Episode 005: Separating Your Identity from Your Business
SPEAKER: Annie Bauer
00:05
Welcome to the Smart Better Life where we talk about how business owners can get more done in less time and sell more in a way that benefits both you and your customers. All of this so that you can grow your business while also enjoying your life. I want more people to have better businesses. So please share this and enjoy.
00:27
Welcome, welcome back everyone to this week's episode, we're going to be talking about the importance of separating your identity from your work. This applies really to everyone. And it's a common trap that most of us fall into, regardless of whether or not we're working for someone else, or we're working for ourselves, or creating something like a book or a side hustle or a program or some sort of teaching we're doing on the evenings or weekends.
01:01
We often get our whole identity wrapped up in our work. And what happens when we do this is we get our identity wrapped up in our work's performance. If you listened to last week's episode about knowing your self worth, and just establishing your worth, the reason that I did that episode and this one together is because I'm seeing this so much right now, particularly in my clients, of not knowing their true identity and who they are as a person and then starting their company or their business or their brand, particularly personal brands, and being able to separate this personal identity from their business and their business's performance. I see this so much in so many entrepreneurs at different levels. So it doesn't matter whether you're making your first $5, $5,000, or $500,000, we really can fall into a trap of getting our self worth all wrapped up in our business. Or thinking that our business and our business's performance is our self worth.
01:02
We're going to break it down into several points. And then at the end, I'm going to give you five different ways that you can avoid or make sure that you're separating your self worth from your business's performance. And why you should be doing this. Why it's so important. It's important for your own mental health. But it's also important for your business's health and performance.
02:36
So let's dive in. First of all, a lot of people out there particularly if you're a solopreneur or a creator, you are creating what's called a personal brand. Meaning that your whole company is branded and formed around your name, maybe your story, your journey, the things that you've overcome, and then being able to transfer that knowledge to other people. So as personal brands, you are sharing your own personal story, you're sharing your own journey, you're sharing your knowledge, and you're sharing more of who you are in your life. So you're basically exposing yourself in your business to stories that you wouldn't normally be sharing if you are working for someone else. So let me give you an example. If you're going out right now, and you are going to develop a physical product like a new chip company, or a new sippy cup, and you're going to brand it and put cute little logos on the side, really the brand is the product. And oftentimes you would never even know the person behind the brand. Sometimes you do sometimes you don't. But look out there at all the different things that you consume. And there's not a person behind the brand. Like you go out to buy Lay's potato chips, or a particular brand of coffee, you're buying the product, you're not buying the person. And personal brands are very different. You're buying a journey with that particular person, and you identify with their story or their journey. And then you're buying a product or service from them.
04:07
So on the entrepreneur side, as the owner, we are using that as part of our brand IP, our intellectual property. But we very often can fall into the trap of thinking that our IP and our personal story and our personal brand is actually where our self worth should come from. And so we take business and failure and success personally. And it looks like "I suck" versus "that didn't work". Everything in our business is really about solving problems and solving other people's problems. And then when it doesn't work, we think we suck personally. And what happens often that I see is that our first inclination is to give up see it as a personal rejection. We think that it's not just that our product or service or the way that we sold it, the way we packaged it, that way we talked about it, needed some work. We look at it as a personal rejection of "I suck, no one wants to work with me, there are better people out there, people want to work with that person versus me".
05:13
It'll show up like this, it'll show-the symptoms will show up like this: you will see someone have a failed webinar and no one shows up or only one or two people show up. And the entrepreneur or business owners response is ending up on the couch watching Netflix checking out of their business for several days, or maybe even several weeks, coming back and saying, "Well, this doesn't work, I give up, I shouldn't be doing this, no one wants to buy from me, I should just give up the whole entrepreneurial journey and not try to sell or do my thing". Or the third thing that you'll see too is that they'll want to switch to something else. "Well, I should sell this instead". Or "I should try this instead". Because they're thinking that it's all about them and their personal worth.
05:58
So we're going to talk about what you could be doing instead. But this is the way that we recognize it. And then the third thing is CEO versus CE-Me energy. what I call CE-Me energy. And often as solopreneurs we don't see ourselves as CEOs. We haven't been groomed to be CEO's. We are just out there sharing our products and our services or teaching some particular system or something that worked for us. And we're often working alone. So we don't see ourselves as running a business, a company, a corporation, an LLC. And this is what I call being in CE-Me energy versus CEO energy. That is where our personal worth is wrapped up in our business. And we're equating our personal performance with our business's performance. So we don't feel like we are succeeding or failing as a human being as an individual unless our business is actually performing. And we're hanging our entire self worth on the day-to-day or the week-to-week in our business of what's working and what's not.
07:01
The problem with that is that we're hanging our entire self image on every project, every decision, every web webinar. Then it's this self-fulfilling or self-defeating cycle of for everything that doesn't work, we think it has to do with us and our self worth and whether or not people are liking us. That makes us less inclined to produce more, when we come at it with that kind of thought of "this is all about me".
07:32
On the flip side, when something goes well, and something succeeds, we also think it's about us. So then our self esteem is boosted. We're riding high, we think that it's because our self worth is heightened. And what I would propose for you to do is go into CEO energy versus CE-Me energy. And the CEO looks at the business as the business, and it has nothing to do with who they are as a person personally. And so from that place, what we're looking at it from is the lens of "having a business is nothing more than solving someone's problem". All you're doing when you have a business is solving a problem out there in the world. You see a problem, you bring them a solution. And when I say problem, it could be anything from weight loss to how to walk your dog better to a chip that tastes better. Whatever it is that you're selling out there, you're helping someone get some sort of transformation or improve their life.
08:37
And the way to approach this with CEO energy versus CE-Me energy is to look at everything as a problem. And then have a hypothesis or theory about how to solve that problem. Take some actions in accordance with that hypothesis or theory, what you think might work to solve the problem, and then reevaluate and see what worked and what didn't. And you do this with everything in your business, not just the main core problem that you're solving for your client or customer, but also with everything like how to get leads, how to write website copy, how to write Facebook ads, how to write better posts, how to write your emails, how to develop a great webinar and show up on that webinar. Everything in your business, every action, everything that needs to be done in order to bring clients or customers in, is a problem. And with every single thing that you're solving for in your business, you say, "Okay, what's the problem here?" I need more clients or I need to meet more people. So you have a hypothesis about how would I go about actually solving that problem? Well, I could meet people at this particular meetup. I can pull up this contact list, I have 300 people who are following me on Facebook. I have 6000 people over here on this platform, or from my high school graduating class or college class. Whatever it is . . . and I could contact those people. So it's always looking at "what is the problem that I'm trying to solve for in my business? What is my hypothesis or theory? What's the first thing that I think that I might want to try that would solve that problem? And the what are the actions or activities I would need to take to test this hypothesis and see if it works? That's all that it is.
10:19
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10:43
And this is CEO energy versus CE-Me energy of "I'm gonna throw something out there, and if it doesn't work, then I suck. And I'm terrible. And I'm on the couch. And I want to give up. And if I throw something out there, and it does work, and then that means that I'm wonderful, I'm riding high". And you avoid these highs and lows-- the valleys, the peaks and the valleys--because you're not on this emotional roller coaster. And you're not tying all of your self worth and your emotional energy to your business. You're looking at your business like an analytical business person. And this is a much more mature way of going into your business and seeing your business as not your identity. But you're developing your business's own identity. They're completely separate.
11:29
This is also taking into account that you might use your own personal story, your origin story, some stories that you've had or experienced, that you're going to bring in to illustrate a point to your clients or customers. You might be bringing in your own knowledge or your own journey, you might be showing more of who you are in videos or pictures or photographs on social media. And you might be sharing more of your backstory in your life so that people can develop that Know, Like, and Trust in marketing so that they know who you are . . . the person behind the brand. But you're using these as elements to support your brand and to sell your product or service. It is not your identity. You're not commingling your identity with your brand's identity.
12:19
And one of the traps that can happen with doing this is that you develop this very needy relationship with your clients and your prospects. And it can feel very graspy. It can also feel like, from your prospects point of view, like you need them to like you, you need them to approve of you. You need them to show up and compliment you in the comments on social media and love on you in order for you to keep your brand going and moving forward.
12:53
Another way that this shows up is in selling. Especially because when we go out there to quote unquote sell or market our brand or our product, we often think of selling as "we don't want to get no". And why is it that so many of us are so afraid to sell? And why is it that so many of us think that selling is icky? Or that selling is bad? And we are afraid to hear the word "No". We're afraid to feel rejection. I think it's this, I think we have a whole lot of warped perceptions around what selling really is. And that would be a subject for another podcast episode. But it's also because we don't want to hear the word "No". Because we're very conditioned to think that "No" is a personal rejection. So it's a thought error in the way that we're looking at the interaction of sales. Because we're coming from the thought of "if someone says no, that means that they're saying no to me". Or if we have our identity wrapped up in our product or service, if they're saying no to our product or service, then it's a reflection on me. And it's coming from this thought that it's all about me. It's about my product or service.
12:58
What we don't understand about sales and marketing is that when someone says no, it doesn't usually mean those things at all. When someone's saying no or hesitating to buy your thing that just means a whole lot more under the surface about what's going on with that prospect, and what's in their mind, and why they may not be seeing the value of what you have to offer, and why they're saying no. And sales and marketing really should be looked at as an invitation to get curious and to find out why and to help the person explore what their decision-making process is and how to get them to make a decision.
14:05
So I would say that's the biggest thing that I want you to take away is that when someone says no to you in your business, it is not personal rejection, and I would highly encourage you to go back and listen to episode 004 about your own self worth. Because if we have our own self worth really firmly planted, and we believe in our worth, and we can separate it completely from our business, it allows us to stay in a place of curiosity and problem solving, and being able to be there for our clients. And not all wrapped up in our own stuff, and our own self worth and our own thoughts of self worth, or lack thereof.
15:26
So I said at the beginning of the podcast episode, I would give you five ways to not get your identity and self worth wrapped up in your business's performance. The first thing is this number one, look at your business as products and services that solve problems and solutions. It is not you, even if you're infusing your story, your pictures, your identity. As far as being the personal brand, the business is not you, it is completely separate from you as an individual. And this will allow you to stay curious with your clients and stay in their energy and be a problem solver.
16:03
The second thing is to stay in that CEO business owner energy instead of CE-Me energy. How do you do that? People buy because they see the value in what you have to offer. And so you're going to ask yourself a lot better questions in CEO energy of, "How do I communicate the value? How am I communicating the value well? How can I hypothesize and strategize to solve this problem within my business? How can I analyze the numbers?" And most importantly, "How can I keep trying and not give up?" I see so many people who build something once: build a course, build a coaching program, build a webinar . . .and try it once and then quit. And I've literally seen people do this, and three or four years later, they've never gone back to perfect it, to see what they could do to improve it to even figure out why people didn't buy it in the first place. They just come away with the conclusion, "I suck, no one wants to buy from me, I wouldn't be worthy of doing this". And then they never try again. So the main thing is to stay in there, keep analyzing, and keep trying and keep asking yourself better questions. And you will continually get better until you have something that people DO want to buy. And none of that process--whether it takes you a month or several years--will be a reflection of you as a human being.
17:28
The third thing I would suggest is see everything is an experiment. Business is really just a game or an experiment. And it's all based on what I teach my clients. I call it PHA. It's everything in business is a problem, a hypothesis about how to solve that problem, and then some actions that go with that hypothesis. And then you evaluate and you figure out whether or not you got the results. If you got better leads if you got some leads, if your webinar worked, if people showed up. And then you just look at the problem again and say, "Okay, this worked, this didn't work. What's another hypothesis, we could run around this problem to see if this would be the solution? That's all that it is.
18:11
The fourth thing is, don't ask your business to be the source of your self worth. That is putting way too much pressure on your business. And ultimately, it can be one of the primary reasons your business fails. Because you're so wrapped up in your business needing to validate your self worth that when it doesn't, you will have a much higher likelihood of quitting, and folding, and not finding the solutions, and being resourceful to be able to keep your business going and be profitable.
18:43
The fifth and final thing is you want to really work as you're building your business also to strengthen your personal worthiness. Well, what does this look like? How would you do this? One of the things that you could do is work with a professional. So you could work with someone like me as a coach who helps to bolster your self worth and helps you keep your self worth separated from your business. I think that this is extremely important. Most of the top entrepreneurs I know all have coaches and a lot of times they will have multiple coaches. Not just a business coach. But they will have a life coach and maybe even a therapist on their team because they do see and understand the value of keeping their self worth and their feelings about themselves and their personal life strong and having a lot of clarity around that, so that they're not getting their self worth mixed up in their business. So the other thing you could do to strengthen your personal self worth is surround yourself with friends and loved ones who don't base their relationship with you on your business or your financial performance. I would also recommend going back and listening to episode number four about why you're just worthy because you're here. And then the last thing underneath strengthen your personal worthiness is you can find interests, hobbies and relationships outside of work. I think this is so important. Find something that doesn't have anything to do with the thing that you sell. So if you are a coach or you have a digital course teaching some particular thing, go find some hobbies and things that help you develop your self worth outside of this. Such as, maybe you learn how to play a musical instrument, or you learn a foreign language, or you learn to garden. But find something that is a supplement to the type of work that you do that gives you joy, that you can identify as you as an individual that has nothing to do with your work.
18:43
I hope this episode has been helpful. Tying together episode four and five, I would highly recommend that you go back and listen to episode four because knowing your self worth is so important as an entrepreneur, and you will learn how to establish your self worth, and why you're worthy already, and why that's so important . . . particularly in the entrepreneurial journey . . . to getting the success that you want. Have a great week and I will see you again very soon.
