The FITSPRO Podcast

Pregnancy Real Talk Part 2!

If you missed part one of this kind of life update on pregnancy and our backstory, make sure to check that out. I will say maybe it’s more the emotional and experiential side of the experience thus far. Today we are going to dive into more of the logistics, challenges and plans

* Cost & context* Insurance * Providers/birthing plan* Maternity leave/business plan

I will be talking a lot about personal decisions in today’s episode. And know that they are just that. Our personal decisions, or my personal decisions. And me sharing them in any capacity is a privilege. Because myself or anyone you follow online does not have to share anything with anyone. But like I mentioned in part one, I think that people sharing their experiences can be very powerful and letting other people know that they are not alone if maybe they don’t have a popular feeling or experience - in regards to anything. So let’s get into it!

Insurance

Insurance was actually another one of my reasons that I was scared of getting pregnant because we have not had insurance since early 2018. We are young and healthy, and had all the health insurance we would need through world nomads travel insurance when we were traveling in 2018 and 2019, and the first part of 2020. After we got back in 2020, we had no insurance. We made that decision after inquiring about it. And the costs that come with being self-employed just weren’t worth it to us. So we opted out.

In the back of my mind was always the fear of pregnancy and having to pay out of pocket. But I also knew people firsthand who had paid cash and were able to get close to half off prices because of paying in cash.

For the first three weeks to a month, it felt like Nate’s full-time job to call and research insurance options. It was a pretty massive headache if I’m being honest. Essentially we are outside of enrollment period, pregnancy is not a pre-qualifying factor, and we make too much to qualify for literally any insurance.

I got pretty mad at the system during that time. Because while we are affluent enough to be able to pay for this pregnancy if everything goes smoothly, someone making $3500 a month in the state of Washington would be in the same boat as us if they didn’t have insurance and that’s fucking insane.

Also, Nate doesn’t work, so he had the time to make all of these phone calls and be put on wait for three hours. I just made us think of all the people who don’t have time, or resources. I can be a super sucky an unfortunate situation for so many people. But that’s another conversation. Because today is about our experience.

We were able to get a first ultrasound at a women’s clinic here called Options 360. And that was completely free. So we got to see our little been at nine weeks. It was one or 1 1/2 inches long. And everything was right on schedule as far as growth to that point.

We finally ended up having a zoom call with a personal insurance broker who I found through my friend Paiger Major. She was awesome. Her name is Jackie and her company is called Translating Insurance. She was able to find us one single insurance plan that we could enroll in.

By the way this was after already looking into shared insurance plans, like medishare for instance. And a few other ones. All of which required you to get the insurance, or subscribe before knowing you were pregnant. Or before conception. The options for pregnant people are so limited. It literally infuriates me.

This podcast episode is the epitome of nuance - of several different emotions and experiences coexisting at the same time. So I want to make clear that if you skip any part of this or take any single part of it as the conclusion of my experience or this episode, you are mistaken and you’re also missing the entire point of this episode.

Bless me and my attempt to keep this episode concise. I’ve already decided to make this a two part series because it’s just needed to get in everything I want to. Bringing a bebe into the world is not a simple thing for me (or anyone I presume).

Pregnancy back story

It’s no secret to my Instagram audience, friends or family that Nate and I were team no babies for a long time. I say that but it’s not entirely true.

If that was the case, we would have gotten him snipped or tied my tubes or taken an actual preventative route. That only makes sense if you’re 100% on not producing offspring.

For us, we’ve been married nine years in August. When we got married, we told people, maybe in three years we’d think about expanding our family. Then three years rolled around, and we said maybe at that five year mark. Then five turned into we aren’t preventing kids (I wasn’t on birth control but tracked my cycle via the Fertility Awareness Method - aka FAM), but if and when it happens, we’ll figure it out.

Therefore we were open to having kids, we just didn’t WANT them in a specific time frame.

I would say I was more against the idea of having kids. And I want to be very careful with my words here. I am simply sharing the most authentic story I can for myself in hopes that it helps other people (both men and women) feel less alone if they had or have similar feelings.

Also, I have always been amazed by and think that motherhood, pregnancy, in the act of giving birth is miraculous. And believe it as a gift. It was just never some thing I saw clearly for myself.

Let’s lay out my situation. I am the breadwinner. And frankly my business has been my baby for the last seven years. Thinking about a child coming into that picture did not seem feasible to me. I couldn’t visualize it working. I’ve never identified with any of the natural motherly tendencies or desires. You could say I have more masculine energy naturally. But the beautiful thing is, Nate is a stay at home husband and is fucking amazing with kids. They gravitate towards him. He’s a big punching bag or cuddle bug, and a big kid at heart. He’s a better cook than I am and he’s hospitable AF.

It’s why we work. It’s not that I am masculine and he is feminine. I want to make that very clear. We very much so respect rather traditional masculine and feminine roles while also letting each person pursue and express what we believe to be their natural gifts - I am task driven. He is relationally driven.

Sooooo all that is to say - I am now, at 19 weeks stoked to raise a babe with Nathanael and trusting him has also allowed me to see myself in the motherly role that will make sense for me.

That feeling is abundantly different than when I found out I was pregnant and two years leading up to it.

From 2018 through 2021 my feelings around possibly becoming pregnant were 110% fear driven. That fact is clearer than ever now. From the fear of actual motherhood - bonding with the baby, balancing my work life, literally not getting to be as selfish as I was without children, to the literal act of labor, I avoided even thinking about the possibility because I was terrified of it all. Stick with me, because I don’t fear these things now.

Coaches are always wondering how much they should charge, what to consider and how to increase prices if needed. That’s what we’re getting into today. This is a straight forward, nitty gritty episode.

The market is the first thing we consider. 

And where you want to sit in the market. We will go over what is typical pricing in the market of online health and fitness shortly, but where you sit in any market needs to be considered.

Are you a premium brand?  Mid tier?  That’s up to you and will also be determined by who your offer and your customers.

If you work with high achieving CEO’s, you will likely have a premium brand charging premium prices, doing a lot to make this client’s life easier.

Not every ideal client falls into a specific demographic from an income standpoint, but it can be a factor which is why I mention it. 

Don’t let your own money mindset limiters get in the way of charging what you should be charging. For instance if you think “I wouldn’t pay x for this” - consider that perhaps you are not your ideal client. Maybe you aren’t in need of what you’re offering. Or maybe it’s not in your current budget even though you understand the value. IT IS of value to those clients who are willing to pay for it.

Food for thought. You’ll feel much better charging a price that makes proper sense for your service. And they will be invested, ready to do the work. Not guaranteed but likely correlated.

You need to feel compensated for the work.

Don’t limit yourself to thinking about time as an exchange for money. Energy balance and demand is a thing. Charging for your ability to be thorough and efficient is a thing. For instance it took me longer to write 1:1 programming when I charged $99 per month than when I charged $250 per month. People are paying for the experience. Not for how long it takes to create a program. Just something to consider from a mindset perspective.

I talk about this in the perfect pricing guide inside FitsPRO Foundations -  pricing should be a win for you, a win for the value of the offer, and a win for the client. Not that the pricing is no big deal for them, but that they understand the value, and feel like they are making an informed and empowered decision in make the commitment to work with you.

If you find that you are indeed undercharging, then increase your pricing.

Don’t make this harder than it is. But do the following, or rather, choose from the following.

You can grandfather in your current clients and simply increase price on your site and in contracts for new customers.

There is no rule for the amount you increase pricing by. You make massive changes by 2-400 dollars or more. Or make smaller increases. $50-$100. 

If you’re increasing pricing due to under charging, there is no need to alter your program and what’s offered within. If you would like to charge more but currently don’t provide that level of value, you can make the needed alterations to your service, offer that to current clientele at the higher price point.

If increasing pricing for current clients, you can absolutely go all in and drop it on them but these people did get you to where you are. So I suggest a drip system.

Over three month periods, increase their pricing. You would notify them with the coming structure, and give them time to adjust finances or whatever else they may need to do. Maybe it goes up by a total of $100/mo but it’s a $33/mo increase every...

I did a podcast back in 2021 on the reflection of my definition of health after traveling the world. It went over things like being able to take a break from all of your supplements and perfect schedule. Essentially can you adapt to less ideal situation. Because I believe that that is part of health. Today’s episode is not that, but kind of a piggyback off of, or a cousin to that episode.

I won’t be going into nutrition because it’s not some thing that I am as well versed in as weight training. But you could obviously dive into nutrition as an additional thing to manage or look at outside of fitness. But I want to look even further outside kind of the normal scope of fitness and nutrition.

These aren’t groundbreaking. They are absolutely normal. And I think it’s pretty natural to venture into these different areas the longer that you have been in not even weightlifting, but just the exercise world in general. This may be a quick episode, but I hope to give you some resources and things to think about an implement outside of your time in the gym.

Breathing

It’s no surprise that this came up considering that I am almost done reading the book Breathe by James Nestor. In my academic brain, there’s quite a bit of pseudoscience in this book if I’m being honest. Or just methods and claims not backed by science. But also just because something hasn’t been scientifically tested, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold merit. The research world is after all still a money-based practice. Research needs funding. So that’s something to consider in general.

Regardless, it’s no secret that we breathe from the moment we enter this world until the moment we leave this world. And there are more efficient ways to do that given different scenarios. Breath can be very powerful in controlling other areas of our body, especially in regards to our nervous system. Breath is often used in a meditative state to bring the body into a parasympathetic state. In your autonomic nervous system you have parasympathetic and sympathetic. Sympathetic is your turn up fight or flight stimulated side, and parasympathetic is your rest and digest. Meaning it is when we down regulate, and slow everything. We prepare for rest. We recover.

Essentially breath can be used to calm the body, or stimulate the body. So I’m not necessarily telling you to implement any practices. But maybe just pay attention to the way that you breathe throughout the day. Are you breathing through your mouth? Are you breathing through your nose? How do you breathe when you exercise? How are you breathing before you go to bed at night? Just draw attention to those areas, and then if you have the means maybe pick up a book like Breathe, or listen to it on audio. There’s several others that I haven’t read yet that I’m sure will come up on suggestions when you select the book nn Amazon. And at the time of this episode it is on my Amazon page if you want to go to that.

I personally bought the book in the beginning of 2022 but prioritized reading it during my pregnancy just because I know the power of breath during highly painful and intense situations. So I thought I would kind of read that as a base. If you’re looking for an area to focus on with your body outside of training, think about breath.

Mobility

In my mind this is a part of weight training or strength training, but it’s not for a lot of people. So thinking about mobility in all planes of movement. For me I am very restricted rotationally, and honestly with lateral flexion in my midsection.

If you have not yet ventured into mobility, I will link some Instagram accounts to follow that have some different takes to mobility.

Over the last month or so, Instagram has created a lot of updates. And creators and consumers alike are feeling the effects of the constant updates by Instagram. That is what brings up today’s episode. Because it got me thinking about myself, and those of us who have been on the app for 5+ years.

Today’s episode is not a feel good one. But I do hope that you can be real with yourself and objectively question whether any of these apply to you. Because in reality, you have the potential, rather the opposite of these have the potential to let you enjoy your time on the app, and to grow on the app.

Which is technically why you are there from a business standpoint. Yes we want an interactive audience, and we need to generate income from the audience we have on Instagram, but growth will always be needed to some extent.

So let’s get into six reasons why you may not be successful on Instagram or feel like you are being successful on Instagram.

I am viewing success in this episode as being able to generate new followers even if people unfollowing. So when you look at your insights, and you go to audience. You’ll see followers and followers and net new followers. I am far less concerned with your net new followers as I am with just the fact that you’re getting 70 to 100 new people in per month or more. That’s a big deal. That’s 100 people you didn’t have last month, who are learning about your brand, who don’t know who you are, and who might be a good client for you. So we need to focus on those people. Success is having an audience who DM‘s you from your stories, asks you questions, comments on your posts, tags you in their stories. This is in my eyes what success on Instagram is from a social standpoint. And then yes of course, generating actual clients from the app.

You don’t like it

In FitsPRO Foundations we talk about what social platforms you should be on, and one of the criteria is that you have to actually enjoy the app itself, and creating content for that app. You'll end up resentful even getting on the app, let alone having to create content for an app that you have distaste for.

It’s just like health and fitness, or anything that you’re attempting to do, and adhere to. If you don’t enjoy it, it gets exponentially harder to stick with the process.

Posting every day on Instagram, being in your stories, answering DM‘s, doing market research to create new content, being in this continual cycle is going to require you to do all of those things when you do not feel like it. So the more that you actually enjoy it, the easier it’s going to be.

Even with the annoyances of the algorithm, and the changes that are made to Instagram so frequently these days, I try to make a point that it is still my favorite social media app. When I take a week off of Instagram, which I recently did, I genuinely miss interacting with my audience, and also taking a contact from a consumer standpoint. I follow people that entertain me, and that I get value from, and that I may not have access to outside of the app. So you don’t have to absolutely love Instagram, but how do you think it will be who’ve you to enjoy it, or curate your own experience as a consumer on the app in order to enjoy it more And learned about it from an organic standpoint.

I do want to be clear, because I’ve said before, that it wouldn’t be on Instagram if I didn’t have a business. And I do think that’s mostly true. But it still stands that of the social media platforms available, it is my favorite app.

You’re not using it organically

Today’s episode is going to be highly beneficial for entrepreneurs, because that is likely the lens that I will see this through, but it applies to literally any area of your life that you want to see more productivity and in the back half of the year. And I want to be clear that productivity is not doing more in general. It is doing more of whatever it is that you want to do. It’s being aligned with that decision and that goal. And making sure that your decisions or getting you more of whatever it is that you are working on. I was just talking to my assistant the other day and she was talking about how one of her goals this year was to actually be "less productive", and to prioritize more fun. So if she was listening to this podcast episode she is looking at how can she be more productive in having more fun. How can she prioritize having more fun, creating more space, using her time more wisely for what it is that she wants to do.

That’s all to say that I'll use the word productive because I think that moving in the direction you want to go is productive. Versus getting a bunch of things done. You can be very very busy and not productive. Your plate can be very very full, and not productive. That is how we are setting up today’s episode.

We’re going to talk about three different approaches and tactics that you can use to get more done of what you want to get done. You can use all of these, you can use one of them. Or implement whatever makes sense on top of whatever it is that you’re already doing.

No, I am not an expert in behavior change. I am simply sharing things that I have learned from other people, I’ve worked for me. I don’t always get it right, I still do things with my time that I would rather not do with my time, and there’s always room to improve. But that’s my point. Do you have room to improve. You have room to do more of what you want to do and I’m hoping that I can help you in someway to do that.

Daily habits and first step plans

First off if you have not read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, I highly suggest that you do so. When I read that book James put a lot of names to things that I was already doing, or that I had tried in the past. He has this really nice applicable structure to the way that he writes about habits and being more productive in the way that I mentioned earlier.

That’s where I learned, or rather give a name to, habit stacking. Or combining your habits. So for instance, in the summer of 2020, during the pandemic, I started doing LISS cardio AND writing captions, blogs, or drafting podcasts during that time every day. It made me feel way more productive in my work, and it got me more movement in my day. I wasn’t concerned about being present for the cardio, or pushing myself. It was simply to combine two tasks that felt annoying, or daunting, or timely to me. Writing sitting down with no stimulation is fine, but it literally just takes time, and so I like to be doing something else if I can be.

I’ve implemented that recently in my second trimester of pregnancy. So I need to draft and create like 30+ podcasts her maternity leave. And that means I need to get ahead now. So I have started doing 20 to 30 minutes audio first thing in the morning, and drafting up podcasts. And that’s just like prepping the show notes topics on my talk about main points things of that sort.

This is not a main point, but as like a subsection of habit stacking, I also suggest doing something that you want to do first thing in the morning if that’s possible. Get in the habit of rolling out of bed and doing the thing. This is the best applied to someone who wants to meditate or have a breathing practice or do some mobility, or shoot, even drink more water.

Today we are only going to talk about three different ways to spice up your hypertrophy set and reps schemes.

All three of them are going to add time under tension in their own respect.

These applications will be added to whatever it is that you are already doing with your training. So I am going to be very specific into how you can use these three methods, whether it be worth one of your lives in your training program, or all of them.

To start off, a standard set and rep scheme includes sets (which is how many rounds you do) and reps (which is how many repetitions you perform within each set). And then we also have tempo. And load. You also have rest periods but we won’t be discussing those today.

That could look like seven sets of three, or five sets of four, or three sets of 15. Your rep scheme could also be wave loading, or some thing a bit more complicated. It could be four by four and increasing weight by 3% each set. It could be a pyramid scheme, where you either increase reps and decrease load on the way up and then do the reverse on the way down. Or like I said wave loading, which could be 642642, using appropriate weights at each of those. Which we won’t get into the specifics of right now.

Just know that those sets and reps will be assigned for every single exercise that you do with an work out. Now let’s get into what you can do or tack on in addition to your normal sets and reps.

Number one and number two go hand-in-hand, in adding specific time under tension in the bottom half of a movement. Or where the extent of the eccentric contraction is happening more often than not.

3 ways to spice up hypertrophy set & rep schemes:

Pauses

You can technically put a pause at any portion of a movement. They are commonly seen at say the bottom of a squat, or at mid shin during a dead lift, or at the top or middle of a pull up.

Adding a pause can be for a single second, or 10 seconds. Or anywhere in between and or beyond that. Point being, to add that time under tension during a specific area of the muscle contraction. And that will be determined by yourself or your coach.

How you might implement this could look different depending on the lift. I’ll use hip thrusts as an example. The pause here will happen at the top of the thrust, with full glute max contraction. You could do this at the top of each rep for say two seconds, or you could add a big contraction on the last rep of each set for 10 seconds. That isometric contraction briefly increases the intensity of the lift, and certainly the demand on the muscle fibers at that point of the movement.

For something like a bicep curl, you could add a pause halfway down. I would curl all the way up, lower halfway down pause for a second or two lower all the way down and then straight back into the next rep. This would be adding extra tension in the mid range of the lift. You could also pause near a sticking point of a lift if you wanted to work on strengthening the muscles within the degrees where are the sticking point happens.

Again, the basics of a pause is that it’s an isometric contraction of the muscle with in either the E centric or the con centric contraction of muscle.. It’s a fun, simple way to spice up your training if you feel you need it. Or if you were looking for a way to spice up PROgramming for your clients, without altering other factors like exercise selection.

Pulses 

I first experienced using pulses in a bodybuilding phase when I was probably 20 years old or so. And I’ve never been so sore in my entire life up to that...

In light of watching some of the CrossFit qualifiers recently, and purchasing a new program myself, I thought it would be a good time to discuss how to choose the season of fitness that you are in. And also to acknowledge that when you’re doing this for the long-haul, it’s OK if most of your seasons consist of maintenance or working on small things. We don’t always have to be chasing big audacious goals. And also there’s nothing wrong with chasing big goals.

I figure it’s easiest to break this up in specific goals or types of seasons that you could be in within your training. And again, I want to make clear that this episode and my perspective is for someone who is weight training for the long-haul. And probably prefers to feel like they are training versus just working out. Because those are two very different things.

Just working out is exercising for the sake of exercising. So enter the person who is going to crossfit.com and picking a workout off of the website to do. We’re going to bodybuilding.com and downloading a template, we’re going on Instagram and doing a random work out that they saw. I personally have had seasons where that is how I worked out. And if you’re moving just to move your body, I really don’t see a whole lot wrong with that. But there are far more benefits to be gained by following a structured program, no matter what the goal is. And that is what we are discussing today.

Some seasons that we can look at could really be anything, but these are some common ones within the weight training world.

Strength, capacity, mobility or rehab, really hyper focusing on a weak link, improving conditioning, training certain skills, or trying a new type of training all together.

Nothing is to say that these things can’t be worked on at the same time. But everything can’t be a priority at the same time. While we work on some things, other things are going to take a backseat and/or be maintained.

So don’t think that all of these seasons work as an on/off switch. You can absolutely be working max strength in your main lifts and still working to improve our capacity in your accessory work.

And now I ask you what season do you either want to be in with your training, or what season are you currently in if you have an actually defined it?

For myself, I am 15 1/2 weeks pregnant during the recording of this episode, and I would consider the season that I am in with my training as a pre-hab stage. It’s a preparation phase. I know I am not special, meaning that women all over the world give birth to babies under all sorts of circumstances. Every human on earth came to be through a woman. So my body is not special in that sense. But, I would like to feel informed, and educated through the process of preparing my body to give birth. And to also maintain as much of my muscle mass as I can.

This would be similar to a rehab stage. Where it’s going to be very vital for you to not compare what your current body can do with what your past body could do. It’s going to be very important to focus on what you can do, and having a plan around that, so that there is indeed a process to trust. That is why I personally purchased a program from mamastefit.

From weeks 12 to 15 I did three workouts per week on my own, incorporating some more core, breathing, and hip work. But I just know that I would prefer to follow a tried and proven program that someone else has written. It’s the same exact reason that anybody else purchases a program.

What’s most important when choosing a season or a goal for your training, is to be realistic with what’s happening outside of the gym. It’s no wonder that at my strongest,

For all my online health and fitness professionals who feel like they have to be everywhere, where is the best place for YOU?

The answer to today’s question is not going to be something that is definite. That’s for a couple of reasons. For one, social media platforms are always changing, disappearing, and new ones are being planted. And also, your creation process and preferences may change overtime, requiring you to experiment or migrate onto other platforms.

So while I may talk about specific platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and others, know that what we talk about today applies to all social media platforms that come up in the future.

First things first, when you are starting out in business, I am a very aggressive believer in the fact that you need to be on one single platform, go all in, and then you can expand. But I do wish personally, that I would have considered a long-term approach when I chose Instagram to be my single platform years ago.

So keep that in mind as we move forward and break down different aspects of types of social media platforms, and why you may choose one over the other.

We first need to distinguish a search-based platform and a social platform. Because I will be lumping those together today, but they are not the same. And it’s very important that you understand the difference.

A search base platform is a platform where content lives evergreen and has a value for as long as the piece of content exists. This is because when you go to YouTube or Pinterest for instance, you can search how to change your oil in a 2010 Volvo S 60, in the most popular or widely used video could ranked number one even though it was posted seven years ago. Now that person‘s content is continuing to drive traffic without them having to create new content on a daily basis like most social platforms.

Pinterest works the same way. There are still algorithms on these search-based platforms. Even on Google. But your content at least has the potential for longevity and to live evergreen on search based platforms.

The downfall to a search-based platform is time. Generally speaking, it’s going to take a longer period of time to gain traction and traffic, and to monetize anything on a search-based platform. Now that’s not definite, and there are exceptions. But on a platform like TikTok or Instagram, or even Facebook for that matter, the potential to gain followers and an audience that can potentially become customers for you, is higher on these platforms. And can happen more quickly.

But that trade-off is, social-based platforms typically require high frequencies of contact creation and output. Or someone may post one to two YouTube videos per week, which are more time intensive, someone would need to post 5 to 14 pieces of content on a platform like Instagram, TickTock, or Facebook. I mentioned these because they are currently the most widely used social platforms in the world.

All of that is to say, if you can swing it, I want you to think long term and which two platforms make the most sense for you, the type of content you like to create, and where your audience is already searching for the type of information you provide. On one social platform, and one search based platform.

From a business standpoint, it behooves you to be on platforms, social, or search-based, that allow you to generate income. Not directly from the platform necessarily, but that make it easy for a consumer to click a link, and end up on your website able to purchase something from you, or apply to work with you.

Always think about these platforms from a functionality...

I’ve said before on many podcast episodes, that entrepreneurship is one of the most self refining journeys you can go on. Thus it’s full of opportunities to learn, and that means lots of lessons along the way. I don’t claim to know at all. Half the time I don’t even feel like I’m a real entrepreneur. But I figure if I’ve learned anything over the last 5 to 7 years, it might be of use to you. So it’s worth sharing.

Some of these are going to sound very cliché. But they are true nonetheless. Let’s go ahead and just dive right in.

5 Lessons for an Online Entrepreneurs

Fear of failure and success

I have been afraid of success and failure many times in my life throughout different seasons. It wasn’t until I became an entrepreneur that I was truly forced to face both of things.

I know you’ve heard people say that the faster you can accept failure as a part of the process, the more progress you will make. People say that because it’s true. Successful people say that because it’s true. There is always going to be something to be afraid of if you are growing. Comfort zones are often bordered by fear. Which makes sense, because fear and comfort normally don’t go together.

Fact is, your biggest fears are probably not that realistic, and not that big when you truly think about how you would face that fear, or come back from that situation. That’s one of my favorite lessons from the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

So I will ask you what you are ultimately afraid of, and to look at the opposite. What if it does work out? What if worst-case scenario doesn’t happen? Is it worth it then?

Again, there is always going to be something to be afraid of. And you won’t necessarily get less afraid of certain things, but you will learn to trust yourself and your abilities the more that you take what you consider to be scary steps.

So whatever that is for you right now in your state of entrepreneurship, I just really encourage you to push forward with the fear and see what happens. It can be something as small as talking face to camera in your Instagram stories, or starting a podcast, or reaching out to network with someone. Fear will continue to be a barrier if you let it, in any situation. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it does tend to be a matter of fact.

Blinders on

Beyond fear of failure and fear of success, entrepreneurship will also rear the ugly head of comparison. Especially, I believe, in the online space. It’s so easy to think that everyone else is running seamless businesses with full client rosters, and doing it with ease. But I promise you that is not the case.

And even if it was the truth, you comparing your journey to theirs is not going to serve you. I am 100% for looking to people that you aspire to be like. People who maybe you want to emulate the way that they run their business. Or people who align with your philosophy. I absolutely love all of that. And I didn’t figure out what I really wanted to do with my business for 2 1/2 years because I didn’t see that what I wanted to do was even an option. That’s in large part why I am very much so for people looking at and taking in information from people they look up to in one way shape or form.

But that is, of course, different than comparison. Comparison is going to happen. It’s silly to think that it’s not. One way that we can minimize it is to attempt to keep our blinders on. More often than not we tend to let our gaze veer right and left when we lack clarity and focus in what it is that we are doing within our own businesses. Or I certainly know that that is the truth for me.