Give yourself a f*cking break

Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach, coming to you this Wednesday night to tell you to give yourself a break. This message. I just wanted to be very upfront that I'm a business owner and I'm a human and I'm an entrepreneur, and I go through this stuff, too. It's really, really easy to go into a downward spiral when it comes to your business, when it comes to your life. One little thing feels out of whack and it all feels like it's going to be crumbling. And let me just tell you, that's not true. Like 99.9 of the time. It's not true that one little thing that feels out of whack, it can be fixed. It's all fine. Tonight I want to talk about the three things that ultimately causes problem, and it is your mindset, your beliefs, and the systems you actually have set up. Okay? So I want to start with mindset, and for those of you who are tuning in, thank you. Hello, I am streaming this to the Facebooks, to LinkedIn, to YouTube, and if you have any questions while I'm going through this, please pop them in the chat. Also, if you have anything to add here, please pop that in the chat as well. And for those of you who are popping stuff in the chat and oh, hi, Yvette. Good to see you. Hello. If you're popping stuff in the chat and I'm not calling you out because I love this to be interactive, know that it's just a technology. Sometimes the technology fails us. Unfortunately, that's part of what we're talking about tonight, too. So it's going to be really fitting if that does happen. Okay. So let's start. Start tonight with mindset. Okay. Because if your mindset is in the gutter, it is so impossibly hard to plan and execute that plan for your business that will lead to growth. Okay. When your mindset is in the gutter, generally you are looking for problems and dangers and, like, slippery slopes. And so all you can see are things that are going to go wrong and what happens when you're focusing on things that are going to go wrong. That's kind of where I am. I'm growing my business. Yes, you've got. Oh, my gosh. Well, I'm so glad this worked out. So let's talk about what happens when you're only scanning for things to go wrong. A you miss opportunities left, right, and center. Okay. Because you're not looking for them and you're not open to them. You're only looking for things that are wrong. It's like if you were to walk into the forest and just look for crocodiles, okay, you wouldn't see any of the pretty birds because you're so focused on the ground and looking for crocodiles. I mean, and granted it is important if you're in crocodile infested lands, it's important to keep an eye out for those motherfuckers. They are vicious. But if you're, if you're only looking for that and not also looking for opportunities, looking for beauty, I mean, you're just, you are the one that is making that journey rougher on yourself. Okay? Not saying that there aren't things that can go wrong in our business that we have to keep an eye out for, but our businesses are not running around crocodiles, thank God. Unless you run a crocodile, like, tour agency. Then, you know, then I don't know what to tell you, but you actually do need to look for crocodiles. So when you're problem focused and you're like always in this doomsday kind of mentality, what happens is you completely lose connection with your creativity. You lose that ability to rebound, to recover, to say, oh, cool. Like this problem I'm experiencing right now, this thing that I'm having a hard time with, this is actually really useful for my clients. I can turn this into something, or this tells me something about a need on the marketplace. Like, I can jump into this and I can do that. When you're only focused on problems for yourself and for your business, you're not seeing that. Okay? So that's just one way in which this shows up. Okay? Another way your mindset can go in the gutter is, you know, it's either what happens in life or you're doing bad self care. I don't know. I've always, I've talked a few times about the saboteur. It's that voice of doubt that pipes up and tells you you're doing everything wrong. This sucks. You know, that person hates you. Just basically gives you the reel of everything that could go wrong. You know, it's like the crocodile in the forest. Now that saboteur, that voice of doubt has a open invitation when you are tired, when you are hungry, and when you are either sick or injured. Okay? When you are not at your best, that voice of doubt has free reign to come in and start spewing their garbage. Okay? So parts of this do tie into self care. You need to give yourself enough sleep, you need to feed yourself healthy food and you can't forget meals. I know I'm the queen of this, but you can't do that to yourself because it's an open invitation for that saboteur. And this is actually chemical. This is, this is our biology is when we go into starvation mode, we come, we up the adrenaline, we up the cortisol, the stress hormones that get introduced into our system. It's chemical that we start thinking about everything that could go wrong. So you have to take good care of yourself. Now. We can't really help getting sick or injured. Those are usually things that are out of our control unless we're just treating our body like garbage and putting ourselves in positions where we're going to get sick and injured. But those are also scenarios where you're going to have that open invitation to the voice of doubt. So, Yvette, I'm looking to incorporate, but want to include my current company as a dba. I have a service business, notary insurance to be added soon. Amazing that you've grown so much since we've talked last. This is so exciting. And yes, I mean, doing new things is another minefield of, of places where, you know, those voices of doubt can come in and tell you all the things that you're screwing up and doing it wrong. So just keep in mind as you're also, as you're anything new in your business that is also, you're gonna doubt yourself and just be ready for it and have compassion for it. Okay, Now I want to get back to being sick and tired and injured and not well nourished because we're going to the holiday season people, and this is prime time for people to neglect their own needs in favor of over committing themselves. And we're going to be gathering and there's still a little thing called the pandemic going on. So getting sick is going to be a thing. And even if it's not, Covid. Okay, let's be real. Our immune systems, we haven't been around each other that much. Our immune systems haven't been practicing their job for a little while. So like colds and flus, all that stuff is going to go around. I'm currently fighting a sinus infection, so I'm. I'm here and this is my world right now. And so here's. Here's what I want you to do. When your mindset is in the gutter and you can't seem to get out of it and you're just struggling and you just can't help but look and see everything that is wrong Is I want you to. I want you to give yourself a panic slash pity party, okay? And I'm serious here. I want you to give yourself a panic slash pity party. And you can dress it up. You can put on like your special like panic slash pity clothes. You can pull out a pint of ice cream. You. You can pour yourself a glass of really sad wine, usually two buck chuck, something really disgusting. Anyway, you're going to throw yourself a little panic pity party. And what this looks like is if you have other people to do the pity party with you, you are just going to tell them everything that's going wrong for five minutes. Everything that's going wrong, how you feel about it. I hate this person. This system sucks. Blah, blah, blah. You're just going to let it out knowing that you're venting. You're not actually, you know, declaring your hatred of anything Next. If you're not around people, if you're doing this solo, you're just gonna write a list. You're gonna write a list of everything that is pissing you off, is making you unhappy, all the things. And you're gonna set the timer for five minutes. And then the five minutes, you're just going to take a deep breath and let it out and let it be over and start looking to list for things to be grateful for. Because gratitude is the key to our creativity. Being grateful for the opportunities that we've been given, even if they're shitty, is going to open up our imagination to what we can create in that moment. Excuse me, I said I had the sinus infection and the cough is starting. So anyway, okay, so that's mindset. Let's go into beliefs before I completely lose it with a coughing fit. Okay? So sometimes the way in which you downward spiral is because you actually slip back into old belief systems. Okay? So I know I talk about this a lot, but your belief systems around money. Now let's get clear here. If you've done work on your money story, that is amazing. I salute you. I'm so proud of you. Go you. Good job. And also remember that shit is baked in from when you're like two months old, okay? Because we start absorbing energy about money and worth and love and, and that kind of energy from when we have awareness in our household. And guess what? Our family was always talking about money, even if they weren't actually talking about money, okay? So it's super, super easy to backslide into old beliefs about money, about how much you're worth, how much you deserve to charge, how much People would be willing to pay. God, I might have to end this early. But anyway, your belief systems around money, they require constant work. If you want to have a positive belief system around money, it requires you to be tuned into that work all the time. Okay? It's not like. So here's the thing. This is my dream, okay? So I. I hope and pray and, like, I'm so excited for, like, vampires to actually exist, because here's my plan. When they come out of the coffin and they tell everyone that they're real, what I'm going to do is I'm going to, like, sign up for a personal trainer every day for, like, three or four months. I'm going to get my hair done exactly the way I want it. I'm going to do all the things to make sure I'm in the best shape of my life, and then I'm going to go get turned. Because then your body just stays the same for the rest of your life, for the rest of eternity, because you're going to live forever, okay? You don't have to do any of this nonsense, like, keep going to the gym to maintain that. Like, that's. I'll be a vampire and it won't matter. I'll just stay the same. So when we talk about. When we talk about doing work in your money, it's kind of like the same as going to the gym when you're just a human. When you're just a human, you have to keep going to the gym to maintain that level of fitness, okay? When you're doing work in your money, it's the same thing. It's. It's almost like those muscles that you build around believing in your worth and knowing what you can charge and feeling confident asking for that, you know, if you're not practicing that, if you're not working on it all the time, those muscles are going to get flabby and they're not going to work anymore. They're not going to be able to, like, heft as much. Carol, eat some garlic. Katie, does garlic help with the sinus infection? Oh, my gosh. I will take you up on that if that is actually a thing. I do have some. Okay, cool. I just won't want to be around anyone for, like, the next 24 hours anyway. So your belief systems around money, you need to keep working on them. And by the way, just so you know, if you have a garbage relationship with money, you're not sure how to work on them. And you're also growing a business. My BYOB program That I'm. I've launched this month. It starts in January. It has a whole section on this. Because when you build a business trying to not do the money work, what happens is you basically poison your business. You, you make sure that the foundation is rotting while you're building the building, and that's garbage. We don't want that, Carol. Not for. Oh, for the vampires. For your cough. Okay, thanks, Carol. I had no idea. I'll try that. No, yeah, exactly. If the vampires are real, I don't want to have any garlic in my system because I don't want to scare them away. Anyway, back to the point. Another belief system that can get us when we're not expecting it, is we can backslide into a belief system that we have to prove ourselves. Okay? I mean, you can have the most killer business year, you can land the highest paying clients you've ever had, you can have the best testimonials, but then you run into someone who just activates you in the wrong way, who has an energy that might remind you of like that mean uncle that you had that always, you know, is talking bad about you or whatever. And all of a sudden you're back in this way, in this belief system that I have to prove myself. I have to show that I know what I'm doing. I have to, like, you know, give all these examples that I'm actually an expert in the thing. And the trick here is you just have to catch yourself in doing that. Notice the reaction. Notice that you're getting in that defensive stance and trying to prove yourself. And realize you don't have to. You absolutely don't have to. The only person out there in the world who thinks that you need to justify that you're an expert in what you do is you. No one else is asking that question unless they're a troll. We don't work with trolls. Right. Another belief system that it's really easy to backslide into because we get this from our families, is that we often believe that to have success, you have to struggle really hard for it. You have to struggle really hard. And if you don't struggle hard for it, then whatever success or money or, you know, good things that happen out of that, you don't actually believe that it's true. Okay? So the money you make when you didn't struggle hard enough for, you're actually not going to keep. It's going to just go right back out into the universe and you're not going to have anything to do with it. Compliments, testimonials, from clients who've loved working with you. If you don't believe that you worked hard enough to get that, to have that impact, it's actually not going to land with you. You're not going to be able to utilize that in your business. And this goes into the third section here. If you're truly committed to the struggle in your business, then what you're actually going to do is you're going to make sure that your systems, which is the third and final section of this suck. You're going to make sure that they absolutely blow. You are going to, instead of finding ways to automate, you are going to do things the hard way, the manual way, which means it's going to slow you down from putting yourself out there more, from generating more business. Because to be able to serve the clients that you have, it's just, you're just going to have to down slow, slog through it and nothing is going to be set up in a way that serves you. So you're constantly going to have to go and rejigger and, and find new ways to, to make sure you checked all the, all the boxes for this one client. And it's just going to be exhausting. And part of this is you let yourself fall into that category of well, I just don't know how to automate, I don't know how to set this up in a way that is going to be easier for me. And let me tell you, that is the most weenie ass answer I've ever heard in my life. And also, I have so much compassion for it because I've been there, okay? It's so easy to say, oh, well, I just don't know how to make this easier for myself. So I'm just gonna continue with it being difficult. Guys, we live in a world of seven point something billion humans, okay? And we have the Internet and we have social media where we get to ask questions of pretty much anyone. If you're committed to saying, oh, I don't know, it's just really hard for me. I don't know what the fuck world you're living on because you have access to so many humans, myself included, who have answers to make it easier for you. All it takes is for you to let go of this mindset that you can figure it out on your own or you have to struggle for it, or this fear of asking for help. You just have to let go of all that garbage and you have to ask for help. Yvette, Mine is the opposite. The early stages seemed Effortless now feels like it requires more important effort. So, Evette, new level, new double. Okay, so so many of my clients run into this as they're scaling. Like, they had a really easy time in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, like, what they tried before no longer works and they're having to try. Like, it's like they're building a whole new business. So just, you know, that's super normal. And. And also there are people out there like myself who help, you know, business owners like you take it to that next level. Thank you. And yes, your next comment. It might be your systems. Yeah, usually it is. Especially when you're scaling to that next level. The systems that you have in the beginning generally don't work with you as you scale up. I'm running into this problem myself, which is the inspiration for this whole thing. So, Carol, need your insight. Our website's still a thing in 2022. Yes, they are. But here's the thing about your website is your website is never going to be like the place that people land on. They're like, oh, my God, I have to give this person money. Your website is a place for people to go and verify that you are who you say you are. The sad truth about websites is that I could probably. And actually, I could probably. I know I could do this. I could set up a website that says that I'm a neurosurgeon and that I do brain surgery and that if you want your brain operated on, I'm the person for you. And there are a certain amount of people out there who, if they found that website, they would think, oh, cool, Katie McManus is a brain surgeon. She could operate on my brain if I ever need someone to cut my brain open. Now, I'm not a brain surgeon. I would never put up that website. But people who talk to you, who come across you, who get referred to you, who find you on social media, they will click through to see your website just to make sure that, like, you are consistent across all of the interwebs so, you know, they can vet if you are the person for them to work with. It is a trust thing more so than anything else. The other thing is that if you are wanting people to discover you, you need to get your website SEO optimized and you need a blog for that. And if you're curious about that, I have some really talented copywriter friends who know SEO who I could connect you with. But, yes, still recommend websites. But don't think that you're going to put Up a website and then all of a sudden get clients. Doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Now, something I didn't talk about is perfectionism, okay? Because perfectionism happens across the board in all of these sections, okay? It happens in your mindset, it happens in your, in your belief system, and it also happens in your systems. How it shows up in your mindset is that you hold off on doing things or you don't publish them because you have this mindset that if it's not perfect, it can't go out there in the world. It just can't go out there in the world. It has to be perfect before it's done. And so what happens, you never put yourself out there, okay, when it comes to your belief, like perfectionism in your belief system actually speaks to, to like your actual belief of your own worthiness. So if that is a thing that you're finding over and over and over again that you have to be perfect to deserves people, deserve people's attention, their business, anything good to happen to you, something for you to dig in there and also for your systems. I'm sorry to tell you this, but systems are going to break. You can create the most perfect systems and they're still gonna fucking break there. There's no such thing as a system that doesn't have something go wrong with it at some point. And so. And also you have to find the system that is gonna work well enough for you right now in the stage of your business that you're in, okay? If you're a small mom and pop shop, you do not need a huge tool like Salesforce to run your your sales. You probably need something smaller. You probably also need something that more affordable, okay? Likewise if your steps before that, if you're still figuring out your client, you don't need to invest in $150 a month CRM or like online course management system, okay? Those are not necessary unless you see your growth happening over the next six months and it's going to hit that point and you have a strategy and a plan, okay? The main point I want to leave you with here is that if you are tired, if you are sick, if you are injured, if you are hungry, if you have shitty beliefs that you're overcoming and if your systems are imperfect. I need you to give yourself a break. I need you to give yourself a break right now, okay? Because we're all humans. Humaning with other humans, that's hard enough. You're out here trying to start a business and that's even harder. And you're doing an amazing job, and it's all going to be okay. There's no one small thing that's going to crumble your career and crumble your. Your business. So I need you in this moment. Just take a deep breath with me, okay? Everything's going to be okay. And when you do spiral, because we know there's no avoiding it, there's no avoiding it, the only thing we can do is get better at recovering from it. When you do spiral, give yourself a moment to feel all the feelings, okay? Have that panic pity party. If you don't do that and you try to shove it aside and push it down and ignore it, it's only going to come roaring back, even more powerful and more destructive in your business, in your life. Carol, Imposter syndrome is a big topic, too. This is essentially imposter syndrome. All of this. This is like all the things that happen in imposter syndrome. You start doubting everything that you do and. Hi, Charlie, Welcome. So you need to feel the feelings when you do spiral, and you need to set a timer on it, because it is so easy to just be taken down in this awful downward slump and then you just can't recover from. So when you do feel this spiral happening, give yourself five minutes. Five minutes to spiral, to panic, to have a pity party. Write notes to yourself about all the things that are going wrong. Talk to someone, but have it end. And when it ends, I want you to think back on. Okay, cool. This is what I'm struggling with right now. How can I make this struggle useful to someone else? Even if you never share it with another soul, design a training. Design an offering. Design the outline for a book, anything. Turn it into something useful. A guarantee. Tapping into your creativity is going to be the fix for that spiral. Anyway, like I said, I have a sinus infection and I need to go to bed. So I hope this has been useful to you all. Thank you for joining Charlie and Carol in Yvette and everyone else who tuned in for this past 25 minutes. I plan on going live tomorrow, but we'll see how I feel because it's been a rough week. Anyway, so great to talk to you all. Love you and have a wonderful night. Okay, bye.