The Myth of Being Ready- Part 5 of 5

Good afternoon. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. And this is day five of the Myth of Get of Being Ready. And I'm so excited about today. We're just going to do a summary of everything that we've covered this week. We've covered a lot and thank you for those of you who have been following along, messaging me when things resonate. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that because, you know, it's just me here talking at a camera and sometimes there are people making comments while I'm here. So I really appreciate you. Just a little housekeeping thing. I'm doing this through Streamyard as I do always. If you're new and I do this to the Facebooks, I also do it to LinkedIn and to YouTube. So if you're on YouTube and you enjoy my stuff, please like and subscribe. Haven't said that before. It's exciting. Also, if you have any questions for what I'm saying or you want to add to the conversation, please comment. Sometimes the comments don't all come through from all different places. So if I don't call you out or I don't answer your question, know that it is not you, it is just the technology. I'm not mad at you, but I do try to go back and respond to any comments that I didn't see while I was live. So let's dive in. There are five ways that you get in your own way by waiting to be ready. And there are five different ways that I see it showing up. The first is you're waiting for something to happen. This can look like waiting to get clients or waiting, yeah, waiting to get paying clients till you pay for a business coach to teach you how to get paying clients. Do you see how it's flipped around there? It usually follows like you're waiting for the thing to already partially happen before you go and do the thing that will really make the difference in. I mean, if you want to bootstrap it, sure. But if you don't know, you just don't know how. If you don't know how, you just don't know how. This happens in personal training a lot. Someone will talk to a personal trainer and say, okay, cool, this will be great for when I'm a little more in shape, so I'm going to work on myself. I'm going to work out by myself and then I'll contact you and I'll get even more in shape with you. It's almost like people want to Have a higher threshold of success before they go and do the thing. Because they think, okay, cool, if I'm this successful from here, I'll be even more successful there. Well, okay, so if you're here now, and this is the point at which you allow for yourself to ask for help, that's actually a really big difference if you don't actually know how to get there. And it also goes to, you know, waiting for something to happen that you don't have control over. Okay, for instance, you know, a lot of people put stuff off until they get their next promotion. A lot of people put things off until they get their bonus, but sometimes the bonus doesn't come through. I know last year, a lot of companies, you know, canceled bonuses. They also canceled promotions. You know, just waiting. Waiting for arbitrary things. And the cost of this, okay, because you can do this all day long, but let's look at the actual cost. You know, if you're constantly waiting for all these things to just magically happen in your life before you go and do the thing that you want to do, guess what? You're not living by your own timeline. You're actually living by a million different other factors. Timelines, not even people. Because no one is intentionally keeping your timeline for you. You are just giving up control of your timeline. You know, I don't know about you, I have. I'm kind of a control freak. I want. I want to control my own timeline. I don't want to leave my timeline to someone else. Because guess what? We don't know how long we have here. And if I only have a finite amount of time here, guess what? I want to just go and do the thing. I'll figure out a way to make it work. I think this is where people get tripped up, is they forget how creative and resourceful they are. You know, if you commit to doing something before you have all the. All your ducks in a row, guess what? You're going to figure out a way to make it happen. That's just it. And also, when you commit, guess what? You realign so that you're actually looking. Your brain is turned on to new opportunities to make it work. Opportunities that would never pop up otherwise. Say you want to run for local government. You've never done it before. So you go to your city hall, you take out papers because you have to go and get a bunch of signatures to be able to run. Guess what? You go and you start talking to people. You tell them you're running, and then all of a sudden, someone hears about you and they say, hey, you know what? I'm a campaign manager. Do you have a campaign manager yet? Because up until that point, you've had no idea how you were going to run this campaign. The universe aligns to help you when you set your intention for what you want to do. By the way, those of you who want to start a business, getting involved in supporting someone else's campaign is one of the best ways to get used to hearing no. Because that's one of the things that new business owners are so afraid of. They're afraid of hearing no because they think it means that they're no good, that their service is no good. They just take it on as a completely personal thing and guess what? It's not. And a great way to practice that and to learn how to take a no and not take it personally is to go and pound the pavement and ask people to vote for your candidate. You know, you're basically asking people to take 30 minutes out of their day to go fill in a tiny, tiny little paper bubble on their ballot on one day that year. You know, if people say no to that, that's fine, but it's a great exercise for you if you're starting a business and you're going to be asking people to buy from you because you're going to hear and it's hard to keep going if you're going to let it crush you every single time. Okay, so the second way we let being ready get in the way is it kind of ties in with the first one. It's that we don't know how and we won't ask for help. Okay, I see this all the time with new business owners. Someone is an expert in one particular area in one field, or they're a certified trained coach, for instance, a lawyer, an artist. So they have this expertise and they're really good at it. They're so good at it, they could change the world if they could have a functional business. But part of their education didn't include how to start and run a business. It didn't include how to set your pricing. It didn't include how to do a sales call. It didn't include how to do the back end systems. It didn't include how to ask for referrals. It didn't include, it didn't include all that stuff. That's a lot of skill sets that your education didn't include. So if you're trying to start a business and you don't have those skill sets, baby, you are setting yourself up for failure. Not helpful. And there's no shame in asking for help. There's no shame in asking for help. There are so many people out there, including myself, who have created businesses specifically to help you. So if you find yourself in that position where you just don't know what you don't know and even the tiniest things of how do I set my pricing and how do I sell my pricing and how do I build awareness and promote myself without feeling like a jerk. Oh, if all that stuff is getting to you, you know what? I'm going to offer you a free call, my generate income strategy call. I'm going to put the link in the comments after this live finishes up. Because you don't know what you don't know. And you know what happens to most businesses that start? They fail, usually because they don't have enough advice. They don't know the right things to do in their business. And I think that's bs. I don't think that's fair. I think you deserve to make a living doing the work you love. So if you just don't know how to do that, get help. It can be myself. It could be a million other business coaches out there. But find your way. This is my advice. It's a little outside the box because I went out and I bought all of the online courses, I bought all of Ramit Sethi's courses, I bought Marie Forleo's courses, I bought a bunch of other ones. And let me tell you something, I got through maybe the second or third lesson and I either got bored because those videos are so freaking long. Why do we make those videos so long? When I do a video course, it's going to be just, here's the information. There you go. Run with it. Not all this preamble junk. But where was I going with that? Oh yeah, but then also I would lose, I don't know, I would lose like my invest, my emotional investment in what they were teaching because it didn't seem to fit me. They were showing me what worked for them and what maybe worked for another person. But it didn't seem to apply to me or my business or the types of clients that I wanted to attract. So here's what I want you to do, is I want you to be very intentional about finding someone who is going to customize your business plan and your business strategy to you. Because you are designing this business. You're going to be stuck with this business. And you know, it'd be wonderful if it was wildly successful, but if it's wildly successful but miserable for you to run. And three years from now you decide that you just need to get away from it and ditch all this amazing work that you've done. No, that sounds terrible. That sounds terrible. No, you want to work with someone who's going to customize a strategy and a plan to that is designed for you and your personality and what you enjoy spending time on. That's it. Okay. Another favorite of mine, when people hold off on doing the thing until they're ready is they spend all this frickin time over preparing. Over preparing. And you know me, I am all about preparing. I think preparing is very smart. I think it's very smart if you're a surgeon, if you're going skydiving, you're going to have babies and a few other different things. And I also think you need to be qualified to do your thing. If you're starting a business, you absolutely need to be qualified. That requires some preparation. What I don't like is when someone holds themselves back because they have to figure out their slide deck a little bit more or they hold themselves back from public speaking because they don't know exactly what their keynote talk is and they're not willing to try something. They hold themselves back from selling their service because they think no one will be willing to pay that price for their service and they need to like justify it. They need to like get better a little bit more. I see this with coaches all the time. Especially you know, they just finished training and they want to go out and start a business and yet they are like, oh well, you know, I should charge really, really cheap for like my next 10 clients so I can show that I am good enough, that I can charge higher and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no. You are a trained coach. You made it through certification, guess what? You don't make it through certification unless you reach a certain quality in your coaching. So start your business. And by the way, if you try to go for the cheap clients, just be warned, they're not going to be as committed to. So they're probably going to quit on you or no show you because they're not spending much, they're probably not going to do the work, which by the way, that's the only way you can guarantee they see results is if they do the work because you can't do the work for them. And so if they're not doing the work and they're not seeing results, guess what? You're not getting testimonials. So one of the best ways Coaches can ensure that their clients get results. It's by charging enough. And by the way, if you have this gift that helps people and you're not willing to make a business out of it so you can consistently do it. Because by the way, unless you're independently wealthy, you're not going to be able to do this work without making an income from it. So you not setting a price and asking your clients to pay that rate that will actually support you in doing this as your life's work is actually incredibly selfish. I'm going to call you out there. It's incredibly selfish because guess what? If you continue discounting your services, you're going to have to quit because you're not going to be able to make a living on that rate. And then you're going to have to quit and go back to your normal regular job that you quit previously. So you go to become a coach and then the world won't get you, they won't get access to you. Your gift will just be lost. I think that's probably one of the most selfish things in the world. So stop over preparing, stop pushing the bar out on yourself for when you're going to be ready for the thing. You're ready. You're never going to feel ready. You just got to go for it now. And if you don't know how, ask for help. Okay, number four, this is, this is a good one. People stop themselves from going and doing the thing because they are afraid of screwing it up. And let me tell you, yeah, there are absolutely some magnificent screw ups you can do. Okay, but very like short of murdering someone, like ending a human life, there's really no mistake that you make that you can't come back from. There's no mistake that you make with another human that you can't apologize for and own. There's no mistake you can make in a project that isn't going to be, you know, repairable. You know, and some of them will be irreparable. But you know what? In the greater scheme of things, you've screwed up before. You've survived all of your screw ups up until this point, okay? All those screw ups and just think back. I can think back to millions of screw ups that I've had. My 20s were a very rich time for screw ups, which I think all 20s should be, but I survived them all. And I know you have as well because you're watching this. So even if you do screw up, and I guarantee you will, okay, because guess what, you're a human not A robot. I guarantee you will screw it up. You will step on people's toes, you will miss deadlines, you will do all the things, but you can recover from it because you have up until now. That's your proof. You'll recover from it and you will be able to make it right in some way, shape, or form. So if you're waiting until you're pretty sure you're not going to screw it up, guess what? It's not possible. You've basically said, I'm never going to do this thing. Never. It's never going to happen because I don't want to screw it up. Great. By the way, while you're waiting to be ready to never screw up the thing that really matters to you, you're going to be screwing up in this thing that doesn't matter to you, you know, this job. Or you're going to be screwing up not going after the thing that you love the most. So, which feels better to you? Finally, number five. Just waiting to feel ready. Oh, I just want to wait to feel ready. I don't feel ready yet. I don't feel ready yet. You know, I'm just going to. I'm going to hold off because I want to feel ready. Guys, good news and bad news. You'll only feel ready after you've done it about a half a dozen times. And even then, even then, you may not still feel ready. I think I talked about this this week. Adele. Okay? You all know Adele. She's an incredible singer. She has a voice of an angel and she writes beautiful songs. Hi, John. Welcome. She. I think she vomits before every performance she gives. Okay? She's nervous. There are plenty of actors and actresses who do the same, you know, or they have some version of that, of stage fright, and it's there. You're never gonna feel ready. There's always going to be that element of, oh, my God, what am I about to do? There's this great documentary on Netflix right now, and it's about the life of Betty White. I love her. I absolutely love her. And I didn't realize how long she's been in show business and just how many shows she was involved in. Basically when she started her career, I think it was like a four hour, four or five hour show where she just showed up and like, they had to come up with stuff. Very basic set, very basic cast, and she just had to work it out. Incredible. But anyway, so she was talking about going on SNL in. I think it was back when she was just in her 90s, you know, because I think she's almost 100 now, or maybe she's already past 100. Um, but anyway, she was talking about she's been in show business for 60 years, if not longer, and she had stage fright. She had stage fright after being in show business for that long. And she said, you know, when you have stage fright, you have to counter it. You have to really focus your energy in managing it. And she made the point that that counterbalancing of having stage fright and then really focusing in is what gives actors their edge. It's what makes them good. And I challenge you all with this. You know, you're never going to feel ready to go and do the thing that matters to you, but scares the crap out of you. But imagine the edge you're going to do it with if you go forth and do it anyway. Just imagine that. Imagine the best performance that you've ever seen in your life and imagine that that kind of energy being applied to this thing. Like, what would be possible then? So anyway, that is my series of the myth of being ready. I am so delighted and flattered and excited that you followed along. If you have any questions about any of this, please reach out to me through any of the mediums. Also, if you're wanting to start a business and any of this has resonated with you and you just don't know where to go or you think you could use some support, this is the thing that I love to do. This is the air that I breathe. And my clients see incredible results. So if you're interested in exploring what it looks like to work together, then just message me and I can give you some information on my program. It's called BYOB Build you'd own business. And it's all about designing a business that actually works for you, that supports your ideal life in the future. It's not just about building a business arbitrarily that gets you to six figures. Anyone can do that. No, this is about building something that actually works for you and your life. So if you are interested in that, send me a direct message and we can talk about the details and then see if it's a fit for both of us. And John, anything is possible. You are awesome. Oh, John, thank you so much. That's so nice. You know, I'm a firm believer that anything is possible to anyone if they are willing to put themselves out of their comfort zone and do the brave thing, to take it on and do it before they're ready. No more waiting to be Ready. This. This is bs Hopefully. I wish I could just say that this week of me doing these five, you know, five lives over five days, this is just doing away with, you know, waiting to be ready. I know that's not how the universe works, but hopefully this has shed some awareness on some ways that you have maybe been waiting. And I'm not just talking to you, John. I'm talking to everyone who's watching that you've been waiting for the thing to whatever thing to happen before you go and do the thing that matters to you. I don't want you waiting anymore. I don't want you waiting anymore. Not just because I want to be able to say, oh, my God, like, my lives work, they impact lives. But no, I don't want you to wait anymore because I don't want you to regret not going for it. Regret is a really ugly thing. Regret is a thing that keeps you up at night and it visits you in your lowest moments of your life. You know, the regret of not saying goodbye to someone before they pass, the regret of not telling someone how you feel before a relationship ended, or the regret of not going for the scary thing that really mattered to you. Those are the things that visit you on your deathbed. They are going to be the final things that you think about when you reflect upon your life. Do you really want to have a super long list? I don't know about you, but I don't want that. Anyway, on that note, go and have a wonderful weekend, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Wherever you are, if you've enjoyed what I had to say, please hit that like button. And if you're watching this on YouTube, then please, please subscribe. I would love to be able to stay in contact with you. Anyway, I'll talk to you all soon and have a great weekend. Bye.