[Personal Development Series] How To Believe In Yourself Even When There’s No Proof You’ll Succeed Leave a comment

This is Part 3 of my 5-Part podcast series for perfectionist entrepreneurs. It’s all about why personal development is the secret to building your business and my simple personal development process that works for perfectionists who are building businesses.

I wouldn’t have a successful business if I hadn’t figured out how to believe in myself when there was literally no proof that I could achieve my goals. I was quiet, I was shy, I was scared of putting myself out there and no one expected me to leave the corporate path I had started down. I’d been successful in my studies but there was no evidence that I’d ever be able to make a full-time income from my business – and yet I’ve been doing that for 6 years now.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing the simple personal development work that my clients and I have done to believe in yourself even when you’re scared of failing. And the answer isn’t to out-work your self-doubt. That doesn’t work for perfectionists! So instead, I’m sharing a simple and practical approach that does – as well as some personal stories that I know you’ll be able to relate to. 

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project. A podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake, so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionists Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business, you can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.

Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so this is part three of the personal development series for perfectionist entrepreneurs and how to grow your business by growing yourself as if you’re a perfectionist, there is personal development work to be done specifically as a perfectionist so that you can get out of your own way and let your business actually grow so that it feels safe to be in growth, to be in momentum, to be seen in the world as yourself and to be doing something risky like entrepreneurship that’s atypical no matter how many people want to start a business, not everyone does, it’s not guaranteed to succeed but it is so worth doing and so this series is really, and this is part three of it, this series is just all about the personal development work as a perfectionist entrepreneur to do. So part one was an introduction to why it matters, part two was all about doing the personal development work and what that is to feel safe to be seen and to show up because if you don’t feel safe to be seen and show up, it is gonna be pretty impossible to build a business and this episode I wanna do is on something so essential and really with this one, I just wanted to speak from, I mean with all of them but with this one, I just wanted to pick up my microphone and talk to you about believing new things, believing in yourself when you don’t yet have proof that you’re going to make it to your goals, that you’re gonna be successful in your business, there’s no guarantees.

There’s no certainty if you will that even if you do everything right in business that you’ll be able to achieve your goals, there are so many other circumstances as well, there’s the economy, there’s decisions that companies like Meta make in terms of algorithms and ads and there’s just so many other factors too, there’s your life circumstances and so as a perfectionist who craves certainty, how do you allow yourself, this is the question, how do you actually allow and support and encourage yourself to be able to show up and do the things you need to do even when they’re not certain to work and I think a lot of the stuff that’s out there about business is like if you do this, then your business will definitely be successful, if you follow this marketing strategy, if you sell this product, if you make this decision right like having your niche and whatever that is. If you do that then your business is guaranteed to succeed.

And so let’s have you do that so you’ll definitely be successful and it’s amazing, it is absolutely amazing that we are now in a place where we can learn from others’ experiences and mistakes and really get a better understanding than ever before in history of the mechanics of a business, what makes a business successful, what makes a business not be successful or struggle to be successful, like there is so much that we have access to that is absolutely incredible for learning about business like what a gift we have to have that and it’s so important to know that entrepreneurship by its very nature is risky. If you are doing business following a set formula and here’s how everyone else does it, then that isn’t really entrepreneurship, not that you wouldn’t have a real business but entrepreneurship is innovating, it’s trying new things, it’s being resourceful, it’s being creative and so if you’re like okay, I’m just gonna follow this formula to have this exact business be this exact way and then do that, that is more of a employee approach to having a business.

And it’s not that you can’t do that but what I love teaching is entrepreneurs who even if you’ve been like me and like someone who typically would follow the rules and do the responsible smart thing but you have a craving to figure things out and to be creative and to do things a bit differently even though like that has been such an area of personal development for me as a perfectionist entrepreneur is shifting identities and shifting my self image from this place of like I’m a rule follower and I just do what’s expected of me and I do the smart responsible thing to being like well actually, that isn’t me, I do do things differently to how other people do them.

I show up differently, I have different interests, like I’m not actually the typical person if you will. I don’t know that any of us really are, we’re just all trying to fit in or many of us are trying to fit in and just be loved but I really support perfectionists who want to be able to have the confidence and self trust to try things their own way and it might be the case that you have been more of a like, okay, just tell me how to do it and I’ll do it and having that approach to business, that’s not wrong but it might be the case that you’re just doing that from a place of lack of self trust, you don’t trust yourself to do things your own way and to try things and you just feel like, okay, I just need someone to tell me exactly how to do it and then I can do it and then that’s that and I can be successful but that you won’t actually be being the entrepreneur that you want to be. That that will just feel like having a job but you also now have all this risk with it and that’s something really important to consider if you just want to be told what to do all the time and to just have that be successful all the time, why would you take on the risk of business? Why wouldn’t you just get a job and work for someone else?

I think it’s just really important to consider and I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs as well and at times I think I’ve been in this mentality for sure where it’s like, oh, I just need to do it right and so the experts say I should do this, so I’m gonna do that and the experts say I should do this, so I’m gonna do that and then being like, wait, this is literally like me, it’s kind of like the equivalent of if you had a parent who’s like you and I didn’t have this, I wasn’t told like you have to do this specific thing which I’m very grateful for but if you had a parent who’s like, you should be a lawyer for example or you should be an engineer and you’re like, okay, well, I’m gonna keep them happy and do that but if you just have a cookie cutter business that you don’t really love, then you’re kind of just doing the equivalent of that but in entrepreneurship. So anyway, that’s a little rant on the side but when it comes to business all I’m really wanting to get home is that you are in the business of doing something that hasn’t been done before.

You’re creating something new, you are being innovative even if you feel like, and for me in the beginning, I was like, I have so much belief in my potential and my intelligence but I am full of self-doubt and I do just wanna be told what to do because I don’t have the self-trust to try things my own way and think like, okay, well, I could take this idea and try it like that and like for me, for example, in, I believe it was 2016, I started on Instagram, writing my own quotes, like writing a quote, if you will, like writing a sentence or two to capture an epiphany that I’d had or that I’d helped someone else had or like an observation and wrote my name underneath it with my Instagram handle and that was just not something that was done, like there were people on Instagram, they’re like poets like Rupi Kaur and people like that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but people like that who would like write stuff and put their name on it but it was really only the Instagram poets. Other people weren’t doing that.

Now it’s like everyone’s got their own quotes and they’re quoting themselves but that for me was just like something that I wanted to do and it felt so scary to do it because who am I to like come up with an idea and kind of like a universal truth, if you will, and then to put my name at the bottom of that and to sign that off as myself and do it in such a direct, like directly owning that idea, especially when it is like an observation of like a universal truth and me just sharing it through my own lens and my own experience and my own words. But that is an example of something where I felt like no one’s told me to do this. Literally no one has been like, you should have an Instagram account and then write quotes and put your name at the bottom of it.

But I decided that is something I wanted to do because I was sharing, I started sharing quotes of, because I was listening to so many podcasts and so much YouTube and like listening to inspiring people. I used to love Evan Carmichael’s channel. I haven’t watched it in ages but he’d do all these compilations of like celebrities and people who are very successful in different fields and like in business.

And he’d put together like top 10 pieces of advice and I love those videos. Oh my God, like I love them just so much. So many ideas sparked by them, so much belief created by them for myself.

And I would write quotes like from that and share them. And then I was like, but I have all these ideas I wanna share. And so just getting the confidence and the self-trust enough to be like, I’m going to do this and I’m not just gonna try it once, but like I’m actually gonna do this.

I’m gonna develop my own like formatting. If you’ve seen on Instagram, I’m at Perfectionism Project. I haven’t actually shared any of the quotes in this format recently and I’m going to be returning to doing it.

But I developed my own basically branding of it, like my own unique formatting of it. So the second you see one of my quotes, you’d know exactly it was me and it wasn’t anyone else. And just being willing to, and as I shared in part two, like that was not how I started my journey in entrepreneurship.

I was like, I’m gonna come up with something and then write my name on the bottom of it and share it on Instagram in my own unique way. Like, oh my God, no. Like I had to do the personal development work that I talked about in part two to be able to even get to this place.

But this is just an example of that I really am here to help entrepreneurs who want to be entrepreneurs, who want to actually be their creative self, their innovative self, their resourceful self. And part of that, a massive part, personal development work that cannot be skipped is that to be able to be a perfectionist in business and to be able to be successful in building something that didn’t exist before and doing things in your own way and letting your creativity flow out and expressing yourself no matter what kind of business you have, being able to create a product or a service or just like add your own flair to things and have your business feel like you. Like in PGSD, we really support you to do things and teach you how to do things in a way that’s in alignment with your values, that’s in alignment with who you are and how you work.

Like we really work with you instead of like, you should be like this, you should be someone who loves this, you should be someone who loves that. We don’t say, like if you don’t like doing reels, don’t do a reel, like there’s so many other ways to build a business. So we really work with you and have you work with yourself and with your perfectionist brain and meet yourself where you are and actually acknowledge your strengths because your perfectionist brain just wants to point out all the imperfections and all the weaknesses.

And what our perfectionist brains do as well is just we really have this idea that if something comes easily to us, that it’s not valuable to others. And so we will just bend over backwards to allow ourselves to easily offer to the world the things that we’re actually good at and the things that we are most skilled at and the things we have the most interest in and the things that we can make the most valuable contribution with. Like our brain will just diminish and devalue the things that we find easy because of this idea that like, well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and the things that are valuable are like I have to be working hard to be deserving of success and to be loved.

And so like, I have to do the thing that’s hard whereas like a big part of what we do in PGSD is support you to do like the obvious thing that’s right under your nose for you to do to actually have you, and we help with this, like give yourself the permission and have the emotional capability and the emotional capacity to offer that because it feels so vulnerable. I’ve talked about this already in the series, like it feels so vulnerable to offer the easy thing. Like for me, coaching and doing this kind of podcast episode is the easy thing for me to do.

I could do such a complicated hard thing for me and try and have a business around that. And for so long, like I used to think literally, I get paid as an accountant as compensation for doing something that I don’t like doing. Like I literally, I don’t get paid for the value I bring.

I get paid as compensation for doing something that I don’t like. And then when it came to coaching and having my blog, I used to be like, well, I do it for free, so I shouldn’t get paid for it because I’d be willing to do it for free. So I should only get paid for something I wouldn’t be willing to do for free.

Instead of 100% today, the things I get paid the most to do are the things that I am willing to do for free because they’re so me to do. Because they’re the things that are like the most valuable things for me to do, like recording an episode like this. Would I do this for free? Yes.

Did I record a hundreds of episodes over the years, many of which I’ve never been directly paid for and I don’t have any monetization on the podcast. So I literally pay to do this podcast. I love doing it.

I love doing it. I love doing coaching. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t bring up insecurities and doubts and fears and I still have a perfectionist brain.

But the most valuable thing for me to do is oftentimes the easiest thing for me to do and for me to have the emotional capacity to do that because it feels risky to actually just show up as me and do the easy thing and all of that. So anyway, all of that to say that in entrepreneurship, we wanna have you and you have to develop yourself in a way that you can believe in new things, that you can believe that you could create something that no one else has ever created before and that you’ve never created before and create, again, safety around that, that if your brain is telling you it’s irresponsible to do something that’s not guaranteed to work and especially if that has you doing a lot of procrasti-learning and consuming and thinking and going back to the drawing board or making a decision and then remaking it or like trying a little bit of this for a week and then you try that for a week and then you try this for a week and it’s just like you’re constantly trying to get it right because you really want there to be certainty that you’ll be successful. What you need to do, how you need to personally develop is to be able to show up and take action and get shit done even when there’s no proof, even when there’s no guarantee, even when there’s no certainty.

I’ve talked about this a lot in this series. It’s so important and one thing that we talk about and coach on and support with a lot inside PGSD is perfectionist entitlement. And I know entitlement isn’t our favorite word.

No one really likes to think that they’re being entitled but what this looks like and it comes up so much in business in such a way that just really, really makes it so hard to be successful is we have this entitlement of, and it’s like this all or nothing thinking that comes into it of like if I do everything right then everything should go right and if everything isn’t going right that means I’ve done something wrong and I have to try and make the right decisions or like not just try, I have to make the right decisions so that everything can be right. And also this entitlement of if I’ve been in business and just like pay attention here because this is likely something that your brain has offered you as a perfectionist, this entitlement of if I’ve been in business, if I’m a smart, intelligent person which I’m assuming you identify that way, if I’m a smart, intelligent person who’s capable of things and I’ve been in business for a certain amount of time then I should be successful. How we know you’re in this thinking is if you feel behind or that you should be further along.

That’s because you have entitlement around well if I started a business two years ago I should be successful by now. If I started a business five years ago I should be successful by now. If I started a business 10 years ago I should be successful by now.

If I pick the right niche people should engage with my content. If I create a good post people should like it. Like any of those shoulds that come up that is from us just like being in resistance to the reality of the uncertainty of business.

We’re trying to create certainty. We’re trying to create like an if this, then that paradigm to work within because it feels so much safer and something that was such a big epiphany for me I remember exactly where I was. It would have been 2018, maybe early 2019.

I wanna say 2018 I left my full-time accounting job and I was working part-time as a hospital receptionist and I started work at 3.30 in the afternoon. So it meant I had the full day to work on my business up until then which worked great for me. I found mid-afternoon anywhere wasn’t typically as productive as in the morning so that was the time I’d go into work and I was working at a co-working space and this is just context for it and I would go to the gym nearby like right next to it during my lunch break and I just remember being in the shower and having this epiphany and I know we all have those like shower moments of like, oh my God.

Where I was thinking about the goal that I had and the big goals that I had for my business and for revenue and for the launch that I had that I was about to be doing and it just felt so uncomfortable to be thinking about it because it brings up the doubts like what if people don’t buy? What if I can’t figure it out? Like just all the what ifs, all the uncertainty that comes with trying to do something you’ve never done before or trying even to do something again that you’ve done in the past but isn’t certain to be achieved again which is anytime you’re ever doing anything in business just because you’ve done it before doesn’t mean you’re now entitled to it happening that way again. And so I remember just like thinking about my goal and like being engaged and connected with my goal and feeling those shitty feelings and then I had a thought of self-doubt and like just like I’m not gonna make it, some flavor of that and I just felt so much relief to be in the certainty of failing and it was so interesting for me to just feel in my body like how uncomfortable it felt to be in uncertainty of like will I achieve this goal or won’t I? Will I, won’t I? Will I, won’t I? And just be grappling with that and then to create certainty my perfectionist brain offered that we’re not gonna get there, we’re not gonna achieve it.

It’s not gonna happen and I felt relief to be out of the uncertainty of my goal and the uncertainty of possible success or possible failure and to be in the certainty of not achieving my goal. And that was just so fascinating to me of like okay so my brain and I’ve noticed this so many times over the years since then that when I’m really showing up and I’m really going for it and I’m really putting myself on the line and wanting to achieve things that I’ve never achieved before that I have achieved before and I’m not sure if I can do it again my brain will offer me thoughts of failure and like here’s exactly why it won’t work as a way to provide comfort for myself, as a way to provide relief for myself and really just like when we’re in that perfectionist mentality of having a very high level of shame and inadequacy hence why we wanna be perfect and wanna avoid doing anything imperfectly and so we don’t want any extra shame on top we don’t like we don’t want to feel any more of those feelings and when you’re going off to something and trying to do something new that that brings up the potential to feel ashamed to feel inadequate, to feel rejected, to feel embarrassed and so if you feel like you’re already at capacity due to your perfectionist thinking for all of those feelings our brains will be like okay let’s not try and add any more of that to the mix let’s just go to this certainty and generate certainty, so that we don’t have to feel shame even if it’s certainty of I’m failing I’m gonna run out of money if it’s certainty of like this isn’t gonna work no one’s gonna sign up and I think it’s normal to like have a lot of those thoughts come up. I think like I just wanna normalize that it’s not like you should never have those thoughts or you should get to a place where you never have those thoughts like it’s normal for your brain to produce like hey here’s some thoughts to try and get you to not do that thing that’s risky but when it comes to business and to being a perfectionist in business that as much as you want to grow and evolve and be someone new and do things you’ve never done before your perfectionist brain is going to offer you a lot of invitations to be in certainty instead of uncertainty because that certainty means that you won’t have to feel as much shame as you might have to feel if you were in the uncertainty of really going after a goal and then maybe not achieving it and maybe finding out as we’ve talked about the most painful thing as a perfectionist is finding out that your best your very best wasn’t good enough.

That is the painful thing so we don’t actually try our very best or we try really hard but we do it in a way that is just so exhausting like we just always give ourselves something to blame so that we don’t have to find out that our very best wasn’t good enough or so that we can be so busy taking action and just working and working and working so that we don’t have to feel the feelings that our best isn’t good enough or let me do something else if you’re just taking action and doing more and doing more and doing more and doing more and doing all the things it is to avoid the feelings of you having tried your best and your best wasn’t good enough or a feeling of rejection or a feeling of abandonment or a shame or embarrassment that we just like go into this overdrive of just like let me just try and do more and do more and be working all the time so I don’t have to feel. So I don’t have to feel the shame or like just feel this like powerlessness and like out of control kind of feeling and so when it comes to the personal development work required to be with the uncertainty first of all there’s really just like overall and I don’t know that I have a specific name for it I probably need to give it a name but having this like accessing thoughts of belief when you would otherwise be in disbelief and being able to train your brain to be able to not try and squash disbelief and fear and doubt and like try and outwork it I hate the advice of like outwork yourself doubt or like try and outrun it it’s there it’s driving everything that you do if it’s there and you’re in resistance of it it’s gonna be driving the car like you are going to be working from a place of inadequacy that tends to not play out well it will have you just like in such a people pleasing proving just like working nonstop but doing a lot of comfort work like prioritizing things that don’t matter over things that do matter.

And so we don’t want it to be that you’re in resistance of it and trying to ignore it and be like don’t be scared don’t be doubtful just believe in yourself like that’s not what we’re doing the process we go through and this is a lot that happens as well you’ll hear when you listen to other PGSDers getting coached you can of course get coaching yourself on the coaching calls weekly that we have or in ask a coach in PGSD or by sharing your persistence log in the PGSE forum but finding the thoughts that are like these subtle thoughts of disbelief or sometimes they’re a lot more obvious and being able to have that thought that fear that disbelief be heard and be acknowledged and to be able to then shift into a more helpful line of thinking without again without ignoring yourself or diminishing yourself like just get over it like just believe in yourself like just stop caring like just do it like we don’t take that approach in PGSD because that doesn’t work long term and we wanna have you showing up long term because building a business is a long term thing it’s not gonna happen just in a month like it is something that you need to build like you are building a business.

And so, we do things that support you long-term and also short-term, but long-term, rather than having a short-term win and then you’re like just back to your old ways. And so, really what we support you with and teach you how to do for yourself is to be able to hold space for the disbelief and for your brain, your perfectionist brain’s desire for certainty and to do the responsible smart thing, which would be to not try at business, to just focus on a job instead or focus on something more steady or whatever, to hold space for that and to direct your brain in a really intentional way towards thoughts that are believable to you, that create feelings that allow you to show up, to follow through with your plans, to make decisions, to adjust the plans that you have, to troubleshoot, to be creative, to be resourceful, to be connected, to keep going, to get rest, to rest your brain, like get that clean rest. Like we want to have you be able to hold space for disbelief whilst also generating belief, generating the certainty, not in like, I will definitely get there, but being able to generate for yourself commitment, conviction, connection, that is what we teach you how to do in PGSD, that is the personal development work you need to be able to do.

If every time you are in disbelief, you just try and like work harder to like, okay, I just need to be more motivated, like I just need to work harder, I just need to try harder. I love this advice that I got from my tennis coach, which is don’t try harder, this is related to serving and he was watching me serve and he was like, don’t try harder, try quicker and like let it go basically. He was like, just throw up the ball and then let it go.

Like I have a lot of experience with tennis and skill and I know the motions of a serve and so like it really was just like, just like trust yourself, like throw it up, like let it go and I love this advice so much of don’t try harder, which is then this like tensing and requires this like muscling through and would also be so much more tiring. He’s like, if you just keep trying to try harder, like trying to hit the ball harder, then you’re like, it’s all right if we’re just practicing serves for 10 minutes, but if you’re playing a full set of tennis, you will be too tired from the trying hard to actually be able to serve for the full set of tennis, like to serve for the full match of the tennis, you’ll only be able to do good serves for a short amount of time. It’s like, it’s not sustainable to try harder.

You have to try quickly, you have to let it go, you have to like let your body be in this rhythm and when it comes to really being able to build a business, it’s not like try harder, it’s try quicker, show up, let yourself do things, let yourself take action, give this a try, see what happens, reflect on that, give that a try, like you have to be in this mentality and this takes personal development work if you’re a perfectionist entrepreneur, because you will naturally not be in this mentality, your perfectionist brain will naturally tell you try harder, only do high quality things, do fewer of it, like everything’s so important, everything is so precious, everything is make or break and imagine if you think about in tennis and doing serves, if you’re like every single serve that I practice matters so much, I probably A, would never practice serving or if I did, I’d do like 10 serves, that’s not a sufficient volume of practice.

I’ve been talking about this in this series of like you need to be taking a sufficient volume of action, a sufficient level of action and to do that, you have to be able to let yourself try and to try things quicker, like don’t try harder to create a great post for social media and have it take hours and hours, try quicker but that takes personal development work to let yourself decide what you’re going to do, actually do it, sufficiently complete it, let it be completed, publish it and move on, that takes personal development work and really inside PGSD, that is at the core of what we do, there’s a tool that I’m certified in called the self-coaching model that I use as well and that I teach you inside the program to help you really visualize and see the connection between how your beliefs are creating your feelings and then driving your actions and creating your results and how you would need to shift your thinking to be able to create a different result.

And then we support you to actually be able to not just like intellectually understand that but to be able to shift your thinking because that is how you will get a different result in your business and part of that shift in thinking is being able to believe, like you have to shift out of believing that you won’t be successful or you won’t be successful unless you do everything perfectly and into believing that you’re like not it’s certain to happen, not this kind of like entitlement or this kind of like disconnection from the reality of business but just like I’m going to, I’m willing to, I’m like I really just want to show up and try this and I’m going to go all out, it doesn’t have to take all my time, I say this all the time because perfectionist when you hear like goal and you’re like oh my god then I have to be like all out of everything else in my life.

And I’m going to be so consumed by it, I’m not going to see my friends, I’m not going to see my family, I’m not going to see my kids, like I’m a mom of four little ones, I get what it’s like to want to have time to be with your family, I work three days a week so that I can have lots of time with my family and time for my personal life and I also work best in the business when I have really constrained work time and I’m not, I don’t allow myself to solve for things of like I need more time as a solution, this and this relates back to it like the way I solve business problems is not by giving myself more time, not that I’m not allowed to do that, I can but I solve through belief.

And what beliefs do I need to shift to be able to create the result I want in the time that I have, what skills do I need to develop and therefore what beliefs do I need to shift to be able to develop those skills so that I can create the result that I want in the time that I have to work on my business, so we solve in PGSD, we solve through a belief first frame, a personal development first frame, not okay here’s the action to take, we’re very practical, I’m going to talk about the practical tools like very practical, we have you set a growth goal which is a goal that will grow you and we have you pursue that goal like you’re out in the world building your business and doing things.

And then you study yourself, you use your power planning to help you study yourself, to help you see where you’re getting in your own way and then you use the tools and what I’m talking about as well in this episode to shift your belief to be able to get out of your own way and to get out of that perfectionist mindset and into growth-minded thinking, we teach you that specifically as well inside PGSD.

The exact kind of thinking that supports you to show up and do the things and how to actually bridge the gap between the thinking you have right now which is creating how you’re showing up now and the thinking that will have you be able to show up and feel freer and to feel like you can actually experiment and put yourself out there and do things and feel safe to do so, so we want to have you and we teach you how to shift those thoughts and on the coaching calls as well and like in the coaching that we give you and we teach you as well, there’s a masterclass on how to self-coach inside PGSD as well, so you can do this yourself and like you will also learn how to do that by listening to the PGSD private podcast or coming to the live weekly calls that we have and hearing me coach on this again and again and again, the shifting of belief and going from a belief that is having you create a result that you don’t want and wiggling that loose and getting into a more believable thought that will actually have you create the result that you do want.

You have to be, if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you want to have a business and if you want to have that business actually feel like a business and not just a job where you also have all the risk as well but you want to have it be a creative endeavor, you want to have it be something where you can be innovative and resourceful and be yourself and be trying things like you want to be that version of yourself, then you cannot skip the personal development work required as a perfectionist from going to this kind of like from this pessimistic realistic like you know, I just look at the past to see what I can achieve in the future or like you know, I want to be responsible about it, if you’re a hundred percent, if you’re someone who’s like I don’t want to delude myself, I don’t want to delude myself, that is how we say like I am scared to believe in something else.

And so we justify it with like well, I’m a smart responsible person and smart responsible people don’t believe new things can be done which kind of sounds crazy when you think about it, that we’re literally like it would be delusional to think that I could do something I’ve never done before instead of literally that’s how personal development works, you personally develop so you can do things you’ve never done before and I have so many of my clients who come to me and I know this too because I had to do this work for myself who come to me and they totally believe in personal development and that you can learn and grow and evolve and develop skills and become someone you haven’t been before and at the same time they’ll say it’s delusional to think that I can do something I’ve never done before especially if it’s something I’ve been trying to do for a while now but I haven’t been able to succeed at.

Like no you just had a thinking problem, you’ve just been thinking in a way that created the result you have now and we just have you think differently and also increase your emotional capacity so that you’re able to feel the feelings that come with entrepreneurship, like it is risky of like of feeling vulnerable, of feeling exposed, of feeling judged, like you need to have increased capacity to feel those feelings so they’re not a problem so that you can feel that and it doesn’t stop you whereas right now when you feel judged you hide and when you feel judged by yourself you hide or you go into perfecting and polishing instead.

We want to have you that you can feel judged and you keep showing up because you’ve increased your capacity for that feeling so that feeling doesn’t spin you out anymore you can just feel judged and keep showing up instead of feeling judged and hiding or polishing and perfecting which is another version of hiding. So this is the work we do in PGSD it’s such at the core of of what we do in every step of the PGSD process in all of the tools like the growth goal is designed the way it is to support you with developing new belief, power planning, clean everything is there to support you with being able to to have an increased capacity for the uncertainty of business and to be able to show up even when it’s uncertain and to be able to believe even when you will also at the same time have disbelief.

It’s not that the disbelief necessarily goes away it’s that the belief the conviction the connection the commitment gets stronger and stronger and louder and like the scales tip in that favor so that even though you have disbelief you have more belief than disbelief whereas if you’ve been really having a hard time showing up and taking action your disbelief you’ve had more disbelief than belief you’ve had some belief that has helped you take some action or have you engage with business things like this podcast but you’ve had more disbelief than belief and what we do is we allow it to be okay that you have the disbelief it’s not a sign that you’re not cut out for business and we build up the belief and we have you shift the way that you’re thinking shift your self-image we do a lot of self-image work inside perfectionist getting shit done.

Your self-image is the thoughts that you think about yourself i always i’m never i’m the kind of person who like those thoughts make up your self-image and so we have you shift and teach you how to shift your self-image this is super important as well if you’re worried about like but what if i’m successful and i can’t maintain it the only reason you wouldn’t maintain it is because you believe that you’re the person who isn’t successful and then you just revert back to being your normal self which is someone who’s unsuccessful so we have you intentionally create a self-image and we teach you how to do this in the program create a self-image that allows you to maintain success because you believe that is your norm and we always act in accordance with what we believe is normal for us.

Unless we’re motivated or have willpower we can act differently but then once the motivation and willpower goes we revert back to the core thoughts we have about ourselves if you believe you’re not a runner you can maybe run for a few weeks but then you’ll revert back to not running because you’re not a runner so we have you actually shift how you see yourself through very intentional self-image work that we do in pgsd so that right now it might feel delusional to believe something new about yourself but soon that will just be part of your belief like for me i believe i’m a i have a successful business and i do i didn’t always believe that and that wasn’t always true but i had to believe first that i was a person capable of having a successful business. Even though i had no proof even though there was no guarantee even though the smarter thing to do was to keep being an accountant or to get a job as a lawyer and to continue down that path and now i mean i feel like when i share it now it’s like well of course you believe that and look at you now like well yeah but i’m here now because i believed it there wasn’t proof when i started believing that.

I had to muster up and gather up that belief and when I was in disbelief, I had to hold space for that and generate more belief so that I could try things so that I could make decisions so that i could take action and not be stuck in the procrastination and the overthinking and the procrastinate learning and that if i got in my own way i could get back out of it again that all came from shifting how i see myself doing the self-image work that i teach inside PGSD. Shifting what i believe is normal for me shifting what i believe is possible for me shifting what i make it mean when i get low engagement on a post or when i sell something and no one buys it or i don’t hit anywhere near my goal.

Shifting all of that, which has me feeling a different way so for example instead of feeling disheartened or discouraged i feel connected i feel curious i feel convicted i feel committed and then from that place i take a different kind of action than if i believe all of course it failed it was always gonna fail this probably won’t work either my brain still offers lots of thoughts like that like for this launch that we’re in right now my brain was like well no one’s gonna sign up so we need to have a plan for what happens when absolutely zero people sign up like my brain still wants to go to the certainty of this isn’t gonna work to try and get some relief.

So i have to and i use what i teach in pgsd like i i practice what i preach i do that personal development work to shift how i’m thinking so that i can be here showing up and sharing an incredibly valuable series for you and inviting you into pgsd even though my perfectionist brain is like this isn’t gonna work and so instead of creating a series from a place if this isn’t gonna work and have that thought taint it all that i instead do the work to shift how i’m thinking and then show up from that place and it’s okay if my thoughts aren’t perfectly where i want them to be they don’t need to be but even just being able to like one of my coaches one thing she said is like you can achieve your goals with a half managed mind and i just love that because my perfectionist brain wants to manage all my thoughts and just have all perfect thoughts and, like, spend all the time self-coaching. I don’t need to be in perfect thoughts and perfect belief but i do need to be in a sufficient level of belief for my actions to be needle movers for my actions to be ones that move the business forward rather than me being in comfort work.

If i don’t have a sufficient level of belief i will revert to comfort work i will revert to confined tasks that feel easy and accomplishable if that’s a word to try and get a hit of of completion and satisfaction and like that i’m making progress but those things don’t actually matter like there’s something else i need to be doing like for me the needle mover today is recording this series my brain wants to be like let’s do something less scary than that less vulnerable than that because i’m here i’m showing up i’m sharing i’m going for it i’m inviting you in like there’s so much emotional capacity required for me to just show up and share in this way on this podcast.

I’ve had to do the personal development work we teach in pgsd to be able to do this my perfectionist brain just wants to be let’s spend the day like organizing the office let’s spend the day replying to emails and creating an email system or whatever like my perfectionist brain wants to do that and so i hold space for that i i let myself hear those fears out and like hold space for that and then i do the work that we teach inside PGSD to shift my thinking and shift my feeling while holding space for how i actually feel not dismissing it not diminishing myself but like holding space for that and at the same time creating and generating belief and then showing up with that belief as the driver.

That’s how i’ve been able to build a successful business and i had to learn that i had to develop to personally develop i had to develop those skills that ability to direct my mind that ability to allow myself to have the self-awareness and the frustration that comes with having self-awareness but still showing up in the way you don’t want to be showing up and then to be with that for long enough you can actually shift the belief because that’s the other thing too we perfectionists are like well once I know better I should do better well no there’s like knowing better and having the self-awareness and there’s actually shifting belief there’s actually shifting what is going on in your brain that is creating feelings in your body that have you then take certain action and influences inaction as well that has you create results.

So if you intellectually if like if you’re if you’re approaching personal development as an intellectual pursuit but you are still actually believing things that are going to make it really hard to build your business it doesn’t matter if you intellectually understand any of what i’m talking about what we do in pgsd is we have you actually shift your belief and actually show up differently because you are believing differently one of our PGSDers is such a great example of that she kept the same exact social media strategy that she had from when before she joined PGSD, and she changed her thinking and she started signing clients from the work that we do in pgse the personal development work as a perfectionist entrepreneur she kept the exact same strategy the exact same number of linkedin posts the exact same offer of doing the meet and greet.

She’s a career coach the exact same offer of doing a meet and greet she shifted her thinking and started signing clients just from shifting into different beliefs that is what we do inside PGSD that is how we create results inside pgsd sometimes when you’re in more belief you will then shift your strategy to be something else it’s not to say you can’t change it but but the first place we go is what is your belief as you are executing the strategy that you have and cleaning that up or if needed giving you a strategy we give you this in pgsd in the coaching giving you a strategy that makes it really easy for you to be in belief and high levels of belief.

Sometimes it is shifting the strategy so as to create belief not shifting the strategy so you can get it right so you can finally be good enough. Shifting the strategy so that you can finally be doing what the experts say you should be doing so that it can finally work no because oftentimes almost always if you’re a perfectionist and you’ll and you then go into well i should do this strategy so it can work you will enter a thought pattern that has you not showing up the way you need to show up to actually get it working you’ll have low levels of resilience you’ll be very frustrated when it doesn’t work. You’ll be very disheartened; you won’t troubleshoot it; you’ll just jump to a different strategy and like well that wasn’t the one it’s something else we look at belief we solve for belief first it’s so important it’s so powerful it’s my favorite way to build a business it is it is the way it is the way to develop yourself and shift your thinking so you can shift your results.

So in PGSD we help entrepreneurs who want to create results for themselves in that way if you’ve tried all the strategies like you you intellectually understand it like you know what to do but you’re just not doing it we do the personal development work and have the tools and have the support so you can do the things you need to do to build your business and we have so many success stories from PGSD and from PGSDers who are just so spinning their wheels overthinking procrastinating just like knowing what to do and not doing it and then coming into pgsc creating safe visibility shifting out of the perfectionist beliefs into more growth-minded beliefs and shifting their self-image and doing that work and shifting their results without then because we solve for belief what first not okay you should work more time or like try this strategy or that.

It’s just like we solve for belief which is why you’re then able to create more results without having to work harder because we just have you believe different but if you if you want to keep your belief the same you have to inevitably work more hours or work all the hours you possibly can to create different results you have to take the approach of like i need to do more and more and more and oftentimes that doesn’t work and it’s so frustrating i’ve been through periods where i was like I didn’t take it like changing my belief approach.

I instead was like I need to get the right strategy i need to make the right decisions and then i had to work harder because i wasn’t believing harder and it didn’t work because my belief wasn’t where it needed to be and it was so frustrating but when i focus on okay this is the result i want to create this is the time i want to create it in and then i become the person who can do that then i create those results and that is how i built my business that’s how we teach pgsc is how to build their businesses how we’re able to help all different kinds of entrepreneurs get incredible results in their business because we take a personal development first approach.

Because we take a mindset first approach to business and we also understand first principles of business and how that applies across all different industries as well so it’s not like you don’t get specific advice for your business but we take the approach first of like let’s look at the person who’s executing the plan let’s look at the person who’s executing the strategy and we’re not going to shame you into like just do it or just be better like let’s actually work with you and with your perfectionist brain instead of against it so you feel safe to show up so you feel safe to do the thing so you feel safe to try.

So you’re willing to be seen to try so you’re willing to put in a full effort even though there’s no guarantee that effort will pay off the way you’re hoping it will it could happen we’re going to do everything we can to support it happening but entrepreneurship inherently is uncertain that’s why there’s so much possibility in entrepreneurship because there’s so much uncertainty in areas where there’s so much certainty there’s very little possibility. So we want the uncertainty of entrepreneurship it’s such an incredible thing and we just need to be able to be with that and also at the same time be generating belief even when you have people around you in your life who don’t get it who don’t think it’s the smart thing to do even when your brain offers that it’s not the smart thing for you to do and that it’s not going to work and like if this could be a waste of effort.

But you can generate enough belief to outweigh that disbelief that’s what we teach you to do inside pgse in very explicit ways and we also just everything we do inside PGSD supports you with that the coaching the tools the community the way everything is structured it’s all it’s all designed to work with your perfectionist brain and with you to personally develop so that you can be the business owner and the entrepreneur your business needs you to be to be able to be successful so i hope that was incredibly helpful and i will talk to you in part four and don’t forget that the doors to perfectionist getting shit done are opening for one week only on the 30th of January 2026.

So that is very soon and the doors will be closing at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on the 6th of Feb. So you want to get yourself on the PGSD waitlist. Samlaurabrown.com/pgsd, and you want to get yourself ready to sign up and join us when doors open if you have any questions now is the time to reach out and get them answered we would love to answer any questions you have or any anything that’s coming up for you around it love to hear how you’re finding this series as well if you’re finding it helpful which if you’re the kind of person we help in pgse then this whole series will be very energizing for you to listen to. So yeah anyway with that said i cannot wait to start welcoming in our new PGSDers and i hope you’re finding this series so helpful these are just really the things that i wish someone had been able to sit me down and tell me.

And so I want to share them with you and I want to share them specifically through the lens of being a perfectionist entrepreneur who has a brain that will tend towards the overthinking and the procrastination and working in a way that burns me out and the all or nothing thinking in the fear of judgment as a way to try and keep me safe and so what do you do with that because the answer isn’t like just remember done is better than perfect or like just stop caring what other people think that’s not the answer. So what is the answer it’s personally developing as a perfectionist entrepreneur and doing the work that i’m talking about in this series and that we go deep on and support you with in PGSD so that’s it for part three of this series and i will talk to you in part four.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode and you want me to be your coach and you want to be doing this work on a deep level with like-minded perfectionist entrepreneurs then I want to invite you to join us inside perfectionist getting shit done aka pgsd it’s my coaching program for perfectionist entrepreneurs and we do this personal development work that I have been talking about in this series you get the tools the structure the support that gets your perfectionist brain working for you instead of against you; it is a lifetime access program it is absolutely incredible. So supportive—just everything you could want as a perfectionist entrepreneur so I want to invite you to join us inside the doors are opening on the 30th of January at 6 am Eastern time and close at 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Friday the 6th of February so to find out more today and join us inside the program go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.