3 things that sabotage your business dreams!

Hey, new listener. Thanks so much for checking us out. And there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. In this episode, we're going to talk about how you might be attracting your wrong clients and the three things that hold you back from ultimate success. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. This is not gonna be your typical episode of the Weeniecast where I'm gonna tell you about all the inspiring ways that you can start your business. In this episode, I really wanna break down who should absolutely not, under any circumstances, ever start a business. I've come to this realization of these three types of people through a couple different ways. So, number one, I find when I talk about certain topics, I draw these people in and I say these people. I don't mean, like in a derogatory sense. I mean people who really struggle with these things. And when I talk about these three topics, they come into my world, they want to book sales calls, and there's genuinely no way for me or any other business coach to help them build their businesses. And I'll explain why. So this is something that I've really had to learn to shift in my marketing, to break away from talking about specific topics because it attracts people like this, and it's really heartbreaking to talk to folks who really want to change their life and do not have the fundamental beliefs or situations to be able to do it. Recently with a lot of my clients, they. They've been going through very similar situations where they're attracting people to book sales calls, and they're not their ideal clients. The way I've started framing it up for them is, what is the pain that you're speaking to? Because there are people out there who absolutely need your help. They're so desperately in the hole with whatever it is that you help with. Yes, they need you, but they need you too much. They need you so much that they will never actually acknowledge that they need help. They will never actually change how they fundamentally believe what's possible for them. And those people can never be helped unless something real serious happens that shifts things for them. I want to be very clear as I'm talking through this, there are absolutely circumstances in your life that you have no control over. Things that have happened to you that have made life harder. And just the fact that those things have happened does not mean that these things may be true for you. That what makes them a true impediment to you ever building a multiple six figure business as an ADHD business owner is the fact that you believe them. You believe that it is just a part of a greater narrative of how your life always goes. And I do also want to shout out that I am going to be talking about trauma. I'm not going to be getting into any details of trauma. Okay? So talking about it in more of a theoretical way. If you're experiencing any difficulty with ptsd, with dealing with traumatic events, please reach out for help. There is so much help available to you. If you go into the Google machine and look up, you know, emergency mental health services in your area, please do it. If you're really, truly struggling with this stuff. I do also want to name just because I've experienced trauma in my life does not mean I'm at all qualified to help you with trauma. Okay. This is something that I've really veered away from talking about in my social media because every single time I open up about this, I get people in my DMs wanting help from me to help them through their trauma. And I am not qualified and I'm also not in a position of my own healing journey to be able to support anyone else. So please do not bring your trauma to my doorstep. I love you and I support you and I want you to heal. And also, I cannot be the healer. There are three things that I have discovered in the last six and a half years of me running my business that tell me that someone is not going to be able to build a multiple six figure business. The first of these I'm going to be very clear, as I say it is trauma. And I'm not saying that if you've ever experienced trauma in your life that you're going to be unable to be successful. That is so far from the truth. I also want to acknowledge that if you have adhd, you've lived in our world, which, I mean, unless you're an alien listening to this, everyone has. Life has been inherently traumatic for you. The amount of gaslighting that we experience as people with adhd just growing up in a world that's designed for neurotypical brains telling us that what do you mean this should be easy. Oh, we'll just try harder. Oh, just give it more time. Just do this, just do that. That is inherently traumatizing. Now it could Be big T. It could be little T, depending on who you are and the circumstances of you hearing that. So I'm not saying, like, if you've ever experienced trauma in your life that you're not going to be successful. I will say that if you have unhealed trauma that you are not actually working on resolving, it will be incredibly hard for you to start a business, to grow that business and to keep it running successfully and sustainably. Like I said, I'm not going to go into any details, but I've experienced some trauma in my life. And as someone who is a big advocate of mental health and removing the stigma of going for help, I sometimes open up about my trials. With the process that I've gone through in overcoming ptsd, I learned fairly quickly to stop sharing about it because when I share about that, like I said in the beginning of this, people come to me and they want me to help them with their ptsd. Now, these posts that I share about my own experience, these are not sales posts. These aren't posts being like, well, I had ptsd, so you should buy for me. Absolutely not. These are genuinely just personal shares that I put on LinkedIn. And I love using this as an example of how you tell your own story. And what you incorporate into your personal brand will actually impact the types of clients you attract and the types of people who book sales calls with you. Because even though I don't use my PTSD trauma story in any of my marketing for my business, anytime I bring it up, that's what I attract. So as a business owner who is promoting your good work in the world, you know, if you notice that sometimes you talk about a certain thing and it has nothing to do with your business really, and you start attracting clients who aren't the right fit, my question for you is, what is the pain that you're speaking to? Because as business owners, if we're speaking to the wrong pain pain, we're not going to attract our ideal clients. If you're a realtor and you want to sell people vacation homes, you don't talk about the struggle of finding enough money for rent every month. Those people cannot be your ideal clients. They may think, oh, maybe this person has a way for me to figure out how to buy a home so I don't have to worry about rent. I mean, that. That would be so nice if you could, but in the current real estate market right now, it's highly unlikely the pain you would want to talk to if you're trying to attract clients who want to buy a vacation home is perhaps like how to manage that home when you're not there, how to make sure it's safe and secure. How do you put in an offer so you're more likely to get picked, especially if the previous owner lived there full time. And they may want to pass this house on to someone who has a family and wants to raise their family there. Those are the pains you want to speak to and say at some point you want to share about your own personal story and about how in your early 20s, you could barely scratch together enough money to make rent. Know that, yes, you're speaking truth, you are sharing vulnerably about your own life. And also know that you're speaking to a pain that is not your ideal clients. And it will attract people who are not your ideal clients. So back to the point. Why is unresolved trauma something that will prevent you from starting a business and doing so successfully? Well, I hate to break it to you, but starting a business will exacerbate and compound any traumatic experience you've ever had. It will bring up any little nugget of shadow work that you haven't delved into. Every fear that you have about yourself, every self doubt, it will blow up, magnify, and make it that much harder to heal from. There's an interview that Anne Hathaway did, I think, on the Ellen DeGeneres show years and years ago about how she had to take a step back and do some personal work. And she explains that before she did that work, anytime she'd see an article about herself where someone said anything that was even remotely disparaging of her because she didn't actually like herself, she'd believe them. They'd say this terrible thing about her and she'd just say, cool. They're right. Absolutely. Here's more evidence that I suck squirrel.

I gotten out of the habit of Googling myself because that's just a bad idea to ever do that. My friends and I had an idea for Funny or Die and we wanted to, like, do something on celebrity pregnancy rumors, so we just googled pregnancy rumors and then the story came up. What was the story? The story, the title of it, was why does Everybody hate Anne Hathaway? And so how did you deal with all that? Well, I listened at first. I couldn't help it, you know, and you try to shut it off. And then I realized why. Why I couldn't was I hadn't learned to love myself yet. I hadn't gotten there. And if you don't love yourself. When someone else says horrible things to you, a part of you is always going to believe them.

Squirrel. Squirrel. When she realized that this was the thing that was really making her ability to live her own life hard, and took that step back and really processed all the things that she hadn't processed before and learned to like and really care about herself and to see herself for all the good things that she had. Once she came back out into the world and people started saying bad things about her, she didn't believe them anymore. One of the biggest fears new business owners have is putting themselves out there, emailing your friends and family and telling them that you're starting a business, opening yourself up to criticism and doubt from people who love you and know you so deeply, posting to social media and, and sharing that you can help people with something, and opening yourself up to the high school bully who called you fat and made fun of you having a pimple on your nose once, that person saying, how dare you? What do you think you're doing? There's no way you could do this, or worse, just laughing about it behind your back to other people who made your life miserable in high school. When someone has unresolved trauma and they haven't even really acknowledged all the things in that trauma, what happens is they become so terrified of any rejection because that unresolved trauma has really created this rat's nest of terrible beliefs that they have about themselves. And if they were to go out there and put their business out there and offer their services and ask to put flyers up in someone else's window or get on a sales call and present their services in here, no, that rejection will activate every single negative, toxic belief in that rat's nest of trauma. Most people are terrified of hearing the word no, but if you have unresolved trauma, that no actually becomes another trauma on top of all the other trauma. And I understand the appeal of having something really traumatic and awful happening to you and thinking, okay, I don't want this anymore. I'm going to go out and I'm going to change my life and I'm going to completely change things up and I'm going to ditch this job and I'm going to start my own business and I'm going to start being the narrator of my own story, and I'm 100% percent for it. And also, the narrator can't be the narrator if they're still fighting the demons in the cave. If that narrator is actually the protagonist who is still working through their own, they're not going to have the ability to start writing their own story. The risk that goes along with starting a business as well is something that will absolutely even if you are 100% healthy, which I've never met, a person who's 100% healthy, even if you're 100% healthy, will activate your survival instincts, because this is how you make money. And you need money to be able to buy things that help your meat suit stay alive, like food and shelter and water. If you're already in survival mode because you have unresolved trauma, is that going to be helpful for you? Absolutely not. So the first thing that will absolutely prevent your success in starting a business is if you have trauma that you are not actively working to heal, the business will not go well. It will not help your healing journey. It will actually make it immeasurably worse. And I say this as someone who started her business while on a healing journey. Key point here. I had trauma and I was actively working to heal it as I started my business. Just because you have trauma doesn't mean that you can't start the business. But you do have to be working on making it better or else starting a business is going to be one of the most unhealthy decisions that you've ever made. Well, maybe not if you. Maybe you've made some other really unhealthy decisions, but it'll be up there. The next belief that will prevent you from starting a successful business and having it run sustainably is, ooh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. The hyperfocus community is the inner sanctum of the Weeniecast. It's a club that's designed just for you, where you'll learn how to leverage your ADHD to grow your business. In the hyperfocused community. We are realistic about the challenges that face ADHD business owners, and we don't believe in one size fits all solutions. We believe in creating strategies that fit you. On day one of signing up, you'll experience that deep sigh of relief that comes from walking into a room full of people like you, who you do not need to mask your quirks in front of in order to fit in. Because they get you in the membership every single month, you'll get two group calls. One is an ADHD group coaching call and the other is a networking call with fellow ADHD business owners. We will also have coworking sessions designed for the ADHD mind. Monday, get organized. Sprint calls to keep you out of overwhelm access to weekly Brave BizLab calls where I will give you practical advice to grow your business. We'll also have the occasional expert training which are absolutely ADHD vetted and of course, community support by folks like you. And those who pay for the year up front get a surprise bonus. Visit weenicast.com hyperfocused and stop procrastinating the things that will grow your business. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or click the link in the episode Description the next belief that will prevent you from starting a successful business and having it run sustainably is is believing that you have a $2,000 a month life. I used to say this a lot, and actually now as I'm talking through this, I'm like, why don't I say this more? It's so much harder to start a business that only makes $50,000 a year than it is to start a business that makes $150,000 a year. One of the things that I hear sometimes on sales calls with potential clients that makes my heart break, just crackle into a bunch of little pieces and then fall to the floor and is when they say, well, I just need two or three thousand dollars a month to survive. And when I ask them, how much are you making in your job right now, as you're plotting out your escape and wanting to break into working for yourself? And they tell me they're making two or three thousand dollars a month, it tells me something that will be a massive obstacle to them being successful. And that's this that they don't actually believe that they deserve more. They don't actually believe that more is possible. And this is a very natural result of being a child who had adhd, who is gaslit and made to think that you were lazy and you weren't smart and all these other things were wrong with you that no matter how hard you try, it's never good enough. So by the time you become an adult and you enter the workforce, if you're not good enough at your best, who the fuck are you to ask for more than $15 an hour? How dare you. Once a person who gets to that point where they're making $15 an hour and they finally feel safe in their career, they finally feel like, oh my God, okay, well I'm good enough doing this. Two things can happen. One is, okay, well this is it for me. This is it. This is just what I have to accept. I'm always going to be at this level. It's Never gonna change for me. I am not good enough to go to the next level or okay, cool. The other system didn't work for me. This system, something about it works for me. What about it works for me? I want more. And the fact that I want more, I know it's possible to have more. For some people who get that first job out of college or after high school, who have this belief set in their mind that they're worth only a little bit because they don't think much of themselves, because they don't think they're smart enough or hardworking enough or whatever the garbage is. Some of those people will just accept that. Others will take it as a fire under their butts to get to work, to find the thing that will make the life that they've always dreamed of possible. If you're the first person, no business coach can help you. Because no matter how many strategies are handed to you, no matter how many how to lessons you invest in, you're never actually going to believe that you can build a six figure business. You're always going to be trying to build a business that will maintain that two to $3,000 a month because that's all you believe is possible for you. That's all you believe that you deserve. Based on everything that you've gone through in your life. It doesn't actually matter how much money you're making when you start your business. And of course I want to acknowledge the privilege that comes along with having money. Right. For someone who is in their mid-30s to mid-40s, who has built their career up and has made a consistent 150,000 to $250,000 a year, and who wants to start a business, of course they have financial backing that will allow them to do that more easily. They also have the necessity of building that business up to 150,000 to $250,000 a year because that's what they need to make to be able to maintain their current lifestyle. I don't want you to walk away from this episode being like, well, I just have to believe that I'm worth it, apparently. And that's going to be the thing that's going to make it. No, that' not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if you're only making two or three thousand dollars a month and if there's a belief system that tells you that that is the max that you're worth before you go and start a business, I want you to prove yourself the wrong. I want you to prove to Yourself that you can go out and you can get a $5,000 a month job, and that through that job, you can get a $2,000 a month raise and you can switch companies and jump up to $10,000 a month. I want you to show yourself that it's not about how deserving you are as a human being. You deserve everything that you want as a human being. It's about what you believe you can actually have. Because when you believe you can have something. Yeah. You're far more likely that you're going to do the steps to make it real. If you do not believe that you could ever run a marathon, there's no way you're going to start training for a marathon. There's no way in hell. What a waste of time. It takes so much effort to train for a marathon. Why would you put all that effort and time and money for all the equipment and the training. Why would you put all that into it if you didn't believe you could actually do it? There's this story about Henry Ford, who is absolutely a problematic historical character. So Henry Ford made cars, if you didn't know that. And at one point in his career, he turned to his engineering team and he said, okay, well, we have a V4. And he's like, I want a V8. And there's a frame involved. And I guess it's really hard to fit whatever those V's were in the frame. And the engineering team was like, it's. It's not possible. Absolutely not. You know, Mr. Ford, go and drink some more alcohol. Forget about this. Not going to happen. And he's like, yeah, no, it'll happen. And I'm gonna pay you guys until you make it happen. And they tried and they tried and they tried and then tried and they failed a gazillion times. And then they did it. They made a V8, which is apparently very impressive. If you're a car person and you wanna write a review and tell me why it's impressive, please do. It has something to do with the car being more powerful. That sounds right. If you have more of something, it could be more powerful, right? Is it like lifting weights? Like, I'm more powerful, the more weight I can lift? Maybe it has something to do with that. Anyway, the point being is sometimes the belief doesn't actually need to be your own. And sometimes you don't actually have to actively believe something's possible for you. Those engineers absolutely could have looked at Henry Ford and been like, you are on drugs. No, like, go take your Bath salt somewhere else. We quit. You're asking something completely unreasonable of us. It's never going to happen. And they could have walked up the door and started working for another car company. They could have done something else. There was a part of them, deep down, they thought, well, this guy's a nut job. But maybe he's right. Maybe we can do that. It's worth a shot. The point of this is that you don't necessarily have to be full throttle believing that this is possible for you, but you need to have just enough belief that you're not going to quit. Then you're not going to be like, you are a psychopath, no way, and walk out the door. You have to have that little voice in your head, you know what? Maybe we do deserve to make another $5,000 a month. Maybe we actually do deserve to be able to take our family on a really nice vacation. Maybe I could charge more than $75 an hour. Just maybe. But if there's no maybe voice, if there's only you're. You're crazy. That's not possible for me. Then you need to stick with whatever you're doing, and you need to work on your money mindset, and you need to leave starting a business to other people or to a later date in your own timeline, because right now, it's just not going to work for you if you don't just have that whispering voice that it might maybe be possible. And I don't think I have to explain to you why that one is so particularly heartbreaking. And I share this to be that extra kick in the balls for you to realize that you believing you don't deserve much doesn't just hurt you. It hurts everyone around you. It hurts the people that you love the most. Because the thing that you're communicating to them is that because you don't deserve much, the fact that you're tolerating them in your life means that they don't mean much, that they don't equate to much. So if you're not going to shift this belief for yourself, will you please do it for them? Otherwise, you're being a selfish, and I don't want you listening to my podcast anymore. The final belief that I'm going to talk about today, that will mean that starting a business is never going to work out for you. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first. Squirrel, Squirrel, Squirrel, Squirrel. If you're enjoying this episode, would you do me a small favor? Will you please leave me a review? Don't worry, it's super easy to do and it only takes a few minutes. You can leave your comments in Apple podcasts, Castbox, Spotify, and Podchaser. Just go to weeniecast.com reviews and scroll till you find the chosen app. That's weeniecast.com forward/reviews. The final belief that I'm going to talk about today that will mean that starting a business is never going to work out for you is if you believe the world is against you. If every single negative thing, big or small, that happens to you throughout your life feeds into this narrative of, oh, well, here we go again, look at that person over there. Things work out for them, but for some reason, the universe just doesn't like me. This is just another knot in the string of I'm sorry, that's a weird metaphor. David's gonna get a bingo card X for that, where Katie gets lost in her own metaphors. Actually, it was a sports metaphor that he said. This is just a normal metaphor that I got lost in that I started down and it didn't make sense. So really, this is a new low for me. Also, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, one of our listeners, a former client and a current business partner of Min, David Fryman, who's an excellent, excellent business attorney by the way, he decided to make my podcast into a game of bingo and he created bingo cards. So if you want to join the bingo game, then please go to weeniecast.com bingo and download your card today. Anyway, back to the world being against you. When you believe the world is against you, you're right. You're absolutely right. The world's against you. God hates you. Whatever greater power you believe in is working against you at every turn. Every person in your life wants to see you fail, and they rejoice in every little time you do. You're right. And you will always be right. But you know what? It's also true is if you think the universe is for you, you're also right if you think that God or universal consciousness or other deities or beings are all conspiring for your success, you're right if you believe that you're surrounded by people who celebrate each and every tiny win you ever experience, you're right. When you try to start a business thinking that the world is against you, how are you going to deal with failure? Each failure, instead of being just a little obstacle that you're going to have to figure out how to either jump over Work around or break down is just going to be a massive, huge wall that you can't get over because it's another piece of evidence that the world is against you. And if the world's against you, even if you do get past this one little obstacle, there's going to be another and another and another and another, because the world doesn't want to see you succeed. But when you believe that the world actually does want to see you succeed and you overcome that obstacle, instead of looking for other obstacles, you'll actually start looking for other opportunities. If you believe that the universe is for you, you will actually start seeing obstacles as opportunities, as chances to grow and expand and see things that you wouldn't have seen before if you hadn't come up against this. Part of this is a perspective thing. If you have the perspective that things are going to work out because everything's conspiring to help you get there, you're going to start identifying all the opportunities to make that real. If you don't believe in that, then you're going to start looking for all the reasons why it's not going to work. In addition to that, it's also an inner circle thing. If you're the kind of person who's always boohooing about life and how hard things are and how sad it is to be you and how nothing ever works out and all that stuff, what kind of people do you think you're attracting to yourself? Like, who is actually going to put up with that? Probably other people who are going to back you up. Probably other people who aren't experiencing a whole lot of success for themselves. So if you start experiencing success against all odds, they will get upset about it. They won't want it for you, because the fact that you can have success means that they can have success. And if there's even a question that they could have success and they're not having it, it might reflect back that maybe the problem's them and it's not the world. Versus what kinds of people does the person attract when they believe the world is out to help them? If you believe the world is against you, you're right. If you believe the world is for you, you're also right. But the latter is where you're going to be successful in business. So if I've described you in any of these things, please never book a call with me. I can't help you. It's going to break my heart, but I won't be able to help you. Please go and do the work. To transform these beliefs around yourself because no one will be able to help you if you can't. First help yourself. And as you think through your marketing for your business, get really conscious about the pain that you speak to Is it the pain of the ideal client who can actually be successful with you? Or is it the pain of the person who absolutely needs someone like you, but who will never be able to be helped by you because they're just not ready for it? And tell me, did you get bingo in this episode? What's that saying? Birds of a feather flock together. So what kind of bird are you being? And I'm so happy we randomly ended up on this topic. This was not planned because this gives me an excuse to talk about the Shoebill stork whose Latin name is the Balanceps Rex. They are large wading birds with massive beaks that they use to decapitate their prey. They are also known as whale bills, whale headed storks, and shoe billed storks. Apparently these birds are really unpleasant. They aren't afraid of humans. They don't really have any natural prey. But they also don't like each other. So they're going extinct just because they're not having sex. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hey, quick question. Did you follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app yet? It takes just a few seconds. I personally love Apple podcasts, but you can find us anywhere, even on YouTube. So as the kids say, smash that button and make sure you never miss an episode.