Embracing Change: How to Overcome Fear in Business

I debated on how I wanted to start this video because there are really two strong feelings I have when it comes to overcoming fear in business. So I'm going to just start off with both. You have to be able to fail in business. You are going to fail in business. You've got to be okay with that. Everybody that you're looking up to, whether It's a popular YouTuber, a popular podcaster on Instagram, they have had fail failures. But what makes them different from people who have not seen success yet is they didn't stop because they had one failure, two failures, 10 failures. And the other problem I see around failure is choosing your success based on what other people say successes. Because if your success is based on what somebody else says is success, you're never going to reach success. I finally, deep down inside accepted what success means is for me and what I want to do to classify myself as successful. And I'm in enneagram 3, so I'm always wanting to perform and do better. So to finally hit this mark in my business is a huge milestone because I kept failing in my business. And the reason I kept failing is because I didn't think about what I wanted to do in my business for me, not based on what I thought the outside world thought I needed to do. If you feel it's finally time to make a big step in your business, you're not alone. I mentioned in last week's video about course creators and online coaches that are feeling this way right now as well. And if you clicked on this video because you're like, oh, I really feel deep down that I've got to make this change. But you're scared. You've been building your business for a while and you're wondering what happens if I change? What if it all falls down? What if I don't make any more money? What if I can't make the change? I'm really comfortable with where I'm at right now. I'm not necessarily happy, but to me it feels easy, but you just aren't happy. And it's time to step into that fear of unknown and make the change. I've got some things for you. In this video, I'm going to share with you the exact steps that I took to overcome that fear to make some big decisions in my business. That included having to let people go, archiving my most popular course, and completely changed the value ladder I have spent the last three years building, all for my mental health and what is truly going to make me happy. So the first Step in overcoming this fear of making change in your business. You can't compare what you have to what other people have. And I learned this lesson unfortunately way too late in my business. Constantly chasing ideas and strategies and never really sticking with one. Because I thought, oh, they're doing that. That's what works. They're doing that. That's what works. Oh, I got to do that. That's working. Because we don't really understand what is going on in their business. They could be showing us the Instagram version of their business. And I realized being in a mastermind, that a lot of the times people's businesses behind the scenes are just as jacked up as the rest of us. But this person that they put on YouTube or on Instagram is the Instagram version and they're not really telling the entire truth and they probably hate their business on the back end too. So what I have found to really get to a point where I feel good with making my decision is talking to other online business owners. Being in a community, I think if we're not in a community, actively listening to people and how they're feeling and what's going on, we're really going to miss out of what's working in the online industry. And I don't mean just Instagram, I mean like in masterminds, in communities, curated communities, it's really important to have actual relationships with people. My mastermind, while the biggest investment ever in my business, changed my business like I could never have predicted. Not because of the coach, not because of the information inside of it, which were all fantastic. But the biggest thing that made the biggest difference is, is the connections and the relationships that I made in there. To talk about these hard things and not feel alone on a daily basis. And you've got to make sure that in that community those people are sharing the truth. They're not giving you the candy coded Instagram version either. I know for my clients, inside of my coaching program, I share everything about my business. I'm as truthful, transparent as possible. I don't want them to have this false expectation and then constantly feel, feel disappointed or that they've done something wrong or that they failed. So when I have my calls with my clients, whether they are the group calls or one on one calls, I will show them my screen, I will show them my metrics. I will be completely transparent with what is actively going on in my business. While not all the decisions I make are epic and amazing and sometimes they totally crash and burn, I personally believe it's important to share that with my clients, to understand that this is what happens in real life. Not every decision is going to be a home run. I'm considering the idea of possibly creating a community all around transparency and business. I'm not sure yet I'm on the fence, but I do want to kind of suss it out first before I jump into a decision. Because like I mentioned in last week's video, you got to think this through and not make instant changes immediately. So let me know in the comments if a community around transparency in business for people who will actually share what's going on is something that you would be interested in. What would you really love to see in a community like that? And what do you actually hate in communities that you've been a part of? Again, just looking for thoughts, feedbacks, interest. So I think what the first thing that you need to do to really overcome this fear of making a big change in your business as having a support team not only at home, which I have and is amazing, but with other business owners that you can speak to and get their honest thoughts and feedback because they're in the industry as well. Before you decide to take that step, the second thing that you need to do to really overcome that fear and making the change is understanding some key metrics. And listen, this is probably the biggest mistake I've made in my business for the longest amount of time. And it's been avoiding specific metrics because numbers, right? I have countless calls with my clients who get upset that they didn't hit the sales goals that they wanted in their launch. They didn't get the webinar signups that they wanted, they didn't get the show up to their live webinar that they wanted. But when they bring their launch debrief to me and we go over it together and I look at the numbers as a whole, they are hitting industry benchmarks, if not higher. What it ultimately boils down to for them, if they want to hit those sales goals that they think they can hit because of the Instagram people or the rainbows and butterflies people, is if they just do all of this, they're going to have like this epic launch. But if you don't have the numbers to support that, you don't have the email list following, you don't get the enough people to the sales page, you're not going to hit those big numbers. But you may be hitting industry standard numbers, which means your launch did great and you can redo it again. Nothing is broke. This is a really aha moment for so many people who joined my CEO Day back in December. And so I decided that for the first time ever, I'm going to host a mid year CEO day on June 12th. So if you're kind of in this position where maybe you're hating your business, maybe your business isn't doing what you wanted it to do, maybe you feel stagnant or plateaued, I'm going to be hosting this live CEO day on June 12th. It is about a three to four hour session. Not only am I going to be walking you through certain exercises to figure out specific numbers to see what is and isn't working in your business, we're also going to be interactively working on building out the next step. Six months of the year. We're also going to go through exercises and deciding what to actually work on based on all of your ideas, going through a priority exercise, what is going to be number one priority with all the ideas that you have and start mapping that out into your plan. If this is something that you want to commit to to get a better game plan in place for the rest of 2024, head to Trina Little.com CEO to grab a free seat. The third thing you need to do when it comes to overcoming the fear of failure in your business is making a plan and deciding how you're going to measure its success or how you're going to evaluate your next steps. I personally love planning in 90 day chunks because it gives me time enough to commit to testing something and getting enough data to see if it's actually working, then say like a month. It also gives me the data to see what isn't working here. Is it just a small tweak that I don't need to scrap it completely but just make this little tweak or is it really just not working and we should put it to the side? But it also gives me enough flexibility that if I decide I don't actually like it, I can create another plan in the next 90 days. I think at this point it's really important for me to share with you. You've got to decide what enough is in your business because if you don't have an enough number, you're on a treadmill that's never going to stop. And by enough I mean what is the number that you need to make to be like, I'm good, like if I could make that money good, I love it. I don't know about you, but I've been personally traumatized by the seven figure number and the number of Entrepreneurs that kind of tout seven figures is the goal and the measure of success. And now even more eight figures. I felt that if I didn't have a plan that was getting me to that seven figure or to that eight figure, I was doing something wrong. And then I was a total failure. So it took a long time for me to truly understand what I wanted as a business owner, not what I was being told. I wanted to constantly meet me in this state of anxiety and stress that if I wasn't achieving that number, I wasn't reaching for that number, my business was worth nothing. When I took a step back and I realized what do I actually need in my business to enjoy life? Take off Mondays, take off Fridays. Work with people that I really love. It was nowhere near that seven figure mark, which means I didn't have to work the amount of work or the amount of content or the amount of launches I was doing to get a business that I loved, making the amount of money that I truly needed. You are truly successful when you actually like your business and it's not giving you anxiety and stress every day when you have people that you're working with or that you have people that are working for you that you enjoy. I personally think success is when I'm not working every single day of the week. I mean, I created this business to set my own time and if I'm just handcuffed to my desk in my own business just like I was in corporate world, what was the point? I would actually love to hear how you are defining success in your business. Let me know in the comments because I think this is going to be a great exercise for you to really think about that. Really think about what success is for you and your business so that you're not letting the chirps of other gurus tell you what success is. Maybe it's a monthly income goal, maybe it's a yearly income goal. Maybe it's the amount of time off you want to take. Maybe it's the amount of days that you want to take off every single week. Let's redefine what success looks like in this online business space and share what your success is. I'm going to be sharing a more detailed look into things that I tried this year, things that worked, things that didn't during my CEO day as I share how I'm planning out my year based on failures and successes already in 2024. So if you want basically a look right into my business books, make sure you join me on June 12th for CEO Day at trenalittle.com cell CEO and if you want to look into some more transparency that I've shared here on my channel, in April I did a whole series on transparency in my business. I will link to that playlist on your screen right now where I basically share all my thoughts and don't hold anything back. So I hope you enjoy that.