Entrepreneurs create businesses out of nothing. So often we wrap up our identities in our business performance.
I was so stuck on the concept for years that if my business was failing, I felt like I was a failure, or that something was wrong with me. I felt like if I wasn’t getting enough clients, or if I wasn’t hitting the revenue goals, something was wrong with me personally.
A lot of that comes from childhood trauma or experiences that our brain latches on as “truth”, and sets a precedence for any future experiences. It wires us to think any failure is a personal criticism of our self concept.
This turns us into performance machines where we judge our success on tasks and results. Left unchecked it can lead to burnout and breakdown because we are not machines.
We take that junk in our trunk from the past and we load up our car. The problem is it will slow down your progress, until you come to a screaming halt.
We spend years trying all the “things” because everyone else says we need to be doing all the things. However, if you’re not congruent with your identity, and who God made you to be, you will feel inauthentic.
So my approach is I don’t believe in quick fixes. There is no instant quick button because growth takes time. If it took you many years to get stuck, it’s gonna take you a hot minute to get out.
The good news is there is a process to getting unstuck and rewiring your brain to function at it’s prime.
If you want to take the process deeper, consider joining my coaching program Unstick Your Mind.
TRANSCRIPT
The Cost of High Performance
Welcome to the unstick, your mind podcast on Mimika TV, get ready to get unstuck align with your true purpose and unlock your God. Given potential for, we are an entrepreneur at hearts.
I’ve always been creative, visionary, always coming up, you know, early adopter loved the idea of video. I actually was trained as a TV broadcaster and you know, how to speak and, on TV got into photography, as usual I, everything that’s of interest to me has to be turned into some kind of business. So I’m always like, what’s the next idea? Right? So talking about pivots and turns and, readjustments and branding makeovers, right? I have been through at least four or five of those, um, throughout the sort of 25 years, I’ve been an entrepreneur. But what I had realized over those years is I’ve always been in pursuit of business in the next big idea and of creating something from nothing, because that’s what us entrepreneurs love to do.
Right? We create us at heart. We love to be able to make something that’s in our minds, eye and along the lines we encounter life stresses. And, but as you get a little older and I’ll say probably when I hit my forties, I was like, okay, middle life crisis going on here, lady, girlfriend, we can’t keep doing this in this pace, trying to do things to impress other people. Cuz my drug of choice was work, being a workaholic people, pleasing perfectionism. So, and I have, you know, subsequently given my membership to control freaks anonymous up. And since then it’s been so much more fun and throughout that process, you know, I’d realized like I had always been doing the things that were either expected of me or opportunities that I thought looked like good business opportunities. But for the longest time I had this internal conflict of not really pursuing what really I felt drawn to do that, that sense of purpose.
And the thing is, you know, it doesn’t matter how much money you make, if you are not in line. And you know, as a Christian faith outcome, that’s part of who I am and who my clients are because our faith is a very important part of our makeup and our alignment. Like some people like to call it the universe. I like to say God of the universe, like to give him credits what credits do. So for me having that internal compass of being aligned with my mind and my emotions and my spirit is just how I live my life. And for the longest time I was having this internal conflict of always like, I would do that, but I always felt like something was missing. Like there was something part of doing the things that didn’t really feel congruent to me. So life teaches us license, right?
And of course I didn’t see the slow down and the speed bumps. I was just ramming myself over them until I hit the wall. Now I don’t advise anyone else does that just in pursuits of being so focused on the end goal, we kind of forget where we are and we forget sight of the Greek, the greater purpose of why are we doing this in the first place? So I got smacked with the big fat lesson, shut down my business for like a year and a half. Just took time to heal. I journal a lot, so I’ve, I’ve written eight books and through the process of journaling, I ended up writing two other books of my own process and thought processes and um, that sort of inner healing process. And I also, I came across coaching and I just love the idea.
And you know, a lot of what I have been doing has been coaching because I’ve been branding and marketing strategist for about eight years. I had my own marketing agency, helping people and brands, author, speakers, entrepreneurs create new brands, new businesses, new ideas, you know, market fit and all the things, the email funnels and the marketing, the social media and all that. But what I’d realized I’d spent so many years building other people’s visions and other people’s brands that I was crying inside of. Like, I know I have something to say, I know there’s something important that I need to do in this world other than just get the next paycheck for, or the next client or hustle for the next job. Right. And once I’d realized and given myself time to sort of stop and think, and really look inside and say, what is it that I really want?
The Cost of High Performance
Like where do I wanna be in five or 10 years time? Cause clearly what I was doing, wasn’t working. And according to Einstein, the last time I checked, he called that insanity, trying to do the same thing, expecting a different result. So I was like, okay, time to sort of take a pause and to really do the inner work, the deep healing that needs to be done. So I stopped bringing the junk in my trunk from the past into every relationship, every business model. And I’d realized I’d had four or five businesses and they all seemed to follow a pattern because my mindset was a hot mess. So how it wasn’t necessarily there was the opportunities were bad. It’s how I approached them in my mind and approach to how I behaved patterns of behavior habits I had established. And, you know, I had to really take the step back and start to do the work that needed to be done in order to change my trajectory, to get in touch with who I really am.
And of course, you know, finding my faith and understanding, you know, having a faith crisis didn’t help, but it made me realign myself as to the importance of why I do what I do. So I went back to school and I got re-certified as a coach, I am a total neuroscience geek. I love to learn how the brain works. And I also come from a sports background cuz I’m a competitive adult figure skater, which I only learned to skate at 31. So I improve, you can teach an old dog new tricks and I’ve been, Brady’s basically being my own Guinea pig of, okay, I have this new way of doing things. How do I overcome my muscle memory? How do I, even though I don’t feel like this or this doesn’t feel natural to me or doesn’t feel like it’s coming easy. How do I, how do I learn the skill?
How do I, become a better thinker? How do I look at things? And stop and address the blind spots that clearly everybody else could see but me? So this whole process, over the last sort of five, six years, I’ve just really developing and honing my own style of coaching. And I resonate very much with Christian women, especially because us women, especially like women entrepreneurs, I have to juggle a lot that there isn’t, it often isn’t time for us to take time off. Like we almost feel like we always on the hamster wheel and I always described it as being pushed from behind. Like even though I would love to take a pause, I feel like I just cannot stop moving cuz I will fall over. And um, obviously the environment in the world we’ve lived in the last couple of years has definitely shifted a lot of people’s mindsets around what truly matters, which I think is great.
So I’m excited about the opportunities and now I’m just super excited. I mean, to me, it’s the most important work I’ve ever done dealing and helping people transform their lives, their relationships, their, their businesses, their bank balances, their, their futures. I mean, nothing. It can be more important than helping somebody else achieve what they wanna achieve by doing the things that we feel light us up the most. You can only help people who want to be helped. So usually we have to come to some form of awareness that just says, you know, what, what I was doing and working, I can no longer afford to be in denial. I need to change what I’m doing. And usually it encompasses some kind of shift or like some of my clients have gone through a divorce. Some of them have had a business failure.
Some of them have, you know, even a midlife crisis. Some of them have had children who leave home and realize, you know, I’ve put my life on hold and I’ve always wanted to do this. I work well and a lot of them are just working professional Christian woman, um, you know, in running their own businesses, just feeling like I just can’t do it anymore. Like literally, I mean, not all of them, a lot of them are on the point of burnout because women especially have had it hard and having to juggle family and relationships and business, it’s like, you never can switch off. Right? So a lot of the time it’s like and a lot of the entrepreneurs I work with, they realize that I keep doing something, but it’s not working. I’m frustrated. Like why is this not working?
The Cost of High Performance
Susie Q down the road has done the same thing, but it works for her, but it’s not working for me. And usually a very indicating symptom is they’re constantly buying courses, buying the next hack, looking for the next quick fix. Or they’re like, okay, I need to do this. Oh, I need to do this. Oh, so and so, and they’re like, no, all over the place, there’s, they’re kind of like, they need to find the calm. And usually they realize that they need outside help and they need it now because it’s becomes pressing. It’s urgent. It’s affecting their life, their bank balance like often, like in my coaching, this is even before I was called myself a coach. I’d always say business problems are personal problems in disguise. We need to look under the hood of the car. You can try and put your foot on the, on the gas pedal and push and have it flat and try and push as much pressure.
But if you don’t have the rights things, if the fan belt’s broken, or if you need more oil or if you’ve run out of gas, hello, you’re not gonna go anywhere. And a lot of the time, my whole brand is called unstuck. Your mind, they, the, the most common denominator is they feel stuck. They’re not moving forward. They’re trying things they’ve done before, which are not working. They, they feel frustrated with the lack of progress. They either feel rushed, but not moving. So it’s kind of like that feeling of, I don’t know what to do next. I’ve clearly what I’m doing. Isn’t working and I need a different approach. So it’s kind of like, we need to take the car, get it unstuck, get it out off the road, take it to the garage, do a little tinkering under the hood, get it fixed, get some retirees, you know, new, fix it and get it before we can get you back on the road because you can’t go anywhere in an empty gas tank.
And you certainly can’t go on a blow a head gasket once you blow that that’s even worse. And a lot of them are, you know, faith based where they feel. They have to be congruent with who they are like trying to pretend to be something you’re not is like, you literally cannot keep up appearances and eventually something’s gotta give. So that’s where I’m here. I have the several boxes of Kleenex and tissues, and we do a lot of crying, a lot of like, okay, you know, physical exercises, you know, moving the body, um, and really just spending the time to dig deep and see let’s find the problem so we can fix it. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, you can’t be something you’re not, you can try, but wearing masks is exhausting. So we really need to get to the crux of who you are.
And a lot of the time, and I find this, especially with entrepreneurs because you’re creating something out of nothing. It’s it’s of you. A lot of the time we are, we wrap up our identities with our business performance, like for yours. I was so stuck on that. If my business was failing, I was of failure or I was, something was wrong with me. I felt like if I wasn’t getting clients or I wasn’t built hitting the revenue goals I had, then this must be something wrong with me. Like I’m unbroken, something’s wrong. Right? And a lot of that comes back from like childhood trauma or experiences where, you know, we can go, there’s so many layers, you know, about how the brain works. And that’s what I love about neurosciences unpacking, why we react these way, this way. But at the end of the day, if you’re not congruent with your identity and, and how, what I believe God made you to be and who you are from a, you know, when you were little and usually when you were five years, old’s a good indication of who you truly are because, you know, that’s, before we become aware of what people think of us, we’re like, I mean, for me, hairbrush, standing on the coffee table in the mirror, you know, rocking it out to.
I didn’t care what people thought. And then of course you get to eight, nine and 10. You’re like, oh gosh, what am I gonna say? You know, we like start putting on all the masks and we start pretending to be so, and oftentimes, you know, when you are in that carefree, childlike, Wanda stage where everything’s, Ooh, this is fun. And Ooh, this is amazing. We have that enthusiasm for life. And along the way, unfortunately, especially for those of us, who’ve been through traumatic experiences or, you know, had bad childhoods or didn’t have the best upbringing or good modeling of parenting behaviors. We take that junk with us that we’ve had in our, and we put it in the trunk of our car and the more we collect, the slower we go. And eventually the junk is in that trunk is gonna start screaming at you.
The Cost of High Performance
That it’s gonna be overflowing unless we get rid of it and deal with it. So my approach is it isn’t just, I don’t believe in quick fixes. I don’t believe in just instant. There is no instant growth takes time. I mean, if it took you these many years to get stuck, it’s gonna take you a hot minute to get out and it’s not gonna take as long, but just like a training program. If you go to the gym, when you first start, everyone knows you feel terrible, you feel stiff. Like you do something and you’re gosh, I’m hurting for the next few days. And why am I not seeing any results? Why is the weight not dropping as quick as I have I want to see it, but just like that, the approach to what I call mental wellness is working through retraining, your brain, using, you know, neuroscience and methods as well as getting you in tune with who you are and your purpose and who God made you to be.
And, and really a lot of that, like that’s was a lot of the time what I do with my, my clients is, and it’s what I would do when I was a branding. Strategist realize is like, who are you? And who do you wanna show up as so often a symptom is, yeah, I wanna have this logo. And I wanna look like, so and so, and have those Brandy colors. Cause this is the, this is how I want to come across. I’m like, well, if you are not this high powered woman, who’s like, you know, really like got that sort of like masculine energy, but you are really sweet and you like, you shine. There’s a, there’s a disconnect and the audience can tell. And that’s part of the thing is, is we can’t pretend to be something. People can read body language so they can see things.
And part of that is just stripping off the layers. Let’s pretend get rid of, like I say, forget what you’ve learned and believe me, I did my marketing for 20 years and I have had to detox from a whole bunch of mass marketing lessons and methods that simply don’t work. You can’t trick people into believing you, you can’t, there isn’t some magic hack that you just quickly plug in or some app that you just quickly or a pill that you just pop that is gonna magically fix everything. The end of the day, it takes time and you just have to do the work. You do have to do building muscle, your mental muscle, just like at the gym. You build up, you start slow. You eventually you get stronger. And as you use more resistance, you get, you build a muscle. No one goes from zero to hero.
That’s just impossible. So it’s the process. And that’s what I encourage people is just embrace the process and celebrate growth because I have a thing I’m not necessarily big on goals. Like I understand you, you need to have goals to have a sort of like direction of where you wanna go, but I’m more about growth goals. How can we celebrate the, the wins along the way? Because women are notoriously bad at this. I don’t know if, I’m the same way I used to be like, I have this list of like 20 things. And if I didn’t get all 20 done in a day, I’d be like, oh, you’re so terrible. I can’t believe you. But now I’m like, you know, I’m actually just gonna do one. I’m just gonna do one. And if I do, I’m gonna celebrate and have a huge party because I actually achieved something.
And that sense of accomplishment in achieving something is far more valuable. And it’s in my approach. What I teach is you have to slow down to speed up. Like you have to take time to fix what’s broken before you can put pedal in the middle and get up to speed. You know, you can’t take a little broken down trunk and try to compete in the, if formula oneyou need the right vehicle to get you there. So part of what I think is important as entrepreneurs is to really allow yourself time to, to do the work and to realize it really starts with me and from a branding and a business and positioning perspective. It’s who you want to be and how you can show up in the world being authentically you, then it doesn’t feel like work just feels normal coming to a point where you feel like you are congruent with yourself is a process.
And sometimes it can be a painful process cuz we have to come to realization and be honest with ourselves to realize that maybe we haven’t been really true to how we feel because we are worried about what people think. Now, the, the concern for how we appear online, especially now with social media and everyone’s like gotta have the brand, gotta have the brand and the word brand itself con come normally conjures up an idea of a brand and a logo and how you look and appear. But at the end of the day, you know, we try on different brands and based on how we are conditioned or how we’ve been trained, especially like if you’ve been through secondary education and you went through, you were trained in a style or you learned certain skills and you do emulate it’s modeling behavior, just like parents do with their children.
The Cost of High Performance
Right. They become very similar to their parents because of what they’ve seen. So we naturally will, especially when we don’t really know ourselves completely. I mean, we see this with teenagers all the time, like middle school, like I have almost 12 year old and oh my gosh, all of a sudden I’m original. And I’m the first one with this idea and no one’s allowed to copy me. And then of course, like, I, you know, you can’t do that is my idea. And I wanna just be so different. And of course I’m a unicorn and I’m like, okay, let’s say, and then this one is criticizing. I mean, it’s like how about we just be ourselves? Stop trying to emulate something and then we wanna be cool. So we get the, get the kicks that everyone else is wearing. And you know, well, so, and so does your hair like this?
And it’s because it comes down to that human human need to be included, to be wanted and to be seen and heard. And it goes back to those old tribal days where you had to be part of a tribe to survive. So you complied with the tribe. And of course in modern day conditioning, everyone wants to be the cool kid. Everyone wants to be in, no one wants to feel rejected, but at the same time, we want to be unique because we have that internal compass in us that says, I need to be me. I need to be me. And you can tell when there’s that frustration of like, oh, I know I need to do this. Like modern methods or marketing says, I should be doing this. Like an example, everyone else is doing TikTok videos and I’m like, no, sorry.
That’s not me. I’m very animated, but you’re not gonna see me looking like an idiot, like a 12 year old on, in, on TikTok. I just don’t no. And I’ve realized some people are, oh, well you can get, you know, it could be good for your business. And I’m like, I don’t care. It’s not congruent to who I am. And I realized I had to try all the things and it’s trying it on like an outfit. Like you try, try to put on the persona or the language, or you start to be something. Or like, especially these guru’s we have online or these big names, we see them doing something. And we think, oh, if we just copy what they did, we will get the same result. But that’s not how life works. There are certain elements to who you are and you can’t show it’s like you’ve ever seen these baking shows.
Everyone is given the same recipe and the exact same ingredients, but they all the cakes turn out different because what you put in and your style and your timing and the effort and the thought process that you put into that, like creating a business and creating a cake and different temperatures. And you know, how it’s, the approach is different, which I think is great. That’s what makes us different. Right? Who wants to be like everybody else? But at the same time, I think as entrepreneurs is as standard of what’s expected, especially with, you know, Gary V says this, and then Tony Robb says this, and then this one says this. And then we feel like we’re being pulled in a hundred different directions. And sometimes less is more so even what I did is I did a rebrand and said, who do I want to be?
And who is me? I deleted like 10 years worth of blog posts. I deleted over 2000 people on my email list. I’m like, honey, we gotta break up because I’m sorry. I can’t keep you all happy. I have to be happy to who I am. That’s why I’m very, very open about like I’m of Christian faith. And it’s not to say it’s from a religion. It’s a way of living. It’s like an internal compass of how I make decisions that I do business decisions with God. Like God’s my business partner. If I don’t pray about something, I’m a hot mess. Believe me. And I know that resonates with the right people. And I know I’m not everybody’s cup of tea because like to describe myself as a personal trainer.
I will make you sweat. I will make you cry, but I will make you push the resistance, but you’ll be so much stronger. You’re gonna look real fancy afterwards. And you’re gonna be so fierce. Like my husband says you only create fierce female. Well, thank you very much. It’s exactly the style. So again, it’s like, what’s your style of music? What’s your style of food? Like not, everything’s gonna work for you and as business owners and entrepreneurs, it’s okay. Not everybody is mean to be your client. You don’t have to please everybody, and you can breathe a sigh of relief. You just have to be, you I’m like, hello back to the five year old. What did he or she like, right. And it’s really simple. Simplicity is really the key to getting back to who you are on a deep level.
The Cost of High Performance
So you can be congruent with who you are in line with your God given purpose. So you can walk out and every day becomes more fun. It becomes more relaxed. There’s less stress because as you know, this is meant for you. And then you don’t have a problem with comparison or criticism or judgment because you know, that’s good for her, but it’s, it’s not for me. You know, I’m, I’m happy when I see people succeed because it means it’s good for them. That’s their race entrepreneurs. We’re always searching for breakthrough. We’re always searching for something that works. And the end of the day, unfortunately, the way a lot of people online have sold it is that you just need this shiny object or this, this silver bullet. And then all of a sudden, all your problems go away. And I’m like, it just doesn’t work that way.
The growth is in the processes. Cuz when you look back, like I look back who I was even five years ago, 10 years ago. And I’m like, oh, even though I look at my YouTube videos when I started my channel like eight years ago and I’m like, oh honey, oh, oh like, seriously, you really put that out there. But I look back and I go, you know what? I’m actually proud of myself. I might have started. And it wasn’t really great. I don’t know what I was doing. I was fumbling all the place, the lighting wasn’t great. And my messaging has changed drastically since then. And even things that I was taring in saying that you need to do this. I realized with maturity and time, not all things are applicable, but I think if we, we just really stopped to say what is right for me in this moment because we go through seasons as well.
You know, just look at the nature. Like we never stay in winter. We never stay in summer. We have to life ebbs and flows. And here’s the thing. Life is always 50 50. There is not better than here because you are always gonna have good and you’re always gonna have bad and you can’t have the good without the bad. But unfortunately modern society has got us in this, this idea that you always have to have feel happy. And if you feel bad or you feel anxious, just pop a pill or do this, let’s just deflect deflect. And I’m like, no, you need to lean into those things that push your buttons. You need to find out why that thing is broken. Not to say I’m against medication. Medication does work, but to pop pills and to buy a course or to get this quick hack as a quick fix to get somewhere because we don’t wanna deal with the real root cause is only going to keep you in delay and gonna keep you in the cycle. Going round and round and believe your life as a way of teaching you the same lesson until you learn it.
So we better off just taking a step back and saying, what is it that I need to learn? What is it that I’m trying to seek? And it, it never really is the thing that you think it is you think, oh, I need to make money my business because, because why? Well, because I need to prove to be successful. But why do you wanna be prove that you successful? Well, all my friends and my family don’t believe me, well, why don’t they believe in you? Well, because when I was a kid, you know, I’d do things and then things wouldn’t pan out and well, why didn’t they pan out? It was like, well, because I would get bored after and then I’d move over. And they’re like, okay. So let’s look at the real thing. What is going on? Well, it’s really because you’re trying to impress the five year old self who wanted daddy’s attention and who didn’t get it.
And that’s why I say business problems are personal problems in disguise. And it’s painful to talk about these things, but it’s necessary. And one of the other things I’ve realized with entrepreneurs is, and not just entrepreneurs in people in general is we don’t wanna feel our feelings. We’re either medicating or deflecting or denying. We, we don’t wanna be bored. So we go play on a, on a screen. We don’t wanna, we don’t wanna feel the feelings. So we go grab, you know, a tab of ice cream to dull the feelings or we go take medication or we over exercise. There’s always like distraction. And no one wants to sit and say, why am I feeling shame? Why am I embarrassed? Like why does this bother me so much? Let me lean into that. And just like, grief has a process. All of the emotions, we have have a process and allowing yourself to feel it even like physically crying is great.
Like I say, if you are feeling frustrate and unresolved grief will show itself up in different ways in your life until you deal with it, same thing with shame, same thing with rejection, same thing with, you know, a, a, a low self-esteem these always a deeper route. But if we are constantly denying and deflecting and distracting ourselves, we never deal with what’s important. So I say, if you wanna make money in your business, learn to feel your feelings. Like if you have a business failure, what is that shame? Well, what’s the worst that could happen. You feel shame. So sit in that Fe shame and go. That was really awful. That feels terrible, but, okay, what’s next? How can I pick myself up? Allow it to leave your body, let the tension go. And that’s why they say forgiveness is key. It’s not for the other person it’s for you because you keep keeping that junk in your trunk.
So what it is is get rid of it, let it go. Like literally physically, emotionally, spiritually work through it. And I call this coming to the edge of the cliff. Like we always fear the worst. The fear of something happening is actually worse than it actually happening. So when you stand on the edge of the cliff and you’re scared about what you’re gonna see, what’s gonna happen when you take that leap of faith, you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna die. Okay. So take a step. And then if you die, woo hoo in my case, yay we are in heaven. We made it Woohoo. But at the end of the day, is it really that bad is the feeling of shame, that bad that’s gonna hijack the rest of your life, your relationships, your decisions? How about we just deal with it, get rid of it and move on.
Like sometimes it’s that simple, but I know it’s not as easy as it sounds. And it does take a bit of bravery and courage, but believe me, by taking that step, just like, I can’t remember which movie it was. It was one of the Raiders of the last arc, where he had to cross over this barrier. And he couldn’t, there was no bridge and he couldn’t see it and was foggy. And he just had to trust himself. And only when he took the step, did, did the rope and the, the bridge appear, but it wouldn’t appear, took until he took the step of faith. Are you ready to change your brain to change your life?
Discover how to break limiting beliefs, stop self sabotage, and unlock your full potential by rewiring your brain, using neuroscience, coaching and faith based principles. Come and join my coaching program. Unstick your mind today.
Come and join my coaching program Unstick Your Mind today!
