Thank you already for reading and for your help with this. I really, really appreciate it. There is so much here…I just had to write it allllllll out. Literally any comments/perspective you have will be so appreciated.

This epiphany came to me while I was listening to Brooke’s “Thoughts and Money Lesson” inside of the “money & abundance” section of the study vault. Her pink shirt is so pretty in that one!

Some background:
Recently I have been incredibly stressed & distressed about money and about my business.
The worst kind of shame and self hate. Really painful, and I see that I’m taking it out on others in various ways too, which hurts so much to admit. The people I love so much, the people who are always there for me–THOSE are the people that I’m mean to when I’m stressed because I’m hating myself so much. Geez.

I’m a coach. Got my first paying client in Jan of 2020. Made about $56k that year, made about $68k this year. I was on track to do double that and then I literally stopped doing ANYTHING in my business (except coach my current clients) for 5 months. I have pretty bad depression and sometimes cannot function very highly. I also had surgery. Anyways. I’m still bitter obviously about not making the money that my brain thinks I should have made this year. I look at all of my diagnoses(chronic depression, OCD, and an anxiety disorder) and then I look at what I have/haven’t accomplished and I still have this horrible, cruel voice that says “pretty pathetic that with all your privilege, with all the tools at your disposal, with all the coaching you invested TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS in, with all the therapy, with allllllllllll this time you have–still this was all you were able to produce this year.” The fact that I can be curled up crying inconsolably from these intrusive, incessant thoughts while at the same time intellectually knowing that they aren’t true/real/relevant….it’s a weird thing to observe in oneself.

I’ve toyed with various other forms of making money so that I’m not so reliant on my business for money. I want to support it until it can EASILY support me. It is my one source of income, and since I haven’t really worked//been mentally stable enough to work in 5 months I have been kicking back into high gear to get some clients.
I have also recently thought about GETTING A JOB (LCS maybe???) to help pay bills and pay down my debt………..I realized that this would be me committing so hard to my business, not giving up or slowing down. Me getting a job in year 3 to support my business, pay rent, and hire a publicist or something??? That is next level love and dedication to my lovely, wonderful, amazing business. I do notice that I’m afraid of doing that–I’m afraid of how fragile my emotional state is (especially knowing that I can’t thought-work my way out of not having balanced brain chemicals), I’m afraid of the time that will take from my week, I’m afraid of sabotaging my business somehow, I’m afraid that working during the day & coaching at night/on weekends will leave me feeling even more drained and miserable than I am now–so then I’ll execute even less in my business and I’ll still hate my life just a little bit more because I don’t get to be completely alone in my apartment all day which I love. I don’t want to overestimate what I’m capable of and then realize that my business & my mental health is falling apart because I decided to take a part time job. Dramatic. Baby. But I genuinely know that this as a real possibility….it’s already happening actually. A friend of mine who is a veryyyyy successful coach (sure, she’s been doing this for over a decade, but why should that mean that my brain doesn’t get to compare us against each other? FUN!) has hired me to help her in her business, and I just FREEZE! I’m like “oh! This perfect opportunity to do work that I love for someone that I love, she’s paying me so well, she’s so wonderful and fun and cool, this work is so fun and cool, let me just NOT DO ANYTHING THAT SHE ASKED ME TO DO. Let me just PANIC AND DESPAIR AND LOOK AT MINIMUM WAGE JOBS ONLINE.” What am I DOING????? Can you help me figure this out??? Why is this perfect opportunity in front of me and I’m freezing??? How can I just go to town on the work she gave me ALMOST TWO MONTHS AGO and make a ton of money and over-deliver to her??

Anyways.

I am a pretty intense person, so finding Brooke and then finding Stacey I went all in. So hard. I realized that I was using things they say like “clients are coming, I create value with my mind, I get to decide if a client says yes, I get to decide how much money I make, the money you make is a reflection of the value you create, etc” against myself.

I was using those things against myself, using them to justify ALWAYS working or always focusing/worrying about:
“WHERE ARE MY IDEAL CLIENTS HANGING OUT??
WHERE ARE THEY??
HOW CAN I FIND THEM AND HELP THEM AND GIVE THEM SO MUCH VALUE???
IF I AM PRODUCING ALL THIS VALUE AND PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME I’M CHANGING THEIR LIVES, THEN WHY CAN’T I PAY MY DAMN INSURANCE BILL??
WHY ISN’T THIS WORKING FOR ME THE WAY IT WORKS FOR THEM????????????”

So the epiphany was all of this:
I’ve been spending this time trying to grow my brand new 2-year old baby business, hating myself most of the time because I’m telling myself that I am the reason that I’m not at $200k or more like some of my friends who started at the same time as me. Again, using “I create the results in my life” as a way to shame myself and beat the drum of how incapable and inadequate I am–but I call it “accountability” even though it’s really just cruelty I think….check me on this if I’m wrong please. I want to know.
I wondered what I would think about my current state in business if I had a job in addition to my coaching practice(and therefore had all the bills and debt covered, had money to buy presents for my family, had money to donate or even SAVE)…I’d think “holy shit this is amazing. This is going so well! I can’t believe this! I’m doing a really good job! I can’t believe I did all of this from SCRATCH?? You did this????? SO fucking cool! I was profitable from the jump AND I increased my revenue this year despite all the depression? Super cool.”
I’m not serving as much as I could be–and more importantly, I’m not enjoying my life as much as I could be. I’m feeling deeeeply sorry for myself instead. I’m using my brain against myself constantly…so maybe if I had a job AND my coaching practice I wouldn’t have all this open time and space to indulge in my anxiety and fear and self pity and I’d have more stability and therefore more peace of mind. Maybe if I had both then I could invest in ads instead of telling myself that I have to do everything from scratch all alone–even though coaches that I admire built/scaled their businesses through huge investments in advertising/marketing/publicizing. Maybe if I had a job AND this coaching practice I could let my nervous system chill out, I could know that rent is always going to be covered, and I could step away from the shame & self hate that is blocking me in the first place. I think then I’d be able to experiment more, have more fun in business and in life, I’d feel so much less attached to anything or any client or any consult call……it wouldn’t affect me at all when I get 20 applications in a row and they all can’t afford it/don’t want to pay for it. I think if I were stable financially I would just not be running my business in fear/anxiety/expectation of payment for the value I think I produced.
(******But then I think–if I were more stable financially would I then just stop trying to build my business? Would I do webinars & not really talk about my program because I don’t really care if they join and I just gave them all the answers to their questions on the webinar? I want to build real wealth, not just have a part time job and a sort-of-coaching practice my whole life.)

I’m trying to make $100k with an email list of 1500 people that hasn’t grown in 6 months & who have already heard my offers in my emails so many times already. That’s silly. I can just say that as someone who has been in business for more than 2 seconds. I’m trying to sell stuff to an audience that doesn’t even really exist yet. We’re talking a few thousand people between email/IG, and none of them are new followers/subscribers. I realized that if I built up an audience, this would flow better. That’s what people talk about all the time–their “overnight success story” is just 15 years of momentum and WORK coming together in what looks to an outsider like a small amount of time. So like…I could literally just have a part time job, run my coaching practice NOT THROUGH FORCE BUT THROUGH FLOW, stay consistent about podcasts and other valuable content, and be very happy and financially stable over the next couple years as I build up steam and get my business running well with SOPs so that I’m ready for scaling to the next level when it happens//when I decide I want to. When I’ve produced so much value and gotten so much demand to work with me that I don’t need to TRY(like grasp I mean. not like put in effort. I’m not afraid to put in a lot of effort, I just don’t want the desperate GRASPING anymore).
As Brooke says on that call: I need my brain online, creating value, and I need to manage my brain so that I can keep doing that. I genuinely think that making sure I can pay rent is part of me managing my mind. That is me going out and getting a fucking job to get some money flowing in ***consistently*** so that I can be at peace instead of in CONSTANT fear and anxiety.

I don’t even know which way is up after writing all that. I don’t even know if I really wrote about my epiphany. I forget what it was now, and I’ve gone back & read everything to get it back and I can’t put my finger on it. Now I’m just lost. Geez. That was the longest thing anyone has ever written. I think I’m just really tired, really sad, really ashamed and embarrassed about my own state/business compared to many of my friends’ businesses, and really worried and afraid.

Sorry//thank you.