8 Ways Self-Doubt Shows Up in Your Business (And How to Move Through It)

Good morning. Good morning. Happy Monday morning. It feels good to be back in the office today. I've been traveling quite a bit the last 2 weeks, and I will be traveling again next week. But today I want to talk about something that, you know, I had this huge kind of realization this last week, and I want to tell you my story behind this, but it's around self-doubt. And I don't know, let me see if I got a copy of my book. Let me know in the chat if you have read my book. The, the, the first title of this book was going to be called From Self-Doubt to Self-Made, and we changed the title multiple times along the way. But in my book, I talk a lot about the self-doubt that I have faced over, you know, probably my lifetime. But I really focus on it, you know, in the business. And so I was at an event this week out— last week out in California. My eye— listen, I'm not crying. This eye has watered for like 4 days straight. I don't know. I don't know. But it's watered for 4 days. I'm not crying. You're crying. I was at an event in Newport Beach, California last week, and I was getting packed up on Sunday and I was trying to talk myself out of going. I was having just a lot of feelings about it. I've been to this event before. It was not like— I don't know. I was, I was having a lot of self-doubt. Let me just start there so that it makes it easier for you. I was having a lot of self-doubt. And I was trying to talk myself out of going, um, because in this room, um, people are super fancy, and I felt like maybe I didn't dress nice enough. I felt like maybe I wasn't young enough, I wasn't skinny enough. There's a lot of health and wellness coaches in this room, and I just was having all of this self-doubt around who I was and who I was in this room. And I didn't have the greatest experience last time I went to this event. And I just— I had already— I had paid for the two events, so I'd already paid for it. And I was like, I don't want to waste my money. I'm just going to go. But I was trying to talk myself out of going. Does this sound familiar to anybody? Like having self-doubts about who you are? And I know it's weird because I show up here every week and do my thing. But it's different in person. It's different when you have to sit face to face in this room and you feel, um, a lot of self-doubt. And it's not about any self-doubt in my business or what I've built or what I've grown. It was just internally, like, I wasn't— I felt not good enough in a personal way, not in a business way. I can go toe to toe with a lot of people, with almost everybody in that room on business. Right? And so it was this self, like, esteem issue that I was dealing with that I dealt with a lot, um, in my, you know, business growth. And so I started to really understand that when we have self-doubt, um, it shows up in a lot of different ways, and it really holds us back in our business. And it held me back in that room that first day. I tried to dress up real nice and be somebody I wasn't, and I feel like I dress nice. Okay, like, let's not get that twisted. I feel like I dress nice. But here's, here's the difference. I'm going to wear, I'm going to wear jeans. I'm going to be comfortable. I'm going to— they're probably distressed. That's where I feel comfortable. Because let me tell you why I wear distressed jeans. This is funny. It's not because they're hip and cool. It's because I get hot all the time and it cools me off. It cools me off. But so I was like, I was going through my closet trying to pack for this. I was pulling dresses, I was pulling slacks, I was pulling suits, stuff I do not wear on a regular basis. And I thought, okay, I'm going to pack all this. And then at the last minute, I went and grabbed like regular stuff that I would wear. And so the first day I dressed really nice, but I felt uncomfortable the whole time. I felt uncomfortable. And by the second, by the second day, I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna go and be me. I'm gonna wear jeans that don't have holes in them so they look nicer, um, but I'm just gonna be me. I'm gonna dress the way I feel most comfortable in, and I'm gonna let this go that I have to be somebody that I'm not. And when I did that, I was open to receiving what was happening in that room a whole lot better. And so I thought, okay, I just need to be me and be open to what's coming. And I'm going to be me to a flaw. And I started to think about things that give us self-doubt in our business and how it holds us back. Because let's be honest here, 99% of my audience is women. And I do have some men in my membership, in my audience. And if you're out there, you might relate to this too. But as a woman, I know our biggest hang-up is our self-doubt. We self-sabotage ourselves in so many ways. And so I got to thinking about how this shows up for us in business and what is it sabotaging for us in business. And if we can recognize it, like I was recognizing on day one that this was sabotaging the way I was showing up in this room And, um, and so what I, what I want us, I want us to do is let's take a look at these things that I wrote down about how we, how self-doubt shows up in our business. And let's just acknowledge that this is happening to us, because if we can acknowledge that this is happening to us, then we can work on changing that. But if we can't acknowledge that this is, this is what is happening to us, we don't have a way out of it. And then we start to spiral in lots of different, different ways. And so I wrote down like the top 8 things, and these are, these are like the things that I had self-doubt about and the way that they affected my business. So when I say these things, I'm not saying you need, you need to recognize this and you need to stop this. I'm saying this was me, and I worked really, really hard over the last 13 years to push these out. But then something will happen like me being in that room last week, and all of a sudden I'm this little girl that doubts herself and has self-esteem issues again. And I did not like the way that made me feel. Okay, and so let's start with these because— and, and as I'm saying these, I want you to put 'that's me' in the chat just so that I can acknowledge that you're struggling with this. And then let's talk about just acknowledge that I don't have the answers for all this. I'm not a therapist, but I think if we recognize these things in ourselves, we have the ability to make changes for them. Okay, so let's start with number 1. You underprice your products. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick on Amanda for a minute. I, I gave her a little bit of tough love in Launch Your Box over the weekend about her fear of pricing and, um, you're afraid people won't buy if it's too high, even if you're barely breaking even. And with Amanda, when I saw her post in our group, I read it a few times and, and she's like, I'm priced like this, I already have a 70% profit margin, because I make everything myself. And I, all I could hear was she felt guilt for having a high profit margin. But you have self-doubt in pricing because you feel like no one's going to buy if you're overpriced. Like it's tied to your worth. And so if you're struggling with your pricing, it might be because of self-doubt, okay? And so I want you just to acknowledge that. I don't have a 12-step program for you, but I want you to acknowledge that this is how self-doubt bubbles up in our businesses, okay? Amanda says, my husband was so on your side. Thank you, thank you, Amanda's husband, for acknowledging that, because what I've learned over the last 13 years is that these things that we battle with personally show up in our business. And so I'm able to recognize them now. I couldn't 13 years ago. I'm still struggling through it. And Amanda, you probably couldn't recognize that, um, that that was what it was holding you back. Okay, number 2, you wait too long to launch. You keep tweaking, you keep perfecting instead of selling because you're not ready. If that's you, say, that's me. You wait too long to launch because self-doubt keeps creeping in and telling you you're not good enough, telling you you're not ready, telling you if you just had this one thing done or one thing that was better, you'd be ready to launch. But the problem is, you keep spiraling and your launch date keeps getting pushed back. You're never going to be ready. Let me just tell you that. You're never going to be ready. You're just not. You just have to throw it out there and quit letting that self-doubt tell you that you're not good enough, you're not ready, you need to do better and be better. Before you can launch the thing. You can't make the thing better if you don't launch it. Okay, number 3, you don't talk about your business enough. You feel like you're being annoying or repeating yourself, so you stay quiet. And when you stay, when you stay quiet, your sales stall out because you feel like you're annoying people by talking about your business, selling, showing up. That self-doubt is saying, people are sick of me, people have heard this and they're just not interested. That self-doubt tells you to be quiet. If you don't talk about your business, people don't know about your business. And that is killing our sales right now. Our self-doubt is saying I'm annoying people when the truth is your people just don't know. Okay, same, same. I have been all of these. Remember, this is not me looking on the outside in. This is— this was me. So many years that held me back. Number 4, I see this one so much. Number 4, you second-guess every decision from packaging to platforms to names to logos to products. You ask 5 different people and you still don't trust your gut to move forward. So instead of moving forward, you're getting more opinions, but those opinions don't mean anything because you're not doing anything with them. You're doubting yourself, which I do a lot, and I ask for opinions, and then I move forward. But that self-doubt says these opinions aren't good enough either. And so you stop moving forward because you're on this cycle of, I need more opinions. Let me ask one more person. Let me ask one more person. And then you still don't do anything because you're just second-guessing. Do you know how many mistakes I've made in my business? A lot. And it comes from me just like doing things without thinking through them all the way. And that's okay. I made progress. I did them. I need you to push forward. So I want you to think about a decision that you have been second-guessing for a little while and asking people's opinions and still not doing it. And let's make a decision this week on that. Let's move forward. You're still going to have doubt. Do you know how many times they're packing a box that I have curated and I'm like, oh, I hope people like that. I still second-guess that, but I gotta get it out there. I gotta get it done. We call it GSD— get done stuff, get stuff done. You gotta get it done because if not, you're just spinning in your head over every single decision in your business. And let me tell you, as an entrepreneur, you have a lot of decisions that you have to make every day. And if you overthink and if you, if you second-guess and you need 5 opinions all the time on every decision, you're never moving forward. Is your decision going to be right? Who knows? But if you don't make it, you can't figure it out. All right, number 5. This was me a long time. This is Sarah 2016, '17, '18, '19. You avoid money conversations. You're not checking your numbers, you're not planning for profit because it all feels intimidating. You just want to make the cute thing and sell the thing, and you don't dig into the business and the finances because you're afraid of what it's going to say about you. And it feels intimidating because you feel like you don't know enough. But we can't have long-term sustainable businesses without having the money conversations about our business. If I don't look at the checkbook, I don't know what's happening. If I don't look at my profit and loss statement, I can't tell you that I did something wrong. Okay, that's self-doubt. And all it takes is we have to learn. It's not because we don't— we're avoiding it because of what it says. We're avoiding it because we just don't know how to look at it. We don't know how to interpret it. We don't know how to analyze it. And that's something as a business owner we have to learn. And by avoiding it, you're doing yourself a disservice. And then you're saying, my cash flow sucks. I'm selling a bunch of things, but there's no money in my bank account because you're avoiding the money conversations. Because self-doubt tells you what you don't know won't hurt you. Right? Been there. Been there. Number 6. You compare yourself to others constantly. You scroll and spiral, thinking everybody else has it figured out but you. And then you go down this rabbit hole of, I'm not smart enough, I'm never going to get this, I'm not good enough, why did I ever think I could do this? Right? The truth is, that person that's winning, they may not be smarter than you, they may not have it figured out. They just did it, and they didn't overthink everything. But when we doubt our ability, we have this self-doubt, it affects that. And then instead of scrolling and feeling inspired, we scroll and we feel like we have to compare ourselves. But instead of spiraling out of control, you think, man, if she did it, I can do it too. I can do that if she did it. If this chick in a small town, Texas, small Texas town figured out to create not one but two multi-million dollar businesses with— by herself, from scratch, no investors. You know what? I bet I can too. And you know what? She's the perfect person to learn from because she figured it out. She figured it out with self-doubt. Telling her she couldn't do it so many times. She figured it out even when she felt like all the cards were stacked against her. I'm not smarter than you. I don't have more resources than you. I figured it out because the alternative was working for someone, and I lost my job 3 times in a row. To bankruptcies, to downsizing, to closures. And the only thing that kept me going was I didn't want to put my future in another corporation's hands that could lay me off at any given minute. Again, 3 times in a row I got laid off from my corporate jobs. The first one went bankrupt, the second one had store closures, I can't remember the third one, but it's there. Oh, they were downsizing too. And at that moment, I realized that I had to take my future into my hand. I didn't know anything about building a business. I didn't know anything about being an entrepreneur. All I knew is I was willing to figure it out, and I was willing to make mistakes along the way. And I have battled so much self-doubt. Do you know how many years went by before I actually showed my face on camera? So many years that I could have been growing, but I was so concerned about the way I looked that I couldn't show my face. And why? That self-doubt told me I wasn't good enough, wasn't skinny enough, I wasn't young enough, and I let it control the way I showed up in my business for a long time, and that stalled my growth until I got over that. And it wasn't easy. There were days that I sat and cried for an hour before I flipped that camera on. I was that terrified. Number 7, you don't ask for help. You don't ask for help because you think your question might be stupid, because you think you should know how to do this and you don't. You should know what that means, you should know how to do that. So you struggle in silence by yourself because you're doubting. Why does everybody know what that means and I don't? Why does everybody have that figured out and I don't? I don't ask for help because there's shame associated with that, that I should already know this, right? That's not true. That's not true. That's doubt telling you you're not good enough again. When if you ask for help, you get the knowledge, you retain the knowledge, and you move forward to the next step. And you know what? You might have to ask for help on the next step to. But if you don't ever ask for help, you struggle in silence, you don't push past it, and you give up. And then number 8 is you quit too soon. If things don't work right away, it means that you assume that it means you're not good enough. Well, I tried, it didn't work, so I'm giving up. If I gave up every time something didn't work, where would I be? I'd be still working for somebody, worrying if I was going to be laid off or not. The thing about these are is that they're common. So I'm here to normalize that this is normal for people, especially women. But they don't have to stay there. They don't have to stay part of your story. If they stayed part of my story, I wouldn't be here talking to you right now. I'd be working for someone else right now. I'd be working for my paycheck. I'd be working for the weekend, and I would do my job and go home. And I didn't just wake up one day and decide none of these mattered anymore. It was slow progress for me. I had to start making decisions quicker. I couldn't be in this decision loop of never making a decision. I had to start talking about my business more. I had to just launch without thinking, because if I delayed it too long, I would overthink every decision. I had to stop comparing myself to other people. And, you know, the best way for me to do that was to block them on my social media. If you get a negative feeling every time you see a competitor or someone else doing something, if it brings a negative feeling, block it and release it. I call it bless and release, block and release. Like, don't put that in your feed. Don't, don't give yourself that energy. And please ask for help even when you feel like it's dumb, because I guarantee you there are 5 other people wanting to ask the same question, but they're scared to. So if you'll do it, it gives them courage to do it. You can shift. If you would have seen— like, there's this trend going on right now, and I've got to pull some pictures. It's 2016 to 2026. You would have met 2016 Sarah, you would not even believe 2026 Sarah is sitting here right now like this. And when you think about 10 years, it feels like a lifetime, but it also feels very fast. And I guarantee if you give yourself an opportunity, if you just acknowledge that these are holding you back, it's going to help you make progress. To move forward. You can shift this one thing at a time. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I hope it helped you today, because when I was sitting in that room on Tuesday, I was feeling a lot of these old feelings again. And when I decided that I was just going to be me, like, put, put the dresses and the fancy clothes away— that wasn't me. That's not who I feel comfortable. I'll wear a dress to a wedding. I'll wear a dress to church. I'll wear a dress to a photo shoot. Um, but I don't wear dresses on a regular basis. That is not me. I'm a jeans and a cute top with some cute earrings kind of girl. That is me to my core. When I decided to put the fancy clothes away and just show up as me, I was open to receiving what was happening. When I thought I had to be somebody else, I was closed off, wasn't talking, I wasn't sharing, I wasn't engaging because I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. So do something that makes you feel comfortable. Do something that, that is just you, true and true. Because that little piece of confidence, me just wearing what I was comfortable wearing, helped me push through the other things. So do something for yourself that gives you a little boost of confidence. It's going to help you push through some of these things. Because what I want you to understand is this is normal. You're not an outlier. You're not out there dealing with all of this by yourself. A lot of us deal with at least one of these 8 things, if not most of them. And so let's acknowledge it. Let's move forward because the best way to gain confidence is having those small wins, and we can have them in our businesses. If we push past the, the noise in our head telling us we're not good enough. Okay, so I hope that helps you this week. I'm gonna be in the group. I don't know what day, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. I'm gonna be in the group this week, Sunday. I just got back from all the trips. Um, I've got some great training that I've been working on the last couple weeks. Um, Scale Your Box just got a brand new, um, ads training just dropped on Thursday. So if you, if you're in Scale Your Box and you have it, um, I'm talking about opt-in ads and sales ads, um, really great training for you. Um, I've got some new stuff for email marketing for Launcher Box that's coming out next month. Um, but I'm there, I'm in the group, my team is there. We're, we're here to help you push back the things that are holding you back and move forward, because I want you to make progress. And the only way we can make progress is realizing what's holding us back. All right, y'all have a great week, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.