Is Your Ego Stopping You From Building Your Business?

Welcome to today's 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.

Have you ever had an overwhelming urge to close your business down? Being a business owner can mean putting yourself in situations that might feel uncomfortable. You’re reaching out to people, taking on some public speaking gigs, and starting sales conversations. 

A lot of these things can feel really ‘unsafe’ activities because they involve putting yourself out there. Perhaps you are approaching a point where you need to step up to the next level in your business. You can feel that ‘fight or flight’ adrenaline rush kicking in. You might even be sabotaging your own efforts.

And there’s a good reason for this: your ego. Now you might read the word ‘ego’ and think, oh no, I’ve heard bad things about that. But ego is much misunderstood. 

Your ego is there to keep you safe. It’s the part of your brain focused on survival skills and it is risk averse. It wants you to get through life unscathed. It doesn’t want you to draw attention to yourself. Being part of the crowd is safe. It doesn’t want you to challenge yourself in case there’s a negative consequence. 

One of the ways this can present itself is shame. The more I read up on shame, the more I just think I want to read books about this my entire life. We can think of shame as ‘I felt bad about that’. But it can have serious consequences. Shame can mean, ‘I felt a bit bad and I slightly derailed my business and actually quite significant things in my life - and I’m not sure why’.

There's a unique pressure when you are growing your business, particularly when you start to grow beyond the pay bracket that you've always put yourself in, and that your peers are in. You can be having quite normal conversations with people who are not in the entrepreneurial world, and talking about amounts of money that make them say, ‘are you kidding me?’ And it blows their mind. At first it blows your mind too, and then it just becomes normal. But in that process, you can feel pressure and shame. It can be very isolating. 

You are doing things which people around you are not necessarily doing. That is hard. You need to build a relationship with your ego and understand why you react to certain situations. 

This isn’t about forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to. I recently wrote about pushing ourselves to succeed and managing our physical and emotional energy. Have a read of those articles if you haven’t already. 

It might be that you have some work to do and that might not be with a coach, it could be with a therapist. Your ego might have had a response to reading that but it’s not a scary thing to do. It’s about getting exactly what you need to move forward.

Business growth and personal growth are really closely linked. Sometimes we need to tackle underlying issues which are affecting us before we can grow the business.

Let me know in the comments, do you find certain things in your business make you want to run for the hills?

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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.?