Hey visionaries. Welcome back to the show, Leah here and excited to bring you this episode, because this was one of the most requested episodes. Um, I’ve ever had. I did a poll a few weeks ago, back on Instagram about what you guys would want to hear next, and this was highly highly requested. 

So it’s clear that it’s a pretty important topic and I’m a little nervous, I guess I’m actually really not that nervous to be totally honest with you. I feel like at this point, um, being vulnerable and honest is really the only way that I know how to do this all. Um, so that’s what I’m going to do, but this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about since my business hit the seven figure mark, and I really appreciate all the nice messages and everything you guys have sent me. Thank you so much.

It means a lot, and I’ve just been reflecting on the past few years. And one of the biggest reflections that I have, um, is about how much over the past few years I was afraid of happening. How many, how much anxiety I had over things, how much stress I had over certain things, how many fears I had and truthfully, how many of those fears came true. So I think that I would have thought that I would be here telling you most fears are only in your head. Most fears don’t actually happen. 

I do think that still percentage-wise the majority of the fears that we think we we have, or that we think will happen. Do not. It still is probably a pretty big amount of things that don’t actually happen. But the truth is that a lot of my fears did come true and no matter how much mindset work or how many coaches I hired or how many things I thought I did quote, right?

Um, things still happened. My fear still came. Some of my fears still came true. And I don’t, I think sometimes that was my fault. I think sometimes it was not my fault. It was just part of the journey, but it really doesn’t matter whose fault it is because these things are unavoidable. They are here to teach us things. And most importantly, they are not a big enough deal to actually stop us from being successful. So I wanted to share five of the fears that I had five of the biggest fears that I’ve had. I’ve had so many, but these were five that really stood out to me. And that I can imagine you might be able to relate to at least one or two of them that that happened. You know, that came true. These fears really did happen and it didn’t stop me from making a million dollars.

It did not stop my seven feet, seven figures from happening. And that’s really the message that I would go back and tell myself. And that’s the message that I encourage you to take away from. This is not that your fears won’t come true, but that they might, and you can handle them anyway, that they are not big enough to dictate your dreams. They are not big enough to take down your goals. 

They are certainly not big enough to take you down. So let’s go ahead and start. I did these in kind of chronological order. And to be totally honest, as I was, I was preparing for this episode, it was a little hard for me to talk about why I encourage you not to be so afraid of these fears anymore, because I’ve just done so much mindset work around these fears that they just don’t even bother me anymore.

I don’t even really think about these things when they happen. And, and you know, that it wasn’t always like that these things used to paralyze me almost, or really be my biggest fears. And I just want to start that way because it’s just a huge Testament to the power of the mind and of mind repetition and of choice and personal development. You really can completely completely rewire, uh, how your brain perceives things, how you experience things, all of that kind of stuff. And that is definitely what happened to me because some of these things before they happened or in the moment seemed like the biggest deal in the world. And nowadays they just, they just genuinely do not. So the first thing that I, that the first fear that came true, which was probably, this was probably the biggest one out of all of them, because I was so, so terrified of this for years.

Uh, and it was early on in my business was that I went into debt to start my business. That was something I was afraid of doing and further, I was not able to pay it off all right away. And my credit score dropped and it kept me up at night. I mean, basically everything that I was afraid of happening happened, it didn’t go quite as far as my fears. I remember when I first started my business and I first started hiring coaches and I first started paying for WordPress and paying for e-courses and paying for marketing. 

My fear was that I would go into debt. I would not be able to pay off my debt. My credit score would drop, and I would end up being a featured story on CNN or some sort of news outlet about this 20 something girl that foolishly spent all of her money, all the money she didn’t have on the internet and now is in crippling debt.

And couldn’t get out of it because of compound interest. And that I would just basically be a millennial humiliation story of someone who felt too entitled to actually work at a nine to five job and was so desperate to get out of that life that she went into debt in and didn’t actually cover all her bases should have saved money, et cetera. I literally was afraid of these things. Okay. So I’m not even exaggerating. 

These were the things I was afraid of happening. Now you probably can guess at this point that I did not end up on the news. My story did not garnish national attention, and I did not end up being a laughingstock because of the decisions I’ve made. And though I don’t feel the need to go into all the details of my personal finances. Uh, as you can guess, debt is not part of my business anymore, nor is it part of my life anymore, but I don’t see it as a bad thing anymore.

And I could get into that all separately. But, um, I made the conscious decision a little while ago to not have that be part of my life and it no longer is, but it was for a long time and all the fears that I had around it came true. So I had to go into debt to start my business. I wasn’t able to pay it off right away. I went into credit card debt, which I had always assumed was the worst kind of debt you can, you can be. And, um, you know, because of how high the interest rates are. And I just had all these negative connotations with it being, um, you know, an irresponsible thing or living above your means. I had all these kinds of ideas about what it meant. And I took those on, I, I made those true about myself and I just thought, well, if I want to do this, and I’ll probably be able to pay it off by the end of the month, I’ve got to be able to, that didn’t happen.

And then I was able to start paying off my initial investments over, you know, a few months, but I wanted to continue investing in my business. I wanted to continue growing. I didn’t want to just stop spending money on it and I didn’t want to stop growing it. I was so growth minded for the first several years. And I don’t think that there’s a right or wrong way to do that. I think you can decide to invest less aggressively if that is what is aligned for you, but that can sometimes be at the cost of growing as aggressively. And that was not as, it was more important to me to grow aggressively. So anyway, long story short, um, a lot of my fears around that came true and it was something that kept me up at night. It was something that I felt shame about.

It was something that I felt humiliated about, even though I continued being put in situations where I consciously chose to continue spending aggressively, no one, you know, was making me spend this money. No one was making my business go into more debt or no one was making me put or like continue to stay in bed, I guess is what I should call it. Um, I was deciding to do that. And at each point, whenever I got really stressed about my situation or stressed about my and my decisions, I would just ask myself, is there any other decision I would’ve made? Would I have done it any differently? And the answer was almost always, no, the answer was that, no, I did not want to postpone my growth. The answer was that no, I did not want to, you know, sort of like delay. Um, my acceleration and I have to say did every financial decision I make was where they all the right one.

Probably not. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know at this point, it’s sometimes it’s hard to even say even in the future or like looking back if it was the right thing or not, some of my investments probably paid off more than others. Sometimes I probably did things foolishly, you know, sometimes I probably did things without thinking them through. 

I’m not saying every financial decision was perfect, but I will say that the approach I took growth at all costs growth above savings during that time period paid off for me. Um, I believe it is why I now do not have a business with debt or a life with that. I believe it is why my business reached the seven figure mark in under five years. And it is why I believe we now have, you know, the recurring revenue and the marketing and the funnels and the streams that we have because I was so focused on those and I stopped giving my energy to the debt.

So anyway, this is a big conversation and I’m happy to talk it out with any of you, if you want to DM me. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh my God, I’ve struggled with this tension too, because it can be kind of confusing. It’s like on the one hand, you don’t want to have debt. You don’t want to spend all that much money. You want to have a high profit margin, but on the other end, you are building a business, build a business, building takes aggression in the beginning. It is not something that you want to just slowly do. You will be competing against those that are getting more aggressive and investing more. And, you know, I knew that I studied enough startups and I had read enough books about entrepreneurship to know that, especially in the first few years, your profit margins might not be all that huge.

And that’s okay because you’re trying to get to a point where you can sustain them. And if you’re just focusing on getting by at the beginning, and you’re not focusing on taking those big financial moves or those big risky moves, you will continue to be in a place of just getting by. So I could go on and on about that. But the point is that was a huge fear of mine. It came true. And I can honestly say that I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I can also honestly say that I don’t believe I would be sitting here with the business I have the months and the year income that we have, the team that I’m able to afford and the life that I have if I hadn’t made those decisions. So it’s a good example of things working out. And it’s just not something that crosses my mind anymore in general.

Okay. The next fear that did come true was rejection. So early on in my business sales were just something that were really hard for me. It did not come naturally to me. I had never sold anything. And I just got very afraid and sensitive around people saying no to me. I took it personally. I thought there was something wrong with me. I would compare myself to other coaches and wonder why they were getting more yeses than I was, or so I thought, I would wonder if I had done X, Y, and Z differently, or if I position myself differently or if I was better or if my brand was better, whatever you could come up with that I would not be getting the rejections that I was. So I wished I wished that if I just became good enough at sales or that if I practiced enough or that if I find tuned to my offer enough, I would not have any, um, rejections.

And that is absolutely not true. It was just the other day. One of my clients was asking me like, so what do you do when you get to know? Or do you even get knows? And it was like, oh my God, yes. Like I get more nos than yeses. That’s another thing I’ve reflected on. As I hit the million dollar mark is that I got more nos than ever, you know, in the final push to get here because I was trying to grow and I was trying to scale and I was trying to get my message out there and get my business to, to have a wider net. And every business will always get more nos than yeses. Um, one of my own clients, I love her. She says the yeses are on the other side of the nose. 

So my rejections have only grown as my business has grown, as my reputation has grown. As I’ve gotten better at sales, all the things that you kind of hope won’t happen, you hope you get good at sales. You hope you get good at, um, marketing. You hope that your business gets such a good reputation. That rejection isn’t really part of it. And that’s, that’s just not true. Uh, the, the difference now is that I get enough. I just get enough yeses. It’s more about volume. And I will say, I think I am good. And I think our business speaks for itself. And I do think we have a good percentage of conversions of people we talked to. Um, but the point is I got rejections early on and I lived to tell the tale and nowadays I still get them all the time. And it doesn’t even phase me because I know that it’s not about me.

I know that it’s part of business. I know that it’s inevitable. And I know that every, no leads me closer to a yes. So it’s just not something that I take personally anymore. I mean, I guess if someone were to say no, um, or reject me or a proposal or my business or a sale and kind of like, you know, twist the knife, if they were to be like, well, I don’t want to do this because you’re like this and your businesses like this and blah, blah, blah. Sure. That would hurt my feelings. I’m only human, but that typically doesn’t happen. It’s usually a simple conversation where people say yes or no, and what’s more. And I think you’ll experience this too, is that typically, if people say no to a sale or people reject you, even, they will acknowledge it. Doesn’t have all that much to do with you.

You know, they’ll say something like now it’s just not the right time. I have X, Y, and Z going on in my life. Um, money is tied up in X, Y, and Z place, things that are often blocking themselves. And that’s, so I don’t even take those. I know those things aren’t even about me. Um, I don’t think that there are reasons people shouldn’t move forward with things, but that’s a different conversation. Um, and, and also they could be lying to me. 

They could be just trying to be nice. They could actually have more of an issue with me or my service or my business, then they’re sharing. And they are just trying to, you know, not hurt my feelings. It, I will never know. So it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t make a difference. The point is, don’t be afraid of rejections. Rejections are part of business.

They are inevitable. They often have little to, nothing to do with you. And even if they do, you’ll probably get so many, you’ll feel so much more fulfilled by the yeses that you do get in the work you do get to do from those guesses. Then the rejections that finish and end with usually simple conversation that it honestly just becomes kind of an afterthought. It doesn’t really become part of your every day thought process. 

It really isn’t something that needs to bother you all that much. So that has come true and it really doesn’t matter anymore. Okay. The third one, this was probably the hardest for me to swallow, um, is the mean reviews slash unhappy clients. Um, so I will admit that it took me a while. It took me a few years to get to the place where we actually started hearing people say negative things about us that were clients, or that were straight up unhappy with working for, with us.

Um, and that is to say that luckily. And I think because we work hard at it, it really has not happened all that much. Um, but it has happened. And I know that it’s probably not even like great business practice for me to sit here and tell you, uh, listening to this podcast that we’ve had people that have said mean things about our programs, but I’d rather just be honest at this point and also share why I don’t think that it needs to be that bothersome, why it didn’t stop me from a million dollars and why it won’t stop you either. Then the main thing is simply the laws of statistics. So for every, you know, first of all, the reason we didn’t get a true unhappy customer for the first few years is because our programs are excellent. And if you put in the work, you will get results.

And if you stay committed to the process, you will get results. Most of our clients do that, which is why most of our clients like us and why most of our clients have good things to say about the programs. So I would say that once we maybe had worked with like a hundred people, we got a mean comment about our program. And so that alone, right there is a good representation of why this is not a fear that can debilitate you because if you have one unhappy person, but you have 100 happy people, 100 successes, 100 accomplishments, 100 people’s lives, businesses, health, whatever it is that you do changed, then it’s pretty obvious that you can’t give more attention to the one negative experience than you should to the 100 positive ones. Um, you know, that’s just kind of the law of statistics at one point or another.

There’s really no institution practice service, whatever that has a 100% success rate. I mean, think about, you know, colleges, law schools, most people at these great law schools get jobs after, but not all of them. Um, even world-renowned doctors, most people get results from these doctors, but not all of them. Um, certain fitness classes, like most people feel good after them, but not all of them. And that person, that doesn’t the person that writes the mean comment. The person that sends the, you know, angry email, the person that is unhappy, their reason for being so will also vary every time. So in our experience the few times that we have had people that have had negative experiences with our programs, didn’t actually do our programs, right. They didn’t follow through, they didn’t commit, they didn’t actually follow through with what we recommend as best practices.

Um, so for certain things like they didn’t actually show up to all the calls or they didn’t actually finish the program material because they dropped out, you know, some, somewhere in it and didn’t see it all the way through, or they never asked a question that they had, so they didn’t actually know how to do it. And therefore they just kind of left it or they, um, I don’t know. It basically, they, they didn’t do it the way we recommended it. So it would be different based on the program, but we’re pretty clear, um, before programs even start about what we recommend, people expect the time commitments, um, and what they should prioritize in order to get the most out of it. And if they don’t do that, then it’s typically not, there’s really not much we can do about their experience in the program.

You can’t make someone do something it’s sort of like maybe the reason a personal trainer doesn’t have a 100% success rate is because the small percentage of their clients that don’t have a good experience with them between the actual training sessions, weren’t doing anything to improve their health, or weren’t doing anything to improve their nutrition, or were actually potentially eating or sleeping or taking care of themselves in a worst way that isn’t the personal trainers. That’s not within their control, just like it’s not within our control. 

So that is usually the case, uh, that we’ve seen is the people actually, I can’t think of a situation in which that hasn’t been the case. If someone has had not a great experience with our programs, it is typically because they did not actually fulfill go through and do the duration of the program or go through the entire program the way we recommended or sometimes, you know, they just won’t, won’t finish it.

And there’s really nothing we can do about that. So does it hurt my feelings when we get these emails? Yes, it does. I’m human. I honestly cry when I get an email I’m very sensitive and I love my business so much. I really care about my clients and I really care about their success. So it hurts when this stuff happens. Um, this one is probably the fear I’ve had the hardest time with happening. Um, but I have just continued to allow myself to remember a few things. One it’s typically out of my control that people don’t have a great experience with us because those that do our programs that we recommend do have great experiences with us to those who do have those great experiences deserve more of our energy attention and like bandwidth than the small, much smaller, smaller percentage that don’t and three it’s just part of business, the bigger that you get, the more people that you serve, the more people that you reach, the more experiences your bringing in, the more exposure you’re getting, the more vulnerable you are to people’s opinions.

And remember their opinions come from a multitude of backgrounds, their parents, their childhood people that have wronged them experiences that have happened to them, ways that they think stresses that they have. I mean, everyone is going to see your work through their own lens of their own life. And the bigger that your work gets, the more susceptible you are to huge varieties of lenses. 

And it’s just sort of inevitable that not everyone is going to see it the way that you’re intending it to be seen or experienced is typically not your fault. And it is sometimes I think most of the time, just kind of the cost of doing business. So you can’t let that fear keep you from putting yourself out there. And most importantly, you can’t let that fear stop you from helping those, the people that really will love yourself and really will get the benefits of it and really we’ll have from it.

So that is my opinion on that. Okay. The fourth fear that I had that has come true is people not paying or breaking their contract. So we have contracts in terms and conditions that very clearly state our payment terms and our refund terms and are just requirements for our clients. And as great as those are, people will still not always follow them. 

My logic about why this shouldn’t bother you is similar to the advice that I gave in the previous point, which is that at some point, this is just going to happen, the bigger that you get. Um, it’s just sort of one of those laws of statistics type things where the more people that you’re reaching and working with, and the more money that you’re dealing with, the, the, the probability of something going wrong within it goes up and almost becomes inevitable. So this fear hasn’t been as hard for me as the one about mean comments toward us, or mean messages, because this is not something I ever take personally. 

If people choose to not pay and choose to not honor their commitments, you know, I know that that’s typically something that’s going to harm them through the law of attraction, more than it’s going to harm me. I also know that sometimes they might not have a choice. Um, it’s just not something that I take personally. It’s honestly something that does make me feel a little bit sad for, uh, the people that can’t, but your fear around it might not be so much about, like, is this going to hurt my feelings? It might be like, well, if people don’t pay, how am I going to pay my bills? Um, and in my experience, this type of thing did not happen until my business was big enough for where my business could sort of like be able to handle, um, if, if there were losses, because I do think sometimes it’s just the cost of doing business.

That payments are late or, or people don’t do them, or, um, they try to break their contracts. So don’t let it freak you out because it certainly shouldn’t hurt your feelings personally. Again, it typically will harm the person not paying and, you know, put out a negative kind of train in motion of their own, uh, it, through their own money situation, that it will you. And then from a logistic standpoint, you will be able to recover, try to put a little bit of money and savings aside every month, at least so that you’re able to do things like this for the cost of doing business and just don’t let it be a bigger deal than it is, and have contracts so that they are legally required to pay. It is much harder for people to decide they’re not going to pay if they have legally required to do so. 

It’s just really important that you have your bases covered with that. So we work with Sarah at destination legal for all of our contracts and terms and conditions. And we very clearly state the terms of payment and the terms of refund and everything. So, you know, those are part of the reason why this hasn’t been a big financial issue either. This also hasn’t happened as much. I mean, I can probably count, um, you know, um, one, maybe two hands, the amount of times over the course of a million dollars in revenue that this has actually happened. So it is a fear that’s come true. It’s not a huge deal. It’s definitely not something that ruins my day or bothers me. 

Okay. The final fear that has come true is the gossiping of friends and family. So this was the biggest fear that I had. Um, when I started, I was so hesitant to even start an Instagram or start my website or anything, because I was so nervous about what people would say about me. I was nervous about people laughing at me. I was nervous about really everything you could think of in terms of, um, just friends and family, gossiping about me and things like that. Uh, I, you know, persevered, I continued on, I decided to not let that be what dictates me, but it was a big fear of mine. And it’s still is something that I think about, um, from time to time.

And it is definitely something that came true. Definitely people have gossiped about me as I’ve gotten more visible as I’ve gotten more successful, as my business has kind of made more of its mark and you know, more people know what was going on. Um, what do they say? I don’t really know because I just don’t care. This is just sort of the thing that has like shed off of me over the years in terms of what I actually care about because by working through it and by pushing through the fear of what other people think I have hugely reaped the reward of putting myself out there.

Now I get to see how my clients’ lives change, how their business change, how their happiness changes, because I pushed through. And that is so much more gratifying and so much more consuming emotionally. Then the fear of what people are saying about me, or then people saying something about me, even if it’s not just a fear, even if it’s real people saying something about me, feels like it could, it feels like a bug bite in comparison to like my hike to Mount Everest.

And the view from above, I guess you could say that was just a terrible metaphor that I came up with on the spot. But the point is, it genuinely feels so small in comparison to how incredible and grand and rewarding it is to see the good things people say about you, the transformations they’ve undergone the way their lives have changed. That it just, this was just a fear that totally naturally, I didn’t really have to work through it. It just kind of shifted because the rewards were so much bigger. So people will gossip about you, but people will gossip about you. Even if you don’t start your business, people are gossipy. 

If people are going to spend their time talking about you, it really has nothing to do with you. And it’s not something that you can do something about either way. So you might as well do what you want to do, and you might as well do what will make you happy and allow those benefits to start out, weighing the fear of what other people will say.

Something you can kind of tell yourself here to kind of fire yourself up is that, um, you know, if you are worried about people talking about you, if you just kind of know that they will wouldn’t you rather have them talk about your success, talk about the money you’ve made. Talk about the business. You build, talk about the programs you offer. Talk about the visibility you have, then them talking about you kind of half doing it or half trying it. Like, if you really need that motivation, you can find it here. I didn’t really need this motivation. It doesn’t motivate me to think about like what other people will say about me or how I’ll show other people, you know, show them what I’m made of. Like, I really believe your only competition is yourself, but you have to do whatever works best for you and what works to motivate you.

And if it motivates you to think, Hey, I’d rather have people talking about how successful I am. I should go get really successful. Then you should definitely go do that. But just know that whenever you put yourself out there, people are going to have opinions about it. And I think a good attitude to take is just if they have so many opinions or so much advice on how to be a better entrepreneur or coach leader, influencer, public figure, consultant, whatever it is that you’re doing, then they can go do it themselves. And guess what they won’t, because those types of people that all they can do is talk about you are so insecure with themselves, that they need to talk about other people to make them feel more secure. And those types of people are so insecure that they would never go start their own thing.

They would never go put themselves out there like you will. So it really is something that can just kind of shrug off with time as well, especially as you become more successful and you start to see the benefits of putting yourself out there, but it has definitely happened to me. It’s just not something I think about or really care about anymore. 

Okay. So to recap, and as I’ve kind of shared through these, there’s a few things I hope you pull out first and foremost, a lot of these fears that naturally fade when you start to see how much more gratifying the benefit of doing the thing anyway, is then the fear of what will come with you doing the thing. So the fear of what other people say about you, the fear of going into debt, the fear of unhappy customers, those things all seem so minuscule.

When you have really happy customers, when you have your income growing and business momentum, when you have people that’s lives are changing because of you just naturally through human nature and the way our brains work, the amount of momentum, you will feel the amount of gratification, you will feel the amount of excitement and just pride that you will feel from the positives that you experience and achieve from going for things will just automatically outweigh the cons. 

So take assurance in that, that a lot of these fears naturally solve themselves and just kind of, you know, figure themselves out, but you have to go for it anyway. You can’t let them stop you because you’re not going to get to experience the other side of them. You’re not going to get to experience that moment. And you’re not going to experience that growth. You’re not going to experience that impact or those satisfied customers.

If you aren’t making it happen, if you aren’t taking massive action, if you aren’t putting yourself out there, if you aren’t taking risks, if you aren’t doing things differently. So you have to do things differently. If you want those fears to subside, you have to do things that will allow the opposite of the fears happening to happen. They don’t happen by sitting there. They don’t happen by playing it safe. They don’t happen by not following through with your commitments. They don’t happen by waiting. They don’t happen by hoping they happen by massive action. Okay. And then the other thing that I hope you can take away from this is the power of the mind. I hope I made clear that so much of these. So all of these things paralyze me at one point or another. I’m not trying to make little of how scary these things were for me.

Uh, just because they don’t bother me at all anymore. Now, these things were scary for me. Each of them has made me cry. Each of them has kept me up at night. Each of them has brought me to some level of shame, some level of fear to even tell sometimes my friends, my closest friends, and even my family about what I was going through because I was humiliated. And these fears made these, these fears felt so real. 

So I’ve been in the thick of all of these. I’ve understood all of these and all of these have happened to me. And your mind is so incredibly powerful that through mindset work, which typically comes from good coaching and through proving yourself wrong and reprogramming your subconscious mind, even your biggest fears, even your deepest, darkest fears and insecurities can become minuscule. That is the power of your mind, but you have to take control of your mind.

You have to want to change your own mind. You have to do mindset work. You have to get coaching it. Similarly is not something that can just happen if you’re not actually doing the work to change it. So mindset work set work works. It is powerful. It will change your life, but you got to do it. Okay. I hope you guys found this episode. Helpful. If you have any questions or you just want to connect on this, then please feel free to DM me. And I hope that it, um, just kind of is reassuring to know that, you know, you can go through so many of these very normal entrepreneurial field fears, um, you know, money, mistakes, uh, judgements, um, meanness mean comments, um, even, you know, not even messing things up here and there, and you can still grow and you can still make your financial dreams come true and you can still impact more people. Then, then you would ever get, I mean, messages, you know, you can still change the lives of so many, including yourself, including your team. Most importantly, your clients, and you can still have a seven figure business, even through it all. And you will go out there and get them here is here. Biggest vision I believe in you. And I will talk to you guys soon.

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