Ep 56: Will the REAL Problem Please Stand Up?

How we think. about 1 thing is how we think about most things & that’s why it’s important to MASTER Your Money Mindset-so you can build a strong foundation for your business.

You can fix your niche, your offer, your positioning , your FB ads, any individual piece in your business but if you don’t detect and expose the Money lies , you still won’t maximize your earning potential and make the impact you’re meant to make.

Think about any lies you might be believing right now:

I don’t deserve this

I don’t know what I want

I don’t know how

I don’t have anything to say

People don’t like me

My niche isn’t something people want to pay for

They can’t afford it

I don’t really have much to offer

If you believe any of those things, you can become an expert at the techniques and the tactics in your business, but they still won’t lead to the impact and the money you want to make.

I just started working with a new client and they have been doing ALL the things in their business and they’ve been doing a lot of the right things in their business. They’re good at those things and they still weren’t making the money they wanted. They don’t have the money they want to have to fuel the life they want.

I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it is NOT about what you’re doing. It’s about HOW you’re doing it and HOW you’re doing it is because of WHO you are showing up as when you’re doing those things. When you believe Money Lies you show up as someone who doesn’t deserve it as someone that people don’t find value in, as someone people don’t want to pay for, someone who this is not meant for, whatever you’re believing.

And when you show up that way — and you can fake it till you make it all you want – but the energy of who you believe you are or what you believe about yourself will still come through.

That’s why detecting and exposing the money lies you’re believing is so important and that’s why building awareness around those lies is so important. So that you can begin to solve the true problem, instead of spending time, energy and money on solving the symptoms of the true problem – niche, offer, copy, content, etc.

Once you solve your money mindset problem, you’ll have so much more clarity around those other tactics in your business.

Since we’re talking about Awareness this month, I wanted to talk about judgment in this episode. The reason I wanted to personally focus on building awareness around judgment is because when I could notice the judgment I could address so much of the resistance, frustration and defeat I was feeling.

Judgment has such an impact on your performance and therefore the performance of your business. As I’ve become better at managing my judgment, I’ve become better at showing up in my business. And as I’ve performed in my business, my business has performed better.

Releasing the judgment also frees up energy, time, brain space and it leads to a better, more enjoyable experience building my business. I have more fun, I take myself and the business and the money I make a lot less seriously.

There are three kinds of judgment. There’s judgment of circumstances. There’s judgment of yourself and there’s judgment of other people.

Judgment of yourself will usually feel like disappointment, discouraged or defeat.

Judgment of the circumstances typically feels like frustration

And judgment of other people can feel like frustration – it happens when you think other people should be different or act differently.

There can also be resistance to doing things. I’m going to talk about the resistance later in this podcast.

But so much of our judgment is subconscious or so habitual and automatic that we don’t even notice it. It just happens and it feels so normal, because honestly, we’re constantly judging something, that it’s escapes our notice. Our brain doesn’t bring it to our attention, because it’s not the exception , it ‘s the rule.

And since it’s so automatic, that’s why we need to build awareness around it.

That’s why it’s so important to address the judgment. If you get stuck a lot in your business, like I used to, judgment could be the culprit. I’m going to help you discern where judgment is stopping you.

judgment is like being broadsided by a dump truck.

It will stop you in your trucks, it will halt all forward progress and momentum.

Judgment doesn’t serve you.

1996 was not a great year for me. There were good things that happened but there was an awful lot of bad.

It started out just fine. My husband at the time, my first husband, had just moved to a new city. We had moved there so I could complete my masters degree in accounting, I had passed the CPA exam and I got my first professional job with an accounting firm that specialized in automotive dealerships. I was really excited about that. We had bought our first starter home. He had a really good job, where he was moving up. Since I had finished school, he wanted start a degree in engineering.

It was just a really exciting time for us, because we were starting to build a really great life.

Until that fall, when things went downhill fast. One day I came home from work, and he told me that he didn’t want to be married anymore,

It was completely out of the blue completely unexpected, and completely devastating.

I have told this story before so I won’t go into all the details of that.

Not long after that, it was before Thanksgiving, I had had this problem in my throat that had been plaguing me for a little while and I decided that I was going to take this opportunity when I already felt like crap to go ahead and get a tonsillectomy to get rid of the problem. The only problem was, I was in a place where I didn’t know a whole lot of people and I didn’t have friends in this new city yet at that point in time.

I didn’t really have anybody that I felt comfortable asking to take me to and from this outpatient procedure and of course they don’t allow you to drive after you’ve had the anesthesia. But fortunately, my sister in law, at that time was planning to drive from Virginia to Texas to spend the Thanksgiving holidays with her in laws, and she was willing to take a couple of extra days to stop on her way through to drive me to and from the outpatient procedure and make sure that I was okay afterwards.

I coordinated my procedure with when she would be going through on her way to Texas. She drove me to the procedure and on the way home. She was driving and I was in the passenger seat. Still, like recovering from anesthesia so I was kind of out of it. And a dump truck turned in front of us, and she tried to stop slammed on the brakes, but there was not enough time and we slammed into the side of this huge dump truck.

Well, needless to say, the dump truck didn’t move. And when we slammed into it, it caused a whole lot of damage so the momentum. As you can imagine, resulted in a lot of damage, damage to our bodies as well as to my car which she was driving. So the car was totaled. She was in pretty bad shape. internally, she, she didn’t suffer. You know, remarkable damage but her leg was shattered because she had slammed on the brakes, and when there was nowhere for that inertia to go it went into her leg and shattered her leg. And so, she, it took her several months to recover or several surgeries to get her leg in operable condition, and I was much more fortunate than she was probably part of, partly because I was still recovering from the anesthesia, I would imagine so I probably didn’t tense up as much, but I broke my collarbone, my collarbone was broken. Lots and lots of bruising to ribs to my lungs to, you know, legs and, you know, all of like the whole front of my body basically was what extensive bruising. But

my point is that the dump truck stopped all forward momentum.

And that is what judgment does to us, it stops all forward momentum.

And that’s why we need to build awareness around judgment because judgment will stop all forward momentum

it will stop all forward momentum in your, in relationships, in your development and growth as a person in your development and growth as an entrepreneur, it will stop all forward momentum in your business.

When you get into judgment, and whether it doesn’t matter what kind of judgment, whether it’s judgment of yourself judgment of the circumstances or judgment of other people. And so that’s why it’s so important to build awareness around the judgment that you get into because if you’re not aware of it, and most of us aren’t.

Most of us aren’t aware of how much judgment we really into on a daily basis, judging things that happen, judging things in general, judging ourselves and judging other people.

What do I mean by judging circumstances? I’ll give you an example.

A lot of people have debt. I have some clients that have debt.

What I notice is they judge that debt. They also judge themselves for having that debt, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

I had this client that when she came to me, she wanted help with her finances because she was making more than she ever had and she was frustrated that she was still living paycheck.

She had set this goal the year before to pay off some of her debt and a year later, she said that she hadn’t made any progress. So we started coaching and what we found was that she had all kinds of judgment around this debt. She didn’t like the relationship she had with money and she didn’t like the relationship she had with this debt.

When we worked on that, we got to the source of the problem and just like I mentioned before, the reason that she wasn’t paying off the debt is that when she focused on it, it brought her pain instead of joy. Of course, that made her avoid it. When she avoided it, she didn’t make progress on it.

Once she started focusing on what she wanted instead of what she didn’t want and once she stopped judging the debt for ruining her life, then she started to make progress.

See judgment of the debt halted, in this case prevented forward progress, it prevented her from getting any momentum, because the judgment kept stopping her.

Have you ever noticed in your business these starts and stops. You get started, you get some momentum going, then it feels like someone slams on the brakes. It’s these fits and starts. If you have ever learned to drive a stick shift, with the clutch that you have to let out just so, you know what I’m talking about.

You’ll let out the clutch and the car will start moving and then you let it out too fast and it jerks and stops, jerks and stops, until it just sputters and stalls, as you’re trying to adjust the clutch.

That’s what judgment of your circumstances does. You judge the circumstances, then you don’t move forward. You don’t make progress. Especially if it’s circumstances you don’t control, like the debt. She might be responsible for the debt, but once she had the debt, she couldn’t really do anything about it being there. It felt out of her control, so she resented it. She wanted it to be different. Instead of investing that energy, time and money on making it different by doing something about the things she did control, she spent it on resisting, spinning, judging the things she didn’t control.

Another kind of judgment is judgment of yourself.

We’ll use the same example of my client with the debt. She judged the debt, but she also judged herself for having the debt. She told herself she should have known better, she told herself that she was naive and stupid when she went into debt.

Basically she thought debt is bad and I have debt. Therefore I’m bad. She obviously didn’t want to feel that way. That doesn’t feel good, so she avoided thinking about it and doing anything about it. That’s another reason she didn’t make any progress on the debt.

She buffered to avoid feeling the judgment. She used her coaching business as a buffer, she used travel as a buffer. Other things that felt good to her to escape the judgment she felt for getting into debt.

She was judging her debt and judging herself for having the debt, and she halted forward progress on doing something about that debt. Had she not been in judgment, then she could have just looked at debt as, okay, I have debt, what do I want to do about it. What’s my plan, and she could have arranged a plan, and then she could have implemented that plan and executed that plan, and gotten rid of her debt, but because she was so busy judging it, she actually avoided the debt.

What you resist persists. She was resisting having the debt, so the debt persisted.

And it’s interesting to look down another layer at how she wasn’t actually avoiding the task of paying off the debt. Instead what she was avoiding was the judgment that she felt around the debt, the shame that she felt as a result of the judgment. She wasn’t avoiding paying the debt, she was avoiding judgment.

I find my clients do this a lot as well. When they don’t do something in their business, whether it’s they, they’re not making money, they’re not signing clients they’re not getting consults, they’re not showing up in their business the way they want. They’re not being consistent, they’re not showing up consistently they’re not posting on social media consistently whatever it is that they’re not doing in their business. They’re judging themselves, and then when they try to show up to do those things in their business, to try to connect with clients to try to create content, or post on social media, they don’t want to. They resist doing it. They procrastinate. They get busy doing something else. They find other things interrupt their schedule.

Then they feel shame around not getting those things done. They’re judging themselves for that. But since a lot of that judgment is unconscious, they don’t always recognize the judgment and when they do, they feel powerless to stop it.

When they self coach on why they’re not getting things done, they get stuck. Because they think they’re avoiding the task that they’re not doing and they can’t figure out why.

The reason is that what they’re actually avoiding is the judgment. They judge themselves about what they haven’t done. And then when they go to do that task, their brain foresess the future of feeling judgment and shame and they avoid the task.

That’s what my client with the debt was doing. She was not avoiding the debt she was actually avoiding the judgment that she had of herself around that debt. That’s what she was avoiding.

Again, that judgment stopped her in her tracks, it halted forward momentum on her debt — and on her business, because how you think about one thing is how you think about most things. If you’re thinking I’m bad because I have debt, you’re going to think that in other areas of your life. In your relationships, where do you think I’m bad at relationships? In your business, where do you think I’m bad at marketing or at sales. With money, where do you think I’m bad with money?

One area I’ve built a lot of awareness around the resistance I’ve felt so much in my business.

One of the most common feelings my clients have in their business is resistance. And like my clients, I have felt A LOT of resistance in my business. So I just tried to become more aware of it. I started to trying to pay more attention to when I felt resistance. A lot of my clients even struggle with becoming aware of when they are feeling resistance. Resistance isn’t like anxiety. It presents differently. It’s not an in your face emotion. For me at least and a lot of my clients, it more of just a low hum or a tensing up or a bracing that has physical sensations that are easier to block out than some of the big emotions.

So you really have to learn to tune into it in order to explore what you’re resisting and why.

When I would notice resistance, I would look to the task I was resisting, but sometimes it’s not necessarily the task you’re resisting or avoiding. Sometimes, you’re actually avoiding and resisting the judgment you’ll feel when you do the task, because your brain is in the background telling you you’ll do it wrong or you don’t know how to do (so you’ll do it wrong) or you haven’t figured it out yet (therefore you’ll do it wrong)

If you have a lot of judgment of yourself when you do things wrong, that doesn’t feel loving, so the next time you go to do that thing or something similar that you don’t want to do wrong, but secretly, subconsciously think you’ll fail at, you avoid the task, but not because of the task or the failure, but because of the judgment you’ll have to endure if you do fail.

Just notice the resistance or the frustration so you can explore the judgment behind it. Judgment of yourself.

I talked about examples of judging the circumstance of debt and judging yourself for the debt or whatever you’re judging yourself.

The third kind of judgment is judgment of others. This is similar to judgment of the circumstances. Other people are circumstances, so I won’t spend a lot of time on this, but I did want to mention this. Sometimes my clients will judge their clients or their potential clients. They have a manual for them. It’s an instruction manual that usually sounds something like this.

Again, this is important because how you think about one thing is how you think about most things. If you’re thinking my clients should show up to their sessions with something to work on, you probably are thinking something similar about your husband, your kids, yourself. They should do their homework, they should bother me on the weekends, they should hire me without so much drama. All the things that other people do that they shouldn’t do or things they should do that they don’t do and all of it frustrates us or annoys us.

Look at the people that you’re judging,

are you judging your clients for not doing what you think they should be doing.

Are you judging your audience, for not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Are you looking at the people that aren’t signing up and judging them for not seeing their thinking is causing their problem?

Are you judging them for not seeing that they can afford your program?

Are you judging your partner for not supporting you in your business?

What are the people that you’re judging?

What if it wasn’t really a problem? If you weren’t judging it, what would you be doing?

If you weren’t so focused on what you don’t control, what do you control that you would focus more on?

If you weren’t so focused on what you don’t want, what would you be getting that you do want?

Focus on what you want, focus on what you can do, focus on who you can help, because what you focus on grows.

Notice the judgment, but don’t focus on what you’re judging. Focus on what you can do something about.

My challenge to you is this. Start to notice where you have judgment.

Whether it’s judgment of the circumstances, judgment of yourself or judgment of others, just notice it.

And be careful to not fall into judgment of your judgment. That’s really easy to do, so I’m warning you so you can watch out for that too.

That’s what I wanted you to be aware of this week is just how much judgment stops you in your tracks, how it halts forward progress, wherever you’re having that judgment. Just think of the example of the dump truck, remember how the judgment that my client had around her debt stopped her forward progress on that debt, and, and notice wherever this is happening for you.

Remember when you find yourself judging, whether it’s circumstances, yourself or other people.

You don’t have to be perfect.

Your business doesn’t have to be perfect.

You don’t have to run your business perfectly and you don’t have to have a perfectly managed mind to help people and make a difference.

All you have to do is show up every time and be your best.

Because your best is getting better and better and your best is always good enough.

One of my favorite useful thoughts to practice is I always give my best and my best is always good enough. I’ve made that non negotiable.

If you want to get better, stop judging and just do your best, because your best is always good enough.

That’s how you get the MORE you’re MADE for. 

Outro: 

In your business you will have trouble.

There’s no eliminating problems showing up in your business.

But problems don’t have to mean something bad.

What if problems are just an opportunity to exercise those problem-solving muscles you’re developing?

I have a new toolkit I use with my clients that I’m sharing with you to help you become a Problem Solving Ninja in your business.

I’m super excited to share this process you can use to solve literally ANY problem you have in your business.

It’s available now by visiting jill wright coaching dot com forward slash solve-dash-any – dash – problem

There’s a series of short videos and three worksheets that will explain in detail as well as walk you through using this process to solve any problem in your business.

This free resource includes some strength-building exercises you can use in your biz so that when challenges and obstacles come up you know exactly how to solve them. I use this in my own business when I feel stuck so I don’t have to stay stuck and I can move forward instead of wasting time spinning.

Go and sign up to download all these resources absolutely free.

When you sign up, you’ll also get notified of the special calls I’ll be hosting to answer questions about the process and coach you live on any problem you have in your business.

Hurry and get yours now, so you can move forward in your business.https://www.jillwrightcoaching.com/solve-any-problem