How To Stop Settling In Your Business
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I can honestly tell you that the Number 1 mistake that has landed me in hot water in my business is settling.
Settling for:
🙃 Unaligned projects for the money.
🙃 Unaligned clients for the money.
🙃 Too tight timelines cuz I thought I had to for the money.
🙃 Working mornings cuz I thought I had to for the money.
🙃 What other people advised me to do that went against what I knew was right for me and my business, for the money.
🙃 Not taking any time off when I was scared about money.
Funnily enough, these turned out to *not* be financially responsible decisions. Because:
🙃 It kept me on the scarcity hamster wheel because I had so much client work, I had no time for marketing my own business.
🙃 I was burnt out AF, which led to a lot of procrastination.
🙃 I kept getting sick or chronic pain flare ups- which kept me from working and had me sending deliverables in late.
🙃 I wasn’t having fun. And the mismatch in clients/projects and my values kept spiking my anxiety and stress.
🙃 There was never a time I felt safe enough to stop, rest and reflect. Which kept me on the aforementioned scarcity hamster wheel.
There is a much better way. Stop settling for less than what you really want.
Sounds simple. In practice? Much harder.
Let me walk you through it.
Be Present
To stop settling, you have to know what you really want.
To know what you want, you have to know what it feels like to want. Beyond just what you DON’T want. Or what you can survive at a level of discomfort you know you can handle. These are very different things.
🌿 They feel different physically- the experience of Wanting vs. Not Wanting vs Settling all feel different in your body.
🌿 They feel different emotionally.
🌿 They affect your energy differently.
And you won’t notice the difference, you won’t be able to identify which is which, unless you are regularly present, in your body. Unless you have regular time with yourself to process your emotions. Unless you give yourself space to connect with what you want.
You won’t get this clarity if you spend your life mostly disassociated, as many of us trauma survivors do by default before we do the healing work to develop other coping mechanisms.
This healing work tends to benefit from a lot of support as it requires us to delve into our shadows and the uncomfortable emotions and trauma baggage that we have been (understandably) trying to numb out from. I am a huge advocate for therapy with a qualified mental health professional in addition to supportive communities and mentors in business. Healing is much harder in environments where you don’t feel safe.
It’s important to seek support from folks who:
🌿 Share your values.
🌿 Treat your vulnerability with care.
🌿 Respect your autonomy, agency, and judgement about what is best for you.
🌿 Put you at ease.
🌿 Will hold you lovingly accountable to your vision for your business.
But, ultimately, only you can grant yourself presence with yourself. That’s why I advocate so heavily for my Marketing Confidence Cheerleading clients to cultivate routines and regular practices for them to check in with themselves, feel their feelings, and assess whether they need to shift anything in their work and business to better align with their true desires. My personal practices for this include:
🌿 Meditation
🌿 Yoga
🌿 Tarot & Oracle Cards
🌿 Long walks with my dog
🌿 Walking out on the jetty and spending time staring out into the sea in perfect silence
🌿 Doing a feelings scan as I drive somewhere. (How do I feel? Name that emotion! Why do I feel that way?)
Have a Vision
Once you are able to connect with what you want, it’s a lot easier to clarify your Big Picture Vision for your business.
🌞 The work you want to be doing
🌞 For whom
🌞 At what price/profit
🌞 When/how often
🌞 Under what terms and conditions
🌞 In balance and accommodation with X, Y, Z other parts of your life
Then you will be able to tell when you are settling. Because you’ll be able to see the disparity between what you want and what you’re accepting.
Then you get to protect your Vision with boundaries.
Have Boundaries With Others
Some important business boundaries you need to protect your vision are:
🏰 Pricing so that you can happily provide your best work rather than resenting your clients.
🏰 Allowing price to disqualify some potential clients rather than underpricing and setting yourself up for burnout and money stress.
🏰 Protecting your scope of work by having a detailed, specific contract, Terms of Use, etc
🏰 Not automatically saying “yes” to client asks before you’ve had a chance to feel out whether a) you actually want to do it, b) if you need to charge more, or c) whether you have capacity now, and if not, when you will have capacity.
🏰 Knowing who your ideal client is and only marketing to them.
🏰 Be willing to fire a client if they make unreasonable demands, clash with your values, disrespect your boundaries, or harm your well-being.
🏰 Blocking time off in your schedule so clients can’t book you when you’re having downtime, days off, or at hours when you aren’t ready to be focused & engaged.
🏰 Unfollowing anyone who drains your energy. Not just the haters, but folks you admire but who send you into a “compare & despair” spiral
Your business can be set up to largely establish and enforce these boundaries for you. Via:
🏰 Your offer suite
🏰 Your pricing
🏰 How folks can & cannot contact you and access your work
🏰 Your scheduler
🏰 Your contracts, Terms of Use, Disclaimers and other policies
🏰 Your marketing and who you address it to
This is where it is so helpful to have mentorship to help you navigate your blind spots and weave protection into your systems, offers, pricing, marketing, & sales process.
Even if you aren’t a recovering people-pleaser like me, this stuff is hardly common sense or common knowledge. A good mentor can spare you a lot of having to learn the hard way.
Have Boundaries with Yourself
You will also need boundaries with yourself, especially if, like me, you are struggling to replace default people-pleasing tendencies with empowered, intentional actions. For instance:
🏰 Resisting the temptation to overstuff your offers with an unreasonable workload or excess freebies due to sticker shock at your own price.
🏰 Scheduling your work availability in alignment with your creative cycles and capacity.
🏰 Taking adequate time off to ensure you’re rested and resourced enough to deliver your best work.
🏰 Actually communicate what your boundaries are with others in your marketing, sales process, systems, and client interactions.
🏰 Holding firm to your boundaries, even when someone doesn’t like them.
🏰 Deciding that money alone doesn’t qualify someone to work with you. There are other non-negotiables that are equally as valid- especially those that protect you mental health and work/life balance.
🏰 Having the courage and confidence to go against any unaligned best practices, expert advice, notions of professionalism, or leader’s influence- even if you respect the source.
The challenge is that the only way you’ll have and enforce business boundaries is if you believe you’re allowed to have them and believe there are enough aligned clients out there who will happily respect your boundaries and jump at the chance to work with you.
This belief work comes in direct opposition to what many of our trauma histories taught us to believe about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. Whether you’ve survived a toxic family, abusive relationships, oppression due to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism or other isms and phobias, or all of the above, you’ve had a lot of poisonous conditioning that you are “less than,” “undeserving,” and the best you can hope for is to simply survive shitty, but bearable realities.
We gotta unravel these harmful beliefs and replace them with healthier ones through practice, repetition, and reward. That is why it is so So SO important to do this work in supportive, affirming community. Community that will affirm your right to boundaries and your worthiness to have them met. Community that will celebrate each step you make in that direction.
If you do not yet have such community or would like to grow yours, you are more than welcome to mine.
Starting Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 I will be teaching you how to weave boundaries that protect your Money, Capacity, Time, & Vision into your offers, pricing, systems, & marketing. We’ll meet for a total of 4 Wednesdays, where I will teach you exactly how to do it, then answer questions so you can implement the lesson immediately into your own business. You can register for The Business Boundaries Course for $9.99 today- the price increases to $19.99 on Tuesday, Oct. 22. Registrants will be gifted access for the entire month of November 2024 to my beloved Squad 🎉 of excellently eccentric entrepreneurs for whom I serve as Marketing Confidence Cheerleader. As a guest in the Squad 🎉, you’ll receive access to our marketing masterclasses, business labs, live group coaching call, and our private Facebook community so you can ask
