Feeling like a fake...

Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Coming to you live on The Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, that's still a thing. And Instagram over here on my phone. So if I'm switching eye contact, please. Excuse me. I'm not. I'm not ignoring you, I promise. Just a little housekeeping. Before we get into tonight's topic, I've been noticing. Hello. Hi, Jacob. I've been noticing that not all of the comments are coming through from all of the platforms. Instagram's on its own over here. But if you're commenting from Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter. Never had a watch from Twitter then. And if. If you comment and I don't respond, it's not that I hate you. It's not that I'm ignoring you unless you said something like incredibly rude. It's just that I didn't see it. Okay, Deal. All right, so tonight I want to talk about something that can hold people back big time in their business. And this is imposter syndrome. And I know, like we. We say imposter syndrome German, it's kind of like a made up, kind of mental health issue, right? But here's the thing. It can seriously cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, depending on how potentially successful your business will be. All right? Imposter syndrome can slow you down. Hi, David. Welcome. Can slow you down for years, if not decades. All right? So if you have imposter syndrome, I want you to know you're not alone, okay? And also, the fact that you have imposter syndrome means you're not a sociopath. So congratulations. But besides that, if you have imposter syndrome, I want you to, to think really deeply tonight, because I'm going to be going through the three types of imposter syndrome that I see most commonly in my clients and in people who are considering working with me. I'm going to name three of the most popular, most popular imposter syndromes. And just because I'm like, naming them doesn't mean you can't have more than one of them. Right? You could do the Pokemon thing. Got them. Get them all. But as I'm talking through them, I want you really to think about where this might have come from. And also, what are you doing? What action are you taking to overcome it? And here's the ugly truth about getting over fears and dealing with insecurities is you just have to do it. Like, if you're afraid of doing something, you're not going to get over being afraid of it just by thinking about it a lot, okay? That's probably going to make you more afraid of it, but you just have to go and do it. Like, I was terrified when I was a kid. I was terrified of riding my bike, okay? Like riding my bike without, without the safety wheels, right? Without the, the training wheels. I just like, I couldn't, I couldn't picture myself balancing. It just, it seemed really dangerous. I was very risk averse as a child with my body. Like, I didn't want to like go downhill fast. I didn't want to do things where I might potentially get hurt. I didn't like climbing trees and I was really upset when people tried to take my training wheels off of my bike, right? But here's the thing. I was never going to learn how to balance on the bike as a two wheeler without the training wheels off, right? And so really what you have to do is you just have to do it and you have to do it again and you have to fall and you have to get up and you have to like brush your knees off and like, you know, the like scream scraped hands. You get on a bike, you just have to get through that, right? You have to show yourself that you're not gonna die, right? Because that's essentially what is happening in your brain, right? When you have imposter syndrome, when you're afraid of putting yourself out there for whatever reason, it's your brain saying, mayday, mayday. This seems way too dangerous. I think this could end our life. We like living. Let's not do this, okay? Because this seems too dangerous, right? And sure, like our brains have not evolved as quickly as our worlds have, okay? Over the millennia, our brains are still operating as if we are nomadic creatures who are trying not to get eaten by tigers and lions and bears. Oh my. In the woods. And they're really concerned about staying in the tribe because if you get kicked out, then you're going to starve to death and get eaten by a lion and all this stuff. Like so, you know, scared. Like emails with scary subject lines. That feels like a predator in your room, right? Posting to social media for the first time. So scary. That's something that, like, if you say the wrong thing, you could get kicked out of the tribe. Like you don't want to do that. But here's the thing. These things are not that scary. Once you do them a couple dozen times, your brain is going to realize, oh my gosh, we've been afraid of this thing for so long. And it's actually nothing to be afraid of. Like, we can. We can do this all the time and survive. When I started going live, I went through this. I went live on Facebook to start because I. I figured that would be, like, my training wheels, right? I was like, oh, yeah, I'll go live to people I know. No, that's worse. Guys I went on dates with once, like, came through and. And it was intimidating, and I got really, really nervous. But my brain learned really quickly that I can go live and I can screw up and I can stutter and I can stammer and I can sweat a little and I can misuse words. And no one, nothing, no one was going to hate me. I wasn't going to die. I was going to be fine. Hi, Sarah Louise. Welcome. Okay, so we're talking about the three types of imposter syndrome that I see most often in my clients. The first one is money based. Okay? So 99.7% of my clients need to work on their relationship with money. Okay? As a society, we do not develop healthy relationships with money. Basically, for the most part, we are born and we just start absorbing however our parents deal with money, right? However they feel about money, what they believe about money, we just absorb it all. We're sponges even before we can talk, right? There's any trauma happening around money. We also absorb that one of your parents uses money to control the other one. Like, for instance, that gets absorbed as well. Your parents learned their relationship with money from their parents in a very similar fashion. Who learned it from their parents in a similar fashion. Learned from their parents in a similar fashion. So you're getting my point here, that our relationship with money is completely outdated, right? I don't know about your ancestors, but my ancestors were dealing with some famine a few centuries back, right? A few generations back, they were not thinking, okay, how can I have a really abundant, beautiful relationship with money where it shows up for me whenever I want it? No, no. They were thinking, like, fuck, we have to make this one potato stretch to feed the whole family for this one week. No, that's not the basis for a healthy relationship with money. Right? So when you are starting a business and you're terrified, and it's based. It's based around money, it usually shows up like, oh, my God, I can't believe people charge for this. I can't imagine people paying me, like, I don't deserve it. It's a deserving and a worthiness kind of thing, right? And where this shows up is in Your pricing, right? So oftentimes when clients come to work with me, they're. They have some clients, but they're massively undercharging, right? And they've done the math, or, I mean, they've. They've kind of, like, thought through it. They might have not have done the math per se, but they've thought through, okay, if I'm charging $100 an hour and I need to make $100,000 in a year, okay? So I need to do 20 hours a week of paid work, so that's $2,000 a week. That'll land them just over $100,000 a year. You know, if you're a coach and you're doing 20 hours a week, that means you're carrying 40 clients. That's a lot. That's a lot of clients. That's a lot of sales calls. That's a lot of marketing. That's a lot of ads that you'd have to spend. Not enough. It's not enough. I worked with this client. I call him Ten Pack Jackie. He works with some people who have sensitive jobs, so he likes his name not used. But when he started working with me, he was selling 10 packs of coaching, right? He's a men's coach, and he's selling 10 packs of coaching for a thousand bucks each, which was great for him. He was getting clients. He was getting, like, one or two clients consistently every single month. But that's only one or $2,000 every month, right? And what was happening, because he was doing these 10 packs, the clients would come in with a problem, like, a really, like, hot, hot problem that they, like, couldn't be with. Like, they needed to fix it right now. And they get through a few sessions, and they work through it. They feel so much better. And they'd be like, great, okay, so I have seven sessions left. I'm going to save these for the next crisis, right? Which. If you know anything about coaching, that's not how it works. Like, if you want to prevent crises from happening, you have to do the work on the front end, right? You have to consistently do that. So we changed his pricing. We went. We worked through a lot of money mindset stuff, and ultimately he started signing clients for $18,000, right? You deserve to make enough money to live. And not just live. Not just survive, but live the life you want to live, right? You deserve to thrive. Right? And it's not anything in your personality that makes you worthy of this. You. You are just worthy of this. You know, I. The one time I'VE pissed people off. I'm, you know, I'm really lucky. I don't get a lot of people who are upset with what I have to say. I guess I don't, I don't say controversial things that often, but the one time someone showed up in my comments and was pissed, was so angry with me, was when I dared to make a post saying that everyone deserves to make a good living from doing work that they love. He could not be with this. For him, like, making money was all about suffering. It was all about suffering, is all about, like putting yourself through something. It was about sacrifice. It was about doing whatever you can to like pay the bills and put food on the table. And that's a choice. You can absolutely live your life that way. But if you want a successful business, you can't, you can't work with money that way. Right? So the thing that I like to remind my clients of is that there are people who are far less qualified than you, who have less training, who have less experience doing this, and they're charging more than you and they're more successful than you and they have happy clients. They do, they do. Because their clients like they're helping with stuff that their clients don't know anything about. So the clients don't know any better. Right. Imagine if those clients were to work with you, right? You are far more qualified, okay? You've had more training, you have more experience. Imagine the difference that you could make if you were to work with your clients and in whatever capacity that you're trained. Right? Oh, I'm jumping ahead into one another one. See, they are, they overlap incredibly. They overlap incredibly. You know, if you need to justify what you're charging, I want you to look at it that way, okay? Your clients, even if you're just starting, are getting an amazing service from you. All right? Have trust in that. And if you need any help with your pricing, this is one of the things that I train my clients on in the build your own business group group program. Okay. It's a six month incubator. If you have any questions on that, then go to my bio and book a generate income strategy call and we can go over all of this. All right? So that is the money based one. Like who am I to charge that? If you have this going on and you can find a way to release it on your own, Release it, okay? You deserve to make money. It's not bad to ask for money, right? And yeah, you're going to charge a lot for what you do, right? Because you're not going to be working 40 hours a week and be paid for every single hour. No, you're running a business now. You have to save time for marketing and for sales and for doing accounting and then cleaning up the accounting when you realize you did the math wrong. And then hiring an accountant when you realize, oh, God, this is too hard. I'm really going to screw this up and I'm going to end up in jail. Like, you're going to have to deal with a lot of different things, okay? So if you're afraid of asking for the money, then, you know, reach out for help. Reach out for help. To me, there's the trauma of money. That's an amazing training program you can go through if you feel like there's a lot of heavy stuff going on here. You know, there are just so many avenues, but, like, do not let this stop you from starting a business and being massively successful. All right? Now, the second one I've already kind of dipped into. It is like the. You doubt your expertise, right? You think, okay, well, you know, I'm not the penultimate expert on this, so who am I to advise anyone on anything to do with this, right? I would ask you. Like, there are cardiac surgeons, like, heart surgeons out there, all right? There can only be one best, and there can only be one second second best, right? The rest of them, could you imagine if. Because they're not the best. They get. They, like, you know, suit up and they got the gloves on. They've all, like, washed up, whatever. However they do it, they've scrubbed. That's the word. And they go into the operating room, they're like, I can't do it. Not the best. I just can't do it. And you're on the table and you really need whatever, like, heart surgery they're supposed to be doing, right? It's the same thing when you doubt your expertise because you're not the best. All right? I have this all the time, all right? I had it recently when or, you know, in the past year when I was approached by two separate people. Hi, Taylor, Welcome. Who wanted to partner with me to build businesses, right? To, like, do second and third businesses with me. So. And it scared the crap out of me. I'm like, oh, my God, like, what if I don't bring it up to the table? What if I'm not? What if I've accidentally tricked them into thinking that I'm super qualified when I'm actually not? Mind you, one of these was a former client and someone else the Other one was a dear friend who knew I was an expert, right? When you're really an expert in something, you're too close to it, right? You. You kind of take for granted that you have this knowledge that not everyone has. When I started my business, I got up and running really fast. I got clients really quickly, and I had all the systems set up and, like, I had consistent income coming in from my business. And all my coaching friends were like, wait a minute, how did you do that? Like, how are you. How are you making money? How are you getting clients? Um, how. How do you take that phone call where you're supposed to just give. Give value? How do you take that phone call and actually get them to sign up? Right? Because in coaching school, we got trained to just give away free sessions and then hope and pray that people would want to work with us. Um, I took for granted my years of working in sales, right? I just assumed that, like, oh, cool. Like, I had this experience. I know how to do this. It just didn't seem like an added skill that I had gained. It just felt like something that you do, um, mind you, wasn't a natural at sales, right? I had gone through training in every single job to do sales in the way that they prescribe for that company, right? I took for granted that not everyone had that experience, right? So I was very comfortable going into my sales calls and signing up clients. My colleagues, the people that I went to coach, training with, they were not. They had never worked in sales, right? They didn't understand how to take that conversation and enroll someone into their program, right? They also didn't know how to create a program. Like, there's a whole lot of stuff that we take for granted that we know. So if you're in the beginning stages of starting a business and you're still ideating, this is. I don't typically work with people who are still in the idea stage, but where you want to look is, you know, what have you done in the past that you really enjoyed, right? What could you train others on? I mean, it could be. It could be, honestly knitting. I taught knitting for a while. I didn't make a lot of money from it. You don't make a lot of money teaching knitting, but, you know, that's something that you can do. I might have been able to make more money if I had thought to do, like, a YouTube channel. Why is this sticking to me? I had thought to do, like, a YouTube channel and get affiliates and all that stuff, but I didn't. And I've moved on. Now it's not happening. You know, you could be a dance instructor. You could. You could teach people a language. You could help them become consultants. I have a client who's doing that right now. You could train on sales. If you've done sales, there are so many things that you have to offer that you are taking for granted right now, right? So I want you to do a whole assessment of what. What are you skilled at? What are your. What do you have expertise in? Or if you aren't comfortable claiming the expertise, what have you done a couple. What do you have a couple years of experience in? Right? That's going to be really valuable, right? And remember, there are more qualified people out there providing the service that you do for more money, being more successful, all right? If you do not step up to the plate, then all of your potential clients are going to be working with someone who is not as good as you, right? You do not have to be the best. You don't have to be the best salesperson in the world to be a sales trainer, right? You don't have to be the best coach to help transform lives. You don't have to be the best lawyer to get your clients a good result, right? You just have to be you. You have to, like, be there and you have to be involved, right? That. That is going to make a difference. All right? You are enough of an expert is what I'm saying. All right? And finally, the identity crisis. Now, this is kind of like the general, like, everything in the kitchen sink kind of thing. It's like, who am I to put myself out there? Who am I to, like, show up on social media? Who am I to speak at events? Who am I to, like, like, create a website and say that I can provide this thing. Whenever I hear this, whenever I hear this, like, who am I to actually do that? What becomes very clear to me very quickly is that this person in front of me, while they want to create a business and they want to provide this service and they want to help their clients, they want to do all this stuff. Like, deep down, they aren't sold on the idea that they can actually do it. Like, they do not, at their core believe that they can do this, right? Because someone who believes they can do this, it may. It may scare the crap out of them to post on. On Instagram for the first time, all right? It may be really gut wrenching to ask for money for your service, right? If. But if you believe that you can have this successful future where you have this full Time business and you're making good money and you're impact so many lives with whatever service you're providing. If you believe in that, that is usually enough to get you to, like, do baby steps and, like, inch your way forward, right? But whenever I hear, who the hell am I to do this? You know, I, like, I just don't see it. I hear a complete lack and belief in themselves, right? And it happens. It happens. You know, my clients, I said this to my clients in my. In my build your own business group program last week. It was last week, one of them was having a real crisis of like, oh, my God, like, it's just not working. Like, ah. And like, he just really needed a little boost and he's like, I'm starting to lose faith that this is going to work. And what I always tell my clients in these scenarios is, like, you. Your job is not to believe in yourself all the time, right? Believe in yourself when you can, right? Believe in yourself, like, when you have the energy for it. But here's the thing. Hiring a coach, it's my job to believe in you, right? I'm like, I want you to imagine I'm like Little Red Riding Hood and I have a little basket on my arm. And in this basket, I have all the belief in all of my clients. So they do not need to believe in themselves. I believe in them, right? And so when they doubt themselves, they get to think, okay, well, there's someone out there, at least one person at least, who believes that I can do this, right? The second thing I like to tell them is that I do not take clients who I don't think will be massively successful. I've been wrong a couple times. There have been a few clients who. A few clients who have, like, come through and signed up for my stuff and never done any work, you know? You know, this happens, right? Drives me nuts. Like, I just. I see the potential in them and they just don't do the work and it never happens for them, right? Those have been my bad bets. But I. Overall, I do not accept clients who I don't think will be massively successful. For one, it would hurt my testimonials. Like, I. I'm running a business here. Two people, all right? If I'm signing clients who I don't think can be successful, like, oh, my God, could you imagine the testimonial at the end? There won't be one. It'll just be like this really sad statement of like, I signed up and I had an idea and it Crashed and burned and it didn't work. No, that's not what I want for anyone who spends money with me, right. I want the good case study. I want to be able to brag that I helped you get to your multiple six figure business. Right. It's in my best interest to be honest with my clients about, you know, is, is their business a good idea? You know, does it have legs? Is there a market for it? You know, but overall, like, I have a really good track record of seeing people and being able to guess like how successful they will be. Right? But here's the thing. You do have to believe in yourself a little bit, right? You do have to be able to access like that imagined future where you're actually happy and running this business. Oh, oh, the connectivity issue on Instagram. If you cannot access that belief system, if you can't picture you being successful at this, you're not going to have something drawn you forward enough to get you to do those baby steps, right? And you're not going to have a, like a massively successful business overnight. You're not. I know, it's always funny. I had this fear too when I started my coaching business as, um, but I hear it a lot. It's like, oh my God, well, what if I get too many clients? What if, what if I start and like I get too many clients and then I can't handle them all and they're unhappy with me and all this stuff, Babes, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And you know what, like, you're probably also not going to go viral and you're probably going to have a really slow buildup of social media following. Your newsletter is not going to like, you know, pop off and get gazillions of people, right? Just not going to happen. Right? It's going to be a slow build, okay? 99.999% of the time, right? And here's what I want you to also know. Like, a big following on social media does not mean you're going to be successful, right? There are people who have hundreds of thousands of followers and they don't make any money in their business, right? Because they made it all about getting followers, not about actually serving clients. There are people who go viral. They go viral on social media, but they go viral for the wrong reason. They go viral for something that's just like, funny, maybe it's a video of their dog, but you know, if you're a lawyer and you're trying to get clients like A video of your dog is not going to translate into clients. Right. But like the fear of these things is, oh my God. Well, it's going to take off and I'm not going to be able to control it. It's going to take off and, and I'm like, I'm going to lose any potential, like agency to, to determine how I want to spend my time. Right. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. I wish I could say that, yes, that is a risk of working with me. You are going to end up with too many clients. Then we're going to have to come up with a strategy for you to dial back and call the crowd and you, you know, cut the weak ones and all this stuff. No, I wish. I mean, that would be such a great service. Be such a great service. Maybe someday I will crack that code. But anyway, those are the three, those are the three main flavors of imposter syndrome that I see so often with my clients. It's like, like not believing that you deserve the money, not believing that you're actually an expert in what you're an expert at, which we know, we know about that. And not actually believing in yourself, like, who are you to dare to put yourself out there like that? Letting your imposter syndrome run the game is a form of self hate. It is one of the cruelest things that you can do to yourself in your lifetime. And I'm being dead serious right now. It is one of the things that will cause you the up there a great deal of pain when you get old and you lose energy and you don't have the capacity to do it anymore. One of the biggest regrets that people have on their deathbed is that they didn't live their life the way they wanted. They didn't take a chance on something that they really wanted. And if you let imposter syndrome get in the way of you going after your dreams, the only thing you're doing to yourself is guaranteeing yourself that pain at the end of your life. And I'm not okay with that. And I don't want you to be okay with that either. Okay, go for it. Go do what you want to do. You're going to screw it up. That's the only guarantee you have. You're going to screw it up and you're going to learn along the way. And like I've said, if you have any questions, if you feel like you are struggling to get started, you don't know. You know, you just don't Know what? You don't know. You don't even know what questions to ask. Know that. That's super normal. You've never started a business before. Okay, if you have imposter syndrome about starting this, like, you know the first. Would you go to France and, like, expect yourself to be able to speak fl. Fluent French just like that? No, of course not. You'd have to spend time studying. You'd have to learn, you have to get instruction. You need to be corrected. You need to screw it up. You need to have some embarrassing moments, which, as someone who went to France and learned French, yeah, they happen. It's the same with starting a business, right? So if you're expecting yourself to magically know how to do all of this without any trial and error and without any guidance, honey, you like, we need to wake you up. That's not how it works, okay? You're not going to learn French overnight by going to France, and you're not going to know how to start a business. Just in your bones, you know? That's just not how it goes, right? So if you need any support, if you're ready to take this step, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy. Call with me. If you're watching this on Instagram, which hello, Jessica and hello, Matt. If you're watching this on Instagram, then go my bio. If you are on the other platforms, then you can either go to my bio where there's a link, or you can DM me and I will send you a link to book that. But bottom line, people, do not let this time pass you by. There's never going to be a good time to start a business if you want to start a business, right? What's that saying? Like, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, right? The next best time is today, right? What I don't want for you is in 30, 40, 50 years, you're laying in bed, your body's broken, you know, you have your family around you, and all you can think about is the shit that you didn't do because you were too afraid. It's not okay, right? Love yourself enough to take a chance on yourself. All right, with that, I'm going to leave you to your evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Have a great night, everyone. And as. As you know, this is day. Gosh, losing count. Day four of me going live 30 days in a row. I am taking weekends off because I work life balance. All right, so we're doing 30 days, Monday through Friday. If you have any topics that you'd like me to go live on. If you like just really want to know my take on something, then please DM me. I'm always looking for ideas on what I should be talking about in these lives. Anyway, have a great night everyone. I will see you all tomorrow. And thank you so much for joining.