I was feeling guilty. I had purchased Business By Design (BBD) in April 2020 and had done nothing. When COVID and the lockdown had shut down my face to face herbal medicine practice, I had tried to do what all those ‘experts’ on instagram were advising. Learn something new, pivot, go online, pivot, pivot, pivot. So I bought BBD, determined to do just that. I had made an online course from one of my weekend workshops but I was paralysed. I was missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle. The missing piece was not about what to do, it was about who do I need to be in order to do the things that will deliver my outcome. My priorities were misaligned. Instead of Be Do Have I was Do Have Be.
What you do won’t get you unstuck
Whenever I feel myself getting stuck, I go back to what I know. For me that is working in corporate, using my Chartered Accountant and high performance coaching skills to lead finance teams. So I got myself a finance contract leading the finance team, closing out the books, working with the auditors, troubleshooting and fixing things. I paused my herbal medicine practice until lockdown ended and then took on no more than 5 patients a month. The contract paid well so my reptilian brain calmed down and things began to sink into a new normal. The finance work was intellectually stimulating but it didn’t feed my soul. And while I could blame COVID for shutting down a key part of my practice, deep down I knew, it was me not the circumstance I found myself in. I wasn’t put on this Earth to survive, I am here to thrive.
It’s August 2020, I read an email from James Wedmore (I still haven’t started BBD) talking about this guy who had helped him grow his business from $250k to $8m. Well I thought, I don’t need $8m but $250k would be nice. That guy was Jim Fortin. I clicked the link and showed up for his free training.
Oh!
Your reptilian brain is very good at keeping you safe but there’s a price
The trade off for safety is you feel as though a piece of you is dying day by day. And that feeling of safety is just an illusion anyway. I realised I was operating from: when I save enough money, I’ll leave my job. Then I’ll be able to do the things I need to do to grow my business. I don’t want to grow my business before that time because I won’t have the time or energy to keep up. So, until then, I’ll keep hustling on the side, getting by with a couple of patients a week.
Here’s what I learned through TOP about that story. Setting my limit at two patients a week was enough to tell my reptilian brain I was a herbalist. It was low enough to not kick start my survival instinct. You know that anxious feeling you get when you’re about to step outside of your comfort zone. The income generated from my envisioned business set up was small enough so I didn’t get to leave my job. Comfy reptilian brain plays a trick so sneaky, I didn’t even notice it.
You won’t grow a side hustle
Keeping that side hustle a side hustle instead of making it front and centre was me signalling to the universe to keep it small rather than taking that leap of faith, and nurturing it into being the vehicle it was always meant to be. The one where I get to make a difference; helping people to be healthy and happy and I grow into being more so I can serve more.
I discovered I was letting my circumstances determine my path rather than being the powerful me who takes responsibility and creates my life. It’s was this thinking that was keeping me in the same circular reference.
Continuously going back to accounting work when I thought things were getting tough was me operating from the identity of successful corporate woman. But I yearned to be the entrepreneurial boss babe helping people discover what really makes them happy.
Jim’s free training started this journey. Working with my mentor, Jim Fortin, is continuing this journey. So much so that I signed up for another round of TCP! And yes,
- I take action every single day
- My life is no longer determined by circumstance. Everything is a choice
- My life provides me with new opportunities to embrace being the entrepreneurial boss babe helping others to be happy and healthy
In case you’re curious, BBD is a fabulous course. James takes you step by step through the tactics to build a successful business. But when it comes to being successful in business, your entrepreneurial identity is everything.
Check out Jim’s free training on Be Do Have by clicking here.
Click here to Be Do Have