Katie McManus (practical business coach) argues that entrepreneurs' success "will always max out at the level of your shame." Using concrete examples (fear of posting, fears about appearing greedy leading to undercharging, bureaucracy like LLCs/taxes feeling traumatic), she says intergenerational and life-long shame surfaces when you start a business and can block client connection and revenue. She warns that launching out of a personal crisis often compounds problems unless you have strong therapeutic/support structures. Her core recommendation: begin therapy/personal work on shame and money issues before (or while) starting a business to make scaling and asking for money possible; final lines present a brief bio/CTA.
I want you to listen to me when I tell you that your success will always max out at the level of your shame. And let me give you an example of this. So let's say you're starting a business and you know that you have to post to social media and you have to share about your business and you have to put your face out there. If you have so much shame about, say, calling attention to yourself, being an attention whore, what have you, chances are you're never going to actually put yourself out there in a real way that connects with your potential clients. You might, you might, might still post, you might still share a few things, but your shame is going to override you at every opportunity. And because of that, you're not going to experience that connection with your ideal clients, which means that they're not going to feel like you know them, like they trust you, and they're not going to take that next step to book a sales call with you or to buy from you from your online store. And it's the same with money. If you hold a lot of shame around, like, potentially being this person that people see as greedy and only caring about themselves, you're going to constantly undercharge for your services because you're going to think, okay, well, I don't want anyone to judge me based on how much money I'm asking for, so I'm going to keep myself really small. So no one would ever have any reason to think, oh, well, why does she think she's worth so much? Like what? Like, you know, to think that you're full of yourself for charging what your services are worth. The biggest thing that I work on with most of my clients is, yeah, like, I train them on how to market their services and how to sell their stuff and how to put together an offer that actually charges the value of the service that they provide. But more so than that, we work on a lot of the, like, dark underbelly of, like, baggage that really comes up with when you start a business, when you start really putting yourself in this position where you have to put yourself out there and ask for attention, where you have to put yourself out there and ask for people to invest big money in working with you. Because all this garbage that you have, all this shame that you have carried along your entire life, that was passed down from generations of ancestors, all this stuff will bubble to the surface. So whenever someone comes to me and they're, like, going through a crisis in their life and they're like, I think the thing that's going to solve this right now is I'm going to start a business, and that's going to help me, like, break away. My first reaction is always like, whoa, okay, that's not how this goes. If you're coming into starting a business out of a crisis, what's actually going to happen is you're going to get so much worse for a time being. And some people can handle that. I know that's. That's what I did. I was able to handle it, but I had a therapist and I had coaches and I had support around me. But most people, it's too much. It's too much. So, like. But also, starting a business is not easy. Okay? It's not easy. And it's not even that. It's hard to get clients and it's hard to market yourself, and it's hard to compete with other people who do what you do. It's all in here and in here. It's. It's this battle that you will have with yourself every single day around putting yourself out there and asking people to pay you money for the work that you provide and just daring to have the confidence that the service you provide actually carries value for the people that you're serving. And once you deal with that shame, once you deal with those fears and that baggage, it is so incredibly freeing. It. It really is that happily ever after of being a business owner and having autonomy and freedom and flexibility in your life. But it can take months, years, sometimes decades to actually get there. And the reason I'm sharing this is because I don't want anyone to see what I share on here and just think, oh, my God, it must be so easy to start a business. It is not. But I also don't want people to have a wrong idea of what is going to be hard about starting a business. It's not necessarily filing the llc. It's not necessarily, you know, doing your taxes at the end of the year or doing the sales call. Like, all those things are challenging in their own way, but the thing that makes them extra challenging is the shame that you carry around. Right? Because if you have shame around, you know, being bad at filling out paperwork, which some people actually do, they're traumatized from the bureaucracy of. Of school and college and their first few jobs, then failing that LLC is going to feel like a massive hurdle that you have to do. If you have money shame, which most of us do, most of us have some kind of trauma when it comes to money, then, you know, dealing with your taxes at the end of the year asking people to pay you for your services in a sales call that is gonna feel like one of the most painful experiences until you deal with the shame. So you know, if you're thinking about starting a business, if you're thinking that at some point you want to leave your corporate 9 to 5 job and you know that have some self worth stuff to work on, if you know that you have this belief that it's bad to ask people to pay attention to you, if you have this belief that it's bad to ask people to give you money, if you have a lot of baggage around money, then I guarantee before you even start the business, start going to therapy on those issues, start doing the work on that dark underbelly garbage because it's going to come out either way. And it's better to come out now, before you've started than to wait until like you're dependent on this income and let it come out. Then it's still going to come out. It's still going to come out. There's no way you can like work on it so much right now that it won't come out when you start a business, but it will be a lot easier when you start the business to deal with whatever version of it it becomes if you start doing some personal work right now. And hi, I'm Katie, your practical business coach and new business owners work with me so that they can leave their corporate 9 to 5 and replace their 6 figure salary by doing work they love that actually helps people follow me for more.
