Navigating The Crisis of Confidence for Female Business Owners in 2023

Welcome back driven woman entrepreneur. If you were not here last week for our amazing guest interview with Nicole Kalil, please do yourself a ginormous favor and listen to that episode right after you listen to this one. She is someone I have so much respect for and really, really loved co-creating that interview and you know, I've been thinking about it an awful lot. I decided to record this episode after re-listening to that interview with Nicole, it was literally that good. Even though I was obviously there for the interview. I listened to it again once it was released. And the reason why is because something I am noticing a lot is what I'm calling the crisis of confidence.

So I want to guide you through this, I wanna break it down with you, share how I'm experiencing this crisis of confidence, and hopefully by the end of this episode, create a little bit of clarity, create a little bit of confidence and a little bit of direction for the future. That's my goal. You see this crisis of confidence is not because you have trust issues, although you might, I do. But because so many of us, whether we are relatively new at business ownership or we've been in the arena for a long, long time, the marketing messages we have absorbed in the last few years have really created a sense of mass confusion and at times mass hysteria. The number of people who are pushing this ridiculous, ridiculous, magical scenario that's starting a business, growing a business, scaling a business, leveraging a business, and creating passive income is easy, fast, fun, and you can almost do it in your sleep, it is simply a lie.

It sells a lot of courses and programs and all sorts of other things. It sells people on a dream. It sells people on an idea. It sells people on a belief, and it indoctrinates people into an identity. I mean, if it really was true that literally anybody could start, grow, leverage, scale a business, then why have we read for years, maybe decades, that these significant majority of small businesses fail like, yes, I understand. We are in a new frontier because of the internet and social media and all the wonderful tech tools that we now literally have at our fingertips. But business ownership is hard no matter how many tools you have, and no matter how many hacks or tips or tricks or strategies you learn, it's hard.

It is literally hard to be where the buck stops. It is hard to be the decision maker on everything large and small. It's hard to manage people, whether they are contractors, remote workers, or your sister working with you from the back bedroom of your house, managing people is hard. Predicting market trends is hard, watching how things change in the economy and how that trickles down to your specific niche market and business model based on major events in the year, in the world events like wars, changes in our economy, changes in our political leadership. All of those things really, really do affect the small business owner and yet who has the freaking bandwidth to pay attention to all of that. I don't care how long you've been in business, whether you are managing a team or managing to do everything yourself, there are a lot of moving parts and the economy is constantly changing, the social media algorithms are constantly changing what works and for who is constantly changing and the number of new options is constantly expanding. So this crisis of confidence is not because you lack the traits, the mindset, the skills, the attitude to be successful as a business owner.

It's because you are literally being bombarded with messages, many of which contradict themselves. I recently had Jadah Sellner as my guest on this podcast. We talked in great detail about her book She Builds and how her idea of a female centric model for business ownership is so important because women are different. We have different lives, different responsibilities, and different physiology, and that affects our bandwidth. We are much more at risk for burnout because of role strain and because of the competing demands of multiple responsibilities and that is true whether you are a single parent, a single person, a foster mom with 10 kids, or a dog mama. We have competing responsibilities and multiple demands on our time, not to mention a physiology that is not always predictable, right? So many things have been changing in the last few years, and we are told that what we need to do is be committed and be consistent.

You know how hard it is to be consistent at anything and I mean anything. I remember when I was a young mom with three littles, and of course I heard from all the parenting experts as well, as well-meaning moms of older kids, that if you can't be consistent, don't do anything. Well, I'll tell you what, enter real life. I found it really difficult, both as a married mom of three and as a single mom, parenting on my own for a decade of three to be consistent about everything. It's really hard to be consistent because shit happens, all kinds of shit happens. Some of it is expected shit, some of it is unexpected shit. Sometimes it's compound shit cuz you got multiple shitty things happening at once.

But being consistent, if that's the message, we need to be consistent in our business. Whether that means as a content creator, you need to be consistent, you need to get your content out, your blog, your podcast, your YouTube every single week or what. You need to be on all the social media platforms or on the social media platform that you have committed to multiple times a week or day. I mean, it gives me a headache just to think about it just keeping up with the demands of marketing your business, forget about everything else. Forget about actually running your business. Forget about serving your clients. Forget about the bookkeeping, forget about the invoicing. Forget about serving the clients. Forget about all that, all of that, just the marketing piece alone is freaking exhausting. So what do we believe? What can we believe? Who can we believe? The more voices you listen to, the more opinions you get, the more confusing it is.

And what I see again and again and again is that as women business owners, we're being told, you need to be consistent. You need to show up in an authentic way. You need to give away, give, give, give, give, give, and then ask, and all of this kind of sounds okay in theory. And I have certainly done or attempted to do 110% of it but what you begin to realize after a while is that none of it is sustainable. There are too many moving parts, you are stretched too thin. It literally feels like you're like one bad cold away from the whole house of card collapsing. This affects your ability to eat healthy, to exercise adequately, and to even get enough restorative sleep on a frequent basis.

So this crisis of confidence is we are not feeling confident about our ability to have successful, sustainable businesses. Many of us are not feeling confident in knowing how to get whatever help we need. Believing that it's actually okay to get help and trusting that the people that we should be able to turn to for that help will actually deliver on their promises. You see, this crisis of confidence has kind of a dirty little secret, which is there are hundreds of thousands of women owned businesses who by and large turn to female business coaches, business consultants, business strategists, and group coaching programs run by women.

Why? Because most of us already know that what works for men is not going to work for us. Because their lives tend to be less complicated than ours. I realize that as a broad sweeping generalization, and you do not need to DM me and tell me that you know of the lives of many men who are very challenging, come on, I'm not a beginner, I do know that. But what I also is that women business owners have a harder time. They have a harder time getting funding. They have a harder time getting business loans. They have a harder time getting people in the position to help them get started or keep going. They have a harder time getting those people to take them seriously, and now it doesn't even feel safe.

And we can't with confidence even turn to each other for help, that's a broken system, my friends. I'm so sad, disappointed, kind of wanna throw up in my mouth a little, to be honest, at the number of women who are leading programs, marketing and selling to other women who are quite intentionally creating false hope, making false promises, and leaving those clients high and dry when they don't get the desired results that they were promised when they enrolled in their program. It's really pretty gross and yes, I know I'm idealistic and I know that there are just as many shitty women out there as there are men, but women tend to be more collaborative. And historically we have been able to turn to one another for safety and support, not so much now, and it makes me very sad to see how many women are struggling in their businesses, do not want to give up owning a business, running a business, they're deep into survival mode.

They're scared shitless, and they don't know who they can trust, that makes me very sad. And I am among the many, many, many thousands of women who turned to other women for help as I was growing my business, pivoting in my business, expanding my business, taking my offline business online. I have hired predominantly other women to help me, and most of those situations have not turned out well for me. So what do we do from here? Do we despair? Do we disparage? Do we throw up our hands? Do we give up? I know I'm not going to do any of those things. One of the things I am trying to do is be a voice for honesty and having a no BS approach to speaking the uncomfortable truth. May not make me popular, but I guarantee you I sleep better at night.

It also helps me connect with other women who are strong, who are no BS themselves and who have no intention to be part of the mental fuckery that is going on, especially in the coaching industry on a incredible scale. They are part of the just say hell no to all that nonsense club. So I wanna say just a few things in wrapping up. One, if you have been duped, taken advantage of, lied to, really screwed over by a female coach or consultant, or course creator, I am deeply sorry that you experienced that, and I want you to make a commitment to yourself that you are not going to maintain that as your frame of reference for getting help in the future. Not everybody is like that.

I hope that that experience helps you be more discerning, be more discriminating, and maybe not get so caught up in the moment because it's been said for many, many years if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I want you over time to be able to reconnect with your ability to trust and your own inner wisdom, your intuition, and your instincts. You know, I happen to be a fan of TikTok and I see a lot of people talking about narcissistic on TikTok, and it really, really reminds me of so much of what's gone on in the coaching industry in the last few years propagated by both men and women. I think I'm just a little bit more disgusted when it's women, although that's probably sexist, right?

So you're not the only one you will recover from this and one of the things I really wanna encourage you to work on recovering quickest is your ability to trust yourself. When you can trust yourself to make good decisions, you will eventually be able to trust that you can hire someone else to help you move forward. Now, I happen to be a business strategist, mentor and coach, but I'll be the first one to tell you, not everybody needs to hire someone like me. In fact, plenty of people don’t. Some people do, some people will reach a point where they're no longer beginners. They've laid the foundation, they know how to attract customers, maybe not consistently, maybe not the best fit customers, but they know how to market their business.

They know how to sell people their goods or services. They know how to manage at least the basics of the money part of their business. They know how to keep the wheels turning. They know how to network. But usually when somebody decides to schedule a free consultation with me and is thinking maybe this is a person who can help me. They're usually in one of the following scenarios. They're either someone who's been in business for several years, lots of times I work with accidental entrepreneurs. They never expected to be in business, but they just started doing something, they got good at it, other people noticed. They became interested in that thing, they said, Hey, could you do that for me? Could I pay you to do that for me? And one thing led to another, and now here they are five years later as an agency owner where they are continuing to do that type of work and they are now also supervising a team of people who do that kind of work. That's a pretty common scenario for women business owners.

They realize they're working too many hours for the money they're making. They are not feeling in control of the business. They feel like there's a lot of what I call gaps and overlaps, stuff is falling through the cracks, and there are redundancies, like maybe two different people have some overlapping roles, things like that. I really like to work with established business owners because rather than brand new doobies, I have helped a few people start their business from scratch, and that is exciting and fun because fundamentally, I'm a builder, but I really like helping people figure out when they have haven't established business, what's working and what isn't, so that we can leverage their strengths and fix the problems easing pressure from them, simplifying, streamlining, and allowing them to gain time, freedom, money freedom, and a greater sense of spaciousness in their life.

Like I said, you may not need a coach or a strategist. You may not need me, but if you do, and you have been listening to this podcast for a while, I hope that you won't let crisis and confidence holds you back indefinitely. I hope that you won't think, well, she actually sounds pretty good on this podcast, but I don't know. I've been impressed with someone who sounded good before and then I got screwed over. I get it, I totally do, and it's one of the reasons why I do a free consultation instead of a discovery call, because with a free consultation, I'm gonna give you direction and you're gonna go away with more confidence and clarity than you had before you got in that call. Whether I invite you to become a client or not, why do I do that? It's not because I enjoy wasting my time. I do a screening procedure. I don't literally give free advice to people, but I want more women to succeed.

I want more women to be successfully self employed, not a week goes by that I don't hear from someone that they just lost their job. Some of these people have kids and they are the head of household, and I will tell you, I will never forget the experience of being a single mom of three kids for a decade and feeling the pressure to keep our little boat afloat, knowing that my boss could have redlined me without missing a beat. So I really do believe that even if you choose to have a full-time job, I think every woman who has the bandwidth should have something of her own. I feel very strongly about. Not everybody needs to be self-employed. Come on, not everybody needs to have their own business, but if it's a must for you, if you are absolutely committed to the lifestyle of being your own boss and you're struggling, not because you don't know what to do, but because you're doing so much, it can be really hard to take a step back and look at your business objectively.

That is the gift of a skilled expert, coach or strategist. They are not in your business, but they can put their eyes on your business in a way that you are simply too close to be able to do. I have worked with a number of business coaches, and every single one of them literally blows my mind with the observations they make almost immediately that, I mean, I think myself as a pretty smart person, just didn't see it, couldn't see it too close. Too close so I know I've been really ranty, I won't apologize because there's a reason for it. I see you. I see your struggle. I see your frustration. You are not alone. You're not doing anything wrong. If you are able to get someone to help, please do, please do. This is a really tough road to walk alone and there are decent, honest people who won't blow smoke up your skirt and leave you high and dry trust me, and if I'm not the person for you, I might know someone who is.

So send me an email or DM me on LinkedIn or Instagram, I respond personally to every message. Next week, I have the pleasure of introducing you to someone very special to me, a consultant that I have worked with for a good little while now, and we are going to be talking about marketing and what's important about standing out and how to do it. So make sure you come back next week and if you missed last week's interview with Nicole Kalil, all I can say is chef's kiss, check it out. That's it for now, ladies.