Your anxiety about marketing isn’t a problem, but your attempts to avoid the anxiety by overthinking and overcontrolling are creating problems.
I see how much building your business matters to you, like mine does for me. Were you also surprised with how much doubt, fear, uncertainty, and anxiety marketing brings up? Has it also left you frozen when business-building was supposed to be empowering and freeing?
Why didn’t they tell us that being a solopreneur would make us face our shit in a way we didn’t sign up for?
The more I work with folks, the more I hear them trying to push through how hard this is with beliefs like:
I need to know this is going to work in order to feel confident…
I need to feel confident in order to be ready…
If I was doing this right, I wouldn’t feel anxiety…
The anxiety means I need to go learn/think/plan more, because I must not be ready.
You may not even realize you’re believing these things. But you may notice your inner critic constantly beating you up for not being far enough along, for not being realistic, for not getting enough followers because you aren’t doing this right, for clearly not being cut out for this if you can’t just do the basic promotional tactics you’re supposed to do. Who are you to do this in the first place???
If that’s the kind of antics going on in your head, first of all, you’re in the right place! And second, it might be a clue that you have a stealthy belief trying to control the results of your marketing efforts in an effort to keep you safe—even if it’s impossible to control how things go.
Let me skip ahead just a bit, because all that feels awful doesn’t it? You’re being hard on yourself for feeling anxiety that’s normal, and you’re trying to avoid more anxiety by creating expectations of yourself that aren’t in line with reality (probably without realizing it.) And when you can’t keep up, you don’t promote your business like you should… and anxiety and pressure build.
(What you might not be telling anyone is that you’re feeling disappointed in yourself–ashamed, even. If that’s your little secret, I promise, you’re not the only one.)
Let’s get out of this pressure-cooker, it’s way too hot in here!
The truth is that building a business will bring up all your shit. That’s because you're taking something that matters to you very much and exposing it to the possibility of failure, rejection, and criticism. Which feels like exposing YOU to all that and NO ONE likes to feel that.
If you’re like most people I work with, you might be making your anxiety mean you’re doing this all wrong and try to control harder, because maybe that will make the discomfort go away: learning more, perfecting more, planning more, seeking more external validation…
You can see where this is going! It doesn’t work! Trying to control the anxiety makes it worse...because you just end up inviting in more self-judgment: I shouldn’t be struggling like this, I’m going to be seen as a hack, I know better than to be afraid of what people will think, I’m in my own way…
“We’re capable of creating work that matters only if we’re willing to be uncomfortable while we do it...fierce means living with the simultaneous certainty that this is vitally important and this might not work.”
The truth is that there are no guaranteed results, and at the same time, you’re responsible for the results, all while feeling really vulnerable. There is a lot of pressure already built in to that truth! Let’s not add more, okay? It won’t help.
More effective is accepting that a certain amount of anxiety always exists when you can’t control the outcome of something that matters, so might as well develop a tolerance for it. If you’re doing work that matters, you have to handle the discomfort.
Spoiler alert: the best way to do handle discomfort is by being kind to yourself—strategically. A good place to start is to stop expecting yourself to be confident marketing before you’ve learned how to market. What would you do differently if you stopped judging yourself for being nervous and inexperienced with something you’ve never done?
And let’s air out those sneaky unexamined beliefs like: you have to spill all your private details on social media to be likeable, or that talking about what you do is always narcissistic, or that feeling confident is a prerequisite to emailing a potential referral partner. Or when you think you need to do some tactic recommended by some expert that doesn’t actually fit your business—but you conclude the reason it’s not working is you.
None of this is fair to you.
The reason you do all this isn’t because you’re a failure and not cut out for this. It’s because uncertainty simply feels shitty, and trying to control the uncertainty makes you feel better…for now. Except that you end up avoiding taking the smart risks that would get you some momentum, and then you’re back to beating yourself up for that, too.
What you have to give is much too special to sit around judging yourself.
I believe that on the way to building confidence, you have to practice courage: becoming resilient around the inevitable anxiety and disappointment that you will experience in business ownership, and getting curious about the stealth expectations you’re putting on yourself–that are making the anxiety worse than it needs to be!
“The moment you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
So here’s the challenge, if you choose to accept: next time you feel anxiety about marketing, pause, and remind yourself that your fear, worry, anxiety, or second-guessing don't have to mean something is wrong. What if all it meant was, I’m doing work I care about, and anyone would feel these things when they can’t guarantee the outcome?
Ready to explore how practicing courage (not control) can help your business gain momentum?