If you want to stop constantly questioning yourself – today’s podcast episode is for you. I’m sharing advanced work you can do when it comes to self-doubt.
Tune in to learn how to mine your self-doubt for wisdom and how this is different to believing your self-doubt, dismissing it or ignoring it altogether. If you feel like you have been ignoring your inner voice and are ready to work with your self-doubt to build self-trust, tune in today.
In this episode I’m also sharing a special announcement about The Power Planning Course that so many people have been waiting for.
Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode486.Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode485.
Other ways I can help you:
- Find out more about The Power Planning Course – samlaurabrown.com/powerplanning
- Join the waitlist: Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (aka PGSD) – samlaurabrown.com/pgsd
- Follow me on instagram for more perfectionism advice: @perfectionismproject
If you’re ready to say goodbye to overwhelm, I invite you to sign up for The Power Planning Course. I’ll teach you how to plan properly as a perfectionist so you can stop procrastinating and overworking and start calmly and confidently getting shit done. Enrollment will be open for 4 days only. To find out more and sign up when doors open visit samlaurabrown.com/powerplanning.
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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 (Custom Introduction)
Before we get into today’s episode, I have a really special announcement. This is something that so many people have been asking me about for so long, and I’m just really excited to be doing it, and I know there’s a very good chance you will be too. So what is happening is that my course, the power planning course, which we have not had open for at least 18 months now, is going to be opening for enrollment this week for four days only. So at 8pm New York time on Wednesday the 18th we will open enrollment, and enrollment will be closing on Sunday, the 22nd at midnight, New York time. So you have four days to get yourself inside the power planning course.
And I was debating whether to have this episode today be a whole episode relating to power planning. And there are so many on the podcast that you can go back to and like the interview I recently did with Eliska on this podcast all about power planning when you’ve got a busy life and lots going on. I have just done so many great interviews about it and different things like that. There will be some episodes about power planning coming out later on this week, but the episode that you will have today is one that I recorded a few weeks ago, and I really don’t want you to wait any longer for it, so I’m leaving it as is, as was planned, but I do want to invite you inside the power planning, course.
So what you’re going to get inside is the calm and clarity to be able to get shit done and to not feel like you’re wasting your time on your business, to not feel overwhelmed and like you’re drowning in everything that there is to do, to actually be able to feel clear about what needs to be done, to get you to your goals, not just all the different ideas and things that you want to be doing, but you have actually thought about your goal. And in the course, I’ll teach you how to set your own growth goal for your business, which is a 12 month revenue goal set in a really specific way to work with your perfectionist mindset instead of against it.
In the course, I’m going to teach you power planning, I’m going to teach you clean rest, which is how to rest without guilt, and you are going to be able to change your relationship with your business, instead of thinking I don’t have enough time to get everything done and just feeling so incapable. I’ve had so many people before power planning say things like I would feel overwhelmed before I even opened my eyes in the morning like that, to do list anxiety that comes when you aren’t planning properly as a perfectionist, I want to help you. Do not have that anymore, and I have the solution. It has worked for so many perfectionist entrepreneurs in all different industries, in all different life situations where they have little ones like me, if you’re working full time, if you are dealing with a health condition, if you’re looking after parents, if you’re a shift worker, also if you have ADHD, it really supports your brain and is very flexible and adaptable, whilst also giving you structure for your week.
So you’re not just like wishy washy, hoping everything gets done, being so optimistic, and you’re also not going to be over scheduled, super strict, super rigid. You are going to be able to have flexible structure for your week that allows you to get the essential things done, let go of the rest and move your business forward. If you are feeling overwhelmed about your business, especially when life, like your personal life, there’s a lot going on. Your business can’t grow. You’re not going to have the clarity you need. You’re not going to be able to have the ideas you need to have. You’re not going to have the energy that you need to have to move your business forward.
And I want you to have a successful business, and I know that you know you’re capable of doing that, but right now, you aren’t doing the things you need to do. You’re procrastinating and putting things off, or overthinking, or maybe you’re overworking. You’re burning yourself out. You’re working evenings and weekends and constantly trying to squeeze work in whenever you can, if that is you, if you are someone who wants to not just manage their time, but also have a way to manage their mind and to feel so good about the week and to have a realistic plan you can actually follow that supports your goals and will have you just not feeling behind anymore.
It’s such a pain point for perfectionists when we aren’t using productivity tools at work, for our perfectionist brains, we constantly feel behind. Nothing we do is ever good enough. And so I want to change that for you. I want to invite you into the power planning course when enrollment opens at 8pm on Wednesday the 18th, and we have some special bonuses. So I won’t go through all of them. I’m going to get into the episode in a second. But usually the power planning course, when we’ve previously done it, is purely self study, but what we’re actually doing is there are going to be three live group coaching calls with me that are happening so you can get so much support, and you can hear other people like you getting coached on their growth goal, power planning, clean rest.
It’s so helpful if you’ve never heard anyone else getting coached before, like I prefer hearing others getting coached to getting coached myself, and I am a coach, and I’m so in love with coaching, but the breakthroughs I have had through hearing someone else articulate my experience and then get support with it, like my defensiveness is way down when I’m hearing someone else, and I can really hear what’s going on and take that coaching. So I really want to have that, because if you haven’t heard that before, that’s the main thing that we do inside perfection, is getting shit done. And so many people haven’t even heard other people get coached. And of course, you can get coach yourself. You have that option. So we’re doing that. We’re doing a Facebook group as well, so you can get every question you have answered by me and my team that’ll be available for four weeks. And I’m thinking, what else we have is I’m just, I’m so excited about it.
There’s also the bonus, your first power hour workshop replay. So I will guide you through your first Power Hour, especially if you have had a lot of procrastination. You have been your past self has been very sure that your future self can get everything done, and do you has just delegated it all to you. If that is the case, I will support you through that in that workshop and guide you through every step of your first Power Hour. If it feels a little bit overwhelming, the steps are very simple, and a lot of people don’t need that workshop, but for those who do that is there. And there’s also a needle mover masterclass, which is going to teach you what the needle mover matrix is, so that you can prioritize your task, not just based on what’s urgent and important. That is not the metrics we want to be using for prioritization.
So with the needle mover matrix, I’m going to teach you what you do need to be considering when you are prioritizing. And instead of having this overwhelming to do list that you then need to calendar, you are going to just be calendaring what’s essential. So I’m so excited. We open for four days only, and I will link up in this show notes, but I believe you can go to SamLauraBrown com/powerplanning as well to find out more about the course, but I will link it up in the show notes so you can go and find out more about it. Also, if you are not following me on Instagram, and you do like being on Instagram, then follow me at perfectionism project, because I’m answering a lot of questions there, I’ll be going live and basically just sharing a lot about the course and power planning and making sure, for those who want to be inside, that you feel so supported with that you have every question answered that you know exactly what it’s about and how it’s going to help you to get shit done.
So yeah, follow me on Instagram. Stay tuned as well to the podcast, because I’ll be sharing a bit more about power planning. I know not everyone is familiar with it, and there’s a lot about it that I haven’t talked about before, so stay tuned. I’m so excited for the power planning course to be open. Follow me on Instagram. If you have any questions too, you can always email support@samlarabrown.com. With that said, I hope you enjoy this episode, and I will talk to you again soon. Okay. Sorry. One more thing, after I finished recording that intro, I remembered one other bonus that we’re doing that I really want to tell you about, which is we are doing a private podcast for the power planning course, because inside pgsd, the private podcast we have so that everyone can listen to the coaching call replays on the go is one of the most loved things, and so I want to bring that to the power planning course as well.
So for the three coaching calls that we’ll be doing as a bonus, as part of the course, you will get access to a private podcast where you can listen to them on the go, like podcast episodes. And yeah, I just want to make sure as well, the power planning course is a course you can do in an afternoon, and it’s not a big thing that you have to make a lot of time for. I know you’re short on time. I know, I know you already feel like you have more to do than you can handle. So the power planning course is designed with that in mind, and things like the private podcast that we are adding, and the way the course is set up is designed so that you don’t have to have a lot of time to successfully complete it. So with that said, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Sam Laura Brown
Today, I want to share with you something that I have been thinking about a lot. I have been working on myself a lot, and also coaching clients on this inside PGSD, and I know it’s going to be really helpful for you. I think this is more of an advanced concept, and requires you to understand a little about how your thoughts create your feelings and that self doubt really is your brain trying to keep you in the safe, familiar, certain or perceived to be certain, reality that you’re in. And that our brains will generate self doubt and doubtful thoughts, questioning imposter syndrome, whatever you want to call it, it will generate that, particularly our perfectionist brains that are very scared of shame, and us not believing that we can handle shame, and feeling like if we are not perfect, then we should be ashamed of that.
So when we have that perfectionist mindset, we don’t want to experience a lot of self doubt. And early on in my personal development journey. And I say this is a lesson today that I’m sharing, that I’ve learned in the last few months, but early on, the big lesson that really helped me, like the beginner, introductory lesson around self doubt, is you’re going to have self doubt. Stop expecting it to go away. Stop expecting it not to be there. Stop expecting yourself not to have it once you achieve a goal or that the people who are doing the things you want to do don’t have those thoughts and feelings. What’s most personal is most universal. I can guarantee anyone you look up to at least 999 people out of 1000 have very similar thoughts and feelings, they just respond to them differently than you do. They just don’t believe them the way that you do.
So when it comes to self doubt, initially, the lesson is, allow it to be there, also to not believe it and to create self belief. And we’ve just actually added inside pgsd an unshakable self belief workshop that’s really going to help you create that self belief in yourself to build your business, to be able to successfully build that especially when you haven’t yet gathered any evidence that you can have a successful business, and especially as well if you have friends and family who are very supportive of you as a person and believe in you, but also have a bit of insecurity when you talk about your business. Maybe it impacts them financially, how well your business does, or what you do for a job and things like that. Or they have their own fears and doubts or unpersuaded dreams that have them not supporting you the way that you want. So that workshop is going to be super helpful for you.
But what I want to talk about today is slightly different to that, though I do believe I touched on it there. But what I want to talk about is really mining your self doubt for wisdom and not just being like, Okay, well, that’s not true. The doubts I have about like, Will I ever be able to have a successful business? That’s not true, and I will be able to have a successful business, and I’m going to create the belief that I can that is work that needs to be done. But what if there’s wisdom in the self doubt? What if you can mine your self doubt for wisdom and take the gems that might be within that? What could that look like? What might be possible if you did that. So this also came up when I was recently coaching someone, and she was saying that when she was thinking about her business, and she’s an artist, and she is selling her prints that she makes, she is selling them like a license for them an exclusive license to other businesses to use those prints for wallpapers and curtains and different things like that.
And we were talking about her marketing plan and her sales plan and going through that, and she was saying, like, I just feel like it’s not going to work, and that this plan I have isn’t actually going to result in me achieving my goal. And so it’s easy to take the beginner approach of, okay, well, guess you can do it, and I believe in you, and here’s how to believe in you, and you can be successful. And I deeply believe this person can be very, very, very successful. However, what I said was, Okay, what if there’s some wisdom in that thought that this plan isn’t going to work, instead of us jumping to the place where you believe the plan is going to work, what if you trusted yourself to look and to be able to be present with that and to see maybe my brain and my body is telling me something that is important here.
Maybe there is not like this missing piece, like you need to have this perfect puzzle put together or nothing’s gonna work, and being in an all or nothing mindset about it, but what if something isn’t adding up? And subconsciously you know that, and subconsciously you. You are telling yourself and trying to let yourself know, hey, this actually doesn’t take into account, because if you have learned a lot about marketing and sales and different things, whether it’s through programs or through podcasts or trainings or whatever, that you have a lot of knowledge, and especially though if you haven’t yet created success with that knowledge, because there’s a difference between having knowledge and then turning that into a successful business. You need the skill of implementation. We teach you that in PGSD.
But if you have a lot of knowledge, and especially if you don’t have a lot of self trust, or you don’t yet have a track record that you can point to, you will often dismiss the wisdom that you have. And so in this case, it’s looking at, Okay, what if there is something that’s not quite right? What if there is a key component of marketing or sales, for example, in this case, or delivering, that hasn’t been taken into account? And your brain and your body, like you have a feeling, your brain your body, is trying to let you know that this plan that you have might be like 70% of the way there, or 50% of the way there, or 20% it’s like, it’s not completely wrong, not that well, nothing, it’s not completely wrong. But there’s something that needs to be added to this, or removed from this, or changed about this, or updated about this. And what if we actually just sat with that self doubt for a second and mind it for wisdom? What if we could turn that self doubt into a way to increase your self trust?
Because if we have doubtful thoughts and then we dismiss them and say, no, no, you shouldn’t be doubting yourself, then it doesn’t help us trust ourselves. What helps us trust ourselves is when we listen, and it doesn’t mean we have to believe everything we think or say, but we’re willing to listen, because then we know, and we can trust ourselves that if we have a feeling in the future that something’s off, we’re not going to like march ourselves off the edge of a cliff. We can trust that we will listen to our brain and our body when it’s telling us something isn’t right here, we’re not just going to seem all over the top of it with positivity. And not that I’m ever a fan of that. But the beginner lessons around self doubt are create self belief, and the advanced lessons are mine the self doubt for wisdom, and have it help you build self trust.
And so when we looked at it, and I went through and reviewed her customer journey, and what would happen if someone was to find her on Instagram, and what would they see on Instagram, and where would they click, and then what would they see on the website, and how would they go about signing up? And she had been having mental drama about Instagram and her Instagram marketing and things like that. I was like, and this is so interesting, how brains do this? Is that that drama distracted her from actually solving a very solvable issue, which was it was very unclear about how to work with her, about what the process is if someone does reach out to her, to work with her. There was no FAQ page not this isn’t me saying you have to have these things, but it was just very clear that her brain was actually telling her. This isn’t set up in a way that makes it easy for someone to work with me.
And her brain was telling her, and all this Instagram drama, and I’ve noticed this for myself too, when I subconsciously know that it doesn’t feel like there’s any point me being on Instagram, and I can be in that thought pattern of like, what’s the difference of me posting or not posting? I looked at it, I was like, oh, because I also have the belief if they get onto my email list, things aren’t set up there to nurture them, to have them actually, like take the next steps towards becoming a student, a client in PGSD, and so because I know the next steps aren’t set up, then of course, I have drama about not doing the first thing, because I know the other things that need to be involved haven’t been taken care of, and it can just manifest as this, like endless repeated drama about one aspect of the business. And if this is going on for you, it’s just such a great opportunity to mine that drama, to look at that self doubt, be like, Hmm, is my brain trying to tell me something?
Is there some wisdom in this? So then we had a look at it, as I said, and we saw, okay, there are some very simple things that you can do within a week, within a day, really, to have this all set up so that the plan that you are working towards actually is making more sense, and that builds your self trust when you allow yourself to do that. This just comes up in so many different ways, shapes and forms, and I want to share another way that it has come up for me, actually two ways. The first way relates to Instagram, and I recently shared about this in an episode, but I want to mention it here too, because it’s very relevant. The Instagram drama I mentioned and also me just being in this thought with my million dollar goal of like, I don’t think I can actually achieve the goal, the plan I have. I like the plan, but something’s amiss, like something isn’t adding up. And when I mind that self doubt for the wisdom, it was, yeah, well, you’re not showing up fully as yourself. You’re not actually letting yourself create. You’re not actually letting yourself be seen.
And so yes, like the logistics of this plan makes sense. The logistics of this plan will have the business help 200 PGSDers and make a million dollars in revenue. The logistics will add up, but the energy behind it isn’t adding up, and I knew that, and I wasn’t letting myself post and create the way that I normally would, and I could tell that, but if I was like, no, no, the plan can work. The plan can work, then I would have missed the wisdom of that. Another way that it’s shown up for me is the decision that I made to make the marketing manager position on my team redundant. And in I did that in, I think it was March this year, in 2023 especially towards the second half of the year, I kept having thoughts that that was something that needed to happen, because it wasn’t paying off for the business, like it wasn’t essentially as well, like, I wasn’t in the self trust required and, like, doing my thing to have that all work for the business.
And I was just in this mindset of, I should just be a better leader. I should just be able to figure this out. This should work. I have a very smart, talented person working for me who’s so passionate about the business, who knows what needs to be done, who helps to bring out the best in me, like I should just be able to figure out how to make this work. I was also so scared of making my past self wrong for making that decision to hire that role, and that role was a full time employee within my business. So it was the first full time employee that I ever had besides myself. I’m technically a full time employee of the business, and I had, and I remember like, standing in the shower and just having these thoughts of, like, I need to make that role redundant. Like it’s not making sense, and I’m feeling like and it’s not because of the person who was in that role at all, but just from me delegating out a key area of the business that I am a great person to be responsible for because I had the thought error.
I’ve taken us as far as that we can get us we have big growth that’s going to be happening. I can’t do the marketing and sales to get us there. I need someone else to be doing it. It’s not me. I need to find someone else who’s better, who can actually clearly articulate what we do, who can actually sell it so much better than I can. And so I just ignored all my wisdom, ignored my expertise, like just dismiss myself in so much, in so many ways, with that thought pattern. And there were so many reasons that I could justify it, and it makes sense, and really, because it was coming from this place of, I can’t be trusted then as well, when I was having the thought, a constant thought, of, I need to make that redundant, and I need to be back in the marketing and sales fully instead of having the work that I’m doing, needing to have meetings, communicating what my vision is and what I want to talk about and things like that, like I just need to trust myself to do it and have myself directly do it, versus having my work go through another person.
And I just kept having that thought, that doubt of like I need to do this, but also I know that involves having a really hard conversation, that involves potentially hurting someone that I really care about and really like as a person. And also I just was so scared of making my past self wrong, because I was in such belief that that was the best move for the business. And so I had that thought, I would say, for probably six months, that kept coming up, and I just kept being like, I should be able to figure it out. I should be able to make it work. I should be able to get this back on track. I should. I should. I should. I should. Instead of actually being like, Okay, this thought keeps coming up. What if there’s some wisdom in that, and when I actually increased my willingness, I did some self coaching on this, I increased my willingness to make that decision, and to be able to have that kind of conversation, and have that maturity as a business owner, that sometimes as a business owner, you need to let go of a role of someone that is in that role that you really like and you think is doing a great job, and you need to let that person go.
And that is a painful experience. Most business owners get the pleasure of having at least once in their entrepreneurial careers. And once I increased my willingness to actually have that conversation, to make that decision, because I hadn’t even seen it in my brain as an option, I was like, Okay, if things really got bad, I could completely stop paying myself. I could, like, I was thinking of all these other things we could do instead of I could actually make this world redundant and put myself back in the marketing and sales and trust myself. I, at that point, already had a business that had made well over a million dollars as a business in total from my marketing and sales efforts, and yet here I was saying I should just be a better leader, and I shouldn’t be doing this anymore, and I should be able to figure this out.
And so I ignored that wisdom for so long, and it was so painful, and I felt like my hands were tied, because then I had to figure out how to get the business back to where I wanted it to be, and do that, while also having more responsibility to make revenue, because I needed to pay someone else as well, and also figure out what to have them do with their time and managing them and having meetings with them, and like all the stuff that comes with having people working your business. And it just felt so hard, and eventually, when I did make that decision and have that conversation, which was really hard, as soon as I allowed myself the willingness to see that, I had so much dread, it was so uncomfortable like hence why I had not even allowed myself to see that as an option. And I’m so proud of myself that as soon as I had that realization and that willingness to actually see that I acted upon it, and in that moment of actually listening to that doubtful voice, and instead of saying no, you should just figure it out, and you should just believe or whatever, which isn’t really the self belief we’re trying to create anyway, but it felt like it was like, No, I’m just, you know, entering this new era as a business owner, and this is me like figuring out how to lead and how to be a CEO.
So that really the lesson how to be a CEO was in protecting the revenue and the profit of the business and not having people on the team or off the team based on whether I personally like them or think they were smart or think they were talented, or wanting to make my past self right for having made a decision but being willing to have the hard conversations and to act on them, and to just be willing to allow myself to update decisions and move forward. And so when I made that or did that self coaching to create the willingness to see that it was a possibility that that would need to happen. I immediately had this feeling of dread, like intense dread. I’m like, oh my god, this is going to mean hurting someone that I really care about, potentially, like, this is just me imagining how they might feel, how someone might feel in that situation.
But this is going to be really painful, and I know I need to do it to protect my business and not protect in this way of like it’s being attacked by that person, definitely not that. But my business needs me back fully in the marketing and sales, and needs me to be leading that and not having to have my work go through someone else. And instead of me spending time communicating my vision and different things like that, like I need to just communicate that directly via podcast episode and things like that, and a lot of that, again, low levels of self trust, feeling a lot of like need for certainty in the business. Because in my personal life, I’d had the twins, was navigating going from Mom of one to a mum of three. My daughter was 19 months when the twins were born, so I had three under two, and also just went back to working quite quickly.
And I planned, I gave myself time off, and I like runway to have a good amount of time off, like months, months, months off. But I went back into work because that felt so familiar, and it just felt like I can control this. I can like I just wanted that certainty, like I wanted familiarity in at least an area of my life, and so as well, that was playing out in this as well. I didn’t want to just show up and talk on a podcast episode or show up on stories and do those things, because I was feeling so uncertain and not like myself, and I just feeling like I just landed on a completely different planet, but it was so jarring, because I was in exactly the same house and like with the same people, but I just felt completely different. Was very sleep deprived. My body working so hard to breastfeed and do all of that and recover from giving birth and all of that. And so there was all of that playing into it as well, which is really important to mention, because we just make ourselves so wrong as well for having our personal life impact how we operate the business. Of course it does. We are humans operating businesses, so I just want to mention that.
So I really regained and built a lot of trust with myself again by being willing to do the hard thing that I really didn’t want to do once I did it, and once I began acting on it, and once I had that, it all unfolded very quickly that I just felt like, oh, like I can actually trust myself again to make decisions, because I know if I make a decision that my future self doesn’t want to continue acting upon no longer makes sense, doesn’t agree with has updated information or wisdom that she can update that decision without making me wrong, and I don’t then have to have the pressure to make every decision perfectly now, because I know my future self will be able to be the person who can update the decision. So this is a theme I’ve talked about in the last few podcast episodes. It’s just something that is so important because decision making is such a big aspect of entrepreneurship, and it’s where so many perfectionist entrepreneurs get stuck, whether it’s a niche decision, a pricing decision, we help with a lot of decisions in pgsd, and have tools to support you with that, because decision making is so important.
And when you have a lot of perfectionism, you’ve got your perfectionism handbrake on, and low levels, low levels of self trust, making decisions is really challenging, and you will find yourself not making them, or kind of making them, and Having to remake them and rethink about them, or going back on them, and just seeing like in this instance, it wasn’t me going back on a decision, it was me maturing as an entrepreneur, trusting myself again, being willing to do the hard thing and I don’t, and this has been one of the biggest lessons, too. I don’t want to go back to being past me who had, in terms of revenue, a more profitable, successful business, because I would then not have learned that lesson, and would have to make that mistake again.
And not the mistake of hiring that particular person, but the mistake, so to speak, of. Having that role in the business and not seeing that I was the best person to be in that role, that there is so much sufficiency in the way that I market, in the way that I sell, and there’s a way to hire someone in a marketing manager role without completely dismissing yourself and not trusting yourself, but because of the thoughts I was thinking, and also, even though we’d had the most successful year we had in the business in 2022 the whole time, a lot of it, I was thinking, This isn’t working. I don’t know how to launch. I don’t know how to sell pgsd, even though we’d had the most successful year, and that was because of my perfectionist brain, not wanting to celebrate the sufficiency. Find the sufficiency see what was actually working. And so even though I had been very successful, I was thinking, I’m not successful. I can’t figure this out.
And really, like however we did, this was a fluke, because I don’t know how I got us here, and I need someone else to take over the reins. And now I have the wisdom to see when that thought pattern is coming into not just hiring decisions, but into any decision that I’m making, and I will make mistakes again, but also I have given myself the gift of learning from that particular mistake, of allowing myself to update that decision, because I looked for the wisdom Within the doubt, within the questioning and not just saying, Okay, well, I should just believe in myself. And I know some of you listening, so I want to mention this, are already a bit too hard into trying to find the wisdom and believing your self doubts.
So there’s a difference here, a distinction that I want to make. When we are looking for the wisdom in the self doubt. We are not agreeing with all of it and believing all of it and saying we are it is true. I can never be successful. Yeah, it is true. I need to have the perfect niche. And I don’t. We’re not saying that what we’re doing is within the doubt, the questioning, whatever’s coming up for you, like that example I shared with my client, who was like, I don’t feel like this will actually get me to my goal. It’s like, okay, instead of saying, Okay, you can never get to your goal 100% and you need to, like, stop what you’re doing. Like, just go into monk mode and like, ghost just go back to square one and learn everything from scratch. Like, we’re not saying that, and I know that some of you who are in lower levels of self trust, particularly if you haven’t yet started your business.
But this definitely comes up as well if you’re in the beginning, but if you have a lot of niche drama, if you’re constantly questioning your prices and like, you’re just having a hard time getting anything to be for sale, or like, posting consistently and like sticking with an idea for more than three months, then I just want you to know that this isn’t about just believing the doubt and believing all of it. It’s about holding space for it and looking for is there some truth in this that might be really uncomfortable to see, that might be really painful, that might be really confronting, that might require me to develop a skill that I don’t yet have, that might require me to question an identity that feels really solid for me.
So for example, with the company finances, and looking at that, I had the identity that I’m really good with money, like I figured out that side of things and that identity because I didn’t want to do anything, like it was too painful to then be like, Okay, it’s it’s painful to see that I’m not looking at my finances the way that I know I need to be when it comes to the business, that having that realization was confronting to my self image and my identity, and as humans, we want certainty, and one of the ways we get that is by having certain beliefs about who we are and then only seeing evidence to support that and getting to continue believing it. So if you believe you’re smart, then you don’t want to do anything that gives you evidence you’re not smart. You don’t want to risk posting something and then saying the wrong thing and someone being like, Oh my God, that’s not true. Who do you think you are?
So there’s so many unhelpful ways it plays out, and helpful ways too. I love the power of self image. There’s a whole module on it in pgsd, and how you can use that to completely transform yourself. So when it comes to this, it’s just knowing, like I had this identity, that I’m good with money, and so it was so painful to see myself not being good with money, that I didn’t let myself look at it. I just kept putting off, and I talked about this in the most recent episode. I just kept putting off again and again, doing my weekly financial review for the business, because I didn’t want to see that I wasn’t living in alignment with my identity, and it was easier to just be unconscious about it and then have some shame about it every now and again, but to really not think about it that much, but instead to see, like the wisdom that I had to keep putting that in my calendar, the weekly Financial Review. Okay, what’s that about?
Can I have time to investigate that? And like the emotion? That were coming up when I would look at my account in zero, my profit and loss statement. What if I could just be with that and mine? It for wisdom of like, yeah, the math isn’t mathing The way we want it to be. We need to make changes on the team or in our expenses or in our revenue, and not have ourselves beholden to only do it a quarterly launch. If that quarterly launch isn’t playing out the way it needs to play out, we are allowed to make money at other times, like I had in 2023 we had, we did a launch for the power planning course, which currently isn’t available. We had a launch for that in January, and then I had closed. This is another thing plays into it. I had closed, we had closed pgsd for enrollment. It wasn’t open until June in 2023 and that’s a whole other story for a different date about why I made that decision at the same time, I think it was just like the ease my brain was just so uncomfortable with the ease of like I could have a marketing manager, and just continuing us, continuing to repeat what we’ve done that’s been successful. I was like, Okay, bring someone in. I’m gonna go also have my twins.
And in the meantime, you can’t sell the main thing we’ve been selling successfully, that’s not available for sale. And also I’m not going to be creating the content that I’ve been creating that has been driving the business. So like, there’s that in the mix as well. And like that decision, it was just like resisting going to that next level and being the person who can just easily have their business make million dollars or more. So anyway, with all that said that when it came to and I’m just thinking now, how did I get onto that when it came to the finances, the business, the identity that I had around the business, the emotions that I had around the finances. And just like exploring that, that it was so uncomfortable, and I had to create willingness to do it.
And this is like you might have to create a willingness to see certain uncomfortable or confronting truths that are going on, mistakes that you might have made, things that you’re doing that are out of alignment with the identity that you have, especially if you have an identity about being smart or intelligent or being good with money or different things like that. Like it’s interesting to look at your positive identities that you have, and if you have been acting out of accordance with them, that our brains don’t want to see that, we just don’t want to see that. And we will often just have these nudges from our brain of like, hey, you need to look at this. Hey, the math isn’t mathing here. Hey, this isn’t working out. But yeah, I remember what I was saying now as I’m talking so when it came to changing your decisions, I mean, it all relates to what I was just saying, changing your decisions, updating them, finding the wisdom in that, that we had in 2023 we had, I think we did three launches, a June launch, a September launch and a December launch a pgsd. So that’s three weeks in the year we could make money. Plus we did a launch for the power planning course at the beginning of the year.
So we had about four weeks of the year. And there are a couple of exceptions to that, but in terms of launches, we had four weeks of the year that we could make money, four weeks out of 52 weeks. And then when we weren’t making the money that we needed to be making to pay the bills we had as a business, I didn’t reduce expenses, and I didn’t allow myself to create more sales and create other opportunities. There’s many reasons for that. I’ve talked about just being in this, like fight or flight, a lot of personal life uncertainty, like all of that, I have so much compassion for myself with that. Now, I’ve done a lot of work on that with my own self coaching and getting coached. So much work on that deep, deep work on that. And now being in a place where I’m like, I’m so glad it’s played out exactly as it’s played out, the lessons that I now have to share with you and that I now have as a much more mature business owner who has experienced all of that and who now deeply understands the importance of not just in 2022 when we had great revenue and profitability, but I didn’t really understand the revenue and profitability in the way that I thought I did.
And then I learned that the hard way, through not having the same revenue and not having the same profitability, or not having any profitability in that year, and then needing to navigate returning to what’s working, finding trust with myself again, developing that even further, developing more maturity as a business owner, as a coach as well, more willingness to have uncomfortable conversations, to make hard decisions, to update my decisions, to untie my hands from behind my back, to know when following through with a plan is the thing to do and is not the thing to do. Like all of that nuance I have learned through those experiences, but it has come through being willing to mine my self doubt for wisdom and turn that into self trust, and do that engage with my self doubt in a way that allows me to trust myself more.
So I just want to invite you at the end of this episode, which is now, I want to invite you to reflect on for you, where do you keep having either a task that keeps coming up and you aren’t doing it. Or you just keep having, like, a shower thought about, like, I should really do this thing. Or you can feel there’s an area of your business where you’ve got one foot in, one foot out, you’re holding yourself back. And what wisdom is there for you within that? Not that you have to believe that, Oh, my God, I can never be successful. I’m never going to make it and all of that. But just like separating out that doubt a little bit to see the different thoughts that are made up within that. And rather than shooting yourself, which isn’t self belief that we want to create, but rather than shooting yourself, I should just be able to figure it out. I’ll be like, No, I should be able to be successful, and I should just believe in my ability to be successful. You need to do that, not from a place of should, but self belief is important.
And the more self belief you have, the more willingness you will have to look at self doubt. And so recently, just when I have noticed those thoughts coming up, like, is there any wisdom in that that that I can take? Is this me instead of being like is this self sabotage? Am I going to do wrong against myself? Am I going to lead myself astray? Am I going to distract myself? It’s looking at maybe there’s some wisdom in here. If my brain is saying maybe this is a distraction for me, then maybe it is. What if I actually sat with that and looked at that versus saying, No, it’s not a distraction, because it is a distraction. What if I just sat with that and looked at that in a non rushed way? I don’t have to decide that right now, but what if I just held the possibility of if my brain is offering me this might be a distraction. Could that be the case, or is it that this feels like a distraction because I’m trying to focus on something that isn’t important, and this thing actually should be the main thing. I talked about that in the most recent episode of the podcast. So one before this on how to stop making yourself wrong for doing the right thing.
These last four episodes that I’ve done are actually today’s, and the one on how to stop making yourself wrong for doing the right thing, and then the untying your hands from behind your back, are very similar themes from deep lessons that I have learned that I just want to support you with this. PGSDers the best place to get my support, and there’s only so much I can share on a podcast with you, and you’re gonna have to piece it all together yourself, and it’s not even all here. So I want to invite you into PGSD to do this work, and this is a great thing to bring to a coaching call to post about in the forum. Of like, this thing keeps coming up. I keep having this self doubt or this drama, and maybe drama about a certain area of your business, whether it’s your pricing, whatever it is, I keep having this drama.
Can you help me find the wisdom in this? Is there wisdom in this? I’m having a hard time either, just like I’ve tried to get myself to believe that I can be successful and to just make a decision, or I’m just believing it and being like, well, yes, this isn’t perfect. Then I should figure out what is or what out what is or whatever that looks like. Can you help me find the wisdom in that? Yes, we can, for sure, help you with that inside PGSD. So I hope this episode has been really illuminating. Has given you a lot to think about and to support you in your business, so that you can begin mining your self doubt for wisdom and turning it into self trust. I hope you’re having a beautiful day, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Outro
If you were spending your week feeling overwhelmed and then procrastinating and then feeling guilty, and then trying to get you done, and then feeling behind, and then putting more things in your to do list, and repeating that cycle. I call it the overwhelm procrastination loop. I want to invite you to sign up for the power planning course, so enrollment will be opening at 8pm New York time this Wednesday, the 18th of September, and closing at midnight on the 22nd of September, on the Sunday. So doors are only going to be open for four days. I don’t know if or when we’re going to open enrollment again. There are currently no plans, and we have an open enrollment for 18 months. So if you want to learn how to plan properly as a perfectionist, if you want to not be overwhelmed anymore when it comes to your business, you can actually make progress and do the things you want to do to build your business and to actually be successful. You know you can be successful, but there is that gap right now that feels so big, and it doesn’t have to feel that way. So I want to invite you into the power planning course to find out more about it, you can go to samlaurabrown.com/powerplanning.