What to do when you feel like you’re not enough.
Struggling with feeling unworthy doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful; it’s a very normal part of being an entrepreneur.
In the Monetization Accelerator Program, which is my signature program for bloggers and influencers who want to make money more reliably selling their own things, one of the first things we do is develop a really specific mindset routine. New level, new devil, the saying goes – it never goes away, you’re always going to be dealing with feeling with these new doubts.
The most practical way that I’ve learned to address this is to have a daily routine.
Most people, even at the highest levels, are still dealing with some issues of self-worth. So if you are dealing with feelings of self doubt, the good news is that there are actions you can take.
The bad news?
It’s probably going to be there in some form for most of your life.
And that’s because your brain has a survival mechanism – to stay as it is.
So, when you have those kinds of self-doubts that are keeping you from taking action, it’s just a part of your brain trying to help you survive. When you have self doubt, it prevents you from taking action, which your brain loves. Your brain loves for you to be cozy and comfy, and not make any kind of changes.
You are very normal if you’re struggling with this!
Now, your brain is a very convincing liar.
So, one of the things that we do in the mindset routine I created is we thank our brains for protecting us. We don’t need to be frustrated that we’re not getting it right away or that we’re not the most confident – we want to work with the systems that we have.
In a mastermind that I was in back in January 2020, there was a very experienced mindset coach who taught me about A.N.T.’s. That’s not something that he developed, it’s just part of psychology. (I’m not a mental health professional, in case you guys didn’t know that. So this is all coming from a novice perspective.)
A.N.T.’s stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts.
This is really common in many areas of our life.
These automatic negative thoughts are often inaccurate representations of what is true, because of cognitive errors. Cognitive errors make us perceive what we think is truth, but often it’s inaccurate, because we have biases that we grow up with, or we create biases based on experience.
A lot of times those things are meant to protect us, but your self-worth is usually influenced by automatic negative thoughts. That’s why we need to challenge these thoughts!
So the first step in addressing your self-worth in a more consistent ongoing basis is not to fight it head on, but it’s really just awareness. And the best way to develop awareness is to become a gentle observer of your thoughts. This has to do with any kind of mindset, or stress, or anxiety that you’re dealing with. The first step is not a 180 and changing the behavior, the first step is just being an observer of the thoughts.
One way to practice challenging some of these automatic negative thoughts is to do it intentionally, by looking at affirmations.
You can just research a bunch of success affirmations, or you can use my Mindset Cards (which aren’t for sale, but you can enter to win by dropping a comment on my weekly live videos in my Facebook group, Mindful Marketing Mavens), or you can look at affirmations you’ve created for yourself.
A really good way to start being an observer of the automatic negative thoughts is to read an affirmation, and check in with how you feel about it.
One common misconception is, “If I read affirmations over and over and over again, someday they’ll just automatically work for me, and I’ll start stepping into that identity.”
And that’s partially true.
However, when you’re reading affirmations about something that you’re very, very far from believing, it can be detrimental to actually believing it. Your brain knows that it’s not true. And so, you can actually start feeling worse because you’re reading these, knowing that they’re not true.
So, for example, the affirmation “I allow money to come in easily from many sources.”
I can read that affirmation, and then just check in with how I’m feel about that.
What are some of the doubts that come in? What’s the feeling in my stomach, or in my chest, or the rest of my body? And maybe you’ll start with the feeling and then you’ll say, “Okay, I don’t feel good about this. I feel tightness when I read this statement.” Okay, and let me think about, “Why might I feel tightness when I read the statement?” Well, it’s because, historically, money hasn’t come from many sources in my life. I don’t know how to create them, so this is not true for me.
And so now, I know why I don’t think this is true, and it’s biased.
It’s based on personal experience, not on research or data. It’s just based on thinking, “I haven’t had this so far, so I don’t think this can exist.”
Once you understand why you’re having a negative thought, now you can say, “Okay, do I have any proof that this is really true? Is my personal experience enough to prove that this is true?”
The answer is almost always – no.
If you’re using only your personal experience to either validate or invalidate any kind of truth, then you’re always going to come up biased.
You’re always going to come up with cognitive errors. It’s not based on truth, or science, or data.
One really great way to challenge things that you feel aren’t true is to say, “This isn’t true for me. Does that mean it’s not true for everyone in the universe?”
No, because I can think of probably hundreds of entrepreneurs that I’ve never personally met, but they obviously have money coming in from many sources.
Some entrepreneurs were born into the world with a lot of privilege and some entrepreneurs were born into the world with no privilege at all. So they had to start from the ground up just like I did. That means it’s possible for me.
Terminal Uniqueness
It’s really common for people to think, “Okay, I really appreciate these tools that you’re sharing with me, but they won’t work for me because of X, Y, or Z..”
For example, there was someone in the Mindful Marketing Mavens Facebook group recently. When she first came into the Mindful Marketing Maven group, she was completely broke. She was on food stamps, her husband hadn’t had a job in a really long time, and I got on a sales call with her, even though I didn’t think she would buy anything from me. I felt that if I could just talk to this person for five minutes, I could open up their mind to what’s possible.
And that’s exactly what happened.
She still hasn’t bought anything from me, but she’s gotten to $11,000 months in her business.
That was so much money for her that her husband didn’t really even understand how much money she was making from her business. There’s no reason, practically, why she should have been able to get to $11,000 months.
But really, all she did was she just kept showing up. She kept coming to the free trainings in the Mindful Marketing Maven group and taking action.
She COULD have come up with a lot of reasons that she couldn’t do it. Instead, she decided to take action, no matter what. And that worked for her. I really appreciate that she didn’t have terminal uniqueness.
Of course, there are layers of privilege. Some people are born with a lot more working against them. And it’s true that it can be harder for some people than others to be successful in business. But it can also be true that there are more things working against you than other people, and you can still use the tools to succeed.
Feeling Like You’re Good Enough
This is something I read on Psychology Today, when I was trying to be educated about my tips for this training, and I loved this perspective:
Feeling like you’re not good enough is focusing on what is wrong with you. Why not focus on what is right with you?
Because there’s way more stuff that’s right with you.
We can apply this to lots of areas of our lives.
We can have a bad day, and think about all the bad things that happened. But, too, we can think about all the right things that happened. And there’s usually way more right things that happened than wrong things.
It the same with our belief about ourselves.
There’s way more things that are right with you than wrong. Get in the practice of noticing the things that go well over and over and over again. Just because you’re not making 20K months yet, doesn’t mean that you haven’t had all these other successes along the way. And if you can learn to celebrate all of your wins, you reduce friction to achieving your bigger goals.
Celebrate all of your wins.
A lot of times I draw confidence from my clients’ wins.
I don’t share all my client’s wins publicly; a lot of times they’re confidential, or they’re in a thread in a paid program and it’s not appropriate to share those with you. But I have a Google doc where I try to write down every single client win.
One of my clients, who joined one of my coaching programs, really struggles severely with mental health issues, That impacted her ability to be consistent. One of the biggest wins for her was just like, “This is the first thing I ever did that I didn’t quit. And now I have the program for the long term, and I will continue to utilize it and grow.”
Being able to focus was a huge win. That’s a huge win when you’ve been struggling with ups and downs that have really hurt you in the past, and now you finally been consistent for the first time in your life.
Taking action
And then lastly, when you’re reaching for goals in general, sometimes we have low self-worth, because we’re not taking action towards our goals and we have a lot of ideas.
And so, starting to take manageable action towards your goals can really improve your self-worth. If you’re someone who constantly deals with feeling shame around not meeting a goal, that will definitely impact your self-worth. Like, “I set a goal, I didn’t reach it. Now I feel like a failure.”
So this is probably one of the most practical non woo-woo tips of all of this: make your goals really, really manageable.
Instead of saying, “I’m going to get to 20K months in three months,” you could say, “I am going to get my first purchase ever in 30 days.” Set goals that feel manageable, because those manageable wins will really, really impact your self-worth over time.
Accountability
The other thing is when you are setting goals: try to have some kind of accountability in place, so you can check in with someone, and just keep taking consistent action.
Accountability helps you to take consistent action: consistent action towards your goals will improve your self-worth. This is one reason why I think that joining the Monetization Accelerator program or another group program can be really helpful for your goals. A lot of you probably have a lot of information in your head that is valuable and helpful for reaching your goals. You just don’t know how to connect the dots. Or you’re not taking action on it, or you’re overwhelmed at all of the ideas.
Joining the environment where you can actually get the accountability and stay on track and simplify the things that you’re moving towards can be really helpful. So that’s what I have to say about self-worth.
Lead indicators and lag indicators
Lead indicators are the actions you take towards your goals; the lag indicators are the results.
If I do the lead indicators, the lag indicators always, always follow. They never haven’t.
They may not follow in the timeline that I was really looking for, but they always come eventually. The place that I’m in right now is really wonderful, because I just feel calm in my business and my confidence right now.
I’ve helped a lot of people over and over and over again with the process that I developed. I feel really calm and confident about the way that I market. I’m just going to keep going no matter what. And I feel like that’s a really, really nice, great place to be in – and I also work on my mindset every single day.
NEED MORE SUPPORT?
If you need some help working on your mindset, feel free to drop me a comment below.
