Welcome to Episode 2.25 of Your Biz, Your Rules. In this show, I’m taking you behind the curtain with me and sharing an honest look at what business has been like for me over the past few months and exactly where I feel like I’ve gone wrong.
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TLDR:
💛 How I failed at business
💛 The changes I’ve been making
💛 Putting yourself first
Show notes:
Welcome to Episode 2.25 of Your Biz, Your Rules. In this show, I’m taking you behind the curtain with me and sharing an honest look at what business has been like for me over the past few months and exactly where I feel like I’ve gone wrong.
I am really quite nervous talking about this topic. It’s not something that I see a lot of people address. You often see people getting vulnerable and talking about struggles that they’ve had or perceived failures that they’ve experienced after the fact. So once somebody has found the solution, once somebody has remedied the situation, then they will go on and tell us their difficult story.
That is not what I’m doing today.
Because I’ll be honest, I haven’t found the solution. I haven’t found the magic pill to fix my life, to fix my business. But that doesn’t mean that this conversation isn’t worth having. I want to normalise the human experience in business because you know what?
Everyone actually has to deal with that.
And in coaching, we learn that all generalisations are false. But this is the exception.
So I’ve been experiencing a dark mood for quite a while. That’s how I would describe it. Some might say it’s like low-level depression, I’m just wary of using that term. I feel like what I have been going through isn’t as bad as depression can manifest for a lot of people. So I don’t necessarily want to claim that that is what’s been going on for me. But I have been just feeling down, I’ve been feeling low. I’ve been feeling flat. And it’s been quite a while – it’s probably been seven or eight months that I’ve been feeling this way.
And even though I have been still showing up for my business, I’ve still been serving my clients, and they’ve been delighting my clients, I haven’t been my usual self. And I’m very aware of this.
A lot of the people in my life probably haven’t noticed – my clients won’t have noticed most of my friends haven’t noticed. I don’t think even Tom’s noticed and he lives with me. But that’s not necessarily because they’re not observant, that’s because I am very good at hiding what I’m going through and I think that a lot of us are, we put so much into taking care of other people, as coaches, as healers, as service providers, that we don’t necessarily take the time or take the space to fully express what is going on through us. And I don’t think that necessarily does us any good if I’m being honest.
So that’s another part of why I want to talk about this today.
So like I said, I’ve been feeling low, I’ve been feeling flat, I’ve been feeling less inspired. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been productive, but I just haven’t had that spark that I usually have. And that has absolutely had a very tangible impact on my business.
Now I’m sure that I could trace these feelings back in time. Not necessarily because I went through anything “terrible’ during the pandemonium, but there were a lot of people in my life freaking out about it. And so that felt like 18 months of me really having to hold space for the people in my life, take care of them emotionally, sometimes physically, and ignore my needs. And on top of that, I didn’t necessarily have the time to myself that I usually need in order to really be thriving.
I think the things that were happening, the struggles that I was having, I ignored them, and I pushed them down. And over time they’ve sort of compounded and built on each other to create this state of just feeling low, feeling not my best.
I know that something that happens for me is when I start feeling low, when I start feeling uninspired, one of my coping mechanisms is to make investments. So I will think that investing in a coach, investing in a programme, investing in some support is going to fix things for me. So that’s what I did during that time. So during that time, when people were locked down, when a lot of people were struggling to make ends meet, I made some poor choices in terms of investments.
I invested a lot of money in a coaching programme that not only didn’t work, but actually hurt me and my business, it actually cause a negative impact, just not just a neutral one. And I’m still probably recovering from that. So on top of all of dealing with being around humans way more than I usually was, and ignoring all of my own feelings and fears about the pandemonium and dealing with the financial implications of making big investments, and also the emotional and energetic implications of making investments that don’t pay off, it was just festering and festering and festering, and I didn’t deal with it. I kept ignoring it, I kept pushing all of these things down and it was like interest in a bank account, every day, there was just like, I don’t know, half a percent more, they’re weighing me down and weighing me down and weighing me down.
And then about, I would say, October last year, is where I feel like I just hit the rock bottom. And that has felt sustained up until very, very, very recently, I’ve really been struggling to get myself out of that hole. It’s felt like a very vicious cycle. And like I said, I tried to distract myself with training, I tried to distract myself with new projects. And honestly, it just made it worse.
And I only realise how bad things got when I took a week off for my birthday this month. And I had this full week to do nothing to just think to reflect.
I hadn’t really been in a position to just think about things for quite a while because obviously on top of the feeling low and feeling uninspired and feeling down and feeling sad, in April I finally came down with COVID, and actually developed along COVID, I didn’t get over it for a whole month, a whole month, I was barely able to work barely, barely able to function. It was a hard time. And then as soon as my symptoms dissipated, I injured my ankle and so I couldn’t physically move around. So I had all of the frustration and the pain coping with that, as well as adding to all of this. And I hadn’t allowed myself to just be, and to just thinkm and to just do the things that I will usually do to make myself feel better.
I’ve noticed another one of my patterns is that when I start feeling down, not only do I distract myself with training and busy work, and new projects, but I also isolate myself. I isolate myself from my loved ones who I know in real life, I isolate myself from my business friends who are usually like the lifeblood of my sanity, I also isolate myself from the supportive habits and practices that keep the wheels turning. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll have seen me talk about things like my journaling practice, and my daily glow ups, and all the different rituals that I used to be so committed to in my life and in my business. But for a good long while, I’ve let them go.
I’ve let them go. But I’ve told myself that I’m still doing them by doing things like writing lists in my journal every morning.
So getting up and writing lists of all of the things that I need to think about, all the things I need to work on. That’s not really like journaling for your mental health, for your emotional well-being, is it? I don’t think that really counts. And doing things like investing in a breathwork membership so that I have regular breathwork workshops that I can attend and replays that I can work through because breathwork is a tool that really doesn’t make an impact for me and then only really going to those sessions when I already feel good.
That’s not the kind of person that I want to be. I don’t want to be the kind of person who ignores all of the relatively easy things that could make me feel better, that could make me do better, that could make me show up better.
So about a week ago now I was doing some thinking, I was doing some journaling and I realised that I needed to just shake things up, I needed to draw a line in the sand and make a change. So I recommitted to doing my daily glow-up ritual, and I call it my daily glow-up because morning routine sounds bleugh and boring. And also, because my morning rituals, then they’re not a routine, they’re not always the same, like I do have free work that I kind of follow but every day, it does look and feel very, very different.
I decided seven days ago that I was going to recommit to doing that every day. And to support me with that intention, I actually went to my Google Calendar and blocked off all of the mornings. So until 12 o’clock, my calendar is blocked out, there will be no calls getting booked in, there will be no busy work getting done – that is time to just focus on me and my well-being.
Let me just be clear, I’m not always going to need that much time. But because I have been going through it recently, I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of space to give myself exactly what I need. And honestly, I’ve been doing it for seven days, and have I ever needed all of that time? No, but knowing that I have that freedom and that space set aside in my calendar has meant that I do actually, intentionally take the time that I need, which has been a game changer already.
I’m feeling so much better. In fact, after one day of doing this, a brilliant idea dropped in for me, and I’ve run with it and nearly seen it through to completion. And that’s just in seven days.
I can promise you, I can guarantee to you that making these tweaks, making these little commitments to yourself does have a very tangible impact on your business. Just like ignoring what you need and ignoring what you know works, has an impact on your business.
Since October, it’s been the worst time in my business financially, that I’ve ever experienced. It is embarrassing to say. It’s not fun admitting that publicly. But that’s the reality. And I know that a huge piece of that is because of how I’ve been feeling. It’s not because of my business tactics, it’s not because I don’t know how to market myself, it’s not any of the surface-level business building things that have been causing a problem. It’s the me stuff – it’s my energy, it’s my mood, it’s my motivation. And only I can actually fix those things. No new framework, no new tool, no new piece of software, no new tutorial is going to fix that stuff for me. That’s just the reality.
I’ve committed to doing my daily glow-up properly every day. I’m also vlogging the process so I decided to vlog myself doing it for 30 days, just so people can see the evolution of my mood.
I wrote down all of the things that I was feeling and experiencing before I started. And then I’m filming the actual rituals themselves. And every week I’m checking in and looking at the differences in how I feel in what I’m doing, and all of that stuff. And what’s interesting is that I filmed the first week’s check-in today and then looked at the kickoff clip that I filmed. And even my face looks different, I look like I’m actually glowing. Whereas in that first clip, I looked grey/
Here’s the thing – I know that when I feel my best, not even when I feel my best…when I feel moderately okay, moderately stable, I just show up differently in my business, I have better ideas, I see things through more efficiently, I am more confident, I’m more magnetic, I’m more focused, and all of these things allow me to start creating the business results that I want to be celebrating in my business.
Your challenge:
I want to encourage you to think about what makes you feel creative, focused, and unstoppable. What makes you feel grounded and excited, and on it? And if you have answers to these questions, go and take action on them. Join me in recommitting to the things that make you feel good.
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