What To Do When You Feel Like You're Failing

What do I get to learn next? And there will be different levels as you continue to grow in your business. If you're just getting started, it's going to be purely tactic. Welcome to the Decision Maker podcast with me, your host, Ali Bjerg. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Decision Maker show. I am so excited to be here today. And what we're going to talk about today is a topic that is so common for so many entrepreneurs. I've coached thousands of entrepreneurs by this point, and I've been asked this question so many times that I thought it was a great topic for us to talk about today. And the question that I've been asked so frequently is what am I missing? What am I doing wrong? Why do I feel like it's so much easier for everyone else than it is for me? Why do I feel like I'm failing when everyone else around me seems so successful? So I had a student asked me this on a coaching call yesterday, and my first response to her was like, whoa, hold up. Because that's not necessarily the case. Oftentimes people will portray the highlight reel right. Like, we know how that looks on Instagram, where people post only the most beautiful photos. They're only sharing the best aspects of themselves and of their lives. We do that in business, too, especially when we enter into masterminds where we want to look smart and our egos are taking over for us. We want to make sure we're putting our best foot forward. So we're not necessarily sharing if we had a bad month or if a launch flopped or something's going wrong or we had to fire somebody or we feel like we need to fire somebody and we can't. We don't share those things necessarily. We only talk about the good stuff. So putting that into context for, for her was the first thing that I wanted to do, just to make sure that she understood that. Sometimes it's just what you're looking at. It's not necessarily the whole story. It's just the tip of the iceberg. And other people are probably struggling too. So when you put that into context, that's the first reframe that you can start thinking about is like, okay, it's hard for everybody. Entrepreneurship is a struggle for everybody. And all of us experience moments of trying things that don't work or testing a new topic and failing. We fail all the time as entrepreneurs. So the sooner we can own that and embrace that and share that with each other other, the better off we'll be. So that was the first thing, the second thing that we talked about was really digging into where that feeling of failure is coming from and if there was something specific that spiked that feeling for her. So when we started talking through it, and this is why I recommend having a coach or a mentor or somebody who can have these discussions with you, because we can't see our own blind spots. We can't do surgery on ourselves. Right? Like, we need someone who is an expert to be able to come in and help guide us through some of these self discovery processes so we even know what's underlying and what's below the surface. We have to peel back all of the layers of the onion and oftentimes we're trying to keep ourselves safe and hiding from the real answers when that's what we truly need to uncover. So what we ended up talking through was, well, what specific events have made you feel like you were a failure? And it was hearing about someone else's successful launch, hearing about how easy somebody was able to upgrade people from a webinar or, you know, it was different digital marketing experiences and how it seemed like other people were having success faster when she had been trying different types of offers and trying different launches and different products. And her thing hasn't quite stuck yet. So when we thought about it, it was all having to do with being able to feel comfortable with the sales process. Right? Like at the end of the day, that is the skill that she can work on uncovering or really digging into. Any time that I've felt that block, like I felt like if I could just overcome something, I would be able to move further in my business or if I could just get over this fear, I would be able to do the next things. I'm able to generally recognize when I put myself in a fence and I need to bust through that fence in all sorts of different ways inside of my business. One time back in, you know, I think it's been like five, six years ago, I couldn't do video calls. Like, I absolutely refused to, to get on a video call with anybody. I just wouldn't do it. I absolutely wouldn't get on Skype. This is when I was a service provider. I was building funnels for people, I was running ads for people. And I straight up would not get on a call because I felt uncomfortable. It was awkward. I'm awkward. Like, I felt like it would be weird. But what I ended up doing is really seeing that as the block that I needed to overcome. Like if I could just do this thing, I would be able to get more clients, I would be able to make more money, I would be able to get better clients and get to the next step of this business that I was building. So I found a way to rip the band aid off for myself in a safe way so that I could start doing the thing and not feel so uncomfortable. And I booked 30 coffee chats with people I had met in Facebook groups over a two week period. And every single coffee chat I wanted to cancel. Every time I wanted to say, you know what? Something came up like, I don't think I can do a coffee chat today. But I didn't. I showed up for every single one of those coffee chats and I made great friends, I built relationships with people, I made an amazing referral network that actually ended up supporting my business for the next two years. If I hadn't done that, I would have never gotten over my fear of camera. I wouldn't be here today, and I would never have built all of those relationships. So the question that I positioned to her was like, okay, so if we're realizing that confidence around sales, like making the sale around, making the offer around, showing up on sales calls and telling people what you have and closing the sale, if that is the block and it's showing up for you as a worthiness thing or like, you know, I don't know if I'm good enough or I'm missing something. If you can identify a single skill that you could focus on and that you could develop in order to be able to get to that next level, all you need is to figure out what it is. So my whole framework inside of my business and probably my entire life is vision, decision and action. So if I have a vision, it usually requires some sort of decision to get myself into action. So for me, it's like finding a mentor or you know, say, say the goal is to get in the best shape of my life. That's the vision. The decision is, do I hire a trainer, do I buy a program? And then getting myself in an action usually relies or is dependent on what type of decision that I've made. As long as I have those three things in place, I'm able to work through towards that goal, whatever that goal might be. So when you think about it for your own business, it's like, what is the vision that you have for this client? It's being able to put on a webinar, book sales calls, and close clients into her coaching program. The block that she's up against is feeling super confident about sales. So what we decided to go through was talking about different skills. She could start building around making sales. It could be feeling really confident about the product that she's selling at the end of her webinar and the stack of everything that's included inside of that offer and being really excited to share it with people and feeling really excited about the movement that she's creating for people. That's the first step for her. The second step is getting on an actual discovery call. And what we ended up uncovering is that I had given her a script. I gave her one of my sales scripts to help train her into being able to make sales and. But it felt really unnatural for her. She didn't like the script. It didn't flow for her. So we need to come up with a better way for her to feel natural in sales. So just learning the basics of a sales conversation, you know, you build rapport, you build understanding. You. You ask the right questions so that you can understand where the client's coming from, what they need. You repeat those answers back to the client and say, like, oh, so it sounds like you're struggling with X. You never make up words for them. You always use their own words. And then at the end, it's an invitation to work together. It's not a pitch. It's not a sleazy sale. It's just having that conversation about how you could support them moving forward. Right? So when you can just put it into another framework to learn or another skill that you can develop. I think a lot of us, we think we're naturally not good at something, but what we don't realize is it's just about developing the skill. It's putting in the hours it's putting in, you know, finding the right support to be able to make it happen. And then. And practicing. Once upon a time, like, probably again, four or five years ago, I was in a mastermind, and I was not the confident woman you see in front of you now. I was really uncomfortable. I couldn't even say what it was that I was selling. And I stood in front of the room and I looked at the floor, and I mumbled about what I had to sell or what I was even offering. And there was a woman in the mastermind who was a money coach, and she cornered me. After my hot seat of standing up in front of the room and asking my question of what I needed help with in my business, she cornered me in the back of the room and she was like, allie, tell me how much your offer is. And I couldn't answer her. Question. I was so uncomfortable to be like cornered like that. I couldn't even tell her how much I was selling something for. I was just so uncomfortable. And she said, okay, your homework today is to go home and look in the mirror and look at yourself in the mirror and say your price and repeat your price. So that when you are on a sales call with someone, you can say it without even thinking about it. It's like it's just a natural tendency to tell them exactly what it is for sale. What you have to tell them exactly how much it is, what you're selling. So I did it. I went home and I practiced. And the next sales call that I got on, I was able to confidently tell them what my actual price was instead of lying about it. I used to, you know, tell people it was less than what it actually was. I get nervous right at the end of the sales call and I'd stop. I'd like change my price mid sales call and drop it drastically. But I didn't that time actually situation said what it was. So the moral of the story is that if you feel like you're up against something, whether I mean it, sales is just the easiest example because it's top of mind right now. But there have been repeated cycles inside of my business, and as I've grown to $5 million in revenue and beyond, I keep coming up against things that I don't know how to do and skills that I haven't acquired yet. But I just think of it as like, okay, that's my next challenge. That's my next thing that I get to learn how to do. Instead of feeling like a failure or feeling like I'm not cut out or I'm not worthy, I turned it into almost a game to think about, okay, what do I get to learn next? And there will be different levels.