#317: 3 Myths About Starting a Business (That You Probably Believe)

3 Myths About Starting a Business

Here's a summary of what we talked about during this episode:

Today we are going to talk about three myths about starting a business that you probably believe but really shouldn't. Hello my friend. How are you doing today? I am so glad I get to talk about this topic. It's been coming up in my one-on-one sessions with clients, and I knew this was a topic that I really needed to bring to the podcast. So I wanna talk to you about three myths you likely believe about starting a business. And so often, and I experience this too, we're in a job situation where we're not certain that we really like it or we know we really don't like it. We feel pressure, we feel overwhelmed, we feel frustration, and something that feels really attractive to us, like it's the shiny object, which is starting a business, starts to really make way in our brain.

And it sounds amazing and I want to encourage you to follow your desires. And I wanna share with you a few truths that we really don't understand. At least I didn't understand these going into starting my business. So the first thing I wanna share with you is that first of all, starting a business is not going to solve your problems because when you are in a job where you already feel overwhelmed, you already feel frustrated, you already feel annoyed, and you don't know how to manage your mind around those frustrations and annoyances and overwhelm, you are gonna take the same brain that you have right now and you're gonna take that into your business. So I was in the situation where I felt all those things in my job, but I knew because I had been listening to tons and tons of mentors on podcasts, and I knew that even though I felt all these things, the overwhelm and so on, that I needed to solve for that while I was in my workplace so that I could then take my new and improved brain into my business.

And this is super important because when you are in a business, you are gonna need to manage your mind more than ever around hitting targets, around creating goals around marketing, around showing up bigger in your life, around showing up bigger on social media, all of the things. And if we can't get into the practice of managing our mind around some of the, I'm gonna put in quote smaller things that we're dealing with in a job, then we're gonna have a heck of a time managing our mind in a business. And so that's the first myth, is that a brand new business is just gonna solve all your problems. You're gonna feel so much better. And I was recently talking to a client about this in terms of how she was showing up in her current job. She wants to start a new business. She started recognizing that every time her boss emailed her that she would get this, this feeling of frustration and that she wanted to lash out in an email.

And what happens is, is that we become so enamored with the idea of leaving our job and going for it and and having all this freedom and, and all of those things that we forget the consequences that come with maybe replying snarky in an email to our boss or maybe being delinquent in doing something that's assigned to us. So we've gotta be really careful managing our brain when we wanna start a business because there's part of our brain that's like, yeah, I'm gonna start my own business and I'm so excited about it and I don't need you. And it's kind of like the teenager that's rebelling. But we wanna think smarter. We wanna think 10 steps ahead. We wanna think like we're playing chess, not checkers. So we wanna think about what is the benefit of having this job right now? And if you don't have a nest egg in which you can feel comfortable leaving your job right now and starting a new business, this is gonna be especially important to you to listen up when you are in your job.

I want you to treat it like it's your business. I want you to treat it with as much love, as much appreciation as you would your own business. Because when you start your own business, you are starting a brand new relationship. You are creating a relationship with this entity called your business, and you wanna practice creating a relationship with your current job that's healthy and that you would be proud of when you leave. And I can say with a hundred percent certainty that I was so proud of the way that I left my position and the condition I left my caseload in, and the relationships that I had formed over the years at the office. I felt so good about the the things that I had accomplished that nobody else had even bothered with in my position. So I just wanna share with you that it is entirely possible for you to do the same in your job.

And when you are doing this A, you're gonna be learning how to manage your mind around all those frustrations and overwhelms. And then B, you are also going to be taking that pride of ownership into your business. You are going to be taking all of the skills that you are learning into your business. And one of those skills is gonna be gratitude. Gratitude is something that we have trivialized over the years. Everybody says like, oh, just have gratitude. But gratitude isn't just saying thank you. Gratitude is feeling deep in your heart, in your soul, how thankful you are for the opportunity to have a job that is currently funding your lifestyle and is going to fund your nest egg so you can leave your job. I wanna just offer to you that we are so used to everything being easy, that we have lost the skill of being grateful, of really being thankful for all of the people who are in our lives and the situations that are in our lives that are teaching us what it is we want, that are allowing us to have what we want.

I know for me, I would not have been able to start my business if it were not for those 15, 16 years at the DA's office. And I am so grateful for them, even in the experiences where I didn't appreciate how certain people behaved. I could appreciate how much I learned from them and how I wanted to be in the world. I didn't have to be how they were. I could learn how to manage my mind and not behave like they did. I could learn from them and get things from the job like financially and experientially and take that into my business. And how grateful am I that I had the opportunity to do that I wouldn't be able to be here talking to you on this podcast serving you if, if we're not for my experience there. And I'm just so grateful for it.

Now, the second myth I want to dispel is that it's supposed to feel good all the time when you have your business. I think one of the reasons we get so excited about leaving the job that we're currently in and going all in on another business is that we think we're gonna feel better when we're in that business. So we are just kind of, you know, getting impatient with ourselves and getting impatient with the boss or whoever it is in your particular situation. And we're making this daydream about what a business is supposed to be like and how much freedom we're going to have. And yeah, there's a lot of freedom, but there's also a lot of mindset work involved, right? You are now dealing with numbers and you might feel uncomfortable with money, and that's okay. You can learn those things. I, I help my clients with those.

But you are now learning a whole new skillset. You are not just doing the work in terms of doing the law. Let's say you wanna become a lawyer and you want your own practice. You're not just now managing the casework, now you're managing systems. Now you may be managing assistance now you may be, well, you will be managing finances for a while. You'll get a bookkeeper, you'll have all of these different responsibilities. You'll wanna keep all of these moving parts running. Plus you're going to want to market yourself, right? So you're gonna wanna think about how do I do that? How do I make a marketing plan? All of that good stuff. And that's what I work with my clients on, especially in my business strategy calls every month is like really laying out step by step the things that you need to do in order to create a business.

But these are the things that we don't think about when we start a business. We just think, oh my gosh, it's gonna be so great. I feel this calling to go towards this thing. And that is wonderful and I love it. That's what I felt. And it got me through a lot of the difficult parts. But I want you to know that it is not easy, as in your life is gonna be easier when you leave your law job and you get your new business. It's not like that. You don't feel better by getting a business. You're simply learning a new set of skills that require you to learn the mindset that you need in order to move through every step of your growth. Because there, there's <laugh>, there's just this misunderstanding that when we start a business, the growth is just gonna be exponential and it's just gonna go straight up.

But what I wanna share with you is that it's more of a zigzag pattern. You're doing great. You're not doing so great, you're doing great. You're not doing so great, you're doing great. You're not doing so great. And that's emotional. And we have to get used to not seeing the numbers necessarily match up with how we think the numbers are going to look like. So for instance, if you have a stellar month in January and then your February isn't as stellar, you can't beat yourself up, you can't get into depression or disappointment. Like those feelings are normal. And I, I definitely, you know, teach how to process them, but we can't stay there if we want our business to grow. And that was something that I experienced big time when I started my business. And I was just really fortunate that I started out my business while I was still practicing the law so that I could experience some of those ups and downs before I left.

And I still experienced up and downs. Like that's just the nature of business. And we have feelings. We're not robots. So we've just have to accept that we're not gonna feel amazing all the time because we have a business. A business is not there to make you feel better. A business is not there to help you feel better about yourself. It's not there to help you end frustration. It's not there to help you end overwhelm or end feeling annoyed. It's not there for that mindset is there for that working with your subconscious and your conscious brain. That is what that's there for. Businesses don't do that. Now, if you wanna follow a desire to start a business and you are willing to feel the ups and downs no matter what, because this calling is just so big, I want to encourage you to do that.

In fact, that's what got me through. That's what really got me through all those ups and downs, is I wanted it so bad. I was willing to feel horrible to make it happen. I don't know, it, it was like the sheer force of will. It was like I had no option but to start this business. It had nothing to do with how my current job felt. Right? When I was there, did I feel overwhelmed or frustrated or annoyed or angry? It had nothing to do with that. In fact, if I were perfectly happy at that job, I probably still would've wanted to start a business. In fact, I made myself almost as perfectly happy as possible just to see, is this something I want to continue doing? Now that I've managed my mind, I figured out all the things that, you know, I, I needed to work on internally.

I used my job as a tool to really manage myself in ways I never knew possible, right? I was getting coached. I had all of the things right? I really worked at it. And yet I still had this deep desire for this business. It felt like this fullest expression of myself. Like I was able to really be able to touch people and talk to them and help them in ways that I could never help them as a prosecutor. And it felt so amazing. And so even though I had those moments, there was still so much hard stuff, right? Learning how to market, feeling frustrated when my months weren't as good as I wanted them to be, right? Having all of that despair, trying to figure out my finances and really trying to understand how money worked. 'cause I never had to figure it out before.

‘Cause Before I was just getting money every two weeks, but now I'm paying myself a salary and my salary is dependent on what I'm creating in my business. So you have all of this information now I want, I just want you to use it. So if you have this desire, I want you to go after it. I just want you to know that the business is not there to make you feel better. Not about yourself, not about your situation. It's simply something that's there that if it's not a calling for you, then I would just really sit with it. I would just really sit with it because there's gonna be ups and downs. Are you willing to sit through the ups and downs? And if you are, then it's your thing. Okay? And the third myth that I wanna dispel here is that I should just know what I wanna be doing.

And I think that that is one of the biggest lies we've been fed. I don't know where we pick this lie up from. Maybe it was when we were little kids and they're always asking us like, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And you're like, I wanna be president. Like, I would never wanna be president, by the way. Like that is just the worst job ever. But I just want, like Oprah's really smart for not running for President <laugh>. She has a good life, but we just all think that we should know what we are meant to be doing. And I wanna offer to you that that's not true at all. That we need to try things in order to find out what feels good. When I was trying to figure out what felt good for me, all the information I had was that I wanted to start a business.

I didn't know what kind of business, I didn't know anything about it. I just had this recurring theme and my journals about starting a business. And I thought, well, why am I not doing that? And it was because I was scared. I was scared of all kinds of things. I'm sure it was rejection, it was not being good enough, it was not being able to do it, not having the capability. But I had this desire and I had a full-time job as a prosecutor. So what was I gonna do with this desire? And I was like, well, what can I do that I can do online? Because I need to be able to work full-time. So I just started a tea business because it was the only thing I knew. I knew how to blend tea. I liked tea. It was interesting. I, I hired somebody to design canisters for me.

I created a website. I did all of the things right? I created a tea company. It was amazing that I made that with my own two hands. Now, there were tons of ups and downs. I didn't know how to market. I, oh my God, I don't know how many tiers I shed over trying to figure out my first website. It was something that I, it was a, it was a skillset totally outside my knowledge. I went to countless conventions and seminars trying to figure out like, what is a good business? How does a business model work? What, what do you do? What's an online business model? Do? Like how do two tea companies run? I learned everything. And it was, it was definitely a beautiful teaching experiment for me because I knew none of that stuff before. And if I didn't have that, I again, would not be here talking to you.

I wouldn't have known that I liked podcasts because I started listening to podcasts when I decided I wanted to start a business and I started listening to Amy Porterfield and I started watching Marie Forleo on, on YouTube and all of these different things. I started learning from all these people. I started getting all of this coursework. And so when I really dove into to this for years, I started to hear about coaching and I'm like, what's coaching? And I went to a Tony Robbins event and I tried that event out and I really, I liked it. And then I went to one of the coaching sessions and the, I decided at the end, I was like, wow, I think I wanna be a coach. But I had so much trouble even getting there. I tried 50 different things along the way. I was teaching yoga at one point.

I was painting at another point. I mean, I was trying everything to see what is it that I really liked to do. And when I thought, well, maybe coaching, I tried coaching and oh my gosh, it felt amazing. It felt like this is the thing I'm meant to do. So it, it wasn't as if I woke up one day and I decided, ah, yes, I will become a coach and I will start a business. No, it was trial by error because I didn't know that I did not want a t business. I didn't know that. I didn't want a physical product, I didn't wanna to do anything with the t long term. It ended up being this beautiful experiment. But whoa, did I put myself through the ringer because I didn't have any mind management tools to really help me manage my mind around the ups and the downs.

And it was really all downs at that point. I didn't really know how to create the ups. And then when I got the coach, that's when I decided, ah, this is the direction I wanna go. And I was so thankful, right, to bring us back to the first part of our conversation here, that I had that job, that I was able to spend money on those courses, the seminars, the tees, all of that stuff, the coaching, training, the master coach certification, like all of that stuff, like I was able to pay for, because I had kept my head around my job, I was able to really put money aside and do things that I wanted to do. Now, if I were to do it over again, I probably would've stayed in my job even longer because I would've had even more resources. I would've been able to show my brain.

I had even more evidence that I could go on on my own. And I think that would've been a beautiful thing. But hey, it's worked out, right? I'm still here. So I, I just wanted to really, I wanna wrap this up by also saying that when you are in it, when you are building your business, you're, you're building it, you, maybe you're still in your law practice. I want you to know that it is really common to feel despair, <laugh>, that it is common to feel frustration because you're basically in two worlds and you can almost taste the freedom in the other. And there's also a part of you that might be worrying about is it is, should I really be spending all my money on building this business? What if it doesn't work? What if I, what if I fail? What if, what if this, what if that?

And I, I shouldn't be spending all my money on this stuff. I, I definitely went through that and I want you to know that's normal. But if you have a desire and it's a burning desire, you will go through the discomfort so that you can get what you want. That's what I did. It was uncomfortable. It felt like I wanted to throw up half the time. And one of my mentors said, you know, if you feel that way, if you feel like you wanna throw up, you're probably in just the right place for growth. So if you are in that place right now, if you know that you have this deep desire and you wanna follow it and it's hard, I wanna encourage you to keep going. I want to encourage you to sit with the discomfort and to understand that you are doing this for yourself and how amazing it is that you are willing to sit with that discomfort and keep going anyway.

And I also want to let you know, you don't have to do that alone. I, I am here for you for that. I have several clients who are thinking about leaving one client who is like, yes, I know exactly what I wanna do and here's how I'm gonna do it. And I'm helping her lay the groundwork so that she can move forward the way she wants to move forward, building her law practice. So if you wanna learn more about that, you can book a strategy session with

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forward slash strategy session. And I will help you every step of the way. I have gone across this terrain. I know what it's like, I know the pitfalls and I can help you. So I wanna do a quick recap of what we talked about here today. So the very first thing that we talked about is dispelling the myth.

Myth that you starting a business is gonna solve your problems. That somehow you're gonna feel better. And what I wanna share with you is that being in your job right now and learning how to manage your mindset where you are, is gonna benefit you so much in the long term. And to feel so grateful for the financial security that you can have while you're building your business. It's a beautiful thing and it prepares you for really creating a strong relationship with your business moving forward. The second myth we dispelled is that it's supposed to feel good all the time. Building a business has ups and downs. Just like where you are working at your office may have ups and downs. It's not as if it's gonna be a totally different experience. You're still going to be dealing with people, you're gonna be dealing with different circumstances that might be challenging and you may be well, you definitely will be dealing with things that you've never encountered before.

Kind of like when I was building my website and shed so many tears. You are gonna be learning so much when you start a business. You really want to have the strongest foundation possible for that so that you can more easily weather those ups and downs. And finally, you don't need to know exactly what you wanna do. You are able to experiment. You have a beautiful job. You are in a position where you can be so grateful that you are supported there. And at the same time, you can experiment. You can try new things. You can do the things that you're not sure interest you because you are able to try those things, then you're more likely to be able to find that thing that really feels good. And it's a myth that we're just supposed to know. We try things, we see what interests us, and then we follow along and we see if that's the thing that feels really amazing to us. Alright, my friend, I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Thank you so much. And best of luck to you starting your brand new business.