#5: Managing Self Doubt

Oh my goodness. I literally fell to my knees. My arms went up in the air. I said, woo, you did it. The whole store clapped. Oh, my goodness. We went off to celebrate.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky mountains, running a multi 7 fig, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Do you ever wish that you could just delete the doubt? I certainly do. You know, everyone experiences doubt. Doubt is something that comes up in our industry a lot. If you are a creative and you are trying to create income, you're a creative entrepreneur. And that means that you are going to experience doubt. Because really, being a creative entrepreneur, our success is directly related to how good of an idea we have. No pressure, right? Of course we're going to doubt ourselves, we're going to doubt our ability, we're going to doubt our expertise, we're going to doubt every little part of it. But does that mean that we stop? No. In fact, I think that doubt and fear have a lot in common. I mean, what are we so afraid of, right? And I think oftentimes we try to wait in order to do something until we're not afraid, but that actually may never come. And so the success is on the other side of doing it. Afraid. You just do it. Afraid. You feel the doubt. It is there, you recognize it and you do it anyways. That is pushing through to success. Also related to doubt is confidence. In fact, I would say that the exact opposite of doubt might be confidence. And so in order to delete the doubt, what you must do is increase your confidence. And do you know how to do that? You increase your confidence by telling yourself that you're going to do something and then do it. Self worth and confidence comes from following through on something you said that you would do. It actually silences our inner critic. I mean, think about how many times we promise ourselves that we're going to do something and we don't, that's when our confidence really takes a hit. But then think about the times that you have promised yourself that you would do something. You really do eat right and work out for 30 days in a row, or you really do work on a sketch in your sketchbook every day for two months in a row. Right. That feels so confident. So in order to illustrate this, I have to tell you a story about my daughter, who's six years old. Her name is Ollie. Well, she's seven now, but she was six when this story took place just a few months ago. So Ollie has been begging me to get her ears pierced for years. And honestly, I'm not sure what the right time is. Is she too young? Should I have done it earlier or older? Wait till she's older. I'm not sure. But her seventh birthday is coming up. And so we actually had a little mother daughter overnight trip planned to Asheville, North Carolina. And I thought, okay, well, what if we get her ears pierced on this trip and they'll be all healed up by the time her birthday comes, which was about 6, and I could buy her earrings for her birthday again. Remember, she's been begging me for years. And so I asked her if that's something that she wanted to do. And she was so excited. And so we wake up in the morning and we eat some breakfast and I had gotten her a little bit of numbing cream to put on her ears so that it would make her a little bit more confident in going in. And of course we head to Claire's in the mall, because where else do you go to get your ears pierced? And I haven't been in a mall since I was probably a teenager, so it was just a whole trip for me. But so we head into the mall and we start walking towards Claire's. And my goodness, she's never seen Claire's. So you can imagine all of the sparkly jewelry and her eyes just getting bigger and bigger. She's so excited. And we had the sweetest tech that helped us that day. So she comes over and we pick out the earrings and we sit down to get ready. But there was one major problem that I hadn't thought about. Can you guess what it is? There was only one tech working that day, which meant that she had to do one ear at a time. And so she got the first one done and she was nervous, but it only took about five minutes. She sat down, got it all cleaned up, and right away got it pierced. And then the Fear settled in. She was so afraid of getting the second one done that it spiraled us into two and a half hours of me coaching her. Okay, so just imagine us and Claire's and this one tech. So of course everyone was relying on her to check them out as well. And you know, because of sanitization, she needed to have gloves on. And so every time we were taking forever, she'd have to take her gloves off and go check someone out and then come back and sanitize up and try again. And let me just tell you that there are people who saw us in Claire's that day that are still talking about us. They will never forget us. We had three people come up to Ollie and encourage her. One of them was like a 17 year old who had just gotten his nose pierced. And two of them were two little girls that saw how upset Ollie was and came to encourage her. I was coaching her. I was talking to her about having 10 seconds of courage and just getting on the other side and how much, how excited she would be, you know, when we left. But at one point the tech is like, well, why don't we put her in your lap? This episode is sponsored by my all new free mini class called Start Simple. In Surface Design, you will never forget the moment you feel your first pattern design in your very own hands. From concept to design to finished product, the process is nothing short of magical. Surface pattern design is the craft of creating artwork for things like fabric, gift wrap, wallpaper, and so much more. It has brought me so much joy over the last decade and I want you to experience the same thing. Because getting started with a new skill can feel a little overwhelming. 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It's B, O N N I E

C h r I s t-I n e.com forward/startSimple. I'll meet you there. I cannot wait to see what you make in class. But I'm like, yes, let's. She'll sit in my lap. That will make her feel better. But no, she would tighten up. And she was so, so scared. It actually, it was. It was really hard. It was a hard day. And so at one point, the tech kind of winked at me. And she said, just kind of go in to give her a hug, but hold her tight, and I'll just swoop in and do her ear like we do with little babies. And I'm like, okay, I got it. And so go in to, like, tighten my grip, and that makes it worse. And so I'm like, okay. First of all, I just want everyone in the store to know that we already had one ear done. It wasn't like we could just walk out of there. I'm like, if we leave with one earring in, we are Are either gonna take it out and let it heal up, or she's gonna be one earring Ollie, you know, forever, and we're gonna have to go through all of this again. So I said, okay, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna go for a walk in the mall. We're gonna, you know, eat something and get our blood sugar going again, and then we'll come back when we're ready. The tech was like, okay, so we go for a walk, and we get some food, and I give her a Coke, which we never do. But I just wanted to, like, spike her blood sugar and just talked about her options. We talked about leaving that day and what, you know, what would we do if we left? Would we take it out or would we keep it and try to come back? Or would we go back and confidently have this done? She already knew what it would feel like. She knew she would be okay. And I really, really talked her through having the courage in order to do it. And so she decides that she's ready. And we walk back in, and the tech is so sweet. She sits Ollie up. Ollie says, I'm ready. And what she does is pretend. Not pretend, because she told Ollie what she was doing, but she would just place the piercing gun on her ear and then take it off and put it on and take it off and put it on and take it off. And she did this like maybe 50 times. I was like, you should just go ahead and you know, surprise her and get it pierced. Because I'm still so afraid that I don't know what's going to happen. But she doesn' because she's building trust with Ollie. And she said, I'm not going to pierce it until you tell me you're ready. And Ollie finally said that she was ready. She went in and she pierced it. Oh my goodness. I literally fell to my knees. My arms went up in the air. I said, woo, you did it. The whole store clapped. Oh my goodness. We went off to celebrate. But here's the part of the story that I want you to listen to. We before we left, we, she had to go to the restroom. So we went to the bathroom. It bathroom. There were just two stalls in it. And so it was just me and her. And I let her go in by herself. And if you have small kids like you know, you can see their little feet dangling underneath the stall door and it just kind of something about it breaks your heart in the sweetest way ever. And I hear her under her breath say, I did it. That's all she said, I did it. And I said, yes, you did, Ollie. And she said, you heard me? And I said, yeah, I heard you. And you did do it. You did it. You built up the courage and the confidence and you did it. And look at you now. But here's the really cool thing. About two months later, after her birthday. So she's seven now and she got all new earrings for her birthday party and she got an organizer for them and she's so incredibly happy that she did this. We were on a little trip and we did a ropes course. So this was the first time that I had ever done a ropes course and I'm not afraid of heights but I had not actually mentally prepared for this. You are all harnessed in and you are very high and you're walking on a cable through obstacles. And so it's very likely that you slip and you know your harness will catch you but it's still very nerve wracking. And her arms are, you know, her wingspan is not quite wide enough to reach in between two of the wooden like obstacles. And you know, so David and I are there helping her but she's in tears because she wants to do it though. You know, of course we're not making her do this, but she's, she is a risk taker and she wants to do it so bad, but she's nervous and she looks at me and she says, I know that I can do this because I got my ears pierced. And I said, you're right. You know that you can. And so that brings me to really the point of all of this, of how to delete our doubt. To tell ourselves that we're going to do something and then do it builds our confidence. Difficult things actually increase our capacity to do more difficult things. Meaning one trial expands our ability to handle more and more trials. Honestly, your confidence is related to how positive you feel about yourself as well. And how positive you feel about yourself also has to do with how successful you are. You have to know yourself and you have to watch yourself talk. Do you talk negatively to yourself or do you talk positively to yourself? Are you confident in your ability to achieve or are you not? So if you're working on building confidence, if you're working on positive self talk. If you're working on self worth, what I would love for you to do is just choose five things. Just choose five things. Promise yourself that you're going to do them and then do them. Prove to yourself that you can, and your confidence, your self worth, will grow, and it will continue to grow because this becomes a habit that you can perform over and over and over again. So, in the words of Ms. Ollie Doe, I did it and you can too. Thank you so much for listening to my story today. I enjoyed this time and I can't wait to have you back. On the next episode of the professional creat.