There are seven major fears holding you back from making the income you want. In this episode of Skinfessional we talk about how to recognize the seven fears in yourself and conquer them.
We all have stuff that keeps us from making the money we deserve and it isn’t the easy things we think like not enough clients or time. No, that would be easy! It’s the deeply rooted fears that whisper we aren’t good enough, that we don’t know how to do the thing, and that no one is going to care what we have to say.
There are ways to find these fears in yourself and overcome them. Alex experiences not being good enough all the time and Cybil battles perfectionism to a debilitation degree. Luckily we’re here to share all our secret tips and we’ve found that leaning on each other helps to stop living in fear and make all the money!
Prepare yourself for this week’s gut-wrenchingly raw episode of Skinfessional where we share our most intimate stories of the ways failure has filled us with anxiety, fear, shame, and insidiously held us back from success. Cybil talks about why failure is like Voldemort, Alex confesses to failures masked by toxic optimism, and we both discuss how isolating failure is for solo business owners.
During my darkest moments, as I’m watching a well-laid plan fall apart and go up in a firey pile of dog poo, I try and imagine what other people have thought about at times like these. What did Elon Musk think as he watched his rockets explode over and over and over again at the same time he heard Tesla batteries were slagging themselves? I mean, that guy’s a genius so what kind of dedication to purpose does it take to get up every day and know you’re doing the right thing even when shit is FUBAR? What did Ludwig Dürr think when he watched the newsreels of the Hindenburg go down in a blaze of firey death? At any time did he doubt his design or mission? Did he think afterward that he learned a lot from that, gave a Ted Talk on aligning his purpose, then designed a hot air balloon?
This is the crazy shit that goes through my head as sobs wrack my body in the post office parking lot at 10pm. Post office parking lots are excellent places to cry in your car undisturbed late at night I’ve discovered. Nobody wants a piece of that. It’s ten years ago, and I’m watching my business fail. There’s a writers strike I didn’t see the full ramifications of coming down the pipeline and I’ve gone from making $16K a month to – not enough. Just NOT ENOUGH to cover all the bills. I had grown arrogant and comfortable in my business and now, like Hindenburg, I was watching it come down in a flaming ball of death and destruction around me.
Sometimes failure is just that – failure. When I listen to people talk about failure it’s nearly always as part of a journey, a learning experience, a tool, blah blah blah. Hell, I’ve spoken about it this way. And yes, failure CAN be those things. But this is Skinfessional where we talk about the real shit. So here it is. It’s true, you need to fail to get back up and try again and you need to make mistakes to learn what doesn’t work like Elon and his rockets, but unplanned, massive, a failure like the Hindenburg isn’t pretty and quite often the biggest lesson you learn is how to deal with the feeling you have surrounding a massive failure. The lessons to be learned don’t come now. They come in your future When you can look back on the event with more experience and distance. When you hurt less and it isn’t so devastating.
It’s been my experience that as business owners, to admit you are failing makes the failure – REAL. By speaking its name it comes to life. I know that when I am on the brink of watching a massive failure, one that has me scared, up at nights, stressed, sitting in my car crying, feeling so, so alone, paralyzed by the fear of it all, this knot in my throat, my hands shaking, with absolutely no idea what to do or how to fix the situation. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone. I don’t want to ask for help. I KNOW it’s stupid. I totally understand that I should reach out and ask for help, but when I’m in this dark place, getting the feeling that my plan is about to fail, it’s like saying He Who Shall Not Be Named. The failure will go from a whisper of an idea to a reality. It will become a truth. I will have said Voldermort and admitted I am failing in a massive way. and weeks, months, years even of planning are collapsing and burning around me. So instead I keep all my anxieties, fears, and insecurities to myself. I isolate, push through the days with “toxic optimism” and hope it’s going to be okay instead of maybe finding a solution from a different source. Why? WHY?
So no one will know the shame I feel in my failure.
There I said it.
I said What No One Wants To Name.
Amidst all the motivational talk around failing up, learning from your mistakes, and even my talk of failure just being failure there’s a dark demon that rides along with any meaningful failure.
Shame.
Let’s talk about the BS that is shame. Fuck shame. Shame has zero place in failure and yet that bitch is hanging out and stopping you from making good decisions. Now that we’ve called her out and brought her into the light you can recognize her, label her, and stop giving her power.
Instead of feeling shame and crying in your damn car, what if you talked about the possible failure BEFORE it got out of control? Reframe a failure as a moment. A space in time.
“Hi there I’m having a moment right now where I’m afraid…”
“Hi I had a moment where I screwed up and I need some advice…”
“Hey,I have a problem and I need a moment of your time…“
When you look at failures as moments suddenly the shame goes away. If you come away with anything from this piece please let it be that shame has zero place in failure. I know for me it’s something I’m still working on. The control freak in you, that seems to gravitate to isolation and feel you are alone when wounded and in trouble – stop it. Remember other perspectives are good. They help you see more clearly. They think in different ways and come at problems with different solution sets. Remember that failures hurt. Sit in them with intent and know that you’re not going to have an instant epiphany. Like a time capsule, failures give you their best insights far into the future if you aknowledge them, respect them, feel them, and look them dead on in the face.
Nothing is more frustrating than clients messing with your schedule. Whether it’s not showing up, spending hours juggling reschedules or heck, even the cancellations a few days ahead of time that are supposed to be okay – it’s still messing your life up! We’ve been there. We know. In this episode of Skinfessional we talk about all the ways we’ve learned over the years to handle this mess.
A lot of your scheduling has to do with actually training clients in advance. Setting expectations is half the battle with clients. Making them understand that your time is valuable and training them that getting on your book is hard is important. This about that appointment you have that you would NEVER change because you’ll never get another chance at it. You know the one. Well that needs to be you!
Holding to a cancellation policy that works for you is vital. We talk about the ways that work and ones that haven’t for, but find one that does and stick to it.
We also talk a lot about how to handle all the feelings that arise with no shows and cancellations. Remember, it isn’t personal. People make decisions for all kinds of reasons and most times you weren’t in the equations at all.
Are you the same as your brand? When Cybil started her business 20 years ago she was working at five different locations but she knew she would one day be working at her own place. She also knew that no matter where she worked she would need to have her own brand. People would need to be able to search for HER, Cybil Solyn esthetician. So she created a website to brand herself. That way no matter where she worked her name could be searched and discovered.
Alex, being a yoga instructor and body nerd had the same epiphany when she started out. She would go from yoga studio and yoga class all over the valley teaching and getting a following for her unique way of teaching yoga. Yeah she used social media, but AE Wellness and her own brand and website was born out of a need for people to be able to find HER in the mess and chaos of the LA yoga scene.
This is one way of thinking about your branding as a newbie starting out. But we dig even deeper in this episode of Skinfessional. Cybil poses the idea that we even need to create a brand to protect ourselves. A persona, hats, to keep ourselves safe and separate from our business on a day to day basis.
