Can you actually grow your business if you don’t believe you’re worthy of success?
Last month I celebrated two years of being self-employed and about two months of setting financial goals.
Yep, I have been operating in business for two whole years without any real direction or hard financial targets.
If that sounds outlandish to you, then I think you’re probably doing better than me in a lot of ways - but if it sounds familiar, welcome, sis.
From the outside, someone might assume I’ve got everything figured out if I’ve managed to sustain myself and my family for two years being self-employed on a single income. But the truth is, I’ve had to overcome mountains mentally to get to the point where I felt brave enough to quit my job, to then go out on my own, to then ask for what I’m worth, and now, to get to the point where I could have a successful business on my hands…if I can just accept that I’m worthy of success in the first place.
If we were going to unpack all the reasons I’ve held myself back over the years, we’d be here for a few days, so I’m just going to focus in on one little aspect in particular that I feel is going to be most pertinent to other mums with small businesses. I’m generalising here, but I think a lot of mothers in business are actually stop themselves from succeeding.
At least, I know I did.
When you become a mother, or particularly, when you take up the position of being a stay at home mother, your whole life changes, and there’s a couple parts of you that take a massive hit: your dreams, your confidence, your capacity…you become CEO of a household and frankly, that’s like three jobs in one. That’s enough jobs.
Career falls away for most of us, as our biggest responsibility becomes the running of the household, supporting our partner while they bring home the bacon and keeping the offspring alive.
But of course, there comes a day when you either need to start bringing some more money into the household, or, you suddenly start to feel a pull back to the outside world. You fire up the synapses that went into sleep mode so your brain could hear your baby crying better (or something like that), and you decide to start a business.
Except, you probably won’t want to call it a business, will you? It’s a project, maybe. A side hustle. It’s not a real business - it can’t be. Your responsibility is to the family, the house; they need you first, and you can’t possibly be expected to run an actual, real, legitimate business when you have kindergarten drop-offs and playdates and scraped knees and school trips?
No, we can’t promise too much, because we might not be able to back it up. We can’t aim too high because we’ll just let everybody down when duty calls. We can’t want too much for ourselves because we’re not really allowed to be successful anymore, are we?
Maybe it’s mum guilt, maybe it’s internalised misogyny, maybe you’re scared of failure, maybe you’re scared of what your success might mean for your family.
Maybe you’re comparing yourself to your partner’s work or his income. Maybe you feel embarrassed that you don’t have a ‘real job’. Maybe it feels frivolous or silly. Maybe no one else believes in you, maybe they’ve called it your ‘hobby’ enough times that you’ve accepted that’s what it has to be.
Whatever your reason is for doing it, you keep it there. You keep it small. You don’t think of it or act like it’s a legitimate business and in turn, you effectively stop it from ever being that.
And this goes for anyone else too. If you treat your business like a hobby or a side hustle, it’s going to be that and stay that.
Every successful business you know got that way because whoever’s running it treats it like a business, and they either did it that way from the start, or one day, they woke up and realised it wasn’t going to go anywhere unless they sat down, set some actual financial goals, then figured out what they needed to do to scale and hit those goals. To make some actual money, with profit and everything. Like a real business.
And then they had to believe they could do it.
So my question to you is this: if you haven’t set financial goals for your business (yes, it’s a business), what part of your mindset is blocking you from allowing it to be successful? What limiting belief are you carrying that’s stopping you from growing?
And how are we going to get you to believe that you’re just as worthy and deserving of success as the next person?