Latest / Business for Humans / Stop Letting Fear Run Your Business: A Founder’s Guide

Transcript

Stop Letting Fear Run Your Business: A Founder’s Guide · Business for Humans

• 0:13
  Hi, I am Jaime Gennaro, founder of Practica Consulting.
• 0:18
  I'm a business coach and consultant, and I help people who are launching businesses,
• 0:24
  growing businesses, or people who are thinking about starting a business and
• 0:29
  are ready for a career transition.
• 0:31
  You're my people. So if you've never been here before, welcome.
• 0:34
  And if you have been here, welcome to the whole new setup.
• 0:38
  One of the things I feel like I have to mention is my bookshelf because my client
• 0:44
  calls face a different part of the bookshelf.
• 0:47
  So I made it all real nice and pretty.
• 0:50
  And then when I did the camera setup for this, it's the messy part with the kids games in the books.
• 0:57
  So just a lesson in this is it doesn't have to be perfect. We're not striving for perfection here.
• 1:06
  But that's not the meat of what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is fear.
• 1:12
  And if you know me, you know that I find emotions to be a very interesting,
• 1:19
  complex part of being an entrepreneur.
• 1:22
  Because there are emotions that drive us.
• 1:25
  There are emotions that help us build momentum and keep us motivated.
• 1:31
  And then there are emotions that stall us out.
• 1:34
  And fear is an emotion that can do either.
• 1:38
  It can give us momentum and drive us forward,
• 1:41
  or it can make us stop in our tracks and procrastinate and not move forward
• 1:48
  because we're too afraid of what may or may not happen in the moving forward.
• 1:54
  And we're also afraid of the other emotions that might come with it.
• 1:59
  So there might be worry or anxiety or in some cases, humiliation.
• 2:06
  So we don't do things sometimes only to avoid a certain emotion.
• 2:14
  Fear is one of the emotions that if you notice that that is where you're taking action from.
• 2:23
  If you're taking action from a place of fear and it's holding you back or it's
• 2:29
  somehow clouding your judgment or it's getting in your way.
• 2:33
  Take a moment with it. I think entrepreneurs move so fast. We're always like
• 2:40
  running, running, running a race that we're never going to win, by the way.
• 2:44
  But we run full speed all the time. And we don't always take the time to sit
• 2:52
  with stories and ideas and emotions that might be affecting our business.
• 2:58
  And it might feel like a waste of time. And you might be thinking to yourself,
• 3:02
  how is this really going to help my business?
• 3:04
  But I can tell you, after decades of working with business owners,
• 3:10
  either as an employee and kind of being their right-hand person,
• 3:14
  running operations in the business, or being a founder myself,
• 3:18
  or working inside organizations as a consultant, what I can tell you is the emotions are there.
• 3:26
  If you've ever worked in a company, you have noticed, likely,
• 3:31
  that people have a lot of emotions.
• 3:34
  And I don't want to say that we want to run a business where all we're doing
• 3:39
  is like looking at emotions, but we also can't ignore them.
• 3:43
  And I think for a founder who's running full speed ahead at all times,
• 3:48
  might not understand how those emotions are affecting their decision making.
• 3:53
  I used to work with a founder who had a lot of anxiety and when things got busy at work.
• 4:02
  And this person got pulled into the weeds and felt like they had to do the work.
• 4:07
  So they were, you know, creating presentations or working on creative pitches
• 4:11
  or coming up with ideas, not running the business.
• 4:16
  So they were kind of in the weeds with the team, doing the work,
• 4:19
  doing the work, doing the work, full of anxiety.
• 4:22
  And all the decisions that needed to be made from the business owner lens,
• 4:28
  like, hey, we've got this person underperforming, or, oh, we're losing money
• 4:32
  on this project, or we might need to bring in a new hire, or have you reviewed
• 4:36
  that thing over there that's not moving the business forward?
• 4:39
  This owner would just shut down. They would stop responding to emails.
• 4:43
  They would not answer questions from the team.
• 4:47
  They would get into the weeds. They'd put their head down, and they would charge forward.
• 4:53
  And it was something that they were doing from anxiety And probably from a story
• 4:58
  that was like, if I don't put my head down, we're not going to go anywhere.
• 5:01
  We're going to lose money or something bad's going to happen.
• 5:05
  So it is important sometimes, whether you're getting feedback from your team
• 5:10
  or you're just noticing patterns within yourself, where every time there's an
• 5:15
  ebb in your business, you go into fear.
• 5:18
  Or every time your business gets busy, you go into overworking.
• 5:23
  There are these patterns that are very important to be aware of as an entrepreneur,
• 5:27
  because they're going to change the shape of your business.
• 5:30
  They're going to change the way you work with clients. They're going to change
• 5:33
  the way you work with your teams and the way you show up after work,
• 5:38
  too, for your family or for your friends or for yourself.
• 5:42
  So it's important. It's just as important looking at your profit margins as
• 5:48
  it is understanding how your emotions may be affecting your business.
• 5:53
  You can call bullshit on that, but trust me, it's important.
• 5:56
  It's really important. And entrepreneurship, if you've been in it for a while.
• 6:01
  It is a personal journey, period.
• 6:04
  It is a journey of looking at yourself and your patterns and the ways you show up and wanting,
• 6:13
  hopefully, to grow out of old patterns and to grow out of old stories and to
• 6:19
  evolve so that your business can evolve,
• 6:22
  so that your relationships with your clients can evolve, so that you can run
• 6:26
  your business with ebbs and flows without emotions that are going to stop you.
• 6:32
  It doesn't mean you're going to go into robot mode. You're just going to have
• 6:37
  some awareness of those emotions and some tools so that when they come up,
• 6:42
  you don't have to follow them. You don't have to take them down the road.
• 6:46
  You don't have to fall into old patterns.
• 6:50
  And you can become a more stable business owner with a more stable business
• 6:55
  if you're looking at your emotions from that lens. So how do we do that?
• 7:01
  So if you notice that, I think procrastination is a very easy thing to notice.
• 7:06
  I think there's procrastination and there's overworking.
• 7:10
  And I think they come from actually a very similar place, insecurity and fear.
• 7:16
  So what you need to do if you're hopefully self-aware enough to see these patterns in yourself is.
• 7:24
  Take a moment, slow down, and ask yourself, what is the story I tell myself
• 7:33
  that is perpetuating that emotion?
• 7:37
  So if it's insecurity, let's call it insecurity about what you don't know, okay?
• 7:44
  So as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, there are things you don't know how to do,
• 7:48
  and sometimes those things might feel like
• 7:51
  blockers like I don't know
• 7:54
  how to drive cold leads into my
• 7:57
  business okay perfect question I don't know how to do it it's causing insecurity
• 8:02
  it's causing fear I'm stopping I'm slowing down I'm not doing things to drive
• 8:08
  leads into the business because I'm afraid that I don't know how to drive leads
• 8:13
  into the business it's like this ironic circle.
• 8:15
  So you have an insecurity about something you don't know how to do.
• 8:19
  And so that insecurity is keeping you frozen. It's keeping you stuck.
• 8:24
  There's a story in there. It may not be a fact.
• 8:28
  So look at the story tied to that emotion.
• 8:32
  Be honest with yourself about the story. And it might be a couple pages long
• 8:37
  if you were to write it down.
• 8:38
  And that's fine. Get the story out.
• 8:41
  Understand what you're telling yourself, all the negative things that you might
• 8:45
  be using as weapons against yourself. We all do it.
• 8:50
  And then separate the story from the fact. I have a business.
• 8:57
  I have clients. Those clients came from somewhere.
• 9:01
  Maybe I don't know how to drive cold leads, but I'm really good at keeping warm
• 9:06
  leads going or client retention.
• 9:10
  So look at what you're doing well.
• 9:12
  Double down on that. Instead of letting the thing you don't know how to do stop you.
• 9:18
  And then if you want to go out and get help with the thing that you don't know
• 9:21
  how to do, insecurity is not going to have you take that action, right?
• 9:27
  Insecurity means you're basically trying to hide the things you don't know how to do.
• 9:30
  But if you can look at that insecurity and understand where it's coming from
• 9:35
  and say, okay, I don't know how to drive cold leads into the business,
• 9:37
  but I do know how to run a business.
• 9:39
  I'm doing this well and that well and that well.
• 9:42
  From the emotion of knowing you're doing something right, you're going to open
• 9:47
  up the door to, if I feel like I need cold leads driven into my business,
• 9:51
  I'm going to go find support for that.
• 9:54
  So the emotion around that is like curiosity or interest in learning something
• 10:01
  new or an interest in meeting somebody new who might have a skill set that you want to leverage.
• 10:07
  So again, there are emotions that drive us forward and there are emotions that hold us back.
• 10:13
  And no judgment, emotions are emotions. We don't want them to...
• 10:19
  Drive our actions, but we
• 10:22
  want to look at them objectively and understand what story's connected to it
• 10:29
  so that we can separate that story from the facts so that we can take action
• 10:34
  despite an emotion that might normally hold us back, like fear or insecurity.
• 10:41
  So if you've experienced ebb in your business, which we all have.
• 10:47
  But even if you're going through a kind of a downward turn right now,
• 10:50
  if you're in a services business, January can either mean people are ready.
• 10:55
  Like if you run a gym, you're busy.
• 10:57
  But if you run a service where it's a luxury item or people don't see an immediate
• 11:03
  return on that investment, January might be slow.
• 11:07
  And what we need to do is understand how to keep taking action despite the circumstance.
• 11:15
  So rather than telling yourself a story, January is slow, and then making it
• 11:22
  mean something that it doesn't mean, it might just be seasonal.
• 11:26
  It might just be the state of the world.
• 11:30
  But the important thing in your business is that you keep moving forward.
• 11:36
  And I don't mean that to say you're driving, driving, driving,
• 11:39
  grinding, grinding, grinding.
• 11:40
  It's a balance. And you find that balance when you're not taking emotions all
• 11:45
  the way to the finish line.
• 11:46
  You're just noting there's an emotion there and not necessarily getting wrapped
• 11:51
  up in what it means for you or the story.
• 11:53
  You're just acknowledging that it's there. You're understanding there's a story
• 11:57
  connected to it, but you're staying focused on the facts and what you can do today.
• 12:02
  So if you're in a cycle of feeling insecure or feeling fearful or feeling like
• 12:08
  you're worried about where your business is, it's all valid.
• 12:13
  But rather than getting wrapped up in the story, find one thing that you can
• 12:20
  do today to keep momentum building.
• 12:24
  One thing. It can be as simple as an email to your network, or a LinkedIn post,
• 12:30
  or looking at events that are coming up that could be really beneficial to be to attend,
• 12:37
  and then registering for those events.
• 12:40
  Something simple, but something that keeps you moving forward.
• 12:44
  Because if you let those emotions slow you down, or you let them push you into
• 12:48
  overworking or procrastination.
• 12:51
  You're going to be in a cycle of feeling
• 12:55
  those emotions and those patterns coming back and back and back and getting
• 12:59
  you every time it's January and there's a normal slowdown in your business when
• 13:06
  you know about these normal slowdowns and these seasonal cycles of your business
• 13:10
  you can get ahead of them you can work.
• 13:14
  A little more in a December or in a February, which might be busier on either side of the January.
• 13:21
  So you can bolster your business. But again, if you're just scared and insecure,
• 13:26
  you're not going to be looking at the facts.
• 13:29
  The facts are every January is slow.
• 13:31
  The facts are every December is busy.
• 13:33
  Therefore, I'm just going to make up some of the income that I would lose in a January in December.
• 13:39
  Right now you're being solutions oriented. You're taking action.
• 13:43
  You're motivated by feelings other than fear.
• 13:47
  Fear is an emotion that keeps us safe.
• 13:50
  It's an emotion that sometimes can spur us forward. But if it's starting to
• 13:55
  slow you down, look at it.
• 13:57
  Give it a real hard look. Ask the why. Why do I feel this way?
• 14:02
  What's the story connected to it?
• 14:05
  Unpack that story. Get into it as deep as you need to so you understand it.
• 14:11
  Then look at the facts. Stories are not facts, and they feel real,
• 14:17
  and they feel like facts, but they're just ways for us to perpetuate,
• 14:21
  usually, feelings that are not great.
• 14:23
  So if you can just put a pause on those feelings, objectively look at the story.
• 14:30
  Understand what the facts are, double down on what's working,
• 14:34
  and find a way to take action.
• 14:36
  Despite the emotions that may be coming up, you're going to be at a much better
• 14:41
  position in your business.
• 14:44
  Emotions should not be the backbone of your business. If you're using emotional
• 14:49
  language, be careful about that.
• 14:51
  Like, if your team's delivering work and you're using words like,
• 14:55
  that makes me sad, or that makes me.
• 14:59
  Frustrated, just be careful where you're inserting emotions,
• 15:04
  where it may be better to be a little more objective.
• 15:08
  And I'm not saying take the human element out of it. We all have emotions,
• 15:12
  but we don't need to follow them all the way through and let them basically take over.
• 15:18
  We want to be intentional.
• 15:20
  We want to be aware. We want to understand our patterns. And we're not perfect. We're not perfect.
• 15:27
  But we want to be reflective. We want to stay open. We want to stay collaborative.
• 15:33
  We want to stay listening.
• 15:35
  And sometimes those emotions might cut off those skills and ways of showing
• 15:42
  up that are very beneficial to our business,
• 15:45
  very beneficial to our teams, and keep us in a much more grounded place where
• 15:52
  we can be running our business from a place that doesn't feel.
• 15:56
  Like a grind that doesn't feel like it's hurting us.
• 16:01
  So I hope that's helpful. These are some funky times right now in the world.
• 16:09
  So if you can find these ways to stay a little bit more grounded to understand
• 16:14
  where these emotions are coming from, it's going to help in a variety of ways.
• 16:20
  So if you are a business owner who is interested in having more community,
• 16:27
  I have a wonderful community that I would love for you to join.
• 16:32
  It's called the Aligned Growth Collective.
• 16:36
  This is for entrepreneurs and business owners who are not into growth for growth's
• 16:42
  sake, who are not just trying to drive profit for profit's sake,
• 16:47
  but they want to have a sustainable,
• 16:49
  purpose-led, impactful business
• 16:52
  that is also creating that benefit of more money to pay people better,
• 17:00
  to be able to be philanthropic, to be able to have more momentum in the business, more investment.
• 17:06
  Gives me more investment, more investment in the business.
• 17:11
  So if you are an entrepreneur or a business owner that is looking for community,
• 17:16
  that's looking for some coaching,
• 17:18
  that's looking for a lower tier spend to see big, big growth and transformation
• 17:26
  in your business, I would love for you to join the Aligned Growth Collective.
• 17:31
  It is a really nice way to share information with other entrepreneurs, to network,
• 17:39
  to have coaching time with me, and also have a place where you can have a thought
• 17:47
  partner, throw things around with someone, and see big growth and transition in your business.
• 17:53
  Not for the sake of growth, not for the sake of profit, for profit's sake,
• 17:58
  but because you want to know what it feels like to get yourself to the next
• 18:01
  level, to really fulfill your full potential,
• 18:05
  in this business, to have more revenue and profit so that you can put it back
• 18:11
  into the business, so that you can put it back into your teams,
• 18:13
  and so that you can put it back into the community.
• 18:15
  So go to practica.consulting.agc and you can learn more.
• 18:25
  So I will talk to you next week.