Overcoming Fear & Indecision: How to Take Risks in Your Business

When a woman starts her own business, she is immediately thrust into a lifestyle where she's faced with dozens of decisions almost every day. Now, if she's a perfectionist, and in my experience, most entrepreneurial women are, to some degree, she's going to experience a great deal of FUD, F U D and if you're not familiar, it stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. If she doesn't learn how to deal with her FUD, she's going to really struggle to feel confident no matter how much she actually accomplishes in her business. Now, women are raised to be perfect, which means to avoid making mistakes. And if you ask most women, they'll admit the best way to avoid making mistakes is to avoid taking risks. However, there is a certain amount of risk to almost any action, and if you want to avoid risk, you'd have to avoid action, which means you'd also have to avoid making decisions, you see the problem?

So if you are a woman and a small business owner, you have a lot on your mind and a lot on your plate. So no one would blame you if you tried to make it easier by mitigating risk and failure. Hey, we all do it and there's nothing wrong with it. But for women, the underlying assumption is often flawed because most of us think we need to know everything before we can take action in order to avoid making mistakes and experiencing failure. But actually, that's what keeps us stuck and spinning our wheels, which is making a mistake. We may try to outsource that fear of failure by looking for magic pills and proven processes but as you have heard from me in many other solo episodes, there really are no guarantees and results do vary.

We drink far too much Kool Aid and assume that if some other woman has a really big audience, she must be really good. Or if her program costs a lot of money, it must work because that many people can't be wrong right? And while this reasoning might seem to make sense when you are in a massive conference room and hundreds of seemingly sane women are rushing to the back of the room to sign up for whatever is being sold like it's the last pack of toilet paper six weeks into the pandemic. But trust me when I tell you fear is not the ideal state of mind when it comes to making decisions for your business and not such a great state of mind when you're making decisions for your life either. The reality is that another woman's business might look great on the outside, but that's good marketing. It might be a total disaster behind the curtain and in fact, many of them are.

Here's the uncomfortable truth, a successful and sustainable business requires balancing passion and purpose with planning, prioritizing and profit, and that's just not the sexy message that's being sold to so many of us. We invest in growth strategies when we don't yet have business foundations and fundamentals in place and risk, I'm sorry to tell you, is always part of the equation so it stands to reason that risk tolerance is the skill we actually need to develop. Something I've noticed with many of my clients and absolutely have recognized in myself is how hard we try to avoid admitting we've made a mistake by continuing to make it.

Now, how this might show up in your business, these are some examples I have seen and experienced myself. The wrong business model, we chose a group program when we should be doing one on one. We created courses when we really should have a mastermind. We call ourselves a coach when we're actually a thought leader. We might have the wrong team structure. We might be hiring employees when contractors would make much more sense from a profit perspective. We might have the wrong size business, the wrong target market, the wrong niche, the wrong customer avatar, the wrong messaging, positioning, marketing, pricing. I could go on, but you get the point.

Sometimes we make these choices because we think someone else knows better than us. We might have set out to build a six figure business with little to no idea what it takes to run a six figure business, or whether we even need six figures to meet our goals. We might love doing one on one work, but we're surrounded by messaging that says, if we're doing one on one work, we're playing small. We have a scarcity mindset, we're trading time for dollars, or we're limiting ourselves so we give in. We give into the battle cry to scale, scale, scale. I mean, have you noticed, or is it just me, how many business coaches who were preaching scaling like their lives depended on it a year or two ago and are now nowhere to be found or talking about simplifying and avoiding burnout.

The hardest part about being a female business owner is that we don't trust our intuition, and we are afraid to make mistakes. So what do we do instead, we exhaust ourselves with overthinking, overcomplicating, and over delivering while attempting to be perfect and avoid failure. This is not a sustainable way to run a business or a healthy life and if we are going to have this much strain and struggle, we might as well just have a job. So is there an alternative, can we get better at taking risks and making decisions so we're not trying to outsource them to somebody else who's making millions with the promise of a proven process?

Well, I think we can learn to get better at making decisions. We can learn to get better at recovering from mistakes instead of continuing to make them because we don't want to admit it was a mistake to begin with. We can also develop risk tolerance and resiliency. So I want to share with you briefly some of the questions that I ask my one on one coaching clients in order to help them develop their decision making muscles and if you want to try these for yourself, I'd be happy to share them with you in a worksheet form, there is a link to that in the show notes.

Are you ready? Okay, here are the questions and they are in three different segments. The first one is I want you to focus on the present. The present in your business right now, whether it is right sized, or blown all out of proportion. Whether you have followed someone else's advice and ended up with a business that may look successful on the outside, but is killing you on the inside, you may have done all the things that all the coaches and gurus have told you, and you still feel like you have no idea what you're doing. So it really doesn't matter if you are successful by your own definition or anyone else's. If the business you're running just doesn't feel great, then let's start there. So in the present, what would you be doing if you never indulged in buffering or confusion?

Now you might consider it an interesting choice of words, indulging in buffering or confusion, because the term indulgence sounds like it should be a lot more fun than partnered with confusion. Indulgence doesn't just have to mean lying on the couch, binging on TikTok or Netflix, or consuming whatever your favorite beverage or food option is. Indulging in buffering or confusion in your business may look like constantly tweaking your niche, your ideal customer profile, your logo, your brand palette, your website font. Indulging in buffering or confusion is when we say I don't know when asked a simple question about what do you do and who do you do it for. If we overcomplicate the answer, it could very well be that we are indulging in confusion because if we believed we knew the answer, then we would have to take action, which might present the risk of making a mistake, being rejected, or failing. Do you see what I mean?

And let me be very, very clear here, when I use the term indulging in buffering or confusion, I do not by any stretch of the imagination mean that you are doing this intentionally because I don't believe you are. But I have certainly indulged in buffering and confusion in a variety of ways at various stages of my business. I've indulged in buffering around is, should I go with this color or that color? Does this font look too masculine or should I go with this one? Have I niched down far enough or should I go through someone else's niche program? Indulging in buffering and confusion might look like buying more courses, enrolling in more certification programs, convincing ourselves that we need to hire one more coach, one more mentor. We need to listen to one more podcast. We need to review all the back episodes in the catalog of some amazing podcasts we just found.

See, when we are indulging in buffering or confusion, it is not like kicking back on a hammock, drinking an adult beverage, or popping bonbons in our mouth. What it looks like in our business is we are making a lot of busy work for ourselves that doesn't move our game piece forward because I promise you and I have done all of this, and I believe we are probably all at some level of risk of doing this whenever we have an important decision to make. Because let's face it, if you have no idea who your ideal client is, if you have no idea who your market is, if you have no idea what your niche is, you can't really make an offer. You can't really put that offer out in front of the world. You can't actually risk being rejected or hearing crickets. So you see why it's an indulgence because if you actually have a business, meaning not a hobby, not a charity, an actual business whose purpose is to deliver services and make a profit.

You cannot do that if you are endlessly circling around and redoing things you've already done. And the really crappy part about that is at the time that you're doing it, it feels absolutely necessary. I have spent months upon months revising something, preparing something, converting something from one platform to another and it all felt very important, very necessary, and very urgent at the time. But the critical question is, did it move my business forward and the answer is always a big fat no. So, back to our question, in the present, if you are not indulging in any form of buffering or confusion, revising your program, revising the font on your website, revising what platform your website is built on, or any of that other mental fuckery, yes, I said it, what would you be doing instead? Because if what you're doing is not moving your game piece forward, meaning helping you get your offer in front of actual potential leads to convert them to potential clients, then you're indulging in buffering or confusion.

So, I'm your fairy godmother, I've just hit you over the head with my little fancy wand. Your buffering and confusion is now rendered disabled. What are you doing instead, that's what you should be doing. Ready for the next question, okay. What if there were no distractions now in your present moment in your current business, if there were no distractions, that might mean you don't have kids or you don't have a partner or the doorbell never rings with all your amazing Amazon deliveries. But actually, more of the time, our distractions are the fact that we haven't put reasonable boundaries in place with contractors, vendors, team members, clients, and so forth. Most of the time, we are distracted by things that could be prevented and if that's the case in your business, what if those things automagically and instant freakintaneously disappeared? What would that look like, so that's the second question.

Here's the third, what if my current options all disappeared? Meaning if everything you have available to you as an alternative, I could go get a job. I could maybe hire someone to help me with my business. Maybe I could get a partner. Maybe I could license my program to someone else. Maybe I could turn it into a certification and get someone else to sell whatever you've got going on. What if all your current options all disappeared? It's a really good question because most of the time when you are a small business owner, when you are a solopreneur, you are so up to your eyelashes in all of your own confusion and doubt and fear and uncertainty and buffering that would never occur to you what would happen if it all just went away. The answer to that question, I promise you, is very revealing. Because sometimes, if you said, if everything disappeared, the first thing that comes to your mind might be, oh, well, then I do X and that might, that X might be exactly what you could be and should be doing right now that would change everything.

So now we've been talking about the present. Now I'm going to take you to a couple of questions that will transport you into the future. You ready, okay, we are now in the future. What is the worst thing that could happen? Now it might seem kind of shocking or weird that I'm asking you this question when you have been obsessively indulging in fear, uncertainty, and doubt, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of making mistakes, perfectionism, the whole shit show. So, you probably have given some thought to what is the worst thing that can happen, but not in a conscious, deliberate, and intentional way, but more like an elevator music, kind of like back of your head, just sort of like a rat gnawing on your brain and just driving you a little bit bonkers, but I actually want you to think very consciously, very deliberately, very intentionally. What is the worst that could happen?

You probably would think my business would fail, but since you're thinking about that all the time anyway, and you're afraid to take certain actions because you worry that that might hasten the end of your business, let's think about the possibility that that could actually happen and really think it through with a lot of detail, not just, oh, well, yeah, my business would probably fail or I'll go out of business or I'll lose my business, but really think about it and what it would look like, not because you want to traumatize yourself, but to get out of it the fear and the anxiety and the worry and the doubt. And to give your logical, rational, analytical problem solving brain a chance to think this through. Because the next question is, what is likely to happen? See, first we go to what is the worst that can happen. What is your personal worst case scenario and most of us get, frankly, quite ridiculous.

Maybe you wouldn't be surprised how many people come up with some version of ending up in a van down by the river even if there's no river anywhere within a thousand miles. And I think it's a normal human fear that if we take risks, any risks at all, and certainly starting your own business seems completely crazy in the eyes of many people. That if you do anything in addition to that it'll surely, surely be the end of you. So, we have this ongoing, low grade, chronic fear that keeps us completely paralyzed, so that we're failing just a little bit every day by doing nothing in order to avoid the big fail so let's demystify that big fail. Let's look it right in the eye, stare it down, tell it, show me what you got. Let's see, show me the worst case scenario. I would be very surprised if what you discover, should you choose to do this exercise, is that it is a whole lot less scary than what you have been imagining on a daily basis. And that is why the second question in this part of the exercises, what is likely to happen.

In my experience as a licensed psychotherapist of 20 something years before becoming a business strategist, mentor and coach. I worked with a lot of people with anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, the whole nine yards on the anxiety spectrum and one of the things that I often did was to take them through somewhat of a similar exercise. What is the worst thing you can imagine? What is likely to happen? Sometimes people have a hard time imagining the worst, but they can immediately imagine what's most likely. Most people, it's the opposite so, what do you think is actually likely to happen? In most cases, it's a whole lot less dramatic, it's a whole lot less traumatizing, it is a whole lot less terrorizing and terrifying, and you realize that you could survive it. Because the third question is, what outcome can I live with? See, here's the thing, when we take ourselves down this road, what's the worst thing I can imagine and really think about it and what is likely to happen.

Okay, and what outcome can I live with? You are right there in the middle of your logical, rational, analytical, creative, problem solving mindset, what can I live with? Now, if you had to sell your business, would that feel great not really actually, for some people, it might be a relief. Could you live with an outcome where you have to let some of your team members go or all of your team members go? What if you realize you bought into somebody else's schtick that you need a big business and a big budget and a lot of overhead which involves paying out a fuck ton of affiliate commissions and Facebook ad, you know, all of this, and you actually don't love running that kind of business. Could you live with the outcome where now you're not a bestie with all the other people running that kind of business? Yeah, chances are you probably could. Could you live with the outcome where you maybe don't think when you introduce yourself at a cocktail party that your business maybe isn't going to be as impressive when you meet someone else who also works and markets their services online? Maybe.

Could you live with that? Could you live with the outcome where you sleep a lot longer and deeper and with a lot less tossing and turning and nightmares? Yeah, I think you could probably do that too. So, the next question in our future focus is, what result can't I live with? Now, here's where we're getting really, really honest with ourselves, because sometimes it's not that we would be making less money if the likely event happened, but that we would be feeling less status. That we might have to give up a membership in somebody's high priced mastermind that we think makes us a big dog or a member of the cool kids club. And that's a result that you can't live with. You know what, don't shame and judge yourself for that. One of the other things I do with all of my clients is a values exercise. And I do it at the very beginning of our work together because your values may not be my values or anyone else's values, and you don't need to have the business that's right sized for my values, but you do need to have the business that is right sized for yours.

So when you go through what's likely to happen and what result, can you live with? Maybe you could live with less money, but not less prestige. That's okay. Maybe you could live with fewer team members, but you could not live without having a VA. That's okay, it's your business. I mean, we're really kind of missing the whole point of being our own boss. If we don't get to decide how to right size our business and create a business that's aligned with what matters most to us. It doesn't matter what other people's values are or what they can live with and can't live without, but you need those answers in order to make better decisions and to improve your risk tolerance.

So to wrap up this exercise, we're going to talk about the subject of regrets. I had a client recently tell me that they didn't want to make any decisions unless they knew for sure that they were going to work. They didn't want to take any actions. They didn't want to commit to anything. They didn't want to create anything in their business unless it was certain to succeed.

That's an impossible goalpost because fundamentally it assumes that we can control the future. It also assumes that we are omniscient about the conditions of the future market forces, financial forces, economic forces that that our ideal client will even find us and have the resources to hire us and choose to do so there's just so many things out of our control.

But I think sometimes when we express and the desire to only take actions that we know will yield the desired result is because we have a hard time dealing with regrets. I've heard from a few people that they are trying to regret proof their life and I think what they meant was I don't want to make mistakes because I don't want to experience regrets. As for me, I prefer to transform my relationship with expectations so that there are no regrets. I've done a lot of work, my own personal development and spiritual work, around having no regrets because of many negative circumstances that I have been through across my entire lifespan. I also choose not to regret any of the past decisions or choices I've made because many of them I would not make today.

If I had been the person then that I am now, I'd like to think I would have made a different and hopefully a better choice, but there's no way that I can say for sure that even that is a guarantee. So, on the subject of regrets, here are the questions I'd like you to ask yourself. What will I regret more, taking the risk and again, we're talking about a risk in your business. It might be launching a new program. It might be increasing your prices. It might be growing your team. It might be shutting down a product or program area. It might be streamlining, downsizing, right sizing, simplifying, changing your business model. It could literally be anything, but if you are on the brink of a decision, ask yourself, what will I regret more if I take the risk and fail, let's say you launch the program and nobody buys or will I regret that I failed to take the risk?

I couldn't possibly answer that question for you, but I will say this, that there's a book and the exact title escapes me at the moment, but it is based on a series of interviews with people at the end of life. Almost every single person interviewed for this book said that fundamentally they wish that they had taken more risks. They wish that they didn't sit things out. They wish they hadn't opted out. They wish they hadn't let opportunities pass them by because they realize that there are worse things than failing or making a mistake. And by refusing to take risks, refusing to make decisions, refusing to take action, that is what they came to regret the most. So how about you? What do you think you will regret more? If you take the risk and experience failure or if you refuse to take the risk.

Here's the next question, how long will it take you to regret it? This is a very interesting question for me, because sometimes I will do something, say something, and I regret it immediately, and it may be a simple thing. Sometimes, for example, I get really excited when I have a guest on the podcast, and they're talking about something that's really interesting to me, and I get a little wound up, and I interrupt them, or I talk over them, or I kind of hijack the conversation a little bit.

Almost instantly as it happens, even though I'm still excited, I immediately regret it. Especially if the other person found it abrupt or abrasive or, you know, you could just tell. I could see there in their face that it kind of threw them and I instantly regret it. But there have been many other decisions I've made in my business and in my life that it actually took me a long time to regret or I may have had a superficial level of regret shortly thereafter and later on down the road after I had more experience, I realized, Oh, I really wished I hadn't done that.

So how long do you think it'll take for you to regret it and is there a way here's question number three, is there a way that you can prevent the regret while still taking the risk. This is one of my favorite, favorite questions in this series because I believe that while regret may be a habit. Just like fear, uncertainty, and doubt may feel like a habit, like it's just hardwired into you along with risk avoidance and low stress tolerance and so many other things that will make being successful in business more difficult. But, what if you could take the risk and still prevent regret? I believe it comes down to mindset, and I believe that it comes down to deciding ahead of time, intentionally, deliberately, skillfully, and strategically that you would rather try and fail than fail to try. Now, it's easy for me to say, but it does take skill and it takes will and it takes self acceptance and it takes patience.

Because if you are a person who wants to succeed, but you also want to avoid making mistakes, there are some mindset changes that would be very good for you to make. And some skills, it would be very good for you to develop, which would allow you to take action in the midst of feeling fear, uncertainty, or doubt. So if you like this worksheet so you can work on these questions yourself, I would be happy to share it with you. There's a link in the show notes and if you would like my help in developing your ability to feel more confident about your decision making. I'm going to manage your perfectionism and fear and uncertainty so that you can move your game piece forward whether you succeed or fail. I will also put a link in the show notes. We should talk, that's the first step to working together. I hope this was helpful to you and I'll be back next week with another amazing guest interview. Stay driven.