Grow With Soul: Ep. 80 Cultivating Self-Trust In Business With Kayte Ferris
Today I want to talk about self-trust. I have jumped into so many decisions and ideas without it ever occurring to me to check whether I actually wanted to do them - and as a result I’ve felt stuck and sad that my business reality doesn’t live up to my business daydreams. Because it is supposed to feel better than this. The pressure, the worry, the actions taken out of panic or uncertainty, the tasks you dread; they are all rooted in a lack of self-trust. I acknowledge here my privilege as a white woman that the colour of my skin, nor my sexual orientation, nor a disability, are something that unfairly holds me back. It is reductive of me to say that every single problem for every single person is founded in self-trust. Yet I do know that everything becomes harder when you aren’t on your own side, when you are another barrier for yourself to get over. It doesn’t have to be hard, and it can feel joyful. So, let’s talk about trust.Here's what I talk about in this episode:
How to advocate for yourself in your business
Discovering what I enjoyed doing
Finding and building self trust
Learn more about my membership and system program The Trail
Having your work align with your values
Links I mention:
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Read the podcast transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 80 of Grow With Soul. Today I want to talk about self-trust.
I have jumped into so many decisions and ideas without it ever occurring to me to check whether I actually wanted to do them - and as a result I’ve felt stuck and sad that my business reality doesn’t live up to my business daydreams. Because it is supposed to feel better than this. The pressure, the worry, the actions taken out of panic or uncertainty, the tasks you dread are rooted in a lack of self-trust. I acknowledge here my privilege as a white woman; the colour of my skin, nor my sexual orientation nor a disability are things that unfairly hold me back. It is reductive of me to say that every single problem for every single person is founded in self-trust. Yet I do know that everything becomes harder when you aren’t on your own side, when you are another barrier for yourself to get over. It doesn’t have to be hard, and it can feel joyful. So, let’s talk about trust.
In my last solo episode two weeks ago I talked about transitioning, and simplifying my business model, and I hinted at a launch and that a new thing that was in the works. You may have seen by now on Instagram or in my emails, that the thing is out - my new programme The Trail is available now.
I wrote a blog post last week of how I came up with idea and pieced the programme together, so I’ll link that in the show notes if you’d like to read it as I don’t want to just repeat that here, although there will be a little cross over. Because, you see, The Trail is a programme about self-trust.
Let me start with a story.
Let’s go back to the summer of 2017 - I’d just moved to Wales and was starting the business. Let me see if I remember this right - I had three different coaching options on my website, and I think five or six different marketing services options, which all had options within them - so, social media management for various lengths of time, content writing, email newsletters, all that stuff. The truth is I was desperate and uncertain. I needed to make money, so I put as many different options out there as possible, in the hope that at least one of these lines would catch a fish.
At the time, I was finishing up coaching with Jen Carrington, and she gently helped me to see that the desperation was visible from the outside too (of course she didn’t say anything of the sort and it’s only with hindsight that I can see that the desperation was visible, but she did suggest that it might be confusing to people to have all those different options). Of course it was confusing; there were eight different calls to action, no one knew what I wanted them to do. So, I binned off the services because I didn’t enjoy doing marketing as much as talking about it, and I stuck with two coaching options. And I started to get bookings.
The bookings felt good, felt validating. I was nervous, for sure, spending hours and hours creating exercises and PDFs for clients so they’d feel like they were getting value, spending hours preparing and decompressing from each call. I worried a lot, so much so that as I was freaking out one, day my boyfriend said “stop being anxious about shit you’re good at”, and I ended up writing that on a Post-it and sticking it in my eye line. But I still worried. I still woke up on the days I had calls anxious about whether those clients were going to hate me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying the business at that point - I was enjoying my photography, I was enjoying my new found freedom, I was enjoying the rush of making my own money, I was enjoying the conversations - it was more that the enjoyment wasn’t consistent. I wasn’t enjoying everything.
I had ready excuses though. It was just beginner’s nerves, or it was just a busy month. The most pervasive excuse, however, was the fact that this was work - and work was supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t work. At some point in my life I’d picked up this belief that no one will pay you for something you actually want to do; the reason you get paid to do something is because you don’t want to do it. It’s compensation for time spent doing things you don’t want to. So with this belief lodged snugly in my head, I carried on building this coaching business.
Fast forward to 2019
I couldn’t call it beginner’s nerves anymore. If anything, I was more anxious than ever. When I was starting out, I just needed to make money, and to know that this thing was viable, but a year or so in I was exploring more about my values and what I wanted. I remembered how, in my very first job writing copy, a month or so in they revealed that everyone had to do a month answering phones in customer service. That was NOT mentioned in the interview. I’d spent the entirety of the job so far doing everything possible to avoid talking on the phone. I’d got a real complex about it. Even when I needed information for the product descriptions I was writing, I would wait three days for someone to email me back rather than pick up the handset that stared at me on the side of the desk. In customer service, I wouldn’t be able to ignore that phone - so I left. I was still in my probation period and I left at the end of the week. The irony was not lost on me, as I contemplated where the business was going, that I left a job because I didn’t want to speak on the phone, and then created one where that was all I did.
Anyway, the values. I began to analyse what I really enjoyed doing, how I wanted to feel in my business, where my joy came from. Over and over the answer came back that I was happiest when quietly writing on my own. You know they say that to find what you want to do, you have to go back to what you loved when you were young? Well, as an introverted only child, I used to like sitting alone in my room with a story tape, colouring, or drawing or writing. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that needing to be ‘on’, for several people every day would tire me out. It just wasn’t in my nature. I realised that I valued freedom, and I valued variety, and no matter how I tried to cut the cloth, those are two things that I couldn’t get coaching to provide for me.
But still, I felt I wasn’t allowed to do anything about it. Still I believed that this was work and it had to be hard - to the extent that I denied myself the things that I did enjoy as a sort of punishment. The compromise I came up with was that I would reduce the amount of coaching I did to make it more manageable, but it wasn’t an option to stop completely.
So that was the project for the rest of the year.
I took on fewer clients, I created more courses and my Kits to make up the income. I gradually got to a place where it felt more manageable - but it didn’t feel more joyful. Still I woke up with the churning worry in my gut and my heart pounded when I saw a client email, convinced they were going to tell me what an awful job I was doing. Here’s the thing though: over that year, I’d inadvertently been practising trust, practising advocating for myself. I’d set my boundaries around how many clients I could take on at one time and although my instincts were to fall over myself to accommodate people, I stayed committed to my schedule. I’d practised my craft in creating products so I felt more confident in my abilities there. I’d practised values-led work, doing what was aligned with what I really wanted.
And this practise meant I was able to challenge that big belief about work needing to be hard - for the first time that belief popped into my brain and my reflex was to say “really?”. In January I set a goal to become appointment-free by the end of the year (it was the weight of the appointments that always felt so pressured, like I had to be on it at that specific time or else), and more than that, my mantra changed. I found myself writing, in emails and blog posts, “if you’re not enjoying it then what’s the point?” - writing it to myself as much as any reader.
This is a story of building self-trust.
It’s not a story about knowing what to do, or gaining expertise, or earning success. The change from “I have to do this because work is hard” to “if you’re not enjoying it then what’s the point” was possible only building, brick by brick, trust in myself. I started my business doing not what I wanted, but what others were doing - it didn’t occur to me that I had a real choice, I just saw that that was what people did so that was the way to do it. Later I grew enough self-knowledge to know that something wasn’t right, but I didn’t trust that I was allowed to do anything about it. Eventually, through practise, I found that my self-trust muscle had grown stronger than the “do as you’re told” muscle. I was able to trust the truth of my self-knowledge and advocate for that above all else. I was able to trust that I could figure things out, make it work. I was able to trust that work could be joyful.
There are so many other contexts where this story is true. Personally, I can see my approach to money and my mindset around it has been a journey of self-trust, the way my content this year has become more no holds barred has been a journey of self-trust. Think about your business - the things you don’t enjoy, the things you’re worried about, the pressures you feel, the things you don’t think you can do. What is at the root of them? What is the bigger problem?
This online business world has been very good at telling you what you need. It says you need to learn this thing and that thing, to do email funnels, get a qualification. It says you need more experience, that once you’ve got more years under your belt then you’ll be able to go after what you want. You don’t need to learn anything new, you need to trust that what you have is already more than enough. You need to trust that you deserve it. And THAT, is what The Trail is designed to help you do. Not learn more stuff, not do what someone tells you, not faff around deciding what to do - it provides a supportive container to get you trusting yourself enough to grow your business from the soul outwards.
Through my story there are three red threads which I believe are key components to this: Knowledge, Alignment, Trust.
It’s hard to start practising self-trust when you don’t have a clue where to start, so this is where Knowledge comes in. It’s not about learning all the things but, by plugging some gaps, providing a stepping stone of strong footing for you to keep moving. This is what Jen did for me right at the beginning - I wasn’t getting that my eight different offerings was confusing, so I needed that knowledge to move forward. Just enough practical Knowledge gives you the confidence to begin.
Alignment is about, yes, knowing your values, but also acting upon them, pulling things into line. In my story, I knew for a long time that my work didn’t align with my values, but I stayed stuck because I didn’t do anything about it. Naming these values is important, but more so is course correcting a little bit every day so that by the end of the week you’re doing more values-centred work than you were at the beginning. It’s checking in, reviewing and keeping on top of this so you can feel when alignment starts to slip and get back into it quickly.
And lastly, it’s taking the opportunities to practise trust. This isn’t a quick win you can do over nine days; look at my story - it took a good year! But recognising where you are being asked to choose between yourself and the external, being present in those moments and making your choice based on trust and intention rather than panic and worry - that’s where the muscle starts gaining strength. And the more you do it, the more your internal validation bank grows, the more you see that you can be trusted - and the more the trust will grow.
Knowledge, Alignment and Trust are therefore the pillars of The Trail, and the resources, talking points and exercises get you actioning these in little manageable ways every week. Hold onto them as you navigate through worry - ask yourself “do I really need to learn this, or do I actually know what I want to do?” Ask yourself “why does this feel off, what boundary or value is this crossing?”
And by asking those questions, you’ll be building trust.
Any links I mentioned here will be available at simpleandseason.com/podcast, and if you want to find out more about The Trail, that’s at simpleandseason.com/thetrail