The Reality Behind Mindset Work
I booked out my business in January 2018. I was on top of the world. Travelling full time, living in Singapore, newly married… my life was pretty dang good on paper.
Six months later I’d be at one of the biggest low points in my life: heavily depressed, no clue how I would pay for another month living in Bali, getting into constant arguments with my husband… I had no idea where I’d gone wrong.
And who the fuck gets depressed in Bali? Me, apparently.
Everyone talks about mindset as being important when you start your own business, but no one talks about why. I just figured it was a “think and be happy and you’ll be fine” kind of thing. I’m extremely good at setting up mental barriers and being able to push through things, so I wasn’t worried at all.
And then I had three clients need to cancel on working with me for circumstances completely outside of their control (literal natural disasters were involved in one case). Cognitively I understood that it had nothing to do with anything I’d done, but emotionally I was spiraling out of control.
That was what broke me. I’d completely ignored my mental health for years, and so I never expected that a relatively small business set back would send everything haywire. I was able to keep my business going (barely), but it was clear I was struggling with myself.
My husband forced me to get help. I was too proud to do it on my own.
I’m talking about this now because I can see the warning signs now. Starting a business is taking on a huge mental load. If your foundation is unstable to begin with, it WILL bring you down. That’s what they don’t tell you about mindset. Telling yourself that things are different than they are will never change the facts, it will just delay the inevitable and make the crash even harder than it should be.
As I said to a friend this morning, I feel like mindset falls into the same gap as mental health: everyone knows it’s a thing, a lot of people talk about it, but you really don’t understand it until it slaps you in the face.
If you’re going to talk about mindset or mental health, talk about the hard things that happened too. Talk about how you spent 4 days of the week in bed because you were completely drained. Talk about how you had to fire a client and it was both liberating and nauseating at the same time. Talk about how you’d worry that you didn’t do enough for your clients even when they are objectively doing better because of you.
And then talk about how you made it through. You pulled the plug on your business so you could reset. You saw a counselor. You kept a document of testimonials to reference. You dropped out of a course that was giving you more anxiety than you could physically handle.
We build ourselves ladders to deal with our mental health. We talk about spoons and fuck-budgets. It’s the same for mindset. You start listing things as little wins. You take small steps because you know that if you try and take a big one too soon, you’ll trip and fall. You face that website copy you need to write with all the overwhelm and dread your brain can muster, so you just write one small thing. You tackle it bit by bit.
Mindset shifts aren’t instant. They aren’t easy. They don’t keep pace with the growth of your business. They’re messy, inconsistent, and sometimes painful. But they’re necessary.
As I went through my recovery process, I found myself faced with a ton of stuff I just didn’t want to do. But my drive to get where I want to be is stronger than the stuff that holds me back. And THAT is what mindset work does.
