Hi. I have just joined scholars and am SO excited to be here. My business came to me almost by mistake as I started a blog as a hobby while I was studying. The blog grew exponentially and is around weight loss & healthy eating.
I generated a large audience unintentionally while I was finishing my degree. After I completed my degree I realized that my love for my blog and what I do on there is actually my true purpose in life. I knew I could be ‘happy’ as a psychologist (that was what I got a degree in) but I really felt like my true calling was around food, food choices, and helping women change their lives when it comes to their eating habits & mindset.
However, I did not have a degree in nutrition which I allowed to hold myself back. I felt that not being a registered dietician made me less worthy, less qualified, and unable to have a career in that field. Every day on my blog I would get requests to work with me but I would turn them down because I would tell myself I need to be a registered dietician in order to give them real value.
This caused me to apply to a major university for a degree to become a registered dietician and I got accepted. I spent thousands of dollars and over 2 years fulfilling the pre-requisites for this degree. But when it came to finally being accepted I had an epiphany.
The first thing is that the tuition for this new degree is an enormous amount of money that I can’t afford and would have to go into debt over. I don’t mind investing in myself if the degree was what I NEEDED. But I realized that I didn’t need the degree to do what I wanted and could actually do it NOW without it!
Thing is, LOGICALLY I know that becoming a registered dietician empowers you to work in a clinical setting with people who have medical conditions, etc but that is not my goal. I do not want to treat people with severe medical illnesses but instead would like to just work with people on losing weight through general lifestyle habits & mindset.
So I KNOW that I don’t NEED this degree to do what I want. I think I should also add that my blog is all about these general lifestyle habits and tips and I have a large audience who value me and my insights despite not being a registered dietician. I took some huge steps and turned away the university offer and launched my first product.
I had very little knowledge of marketing and set an enormously high goal for myself to reach and didn’t reach it. This took a knock on my self-confidence and made me doubt myself. After a couple of months, I was able to work through that but there are still some things that I am struggling with:
1) I still feel like I am not enough without having the degree of being a registered dietician. More specifically, being a registered dietician with the title of studying at that particular university (it was an Ivy League University that is one of the best in the world).
Despite helping thousands of women through my blog, I still don’t feel worthy or like I have a space to hold because of my lack of degree/title in that field. I have done countless models on these thoughts and tried so many different ones but I can’t seem to break through this limiting belief and BELIEVE the new thought. How do I believe these new thoughts? I have tried to find evidence for them and have loads of REAL evidence but I just can’t seem to shake this feeling of not being enough as I am.
2) When I didn’t achieve my goal for the ebook, I felt like it further reinforced my thoughts surrounding not being enough. After a lot of thought work, I realized that I didn’t hit my targeted goal as I did not have a good enough marketing strategy (I only announced it once on my stories) and was almost ‘scared’ to market to my audience (because of my limiting belief of not being enough).
However, now with my next product launch, I am riddled with self-doubt and fear. When I set these goals for myself I just feel like they are impossible to achieve, and it feels a little like I’m stuck. I have done 10X more than the last time in terms of preparing and marketing but I fear that the result will be the same as last time.
When I set these goals, I look at them and I’m like ‘yeah right that’s impossible’ and I just don’t know how to realize that IT IS POSSIBLE. I know that just because ‘I have never done that before’ or “I have never made that amount of money” that doesn’t mean it’s not possible because most things in life we haven’t achieved until it’s done.
But I just can’t get myself to wholeheartedly believe it. It just seems like the impossible at the moment. I think there is also a fear of if it doesn’t work this time around then I do not know of anything else that I could implement to change it as I have maxed out on research, resources, etc.
