Grow With Soul Ep. 22: Lessons Learned In The First Full Year Of My Business
Although this episode is going to have a slight round up feel to it, it’s definitely going to have something useful for you whenever you’re listening. As 2018 is drawing to a close, I thought that I would share with you some lessons that I’ve learnt in the past year, which happens to have also been my first full year self-employed and running my business. So whether you're starting out, re-starting or just slogging away, I hope this episode can serve as some useful tips or reminders to help you grow with soul.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
Some more time spent planning and not so ‘in it’ would have been useful
There is no reason why you can’t other than what you tell yourself
It’s nothing to do with you
Investigate everything
Accept the way you work and lean into that
You’ve got to ask for what you want
Connect to a personal why to make sure you’re doing your most fulfilling work
You need a life
Tell yourself you’re good and celebrate
Links and resources I discuss:
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 22 of Grow with Soul. If you’re listening to this at the time it goes out, then Happy New Year! And if you’re listening sometime in the future then happy…whatever is appropriate! Although this episode is going to have a slight roundup feel to it, it’s definitely going to have something useful for you whenever you’re listening to it as well. As 2018 is drawing to a close, I thought that I would share with you some lessons that I’ve learned from the past year which also happens to have been my first full year self employed and running my business. Do bear with me as (I’m sure you can hear my voice) I’m a little bit under the weather, but I really wanted to get this episode out to you, as I’ve been thinking about it as part of this end of year review, I really feel like there are some good lessons in here that might save you some heartache or some complications down the line. So, let’s get stuck in.
LESSON 1 – SPEND MORE TIME PLANNING AND NOT SO ‘IN IT’
At the end of each year, I seem to have got out of control. Both this year and last year when I was working in the business, it definitely got to November/December and I was really up against it. I didn’t have a grasp of what was going on, and have ended both 2017 and 2018 really feeling like I needed to regain control over things. Which is ironic, because at the end of last year I set my 2018 word of the year as ‘steer’, because I really felt that I needed that directive approach and to be able to regain control and not feel the same way in 12 months time, which I ended up doing anyway. But looking back, while I think steer was a useful word, I was not steering against the tide by really just with where it was taking me. Although I felt like I was making good strides and I was doing the right things, I was just kind of following a preset course rather than making my own.
I always thought I was a good planner and I planned a lot, but when I think back over the year and I definitely spent a lot of time thinking what to do each week and planning on that more zoomed in level, but a lot more top level thinking was necessary. And particularly just giving myself that time to really question what I was doing, and really being the CEO of my business, and I think I thought I was, because I was reviewing what I was doing every week and looking at plans and things like that but I didn’t ask the big questions like ‘am I doing work that’s really aligned with what I want out of this?’ and ‘how am I feeling about my work more generally, does this feel right and if it doesn’t, why not?’ and didn’t dig into that top level stuff or give myself the space to dig into it. I thought I was just planning my weeks and reviewing my weeks and that was good, but it was really taking me in a direction that I didn’t want to go to, and that’s something that I’ve discovered at the end of the year as I’ve been doing this reviewing process, so that’s definitely something that I want to take into next year; that time spent just thinking, asking questions, sitting with it, is going to be time really well spent to stop you going with the flow of the business.
A quote I heard on a podcast recently was ‘am I in control of the business or is the business in control of you?’ and the business for me has definitely been in control of me for most of this year, so that’s something that I want to turn around and take back the power.
LESSON 2 – THAT THERE IS NO REASON WHY YOU CAN’T DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOU TELL YOURSELF
So I have a post on the blog which is a letter to people who think that that’s not for people like me, because that is something that I’ve really overcome this year, well, really realised this year and an ongoing process of overcoming it. If this is something that you really feel and really resonates with you, I’d recommend checking out that blog post. So for me this year has been really full of realisations of how I really limit myself with stories like ‘well, that’s amazing for her but I could never do that’, and ‘oh, I would love to but that’s just not for people like me, I can’t, I can’t do that.’ A big one of that was at the beginning of the year where there were some discussions with Sara Tasker talking about the amount of money that she had earned in a year. And I know that was quite triggering for some people, but for me it very much awoke this realisation, because it was something that I looked at and I thought wow, that’s insane, that’s amazing but I couldn’t do that, that’s not for me. And for the first time ever, the question ‘why?’ popped into my head. Like, why can’t that be for you? And I didn’t have an answer. And that was really where the ball started rolling was that I realised that all these stories, all these reasons why I couldn’t do something or shouldn’t do something, they’re all from inside myself, and that there were no limits outside of that, there’s no boss, there’s no nothing saying you can’t do this, you can’t do this, this is as far as you can go, the only limits were the ones I was putting on myself.
I still have to constantly question, it’s constantly something that comes up and you have to push down, but being really conscious that I limit myself was very freeing to my ambition this year, because all of a sudden everything was an option, and that being able to choose what I wanted and knowing that it was all in my power was a very empowering thing to experience and to realise.
So really dig into what’s stopping you from getting what you want. When you see something that you want, what is the thought in your head that is limiting you and telling you that you can’t, and actually is that a true story? Or is that something you can investigate further and begin to tell it it’s role. It’s not the truth, and you can do it.
LESSON 3 – IT’S NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU
This has quite possibly been my mantra this year, and has come out of a couple of conversations with my friend Jessica who I have the podcast with, The Little Chapters, which you might be interested in listening to, so it has kind of developed out of several conversations. And there’s a couple of parts to it.
One is that no one cares about what you’re doing because they’re too busy caring about themselves. A lot of us feel so paralysed by the ‘but what will people think?’ question and worrying about everybody looking at us and judging us, but nobody is, because they’re all worrying about themselves to. Think about yourself; you’re not watching every person’s step or misstep and judging them and thinking ‘oh god, what are they doing’, because you’re worrying about yourself and what everybody else is thinking. So that should be a very freeing realisation, that nobody’s looking at you as much as you think they are, everybody’s just worrying about themselves and what somebody else can do for them, so that’s all you have to worry about too. You can test something out and if it doesn’t work nobody will really notice and nobody will really care, but also they’re not judging you, they want to know what you can do for them if you’re thinking about your customers. So just really get into their shoes and into their head and what can you do for them and meet them at that juncture.
The other part of it not being to do with you is around the negativity – so if you get a negative comment or reaction to something, then that’s not anything to do with you either. It’s always about them and how they want to be seen and heard in the world, or something that’s troubling them that they want to take out onto somebody else and reflect onto somebody else.
For example, perhaps somebody has a problem with a product that you’ve brought out or they don’t like a take that you had in a podcast. Rather than go straight into ‘oh god I’m so wrong, ugh’, actually think about where that might be coming from for them. Maybe it’s a real flash point for them? Maybe they are feeling politically enthused, and want to make a point about something but actually it’s not about you it’s about them wanting to make a point, it’s about them wanting to feel heard and to make a difference?
Learning to turn this around and be truly empathetic and objective about why somebody is behaving in a certain way has really helped me avoid a lot of stress and a lot of hand wringing this year because I’m about to say ‘that’s not mine, that’s yours, and I’m not going to take that on’. You need to be able to say ‘actually that’s mine’ if something I’ve done has been misworded and has been done in the wrong way then you have to accept that, but if you’re able to say ‘right, you are projecting something onto me here which was absolutely not in the context of what I said or that I wrote’, that’s been a very useful tool for me this year and has stopped me going down some dark rabbit holes.
LESSON 4 – INVESTIGATE EVERYTHING
You can’t always trust your first feelings on something and you need to investigate it. I’m a big believer in listening to your gut and trusting your intuition; I’ve run this business quite intuitively this year, but we can’t always trust that negative self-talk. Well, we can’t ever trust it, but very often that will be the first reaction.
If you do get a negative comment, or even something like a post on Instagram doesn’t perform well, our first instinct and feeling is to really beat ourselves up about it and think ‘well, I’m the worst person ever, I shouldn’t be doing this, I’ve got no talent, who do I think I am to do this’ and so we can’t trust that. You can’t trust that feeling, and you can’t allow that to take over. So rather than follow that self destructive path, investigate it. Investigate the feeling itself; why am I feeling like this? What is the root? What is the cause that this is the symptom of? If it’s this post and the thought that I’m talentless, well, why am I talentless? What is this root cause, is it because actually I know this wasn’t my very best work and I haven’t been giving enough time to my photography, and that’s actually the problem? I know it wasn’t my best work, I put it up anyway, and I need to devote more time to the photography part of it. So what other reasons are there other than that negative self-talk that could explain that feeling?
On top of that, once you’ve investigated the feeling, investigate the work itself to make it better. So with the photo example, how would you shoot this differently? If I’ve identified this post as one that bombed, but I’m not making it about myself, what can I see in that post that maybe made it not a great performer like I wanted it to be? Maybe it’s too close in, and it doesn’t perform as well as a thumbnail, and I should have taken a few steps back to improve it. Maybe I didn’t include a question in the caption which would have helped the engagement, maybe the edit was a bit off. You’ll always be able to find the answers in the work, so think about how you do it differently, and then do so, so that you can prove to yourself that it’s not you being a talentless idiot, it’s actually just a small misstep that you made and that you can correct. And you can always post the improved version later on.
LESSON 5 – ACCEPT THE WAY THAT YOU WORK AND LEAN INTO THAT
I always thought that I was a really, really thorough worker, and a real perfectionist, until I started my business. Actually, I am a perfectionist, but my perfectionist tendencies show up more as competitiveness rather than in the work that I do. I very much think ‘if I can’t be the best then I won’t even try’, which I’m not saying is the best way to be, it’s just a fact that I’ve learnt this year about myself, and that I much prefer working within my comfort zone where I know that I can compete at the level that is necessary, which as I say, isn’t necessarily healthy, but it’s a lesson I’ve learned about myself.
But that means that what I thought I was, which was more thorough, isn’t the case. I’ve found that in spite of that perfectionism, I actually am quite last minute, and not very thorough about things. I have finished articles on the day of the deadline, and I’ve pushed things really close, and I’ve been like ‘I’m not really going to learn more about how to use my camera because how I use it is fine, and I’m just going to do that’ so that was something that I felt quite bad about for a long time, I didn’t want to be that person that was leaving things ‘til the last minute and couldn’t be bothered to look up YouTube tutorials on things. But I just decided to accept it, because I couldn’t change it, and why was I making myself feel awful for something that I couldn’t change and that was still getting stuff done, just not in the way I had expected it to?
In accepting it, you give yourself a fighting chance to work better within those limits. So rather than trying to make myself do something four weeks before the deadline which I know I’m never going to do, I just make it easier for myself with my style of working. When I know when the deadline is, I take on less stuff that week, I make sure I’ve cleared the calendar a bit, I make sure there’s food in the house that I can just wang in the oven because I’ll be working on things.
So it’s really just making it easy for myself when I know that I’m going to be pushing it right up to the deadline and to not allow myself to get too stressed or out of control with things. Really accepting that working method and putting things in place that means that it’s as efficient and effective as possible.
LESSON 6 – YOU’VE GOT TO ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT
As I mentioned in the How to Get Stuff Done episode, the difference between the people who do and don’t get what they want is that the people who do do the work to get there. So that’s not just doing the work, that’s asking for what they want as well, because as we’ve discussed, nobody’s thinking about you, nobody is trying to think about what amazing, great thing they can do to land in your lap, they are wanting to find their own thing to land in their lap. So you have got to ask for it if you really want it.
That’s something that I’ve done this year in terms of selling my progress and also like the Blogosphere award that I won, I asked people to vote for me, I pitched for things, I asked to be on Hashtag Authentic. So if you want it, you’ve got to ask for it, and that’s something, interestingly, that came up in my Smoke Signals course this year, which is my course about outreach and pitches, is that some people didn’t actually realise that people pitched for their coverage. They thought that magazines and podcast hosts just found them and asked them to be on. Which, of course, does happen if you reach a certain level, or you have a lot of luck and good timing, but 9 times out of 10 that’s not going to happen, because it takes luck and timing. So if you really want something, you’ve got to make it happen; it’s always in your power. No-one else is looking out for you, you’ve got to do it. If you want something, ask for it, if you want to connect with someone, send them a message, don’t skirt around liking their pictures, you’ve got to actually get in there and pitch for things, make contacts, ask for what you want.
LESSON 7 – CONNECT TO A PERSONAL ‘WHY’ TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE DOING YOUR MOST FULFILLING WORK.
This has been a very recent lesson for me, and one that I’m still working through the practical side of, and I posted about it in more detail on the blog too.
What I really discovered recently is that the reason that I felt, at times, out of sync and out of control this year is because I hadn’t worked out my personal ‘why’, or my personal ‘why’ was out of date. When I very first started the business, the driving force for me was to just make it work, and make it work in whatever way that took. I did that, but I never updated what that personal ‘why’ was. I was still 6, 9, 12 months in, working from a place of…I don’t want to say desperation, but kind of desperation, and hadn’t upgraded that personal driver with the reality of the business. And so I’d been really focused on the business ‘why’, the front facing ‘why’ of ‘grow with soul in your work and life’ and making sure that I was providing that to people, but I hadn’t actually thought about what was I getting out of it. What was the value for me? Where was the fulfilment for me? And I was focused so much, I think, on the value for others that I lost the value for myself, which meant that the value for others started to slip because I wasn’t feeling so fulfilled.
What I realised was that when you know what your personal ‘why’ is, that defines how you work on and communicate your business why. ‘Grow with soul in your work and life’ is my business ‘why’ and my personal ‘why’ was just make it work however you need to make it work which meant that obviously the way that I did that was coaching and courses and things like that, because that was the most obvious way to do it. But then when I actually sat down and thought ‘okay well what is important to me?’ I kind of dug out that the first thing that came to mind was that I want to share ideas, I want variety in my work, I want to have space to explore life and have new ideas. When I worked all that out, I realised the how was maybe not entirely right. Whereas coaching and courses are important as part of that variety, maybe I need to make writing more of a focus, podcasting and content creation in order to really fulfil that sharing ideas part of what drives me.
As I say, this is something that I’m still really working out and how it all fits together practically but I think that this year I’ve been way too focused on the business ‘why ‘and in providing value and service for others and I’ve lost myself in the process. Without you and yourself and what you’re getting out of it, there’s no life or soul, there’s no experimentation, excitement, difference, uniqueness. To really hone in on what you want out of it, what fulfils you is going to make you do the best work, whatever the work ends up being.
LESSON 8 – YOU NEED A LIFE
I’ve been asked the ‘what’s it all for?’ question this year and haven’t been able to answer it really. I’ve gone all in on the business but really to the detriment to any kind of life outside of it. So including the basics of just feeding myself, having a house that’s not covered in laundry and dust and all that kind of thing. I mean, there’s been times where my treat for the day was having a shower, because I’ve been so tunnel visioned on what I’ve been doing for the business.
Because the blog started out as my hobby and my passion project, it’s just a vacuum behind it from when it became my business that I haven’t filled it with anything that makes up life and living. Although I’ve got personal goals going forward about where we want our life to go, there’s nothing in the here and now, and I have felt a lot of times this year that I’ve really been treading water and I’m just in this limbo period before we’ve saved up enough money to buy a house or whatever. Realising that there has to be life in life and that there has to be something here and now that makes it all worth it, so that it’s not just the business itself in the pursuit of success, whatever that means in that moment, it has to have something outside of it.
LESSON 9 – TELL YOURSELF YOU’RE GOOD AND CELEBRATE YOUR WINS
I’ve been working through Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook, which I would highly recommend, but I did find it very difficult to think of, and write down, accomplishments, or things that I was proud of, or things that I’d embraced. I obviously had lots of answers for challenges, and things I was unhappy with, and what had been big learnings for me, but I did get there in the end, and actually realised how powerful it is to tell yourself that you’re good at what you do. And what the workbook forced me to do was not only to write it down, but to write down the evidence that makes it objectively true that you’re good at what you do. We can always twist things and say ‘well, that’s not quite what I wanted it to be’ or ‘I hoped I’d do more’, but when you have to write down the proof that you’ve achieved good stuff and you’ve done great work and that you’re good, it makes it a lot harder to tell yourself those negative stories.
Spend time telling yourself that you’re good at what you do, and also celebrate your wins and I know this is one that everybody says, but again, in Susannah’s workbook, it asked you to say how you celebrated things this year and I could only think of one thing. And then all of these other things that I’d accomplished, I hadn’t celebrated at all, apart from ‘have lunch today’, or ‘go and shower to celebrate’.
Actually, Dan and I had a celebration day in April, so it was early on in the year, to celebrate the first quarter and we went to stay and had an amazing dinner at a Michelin star restaurant, and that’s definitely, for both of us, the best day of the year in 2018. We both hold it in such high regard and have such great memories of it that it made me realise ‘god, imagine if we’d had loads of those this year’. It does make a difference and I think that when we’re working for ourselves, we should be the best boss we’ve ever had, otherwise what’s the point if you’re not going out of your way to pat yourself on the back and to celebrate and to give yourself a treat? Literally, what is the point? That’s a kind of nice end point; tell yourself that you’re good and celebrate it and be nice to yourself.
Those are my lessons from 2018, the first full year of my business.