Just Handle It: How to Stop Overthinking Your Business

If you are thinking about something for more than 2 years, it's worth it to just try, to just handle it. Stop thinking of every other option and just freaking handle it. I saw a question posed online this week that really changed the way that I think about everything, and I want to share it with you today because maybe it will help you think about things differently. Maybe it will reframe Some of the challenges that you've been having in your business or just make you focus in a little bit different way because it helped me a lot. So I want to share it with you right now. So the question was, if you had to run your business and you couldn't leave it, you couldn't start a different one, you had to make it happen and you had to make it fit your dream life, what would have to change inside of your business for it to work the way it is right now? So if you think about that and you think about, you know, you have this business and for the sake of this conversation, starting over is off the table. You can change how you run it. You can change your role inside of the business. You can get more help, but you have to work with what you already have. You have to stay in your niche. You have to keep your existing offers. What would you have to do or what would have to happen for you to actually want to continue running your business? And I think that question is really good because it takes away the option of escaping to a brand new idea. If you have to look at the problems that are in front of you and you have to figure out how to fix those problems, how to overcome those problems, how to stop making excuses about the problems that you have, it opens up a whole different part of your brain that allows you to think creatively, allows you the option of not escaping, and lets you get to a clear decision, a clear, concrete plan of action. And I think that's important for a lot of us as entrepreneurs, because many of us are visionary. Many of us are ADHD, neurodivergent, all the things. We think we can do anything, right? We believe we can run multiple businesses. We believe we can work with 30 different avatars at the same time. And oftentimes those are the beliefs that are actually keeping us stuck. So this reminds me of a conversation that I had with a dear friend of mine, Tara Zirker. And maybe I've shared parts of this conversation in different contexts, but there's a phrase from the conversation that I had with Tara that has lived rent-free in my head ever since. So the story is this. We went to Social Media Marketing World. Tara and I were both speakers at that conference. It was like last April, and Tara and I are sitting at the pool. We're like dream casting together. We're making our plans for the next 12 months. We're putting launches on the calendar, we're putting offers and ideas, and we're just laying it all out there to plan our next 12 months. And something that I shared with Tara at the time was that I was feeling really uncomfortable on camera. And after coaching many entrepreneurs, men and women alike, I know that camera confidence is an entire category that can impact how we show up. It can impact what we're willing to do to market our businesses. It can make us want to run faceless businesses, right? And be behind the scenes and not really be a personal brand with no person in it. Sometimes our camera confidence has that much of an impact on us, and I've seen it again and again. So I was seeing this come up for me. I was seeing I had gained a significant amount of weight heading into the last years of my 30s. Didn't really know what was going on. I didn't know if it was my thyroid, if I was super inflamed, if it was just age and I'm not as active as I used to be when I was chasing toddlers around all day. And it had really impacted my camera confidence. I didn't like the way I was looking on camera. I was embarrassed. I felt a lot of shame around it, which even now it's kind of embarrassing to talk about having those feelings, but I know it's so common. And every time I talk about weight on social media, I get so many DMs that are like, thank you for sharing this. So As embarrassing as it is for me to talk about it like that, I know it's important, and I know that it is a universal feeling for many humans around the world. So I was having this conversation with Tara, and I was saying, I know I should be recording more content. I know I should be more visible online. But every time I try to record something, I hate the way I look on camera. I'm so embarrassed that I'm gaining weight. I don't know what to do to lose the weight. I've been working with a coach. I was sharing with her all of these things that I had been trying. You know, I've been counting my macros and I've been weighing my food and I have a coach and I, you know, I'm like thinking about going keto and I'm thinking about going back to Whole30, or I used to be vegan. And when I was vegan, it was really easy because I was plant-based and I didn't have to think about my weight. And I was like talking in circles, right? I was talking about all of these different things, like I could do this. And I was like verbal vomiting on her. And then I said this thing. About, I've kind of been thinking about even a GLP-1 as an option for the last 2 years, and I'm too scared. I'm too scared of the side effects. I'm too scared of the long-term effects. I have health anxiety. Like, I'm too scared to try this option. And Tara looked at me and she like slammed her notebook down on her lap and she looked at me and she's like, Allie, just handle it. Just get it figured out and handle it. Do the thing that you know is going to work. Stop making all these stories up about it. Stop making it mean more than it actually means and just handle it. And what I did after that is I actually went to the GLP-1 appointment that I had booked. I started microdosing it back in May, and I've since lost almost 30 pounds. So moral of the story is if you are thinking about something for more than 2 years, it's worth it to just try, to just handle it. Stop thinking of every other option and just freaking handle it. So I always think about that quote now. Yes, this is me telling you that I've been on a GLP-1 since May. I know that this is kind of not something that everybody talks about openly, but for the sake of, you know, not gatekeeping, this is what has been working for me. And if you want to hear more about that, okay, we can talk about it another time. But every time I have this conversation behind closed doors, the people that I'm talking to, I'm like admitting it, like I'm ashamed. Oh yeah, I, you know, started tirzepatide in May. And they're like, oh yeah, I've been on that for a year. Oh yeah, I'm on that. And— Even when I had the coaches, this is probably more of a tangent than I meant it to be, but even when I had a health coach that I had hired in January and I was like struggling, I think I lost 7 pounds in the span of 3 months working with this coach and I was super frustrated. And she's like, well, maybe you might want to consider microdosing a GLP-1. And then she says, I've been on one for the last 2 years. And I just remember sitting there this whole time that I've been paying for coaching, you didn't tell me that information. That would have made it really helpful when I'm paying you as the expert. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation about transparency and coaching that I have big feelings and probably could stand on a soapbox talking about that. But the point is, Tara said, just handle it. And I handled it. So if there's something that's keeping you from showing up or keeping you from making the decision that needs to be made, just handle it. Just make the decision and figure out what it is that you have to do or what your decision is going to be, what you're gonna try, what you're gonna test. And just handle it. So I keep coming back to that story, especially when I catch myself kind of ruminating on different things inside of my business or inside of my head over and over. I'm considering every possible solution, but I'm never really getting to a decision. I'm never putting anything into a concrete final position because then I can't see myself fail, right? If I don't ever make a final decision, Then I don't have to admit if it doesn't work. I did the same thing in college where I would procrastinate and I would wait until the very last second. I would pull an all-nighter and I was an art student. So all-nighters as an art student, when art can take a very long time to create, is not a great pattern to be in. And I remember this 3D sculpture class that I had and we had to build a chair. That was our assignment, is to build a chair. And I waited in true Allie form until the weekend before it was due on Monday. I think I started my project on Friday and I, it had to be a weird chair, like a creative chair. And I decided I'm going to make my chair a piece of cake. It's going to be, you know, probably 4 feet tall. I decided I was going to use that yellow fluffy insulation that is actually made out of fiberglass. And I was trying to, you know, cut the wood so that it was chair-shaped and I was trying to shove all of this fiberglass in there and I was really itchy and I didn't realize what I was even doing, but I hadn't done the time to put in the research. I hadn't put in the work to figure out best— the best process to do this correctly. I have procrastinated for so long, and my cake come Monday was beautiful. I somehow always had this magic way of being able to pull it off, and I was so proud of it on Monday, even though it had taken me 2 days. I was like, like reliving this pattern, approving it to myself. It's okay that I procrastinate. But what ended up happening is that a big chunk of our grade from this specific professor was on our class involvement and our class behavior. And I had spent the last couple months of class screwing around, you know, dinking around with my friends, talking to them, socializing, sitting out in the, you know, the patio of the art building and not really not doing a whole lot in class. So my grade ended up being a C and I was bitter and I was annoyed and I was like, you know what, this cake, I wish I had a picture of it because I loved that project. was like this giant piece of cake that you could sit on as a chair. And I remember the professor gave me a C and I was mad at him, even though I hadn't done the work. But I had this pattern of not fully showing up, not fully owning it, not doing the work in advance, partially because my executive functioning skills sucked and I didn't know how to start sooner. But also it gave me a really great excuse. If I didn't study until the night before, it wasn't that I had tried my best and failed, it was that I didn't, fully commit and I got a C and it was okay because I did an all-nighter. I couldn't have expected to get an A. I didn't study until the last minute. So I always had this out. I always had permission to not go all in. And it was okay if I didn't see myself get the best grades because I knew that I wasn't really trying. If I had fully committed and I had fully tried and I still got a C, well, then I had to look at my own skillset. Then I had to look at some of my shortcomings. And then I had to see myself fail and be able to sit in that failure and be okay with it rather than trying to prevent it. And a lot of us continue doing this in adulthood, continue seeing ourselves do these kinds of patterns in our businesses. If we're launching something, well, we don't send the last 5 emails and we think it's okay, I didn't hit my sales goal, I didn't really commit. And if I had sent those last handful of emails, then I probably would've hit my goal. But if you do send all the emails and you do full send it, then if you fail, you see yourself fail and you're like, oh, maybe I suck. And maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought. Maybe I need to improve my sales process. Reminds me a little bit. My son is a freestyle skier. I don't love that for us, but he loves it. And he does flips and he does all these crazy spin moves while he's skiing. He goes on the ski parks where they've got rails and it's Super dangerous. But he has this saying about full sending it. You can't half send a backflip when you're on a ski hill. You can't kind of commit because that's when you end up getting hurt. And he was telling me about this and I was thinking about how that related to business and how it was interesting and how you had to full send things in all areas of your life. Because if you half-ass it or you just, oh, I think I'm maybe going to try a backflip, well, you're probably going to fall and injure yourself. But if you full send it, that's when you end up landing it or you end up nailing the landing. Or maybe you bobble and you fall, but you still full sent it. You have proof of what you need to change next time. So when you think about your own business and you think about, you know, maybe it's health, maybe it's relationships, maybe it's your business, parenting, whatever. If you feel like you have been spending all of your time really figuring out the thing that's not working, And you actually see yourself fail, then you have to admit it. You have to own that. You have to believe, oh, maybe I'm a failure, and you have to work through some of those feelings. But if you don't fully commit, you don't full send, you always have an excuse. So when I was looking at weight, for example, because I do think this is a universally relatable idea, when I was thinking about how am I going to lose this weight? Why am I gaining weight? I was looking at intermittent fasting. I was looking at keto. I was thinking about Whole30. I was looking at— low inflammation diets. I was like reading books about fiber. I was doing all of these things and I was trying to figure out, should I do some combination of these? Which one is going to work best with my biology? Like all of these things, there were limitless possibilities and it just led to a whole lot of spinning for me in my brain and no results. I wasn't seeing any results that I wanted despite the fact that I had been thinking about it and dreading it and feeling stuck by it for over 2 years. So if you think you're considering every option, that could be the thing that's actually keeping you stuck. So maybe it's making that final decision. It's doing the thing that you've been ruminating on or the option that maybe needs a little bit more consideration so you don't have to give all of the other options so much mental space. So the part of the experience that I keep thinking about when it comes to that conversation with Tara is that how much time I had wasted Considering the paths, considering all the different options instead of just settling on the path that was right. So this quote of just handle it, it keeps coming back for me when I'm spinning on something else. Oh, I'm mad I haven't been consistent with my podcast, or I'm frustrated that I'm not currently doing a live weekly webinar. Okay, Allie, just handle it. Figure it out. What does just handling it actually look like? What do you need to put in place to make some final decisions about things. Do you need to get help? Do you need to get a coach? Maybe you need to book an appointment. Maybe you need to choose one specific approach instead of reconsidering the decision every time you get at a challenging point. Because when you give yourself a menu of endless options, it's going to start feeling like you have no idea what you actually need to do. There's too many possibilities that are competing for your attention, and then you're trying to evaluate all of them at once. So, the longer I know personally, the longer I sit in this phase of considering all the options, the more impossible it starts to feel, the more complicated it starts to feel. And there are definitely versions of this in business. So, if you're thinking about the quote at the beginning of this episode that says, if you couldn't run a different business, if you couldn't run a different version of your current business, if you had to make what you're currently doing work, What would you have to do if you handed your business to your mentor, to your business idol, the person you admire most, or you think is the most talented business strategist in the world? What would they do? What— how would they make your current business successful? If you were to bring in an investor inside your business and it was their job to make you successful, what do you think is the first thing that they would suggest? So if you're looking for more customers, for example, you could run ads, you could start a podcast, you could host a webinar, you could do a challenge, you could launch a membership, you could start posting on a whole new platform. Maybe you start TikTok. And every single idea comes with another person, especially online. And you get all the ads, right? All your whole newsfeed is like, you need a webinar, you need a challenge, you need a membership, you need ads. Now you have 14 different tabs open, maybe 3 different Google Docs. Your ChatGPT is full of ideas and every single Friday, you end with a different plan or a different idea than you started with on Monday. And at some point, you have to settle in. You have to ask yourself, what am I actually going to do here? What is the simplest path of least resistance to make the next step automatically clear? So this is where that quote comes in that I always feel like I'm saying to customers or that I hear them saying about themselves is that saying of the shoe cobbler's children have no shoes. So the example is that Someone who makes shoes for a living, he's giving everybody else shoes. Somehow he never gets around to making them for his own family. Right. And I think a lot of us entrepreneurs can relate to that in that examples or different examples or ideas of the copywriter who doesn't have a sales page, a marketing consultant who's not creating any marketing, not putting out any social media content, a business coach who helps clients with their offers and then goes and tries to come up with 3 brand new things to sell instead of just perfecting their own offer. And I totally get it. I love ideas. I can make a very convincing case for just about any new offer, any new business idea to myself, and I can be excited. I once started a cleaning company on a Wednesday. But imagine that somebody had your company, same offers, same audience, same amount of money, same responsibilities outside of work. What would you tell them to do? How would you tell them, especially if you're a business expert and you see your own business struggling, What would you look at someone else if they had a carbon copy of your business? What would you tell them to do? So if you already have an offer that people have bought, you just need to talk about it more. You just need to get more eyeballs on it. If you have a delivery problem, okay, let's figure out how to support your customers without you being available all day. Or maybe if you feel like you have too many projects already, pick one to finish, pick the one that you think is going to unblock the biggest constraint. It can be so obvious when you're looking at someone else's business. Because you're focusing on the problem that they brought you and you can help them choose a next step. In your own business, it feels different, right? Because you know every possibility. You remember the disappointing launch. You remember the time you post on social media and got no views. You remember what someone else in your industry is already doing. And you start thinking about time, money, whether you'll regret choosing the wrong thing. And The core of the word decision is to cut, and it means— it's Latin, and maybe I'll have to put it in the show notes because I can't remember the exact phrase, but the Latin root of the word decide means to cut off. So when you're deciding, you are cutting off other options, and those decisions can start to feel like they're carrying a lot of weight because you're cutting off other options. And sometimes we think because we keep the options open, it means that if we're not choosing, We're gonna, you know, it's, we're able to keep our options open that we don't have to cut off something that could be the winning decision. And that can feel really hard. What about the other idea? What about the opportunity we might miss? What about a strategy that could work even better than what I'm doing? And those conversations can keep going forever and forever. So when we think about that question or we think about the quote, just handle it, we can think about all of the other options and we can start cutting off things that we know are providing too many different options for us. We can start to decide, we can start to eliminate, and we can look at our business almost from an outsider's perspective and think, okay, if someone else were in my business, what would they cut off? What would they decide? What would they have to do to just handle it and make this existing business work? So again, let's say your business needs sales. What offer can you confidently deliver right now? Who could you put it in front of? Could you email your list and find sales today? What do you need to complete inside of the offer to feel really good about selling it? You can work with those questions. You can also recognize maybe when you wandered away from your core thing, maybe you were going to invite people into a new program and your gut is just telling you this isn't right. Or maybe you're looking at software. Maybe you're considering another rebrand. Those are moments to pause. That can be busy work that is making you feel productive. All of these Claude and ChatGPT strategy sessions feel really good. Our brain loves the dopamine of having the ideas, of having chat tell us what to do. But something is happening to a lot of entrepreneurs where we're not finishing things the way that we used to. We're not shipping them off the way that we need to be able to see progress in our business. So again, back to the original question, if you just had to make it work, What are you going to decide? What are you going to handle this week? And stop thinking about all the other options. Stop giving yourself an out. Stop procrastinating your way into taking action because this is a really common way that self-sabotage comes up. You're staying busy. You feel like you're being productive. You're getting all the dopamine of having the idea sessions, but sometimes there's a real concern underneath that's keeping you from doing the thing. It's keeping you from allowing yourself to complete it and feel that discomfort of allowing yourself to fail. If you think there's a possibility you might fail, that's not safe. Our brains and our bodies want to keep us safe. So we have to figure out full send, how do you just handle it? And what does handling any of your challenges look like? Because it's not that you're not trying, right? It's not that you're not taking action. It's not that you're not busy and working. But if I think about the 2 years that I was considering how I was going to lose weight, it's not that I wasn't trying, but I was counting macros. I had hired a coach. I was Googling things all the time. I was thinking about it constantly. And what I recognized in my own experience is how much room that search for another possibility was taking up. People talk about food noise. The noise of all of the options is infinitely worse. So think about this. Where am I still collecting options? Where am I looking at what other people are doing? What information do I actually need? And what decision am I ready to make? You're allowed to make an informed decision with the information that you have today. And something that I talk about with a lot of my clients is, well, 2 things. A, minimum viable product. How do you get something out and done and into the world as fast as you can, even if you feel like it's not perfect? And the second thing is path of least resistance. So if you're resisting something, what is the path of least resistance that you can move forward with today? So minimum viable product, path of least resistance. I feel like I say this on every single coaching call that I host because you can decide in advance what you're gonna get done this week. You can promise yourself you're gonna ship it. You can put a date on the calendar and you can work your way towards that date if you need to complete a project and then you ship it. on that date, no matter what. Our brains love a deadline, and our businesses know that when we have too many options, we'll fill the time with something else. Yesterday, I was supposed to record this podcast. I was supposed to go for a run, and for some reason, I ended up repotting my plants because I gave myself an out. I only had a limited amount of time. I noticed one of my plants was looking a little droopy. I took a picture with ChatGPT, and it was like, oh, your plant has root rot. You need to repot it as soon as possible. So guess what? I didn't record the podcast yesterday, even though it was on my to-do list. I didn't go for a run because I lost track of time. And then in true ADHD form, it was time to go pick up my kids from school. And I gave myself an out. I gave myself excuses and I am committing to doing that less. I'm committing to making a plan, just handling it, sticking to the plan, doing what I know someone else would do if they came into my business and they saw the path for how to make it successful. Successful. I want to enjoy running my business, and I want to have the discipline to enjoy running my business the way that I need to. I care what my calendar looks like, right? And I know all of these things, and I can still make a decision. I can still handle it. I can still spend time with my family. I can still grow a multi-million dollar business. And I can do all of those things because I am committing to doing the things that, even if they're scary, I'm committing to growing my consistency muscles. I'm committing to becoming the person who is comfortable owning the room, who's comfortable on Zoom with thousands of people, who loves posting reels that are seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I'm becoming the person who is comfortable in those scenarios, even though previously I have not handled my fear of reaching millions of strangers, right? I've had things happen that created Some amount of a response in my body. Maybe it's PTSD, maybe it's trauma with a little t. You get your ads made fun of so many times, people call you a scammer so many times, you get team members that screw you over so many times, people copy you. All this shit happens, right? It happens over and over again. And at some point, at least maybe for me, this is part of turning 40, but at some point you have to put a little bit of a middle finger up and say, you know what, screw it, I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm going to do the things that need to be done. I'm just going to handle it, and I'm going to put one step in front of the other, or one foot in front of the other. I'm going to start tiny, and I'm going to make it happen. So if this is any, you know, there's some amount of a rant, but I hope it gave you something to think about and something that is going to help you catch yourself if you're spinning, if you feel like you're ruminating, if you're not taking action and you're If you feel yourself coming back to the same type of thoughts, the same patterns of thoughts, revisiting the same offer that you've been thinking about for two years and you haven't launched it, those are the things to start chasing. Those are the things that you should go after. So again, leaving you with this question one more time: If you had to make it work with what you have right now, if you had to start where you are, you had to make your business successful, what would you do? I want you to write down that answer, and I want you to look at it as if someone else handed you that question about their own thing, and then I. Want you to tell them what to do, because we're really good at giving advice to other people, right? But we're kind of bad at doing it for ourselves or thinking, you know, not overthinking it. So that's the question I'm going to leave you with. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it really helped you. And I might have a vulnerability hangover after this. So if you message me about it, I'm probably going to feel super awkward, but I guess I kind of want you to anyway. So I want to know if this resonated, if this is something that you've experienced in your own life, in your business, And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Share this with somebody that you think needs to hear it. Leave me a review on the podcast if you're here and you're enjoying this podcast, or if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to leave me a comment down below. Tell me what you think. Tell me where you're at in the journey, what this is going to help you accomplish. I'd love to hear any of those questions answered inside of the comments, and I will see you on the next episode of the Start Tiny Show.