Good morning lovelies,
How are you all. I feel like its’ been ages since I did a solo episode. I hope you have been enjoying the conversations I have been having with all the other fabulous women in the entrepreneurial space. If you have found them super useful, I would be so so grateful if you would take a couple of minutes to leave a review so others can find this podcast and be helped too.
But yea – today is a solo episode. And probably a short one. But an important one.
Because today we are going to be talking about some of the symptoms that you can use to recognise and identify the fact that you might be tying your worth to your business success.
But before I go into what those symptoms are – so you can see if you have them…
I want to share a bit about why this matters. Why do we care that you might be tying your worth to your achievements, to the amount of money you make in your business, to your rate of progress and level of success?
I think it matters, for a few reasons…
1 – is that it makes the journey of entrepreneurship wayyyy harder for you. Wayyy less enjoyable. And I already think it’s hard enough.
To have made the courageous leap to believe in yourself and your ideas and your skillsets and capabilities…to go from a job to starting a business is tough.
And then to learn all the skillsets you need to have in order to succeed – is hard work. And painful and frustrating because you will probably be bad at them at the beginning and so you will have lots of fails. And maybe feedback from those fails that doesn’t feel good.
And then you have to invest time and effort and money into something you don’t know for sure will pay out, or when it will.
Whilst you have other expenses and bills and money going out just to live.
And maybe you do work hard, and you do have the skillsets, and you are investing all that – and still there are obstacles you have to overcome.
And mindset barriers – doubt and fear.
And subconscious beliefs that lead to you sabotaging your progress every now and again.
And maybe not everyone in your life will believe in you, or support you.
That is all hard enough.
And then when we layer on tying our worth, how good we believe we are, our feeling of being enough, to our business success…everything becomes more serious. And more painful when we aren’t where we want to be. When we are failing. Or when we achieve it but we can’t believe that we were the ones who achieved it – we think it’s a fluke. Or we still don’t feel good enough so we don’t enjoy it before we move onto the next part of the arduous journey.
2 – The second reason is that when you are desperate to feel worthy or good enough, and you think that making more money or being more successful will prove you are good enough or make you feel worthy, you will tend to put working on your business before everything else. So you will neglect your health, you will sacrifice certain things, like time with your loved ones, time for rest, time for fun and play, and adventure. And you will overwork and hustle. Because your main focus will be to achieve the success that will make you feel good enough.
And the problem with this, is that isn’t kind and it isn’t sustainable. And it’s also something you can’t do over. So that time will be lost forever. That time with loved ones. That time where you could have been looking after your health or preventing yourself from getting sick. That time where you could have been making memories.
And this is such a shame. One of the most commonly found regrets of the dying, that comes up in studies, time and time again, is that they wished they hadn’t worked so hard.
They wished they’d spent more time with their loved ones. They wished they’d taken care of their health more. They wished they’d had more fun. And adventures.
Yet when you are tying your worth to your success, these are the things that tend to go first.
- The third reason is one of practicalities. Because you will be in such a hurry to get to that success that will make you feel worthy, you won’t actually be willing to slow down to find the solutions that would help you get there faster, whilst saving you time. You won’t have time to slow down and clean up your back office, even though you know if you were more organised, things would take you less time to do and so you probably would get there faster and still have time for other things outside of your business. But if you don’t slow down, you won’t have time to figure out how to be able to have a work life balance and still get as much done. Because you are in a hurry to prove your worth.
- The fourth reason is that if there is any resistance to committing to a goal, because of the fear that if you don’t hit it, it will be more painful evidence for you that you aren’t good enough, because you are tying succeeding with your goal with being worthy and good enough, then you won’t actually be putting yourself in the best position to achieve that goal.
Because committing to the goal properly is the first step to achieving it. So in a way, you will be almost setting yourself up for failure from the get go.
So those are the core four reasons why I think it is such important inner work to do – to detach our business success and achievements from our own worthiness.
So I’ve touched on a couple of the symptoms already within those reasons but here are the full 8 symptoms you want to be on the look out for, to make sure that you know if you are tying your success to your worth, that you can be aware of the consequences and that you can decide if this is inner work to do for yourself…
- You aren’t where you think you should be right now and it’s painful when you think about that
You think you should be further ahead by now. You thought you’d be making more money. You thought it was going to be easier. Or you were better at it than you now feel.
2. You are in a hurry to achieve your next goal…And you are frustrated by how slow your current progress is
Pretty much as soon as you set the goal, you wish you were already there.
3. You are willing to do “whatever it takes” to achieve the goal, even if it means postponing life now, and neglecting parts of your personal life, (including your health and your other desires)
Because perhaps you’ve heard that you have to make sacrifices…and you want it so bad, you are willing to make them. Even if that means pushing your body to breaking point.
4. You are always in such a hurry to make more money, that you won’t slow down or find time to clean up the back end of your business…even though things in your business are taking you five times longer to do, because it’s such a mess behind the scenes
Even though your processes and systems are so chaotic, you know cleaning them up would save you time. And make you more efficient and effective.
5. You are kind of scared to commit to your goal (whether that means telling others, or even properly admitting it to yourself, in case you don’t reach it)…because if you fully commit and then you don’t achieve it, it will be proof that you aren’t good enough
So maybe you haven’t properly set one. Or maybe you haven’t told anyone about it. Or you’ve sort of set it in a “I’ll give it a go but it’s really just something to aim for” mentality.
6. Even when you do achieve the goal you set, you aren’t 100% sure that you achieved it on your own merit (other factors like luck, and timing and connections with others were the REAL reason you achieved it) so it feels like a fluke…And you don’t feel that proud or maybe the self-pride lasts about four seconds flat before you are onto the next goal as this one still isn’t enough
And you are still chasing that feeling of being good enough.
7. You don’t believe you are successful yet because you haven’t achieved the level of success you want…And you completely ignore all of the other wins, successes and goals you have achieved in life, focusing only on your failures and the gap between where you are now, and where you want to be.
You think that there is an end point where you finally reach it and that means you are successful. And because you aren’t there yet, nothing else counts.
8. And lastly, we put people who have achieved the level of success we want on a pedestal. And either admire them, think they are better than us or extraordinary in some way, want to be like them or spin out in a cycle of compare and despair because we feel inadequate next to them – because of where our level of success is at.
So those are the symptoms that might indicate that you are tying your worth to your business success, money, and your rate of progress.
So I want you to check in with yourself today and see how many of them, if any, resonate with you…
And also check in with yourself as to whether or not you can see it being a problem for you…what impact is this having on your life, on your journey as an entrepreneur.
And consider if you want to do the work to unpick it. Is it causing you enough pain yet that you see the benefit of learning how to do business a different way?
And if you do, this is exactly the work we do in my program 100 days of freedom.
Because even if we worked together to have you being more strategic with your time, and more productive in the hours you work, and more organised with your business…so that you could free up the time to take time off…
That extra time you create, the 100 days where you could be stepping away completely from your business, have it run without you, do something else instead…you will just fill it with more work if you haven’t done the inner work to uncouple your worthiness from your business success. Because you will prioritise feeling worthy over everything else simply because your brain has linked it to survival, – the validation, love and affection we think we will get from the success, our brain thinks is important for survival. So that’s why we don’t just do the time management and productivity and strategy piece in my programs.
So if this is you – you are going to want to join the program starting this October. You can get on the waitlist for finding out more about it by visiting my website www.Kirstyknightcoaching.com
That’s it for this week folks. See you next week x
Recent Comments