Can’t turn up the sound? Here’s the transcript:
I had planned on doing a tech tutorial for you today. When I woke up, before my feet even hit the floor, I realized that my brain was too foggy to be able to talk tech with you. But I’ve been thinking about something a lot lately–I wanted to share with you about limiting beliefs, mindset, and being able to grieve for what we think we should have versus what we have.
When I started my virtual assistant business, I did a lot of research. I’m just the kind of person that needs to research everything before I dive in. I started working with coaches and I took online classes. I was reading all of these business development books. They were all talking about the importance of mindset…and they’re right. The act of building a business is easy. You can teach yourself how to do marketing strategy. You can teach yourself how to build an email list. You can teach yourself how to create tech systems in a business. All of those things are pretty easy. It’s the stories that we tell ourselves about why we can or can’t do that thing that makes business challenging or make it fun.
There’s a lot out there about this idea of limiting beliefs. A limiting belief is something that we tell ourselves about why we can’t do something. For example: A lot of people who are starting a virtual assistant business, they hear, “Oh, you need to have a website. You need to be able to show off who you are, what you’re doing, and give people a place to connect with you.” So many people entering this business don’t know how to code. They say, “I don’t know how to code. I can’t create a website. I am just learning how to do graphic design. There’s no way I can make a website look right. This is just too overwhelming. That’s not going to happen.”
That’s a limiting belief you’re telling yourself. The reality is that you could go out and Google how to create a website. You don’t have to even know how to code. You could reach out and get somebody to design a logo for you or help you with your branding if you needed. You could even have somebody build the entire website for you if it’s too much. Telling yourself that’s never going to happen is totally a limiting belief.
What I got frustrated as I was building my business is that a lot of these people were talking about limiting beliefs but had no idea that for a lot of us there are true limitations that we are never going to think our way out of. I live with chronic illness–and I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have other challenges. They’re caring for aging loved ones. They have children with special needs. They’re single parents. In all of these situations, we all have very real limitations. We can certainly choose how we approach those situations but it will never take away the fact that that situation is there. I can determine how I think about my illness and whether I let my illness hold me back but my illness is always there and it’s never going away. The fact that if I push myself too hard that I’m going to feel awful the next day? Always there.
The decision I have is knowing my body’s signs for when I’m pushing myself too hard and not going there. I can choose to grab my cane when I walk out the door instead of being stubborn and saying that I don’t want to take it that day. Those are choices that I have. What I realized when I was starting my business is that the number one step that I had to take was understanding my limitations and how they impacted me both personally and professionally.
It’s hard because when you look at all of the ways that you can’t do something in the way that everybody else is doing it–it feels so overwhelming. We go through this grief process. It’s hard to explain that to somebody who’s never been there. I was working with a coach and I was trying to explain, “No. Really. I can’t do that. That’s not me saying this story about myself, it’s really the truth that I cannot push myself that hard. I cannot do what you are asking me to do.” It’s hard to explain that to somebody who’s never been there.
This is your permission slip to get real about what you can do, certainly, but also what you can’t do. The first step to finding your way around the cant’s is to figure out what they are and to get real about how you’re handling it now–and if that’s the way that you want to handle it. If it’s not, how are you going to approach it differently?
I knew that my can’t today was, “I can’t sit at my computer and do this in-depth tech tutorial.” But I also knew that it was so important for me to show up anyway no matter what’s going on because that’s the commitment that I made in my business is that I will show up anyway. I decided that I was just going to go off the cuff, and I was going to do this video for you. That’s my way of working around it. You get to decide how you work around your limitations. Take the time to know your limitations, to grieve your limitations, and then get to the point where your limitations are just kind of in the room with you, but they’re not driving everything that you do.
