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We (hello, weāre Jason and Caroline Zook š©š»āš¦°šØš»āš¦² by the way) know how tough it is to start a business, run a business, or simply create a new product or service.
The number of to-dos and tasks get piled higher than all the stacks of pancakes š„ at IHOP on a busy Saturday morning. But it’s not actually the project to-dos themselves that bring us stress; itās all the mindset hurdles we have to navigate in accomplishing those tasks that bring our projects to a screeching halt.
We have personal experience with this entire cast of lovely charactersā¦
Fear not, though! Over the years we’ve acquired some tools to shift these mindsets and we want to share them with you. Weāll go over a bunch of these “mindset poisons” in this article AND give you the “mindset antidotes” to deal with them!
We want you to know you are NOT ALONE, and dealing with these mindset hurdles as a business owner is completely normal š.
We all have voices and thoughts in our heads that are not helpful. Some voices are louder than others and can keep us from reaching our goals.
š§ “My work isnāt as good as theirs, so why try?”
š§ “Who cares what I have to say?”
š§ “Iām an imposter and totally unqualified to do this!”
These are just a few examples of mindset poisons. They are thoughts and ideas that run rampant in our minds, kind of like a kid getting let loose at a Chuck E. Cheese šš§š for the first time. (Gosh, remember those simpler times??)
Our goal with the rest of this article is to identify a handful of these mindset poisons and offer you mindset antidotes that have been critically helpful for us and our Wandering Aimfully members over the years.
Weāve created a ā”ļø 5-step process ā”ļø to help cure ANY mindset poison you might encounter! This simple process will be the guiding force moving forward (kind of like a giant mouse was the guiding force at Chuck E. Cheese*).
Extremely random and silly fact: From 1977 to 1992 the Chuck E. Cheese mascot was an anthropomorphic rat, then it was changed to a mouse in 1993. In 2012, the mascot was rebranded into a smaller, “hipper” mouse-version in an attempt to increase sales. (Thank you Wikipedia!)
The first step to changing anything is becoming AWARE of what you wish to change.
What is the poison when we break it down into its most basic fear? What moment from our childhood or a previous time in our lives is this fear grabbing onto?
What thoughts and actions can you intentionally shift in order to offset the effect of the “poison”? What is an opposite action (antidote) you can take?
Imagine your mindset shifting from negative to positive. How would a specific situation be different using a different outlook?
Identify 3 tangible habits, practices, or processes to ACTIVATE that antidote and see it play out in your work and life.
Don’t worry, we’ll go over specific examples throughout this article, but now that you have a clear process for working through your own toxic mindsets, you will be able to identify your own antidotes any time you encounter an unhelpful mindset in the future.
Okay, let’s get into a few specifics, shall we!
When Perfectionism holds you back:
š Projects or tasks drag on because you always see how they can be 1% better.
š You abandon an idea or project before sharing it because you donāt want people to see what you consider an imperfect product.
š You wonāt try a new endeavor because you already know you wonāt be able to execute to your perfect standards.
š You donāt allow yourself to be vulnerable or authentic because the real parts of you feel imperfect.
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my perfectionism really stem from?”
Potential answer: “Iām afraid of feeling not good enough.”
Ways this root fear can impact you…
š “Iām afraid people will judge me if I put out something less than perfect.”
š “I learned as a kid that I wasnāt worthy of love unless I was perfect so feeling not good enough feels like Iām worthless.” (This one goes out to all our fellow over-achievers!)
Let’s go with: “Iām afraid of feeling not good enough.”
š¤ What are some thoughts you can repeat to yourself that can assuage that fear?
š” “I am already āgood enoughā as a person because my worth is inherent.”
š” “I have the power to decide what āgood enoughā means in my work, which is separate from my worth.”
š” “My skillset may not be perfect, but Iāll never improve if I donāt continue making and sharing things.”
Basicallyā¦learn to be your own best friend and lean into some self-love (you deserve it)!
š Perfectionism (poison) says: “Iām afraid of feeling not good enough.”
šŖ Completion (antidote) says: “I’m the one who gets to define ahead of time what is good enough in my work and that will help me keep creating.”
Constraints help you pre-define “good enough” and completion helps you focus on finishing (not perfecting) so you can make more awesome stuff.
The goal is no longer to make something perfect; itās to COMPLETE something in the time allotted to the standards you already set.
There is a snowball effectāthe more you complete, the more you will see that things donāt have to be perfect for them to get you results.
You practice overcoming the fear of feeling not good enough by reframing good enough as something YOU determine, not anyone else.
Previous you: Posting 1 or 2 “perfect” things on social media and continuing to feel stuck.
Antidote you: Posting consistently according to your constraints, knowing youāre planting seeds of audience growth every time you publish!
š Try a daily challenge: Here’s an idea. For the next 2 weeks, publishing something daily thatās imperfect but still helps move the needle forward for your business. Thereās nothing like a daily challenge to desensitize you to imperfection.
ā³ Constrain your time: You only get ONE hour to do X task. Once the time is up, you are done and you move on. No extra time. No perfecting for hours.
š Write a “good enough” list: Before you start a project or share your work, try making a checklist for yourself for what Good Enough means in your eyes.
Constraints help you fight perfectionism by pre-defining “good enough” and completion helps you make more awesome stuff with less pressure.
When Self-Doubt holds you back:
š© You say no to opportunities because you doubt your abilities or donāt think youāre qualified.
š© You feel paralyzed before you get started on a new idea because you donāt believe youāre capable of figuring it out.
š© Youāre afraid to raise your prices or charge more for your product because you doubt people will pay it.
š© You feel a general sense of Imposter Syndrome which affects the confidence you bring to situations.
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my self-doubt really stem from?”
Potential answer: “Iām afraid of being exposed as a āfraudā.”
š¤ What are some thoughts that can assuage that fear?
š” “I know that Iām conscientious and I will give my best to every opportunity.”
š” “I have taken on opportunities before when I felt fearful and it turned out okay.”
š” “Iām not ādefraudingā anyone! If Iām clear about my strengths and honest about my skills, I can set the expectations of those I fear letting down.”
š© Self-Doubt (poison) says: “Iām afraid of being exposed as a fraud.”
š¤ Self-Trust (antidote) says: “Giving myself the opportunity to grow does not make me a fraud. I trust myself that I can handle the discomfort of growth and I will bring my best to any opportunity.”
You think you need confidence first in order to trust in yourself, but you actually need to trust yourself before you can build confidence.
Self-doubt counts you out before you even begin; self-trust deals you in so you can continue to grow.
Self-trust is a muscle. The more you can trust yourself and practice sitting with the discomfort of feeling “out of your depth” the more you will grow and the less uncertain youāll feel.
Previous you: You say NO to speaking or podcast opportunities because you doubt in your ability to deliver.
Antidote you: You say YES to opportunities, even if they scare you, and you grow your brand awareness and improve your speaking skillset.
š Create a “trustworthy” list: Sit down and make a running list of all the things youāre good at and the things you know how to doāall the reasons big and small that make you trustworthy. Go back to this list when you doubt yourself.
šŖ Intentionally practice a skill: Building self-trust takes EXPERIENCE. But you donāt have to wait for an opportunity to grow. If you want to get better at something, set time aside to practice which will improve your confidence.
šÆ Set a “rep goal”: 50 speaking engagements. 20 podcast interviews. 50 art pieces. Focus on a clear goal to get the experience and this will help you establish building self-trust as the goal, not the outcome.
Overcome self-doubt with self-trust. You think you need confidence first in order to trust in yourself, but you actually need to trust yourself before you can build confidence.
When Need For Validation holds you back:
š¬ You let the thoughts and opinions of your audience steer your content in a direction that doesnāt feel authentic.
š¬ A negative comment or email sends you into a self-doubt spiral.
š¬ You try to be everything to everyone so you donāt turn anyone off your brand, but for this you end up being vanilla.
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my need for validation really stem from?”
Potential answer: “I’m afraid of not being liked.”
š¤ What are some thoughts that can assuage that fear?
š” “Not being liked might feel crappy in the short-term but stifling my own wants or needs in the long-term will have much more severe consequences.”
š” “I canāt make everyone happy anyway, so I might as well be true to myself.”
š” “Relying on other people for my source of happiness or validation puts way too much power in the hands of other people.”
š¬ Need For Validation (poison) says: “Iām afraid of not being liked.”
š Intrinsic Motivation (antidote) says: “Being liked is not my primary objectiveābeing MYSELF is. Iām not chasing acceptance, Iām fueled by my own deeper purpose.”
Intrinsic motivation is about finding a WHY and a purpose that has nothing to do with the opinions of other people.
It requires that you prioritize your opinion of yourself above the opinion of others.
You have to be willing to be misunderstood, not liked, or ignored in order to try something new.
You can be motivated by the desire to develop a skill; the desire to be creative; the desire to impact other people positivelyā¦anything but “I am motivated by the desire to be liked.”
You have to learn to prefer the free feeling of being true to yourself above the fleeting feeling of being patted on the back or liked
Previous you: You water down your content to please everyone and feed the algorithm, but start to feel uninspired.
Antidote you: You allow yourself to experiment, you feel free, you stumble upon a new area you want to explore.
š Write down your why: When you embark on a project or endeavor, be sure to take time to write down your deeper why. This will help you stay connected to your motivation even if people donāt “get it.”
š Donāt wait for the response: If youāre putting your work out there or hitting publish on something, donāt just wait with bated breath to see the reaction. Once you release it, let that be enough.
š Celebrate yourself: Become your biggest fan. When you push the envelope or try something new, celebrate it. Congratulate yourself. Learn to value your opinion of yourself in the highest regard.
Avoid the constant need for validation by focusing solely on intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is about finding a WHY that has nothing to do with the opinions of other people.
When Comparison holds you back:
š You use the talent or success of others to put yourself down or feel negative about where you are.
š You follow others so closely that you lose your unique voice and start to copy their blueprint instead.
š You compare your beginning to someone elseās middle so you think something isnāt worth doing because you donāt have the skills of someone whoās further along.
š You see how someone else does things and it makes you question your instincts.
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my comparison really stem from?”
Potential answer: “Iām afraid of being judged as inadequate.”
š¤ What are some thoughts that can assuage that fear?
š” “Inadequate according to whom?! I canāt let the opinions of other people stop me from making progress toward my goals.”
š” “Comparison is relative, so why do I only use comparison as a means to discourage myself, rather than comparing myself to where I was a year ago?”
š” “I canāt compare my journey to anyone elseās because they arenāt me. They donāt have the same strengths, values, skills, etc. that I do so I have to make decisions that are right for no one else but me.”
š Comparison (poison) says: “Iām afraid of being judged as inadequate.”
š¬ Owning Your Story (antidote) says: “My story is mine alone. I canāt look to the path of others to set my standard of adequacy; only I can do that for myself.”
Owning your story will help you focus on the strengths within your own experience/self instead of chasing the story of others.
Comparison is about looking outward at others for cues on how youāre doing; owning your story is about looking inward instead.
Once you realize that everyone’s path is 100% unique to them, you realize that comparison is futile.
Previous you: I want to start a travel vlog but compare my video editing skills to the popular channels and feel discouraged and paralyzed.
Antidote you: I know I have a unique creative voice to bring to the table so I start anyway and one year from now my travel vlogs feel polished and unique to me.
š Limit your consumption: One easy way to stop comparing yourself is to limit your exposure to what other people are up to. If you find yourself comparing, unfollow. Spend more time creating than consuming.
š§ Make a core values list: Remember, those you are comparing yourself to are not operating with your same core values. Write down what YOU care about, what your guiding list of values is, and this will help you own your unique path/story.
šŗ Write down your journey: Write down a timeline of all the pivotal moments that led you to where you are now. This will help you focus in on YOUR journey, no one elseās, and remind you how far youāve come.
Steer clear of comparison traps by leaning heavily into your story. Owning your story will help you focus on the strengths within your own experience/self instead of chasing the story of others.
When Procrastination holds you back:
ā± You put off getting started on projects because you donāt know where to begin.
ā± You donāt get back to clients or other business connections in a timely manner.
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my procrastination really stem from?”
Potential answer: “Iām afraid of feeling overwhelmed and like I’m not capable.”
š¤ What are some thoughts that can assuage that fear?
š” “The most overwhelmed Iāll be during a project is likely at the beginning, so the sooner I get started, the sooner I can get through that feeling.”
š” “Overwhelm is something I feel if I focus on the WHOLE project instead of just the first step.”
š” “Not knowing how to get started or what to do is a natural part of figuring anything out.”
ā± Procrastination (poison) says: “Iām afraid of feeling overwhelmed.”
āļø Permission to Start Ugly (antidote) says: “I embrace feeling overwhelmed or inept at the beginning of every project because I know itās a part of the process.”
Giving yourself “permission to start ugly” will help lower the stakes for getting started.
By focusing on “starting” rather than the whole project, you can reduce that overwhelm just a tad and find the discipline just to tackle step 1 instead of steps 1-100.
Keep your expectations super low to get started and with that first action, youāll notice you build momentum, requiring less effort to continue moving the ball forward.
Youāll make yourself feel like whatever crappy version you start with was done on purpose!
Previous you: Waiting until the week of a deadline to start a project, getting stressed out and working long hours all week.
Antidote you: Starting the moment you got the project, and working in increments to slowly complete/improve the project.
š¦¢ Make “ugly” part of your process: Not everything starts out as a swan! Whatever your process is for your work, make step 1 something that is VERY low barrier and easy to accomplish. Ex) coaching slides
ā³ Set a “Getting Started” timer: Constraints for the win again! If you have trouble feeling overwhelmed when you start, try setting a timer for just 15 minutes to “start ugly.” You can do anything for 15 minutes!
š Do the 5-minute task first: Title the Google Doc, even if you don’t start it yet. Import your footage. Write bullets for the blog post. Choose one maddeningly simple place to start.
If youāre constantly procrastinating, giving yourself “permission to start ugly” will help lower the stakes for getting started.
When People-Pleasing holds you back:
š„ You say yes to too many opportunities because you donāt want to say no or let people down.
š„ You let clients take advantage of you and project scopes creep because you have trouble putting your foot down.
š„ You donāt speak up for yourself when a situation feels out of integrity or inauthentic because you donāt want to seem “difficult.”
The question to ask yourself: “What fear does my people-pleasing really stem from?”
Potential answer: “Iām afraid of letting other people down.”
š¤ What are some thoughts that can assuage that fear?
š” “My responsibility is to myself first. I have to put on my own oxygen mask first.”
š” If people are not okay with me standing up for my own needs, they are not people I want to let into my circle anyway.”
š” As long as Iām clear and up front about what my feelings/needs are, most people will respect that.”
š„ People-Pleasing (poison): “Iām afraid of letting people down.”
ā Boundaries (antidote): “When I take on too much or donāt speak up for myself, I let myself down. I have a right to protect my energy and be honest about what I can and canāt take on.”
Boundaries are how you articulateāto yourself and othersāwhat does and doesnāt feel authentic to you.
When you are clear about your boundaries, you limit your resentment toward other people or the feeling that theyāre taking advantage of you.
Every time you enforce a boundary, youāre choosing to “love yourself, even if you risk disappointing others” (credit: BrenĆ© Brown).
Previous you: You say yes to every request a client makes because you donāt want to disappoint them but you end up spending twice as long on a project for half the money.
Antidote you: You establish clear boundaries and scope with your clients upfront, and because you’re sticking to timelines you can take on more clients while being happier.
š Know your limits: Hard to enforce boundaries if you donāt know what they are. Decide where your limits are. How much are you willing to work? How many opportunities are you willing to take on?
š Write down your “no scripts”: Saying “no” sometimes feels awkward because weāre so trained to say yes. If you need to practice, write out thoughtful responses to some requests that have crossed your boundaries before.
š Create a “not okay” list: Boundaries arenāt just about what youāre willing to take on, they’re about what behavior youāre willing to accept. Make a list of things that are not okay with you so that if they come up, you can speak up.
If youāre constantly procrastinating, giving yourself “permission to start ugly” will help lower the stakes for getting started.
In this section, we wanted to give some quicker antidotes to additional poisons that can affect our mental fortitude as entrepreneurs.
Over-Thinking (poison): “Iām afraid of making the wrong decision.”
Embracing Experimentation (antidote): “Itās impossible to know the ārightā or āwrongā decision. I canāt think my way to an answer; I have to ACT my way to an answer and learn by doing.”
Need For Control (poison): “Iām afraid of putting my fate in someone elseās hands.”
Collaboration (antidote): “I recognize that there are also positive things gained from combining forces with someone else.”
Disappointment (poison): “Iām afraid Iām not cut out for this.”
An Attitude of Service (antidote): “One setback doesnāt define me. Instead of focusing on one lackluster launch or project, I choose to focus on helping/serving others and how good that makes me feel.”
Over-Committing(poison): “Iām afraid of losing out on an opportunity.”
Prioritization (antidote): “My next opportunity is not my last opportunity. I can only be effective if I choose where to place my focus carefully.”
Giving Up Easily(poison): “Iām afraid of trying and failing so I give up before I can feel disappointed.”
Patience, Persistence, and Practice (antidote): “I know anything worth pursuing will have setbacks and I need to offer myself time to work through those setbacks to get to where I want to be.ā
Unworthiness (poison): “Iām afraid Iām not worthy of good things.”
Self-Love (antidote): “Every single human is worthy of good things, including me. I will practice loving myself out loud until I believe that in my bones.”
Much like learning how to sell, market, grow an audience, or even creating a great product or service, mending your mindset is a business skill.
Without the tools (antidotes) to deal with mindset hurdles (poisons) we all face, none of the practical business skills are enough. You know, just like going to Chuck E. Cheese isnāt fun if you only eat pizza and never play whack-a-mole!
Our hope is weāve given you a process to work through whatever mindset poisons might be affecting you or that you might run into in the future. Just remember, your fears and your mental roadblocks are normal and we all go through them!
Now, grab your antidote and kick those poisons to the curb.
Have you ever felt stuck in a situation and the only solution to move forward seemed out of alignment with your values?
Recently Iāve run into a mental roadblock and discovered a way through it. My hope is in sharing how Iāve figured out how to redefine my problem, you can do the same in your life.
To add a little context here, it would be helpful for you to know that my wife and I just passed one year of running our combined business together (Wandering Aimfully).
When we first started Wandering Aimfully, we described our core business offering as a āmembership communityā but that always felt a bit vague. Sure, we had/have an awesome Slack channel where our customers/members hang out, but to say we run a membership community in the way you immediately think of it would be a stretch.
Start ugly, and figure it out from there, right?
We knew we simply had to get started with Wandering Aimfully (MVP, anyone?) so we did what all aspiring biz owners do, we made revenue projections for our membership community. During the projections meeting, we also assumed weād be testing different sales funnels, marketing plans, promotion strategies, and everything would get figured out along the way (as it tends to do).
The creation and launch of Wandering Aimfully took 10x longer than we thought (we planned for 5 weeks, it took 5 monthsā¦ š).
About 1 month into running Wandering Aimfully, Caroline got hit with shingles and couldnāt get out of bed for nearly two weeks due to unbearable shooting pains in her neck and head. After the debilitating shooting pains subsided, there were other symptoms that made it nearly impossible for her to get any work done each day for a few more weeks.
Then we hit the holidays and we were finally feeling excited about the energy of a new year only to have Caroline get sidelined with the worst anxiety sheād ever experienced in her life. Anxiety that kept her from being her amazing self for nearly 6 months.
Even with those three hurdles stacked against us, we were able to grow Wandering Aimfully memberships from $0 per month in recurring revenue to ~$10,000 per month in 1 year (we actually hit $10k/month in the 6th month, but it stayed steady and has sat around $9,500/month since that 6-month mark).
We arenāt trying to belittle how amazing it is to have grown Wandering Aimfully to a ~$10k/month business. Truly, we are so grateful to have 100+ WAIM members who believed in us and see value in what we were offering, especially when the āmembershipā part of it was hanging on by a tiny thread.
Well, for us, and especially for me as the person whoās been running the day-to-day operations of Wandering Aimfully for most of the past year, it showed me some pretty glaring facts:
(One of the questions we ask in our initial welcome survey to new customers has continued to blow our minds: 40% of people join just to support us!)
The term business coach has made my skin crawl in the past. Maybe it currently makes your skin crawl, too? Weāve all witnessed friends or people around us becoming coaches of some sort only to raise an eyebrow and cast judgment (Iāve done it more times than I can count and Iām not proud of that fact).
But then I took a step back and reviewed the glaring (and proven) facts about our Wandering Aimfully business. People arenāt buying from us just because we made a few online courses or because they can hang out with random strangers strewn across the globe. Our Wandering Aimfully revenue has grown because people see our experience, our paths, our successes and failures, and they want to learn from us. ANDā¦ Iāve personally spent more time this past year sharing that experience in 1-to-1 or 1-to-many capacities with Wandering Aimfully members and seeing incredible changes in their lives (and feelings of pride in mine!)
That reflection led me to a realization:
What if Wandering Aimfully, as a business, was more about business coaching than about anything else?
And is there a way I could stomach being a ābusiness coachā and be PROUD of it? Could I own that label and not feel like my skin was crawling (with metaphorical mental shingles, you could say).
Thenā¦. something clicked.
That lens? Sports.
Pick your sport of choice, Iāll go with basketball for this example (you can replace basketball with futbol, football, baseball, or whatever sport tickles your fancy).
Thereās a time in a professional basketball playerās career when thinking about being a coach is the furthest thing on their radar. Theyāre too busy putting up hundreds of shots per day in practice. Theyāre too busy working out and trying to make sure their body can handle the physical effort it takes to perform on a continuous basis. Theyāre too busy actually playing the game and being on the court to do anything other than play the game and be on the court. But, you can only be a professional basketball player for so many years. Heck, maybe you have a few years left to play but your heart and mind just arenāt up for the daily grind of it.
Itās at that time you entertain the idea of becoming a coach. You see an opportunity to pass on what youāve learned in your countless hours, days, weeks, months, and even years of hard work. You realize the impact you can make for hungry up-and-coming basketball players is more than you could make by slogging through a few more years running up and down the court.
Maybe for a few years, you loved getting on the court, spending time in the weight room, putting up hundreds of shots each day, and it was all-consuming for you. You used to be genuinely excited about every aspect of playing the game. But, then you werenāt. Then you realized playing the game didnāt light you up as much as it once did and now you see a way to help others who have the burning desire for the game that you once had.
Your excitement can transfer from your career to someone elseās (which is truly valuable and necessary)
Becoming a business coach made a lot more sense to me when I redefined what was happening at this time in my life. I no longer have the hunger I once did to create new products, promote them, market them, etc. But for the past year, Iāve worked hand-in-hand with our Wandering Aimfully members helping them learn from all my/our experience. And Iāve LOVED IT!
Shifting from athlete to coach as a focus for what Wandering Aimfully does at its foundation made a lot of sense. Sure, I may no longer be selling online courses, creating tons of content to grow an audience, landing paid clients and sponsors, and all the other things Iāve done over the years but that doesnāt mean I donāt know HOW to do them and wasnāt successful at them during that phase of my life.
It simply means my time as the āathleteā is done. Iām ready for the next chapter in my career of enjoying the game I love, which is to coach people who are hungry to get in their (proverbial) gym each day.
This redefinition exercise also helped me take a step back and look at my career āon the court.ā It helped me take stock of all the amazing things Iāve been able to do. It helped me look back and see all the successes and all the opportunities that I was able to create (along with Carolineās help, obviously I didnāt do this all alone).
This mental shift has been critical for me as we transition into the next phase of what Wandering Aimfully will become. As we help people make a big transformation in their lives just as we have with ours.
I can clearly see how all our past experiences and experiments are going to be invaluable to the hungry online business owners that are stumbling upon the things weāve created. There are so many missteps, failures, and roadblocks we can help people overcome or completely avoid. And Iāve definitely noticed the huge personal satisfaction we get from coaching people intermittently this past year. This satisfaction has replaced the feeling I used to get when creating and launching all of my own projects.
As we all know, change isnāt easy. Creating a plan and shifting gears away from a plan can feel very uncomfortable. But progress isnāt made by sitting still and staying the same.
It may be time for you to evolve and move into the next season of your life. I know I can speak for Caroline when I say how excited we are for whatās next with Wandering Aimfully!
If you want to see whatās next for Wandering Aimfully, learn more about our Un-Boring Group Coaching and WAIM Unlimited.
Over the years Iāve dealt with feeling lost on many occasions. Whether it was taking my first step into the world of entrepreneurship (working for myself) or leaving behind a āsuccessfulā business (IWearYourShirt).
Feeling lost seems to be part of the human equation. Something we all have to deal with at different times in our lives, whether we like it or not.
In May 2013, I attended a small conference in Fargo, North Dakota. Iād never been to Fargo before and the only thing I knew about the conference was that I was a speaker, and it was going to be a small, hand-crafted event put on by my friends AJ and Melissa Leon (of Misfit Inc).
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Backing up for a moment, at the time (May 2013) I was running my IWearYourShirt business and things were in a huge state of flux. Actually, letās just call it like it is: My business was failing completely and I was 100% burnt out.
My IWearYourShirt business had been my life-blood for the previous five years. It changed me as a person. It brought me amazing opportunities in life. It taught me so many lessons about running my own business. It also helped me build my first (awesome) community of friends, followers, and customers. But IWearYourShirt also took over my life, robbed me of all my time, and left me $100,000 in debt and 50 pounds overweight.
When my wife and I boarded the flight from Jacksonville, Florida to Fargo, North Dakota, I knew I was at a breaking point. Something had to give, I just didnāt know it would happen in front of a room full of strangers.
Letās back up even further for a moment. In 2007 I left the 9-5 corporate world to start my first entrepreneurial venture. I took a huge risk to leave a super comfortable career as a web designer, to start my own design company with a friend. I had my first inkling of feeling lost at my comfortable 9-5 job. I felt out of place sitting in a beige cubicle. I felt incredible resistance to mundane meetings. I certainly didnāt see my work as meaningful, nor was I ever proud to share it with anyone other than my boss (for his approval, so heād keep paying me).
I felt the least lost when I was in control of my day and my decisions.
As it turned out, working for a corporation or in my own first design company I realized I wasnāt really passionate about web design, websites, finding great clients, or any of that. I found that I liked working for myself and calling all my own shots. I felt the least lost when I was in control of my day and my decisions.
During the year and a half that I ran my own design company with a friend, the idea for IWearYourShirt came to me. I remember that idea giving me an incredible feeling of purpose. It wasnāt even a business yet, heck there wasnāt even a logo for it, but the idea itself gave me hope. It gave me a direction to go in. It gave me something that felt bigger than myself and something truly unique.
The first time I ever got over the feeling of being lost was when I chased a big idea and allowed it to have space in my life.
Having a mini emotional-meltdown on stage in front of a room of strangers helped me realize I was lost and forced me to start dealing with feelings Iād been internalizing.
Getting back to the beginning of this story, being a speaker at Misfit Conf presented me with a weird opportunity. I wasnāt new to public speaking and sharing my IWearYourShirt story with a room full of strangers, but this was the first time when I felt like I would be a fraud if I pretended everything was okay. If I just stood on stage and spewed the same stories Iād done the previous few years at countless speaking events around the country.
Instead, as I took the stage in front of 100+ people I didnāt know, I decided to admit I was feeling lost.
I remember sitting on a chair and saying out loud, āNormally Iād tell you all the good things I have going on in my life, but I can lie to you or myself any longer. My IWearYourShirt business is failing and I have to be honest about it.ā
I donāt remember the next 45 minutes of my talk. Thatās the honest truth. All I remember is snapping back into focus, seeing a room full of people with tears in their eyes, standing and clapping, and me feeling an incredible weight lifted off my shoulders.
For the first time in five years, Iād told a group of people that things werenāt going well. Every day prior to that Iād put on a face and a show.
Iād pretended and forced myself to say that life was perfect. I thought if I didnāt do that my community would abandon me and no one would pay me money ever again.
I stepped off the stage to a group of 100+ strangers who welcomed me with open arms. Where Iād been thinking people would ridicule me for admitting things werenāt going well, I was instead met with love and encouragement (truthfully I think Misfit Conf was the best possible place I could have had this emotional meltdown – that group was/is something really special).
I had been dealing with feeling lost for months (maybe even years) leading up to that talk in Fargo, North Dakota. But instead of trying to acknowledge being lost, I suppressed my feelings and didnāt change anything. I tried to strong-arm my way through my problems, not realizing that I was merely putting tiny band-aids on a gaping open wound. When I took the stage, poured my heart and soul out, and was accepted for my failings, it was as if a switch was flipped.
My wife and I boarded our flight back to Florida and we spent the next few hours talking about everything weād change.
But without change, I realized Iād just keep digging myself further and further into a hole. Iād ignore problems and Iād hurt myself and the people around me that I cared about most.
At that same conference, another speaker took the stage and his name was Joshua Fields Millburn. With his beautifully coiffed hair, he spoke about his life and how lost he had been at certain times. His story really resonated with where I was in my life and I was eager to learn how he solved his own issues.
Thatās when I learned about minimalism. Not about getting rid of everything you own and only having one chair in your entire home, but looking at everything you own (and choose to spend your time on) and deciding if those things are actually bringing you value.
It may sound silly to say that getting rid of a few household items made me feel empowered, but itās absolutely true. The stuff we surround ourselves with takes more of a mental toll than we can see. When YOU are the one to remove something from your life that is no longer serving you, it feels great.
My wife and I started with our closet, getting rid of garbage bag after garbage of clothing we no longer wore. Clothing from our time in college. Clothing from when we were another size in our lives (damn you teenage slender years!). Clothing that we bought on a whim because we thought retail therapy would make us feel better about the things we had going wrong in our lives. It may be hard to believe, but my wife and I spent multiple hours in our closet laughing our way through getting rid of mountains of unused items.
From our closet, we moved on to other rooms in our home. It didnāt happen in one weekend. Our process of decluttering took weeks/months. But then I decided it was time to apply minimalism not only just to the stuff in our home, but also the business we ran out of our home: IWearYourShirt.
On May 6, 2013, I shut the doors to my IWearYourShirt business. As weird as it may sound, posting a status on Facebook about closing down my business felt better than most things had in my life at that time.
We re-painted our office, which was decorated for IWearYourShirt and all the videos I had been filming on a daily basis at that time.
From that day, weāve continued to embrace minimalism in our lives. We sold everything in our home and kept only what we could fit in our small VW SUV and moved clear across the country to California. Weāre proud to call ourselves minimalists, and we have way more than one chair!
Okay, truthfully, we only own three chairs and two stools, but thatās all we need.
In 2014 my wife and I ventured back to Fargo, North Dakota for our second Misfit Conf. We spent the entire previous year rebuilding our lives and businesses. Getting rid of the things we no longer needed, and for me, sharing more of the thoughts and feelings I was keeping pent-up.
We hadnāt fixed everything in our lives, our businesses were still in flux, we learned three valuable lessons after our second weekend in Fargo:
We all have ideas, goals, and dreams, but most often we are the ones limiting ourselves from making those things happen. Itās not money, timing, or any other factor, itās giving ourselves the permission to just get started.
I wasnāt able to accomplish what Iād accomplished in the previous year because of luck or good timing. I intentionally changed things in my life and āsat in the chairā as Joshua Fields Millburn says. It wasnāt easy for me and it probably wonāt be easy for you. The key is to make a commitment to yourself and to not do it alone. As proud of a person as I am, the best thing I did was give myself permission to start asking for help and being open to the change that comes with that help.
My wife Caroline deserves so much credit here. Not only because she was my biggest cheerleader in me giving myself permission to shut down my IWearYourShirt business and do other things, but also because she is so emotionally tuned-in and could help me navigate the thoughts and feelings I was having.
I was too proud to ask for help. I was too proud to think I could figure everything out myself. I was too proud to ask people smarter than me for advice. I was just being too damn proud.
After the second year attending Misfit Conf, I decided to let my guard down a bit in hopes of figuring some things out about myself. Iāll be the first person to admit that I used to shudder at the idea of reading a self-help book or talking to a coach of any kind.
Acknowledging that I was being too proud made me feel like I was at least taking the first step toward working on these things.
Iām not sure where my too proudness stemmed from. I canāt remember a specific story from my childhood, but Iām sure thereās something there. Nevertheless, I remember being stubborn from a young age and I needed to change that. I needed to let go of trying to be in control of everything, especially my emotions.
While I do see pride as a useful tool in certain situations, it can also be a detriment if you have too much of it.
It might be time to admit this to yourself and attempt to make a change.
This may sound dumb, but maybe you can relate. The question āwhat do you do?ā had thrown me for quite a loop since 2009. Explaining IWearYourShirt to a random stranger in an airport who wanted to make idle chit-chat? That was always a hot mess.
I started to really resent the question especially after I shut down my IWearYourShirt business. I didn’t have an easy answer that quickly explained my weird entrepreneurial endeavors and each time I was asked thoughts of doubt and criticism swirled around in my head. I started to wonder why this question was bothering me so much and if there was a way I could fix it?
After multiple conversations with my wife, we both decided I should just accept that I was in a time of flux and experimentation. Sure, I didnāt have an easy answer at a cocktail party that could quickly define who I was and what type of work I was doing, but that started to not matter once I allowed myself to be doing a āfloaty dance through lifeā (as my buddy Ben Rabicoff put it).
Once I came to terms with the fact that I didnāt need a clear definition of what I did for work to give me self-worth, I started to be more accepting of myself.
I never thought Iād be a writer. Heck, even as I type these words to you, it feels incongruent to the person I pictured Iād be in life. But alas, here I am. A writer. Someone who has typed millions of words, thrown the majority of them away, self-published a book, and written for many major publications. But it didnāt start that way.
Writing became my form of personal therapy.
My journey with writing consistently started with writing little blog posts about life and things that werenāt going so well.
I was incredibly nervous to hit publish and to share the first blog post I ever wrote that was the least bit vulnerable. But guess what happened? People celebrated my honesty. They didnāt critique all the bad grammar and poor sentence structure. They simply appreciated that I was willing to go out on a limb and to share something many people might not.
My writing went from a random blog post here or there from 2012-2013 to a consistent weekly post and email in 2014 to a small group of subscribers (just 400 people). Also in 2014, I self-published my first book, Creativity For Sale.
In 2015 I started writing for Inc Magazine and a few other notable media outlets while continuing to write for my own audience (a group that became known as the Action Army). In 2016 and 2017 I stopped writing for anyone else and only wrote for my own audience on JasonDoesStuff.com.
In just a few short years I went from writing random updates on a Tumblr blog to having over 500,000 people read my writing in 2017. Can you believe that? Itās hard for me to believe!
Maybe writing could be an outlet for you? You donāt have to start by publishing your writing. Maybe itās just a journal you keep? Or a daily writing practice you do for one hour per day that lives in a Google Doc that only you know about? Give writing a shot, it was instrumental in helping me overcome feeling lost.
While I do believe some solitary activities can help, like writing, if youāre currently feeling lost you should absolutely reach out to someone. Is there a peer in whatever industry youāre in that has been down a similar path to you? Or maybe finding a therapist in your local area that is highly well reviewed? Therapy has such a negative connotation, but people like my wife swear by it (and we celebrate its effectiveness in our house!).
If you want some book recommendations, Iād highly recommend The Obstacle is the Way and Body of Work. Both of those books were really helpful for me and continue to provide lessons for my life.
Iād also highly recommend giving minimalism (your own flavor of it!) a try. Decluttering your life can lift more weight off your shoulders than youād ever imagine.
You arenāt on this journey called life alone. There are people around you who want to support and help you. Be willing to open up to them and be willing to ask for help. It was difficult for me, but it was also the best thing Iāve ever done.
The questions in this post came straight from Made Vibrant readers in my email community, Self-Made Society. If you’re not signed up yet, do so here! I asked subscribers to write back with one question they have for me, and I received dozens of responses, spanning topics like my creative process, creative business revenue streams, email list growth and marketing, pricing, and personal motivation.Ā
I tried to answer them all by breaking them down into categories. This group pertains mostly to confidence and the creative mindset.Ā
āDo you have a specific practice to help yourself when you start comparing your journey, yourself or your gifts to others?ā
For a long time, honestly my strategy for dealing with comparison was just to try and avoid it altogether. Iād be on social media and scroll past a photo of a fellow artist that made me feel like my work wasnāt good enough or Iād start comparing my journey to theirs, and when I recognized the presence of that feeling, Iād simply hit unfollow. I thought, You canāt feel bad about what you canāt see, right?
But I knew that wasnāt a winning strategy forever, because in doing so I wasnāt actually confronting the source of that comparison: me.
Comparison is a natural part of the human condition. It stems from our deeply rooted biological wiring that tells us there are limited, finite resources and we need to be on alert to compete with those around us for those resources to ensure our survival. While this is incredibly helpful when weāre all cave people living off the land, itās NOT very useful when weāre cultivating our creativity.
Finally Iām now entering a phase where I have enough confidence in what Iāve created these past few years that I donāt need to avoid comparison anymore. In fact, now I use that feeling as a guidepost, bringing my awareness to my own desires. When I scroll past an artist or fellow entrepreneur and I have that feeling, now I can ask myself: Where is this coming from? What it is that I see that person doing or having that I feel envious of or that makes me feel less than?
Is it that theyāve developed a unique and distinct artistic style? Great, then I know I just need to create more things to work on that. Is it that they have dozens of comments from fans who love their work? Cool, then maybe itās time to prioritize my community more. See what I mean — I still experience that feeling, but now I can recognize it and use it as a motivator to keep creating (without beating myself up.) I donāt let comparison discourage me, I let it encourage me to keep going, to keep working.
**In short: If comparison is holding you back from creating, then do yourself a favor and block it out to focus on your own work. Keep your eye on your own journey, and donāt waste any precious time focusing on others. Cultivate confidence in the things you DO have, rather than what you donāt. And if youāre at the point where youāre ready to widen your view again and keep tabs on what peers are doing, then consider using that feeling of comparison as fuel to push you toward the desires that are still within you.**
Further reading:Ā What To Do When Comparison Kills Your Confidence;Ā Are You Limiting Your Possibilities with a Scarcity Mindset?;Ā Room For Us All
āConsider using that feeling of comparison as fuel to push you toward the desires that are still within you.ā
āI was wondering if you have any tips/ideas about designing with depression. Or more accurately, dealing with depression while designing. It’s really hard for me to keep my creativity when I’m having a rough time and it kinda shuts down almost completely.ā
As much as I wish I had a definitive answer for this, I donāt want to belittle the struggles of depression by pretending I know what itās like to try and design with depression. I donāt. However, I do struggle with anxiety. Two years ago I went through a period when I was starting my business where it got so bad it was affecting me on a physical level — dizziness, chest pains, shortness of breath. Every day it was all I thought about and it made working really difficult. The worst part was feeling like it would never get better. That every day was going to be like that going forward.
I donāt know what brought about the change for me — maybe the exhaustion of living like that for a few months — but finally I said to myself: What if I just try convincing myself that it WILL get better, whether I believe it at first or not? What if I operate on the assumption that things WILL eventually improve?
That shift in perspective was enough for me to start making the tiniest moves to climb out of the hole I felt in. My new belief freed up enough hard drive space in my brain that I could start to see the changes I needed to make to at least limit the things that were causing me anxiety, and to be more discerning with the projects I took on.
As for how this applies to your story, my advice would be to first try my trick of convincing yourself that it wonāt always be this hard. You may not even believe yourself at first, but trust me when I say that the underlying belief will give you a tiny bit of relief which you can use to free up a bit of energy and clarity. Then, Iād also say get really acquainted with yourself and your intuition. In my guide Connecting With Your Core, I talk about developing a language between your head and your heart. If you can develop a sense of mindfulness within yourself and clue into even the slightest things that either lift your mood or keep you feeling shrouded in depression, then you can take actions to do more of what lifts you up and less of what keeps you down.
On a more practical level, my guess is that itās not very predictable when youāre going to be feeling motivated to design or when youāre going to need time to take care of yourself. I know there are many MV readers that also have chronic illnesses and can relate to that. Because of that unique circumstance, I recommend coming up with a work process that allows for extra flexibility and time cushions. Maybe you take your design timelines and build in a few extra days when working with clients. This means that if you wake up one day and youāre not feeling it, you can focus on some other aspect of your work that doesnāt take quite as much brain or will power.
**In short: Believe that it will get better. Build in time and processes that allow for flexibility, and give yourself permission to take care of yourself.**
Further reading:Ā Connecting With Your Core
āBuild a process that allows for flexibility, and give yourself permission to take care of yourself.ā
āWhen you are in a āI don’t like what I’m currently doing.. what’s next for meā phase…. What helps you take action?ā
Well, maybe this isnāt the most relatable answer but itās the honest one! Hereās one gift-slash-curse that Iāve always had deeply embedded in my personality: once I make the realization that the current path Iām walking is the wrong one, it becomes actually painful for me to keep going down that path. Painful in this sense just means my core self feels so uncomfortable and resistant that itās all I think about. Iāve become so intimately acquainted with my own core self and what it wants that when Iām out of alignment, itās like my own inner voice is screaming at me āTIME TO CHANGE COURSE!ā
So to answer your question, what helps me take action is the recognition that the sooner I course-correct, the sooner I alleviate that psychic pain. Even if making that shift is uncomfortable (which it always is), I just remind myself that staying stuck on the wrong path is the MOST uncomfortable thing because to me it feels like a waste — wasted potential, wasted time. We only get a certain number of moments on this earth and I intend to spend mine wisely (aka BRIGHTLY.)
**In short: Ask yourself whatās more uncomfortable: taking action to get back to a path where you DO enjoy the way youāre spending your time (and life) or continuing to waste minutes and days and months doing something you know is out of alignment with what you truly want? Then, use that answer to motivate you to action.**
Further reading: The Clarifying Power of Regret
āWhatās more uncomfortable? Taking action to get back to an aligned path or continuing to do something you know is out of alignment with what you truly want?ā
“How do you refocus when you feel like you’re just āchecking boxesā in your business? I understand that every day I’m not going to be completely passionate about every aspect of my business and some things are going to make me uncomfortable and I’m just going to have to DO THEM. But I also realize that energy and sharing my passion about something is what attracts people and I’m MORE effective when I’m passionate, white hot and excited.ā
— Submitted by: Dr. Lauren Frauenheim
I feel like this question is at the heart of what it means to run a soulful, heart-centered creative business! The foundation of your question is how to balance things that are necessary but less than stimulating in your business with the things that really light you up and get you excited.
Honestly, this is a toughie for me because I think the answer is different for every person and where they are with business! I will say that I donāt believe anyone, especially solopreneurs, can run a business and be on fire with excitement for every single task in keeping up that business. Thatās like online biz utopia and Iām just not sure thatās practical for most of us. The key, then, is in making sure that the aspects of running your business that youād consider merely āchecking boxesā are not stealing precious energy from the heart-aligned aspects. What I mean by that is, Ā while a task like emailing clients/customers maybe not soul-stirring or get you fired up, you just want to make sure that task is not soul-DRAINING. If there are aspects of your business that are actually taking a negative toll and preventing you from shifting your energy to that white hot excitement in other aspects, itās time to rethink those tasks. See if you can outsource them or reframe them or do away with them altogether and change up your process to minimize that kinds of energy-zapping.
On a more macro level, aside from just daily tasks, there may be times that you find yourself in a āchecking boxesā phase altogether — a time when you have to hit pause on the more creative and exciting projects in order to focus on ideas that are less exciting but more predictable in terms of income. This could be because youāre in a tight financial spot and you need to focus on bringing in some immediate cash so that you have the breathing room to feel excited again. As a creative who has found herself in that phase on more than one occasion, I think itās perfectly normal. After all, we canāt do our soulās work to our best ability when weāre worried about paying the bills all the time. So I think itās totally helpful to give yourself permission to focus on the more ābusiness-yā goals for a second in order to make breathing room for the white hot excitement. (And hey, if those things are one in the same, well more power to ya!)
**In short: Not every aspect of your business is going to light your soul on fire with excitement and come flowing out of you with ease. Thatās okay. Just make sure that whatever those less-than-thrilling aspects are, that they are a) not negatively impacting your spirit and b) at least helping you get to place and a greater goal that DOES light you up.**
Further listening: I go into these ideas more in-depth in my interview with Tiffany Han on her podcast, Raise Your Hand Say Yes.
āThe key is in making sure that the necessary mundane tasks are not robbing your soul of the joy it feels overall in your creative business.ā
āHow do you start a branding or an illustration project when you have a great idea of a theme, but you don’t have any clue how should it look?ā
The first thing Iāll offer up to you that might be a helpful mindset shift is this: there actually isnāt a way something āshouldā look. Thatās what YOU get to create and decide! The whole fun of branding or illustration is uncovering the creative solution to a project throughout your process, whatever that might be. So perhaps it might free your creativity up a bit to start viewing your process in a spirit of openness as though itās a discovery, rather than a linear path from idea to execution/solution. Viewing it in the latter way — as if youāre ātrying to find the right answerā — puts pressure on you to hit a bullseye versus being open to new ideas and discoveries.
Something that also might help you is developing a clear process for yourself to help you get from point A — like a āthemeā — to an end product. For example, in my branding process, I have many different ācheckpointsā along my process that carry me through to a final brand. I begin with a conceptual brief, then I decide on five tone words, I create a mood board, pick out exploratory colors, then choose typography, design a logo and round it out with graphic elements. Each part of that process is like another tiny ingredient or piece that I can add to my branding stew, which helps me land on a āflavorā that feels right rather than just trying to go from a general theme and stare at a blank piece of paper (or Illustrator art board!)
**In short: Break your design process down into bite-sized stages and allow yourself to be open to possibilities during that process. The more you can view your work as a discovery process rather than a test, the less pressure youāll feel and your creativity will be free to express itself.**
āThe more you can view your work as a discovery process rather than a test, the less pressure youāll feel. ā
āI have always had an interest in graphic/web design, and decided to start pursuing that as a career. My original thought was to go back to schoolā¦ but I’m now going with Plan B, which is teaching myself. Sounds awesome in theory, but lately, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and discouraged – there are SO many different classes to take and programs to learn that it just makes me want to take a nap and forget about it! There’s also the recurring feeling that most creatives have of, āLOL there’s no way I can do this and come out as talented as these people I’m looking at on social media.ā ā
As far as the idea of āIām not as talented as these people on social media,ā that kind of comparison is natural when youāre starting out, especially when youāre self-taught. See my earlier answer about comparison on that front!
I did also want to offer up some advice about teaching yourself graphic and web design, which is what I did! In the beginning, itās all definitely very overwhelming: Which programs should I learn? Are my skills good enough, etc? Most people make the mistake of thinking they need to learn everything under the sun and master all the programs, which can oftentimes leave you feeling, as you said, like all you want to do is take a nap! My advice is to start with one very specific skill and one program in mind to learn. Once you get comfortable and master that, you can layer in new skills and new applications over time, as the opportunities pop up.
For example, I started out learning photoshop so I could create graphics to spruce up my blog (this was back in 2011!) Since I had a very specific program (Photoshop) and a specific reason for using it, it helped me seek out the online courses and resources that pertained to that one thing. Then I learned how to create blog post graphics, then a new blog logo. Once I felt comfortable, more people were asking to hire me to do their branding and I felt it was time to expand my skills to Illustrator. The same thing happened when I got a big branding project and they wanted a Brand Guidelines PDF — thatās when I felt it was time to invest in learning InDesign to create a document like that.
**In short: Start with one specific skill and program to teach yourself, then upgrade or evolve your skills as the circumstances require more of you. Keep expanding your portfolio as you keep creating work. Narrowing your focus will help you fight that feeling of overwhelm, and the only remedy for comparison syndrome or lack of confidence is to keep creating until you believe in your voice and your own work.**
Further reading:Ā Follow Your Curiosity And It Could Change Your Life
āStart with one specific skill to teach yourself, and upgrade or evolve your skills as the circumstances require more of you. ā
āMy question is all about how to start the entrepreneurial journey. I’ll soon be out of college and would love to start by own business(es) but I’m quite lost regarding what to do… where to find the clients, and especially how to convince them I’m adequate enough even if I’m new-ish (but know I can do a good job nonetheless because I have the skills). Actually I modify that first part: not how to find what to do but how to prioritize as well so that it aligns with you!ā
— Submitted by: Camila R.
Hereās the thing about starting out and know what aligns with you. Unfortunately there’s just no other answer than: experiment. When youāre fresh out of college, those first few years you are changing SO much. Youāre figuring out where you want to live, who your friends are, how you want to spend your time, etc. so that target of alignment is going to be constantly shifting. To really know what you want at any given moment, youāll need to engage in all kinds of things and activities. The best advice I can give you in the regard is to PAY ATTENTION. Get to know yourself, your intuition, and the signals your body sends you. What kinds of activities feel freeing and which feel confining? That will help you navigate and course-correct as you move forward.
As far as turning all of that into your own business, yes, it can be hard when youāre starting out and you don’t have that much experience. (You may know that your skills are good enough, but you also need to show that to others if you want them to pay your or hire you.) Just remember that you are in control of how much experience you get. If you believe in your skills (and it sounds like you do) but people wonāt hire you without experience, find time to take on small projects free of charge. Ask for testimonials. Hone your process. Use those experiences to build a portfolio so that when you do try to get paying clients, you have something to point to. Everything will likely feel uncertain in the beginning because youāve never done it before but the more youāre able to withstand that uncertainty, the faster youāll be able to get that experience and the more confidence youāll have in charging what youāre worth.
**In short: Learn what you want and what feels good to you by experimenting. Test the waters on many things, and prioritize accordingly. If youāre worried about lack of experience, take on small projects for free to build a portfolio. Donāt just tell people what you can do, show them.**
Further reading: 5 Crucial Steps To Building A Profitable Online Business (see especially point #4: Do the work.)
āLearn what you want and what feels good to you by experimenting.ā
āHow long did it take to get your “voice” dialed in? Did people respond right away or did you have to make stuff for a while until you got it right?ā
I would say that the first iteration of trying to hone my creative voice was when I started my first blog back in 2011. For the first three years or so I didn’t really feel like I knew what my voice was — what I wanted to talk about, what made me different, how I wanted to write. But the best decision I made back then was to write on a consistent basis, because thatās how I was able to not only get better at infusing my personality into my writing, but to look back over the course of time and find patterns.
To answer your question specifically, no people didn’t respond right away. There was a long part in the beginning when I was really just experimenting and figuring things out, without expecting anything in return from readers. Then, I feel like once I got some clarity on my message and my voice, I started communicated with more confidence. That allowed me to attract an audience of people that āgot itā and thatās when the response started to happen. People started to resonate. But it all begins with that exploration and clarity phase. It begins with letting go of perfectionism and the fear of āgetting it wrong.ā If youāre able to start from a place of curiosity and embrace the messiness of the beginning, thatās when youāre on the journey to finding your voice. It’s about finding what YOU love and what you want to create.Ā Once you have a better sense of that, share with confidence to a clearly-defined audience and things will surely start to resonate.
**In short: Finding your creative voice takes exploration and creating with consistency. Once you narrow in on what you want to share and your unique way of sharing it, doing so with confidence to a clearly-defined audience is the recipe for creating something that resonates.**
Further reading: 5 Tips For Uncovering Your Unique Creative Voice
āFinding your creative voice takes exploration and creating with consistency.ā
“If there’s one vital/helpful information you hope you knew before you started this journey, what would it be?”
Great question! SO many things! But if I had to boil it down to one impactful thing, I think it would be this reminder: Life is an experiment.
Iāve written about this many times in different ways (like here and here) but the main reason this is a powerful guiding force for me is just that it reminds me that you wonāt know unless you try. Every person, every business, every life — weāre all different. The advice or blueprint that works for one person doesnāt always translate to another. Weāre all looking for the roadmap not realizing that no one holds the right one because no one has ever lived THIS life, THIS way, at THIS particular time before. So the only real way to know what feels right in your gut, or what works for your business, is to get out there and experiment. Create, test, try, fail, and learn from the results.
There are still times when I find myself stuck thinking and strategizing and standing still, afraid to move forward because of the What ifs. And I KNOW there are SO many creatives with so much potential out there right now, afraid start the blog or start the business because they don’t know if it’s the right thing. What they donāt realize (and what I had to learn) was that ANY move you make is ultimately the right one because just one step forward in reality (even the wrong step) will teach you far more than standing still or moving forward only in your mind. We can make all the assumptions in the world but until we actually run the experiment, until we actually do the thing, we won’t really know the outcome.
This one phrase also reminds me that the variables in this experiment of life are always changing. If my aim is to design a life and business around my values, then I have to constantly be checking in with myself to ask what those values are. I have to understand that I myself am a moving target and sometimes the only way to know if something aligns with my vision for my life is to simply go out there and try it. If I fail or if I decide it doesnāt feel right, I can remind myself that itās still a win because I learned something from the experiment.
**In short: To learn, you must DO. And to do, you must embrace experimentation. The circumstances for the experiment of life are always changing, so give yourself permission to evolve along the way.**
Further reading: Life Is An Experiment; How To Embrace Experimentation In Your Creative Business
āTo learn, you must DO. And to do, you must embrace experimentation.ā
Hope you enjoyed this Q&A post — more installments coming soon!
Our brains have this mystical, magical, and commanding power over us. We know this. We even acknowledge it. But it can be incredibly difficult to challenge our own thoughts.
We give our assumptions more authority and power than they deserve when trying to make decisions and take action.
Iād like to tell you Iāve come up with a perfect framework for you to test all your assumptions and never let your assumptive thoughts dictate your decisions again. But I havenāt. Maybe someone way smarter than me does, but all I have to share is a life of assumption-challenging experiences.
Iām amazed at how often I hear from people who are talking themselves out of being successful (a term, for which, you must define yourself, not based on any outside metrics). They use phrases like these:
Letās attack these assumptions together.
AWESOME! That means the market is proven for this product or service. People are already paying for it. The assumption youād want to test (people being willing to buy this) has already been proven for you, and you donāt have to scale the huge mountain of trying to prove that there are actually people out there who will pay for your idea. Itās a good thing that there are are virtually ZERO new ideas left. Our species is too smart. Everything is just a remix of other ideas at this point. Embrace what makes your remix of an idea unique.
Whoever told you that you werenāt special was an a-hole. You are special. I am special. We are special little snowflakes. Now that weāve gotten that out of the way, being āspecialā isnāt whatās going to help you succeed, anyway. No one lines up to buy the newest iPhone or pair of Air Jordans because Steve Jobs or Phil Knight are special people. They are special (just like you and I are), but the blood, sweat, tears, work, sacrifices, failures, mistakes, and assumption-testing thinking is whatās led to you wanting to buy the product theyāre producing. People will absolutely care what you have to say. You just have to understand it may take years for you to find the right, resonant way to say it. You are significant.
I have virtually NO specific skills. Iām a jack of all trades, master of none. I dabble in design, but Iām years behind designers whose work actually receives praise and accolades. I donāt know a thing about programming languages. Iām terrible at managing people. Really, you could argue, all I have are my ideas. But yet, I find ways to turn my ideas into realities. I seek out people to whom I can outsource my weaknesses. If you really want your ideas to happen, the skillset you have doesnāt matter one bit. The only skill you need is the work ethic to figure out how the heck youāre going to get your idea out into the world. Someone else in the world knows what you donāt. Find them. Pay them money. Exchange something for their time. No skills required.
Why not? Because other people havenāt been able to? Because others already have? Those are other people, they arenāt you. Iām never willing to accept assumptions based on the actions of others. This is a blessing and a curse. But you can make money doing literally anything right now. I once wrote a silly joke in an email about becoming a professional snuggler. Then, a few weeks later, I received an email from a woman named Sam who actually created a popular Snuggling Agency because of my silly joke (amazeballs!). Iāve made money doing weirdly outlandish things. My name has been included in segments on TV called āthey get paid for that?ā and ājobs you never thought you could get paid for.ā As the old adage goes, you wonāt know until you try. And as it relates to making money doing what you want to do, you absolutely wonāt know until you try (and try in all the different ways that other people havenāt thought of before, or in ways they havenāt done it as well as you will).
By reading this article, you are starting. By wanting to start, you are starting. But those things arenāt enough. Eventually, you just have to put one foot in front of the other (or click a mouse one click in front of the other). Because guess what? I didnāt know how to start, either. I still donāt know how to start most projects, but I do it, anyway. I find my way by giving myself permission to start ugly, learning all I can, and then trusting my intuition along the way. It looks different every time, but the important part is that I start at all.
Our culture loves to tout the successful. Magazines, TV shows, movies, and websites love to glamorize how people āmade itā and ābecame so insanely rich they turned into a pile of money and flew off in the wind.ā
People assume success is a straight line. You start on your little dot on a map. Then you cross a single line, and youāre at the X. Success!
Wrong.
You follow a dotted line that twists, turns, curves, hits all kinds of obstacles in your way, and eventually you find the X (maybe).
(Treasure map illustration by Tim Vandevall)
The unfortunate thing about the treasure map to success is that sometimes you get shipwrecked. Sometimes you get stranded. Sometimes your only friend is a volleyball. No one can predict when youāll get marooned on a deserted island (read: when you will have a mistake or failure). But it will happen. It happens to everyone at some point or another.
Just like testing all your assumptions, if you accept the fact that success looks like a treasure map, youāre going in the right direction. You will veer off path. You will hit roadblocks. You will have challenging moments when you question the entire journey altogether, but the journey wouldnāt be worth it if you didnāt.
As I mentioned, thereās no framework for getting better at testing your own assumptions. All you can do is make the decision to start testing all your assumptions (and the assumptions of society, your friends, your family, etc.) all of the time.
I donāt assume anything will work a second time around. I donāt assume that just because I read something in a book that it will work for me. I donāt assume that because someone else does something a certain way thatās how I need to do it.
I test those things. One by one. Assumption by assumption.
Hereās one question that always helps me when Iām on the dotted line of my treasure map and being met with an assumption:
āHave I dealt with this exact issue before with the same exact circumstances?ā
Almost always, the answer is āNo.ā Itās nearly impossible for the answer to be āYes.ā And because the answer is āNoā you have to test your assumptions. Sometimes, it feels like youāre re-testing assumptions youāve already re-tested in a re-test of assumption re-testing before. Well, welcome to life and business. Itās not a straight line. It gets pretty damn windy, and youād better hold on for the ride.
My wife, Caroline, and I have some of our most emotionally charged discussions when testing assumptions. We typically use the three whys:
āWhy does it have to be done this way?ā
āWhy do we have to run our relationship the same way as other people?ā
āWhy do we ever have to do anything the same as anyone else, ever??ā
That last one is a troublemaker, and admittedly, must be obnoxious to deal with (Sorry, Carol, love you!).
Thatās not because of a certain amount of dollars in my bank account, and itās definitely not because of a number of friends Iāve amassed on a social media site.
The point here is that Iāve āmade itā because Iām willing to question everything (and I have the ability to do so). I am in control of my outcomes and Iāve earned every bit of success Iāve achieved. I could lose everything in an instant, and Iād be okay, because I know what itās taken me to get where I am today. A place (or some version of it) I could get to again, knowing Iāll have to follow a pretty damn windy treasure map to get there.
When I released my first book, Creativity For Sale, I was met with a barrage of messages from people all over the world. They were all inspired to start their own business or pursue an idea theyāve been sitting on for years, which was awesome. Yet most of them felt stuck and werenāt sure what to do next. The question I got most often was (and still is), “What’s your advice on getting started?”
What I’ve come to realize from my discussions with hundreds (maybe thousands) of readers and subscribers asking that question is that they donāt actually need any advice or knowledge. Theyāre looking for someone to give them permission to start.
We live in a time when anyone can create anything. Itās those of us who donāt need permission who make progress the quickest.
We’ve been taught our entire lives that we need to ask permission to do things. Whether that’s permission to go outside and play with our friends (when weāre kids, or big kids posing as adults). Permission from a guidance counselor to take a certain class outside our major. Permission from a boss to veer from the normal corporate strategies or tactics. Permission from a significant other to pursue a side project that has nothing to do with our current work. There are a million things in our life we ask for permission for, itās no wonder so many people are afraid to take a leap and start a business or chase a dream. No one told us that we donāt have to ask for permission anymore.
When I reply to people asking my advice, I often hear some version of this reply: āThis was the exact permission I needed to get started!ā
Itās not that I wrote anything amazing. I donāt have a nugget of wisdom perfect for every situation. I donāt even actually grant anyone permission for anything. I just reply, and thatās often the catalyst people need to go ahead and grant themselves the permission theyād been waiting for.
So letās pretend you sent me an email today asking for advice, and that this article is my reply to you.
If you want to start a freelance design business right now, you donāt need anyoneās permission to do it. Whip together a website on Squarespace that promotes your awesomeness, your skills, and your work (if you donāt have work, make some!). Email a handful of friends and ask if they need design work. You could do this in the next few hours and make thousands of dollars immediately.
If you want to write a book, but donāt think landing a big publisher is realistic, publish your book your damn self! Thatās what I did with Creativity For Sale, and itās gone on to sell 15,000+ copies. Sure, it hasnāt been a best-seller or on any fancy lists that books get put on, but who cares? If youāre writing a book and your only measure of success is a best-seller list, you shouldnāt be writing a book.
Maybe you want to open a super hipster coffee shop where all the drinks have Saturday Morning Cartoon themed names (like Scrooge McLatte, or Captain Americano, or The Flintspressos). Sure, my examples are awful, and maybe the world doesnāt need another hipster coffee shop, but why not? You could hone in on a super-defined niche of people who absolutely love your crazy idea and want to pay you money for it. Stranger things have happened.
In all of these examples, one of them not-so-great, youāll never know unless you give yourself the permission to try. No one else needs to approve. Stop locking the gate on your own progress.
#1 Write a message of permission to your future self: Use a service like Followup.cc, Boomeranggmail, or RightInbox to send yourself an email that arrives in one week. In that email, write āI give you permission to start or launch .ā Youād be shocked at how powerful receiving a message from yourself can be.
#2 Get permission for an accomplished person: Watch Casey Neistatās Do What You Canāt video. Then watch it again.
#3 Ask someone you know to give you permission: Send an email to a person you admire and ask them to give you permission for your idea. Sound weird? Well, I think itās weird that you havenāt given yourself permission yet, so this seems less weird to me!
Do you have a crazy idea for a business? Something as crazy as getting paid to wear t-shirts for a living? I launched IWearYourShirt during the recession of 2008. All signs should have pointed to that being a terrible time to launch a weird/unique business idea. But to the contrary, there probably wasnāt a better time I could have picked. People were ready for something weird. People were looking for ways to get attention and get noticed on social media.
Are there almost 50,000,000 books already on Amazon? Yep. But does that mean there isnāt room for your book? Not at all. If anything, it just shows how much people are willing to continue to purchase and read books. Get your book out there, because if whatever you’re creating never exists, you have a 0% chance of succeeding.
You already have enough skills and resources at your disposal, all you need to do now is give yourself permission and get started.
I see this trend a lot in the online business world. Well-intentioned folks will build a website and brand, set up social media accounts, have a goal or mission, and spend a ton of hours getting ready to sell.
But then, something happens. Self-doubt creeps in. The second-guessing police show up at the door. Defeated, these well-intentioned people shy away from promoting and selling the thing theyāve worked so hard on. They say ānoā on their customersā behalf…even before the customers can decide for themselves.
Working for yourself isnāt easy. You have to wear all the hats (and most of them feel like ugly fedoras). You have to juggle all the balls (hehe). You have to be a salesman/saleswoman. People are going to say no to you, because what you are selling is not right for everyone.
THIS. IS. OKAY.
If you fear rejection so much that it holds you back from promoting and asking people (more than once) to buy your product, running your own business may not be right for you.
And besides, working for someone else is not a bad thing. Sure, you arenāt going to end up on the front page of Inc. magazine, but who really cares about that, anyway? If it crushes your soul to ask people to buy things, work for someone else who is already doing that asking. Take a paycheck for work you donāt loathe, and live your life in a way that makes you happy.
You may not even realize it, but youāre saying no for people by staying quiet about your idea.
Iām not advocating that you start hammering people with marketing and sales messages left and right. But I am advocating that you give your idea a chance. Put in effort, aim for a yes, and actually let people say no on their own so you can learn from the experience.
Remove these things from your mind or vocabulary:
All of those are self-defeating thoughts, and thoughts that put the word ānoā in someone elseās mouth before they can even do it themselves.
Instead, muster up the courage to promote and sell whatever youāre working on and embrace the actual no instead of the imaginary one.
When you do hear āno,ā donāt just hide away to lick your wounds. See if you can learn more:
These are questions you should ask the people who say no to you. Donāt look at it as punishment, either. Look at it as a learning experience, and tweak/hone your promotion and sales strategies. Because Iām here to tell you, whatever youāre trying to sell isnāt going to sell just because you have a website, brand, Instagram account, testimonials, etc.
Selling takes effort, so be proud of the fact youāre hearing no because it means youāre actually doing the work.
Stop saying no for someone before they have a chance to.
Related articles: You Don’t Get What You Don’t Ask For and How To Deal With Rejection And Hearing No.
People often ask if I ever had an āa-haā moment with my IWearYourShirt business. A moment when I clearly knew it was a good idea worth pursuing.
In September 2008, there was a moment, in my closet, when a culmination of previous thoughts and ideas came together, but that was simply the spark for the idea of IWearYourShirt. And we all know what they say about ideas, right? Theyāre worthless without execution.
Which brings me to an āa-haā moment that actually was important.
When I first came up with the idea for IWearYourShirt, there was nothing like it. No one had thought of IWearYourShirt in a way that I had packaged it all together in my mind. And certainly, no one was crazy enough to take on a 365-day challenge like I was. At least until November of 2008, when āGirl In Your Shirtā popped up on my radar.
Now, back in 2008, Twitter was a very small space. Yes, there were millions of accounts already, but when you did something that got press on TechCrunch, everyone knew about it. And Girl in Your Shirt got it. Suddenly, she was everywhere.
Iād clearly had the idea for IWearYourShirt first, but there was no mention of me. No credit wasĀ given to my unique idea. Just a girl doing what I set out to do, which apparently was more worth talking about to the all-important TechCrunch. She was going to get all the attention going forward, and IWearYourShirt would get left in the dust (that’s the thought that ran rampant in my mind).
But then, my clouds of self-doubt and anger started to disperse. I felt in a shift in the way I looked at this t-shirt wearing competition that had popped up out of nowhere.
I had to crush Girl In Your Shirt.
(Not literally. Iām a lover, not a fighter, people!)
Having someone in direct competition with my unique idea created a spark of motivation. I knew I was going to have to work hard to make IWearYourShirt succeed, but now, I was going to turn things up to 11. I was going to give everything I had to my shirt-wearing business to make it more successful and more talked about and to leave any potential competition in the dust.
For the rest of 2008, I obsessively checked in on Girl In Your Shirt. I checked her Twitter and watched her videos, all while putting in maximum effort to do the best work I could possibly do with IWearYourShirt. By the time January 1, 2009, rolled around, I had already sold out 1/2 of my calendar (nearly 200 sponsor spots). Because sheād copied my idea, she had a calendar as well, and Iād sold triple the amount sheād sold.
Competition early on was the motivation I needed to make my business successful, and was probably the most important a-ha moment Iāve ever had.
Whether you have a crazy idea like IWearYourShirt, or youāre a designer looking for great clients, or youāre an aspiring food blogger, etc., having other people do what you do proves thereās demand for it.
You have three options if thereās competition in whatever space youāre in:
1. Let the competition crush you: See other people already doing what you want to do, and let them stomp on your dreams until you cry yourself to sleep every night. That sounds fun.
2. See the competition as a learning experience: What can you learn from the people already in your niche? What are they doing that you can do differently? Can you find customers of an existing business like yours and ask questions about what they like and donāt like? Be a sponge, and soak up as much knowledge as you can about what people have already done (or not done).
If someone is already doing what you are trying to do, donāt get discouraged. There are barely any unique ideas left in the world. Thatās okay! You can start businesses and embrace ideas that already exist. You just need to put your unique spin on it.
3. See the competition as an advantage: Especially if youāre first in your space, seeing competition pop up is a good thing. It means your idea is attractive to others and is inspiring āme-tooā tendencies. When that happens to you, celebrate. Iād always rather be the āI did it firstā guy than the āme tooā guy. And then, when youāre done celebrating, get back to work. Learn from what the me-too competition is doing and not doing, and keep innovating. Itās a great sales strategy to be able to tell potential customers that you were the first one to start doing X.
I have my competition to thank for my success. They motivated and pushed me to work harder.
For all the time I spent worrying about her and how she would affect my business, Girl In Your Shirt shut down just a few months after starting. But she wasnāt the only competition I ever had in my t-shirt wearing business. Far from it. As the years went by, there were multiple people who tried to copy IWearYourShirt. I watched as all of them lasted a few days, weeks, and sometimes months. And I kept working hard. Then, as fast as they had appeared, they disappeared into the catacombs of the Internet (somewhere near Geocities, the Netscape browser, and Dogster).
Instead, competition kept me on my toesāfor that project, and for every project that has come after. Whether itās an existing idea and someone tried to copy it, or I was starting a project where people had already created something similar.
Donāt be afraid of competition. Embrace it. Be thankful for it. Learn from it, use it to your advantage, and then dominate it!
Do you feel like there’s just something holding you back from accomplishing your goals, but you’re not sure exactly what it is?
Back in October, some of you will remember that I sent out a long-form survey to get to know you guys better. I wasnāt interested in the typical stuff ā how old you were, where you come from, where you found Made Vibrant, etc.
Instead, I wanted to open up a deeper dialogue. Things like —Ā What does success look like to you? What relationship do you want to have between your creativity and your income? What do you think is holding you back?
As I pored over HUNDREDS of entries, I felt l got to know each of you in a much more vulnerable and intimate way. (Thank you for sharing those things with me, by the way.)
Turns out that last question āwhat do you think is holding you back? āwas quite illuminating.Ā
I was struck by just how diverse and specific the answers were regarding the limiting beliefs and mindsets that keep us from our full potential. With every new entry, I felt I unearthed another fear that I myself had experienced, but that I hadnāt specifically identified for some time.
Which got me thinkingā¦
So thatās what I want to attempt to do in this article. I went through all your responses looking for patterns and I plucked out 27 distinct mindsets or limiting beliefs that you all feel are holding you back in one way or another.
I want to encourage those of you that feel a sense of potential for your life beyond what youāre experiencing right now to carefully cull the list and write down which of them apply to you.
Iāve also shared some links to past articles related to some of these mindsets so if they call out to you, you’ll have some actionable advice on how to work past them. (You guys know me… I can’t just leave ya hangin’ with a list of things holding you back without some direction on how to change them!)
So, let’s start here, and let’s get honest about what habits and old mindsets have been deepening their grooves in your head.
(One caveat: some of these obviously overlap and share similarities, but I wanted to break them out into their most granular characteristics so that we can really see how broad the idea of Fear is and how it manifests in so many different ways.)
I listed this first because it is probably the most insidious of all the following self-limiting beliefs. If we don’t believe we’re deserving, we’re always going to be sabotaging the good things that unfold in our lives. This is work that takes time to break through, but once you truly believe you are enough and that you are deserving, it makes the rest of this list become a heck of a lot easier!
See this article:Ā Confidence And Learning To Trust Yourself
See this article:Ā How I Wiped Out $7,500 in Credit Card Debt in Six Months
See this article:Ā Is There A Secret To Sustained Motivation?
See this article:Ā Using Prioritization To Make Values-Based Decisions
See this article:Ā The First Helpful Thing Failure Teaches Us
“An imperfect reality will always beat a perfect mirage.”
See this article:Ā Are Your What Ifs Helping Or Hurting You?
See this article:Ā Are You Giving Yourself Permission To Evolve?
See this article:Ā Why It’s Harder For Some People To Form New Habits
See this article:Ā Re-defining What It Means To Be Selfish
See this article:Ā How To Deal With The Pain of Rejection
See this article:Ā Why Is It So Hard For Us To Ask For Help?
See this article:Ā Are You Afraid of Running Your Business The Wrong Way?
See this article: How To Make Big Choices With Less Stress?
See this article:Ā Selling What Is True Over Selling What Is Easy
Watch the workshop:Ā Connecting With Your Core
See this article:Ā Framing Your Year With Thoughtful Reduction
See this article:Ā How Do I Create A Brand When I Have Many Different Interests?
See this article:Ā Do You Feel Pressure To Make Everyone Around You Comfortable?
See this article:Ā Defining The Relationship Between What You Love & What Makes You Money
One you wonāt see on the list āLack of Time.ā Time is simply about prioritization so if you donāt āhave the timeā itās because youāre not āmaking the timeā and that means something else is filling up your days. The answer to why those activities are getting all of your attention is hidden in one of the items listed above.
You can see just based on the fact that I’ve written articles pertaining to a majority of these topics that they are all things that have crept up on me at one time or another. Thankfully, though, by confronting them head on and taking steps to overcome them, I’ve been able to stretch my own boundaries and continually raise my own expectations for what’s possible in my life.
I’m hoping this list is the beginning of that process for some of you!
We all want our work to be high-quality and fully-formed right out the gate, right? Itās only natural.
Thankfully, though, over the past few years, Iāve seen a shift in conversation encouraging creatives to overcome this barrier of perfectionism. This conversation has given birth to ubiquitous mantras like:Ā āDone is better than perfect,āĀ āAim for progress, not perfectionāĀ and āStart before youāre readyā —Ā all of which is advice I can certainly get behind.
Personally speaking, perfectionism is actually something deeply rooted in my consciousness, being the over-achieving, academic kid that I was growing up. For the past six years, Iāve worked to overcome this mental barrier nearly every day, trying to create and share my work despite the voice in my head that naturally likes to point out every flaw or short-coming or opportunity for improvement.
Today I want to share with you one specific mental shift that helped me start to make that journey from perfectionism-induced paralysisĀ to prolific production (holy P’s!),Ā and it may just be one take that you hadn’t yet thought of.
It starts with a story.
My first job out of college was at an advertising agency in North Carolina. The office was in an old renovated tobacco factory, with industrial-chic brick walls and polished concrete floors. There was ping pong and shuffleboard, dry erase marker frenzied across glass walls, and a coffee bar at the center of the office to work and hang out with fellow co-workers. It was the epitome of what I imagined was a ācool place to work,ā and I couldnāt believe Iād snagged such a coveted spot.
But there was a problem ā I was so eager to get my foot in the door of the advertising industry and this ācool firmā that I ignored the fact that the only position they had available when I graduated was in the media department.
In short, this meant I spent my days formatting spreadsheets, running banner ad campaigns, and fielding calls from media reps at niche financial magazines. (You see where Iām going with this, right?)
Iād gaze longingly at the creative department that sat in the pod of desks nearby. Iād see them revising logo concepts and brainstorming wild campaigns and editing TV spots. I wanted so desperately to be there with them. Knowing inside the kind of creativity I was capable of and realizing that nobody else knew the potential inside of me inflicted on my heart a slow, desperate kind of suffering thatās hard to describe.
I would daydream about someone from the department marching over to my desk and asking little 22-year-old me: āHey Caroline, I know youāre super creative and we could use a little extra brain power over here ā can you come help us?!ā It took me months to actually snap out of my delusion and realize: that is NEVER going to happen.
Why? Because I hadnāt given them any reason to.
āNo one will know what youāre capable of unless you SHOW them.ā
Thatās the simple truth.
In an interview I watched recently, Glennon Doyle said this when talking about the feeling of envy:
āThereās nothing more painful than seeing someone else do something that you feel like you were meant to do.ā
Weāve all had that feeling, right? You come across something another person had made and it HURTS. You don’t want it to feel that way but you can’t stop it; the envy creeps in.Ā When that hot feeling of envy rises up in us, itās usually because weāre actually mad at ourselves for not acting on the potential that we know is within us. We donāt want to feel the disappointment in ourselves, so we pass it off onto another person in the form of envy or jealousy.
Back in 2011, I was itching to start my own blog. I had SO much I wanted to say and share and create, but I couldnāt settle on a name and I had no idea how to customize my blogger template and I didnāt know exactly what I wanted to write aboutā¦ so I just waited.
I waited for A YEAR. I waited until I finally paid attention to that hot envy I felt when I stumbled upon every favorite blog I saw, and I decided that it was time I stopped whispering to myself āI can do thatāĀ and I started proving it by putting in the work.
Again:Ā No one will know what youāre capable of unless you SHOW them.
Donāt just expect people to senseĀ that youāre a writer; start a blog or self-publish a book so you can show them.
Donāt just expect people to guessĀ that youāre an artist; post those paintings on Instagram and show them.
Donāt just expect people to assumeĀ youāre musically gifted; publish those tracks to SoundCloud and show them.
Right now you might see sharing your work as scary, especially if you feel itās not perfect. (Reminder: no oneās is.) You donāt yet have that perfectly cohesive Instagram feed or every page of your blog beautifully designed or each lyric of your song in its poignant beauty.
Thatās okay.
With every new piece of art that you make and share, itās like one more little beacon of proof showing the world (and, more importantly, yourself) what youāre capable of.
I guarantee you, if you simply BEGIN and you share consistently for just one month, youāll start to experience the thrill of taking what is inside you thatās begging to be expressed, and letting it see the light. That is the soulās ultimate feeling of freedom, and itās better than any drug. (Full disclosure: I donāt like drugs, so that’s an easy comparison for me.)
The truth is:
Imperfect freedomĀ tastes so much better than perfect confinement.
Imperfect realityĀ feels so much better than perfect fantasy. (Because it’s real.)
Imperfect progressĀ is so much more satisfying than perfect stagnation.
Your challenge this week is to identify what potential is inside you that youāve yet to share.
What are you capable of that you can start SHOWING today. Then, make that plan and simply begin.
The tools that are available to us as creators have never been more accessible or more plentiful.Ā Get out there and use them.
