Stop Outsourcing Your Authority: How to Trust Yourself in Business

[gentle music] I knew that I was a pretty good designer, and I knew that people would probably pay me to do that, but as far as running a business goes, I was completely uneducated and naive.

So naturally, I started to consume podcasts, buy courses.

I hired a business coach.

I asked lots and lots and lots of questions, and I really went through, like, an information collecting phase.

That is exactly what we should be doing when we start our business.

But if we're not careful, we never stop doing that, and it can become a problem.

We get so used to asking someone else what we should do or asking for permission that making decisions on our own in our business begins to feel really, really uncomfortable.

Now, this is probably not something that you're gonna notice happening.

It doesn't happen overnight.

It's kind of a slow burn until one day you realize that, okay, now you're asking five different people whether you should change your website headline, but they're all giving you different answers, and now you feel overwhelmed, so you're just gonna not do anything at all.

And it really, really keeps us from taking action in our business.

Now, I wanna be a little bit careful here because I don't want this to sound like this is, like, an anti-coaching episode or that I'm telling you that you should never ask anyone else for their opinion.

That's not the case.

I still ask people who I trust for input all the time.

But the difference here is why I'm asking.

Usually, I already know what I wanna do.

I just need to kind of verbally process it and say it out loud to someone and hopefully have them say, "I think you're on the right track," or, "This is great, but..." That's different than being in a position where you literally cannot make a decision until six other people weigh in.

One of those is collaboration.

The other one is dependency.

My husband and I, when we're trying to make a decision of, like, what to have for dinner or something kind of small and inconsequential, we frequently will say, "Okay, well, let's flip a coin." And one of the things that I learned from him is that the point of flipping a coin is not necessarily to tell you if you should have hamburgers or pizza for dinner.

It's that when the decision is made, when you flip tails and tails was hamburgers, you instantly are gonna know which choice you wanted because either you'll be happy that now you're having hamburgers for dinner or you'll think, "Oh, man," and you realize that, "Okay, I really did want pizza." So it's not that it takes the decision away from you, it's that it reveals to you what decision you really wanted to make in the first place.

And I think that that is a really good way to approach asking other people for their opinions about your decision-making in your business.

For example, I will give you a very current real-life scenario here.

I am working on some new ideas for, like, lead magnets and opt-ins and ways to warm people up to hopefully move them closer to purchasing a Stand Out Brand Strategy Session.

One of the ideas that I had was to create a small private podcast where I'm interviewing past clients about what their experience was like working with Specht & Co. and what kind of results they have gotten.