, essentially a functional freeze, like just feeling so frozen, so scared of making mistakes and like, the business running out of money, and that did not help me not make mistakes and not Well, I haven’t run out of money, but being in a situation financially like it, just being so stressed about it and me freezing up from the stressful thoughts then didn’t help me be resourceful and do helpful things for myself.
So anyway, part of what kept coming up for me was having time to do a weekly financial review, to really get intimate with the numbers of my business, to know and review exactly what the expenses are. Like if you have an online business, you will know there are probably a million different software subscriptions that you have, like I was looking at for PGSD. I think there’s like seven different software subscriptions, and I’m sure no need to DM me. I know there are things you can do that mean you don’t need to have all these different things. But the way we currently have it set up, there are a lot of different things for the podcast. There are different things, like, it’s just part of having an online business, especially one that started early on, and I signed up for certain things, and then now there are better things that amalgamate everything together with all that said, it just kept coming up for me. I want to do a weekly financial review. I want to have the time to actually get intimate with the numbers again and also with the revenue of the business, and really understanding not just like what the revenue was from a launch and what the cash collected overall would be, but like, okay, each month, what is the expected revenue that we’ll have?
Because we have payment plans, and it’s 12 month payment plan for people who take the option of, rather than paying for it upfront, they choose to pay it off over the 12 months. So we have that recurring revenue in the business. But I didn’t have even, like, a spreadsheet saying, you know, in December, this is how many people are on the payment plan during that month, and this is the revenue we would expect to have come in. I didn’t have that information. And so just I had that desire to have that information. I knew it was important, and that a lot of the thoughts I was having about money that were unhelpful were having me not want to look but also because I didn’t actually, then have the data, it was easier to think stressful thoughts and thoughts of like, I’m not in control of it, because, literally, that was the truth. I wasn’t actually controlling what I could control.
It was just like, okay, overall, what’s the money we have in our bank account, and is that amount going up or down, versus really knowing what’s coming in, what’s going out. And if we have this certain launch result, where will we be at with our cash? And if we have this result, where would we be at and understanding that that’s part of entrepreneurship, that’s a skill you will develop over time having a business, and that kept coming up for me. And I kept putting it up. I kept and emotionally, like, not having the emotional capacity to look at the numbers was a big thing, and I did have the emotional capacity, but my self image around being able to handle the feelings and, like, the shame my brain was generating around that as well. Like, it just I didn’t want to look and so I kept having this task come up and making some time for it, like, so I work a three day work week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and I put, like, a half hour at the end of a Thursday, saying weekly financial review.
And then I wouldn’t do it. Or I’d do, like, the super Express version of it, like, I’d log into the bank account and see what’s going on, but I wouldn’t actually give myself the time to sit down and go through it, and also have time if I needed to, to emotionally regulate myself and support my nervous system with it, to self coach on it, to take it to my mastermind that I’m in, like all of that that it was just like, you Should just quickly do it. And so last week, and maybe it was a week before as well. But last week especially, I was like, I’m gonna give myself a whole day to actually look at this and be with this. I’m gonna give myself that time to create a spreadsheet. It was very tedious as well. So that’s another part of it’s like, oh my god. I do not want to look at like, where our websites are hosted, and what plan we’re on, and why we have like, so I started my business as a blog called Smart 20s. We have the smart 20s domain, smart-twenties.com we have that, and yet it’s not set up, and I don’t know why and do we still need it? And, like, my brain just doesn’t want to do that and look at all of that and just so many other little services and things that were in this great area of like, we use it, but is it actually giving us an ROI? We have this thing set up, and if we cancel this plan, then we’ll lose the setup we have, but we’re not using the setup.
So should we keep paying for it, or we’re on a legacy plan, and that means if we cancel it and then sign up again, we’re gonna be on a different tier, and it’ll cost more and just things like that. And I just gave myself the space. It’s like turning the unspoken goal into the spoken goal, and not making myself wrong for doing the right thing. I gave myself the space to look, I gave myself the space to feel, to allow myself to be with any emotions, to not expect it to be just be this quick, easy thing, and to create the space that it could be like that as well, but to have the willingness to do some self coaching around it, to take the time to create a spreadsheet and to have all that information and not just thinking about as well. This is something that isn’t, I would say, relevant as much when you’re earlier in your business. But for anyone listening who is in six figures, multiple six figures, going to seven figures, even beyond that, that thinking about, how can I create this and do this work now forever, like do it in a repeatable way?
So I was thinking about not just this time of going through my like, revenue and expenses and looking at it, which I’ve done before. But also, how can I make it so that the next time I need to do this review, it’s a lot easier. I have this spreadsheet. I know exactly how much we’re paying for each thing. I have all of that information there. So when I come back to review it in six months and see, okay, where is our and I’ll be reviewing it every month, but when I come back to review like, which services we still need and which ones we don’t need, and when I can make decisions now about if we think, okay, we want to have this service, software, service for whatever, I can come to the spreadsheet and go, Okay, does that make sense financially, to do that and see it like there were so many things like, Oh my God, I didn’t even realize we’re paying For this. Like, there was about five things, like, I can just immediately cancel this because we don’t use it, or we don’t need it, or, like, that was a decision I made seven years ago, and it just no longer works, and I didn’t even know we were still paying for that, or that we were on, like, for zoom we used to do in PGSD. We used to do, technically, like, on the back end of zoom a webinar, and now it’s a meeting.
So you don’t need to know much about that, except that we had both the meeting and the webinar package. The webinar package with Zoom was $50 a month, or 55 a month. The meeting package is 23 months, so we’re paying 80 something a month, and we only use meetings. I literally looked as like we don’t even do any webinars, like, there’s actually we’re not using this $50 per month expense at all, and we’ve been paying it when we switch over, maybe at least a year ago, that we switched over, but then that wasn’t canceled, and I missed seeing that, and then we’re still paying for it. So anyway, there was the emotional regulation required to see like I have been mismanaging money and having that thought and the feeling from that, but like I’ve been feeling scarce around money, and then I can see myself mismanaging it, but I don’t want to keep mismanaging it, so I’m gonna emotionally regulate myself, support myself to keep going, support myself to look support myself to have intimacy with all these numbers and to see past mistakes, so to speak.
And I know that sounds like a relatively small one, and it is, but like the compound effect of that and like that thinking wasn’t just applied to that decision, but just like a general not wanting to look, especially in the past, where I’ve been like, I want to look, and was so engaged with the numbers, and then I just stopped emotionally. I wasn’t able to do it anymore, and I just kept having it in my power planning, I need to do this weekly financial review, and I didn’t give myself the time and space because it wasn’t a spoken goal that I have. So now it’s one of the essential things that I’m working on in my business. One of my mini goals is that I am getting intimate with the numbers of the business, so we’re doing that with all the stats we have for our websites.
Like, I hadn’t even like, I had to get a tutorial from someone on my team on how to actually look at our Google Analytics for our website and our PGSD sales page and checkout page. And I used to have a blog and be a blogger and being Google Analytics all the time, and I just hadn’t looked in years. And it’s not to say that you need to have those stats. It’s the thought and feeling behind it was not helpful. And I want to be able to have that emotional willingness and that skill set of being able to look and understand what’s really going on, and just that maturity and maturing as a business owner, but I hadn’t been giving myself the time and space to do it. So I kept putting it off, just simply because I hadn’t acknowledged with myself that while yes, in three months from now, that might be a quick 30 minute task that I do once a week, but right now I need half a day to develop the emotional capacity and the willingness to do that, and I need to have more time, because I need, there’s more things I need to look at, because I haven’t yet got it into this streamlined thing.
And I kept having, like, an hour to create a weekly financial review, like system or process, and then an hour to do it. I was like, but the system, I just knew I needed more time than that, and it was because I didn’t let it be a spoken goal. It wasn’t something that I allowed even to say, like, this is important so so much like of what I’m doing now is just reprioritizing what I’m doing, allowing myself time to record podcast episodes, allowing myself time to be on Instagram, allowing myself time to write emails and to think about the email strategy, because that was another thing that I hadn’t given myself time for the emails that we send out. So we send out behind the scenes. We refer to it as an EDM, which is language that is used in the industry as well, but basically, I think it’s like electronic direct mail or something, but like a weekly email goes out on a Monday, an EDM, we have our perfectionist power ups that go out Monday to Friday that are just short and sweet and really motivational inspirational to help you get out of your own way, and a few other kinds of emails that we have.
And we have other opt ins that have been set up as well, like the power planning training and things like that. And so a couple of weeks ago, I was like, I want to actually get intimate with like, what’s going on in the business, and just kind of, like auditing my business, as if I was an outsider coming in to either buy the business or help the business, like if I was a consultant, being like, hey, how does this business operate? What’s the current customer journey or experience? And I recommend doing this, by the way, if you are spending a lot of time, like working in your business, I was talking about this with a PDSDer on a call that she was like, Well, I’m spending all my time, like, posting consistently on Instagram and things like that. And what we identified is, like, first of all, she didn’t have any kind of sales periods. She was just purely in marketing. So we talked about that, but also that she wasn’t spending time working on her business.
She was just working in the business, so she wasn’t doing any of the high level thinking about the business and things like that. She’s like, I just don’t know where to start. And I said one thing to do is to just do almost like a business audit, and to just have a look at what’s going on and kind of like document how it currently is. So what I was doing with my emails and my email list is I was looking at, okay, if someone signs up for this, opt in that we have. What emails do they get following that? Like, what is the the landing page or registration page? What does that look like? What is the thank you page that they go to? Then what happens? And so much is that when I actually look, because I hadn’t given myself time to look at that, and I just squeezed in in my week, like write the EDM or the perfectionist power ups, and instead had a lot of time, like trying to plan and think and like, just that’s a whole different thing.
And I mentioned a few times doing an episode on time consuming underthinking, where you are doing a lot of planning and but in this kind of, like spinning your wheels way, and just thinking about different things, but not actually deciding about them. Or, like, I had to spend a lot of time. I had made some decisions, and then I had to spend time unwinding those decisions. Or, like, there are a few pgse launches, like, oh, we need to do a launch. And I was like, no, no, we need to cancel the launch. And like, there was two weeks worth of work involved in that. So anyway, around that I was squeezing in the important things that need to be done, or doing them, and not the best way, like just kind of half assing it and not really thinking about it. But I had to give myself time to actually look at, like big picture, what happens when someone joins our email list.
And when I did that, I was like, oh my god, I’m so frustrated at myself, and I had to just again emotional capacity. I had to just create the willingness and emotional capacity to feel frustrated and to feel mad at myself. Because when I looked I was like, Oh my God, when people sign up for this thing, like they don’t get any other emails about it, and there’s this massive, like, black hole in this section of the email list, and like, it is not a great experience for them, and they’re probably okay. They’re fine. But when I look at I’m like, oh my god, it’s not actually even sufficient. And there’s sufficiency around some areas. But I was like, this is actually insufficient. Like, when this person signs up for this training, they can actually never find that training again without signing up that is insufficient, so I just had to hold space for a lot of frustration, anger with myself that I hadn’t looked and that I hadn’t given myself the time to look and I hadn’t seen what was going on.
And even now, like having the emotional capacity to just sit with the imperfection of that is still the case. And I have my three work days a week, and I want to be constrained to that, and have lots of good reasons for that business and non business related. And so, as with all businesses, there are like seeing that imperfection. I talked about it in the most recent episode, seeing imperfection, and then not I. Like changing it right away creates, or requires an emotional capacity and a vulnerability, and this feeling of like being naked and exposed and like, I just want to fix all the things right away. I was like, and that’s not the top priority. It is a priority. I am going to allow myself the time and space to work on it, but I’m also working on other things, and so I want to actually give myself instead of and what I had been doing, like squeezing in, okay, spend an hour looking at our email marketing strategy. Like, No, I actually need more time to really truly look at it, so I can look at it and not have to then come back and make the decision again and again and again, because I haven’t fully made it.
I haven’t allowed myself the time to fully make it. So I just have to keep coming back because there’s incomplete work, because I haven’t given myself enough time, or I’ve completely put it off because I already know I have not got enough time, or I don’t have the emotional capacity, and I haven’t supported myself to create that, either by like giving myself time for self coaching or and we’ve just actually added a self coaching masterclass to PGSD, just a quick plug for that and what to do in a self coaching session. So having that self coaching time or having some clean rest time after that task, so that my brain can okay. We’re in this emotion now and after it, will be able to completely rest and do whatever we feel like doing. We’re not going to have to go into another scary task right after this. We can just do this task and then keep going, but not from this place of forcing yourself to do things, but I can do this task, then I can rest, and then I will keep going with something else.
And then if I need to, I can rest so giving yourself time to do the unspoken goals and unwritten goals is really important. If you just find yourself squeezing things in, not giving yourself enough time, then this is something to look at. We can definitely support you with this on a pgse coaching call or in the pgse forum and help you review what your mini goals are. You have the needle weaver matrix and that masterclass that will help you identify if this is going on for you. But yeah, I’d say it’s quite common to have a think about it. Reflect on it. Is there something that like in your mind? You know you want to be working on, but you’re not giving yourself the time and space to do it? Allow yourself to do that. Stop making yourself wrong for doing the right thing. It instantly builds self trust, connection with yourself and a more successful, profitable and fulfilling business.
So with that said, sign up for the PGSD waitlist. By the way, if you haven’t already, link in show notes or samlaurabrown.com/pgsd, I just want to welcome you in there. Have you work with us? Have you get out of your own way? Releasing your perfectionism handbrake. Do this work that I’m talking about. We are opening in October, so join us inside. Join the wait list. You will find out all the enrollment details and more about the program and who it’s for, and you’ll also get an early invitation to sign up as well. So get yourself on that wait list. If you are not already, I hope you’re having a beautiful day, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the wait list for my program called perfectionist getting shit done, aka pgsd. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business, you’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business. Planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning and getting regular, guilt free, clean rest, you’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today. Go to SamLaurabrown.com/pgsd.