Women Consultants, You Need To Start Where You Are

Welcome to the latest edition of the Seven Figure Consultant LinkedIn Newsletter for Women in Consulting. Don't forget that you can get daily updates from Jessica in your LinkedIn news feed by accessing her LinkedIn profile and hitting Follow. She will be sharing insights and discussions through the week that she would love to hear your views on.

When you set your sights on a goal, what do you try to do first? Do you go straight for the biggest challenge or do you work your way up to it?

So often we pick the most difficult thing to tackle when there are plenty of smaller steps we could take that will still get us to our goal but enable us to warm up to it. You wouldn’t expect to run 5k on your first day of doing a couch-to-5k, and yet as high achieving women, we so often expect ourselves to be mastering new systems and challenges in our business immediately.

It’s easy to get hung up on perfectionism. We don’t want to get it wrong. We don’t give ourselves permission to give something a go and see what works for us. We stay in our zone of genius, where we know we are capable. And this can mean we put off trying new things or we don’t take risks, even though they would move us forward.

You can want to achieve something in your life or your business but still fight it every step of the way. That’s when I love to do journaling, those times when I feel an imbalance between the thing I want and the process that I want to go through in order to get it. I feel that resistance and make myself aware of my own self-sabotage. I can see the signs of my own behaviour in my writing as I give myself space to think things through, see what is holding me back, and question myself about it.

Journaling is also a safe way to move yourself past perfectionism. There’s no-one checking to see if you’ve done it ‘right’. There is no ‘right’ way to journal. All you need to do is get a pen and paper and start writing about what is actually impacting your life right now. What are you struggling to do? What are you putting off doing? Or what are you worried you are not doing well? How do you feel about your life at the moment? Start where you are.

Allow yourself to experiment with journaling and see where it leads you. Ask yourself questions and think things through. Develop that practice of having a place where you can say that you don’t know, or that you are worried, and encourage yourself. It will make a huge difference to your mindset.

And that practice of starting small, starting where you are, will enable you to work towards your larger goals in so many ways. You will learn to let go of perfectionism. You will be able to think through what you need to do to achieve the next step in your business. You can write down your lofty goals and then set about making them happen. There can be such a gulf between what we think in our heads and actually what we live out publicly and that gap can be bridged through the process of journaling.

My guest this week on the Seven Figure Consultant podcast is accredited coach and organisational consultant, Moyra Mackie. Moyra has developed the Journal Safari and shared lots of insights into how to create a journaling practice and the benefits it can bring.

We talk about:

●     How journaling is like having a life coach

●     Giving yourself permission to make space for yourself

●     Figuring out your personal journaling practice

●     Dealing with our emotions

●     Starting from where you are

●     Getting stuck and learning from it

●     Talking down your inner critic

●     Integrating the pieces of yourself

?? Head here to listen to this week's episode in full - 048 Developing A Journaling Practice

Let me know in the comments, what’s a small action you will take this week to help you towards your goals?

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To find out more about the work I do, visit jessicafearnley.com or message me here on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear more about private coaching and how I can help you transition from booked up and burned out to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure consulting business.