Episode 632: Failure, Mistakes + The Courage To Keep On Trying

I’ve made A LOT of mistakes in the last few years of running my business. I’ve experienced a lot of failure. And that’s normal! So in this episode I’m sharing about it – including all of the specifics – so that you don’t feel any shame (like I did) about having a completely normal experience of growing a business.

In this episode, I get into the details of some of the not-so-smart decisions I’ve made in my business, the shame I experienced after making those mistakes and how I was able to recover from them even when my perfectionist brain was yelling at me for failing so badly. 

If there’s anything I want you to know, it’s that we all have periods when we’re trying our hardest and the goals just aren’t happening. There’s nothing wrong with you. And I hope this episode helps you feel that in your bones. 

To learn the simple steps to plan properly as a perfectionist, sign up for my free training here: samlaurabrown.com/planningseries. 

Inside Perfectionists Getting Shit Done you will learn how to follow through on your business plans even when your perfectionist brain tries to stop you. Sign up now and get instant access to the program at samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.

I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.

Sam Laura Brown (Start of the episode)
Okay, so in today’s episode, I am sharing 10 of my favorite business failures. These are actual failures, not the ones where it’s like someone might say it’s a failure, but it’s really like a success dressed up in disguise, even though these things I have triumphed over and they are successes in that kind of way. Like this isn’t like a fake failure that I’m sharing in this.

These are like genuine mistakes, genuine failures. And it’s so important to me that I share this with you. And this came up on a PGSD call yesterday that we did that in the coaching that I was doing, what came up was I was saying about how, for me, one of my values that I have as someone who is leading other entrepreneurs, especially perfectionist entrepreneurs, how we can just go into that thinking that everything needs to be perfect.

That is really important to me that I show you that it is safe to fail. It is safe to make mistakes and share the truth about entrepreneurship, which is that it is challenging. It requires you to hold uncertainty and not crumble under it.

It requires you to be creative and resourceful and to be really like, it’s just, it’s such, and this is why I love business. It’s the ultimate personal growth tool. It brings everything up.

That’s how I figured out I was a perfectionist. When I started my business, it brought up all the perfectionism that was already there, especially because I was doing something that felt more like me than anything else I’d ever done. That felt so vulnerable and exposing that my perfectionism came up to try to protect me from the real me being judged and criticized and judged by myself and criticized by myself, because when we publish things, we experience our own work and can be so self-critical of it as well.

So really in business, I really, really deeply believe it is a value of mine that I not just tell you like, yeah, it’s hard, but I also show you that yes, it is challenging and you will mess it up. And also you can be okay with that and you can survive that and you can recover it. And that that is so normal.

I think, and I don’t think this is done in a malicious way from anyone, but it can be very easy. And like the thing that all of our brains want to do is that we want to share the successes and not share the fails, and that we want to give the appearance that we are really successful. And so you can see like people, and I’ve done this myself, that when I’m doing well, I share more of that than when I’m not.

And so it can be easy to just like hear when someone’s doing well and not hear when they’re not doing well. And then we’re just left with the impression that always doing well. And so what came up for me, and I’m going to be in this episode, what came up for me when I was going through the failures that I’m going to share with you in this episode, that I felt like there was something wrong with me, that I just wasn’t good at having a business, that I was failing because of the way that so many people talk about business, that I felt like I was having a very abnormal experience when I was actually having a very, very, very, very normal business experience.

So normal. It’s the more common thing, the experience that I was having. But because of, for many of us, what we’re exposed to when it comes to business, we’re sold the dream that you’re going to have freedom and flexibility and all of these things, and you’re just going to, like your revenue, this was a big one for me, like this idea that your revenue will just go up and up and up and up and up, and that’s what should happen and that’s what’s normal.

And if that isn’t happening, you’re doing it wrong. Something has gone wrong. And so because of that, and I’ll share more in this episode, I experienced a lot of unwarranted shame.

Shame that came from a thought error that I was failing when actually I was succeeding and I was killing it. I could not see that at the time. In hindsight, I can.

I’ve wanted to do a lot of mindset work, like shifting how I see myself, shifting my story about the experiences, working through the emotions of it, processing it to be able to get to the point where I’m like, damn, I am killing it. And it’s not just in the revenue way. Previously, I used to think revenue was the only metric of doing well in business.

And it’s an important one, right? But what I can really see now on the other side of so many really painful failures that went on for a very long period of time through a very hard personal season of life, that it really is like I have a whole new skillset now. Before all of the things I shared, I’m going to share all the failures. Before all that happened, my view was that I felt successful in my business, even though I had a story that it wasn’t working.

I felt successful in my business because I was on that up and up and up and up trajectory. But it was very conditional success. It wasn’t really this deep feeling of success.

It was like, oh, my revenue’s increasing and I’m now making a lot more than the average person in a good corporate job is making. And I’m doing that in three days a week, doing work that I love, like I was succeeding. And also, I now have such a deeper sense of being successful because I not only know how to build a business, but I know how to navigate when that is failing, like when your results are dropping.

I know how to pick myself back up and dust myself off and keep going. I know how to go from being frozen for a very long period of time, like in kind of like a functional phrase, a perfectionist phrase, where I was still working on the business a lot and even more than I normally would. But I was just not doing the things that I needed to do to get the business into a different situation and then unfreezing myself, throwing myself out and turning it around.

And I used to work as an accountant and I was in insolvency, which is liquidations, bankruptcies. And one of the departments within insolvency was called turnaround. You literally, there was a team there that would go into a business and turn it around, have it go from failing, not being profitable to turning it around into a business that was successful.

And so I now have that skillset to not just how to build a business and have it be on the up, up and up, but how to actually navigate the hard season, really hard seasons and how to emotionally, this is such a key thing, like our perfectionist brains just want to go to shame, just want to have us disconnect, just want to have us stop trying, or just try and try and try and try some more, just try harder, just try harder, just work more, just work more. And I have so many deep nuanced experiences to share from over particularly the last four years that are absolute gold. And yet I wasn’t sharing them.

I mean, I’ve talked about a lot of them, but not really in such a cleaner way as I was still in the midst of it. It was kind of like, oh, here’s what I did and now here’s what I’m doing to be better. Now I’m like, oh, that made so much sense.

I did it. And also that was a mistake and from a thought error or from not yet knowing what I know now about business. And that’s normal.

And it’s not that it’s not a mistake, it’s a lesson and that kind of platitude. It’s like, I made a mistake and I recovered from it and I can guide you through that too. And this is what I was saying on the call yesterday.

One of my favorite quotes is from Maria Sharapova, the tennis player. I love tennis, but I was listening to her a few years ago now doing a podcast interview. I think it was when she released her book.

So she was doing the rounds of interviews. She did one with Tim Ferriss that was great from memory. She is amazing as a guest, just the way she puts things into words.

I loved listening to her. And she said, whether it was with Tim Ferriss or someone else, she said, I want to win with a coach who can lose with me. I don’t just want a coach.

And she was talking about having a tennis coach and who she was having coach her. She didn’t just want a coach who could only support her when she was winning. She wanted a coach that could be there to support her when she was losing.

Because with tennis, like with entrepreneurship, you don’t win every game. There’s losses, there’s mistakes, there’s failure. And if you don’t have a coach that knows how to be there for you in the winning and in the losing, then what’s the point of the coach? That’s the best time to have a coach is when you’re losing and also to help you win.

But I just really think it is my duty and my responsibility to share with you that entrepreneurship, you’re going to fuck up. You’re going to fuck up. And also that’s okay.

And also that’s normal. Everyone else is doing it too. And by me talking about when I have done it and not just like in a general way, but like the very specific ways that I have done it and doing that in a way where I’m not making myself wrong for it and not diminishing myself for it and dismissing myself for it and laughing at myself.

Like no, all of that time was trying so damn hard. And there were things I didn’t know yet, lessons I needed to learn. Payne is a great teacher.

And really in entrepreneurship, that is how you learn the lessons is that sometimes someone can say, tell you something, and it can help you avoid a lesson, potentially like avoid making a mistake. And that’s great. But also there is no getting around making your own mistakes that will happen.

That is how we learn. And so much of what I’m able to do, like all of the stuff that I teach in perfectionist getting shit done, that whole body of work came from the first four years really of my business, where I was just in, in such a deep struggle with having my perfectionism come up and having that stopped me from building my business. I wanted to make a full-time income.

That was my goal. It felt so impossibly far away. I wasn’t doing the things I needed to do to build my business.

I knew what they were. I wasn’t able to do them. I wasn’t able to do them consistently.

I kept overthinking. I kept procrastinating. I kept burning out.

I kept getting in my own way. And I had to figure out from all of those failures to show up and failures to do things. And all of that, I had to figure out how to actually get myself to do stuff, support myself to do stuff without burning out, without having to work all the time.

I had so much wisdom come from that, from just being willing to be in the failure of that, tell myself a story of, and I’ve shared before through that period, if I persist, I will succeed was such an important mantra for me. And I also had skills to develop. I also had things to learn.

I needed to develop the skill of making a plan I could actually follow through on and then following through on it, even when my perfectionist brain tried to stop me. I had to develop a skill. That wasn’t just going to happen from persisting.

I had skills to develop. And also, I could just feel that if I can just keep going and just keep navigating myself through this, I will pop out the other side. And I had this ultimate high-level belief that I will be able to get to the shore, where I am able to take action and do things and make a full-time income and then maintain a full-time income, including when I’m having kids, because we already knew we wanted to have kids.

And I was able to do that. And PGSD, perfectionist, getting shit done, is where I teach that body of work that emerged from that. And now I feel like through this next period, which four years, very similar, that’s a long time.

That is what, over a thousand days, well over a thousand days. It is, and this is so interesting too, I was thinking about this from the coaching call yesterday, that when we share our failures, that it is very hard to understand the pain of the failure when you hear someone else talk about it. And I was talking about this with a friend.

She is pregnant and she has a toddler. And she was like, why didn’t you tell me that it was so hard to be pregnant with a toddler? And she’s like, I know I saw you doing that. I know I was there when you were doing it, but I really didn’t think it was as hard as it actually is.

And it was so interesting too, because I was telling her, yes, it was hard. I’m sure I would have told her it was hard, but when you’re not in that experience, like, yeah, but I see you as so capable. I know you’re saying it’s hard, but I see you as being bigger than the circumstance.

And the really interesting thing was when I was telling her about different stories, they were all from when I was pregnant with Jack and James, our twins, while Lydia was a toddler. But what I also didn’t, like, didn’t even come to mind, which is so interesting. And then when I realized this was like, oh my God, like I’m a badass, that when I was pregnant with Liam, I essentially had three toddlers.

I had Jack and James, who, when I got pregnant with Liam, they were 18 months old. So I had 18 month old twins. And then I also had a three-year-old and also had a business.

And I, it’s almost like, I just like, that was so challenging. And the pregnancy with Liam was high risk. There was a lot of uncertainty about Liam during the pregnancy and what was going on with him that like, that was so much to hold and to navigate also while the business was going through a really challenging period as well.

And I did it, but it was just so interesting. I was like, oh yeah, when I was pregnant with the twins, I was like, wait, I did something even harder than that. I mean, the twin pregnancy was hard.

It’s not two for the price of one. It is not. But I, and this is such an important thing as well.

Like we can just not own when we actually did something amazing, but we just see as like, well, my emotional experience during the time was so challenging that I definitely wasn’t killing it when I actually now in hindsight, I’m like, I did that. Like, that is actually incredible. So anyway, all of this to say that it is, it’s just important to know if you do help people with businesses or whatever you help them with.

And you feel as a perfectionist, the pressure to be like killing it all the time, succeeding and never failing in what you do. And that that’s a signal to your clients and customers that you’re the perfect person to help them. I think the more powerful thing, and this has been like from the beginning of my business, I just always fundamentally innately knew that me sharing the ups and the downs was going to be a really important part of me, not only being successful in my business, but also really enjoying and being connected to my business to not resist that there are downs, but actually to be able to ride it, to be able to ride it out and get back to another up, enjoy the up and enjoy the down and not make it mean there’s something wrong with me or that I can’t do it or I’m failing or no one wants to work with me, no one wants me to be their coach or any of that.

And I have had such hard lessons in that. And also I have navigated that. And I just, all of this episode and all that I do, I really, I think it’s so important for your resilience that you understand that failure is part of business and not in this like conceptual kind of way, but like, oh, Sam has failed and she’s okay.

Okay. If I feel like I’m failing, I can also be okay. I can navigate that and I can actually enjoy my life while I’m in the failure, not just like, okay, but things will be better and then I’ll feel good.

Like actually I can enjoy the adventure and something that like, and then I’ll tell you my failures, but something that I was doing like every day to just help me navigate at one point during this was that when I was in the shower each night, I’d like write letters on the, what’s it called? The shower screen. And one of the combinations I would write, like that’ll be a little sentence. One of them was, I think it was like, I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

Like just really connecting me to the present and like that I was having the experience I was meant to be having. And I’d write like the first letter of each word in the sentence and then write it out to just like connect with that. And one of the other ones I wrote was I-A-A.

It’s all an adventure. And I guess that should be I-A-A-A. Anyway, I’d write, it’s all an adventure.

And to just connect me with like, it is all an adventure. That’s why I love entrepreneurship as much as my perfectionist brain doesn’t want the uncertainty. I love that.

That’s where the magic is. That’s where the possibility is. That’s where the, the ability to have your business just completely transform within six months, within a year, within two years, like it’s birthed from the uncertainty.

And so the whole thing essentially that I, I teach, I’m here to teach is how to be in entrepreneurship with all of the uncertainty of it. And the fact that you’re going to make failures, fail, make mistakes like that is going to happen. And it’s going to be painful and hard.

And there’s going to be wins as well. And your perfectionist brain is going to be like, yeah, what’s next? So you like, we need to learn how to celebrate the wins as well, to connect in with success. But also like, how do you navigate that when you have a perfectionist brain that is telling you that it’s, if something is hard, you’re doing it wrong.

Or if something is too easy, you’re doing it wrong. Or if your revenue is going down, you’re doing it wrong. Like there’s something fundamentally wrong, which then has us go into shame, has us go into freezing and makes it worse.

Like I know this from experience, not just from like reading a book about it. I have the lessons in my body, the nuance of it all, the real life experience of it all. And also I’ve been coaching on it in PGSD on our weekly calls and bringing all of the wisdom to that as well, which I feel like the coaching I do now in PGSD is better than it ever was before.

I feel like it’s always been good. Like it’s always been great because I am just in my zone when we’re doing the coaching calls, but also like the, the way that I can coach now, having navigated, not just my initial period of failing, failing, failing, failing, but then having been successful and then navigated after success, a period of failing, failing, failing, failing, failing in my experience and real experience and those numbers to match that is that I can now, and this is so important for you to own for you. I can now lead in a way I never could before.

I have such a, such an ability, like especially with my private clients that I work with as well, the things I have been able to help them navigate the uncertainty, the decision-making, the personal life stuff happening at the same time as the business stuff. So many lessons that I am able to help them avoid the mistakes, but also teaching them like the, the concept of it. So they understand it.

They’re not just like doing what I say and not learning, like they’re deeply learning and also helping them navigate when they are having a really hard time. Like I have got them, I am there for them. I get it in my bones, what the experience is like.

So I can say the actual thing that will help them in that experience and not just be like, wow, that must be so hard. I can’t imagine. Oh, I can imagine.

I have lived it deeply. I have felt it deeply. I have studied myself deeply to figure out how to get out of it.

And then here’s how I got out of it. Here, here is the path. Here’s the steps I went through because I’ve studied it so much.

I’ve broken down, like here’s what, here’s the shift that needed to happen. And then this shift could happen. And then this shift, and then I did this, like I have the path and just seeing them follow that path as well to turn their business back around or pick themselves back up.

And just all those things like that. It has, I’m really excited for that next body of work to come out, which is really like what after PGSD like that, going from not showing up, not being able to finish the things that matter and all of that, to being able to then go into a place of beginning to be successful in your business and all the perfectionism that can come up and all of that. I’m really excited for that to be the next things that emerge.

I am doing that with my private clients and I am currently fully booked with private clients, but keep an eye out if you have already done PGSD or if you are like, I hear this a lot and then I will really get into my 10 things today. But I hear this a lot of like, Oh yeah, like I’m a perfectionist. Oh, maybe I’m not a perfectionist because the stuff you talk about is like, I don’t have a problem with taking action.

That’s just one perfectionist problem that can manifest in business. And that’s what PGSE helps with. But then after that, it’s the perfectionism around sales specifically.

And that’s what I do a lot of work with and guidance with my private clients that I have. And then after that, it tends to be team. It’s the next area after sales.

So it’s taking action where perfectionism comes up, then sales, then team. And so anyway, I’ve got so much wisdom to bring in this episode. I want to lay out like, it’s not like it’s okay to make mistakes in this.

So just do whatever and don’t care. It’s okay to genuinely be trying so hard to make the best decision you possibly can and to have that decision turn out to be quote unquote wrong. And that also, this is such a revelation too for me that I have maybe mentioned the podcast, maybe not.

I mentioned it in the persistence log stuff that I did in PGSD when we did the get out of your own way challenge. I documented my own journey with that challenge and I shared this in that. We did a little podcast episode.

It wasn’t little, an hour long podcast episode on the get out of your own way private podcast. Anyway, that’s a side note that having, it’s so important to distinguish the quality of your decision from the outcome of your decision. And you can make a great decision and not have the outcome you wanted it to have.

Just because it didn’t have the outcome you wanted doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. But our perfection is all or nothing that we can go really into that mindset of if it was a bad outcome, it was a bad decision. And for a long time, I was thinking that way and therefore thinking like I’ve made so many bad decisions instead of like, I actually made a great decision that didn’t have the outcome I wanted.

And that’s okay. So let me get into what are the failures specifically. So failure number one was having my revenue, my annual revenue halve.

So specifically it went from $600,000 to $300,000. And that was at the time too, that year, so it was 600,000 in 2022 and then 300,000 in 2023. And that was the year that I had the twins.

So I had Lydia and the twins, three kids under the age of two. I’d just hired a marketing manager and I was, I started, I normally would work three days. I started working an extra day because I was trying to figure out what the hell was happening.

That I had just hired a marketing manager, someone who was skilled at marketing to come in and help keep growing the business to a million and beyond that. And then instead of the revenue going up, it went down. It halved over the period of that year while my expenses massively increased, which I’ll talk about and actually maybe I’ll group that failure together with this one is that I had that year 150,000, I think it was maybe $160,000 loss.

So I had revenue of 300,000. This is not exact to the dollar amount, but do you know what I mean? I’m rounding to the year I said thousand, 300,000 revenue. And then my expenses, our expenses as a business, I think were 460,000.

So there was $160,000 loss. And this is something that profitability is so important in business, right? It’s really important, but there’s this idea that you should be profitable a hundred percent of the time. And it depends what industry you’re in, because in some industries, say like tech startups, it’s definitely not the expectation for any tech startup that you should be profitable from day one.

It’s like, hopefully, like, you know, you’ve got to find product market fit and like, it’s a journey to get to profitability. But I think just the way entrepreneurship is marketed with a lot of kinds of businesses that it’s marketed that if you have, and like for me, especially the thought for me that was so painful was I have a coaching business with really low margins. I don’t have, like I don’t have inventory or stock.

I don’t have postage. Like I don’t have a lot of expenses. Say when people talk about restaurants and restaurants failing, like they have a lot of expenses.

They have fresh produce. Like there’s so much more complexity in their cogs, that cost of goods sold. And there wasn’t that in my coaching business that isn’t, I have a different kind of business model.

And so for me, it’s so funny, even as I’m saying, like it just popped into my head. Oh yeah, I used to think this, that I was thinking like, I have a coaching business. It is so wrong that I had an unprofitable year.

Like that is just fundamentally, like I’ve massively fucked up essentially. And that was so, that created that thought, not the circumstance, the thought created so much shame for me that I then essentially like went into both hiding and overworking as a way to solve it. So like I was in a mastermind that I had invested a lot of money in.

I loved the mastermind. I loved the coach. I still do.

She’s still my coach, but I didn’t actually share what was going on. And it was only at the end of that period. So the year that that happened, I wasn’t in that mastermind and I didn’t, and this is not a failure as such, but like I learned a lesson from this, that before I had Jack and James, I was like, I have no idea what it’s going to be like to have three kids under the age of two.

That feels like a lot, that feels very uncertain. And so I don’t know if I’m even going to be, how much I’m going to be working. So I’m not going to keep staying in this mastermind, the 200K mastermind that I’m in now.

I’m not going to stay in this because I don’t know how much I’m going to use it. And even though that year, my revenue, like in 2022, my revenue increased by at least $200,000 in that year, even while being pregnant with the twins and having Lydia and like getting married that year and home reno and all of that stuff happening, moving into our home, the home reno finished the year before that at Christmas, that I decided not to get support because of the uncertainty and my thought of, well, I’m uncertain what’s going to be happening. So I don’t want to invest money in something I’m not going to use.

But this is just, I’ve shared this with so many clients too, like, oh my God, if you were going through an uncertain period in your personal life, unless you are literally closing down your business, you a hundred percent want support more than ever. Like join PTSD, get yourself inside. If you were like, I’m moving or I’ve got this going on and I just don’t know if I’m going to use the support.

Like if you were going through a harder period, you need more support than when everything’s just stable and there’s less uncertainty. But I hadn’t realized that yet.

So anyway, that year that was super challenging, I’d say my hardest year in business emotionally, that I didn’t have like a coach and a philosophy to follow. I was watching a lot of different kinds of content and trying to reconcile it and figure out what to do. I was watching also in that period a lot of content that just made me feel like, and this is my thoughts, that I needed to be working more and working harder.

None of the content was from, and rightly so, it’s not as common, was from people who had three kids under the age of two and a business at the same time. So I was just like ignoring the season of life that I was in and kind of in this mindset of like, I shouldn’t impact my business having kids. But like, sure, it needs to be taken into account.

Like I really was trying to just not take it into account. And that was really painful because I felt unsupported by myself. And also I had decreased support in my business as well.

And then was left piecing together like free content, reconciling what to do and just constantly jumping from one thing to the next and trying to work harder, working harder. But I wasn’t doing what I needed to do. I was just like working so hard in my brain to try to get past the shame that the revenue had decreased and we were having PGSE launches.

By the way, you can go back and I like documented behind the scenes of many of these launches so you can hear like my experience in it. Because I love sharing this stuff. But I really was just putting so much pressure on myself in a really unfair way that it just didn’t like it.

I just had, and this is such a perfectionist thing to do. Like when you see how much, you know, how much potential you have that you just feel like, well, I should just be able to do it all and never struggle. And like, I know I could do better than this, but ultimately I was doing really well.

People were telling me that like, wow, you’re handling so much, but I just felt like I wasn’t handling it even though I was because I had this image of what handling it should look like. And it should just be easy and business as usual. And like all of these things, instead of like, yeah, but some, like I was handling a lot and it was challenging, but I was handling it anyway.

So I had in that period, like after coming back to the 150K loss and then not getting help. Like this is why as well, PGSD, why it is intentionally a group coaching program where you can listen to others getting coached because when we are in shame for some people, they reach out, they get support. Amazing.

Love that for you. My brain takes me into hiding and the way I can get support through those hardest times is by listening to other people who are having a very similar experience and have the willingness to share it, hearing them get coached so I can get the coaching I need, even when I’m not willing to share it. And even when I would get coached, so I signed up again in 2024 in $2 million group, I went to Nashville to go to the event, which was amazing as well.

But when I was getting coached, like I get coached in the coaching calls and share in the group, but I wasn’t actually sharing the real thing, which was what was going on high level with me, with the business and the revenue and my thoughts about it. I kind of get coached on like the still helpful things, really helpful things, but like I didn’t get, I didn’t share about high level what I was thinking. And it was only when like at some point I was like, okay, I’ve got to share about it.

And other people were like, oh, me too. Oh, me too. I was like, oh my God, thank God.

Like that removed so much shame. And also part of the reason why I signed up for that mastermind was because my coach Stacey had just navigated a really hard season and had shared about it on her podcast, like about what had it been like, I was like, I need, I need her. Like someone who has gone through the, like who has, who just gets it, who has navigated through a really challenging period.

Like that is who I need. Someone who can help lead me through a period of business, not feeling good and help me pop out the other side. That’s what I need.

Not just someone who’s only known success in their business. Like I literally need someone who has known success. And then after that has known failure, not just failure in the beginning.

And then I became successful and I’ve been successful since I needed someone who was like, I get it that you were successful. And then you went through a really hard period after that. And that was so helpful.

So another reason why I am sharing this, because if you’re listening to I need, I need someone who could help me not just navigate, like be successful, but can navigate a failure. It is me. So when I was in that mastermind, I wasn’t sharing like, here’s what’s going on.

And so I’m, I got so many important breakthroughs just from hearing other people sharing and being like, oh my God, that was exactly for me. Like, are they in my brain? So that’s why PGSC, you can hear everyone else getting coached because you might be like where your perfectionist brain takes you away from support when you are struggling. And when you feel ashamed and that being able to put in your ears, the PGSD private podcast and hear another perfectionist entrepreneur like you getting coached on exactly the thing you’re struggling with that you either didn’t have the awareness over so many things.

I was like, oh my God, that’s what’s going on. I didn’t even know it or I know what’s going on, but I don’t feel not that I don’t feel safe to get support. I feel too embarrassed to talk about it.

I just feel like I should be able to figure this out by myself, which not, I should be able to figure it out by myself. Like that should in there makes it not a helpful thought at all. And just has me then not figuring it out.

So anyway, I then had so much shame, like so much of 2024 was me figuring out how to get out of the shame of having an unprofitable year from the story that I have a coaching business, which is a very lean business model. Like it is so wrong. Like I should never, you know, people have breakeven years, but I should never have a loss.

And I’m essentially this feeling of like, I’m so irresponsible. Like that was so irresponsible of me to be in a situation where the business spent more money than it made. And I had a lot of money in my business bank account.

I had $300,000 so I could cover that loss. I didn’t see that actually as a success at the time that I had generated so much revenue and had it there that I could actually cover that. I saw that as like, well, I was just enabling myself.

Like I just made myself wrong for having a large cash buffer through a really uncertain period, which is a smart thing to do. So anyway, so many ways I was making myself wrong. And like really for me, what exacerbated the failing was the shame about it that had me freeze and then not do what was needed and being able to navigate like, yes, as a strategic things I did to turn the business back around.

And also it was like, to be able to do the strategic things that I needed to do, I needed to navigate the emotions of it so that I could actually take that action. So having the second one, having 150K loss, I just want to share that if you have, maybe at the moment, like, oh my God, I wish I could even like be making enough money to have 150K loss. But if you, and this is just like for future you as well, if you ever have a loss, like that is a normal thing in business.

And you can know that without being worried that knowing that is going to like be enabling for you to just like, okay, well, it’s okay to have a loss so I don’t have to do anything about it. Like that was a thought for me of like, I didn’t protect the profit. I was like careless in the business.

And really I was avoidant from a place like that is true. Not that I was careless. I was caring a lot.

I was trying really, really hard. But because of the feelings I was having, I became avoidant in the business, even though I was working so hard. Like I was just, I was the way it looked for me just to share more about that or like, how can you be avoidant while working? Like I wasn’t sitting on the couch watching Netflix.

Sorry. Like I was in my office trying to figure things out. And ultimately for me, it looks like a lot, a lot, a lot of self-coaching and trying to like make the plan, make the perfect plan that would fix everything all at once, like a real all or nothing approach.

And what happened is that I also became really fixated on the launch. And so I was talking about this on the PTSD call this week as well, like your business, and there’s lots of different parts of the business. And if it’s just you in the business at this point, you’re taking care of all of it.

So you’ve got marketing and sales, you have delivering to customers and clients, you have your finances, like there’s the operations, there’s lots of different facets of a business and you want to be taking care of each of those sufficiently. But what I was doing, my thought was, it’s the launches. Like there’s an issue with the launches, even though I had many successful launches under my belt and there wasn’t an issue with the launches.

The only issue was that I didn’t see that there wasn’t an issue and that I was doing them very sufficiently and that I’d pulled back. So this is part of what happened. I pulled back on the marketing and that became insufficient because I was trying to optimize the launches in an effort to save the business, if you will.

So all of my time was going to trying to figure out how to make the launch perfect, but then that didn’t actually have me do a perfect launch. What it had me doing was trying to figure out, like I remember it really clearly with my marketing manager, that we had this time where we were trying to figure out what to name the event that we were doing for the launch. It was like a four-hour brainstorming session for us to figure out the name of it.

Even what we came up with, it sounded good, but I was like, I don’t even really get what this means, but we need to have it, get it right. All this, we need to get it right. So what happened during that period is that a lot of things that were already sufficient, I was trying to optimize them and not realizing what was insufficient, which for me was the marketing, that I had really pulled back on how alive and connected I was in my podcast episodes and emails and Instagram.

I just really pulled back. And also it makes sense, right? It’s so important to be like, yes, this makes sense. My brain was like, there’s so much for me, this was such a thing at the time, there’s so much uncertainty in my personal life, figuring out being a mom of three under two and then three under three, there’s so much uncertainty, so much demand.

I’m just constantly in demand. I breastfed the twins for seven months. I did all breastfeeding and then we introduced formula.

I wish I had done that sooner, but I was just like, I fed Lydia, I should be able to do it. I’ve got the supply. I didn’t factor in my own experience of that and just how with Lydia, I could just be at the park and pop her on.

Luckily I had great supply and we didn’t have any feeding issues. So I could do that. I could just be walking around the house feeding her if I wanted to.

With the twins, I had to be under this twin pillow, either on the couch or on the inside or the couch outside. I couldn’t feed them in public easily because then I’d have to feed them one by one and then they get out of sync. A lot of the twin newborn life and infant life is keeping them in sync, keeping their feeds in sync and their naps in sync.

Otherwise you end up doing nothing but try to feed them in sleep. As you know, if you’ve had little ones, they feed a lot all around the clock. I really just essentially throughout that period, I was very sleep deprived.

I’m saying all this because I know there’s a lot of PGSDers as well. Definitely not everyone, but many. One of our PGSDer on the call yesterday had a little two-week-old bub on the call.

It was so cute. Being able to help her in PGDE navigate mat leave and figuring all that out and how to keep growing her business and what to do with things and her goals and all the things. With mat leave, I’ve actually had a lot of PGSDers who I have helped with that, which has been so fulfilling and satisfying.

I’ve figured out a lot about that and how perfection is how we can also come up in all different ways throughout pregnancy and postpartum and mat leaves and things like that. Really with having that season of life, I was sleep deprived, literally sleep deprived in so much demand, in so much uncertainty and newness that I didn’t want any new business problems to solve. I really wanted to just keep, unconsciously, keep the same problems because they felt familiar and I didn’t want unfamiliarity or uncertainty in personal life and business at the same time.

I’ve done a lot of work since then to really increase my capacity for uncertainty. Liam’s pregnancy was really a driving force in that because I had to figure out how do I sit with the uncertainty of this that we won’t actually know if he’s okay until the birth. There were so many scans.

I had CMV, which is essentially like a virus that if you have it as an adult, it’s not a big deal, but if you have it in first trimester and it’s the first time you’ve ever had it, it can have really serious impacts on the baby, but you can’t tell what they are fully until birth. That was so uncertain, so challenging. Also, as I was recovering from this period, then I was pregnant again, which is what we did that on purpose, but I was pregnant again, had the uncertainty of that, and was also back in pregnancy, first trimester nausea, fatigue, all of that while navigating, turning the business back around.

It was a very challenging circumstance. I think it’s so important for us as perfectionists, we want to dismiss that and be like, yeah, but it shouldn’t make a difference. Yeah, but I should be able to navigate this.

Yeah, but I should be able to just do what I normally do. That doesn’t make sense. I know it does to our perfectionist brain, and especially when you have a real self-image about being smart and having all this potential, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore your circumstances.

It doesn’t mean you can’t be bigger than the circumstance and increase your capacity and your thoughts around it to be able to navigate it more powerfully, but still, there’s something there to navigate. That for me was such a, I don’t want to say a failure as such, but a mistake was to not take into account that I was going through a really challenging season, and I just tried to push through, push through, push through to try and prove to myself that I could do it all, which was really, really rough to feel very unseen by myself when I handled that season very well, but I felt like I didn’t, and then it was just, it was super hard, and we can really, as I said about with my friend, with the pregnancy and the toddler, someone can tell you about a failure or something being super hard, and like, yeah, but I see you as so capable.

So I feel like that wasn’t that hard, but this was so hard. I had many times crying to Steve, just absolutely distraught about what to do, just feeling like days where, so many work days where I just felt like, what’s the point? Like, what’s the point of, what’s the point of trying with my business? Like, no one wants to buy PGSD.

I don’t know how to sell it. I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, just so many thoughts that I was incapable and powerless, and I felt so much not like myself because I feel the most like me when I feel powerful, when I am owning that I, like, what I know, and that I’m still learning things, and that I have so much to share, and that I can guide you so, so well, but I just felt not like me during that period, not really because of, like, being a mom and all of that kind of stuff people talk about, but I just had so many powerless thoughts that then had me not feeling like me.

I feel like me when I feel powerful, so that’s number two. We’ll go through the others more quickly, but my revenue halved, that was number one, and then it also went down after that to 200, I think it was 230k the following year after that. So, that was, like, to feel like, oh, I failed, it’s now 300, to be like, oh, now I’m failing even more, so hard having the loss, so hard.

What’s another one? Having PGSD launches with one sign up, and especially having that, I think, actually, when I had the marketing manager, the lowest we had was maybe four, but, like, after, so the way it worked, we had a quarterly launch for PGSD, so every three months, and as I was saying, I was getting hyper-focused on the launch to the exclusion of other things to try and fix a launch, and also the same with my marketing manager, like, all being focused around the launch, so I’m paying her salary, a six-figure salary, and paying myself as well.

And then to have a launch where we didn’t even come many times close to covering just our expenses in terms of our salaries was so defeating when we’d been trying so damn hard to nail it, and I needed this to happen. I wouldn’t have gotten the lessons I got if it hadn’t happened this way, but it’s, like, I’ve had PGSE launches with it at the same price it is now with 51 sign-ups, and to have it be then where we’ve had some with one sign-up, and also, like, part of that is, like, I had one sign-up because I got in my own way, because I didn’t show up and sell, because I was thinking no one wants to buy this, because I was so scared to, after having so many failures with it, and, like, my experience of it failing, that then it felt so scary to go all in with a launch, because, well, what if, like, because my hypothesis was, well, I haven’t gone all in with it, and that’s why it’s failing, then I was so scared to go all in with it, because, well, what if I go all in on it, and I still fail, and this is the episode I just released on the ultimate perfectionist fear, is that’s the fear, like, my best won’t be good enough.

And just being really scared to try my best with a launch, because then I’m, it won’t be good enough, again, this all-or-nothing thinking of just, like, wanting one launch to magically come in and save the day, not helpful, but this, like, perfectionist thinking, right, of, like, I just, like, I need to have this, like, amazing launch that, like, rights all the wrongs, essentially, the pressure of that just really had me freeze up.

I wasn’t showing up and marketing and selling, like, at points I was just going through the motions, like, me now, when I’m frozen, I’m still, like, doing podcast episodes and things like that, but it’s very different to when I’m not frozen.

So that, having a launch and multiple launches where we’d have dozens of people sign up, to then having launches where we’d have one or two people sign up, or, like, four people, that was so hard, and then, again, it’s, like, the hard thing was my emotions about it and feeling, like, it’s, like, I’m failing, I don’t know what I’m doing, and then I kept getting more and more in this, sort of, I don’t know what I’m doing, and, really, and, again, I was sharing this with the PGSD call yesterday, is that a thought that’s been really powerful for me is, I know what I’m doing, and the distinction I got yesterday morning, as I was just going about my morning, was that, like, yes, that’s a great thought, better than I don’t know what I’m doing.

But I know what I’m doing is also an all-or-nothing thought, but the actual most powerful thought is I know what I’m doing, and there are skills I’m developing, and I know what those skills are, and I’m developing them, but not this, like, all-or-nothing, either I don’t know what I’m doing, and I tried to get back into, like, no, I do know what I’m doing, and what I was missing was, like, actually, there are sales skills for me still to develop, I have many of them, and also, like, I love developing skills, and there are skills still to develop.

So it has been so great to just be connecting back in with, like, the skill sets instead of I really got into this mentality of, like, trying to be like, no, I know what I’m doing, I need to prove it by essentially, subconsciously, like, I need to prove it by not learning anymore, and just focusing on doing what I know to do, and ultimately, there are new skills to learn, and that’s a massive part of business that I love, there are always new skills to learn, and so much of my content, like, on the podcast, and everything that I was creating earlier in my business was, like, here’s a skill I’m developing around this, and then I think I really got into this place.

This mindset, this thought pattern of, like, well, I’m successful now, so now I just need to essentially defend my position almost, like, I now need to, and I was still talking about learning new skills, but more so from a place of, like, how do I even word it? Essentially from a place of, like, yeah, I have skills to develop, but trying to talk about it in a way that would make it seem like I knew more, I don’t know how to even describe it, but essentially from a place of insecurity, of being, like, I, now that I’m successful, I can’t share in the way that I did when I was, like, on the rise, if you will, and, like, yeah, I, like, follow along with my journey, I’ve never been successful in my business before, but, like, come watch me figure it out.

I then kind of got into this mindset of, like, oh, no, I should have it figured out by now, and also hearing lots of advice, not from my own mastermind, but, like, from different content I was consuming about, like, you have to be the expert, and you have to do all of this, like, posturing, essentially, when really my expertise shines when I share what’s going on for me, like, when I’m actually owning my successes and my failures and the journey of it all, that’s when I’m in my expertise, even, and when I’m in my truest expertise, I’m really not feeling like I’m an expert, it’s, like, this stuff I’m just sharing, like, my experience when I’m being the expert is I’m sharing, but I went into a lot of, like, trying to get it right.

Anyway, so many more things I could say about that, but having PGSD launches with one sign-up after having launches with 20 sign-ups multiple times, like, 20 plus sign-ups, 50 sign-ups, like, we’ve made over $2 million from PGSD sales and helping so many perfectionist entrepreneurs, and to then have launches that we tried so hard or I tried so hard in my brain, like, so much of the trying was me trying to muster up the energy to be willing to give it a go, but that was really painful, so painful.

Another one was, and this is going back a bit to pre this period, but as I was writing stuff I wanted to share, I stayed at my job, because this is another thing that’s come up a lot on coaching calls and PGSD always, but also recently, was that I stayed at my job for a whole extra year than I wanted to, and so when I left my job, my accounting job in March 2017, I’d made $3,000 in my business, I was not able to live off that.

I went to a part-time job as a receptionist, though I could just work in the afternoons, and I could still, because the hourly rate for the receptionist job, even though it didn’t require any degrees, was greater than my accounting hourly rate, where I had a law degree and a finance degree, but the hourly rate was lower, so it actually wasn’t much of a pay cut. It was a pay cut, but I got to work better hours.

Anyway, I transitioned into that job, and when I did, I was like, I’m only going to be here for a year, like, I’m for sure only going to be here for a year by March 2018. I’m going to be gone from this job, and I wasn’t even close. In March 2018, I hadn’t yet had my first 10k month.

I was really in a mindset of like, if I just have one 10k month, then I’ll be able to quit, when really, after you pay taxes, that wasn’t going to be enough to then have me ride off into the sunset. I had to learn the hard way when I had my first 10k month, which I’ve also documented on the podcast, when it happened in, I think it was October 2018, or September 2018, and then I shared it, the episode in October 2018, if you want to go back and find it, where I did a monthly personal growth update on the podcast. Maybe I need to do that again.

I loved doing that. DM me @PerfectionismProject on Instagram, if you want me to do that again. It was so good, but I really wanted to be gone, because I was in such a rush to go.

I felt like me being there, now that I let everyone know I have a blog, it used to be my secret that I had a business, that I let everyone know, and I was really like, now that I’m not being drained by my full-time job, I’m going to finally have enough energy to get the business going, but I still had perfectionism coming up that I needed to work on. Just because I had time, didn’t mean perfectionism just subsided.

So what happened was, by March 2018, I wasn’t in a position or anywhere close that I could leave that job and be able to live off the money from my business, and I ended up leaving in June 2019, so over a year later, and part of the work of that was also stopping being in a rush to leave and resenting that job, because that was just sapping my energy and making me try and really do drastic all-or-nothing things, like having this massive launch to be able to leave.

It was only once there’s a lot of work that I did on my perfectionism and my brain to be able to slow myself, calm myself down enough to be able to do the things I need to do, get out of the all-or-nothing mindset of trying to have this big result happen all at once to save me from needing to be in this embarrassing position of having a job, having a business and not being successful in it enough yet to be full-time. I had to do so much work on that, but I was able to leave. I created me leaving.

It’s not like it just happened to be. I actively created that. I was there for a whole extra year, and even then, that’s kind of a miracle there was only that long extra.

By the way, I started my business in August 2013. In June 2019, I’d been building my business for six years. If you’re not familiar with my story, I didn’t just start my business and then leave my job and then I’m full-time.

It was a ride. It was a ride. That is number three.

Number four, and I’ve already touched on this, so I’ll be brief, is just the overworking that I did from a real place of inadequacy and rushing and trying to magically fix the business in 2023 that I added an extra workday. Prior to that, I was working three days a week and I was very constrained with my work hours. I’ve always loved solving for like having constraint, positive constraint.

This is what I’ve got to work with. Now, let me figure out what I need to do and how I need to think and how I need to feel in order to grow the business the way I want in the time that I have. Then let me rest without guilt and recharge so that when my next period of work time comes, I’m able to do the courageous, tedious things I need to do to build the business.

I stepped out of that way of thinking. I went into a real way of thinking of like, I just need to throw more time at this. I just need more time, which only made it harder.

There’s many times, and I shared some of them on the podcast as well when this happened, like I shared it in closer to real time, is that I previously, when I’m in a place, when I’m in self-trust mode, when I’m in a place of self-trust and developing skills, not just blindly trusting, but I’m trusting myself and I’m trusting myself to learn new things and actively develop skills as well. The skill we teach in PGSD is making plans your perfectionist brain can actually follow through on and then following through even when your perfectionist brain tries to stop you, that’s a skill set. I stepped out of that positive constraint and was just trying to throw time at the problem.

I then, instead of just briefly outlining an episode and then recording it, it would take me a whole day to record a podcast episode because I was like, I have to get each episode perfect. Everything felt like such a big deal because it had to make up for me failing and I had to turn it around so quickly. I was in such a rush to do that.

I was working extra, but I could feel it wasn’t moving me forward. I was moving forward less. It really felt like walking through mud.

I was working more, working harder. Also, still at that time, three kids under the age of two, solo parenting on the weekends and just feeling so tired. And that wasn’t even the hardest thing, the fatigue and the demand.

It was the thoughts of I’m failing and I’m tired of failing. Like the real fatigue I had was being tired of failing in my business and then just throwing extra time at it and that not working. I’m so glad it didn’t work.

I’m so glad that didn’t work. But that was for most of that year. I worked an extra day.

I’d have to organize a babysitter to come and look after the kids. So all of that work of figuring that out and just then to feel myself wasting that time, really, it just was so hard. And especially what I teach, and this is part of why I can teach what I teach is I don’t just know what to do.

I have the experience of doing the don’ts. And so I can share with you, this is the don’ts. And so I can feel when someone’s like, I think the solution here is to add an extra day.

It’s not that the answer is yes to that or no, don’t do that. But I know the thinking when we’re in of maybe if I just add an extra day, I’ll be able to do this. There’s thinking we have, and now I can spot it so easily myself from these lessons is when we are in a place of it’s not working.

So maybe I need to work more. That’s not going to have us create the result, but there is a place like a thought and a feeling you can have behind a decision to work extra time that is going to be really helpful. But it’s not from the thought of like, this isn’t working.

So let me just try and work more in the hope that fixes it. Because my work hours was not the problem. The way I was thinking, my perfectionist thoughts, that was the problem.

So another one is that I took six months to let go of the marketing manager role after I knew I needed to let that role go. And so the thing I want to say here is it wasn’t that the marketing manager was doing a bad job or anything wrong at all with her, but fundamentally I hired that role. And this could be definitely listed as a mistake, but a such an important one, but a mistake nonetheless, is that from a thought of I’ve gotten us as far as I can take us.

Like I don’t know how to market and sell literally after we’ve just had our most successful year. I don’t know how to market and sell. I’ve gotten us as far as we can go.

So I need to have a marketing manager come in to figure out the right messaging, to grow the podcast and to have the business be successful. Like I am not capable of that. I need to find someone capable of doing that.

And so what I knew, and there’s other things as well, so I’ll mix this in with one of the other ones, is that I, another failure, is that I closed a successful program, PGSD, because I was feeling uncertain in my personal life. And that was, I did that like right after I hired the marketing manager. So I think it was November I hired her.

She started in December. And then in January, we launched the power planning course and closed PGSD in December. We did a promotion of like, it’s closing.

We don’t know when it will open again. So come join us if you’ve been thinking about it. And then I then had some time away, time off, heavily pregnant with twins and a toddler in January, and then had the twins in February.

And during that time, we didn’t have PGSD open for sale. And so I had a marketing manager and I literally like hired her to keep growing the program. And then I closed it.

So she couldn’t sell it. Like she literally couldn’t sell it and couldn’t just keep, oh, here’s what was working. Let’s keep doing it.

That I felt so uncertain, as I mentioned before about what was going on, that I closed it. I made a decision from the place of it’s not working. I couldn’t see that again, it’s working or it’s not working both all or nothing thoughts.

I couldn’t see all that was working about it. And I was thinking too, well, now the power planning courses are, I don’t know what PGSD is because power planning is the core tool in PGSD. So now I have to figure out like there’s more to PGSD than power planning than like, I like made it this big existential thing from a place of not being able, not seeing myself as being able to hold the uncertainty of having the business keep growing while my personal life was growing as well.

So that was not a great decision. And also I’ve learned from it had to happen out. It happened.

I’ve got so many lessons from that, but like, not the best decision. Really me getting my own way and from a great place, right. I was trying to keep myself safe and like keep, and like make sure that I didn’t have too much on my plate, like more than I could handle on my plate.

So I knew, so part of it as well, like as I returned to work and we did a launch in June that year, and then in the launch we did in September, like by that point in time, I knew that I actually needed to be the one in that role. It wasn’t that that person was bad or wrong. It was that I knew that I needed to be that person in that role because I was essentially just trying to do all of my work through her, which made it so much harder as well during that time that I couldn’t just like go and post stuff and do stuff.

Not because of anything she, any criteria she had, but my thought was like, well, I’m paying her to do the marketing. So if I just do it, then like, what’s she going to do? So then I have to instruct her and give her things and try to figure out what to do with her full-time hours. Cause I wasn’t working full-time hours.

I was working three days a week and then four days a week. And so I knew, like, I remember standing in the shower, like just knowing that it wasn’t making sense. Like our revenue wasn’t increasing the way I thought it would.

I needed to be the one in the marketing manager role. It was harder to market and sell having an extra person in the team, kind of like the too many cooks in the kitchen sort of thing. And that I was still like, I, I needed to be able to just send out the email and not have, have an extra person that needed to collaborate on it.

And it was just, I was so scared of making myself wrong for having hired her or hired specifically the marketing manager role that I was in this mindset of like, I just need to be a better leader. I just need to learn to delegate. I just need to, we just need to like nail the launch so that it can make sense financially.

But I knew that it wasn’t making sense from a business perspective, but I didn’t want to feel wrong for having hired her, especially because the advice that I had gotten and that like everyone was sharing is not that the person you should hire in the position I was in was a marketing person. And I get it now. Like I was the marketing person the business needed at that stage, but, and people like get support with the operations or like, you know, what would it be really great is like with that same money that was being spent to have more support in my personal life, that would have been very helpful and made a massive difference.

But I was in the mindset of like, I don’t know how to sell. The smart thing to do is to get someone in who knows how to sell. I had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Like now a big thing that I do specifically with my private clients is helping them with sales and making more sales, making consistent sales, getting out of their own way with sales and launching new things, all the mindset stuff that comes up with that. And I, it took this experience for me to learn that I’m actually very skilled at marketing and sales. I really understand it on a first principles basis and how anyone in any area, any kind of business in PGSD, it’s all kinds of entrepreneurs.

I understand not just how to make more sales in a coaching business. I understand fundamentally and can coach people to do that in any kind of business. But it took me having that experience to really own, actually, I am skilled at sales.

And I also like the way my business works is like, I am the messenger. I am like part of the sales of what I do is that like the way it comes through me is what you need, is how you need to hear it. And so I knew for six months that I needed to let that role go and I didn’t.

And there’s that saying in business, like hire fast, fire, fire, no, hire slow, fire fast. And I, I didn’t hire too fast, but I did hire quite fast. And I can see in hindsight, so many lessons I can see in hindsight, when I was interviewing all the candidates for the role, I was doing it as if it was a podcast interview and in a podcast interview, like part of that is really helping the guests look amazing.

Really asking questions that help them shine. And I didn’t ask the hard questions. I wanted to find someone.

I was like, I was in a rush to find someone before I went off to have the twins that could come in and save the day. So I hired fast, even though it felt slow, it was fast. Like I did, I don’t think, like I can see now in hindsight what I would do differently in the hiring process and just, and whether I’d end up at the same person or not.

It’s like, I can, I’ve learned a lot from that. And also I didn’t even mention in this, I had, I spent once I had the twins, a lot of time, like a good two months, a lot of my time went to trying to find an operations manager. I was like, okay, I need to get out of the operations too.

I need to have the marketing manager, the, the operations manager, who’s also going to be a six figure salary. I’m really glad that fell through. Thank you, universe.

We were like right on the brink of someone for that. And then they ended up going a bit weird and it was so perfect that it happened that way because it kind of just snapped me out of like, wait, the business doesn’t actually need this role. And especially while our revenue is declining, I don’t think it, it makes sense to do it.

Even though I have the cash there that I can pay them and I have like months worth of everyone’s salary set aside and everything like that. It just, I was in a place of like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I need, I don’t know how to run this business.

I need someone else to come in. I need to like make it feel like a real business. I got so many other lessons coming out as well.

Like just, I think for me really, I felt like I need to have like the bigger the team, the more successful I will feel or the more successful I am. So that was part of the drive. Like I felt so successful to be able to say I have a full-time salaried employee.

And that was part of the pain as well of like letting that role go was, and especially someone who was so enthusiastic, who was like doing great work, trying so hard, like all of that, it was really painful on a personal level to let that role go. But just really in this mindset of like, I don’t know what I’m doing. And I also want it to feel like a real business with employees.

And then during that time as well, I started working at a coworking space, which was beneficial to not be in the house all the time. Like that was really helpful to be able to go there. And instead of feeding all throughout the day with the twins being home with Steve, I was able to pump, even though that was time consuming and I needed to do that every three hours.

And like all the admin that comes with that, that it was really nice to get out of the house. But then there was an expense from having my own office in a coworking space. And I was just really like trying to make the business feel more real.

And it felt then really hard to let go of that role. And almost, it felt like a failure of like, well, I needed to let that person go. And it just, it’s so interesting.

I think it really is marketed like the bigger the team, like people often will be like, oh, this, they have this team of X number of people as if the more people, the better. And I love like, love the Kardashians, Kylie Jenner. I remember hearing that her, her like lip kit or whatever it’s called now.

What is it called now? Kylie? Anyway, I don’t know what it’s called. That her business, like making a lot, a lot, a lot of millions, billions of dollars that there were seven employees and it was just like all very lean and just like, it just, this is maybe for future you that just to be aware of your perfectionist brain, wanting to hire people just so that it, like you feel more legitimate. And that was going on with me.

That was unconsciously going on is that I wanted it to feel like a bigger thing, a more important thing, a more real business from a place of insecurity of not feeling like it was real enough or serious enough. And yeah, just so, so interesting. Another team failure that I had is that, I mean, there was, with all of this, as you can hear, there’s like wins and lessons and failures and it’s all mixed together because that is business to have all different experiences going on, is that I let go of, if you’re in PGSD and you were in there earlier, like not a recent PGSD, but Daisy, who is incredible.

And she was essentially my assistant in the business for many years. And I let her go so that I could connect back in with the business. Like, I really just feel like after I had Liam, this was when he was three weeks old.

So we had four kids under four. I was like, I just, again, I think I just was like, I need to slow this business down. I let her go.

And I was like, I just need to connect him with the business. Like I feel so disconnected from it. Prior to that, I spent like the first, like a lot of 2024 and 2025, especially like we knew we were going to have another one.

And then once I was pregnant, it was like, how do I get this business to keep growing without me? So I was trying to like get the business. I was trying to optimize myself out of the business. And so after that, and after I had Liam, I felt so disconnected from it because I’d literally been trying to remove myself from the business and spending a lot of time on backend systems, which all made sense at the time.

Like this, none of this was wrong. It all made sense. Like all, all the thoughts I was having at the time, like I did, like we all just do what makes sense based on the thoughts we’re having.

So I spent a lot of time in the backend and just trying to like make perfect like content systems, but then I wasn’t creating content and just like trying to figure out how to have the business grow without me because I didn’t know what it’d be like again, to have four kids under four. And I also didn’t know what, if Liam would be okay and if he would have like serious conditions that we would need to be spending a lot of time on. I just didn’t know what it would look like.

So again, I had a lot of uncertainty in the postpartum, like that I was worried about what that would be like. And so I felt very disconnected. And that’s, again, say part of why I was trying to optimize myself out of the business is that felt like the smart thing to do, because I don’t know how impressive I can be here.

So then anyway, after I had Liam, it turned out he didn’t get the CMV infection. He was all okay. And everything was great, which was amazing.

Great news. And also I was like, I want to connect back in with the business. And so I let her go.

And then it was just me in the business and I didn’t have anyone supporting me and having like, then I spent a lot of my work week, like I was still working. I had figured out by my third postpartum that I just wanted to have more of a fluid experience in terms of not having strict dates and things like that of just like, I can work when I want. I can trust myself to know when I want to work.

I can trust myself to rest. So I did that. But I spent like most of my week figuring out like if a PGSDer I had an issue logging in, like spending an hour figuring out how to get some access.

Like I just spent a lot of time doing admin work that wasn’t moving the business forward and then trying to create systems around it to optimize it when we already had a sufficient system. And then I, from a place of like, I can’t trust myself to pay people money to like, I can’t essentially, like if I invest properly in hiring a role, it’s going to be a big mistake and I’m going to make a mistake again. So from that place, I made the mistake.

I made the mistake of being like, who’s the cheapest, like what’s the cheapest way to solve this? And hiring, like I’ve had a lot of great roles from Upwork, but the way that I market, I essentially marketed the role of assisting in the business was from this place of essentially like calling in someone who was enthusiastic. And I had a couple of people that I worked with that like enthusiastic, very willing, but like didn’t have the skillset needed. So even though I had support, I was still needing to, I couldn’t just hand things off.

I was like very much in the backend of the business and in like the admin stuff that I’d been out of for many years. And after I’d reconnected, I still stayed in it from this fear of like, it’s a mistake to hire someone. If I end up letting them go, then it was a mistake.

And so I want, I just was really in this thinking, not knowing what I now know. And I’d already heard people say like, yeah, team’s super hard. Like you’re going to make hiring mistakes.

That’s part of it. I heard that, but I didn’t get it. I was like, oh, but if I’m just smart enough, I can avoid that.

No, no, I cannot. So I then was really gun shy with hiring someone. And I had, so that was, I had Liam in May and then it wasn’t until, I think it was January after we did the January 2025 launch.

And in that launch, I was like, oh, like this isn’t working to have, like there’s an issue with needing to have the checkout pages tested for the launch. And I delegated it to the VA and she didn’t do it in the timeframe needed. And she didn’t seem to understand that it was important that it was done that.

And I did my best to communicate it. And also I feel like it was clear in my communication that this wasn’t like, I wasn’t clear. Like I was very clear and she didn’t get it.

And I was like, I’m going to have to step in on a Friday afternoon when we have friends over and figure out this issue, which I was able to figure out, but I was like, oh, I need someone who like, part of the reason my launches aren’t growing is because I know that as it grows, I’m having to do all of the tech. I’m having to do all of the troubleshooting of access. And I didn’t want it to grow bigger when I was having to do all of the admin, all of the delivery, all of the coaching, all of the selling.

And in 2022, when we had that 600K year, I wasn’t doing the admin. I wasn’t doing anything to do with a lot of the backend.

And I, that was really important that I could spend my time doing a podcast episode instead of spending the hour trying to get a PGSDer. If they’d had like an issue logging in, which doesn’t happen very often, but like spending an hour fixing that, because that’s obviously very important. Then I then wouldn’t spend that time marketing and selling.

So it all makes sense. Like all the revenue stuff, like it makes sense, but it took me because of how long it took me to even really truly see, like when I was with the marketing manager role, when I knew it, I didn’t know it yet. Cause as I was saying, I went into this, like, I just need to be a better leader.

I need to be a better CEO. I need to stop micromanaging. I need to let her take the reins.

And I was just selling for like, I must be the problem here. So let me solve that. And so it took me like six months to be like, Oh, I like, I, I actually need to do this.

Like I wasn’t even willing to truly see it until I had to coach myself on being willing to see it. And then after that, it wasn’t like, it was only a few days before I let her go. And that role go, like, it wasn’t just that person.

Like I then stepped back into the marketing manager role, but then I was just so scared of hiring that it wasn’t until January and in 2025, no, 2026 this year. Yeah. Liam’s not that old.

He’s 18 months. And it wasn’t until this year that I reached out to Neha who I hired from Upwork in 2018 to help me rebrand from smart twenties to similar around in the perfectionism project and go into a new website. And she’d worked for me for a few years.

And then we didn’t work together. And then I reached out to her. I was like, any chance you come and work for me again? She was like, yes.

And I’m available. I was like, Oh my God. Amazing.

So that has been so good because it took me a while to realize, like, I actually need proper support and me trying to have like the minimum support I can get by with is not helping. I realized like, it’s just not helping. And I need to be willing to hire someone and that that might be a mistake, so to speak like that role or it might not be a right fit.

And like, that’s part of it. But I really had to get like, Oh, I can see how me now not hiring properly is causing more issues than if I hide the wrong person and needed to let them go. So, Oh my God, that was also painful because during that time, then I’m four kids under four trying to figure out how to do all things and really like have the business keep being turned back around.

And like so much and how to have like solo weekends with the kids and have whilst he was working and have my time off from the business be very, very demanding. So I have, Oh my God, all the capacity lessons I have like so much to share. What else did I have? I think there was 10 lessons.

Let me just quickly read my list. Okay. I think it cut out, but there are three more things.

So one of the things is the projects we had, this was in 2025 before I had Liam. We just had a massive pile probably for about a year of half finished projects, like to the point where there was a spreadsheet of projects that, and I remember going through it with Daisy of trying to figure out, we’ve got all of these projects for ages. It was just like, I’d be like, Hey, we’re going to do this thing.

I’d be so excited about it. We’d start it and fizzle out. And then I’d be onto something else.

And then I got to the point, I was like, okay, I’ve got all these half finished things and we need to now like put them all in a spreadsheet and figure out, okay, what’s half finished. Where did it stall out? Why did it stall out? What do we need to do to get it finished? And just like spending all this time trying to prioritize like what to finish. And I mean, I have so many lessons of this from a needlemover perspective.

And essentially what I did was get out of this way of thinking of like, I just need to finish all these things and figure out what to finish first and just like zoom back out. Okay. What’s the goal? What’s the needlemovers? Let me just do that and let go of the rest.

But just having so many things that were started and not finished and having like a literal pile of them. And this is also as someone who I help people with getting shit done. And also I, and this is like, I really had to get this, but like the circumstance I was facing was not the same as the person I help in PGSD.

Like I just was in a different circumstance, like the next level, the next, next level of the problems. And that I was just like a more advanced, a much more advanced problem of that I was solving. But in my brain, it was just like this energy of almost with selling PGSD of like, well, I’m having all these things that I’m not, I’m starting and not finishing.

So like, not even like, how can I help anyone else with that? Because I know I always can. But more so from a place of just like feeling like there was a mismatch or like not having all the stories to share that I do at different times. Cause I just wasn’t wanting to share all the failures from a place of shame.

And being like this, it’s just too embarrassing to share. Even though I like the best stuff is all, you never have to share anything you’re not ready to share. Super important.

But I know that part of like my gift and the thing I love doing is sharing the hard stuff. What’s most personal is most universal and all of that. But I just felt like I, when I was sharing about getting shit done and following through with your plans that I just didn’t, it didn’t have the oomph it normally has because I wasn’t feeling like I was doing it.

Another one, number nine is avoiding finances and related to this is number 10, which is the specific financial situation, which I’ll start with, which is going from having $300,000 in my account, in my business account to having $2,000 and $20,000 on a business credit card in debt. And just like the stark contrast of feeling like I was like flush with cash to then feeling like I have no money and constant thoughts of like, I’m running out of money. And like, I don’t know how I’m going to make money.

And also cause I was having all the thoughts about PGSD and like, no one wants to, um, no one wants to buy PGSD. I don’t know how to sell PGSD. Like that was like the failure there wasn’t, um, like I’m trying to say this in, I’m trying to figure out how to say it.

The failure wasn’t having that amount of my account. It’s like the failure was, was the, like the journey of it was going from having $300,000 and also from a place of like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I need to like, have money set aside for this more uncertain period, which is a smart thing to do.

But then going through, like, as I was saying, with the marketing manager role and paying for that and all of that, that I was like, I know the math isn’t mathing here, but, and I know like, if this continues, I’m not going to have enough money. And part of a redundancy as well is needing to pay out leave and, um, pay out like any extra amounts. And so like it, it costs a lot of money to make that role redundant and to get advice on it.

Um, and to follow all the legal processes with it. So like, it costs a lot of money to fire that role and let them go and make that role redundant is technically the term. And also like, I just, it was from this avoidance of not wanting to feel feelings like the, the failure in my willingness to feel the feelings.

And like, it was super hard, right? Like as I’ve mentioned, circumstantially, but also I went really avoidant with my finances. And I used to share on the podcast with like, or like my money routines with the business and how I like what I do every week with the money. I stopped doing all of that because I didn’t want to look because it brought up all the thoughts and the feelings that I’m failing.

I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know how to fix it. And so I stopped looking, which did not help it, but I stopped looking. I wasn’t selling as much.

I wasn’t marketing as much. Like it makes sense, right? Like if you take your foot off the gas, the car slows down. If you don’t put as much fuel in the tank, like it’s, it’s going to be harder to drive.

But then because of it was just like this spiraling of feeling like that, like that I’m going to run out of money, which that there was like a lot of wisdom in that mental chatter. Like that was the trajectory that I was on, but then I felt too frozen from the shame to solve that and to solve it powerfully. And so I think just finding myself when I found myself in that situation, it just felt like such a failure from like the contrast.

It’s, it felt very different to like having, like when I started my business, not having made money in the business yet. And like being on the journey of building the business, that was one kind of like feeling like I’m failing and maybe I’ll never get there. It felt so like there was just a different kind of feeling attached to like, Oh no, I’ve been in a much more successful position in my business, not just like in my career, in a different line of work, like literally in the same business doing the same thing.

And now I’ve, I’ve fucked it up. I’ve messed it up. And now I can’t, this was the real hit.

Like now I can’t trust myself because I’m the one who got me in this situation in the business. So I can’t, like, I’m not, I, I can’t trust myself to solve it because look at all the mistakes I made. And that was when I really feel like I had my hands tied behind my back.

If you go back, there’s an episode about untying your hands from behind your back, such a powerful episode. Also in PGSD, that’s a course that I created with a lot of the lessons I’ve learned called Unfreeze Yourself. And I go through the five steps of how to unfreeze yourself.

When you sign up for PGSD, you get instant access to that course. So if you are frozen, you want to go sign up for PGSD, get all the lessons. And it’s not just what I shared in this podcast episode.

Like I walk you through how to go the five steps to go from being frozen to being unfrozen and doing that when you’ve gone through a really hard period, you’re feeling really defeated, you’re in a lot of despair, how to navigate out of that. Oh my God. I feel like there are not many people, if any, teaching that process.

And I had to learn it the hard way. That’s how I learned it. I feel like that’s the only way you could learn it is to experience it and then like dig yourself out of that damn hole.

So having that situation of going from not being avoidant with finances to being very avoidant and going to having a lot of money in the business to not, it just felt so painful to feel like I had been successful and then not. And that’s kind of like the whole theme of all of this is the story that I had of like, I was successful, even though in that year, my main thought was it’s not working, which is like the domino for all of the other stuff that happened.

I didn’t actually allow myself, like I had, as my coach would call it, success intolerance and really like uncertainty, like intolerance that it felt so uncertain to be successful and for my business to keep growing while also going through a lot of personal life changes and having three kids under two and then four under four and having an employee, a full-time marketing manager that I’d never had before.

And then PGSD was closed. Like I added, as a way to cope with uncertainty, I added in a lot of extra uncertainty on top and change things and all of that from such a place of like great, great intentions that I was trying to protect myself from having too much uncertainty. But ultimately I went from feeling like I had my best year ever to I’ve fucked it up.

And now I’m in the place of like, oh, like this is all exactly how it was meant to happen. This is all the things I’m here to teach. I had to get it in the hardest way to get it because I didn’t want to get it.

I just wanted to push through and motor through and, and like be successful and like have, have none of the, the hard stuff. And the hard stuff is that for me is where I, I learn all the things that I teach. As I said, PGSD came from all those super hard lessons that I learned in the early years of my business, just trying to get it off the ground and trying to just get myself to stop procrastinating and do what I knew I needed to do and not burn out all the time.

And like actually have a plan that I follow through on and not just keep writing in a planner. And then I forget about the planner and then I do my calendar and I jam pack it. And then I’m not looking at my calendar and then I write a long to-do list and I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know where to start.

So I’m scrolling. Like I figured out that, which is amazing. And then now I have gotten my next set of lessons, many more always happening all the time, but really just to wrap it up like that, that call yesterday in PGSD when we were talking about, and I was just hearing myself say how important it is for me as an entrepreneur and someone guiding entrepreneurs to share the truth of entrepreneurship and have you love that.

And that like, have you not have shame about like you, there’s going to be mistakes, genuine mistakes, genuine thought errors, and you will make decisions that your future self will be like, I, not like I know better from this. Like, you know, you should know better, but like, you will not get it right all the time and you are okay. You will be okay.

And I can help you walk through all of that emotionally and also strategically. Um, there’s so many, like I could tell as well, the story of all the things I shared with you in this episode in such a different way as well, because there’s so, I wanted this episode to be like, here are all the failures, but like, there are so many wins from that season as well. That, um, just like the way I turned the business back around and I increased my capacity, the quadrupled it literally to such an insane level, the way I can make a plan and follow through with it.

Like power planning was my rock through all of that. Thank God I had power planning, um, to like help, to just help me navigate business with multiple little ones and so much uncertainty. And just like, it just allowed me to stay out of the overwhelm of it all to clearly see where my time was going.

I could see from my power planning when I was getting in my own way. So it was so much quicker to be able to get out of my own way. Um, it was so important that I was power planning and I knew about clean rest that I created for myself.

I clean, had to clean up my clean rest. There was just so much, there’s so much courage, resilience through this period. Like I just feel like now that I’ve been through it, I’m like, Oh, like that was such a badass thing that I navigated and that I really deeply believe without the coaching tools I’ve developed and without being getting coached myself that I would have quit business, that I wouldn’t have been able to navigate the circumstance and become bigger than the circumstance.

And I would have crumbled completely and I didn’t. And when I did crumble a bit, then I could pick myself back up and keep going. And just like, now I feel like, Oh, like not only can I build a business, I can turn it back around and do that when my perfectionist brain is screaming at me that I am failing and that no one wants this and it’s never going to work.

And what’s the point trying and it’s not going to make a difference. And then witnessing myself being avoidant for months at a time, going through the motions, knowing I’m not doing what’s needed, but trying so hard and not getting so frustrated with myself that I just decided it’s never going to work. But just ultimately still believing if I persist, I will succeed.

I can get through this. I am capable of this. I can rise above this and it’s really hard and I can do hard things.

And so that’s what I want to give to you and to teach you is like, this is such a big part of entrepreneurship is the resilience, is the navigating the emotions and your perfectionist brain yelling at you that you should be doing better. You shouldn’t be getting your own way. You shouldn’t be so behind like all the shoulds that come from our brain that try to wear us down and try to protect us and keep us safe.

Being able to have not just the resilience, but actually it’s all an adventure and being able to be in a place of having really hard failure. And at the same time, being able to be in a place of it’s all an adventure. This is all like, I’m capable of rising above this and it’s so hard and I feel like I have no energy, but I can increase my energy by changing how I’m thinking, shifting my perfectionist thoughts that are just the all or nothing ones that have me feeling resentful or bitter or just wearing me down.

I can change that into a powerful thought, even when I’m so tired, even when I’m so tired of failing plus being physically tired. I can pick myself back up, dust myself back off and either have a quick shame spiral or not have it at all and keep going. And I was coaching a private client on this the other day of just like, it’s like how quickly you can just go through like that cycle of despair, as she called it, where like she had a no on a consult.

She does web design stuff. She had a no on a consult that she did on a sales call. And then she went into this cycle of despair of essentially like, what’s the point anyway? Like this kind of like pessimism, feeling so disheartened and then did a few points here and there, but like very scattered action.

And then after that was just like, okay, well nothing’s working in the business. I may as well clean the house up, but then getting so restless and then like picking herself back up and dusting herself back off and going into back was working again, that like the quicker you can just either skip the cycle of despair just by like processing the feelings and like dusting yourself back off or just go through the cycle of despair much more quickly as in instead of it taking a year, then it takes nine months and it takes six months and three months, then you’re in it for three weeks and you’re only in it for three days and then it’s an hour and then it’s five minutes. You’re like, okay, back to work, back to business as usual.

Like that is such an important skill set. It’s a skill set. I teach that skill set inside PGSD.

You want to join PGSD so you have the resilience, so you have the ability to navigate the journey, to make plans and follow through with them and to navigate all of the emotional turmoil and drama that comes with showing up and putting yourself out there and trying things that aren’t guaranteed to work because you have to. With entrepreneurship, you have to love the journey of it, the cliche thing, but like you have to love that it isn’t guaranteed to succeed. There is a high level of uncertainty, but there is magic in it from that uncertainty.

But if we’re in resistance, like if we’re just trying to get to certainty of like I’m succeeding and my clients are succeeding and we’re all okay and like all of that, like that’s missing the point of entrepreneurship. And so for me also, all of this season that I’m talking about in this episode has just been like me really needing to fall back in love with entrepreneurship and like, yeah, it is hard and I love doing hard things. I love feeling powerful and having an occasion to rise to and rising to it and becoming bigger than the circumstance instead of feeling powerless to it.

That’s what I love doing. That’s what I nerd out about. That’s what I teach you to do in PGSD so that like the circumstances that have you freeze or get in your own way or overthink things that you are then not stopped by that anymore, that you’re able to even in the hardness, it’s not about like, let’s have there be no friction in your life.

Like, no, there’s going to be friction, but how do you become bigger than the friction and bigger than the friction from your perfectionist brain so that you can actually do what you need to do to build your business even with limited time, even with a busy, uncertain personal life, even with your perfectionist brain yelling at you the whole time. So that is my episode for today. I hope it has been incredibly helpful and that you can learn from my mistakes and my failures.

But hopefully, ultimately, my hope is that what you learn is that it is part of entrepreneurship. It is not something that if you’re just smarter, like it’s a sign you’re not smart if you make a mistake. I know we hear all the time about people making mistakes and failing and all of that.

And then we think, but if I just can do it right, I get to skip all of that. No, you don’t. And that’s a beautiful thing.

And the more I think just for me, like what always helped me in the beginning was hearing people talk about the mistakes they made and the failures they had that helped me feel more safe to try because I felt like it was more safe to make a mistake instead of this mentality of like, well, if you just get it right, you won’t make a mistake. I’m here to teach you how to get it right. I don’t think that’s helpful for entrepreneurs.

I think it sets us up to have a really low level of resilience. And that is not what I’m wanting to do for you at all. I’m wanting you to be highly resilient.

And that includes seeing that I have been failing in that period, really, really hard and making mistakes and I’m okay. And you can fail and also be okay and pick yourself up and dust yourself off and enjoy the journey of it when it’s really hard. And that it’s okay to try because it’s okay to fail.

It’s okay to try because it is genuinely okay to fail. So with that said, I hope you’re having a beautiful day and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Outro
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