Separating Your Self-Worth From Your Business Performance
Episode 522: Show Notes
Okay, so this is going to be a rambling conversation that we still feel you guys will get a lot of benefit from. This conversation has come up multiple times with a good friend of ours who you all know, Jessica Eley, and in Emylee’s maker community as well. Abagail and Emylee have also had this conversation between themselves over and over, and with their students too, so it is something that definitely affects many people. The overarching concept is how to separate your self-worth from the success of your business.
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We are going to share a few tangible strategies we have picked up recently, but we want to open the conversation by saying that if you struggle with this problem, we want to give you some examples of what you can do to help yourself feel better. These are things we have learned ourselves and also lessons other creatives have helped us learn. So tune in to hear how you can learn to identify this self-sabotaging behavior and, if you suffer from it, how you can learn to manage it and be kinder to yourself going forward.
How To Identify Behavior That Connects Self-Worth to Business Success
Tying your self-worth to the success of your business is a problem in itself, but it can also create extreme effects for your life more broadly. It can even lead you to sabotage your business when things were actually going fine! The seriousness of this issue can therefore not be underestimated. Trust us, because we have been through the trenches with all of this. It has taken us years to get to a more healthy place about it, and it is not even like we are 100% free of this type of thinking now. Some advice we can give you though is that working on these negative thought patterns has to begin with some self-reflection and behavior analysis. Do you feel bad when your business does not perform as well as you want it to? To dig even deeper, if somebody asks you what you did today and it makes you feel defensive because “Of course I was in my office working”, this is the beginning of patterns of tying your self-worth to your business. This type of thinking comes in all shapes and sizes. One form of it is that you could suffer from feelings of imposter syndrome when your business does well. Another is that you could even start thinking your business sucks on days that you actually feel bad for other reasons, and this can happen even when everything about your business is objectively going smoothly! We want to tell you that your business and your value as a person have nothing to do with each other. There is no logical connection between your value as a person and the performance of your business.
How To Step Away From Patterns of ‘Should-ing On Yourself’
We want to take a second to talk about ‘should-ing on yourself’, have you ever heard of it? Should-ing on yourself is when you drown yourself in excessive thoughts about all the things you should be doing. Of course, if you want to grow your business there are things that you need to do, and part of what we teach in the Strategy Academy is how to line these things up in the correct order. This type of planning-oriented thinking is necessary and healthy enough. The problem starts when you are almost belittling yourself and being so bogged down by this inner voice that tells you what to do and which you can never fully satisfy! We want to propose something to you that might help if you suffer from this type of thinking. What if you came to us and told us all the things you should be doing and as a response, we simply told you that you don’t have to do any of that. This is the simple truth: You don’t have to do anything. Sure there are consequences if you don’t do things, but this doesn’t mean you have to do them. The best part is that you can still get things done without should-ing on yourself. This is possible if you can learn to think about your goals and the actions that will get you to them as choices. You can either blackmail yourself into doing things through guilt and should-ing, or you can simply choose to do things when you want to do them. Another helpful tip is realizing that the only things you can control in life are your actions and your reactions. You can’t control the success of your business, all you can do is show up and try. Thinking about the end goal is good, but rather than obsessing over achieving it, think about the actions necessary to get you there and focus on those.
Actionable Ways To Manage Self-Doubt and Comparisonitis
We want to talk about some tangible ways that we have changed our behavior around these issues, things we have implemented, and how they have helped us. For Abagail, most growth comes with acknowledgment. It's like any 12-step or recovery program. Let’s all pretend we are recovering from addiction. The first step comes with admitting and identifying the real problem. We have to be honest about what is really bothering us. The real issue is not that we didn’t make that post or email that client, but about how we treat ourselves more generally. The next step is all about trying to build up some systems that help you to manage your behavior when this problem area gets triggered. Abagail’s main struggle with the business has always been around finances. This is how her feelings of self-doubt present themselves. What she has done to manage this is to build in good reporting systems that help her to identify the cause behind financial issues so she can remedy them and not start blaming herself like she used to. For Emylee, she straight up unfollowed everybody that she was connected to on social media who was doing something similar to her. She was comparing herself to everybody too much, and once she exposed herself to other products in her niche less, the bad feelings she was having went away. She feels that she not only questions herself less now but also has to rely on herself more to make a plan for her business, and this feels really good.
Managing Relationships in This Context with Boundaries and Communication
A lot of this all comes down to boundaries as well. There are practical ways that you can reinforce the boundaries between your personal and professional life in an exterior sense that will hopefully help in an interior sense too. Abagail speaks about how she has learned to be very disciplined about the time she stops working each day, and how she has segmented her house into parts that are for work and other parts for domestic life. Changes as small as these can go a long way. We spoke earlier about feeling defensive when somebody asks you what you did on a particular day, which is something that Abagail and Emylee have both struggled with in the past. They have both come up with strategies for dealing with this though. Abagail has learned that when friends or family ask her what she has been up to, it is mostly coming from a place of genuine love and care, and not judgment, and this has helped her respond more calmly. It has been quite a big issue in her marriage, but her approach now is that her husband is pretty much on a need-to-know basis. He is quite involved in some parts of the business so he does have to have some idea of what is going on behind the scenes, but these conversations are not triggering for Abagail anymore. For Emylee, the ‘What did you do today’ question is still triggering and she feels it is rude. So conversations of this sort have to happen between her and her husband as the result of different kinds of questions. It all comes down to communication for her, and she and her husband have gotten really good at knowing how to navigate each other and behave in certain ways that keep them in harmony. When either of them has had a rough day, the other naturally takes on a little extra responsibility, and it is the same for Abagail too. A final point made by our hosts is that this kind of work does not stop. You never get to a point where you are totally on top of your emotional responses. Furthermore, when you go through major life changes, sometimes you feel you have regressed into old patterns afterward, or sometimes you change completely. This simply rekindles the need to be as communicative as possible with your partner so they know what you need and don’t have to read your mind!
Quote This
There is no logical connection between your value as a person and the performance of your business.
Highlights
How To Identify Behavior That Connects Self-Worth to Business Success. [0:03:38.1]
Stepping Away From Patterns of ‘Should-ing On Yourself’. [0:12:46.1]
Actionable Ways To Manage Self-Doubt and Comparisonitus. [0:24:46.1]
Managing Relationships in This Context with Boundaries and Communication. [0:30:30.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Self-worth, Boundaries, Self-love, External validation, Self-doubt, Communication, Recovery, Healing
