GETTING BRAVE WITH BOUNDARIES: PART 2

This is part 2 of Getting Brave with Your Boundaries, head back and read Part 1 first.

5 signs we may need to update our boundaries.

Martyrdom:

With this, you identify as having had your boundaries imposed and become overly defensive to ward off further imposition. Often you continue to be knowingly imposed on and then let others know of your martyrdom.

Resentment:

This is reflected in your interactions with others. Because of your anger over past imposition of your boundaries, you feel resentment towards a lot of people, situations and expectations of you.

Invisibility:

This might involve you pulling in or withdrawing so that others, and maybe even yourself, never know how you are really feeling or what you are really thinking. Your goal is not to be seen or heard so that your boundaries are not imposed on.  

Aloofness:

As a result of experiences of being ignored or rejected in the past it might feel easier to protect your boundaries by taking the defensive posture to reject others before they reject you. This keeps you inward and unwilling or fearful of opening up your space to others. You may try to seem cool or withdrawn so not to have any boundary imposing experiences going forward.

Hyper Accessibility:

This is when it seems to you that nothing you think, feel, or do is your own business. You are expected to OR feel an urge to report to others all details and content of your feelings, reactions, opinions, relationships and dealings with the outside world. You begin to feel that nothing you experience can be kept in the privacy of your own domain. You begin to believe you do not have a private domain or your own space into which you can escape and need to explain yourself to others – even people you don’t know.

HOW WE CAN ADVOCATE FOR OUR BOUNDARIES:

Now since we have gone through these five things -  you might have identified experiences or behaviours that could indicate that you have felt like your boundaries have been compromised or imposed – I want you to reflect on where some of these experiences came from?

What was the boundary that was not in place, was porous or wasn’t communicated or kept that allowed this to be the case? Based on the evidence markers above, can you connect to a situation or person where you know you need to update your boundaries in order to free you up or allow you to become more true to yourself?

5 WAYS WE CAN UPDATE OR ADVOCATE FOR OUR BOUNDARIES:

1. Have support in place before and after setting boundaries

talk it out with someone trusted before you set them with someone or something that you're feeling nervous about. Accountability is key.

2. Have clear agreements about expectations.

To be clear is to be kind. Don't be afraid to ask as many questions as you would like or to get as much clarity as you need so you can weigh up where your boundary lies on a particular situation.

3. Use simple and direct language.

"I've decided not to take phone calls between 10am and 2pm so I can get my work done. I will need to call you later."

"Although this cause is important to me, I need to decline your request for help in order to honour my family's needs right now."

"It's not okay with me that you comment on my appearance. I'd like you to stop doing that."

"I'll have to think it over; I have a policy of not making decisions right away, so I'll let you

know by __________."

4. Realise you do not need to defend, debate, or over-explain your feelings.

Be firm, gracious and direct. If you face resistance, repeat your statement or request.

5. Back up your boundary with action.

Show that you mean what you say. Be loyal to yourself and your values.

So now I want you to think about what you need to do in order to update the boundary that you have been struggling with, that has caused you to compromise in whatever way and which of these 5 ways might you need to activate to update that boundary for yourself?

What are you actively going to do to update that boundary?

WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE FEAR OF FAILURE?

This week I want to talk about what we do with the fear of failure.

It’s so so important that we address this as an elephant in the room for anyone who is contemplating doing something new or putting themselves out there in any way with their ideas or work. At some stage or another in our lives, our businesses or in our attempts at creating, we’ve all felt the sting of failure or disappointment.

-        Something hasn’t quite taken off.

-        The thing you poured your soul into was met with crickets

-        The product you really believed in didn’t sell as well as you hoped.

-        The idea you have had for a lifetime suddenly seems to be happening for other people all around you.

-        We’ve all lost steam. We’ve all lost our nerve. We’ve all shut down and stopped.

This is the stuff of being human and we need to talk about it and normalise it just as much as we do the strategies and the reflective tasks we undertake when things are going well.

Especially for women, failure feels personal. It feels overwhelming and daunting. It shuts us down, closes us up and stops us from moving forward because failure feels SO vulnerable and exposing.

Often it feels like visceral rejection when things haven’t gone the way we hoped.

But - if we continue to try to hide from the things that aren’t going well, and bypass the hard feelings about the ways in which we feel things haven’t worked out we are going to miss out on a huge component of growth, of resilience building and of the courage honing muscles that it takes to life fully as a whole hearted person.

To fail and just hide is to skip the most significant work that we can do as humans. To fail and learn is how we grow and evolve and develop empathy for ourselves and others.

When we deny the times where things have crashed or we try and swipe away the hard, painful moments of discomfort we are missing out on an opportunity to learn and build.

I want to talk about three perspectives on failure that are really significant and freeing and can hopefully reframe our view of disappointment into liberating opportunities to understand ourselves, the world around us and how we can meaningfully continue to build courageous lives, even when things don’t work out how we had hoped.

Three perspectives on failure

1)     The first thing I want to talk about is the importance of identifying how the fear of failure shows up for us.

Because this fear of failure is a huge deal and the effect it has on us is powerful. The perceived fear of failure is stopping women from bringing their ideas, products, solutions and service into the world. Think of all the amazing things that women have tucked inside them that can contribute to more goodness, more beauty, more awareness, more education in the world that are not being revealed because we are afraid of failure.

-        I want you to take some time and really, REALLY hone in on how the fear of failure is showing up in your life. Is it hesitation of even looking into that thing you’ve been ruminating over? Is it showing up as perfectionism – never being quite ready to put that thing out there for others to see or hear about and endlessly polishing it up? Is it showing up as relentless calculation of numbers, followers, figures and stats? Waiting for that magic number before you dip your toe into the thing that you feel really drawn to make, create or do? If any of those things connect – I want you to feel relieved – there are so many of us that feel this way – but it doesn’t have to be so.

-        The fear of failure is NEVER going away – again, this threat of failure is just a tactic of our inner protector that wants to keep us safe from emotional risk. but how we view failure can be reframed to serve us better. If we can try and view it differently as I’ll line out in the next few minutes, then maybe, just maybe we can be women who boldly try, showing up and being true even when it feels scary, knowing that it’s more important to be loyal to our dreams and our desires than it is to our fears.

2)     Secondly I think it’s important to talk about expectations.

When we set out to bring something to life in the world, often we are caught up in the how, the what and the when that we forget to reflect on what we want this offering to achieve. We spend a lot of time working out the details of all the other stuff without giving thought to our own expectations around it and when we forget to take that stuff into consideration and things don’t go to plan, we end up feeling hijacked, dijected, thrown and deflated. Something that I like to do to try and manage my own expectations around whatever it is that I’m going to put into the world is to get comfortable with the base level.

For me, the base level of my expectations is about being loyal to my idea and affirming that I AM HAPPY WITH HAVING COMPLETED WHAT I SET OUT TO DO. My own satisfaction is the top of my expectation list. This trumps anything that comes next. Have I been true to my values? Have I worked hard? Have I put the time in? Have I really took into consideration what will serve my community well?

Once that is in place, I try to hold the rest of the expectations a little less tightly. Once I have decided that I am happy with what I have done or put out there, then I am more able to identify what kind of response or reaction I want to have from the things I put out there.  The more secure I can feel in the value of my work, and naming the desires for impact that I have can actually help give me the energy and self support that I need to put those things in the eyesight of the people I want to serve or connect with. And it takes energy to do that because marketing or talking about our offerings can be tiring and exposing. Having no idea of our expectations, or just having our expectations swirling around in a mass of insecure ideas can actually harm us, because we haven’t fully connected with our desires or outcomes and that is an important and worthy part of the process, not to be overlooked.

3)     The final thing that I want to say about failure (and this is the gamechanger)  is that everything we do, every wrong turn, tricky decision, every way that we hide, every time we choose to stop, is SIMPLY JUST AN OPPORTUNITY TO RECEIVE INFORMATION.

-        Every time we put something out into the world and we get a response, whether good, bad, noisy or quiet – it’s all just information. Learning this – THAT EVERYTHING IS JUST INFORMATION has been a REALLY SIGNIFICANT, LIBERATING part of my visibility journey and remembering this aspect has given me real courage as I have decided to put my ideas out there, marketed my offerings and continually chosen to show up for myself truly. Everything we receive back – its not good. It’s not bad. It’s not praise OR criticism. It’s JUST INFORMATION. And it’s up to us what we do with that information. 

-        If you’ve ever launched something to crickets or posted an idea that didn’t take off or developed a product that didn’t sell – it’s not that the idea was bad. It’s not that what you had to offer wasn’t valuable or interesting.

The quiet response is just information. And it’s up to us to access and use that information wisely. If our offering is not connecting, it doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It might just mean that we need to collect more information. These things that might immediately feel like failure might just be an opportunity to get the information you need to get your thing out there in a way that does connect.

It might mean you need more information about the time of the month or year you are offering it. It might mean you need more information about the people you are trying to reach. It might mean you need more information about what price points. It might mean you need more information about what kind of set up people feel is accessible etc. It might mean you need to build more trust with your customer or audience base in order to connect in the way you are expecting to…

-        This information isn’t given to you to shut you down and stop you, like your inner critic or ego would like. It’s given to you as a gift to sift through and determine what you should do with it. See this as a gift to build on rather than an out or an opportunity to wallow or quit. If we can see this information as a way of shaping what you do so that more people can connect with it in the way you want them to then we are exercising bravery and resilience and our ego is not in the driving seat – service and value is.

Here’s the thing.

When we look at things through this lens of failure is just information, it kind of makes the threat of failure less powerful. Of course there are always going to be risks when we decide to put ourselves out there and take steps to pursue something close to our hearts and the risks are real and we have to deal with the real feelings of fear and discomfort.

The other option is to not do anything with the things we feel drawn to create or do and the trade off for that is another type of discomfort. It’s the discomfort of always wondering if we could have given that thing a go. It’s the discomfort of maybe never feeling the fulfilment of trying.

Both paths lead to some sort of risk and that’s the work – figuring out which one – because we are going to face discomfort either way. Hopefully you’ll chose the one that gives you the chance to be loyal to yourself.

In the meantime, please reach out to me with any of your own thoughts on this and know that if you want to build courage in a deeper way you would be so welcome to join the assembly members community – my coaching community of women who are all on this courage building journey together.

TOP 3 LESSONS IN BUILDING A BUSINESS

Today I thought I’d share a little bit about my own experience in building a business.

If you don’t already know, I am a coach. I spend my days working with women who want to build more courage in their lives to pursue their ideas. I run a thriving monthly membership community, group coaching programmes and have a small roster of one to one clients. I freaking LOVE this work. Honestly, I do.

I didn’t set out to build a business.

I was working, happily in the charity sector for many many years and in 2016 decided to create some events for women to come together and eat really nice food and do creative things together – I was missing some creative community in my life.

I branded the events under the name Assembly, and we had these gatherings a few times a year for a couple of years. From then, I decided to do some coaching training and then began to offer out some of what I had been learning to the women already interested in Assembly.

From there I hosted some workshops, created a membership to take those workshops into a monthly accountability and learning online space and then deepened my work to include group programmes that would serve women who wanted to build on their ideas and create thriving businesses themselves. 

I would hate for anyone to look in at Assembly and think that it magically and easily appeared so I thought today I would share three things that I’ve learned about building a business that I feel don’t get talked about enough in entrepreneurship.

My three lessons for building your business

So let’s dive in:

1)     The first thing I want to say is: you gotta do the work.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll know that I really reject the idea of hustle culture, of having to be ON all of the time, of working yourself to exhaustion for arbitrary metrics, but what I never want to dismiss is that building a business takes effort. And more than that, there is no secret formula. If you want to build a business that allows you to thrive and do the thing you love without having to hustle all the time, it requires some leg work to get going.

All of the facebook ad’s and webinars that promise you six figure months and enormous client or customer bases in short time-frames or with some magic formula  are a fools errand. There is no silver bullet to building a thriving business without some cost to your time and energy for a period of time. What this doesn’t mean is that you should be a slave to your business and overwork yourself into the ground to the detriment of your wellbeing or the health of your relationships. What it might mean is adjusting some expectations of what it might require of you for a period of time as you build, connect and hone your offers. This is especially true if you are building a business on the side of another job or role.

Often what I see in the coaching world, particularly the online business coaching world are these headlines and clickbait that disregard the real graft that often goes into the beginning and developing stages of building a business. When it’s just you, it’s going to take some time and energy and willingness to be on a steep learning curve. To learn how to create systems, to get a little more savvy with websites and social media and mailing lists. Building my business has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career so far, but it has also meant that for periods of time, I have worked late, I have had to learn new skills, I have had to really listen to my community and make decisions that feel hard. To imply that building a business is as easy as a 4 step formula is actually really patronising – it doesn’t account for the real lives of the real people with all kinds of other stuff, other responsibilities going on that need to be accounted for. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

2)     Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that when you’re building a business, you won’t feel a sense of ownership with it for a while.

What I found was that for a while, it felt like I was imitating someone else (no one in particular, just a mash up of people that I admire or that I thought were doing things well). It takes time to find your own groove in building a business and to feel like you are really making it your own.

And in saying that, it’s really normal that you go poking around other people’s website and socials. It’s really human to be curious about what other people are doing and how they are doing it. It’s totally a given that you will want to see or hear about the tactics, the ways that other people in maybe a similar field to you are operating. It’s normal. But it’s also a slippery slope. Paying too close attention to what other people are doing is likely going to have you spinning your wheels about what YOU’RE doing. And the reality is that what you can actually see, is the tiny little fraction of what that person allows to be visible – none of the dilemmas, struggles or winging it. So don’t get yourself wrapped up in someone else’s story. Have a look and move on – start practicing using your own voice and doing your own thing. Even if it feels unnatural to begin with, your own style will come. Just keep going.

3)     Thirdly, There comes a time where the benefit of investing in your business is what is needed to move the needle.

Trying to build a business without support is exponentially harder. If you are doing it on your own, or think that you should be, you run the risk of thinking that you’re the only one finding things tough or overcomplicating and overthinking.

It is super overwhelming to take care of every little aspect of our businesses ourselves. To think that we should be the strategist, the marketer, the copywriter, the deliverer, the creator, the analyst, the salesperson, the social media manager and the troubleshooter all on our own is a really lonely and overwhelming idea.

Making the move to start investing in your business doesn’t have to be massive to start with.

When I say investing, that could mean hiring a Virtual Assistant for a few hours a month to help you create some more streamlined processes, or a designer to properly create branding and content for you instead of slaving over Canva, or an accountant that can make sense of your finances, or a coach who can help you unmuddle your brain and keep you accountable to a particular goal you have. Whatever it is you need to start to creating some space for your best work in your business. We all have limitations to our expertise and capacity and we need to know what part of our business is our sweetest spot – the space that needs our expertise the most.

For me, I started with hiring a virtual assistant for a few hours a month, then gradually I saw the benefits of this both in time and in how it was freeing me up to create more and in creating more I was able to show up more for my community and bring more clients in to work with.

I’ve now worked my way to being able to hire an operations coordinator to handle the behind the scenes of my business systems and processes and a community and content coach to help me connect with and create support in my membership community and doing this gradually was the best decision ever.

It means that I can spend most of my time communicating my message through creating content like this and serving my higher level coaching clients in a deeper way. I understand that spending money in your business feels scary and risky, but if you can budget for it and you are willing to experiment with what it might feel like to have more help, do it sooner than you think you need to.

With all of these things, I’ve found building a business to be super stretchy, mostly internally. The most amount of effort that I’ve had to put in is the effort of managing my own fears, insecurities and doubts. It’s really difficult to be brave and comfortable at the same time. But I know that taking action, practicing using my voice and getting some support in my business has made all the difference.

I hope me sharing some of that helps if you are in the throes of building a business or maybe you’re further down the road and relate to some of it as well. As always I love hearing from you so if you want to chat more – you can find me on IG @melwiggins or you can email me hello@melwiggins.com

WHERE TO START WITH YOUR BIG IDEAS

Today I thought it might be fun to get practical and talk through where to start when you have an idea or are coming up with a new project or offering in your work or creative life.

It can feel so exciting when an idea or a new thing lands in your mind right? Tingly, interesting, fun, scary, thrilling. All of those feelings have come up for me when I’ve contemplated something a bit new.

And if you’re also like me, the next breath can offer a whole bunch of overwhelm. Where do I start. Which part of the process of bringing this to life or experimenting is the best course to start down…

Often what I have seen is that at this stage, women tend to get tangled up in the practicalities or the really complex aspects of a new idea first: like thinking they need to have a full website built before they can ever talk about their idea (newsflash, I didn’t have a website for my business for the first year – all I had was IG and a paypal account – it did the job to allow me to get on with things and experiment for the first while), or other stuff like setting a budget or working out costs or faffing with spreadsheets or overcomplicating their idea by trying to write business plans or create their own logo. PLEASE. I’ve done it all, I’ve seen it all so I want to call it out as a pre-emptive warning for you to notice if this is where you’re at.

Because I’ll tell you what – nothing can kick the enthusiasm out of a shiny and exciting new idea faster than opening up an excel sheet, am I right? Or spending hours on canva trying to create the perfect logo. This embryonic stage of your idea is not the time to complicate.

Often we overcomplicate things as a form of protection and hiding from really getting on with the stuff we know is going to move us forward. Because: well, fear! I really do understand why this happens. But if this idea is chewing away at you and will not leave you alone, it’s time to take some brave action.

So what I want to do is offer two simple strands for starting. Two strands that will set you in the right direction when it comes to slowly breathing life into your next idea or thing.

The two strands I’m talking about are IN AND ON.

These are the small but mighty bits of work we need to do in our idea and the work we need to do on our idea.

So I want to break those two strands down a little bit to see if it might help you know where to start, and give some context to the ways that these two strands separate so you can see how when they are woven together, can create some movement and momentum.

So, working IN your idea.

The in your idea part is all about the inward facing stuff that needs to happen to start to nourish your idea. When I talk about working IN your idea I’m talking about the foundational, root growing aspects of growing this thing.

In the early stages, the IN stuff for me has looked like:

1)     Solidifying your impact – putting language to your idea so you know what it is you want your idea to do, what impact you want it to have, what problem you want it solve. What is at the core of this idea, and what are some of the key ways that you want to be able to bring people towards it? Pick 3 core aspects that you know you can go deep with around your idea and start mind-dumping ways to extract and dispense that information.

2)     The IN stuff may also be about Information gathering; finding out who exactly your idea is right for, zoning in on who this idea is going to be a great fit for, who is going to want to buy it or connect with it or engage with it. And where those people are; where do they hang out online, what are they thinking about in relation to your idea, what are they struggling with? How can you find that out and ask good questions to get more information about the people you want this idea to connect with?

From here, armed with this information you can start to move into the ON strand.

The ON strand…

is all about the small steps you can take to start implementing the information you’re gathering and creating messaging about the impact you want to have. The ON or outward facing stuff is how you start to water those foundations, tend to the knowledge you’ve been gathering and allow the idea to start to be seen above the soil.

And the working ON strand for me, when I have a new idea usually looks like:

1)     Starting to share what I know with the people that might need to connect with it. Creating content, blog posts, podcasts, IG posts that speak to the new idea, that break down the new idea into those three core aspects you identified in the IN strand and find the best way to communicate about those things to the people you identified in the places you identified as best to show up in.

2)     The working on strand can also look like starting to map out ways to build community or to take people who are really interested in your idea along with you. This might mean creating some form of content that people can opt into, like a mailing list or a facebook group that they can go to to find out or hear from you more. How can you create something where people can let you know that they want to hear from you more?

I know that the ON strand, the actually moving out of inward, behind the scenes information gathering and into some forward-facing, letting people into your idea stuff is going to feel really hard.

It’s going to feel vulnerable because actually, keeping your excitement about your idea in your own little container of happy is going to feel way more safe. And I can’t sit here and promise you that if you release your idea into the world that it’s going to be a huge success (whatever that means).

But I promise you that giving your idea some room to breathe outside of the container of just you is what it needs to evolve. If you keep it in the container too long without oxygen, you will smother it and it will wither.

If you are looking for a way to measure how your idea is going then you can start by measuring your loyalty to it – that’s the only metric that matters.

Are you showing up for it?

Are you giving yourself time and permission to pursue it?

That’s a great metric for measuring how your idea is going. If you try to measure it by any other factor – followers, subscribers, purchasers, money, you’ll be hanging your worth on something that can change with the wind for a million different factors.

The point of taking action on your idea is not so it can be perfect right out of the gate, but so that you can be a learner right out of the gate. So that you can grow WITH your idea as you experiment and give yourself grace to practice and get it wrong and course correct and shimmy in other directions.

Start today.

Take a look at how you can work IN or ON your idea today, and stay fiercely loyal and fiercely gracious to yourself as you explore and experiment.