You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 124.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi, my strong friends. Hey, this is gonna be a different type of podcast episode this week. I have some pretty amazing clients. And over the last month, they've all started to believe in themselves. Some pretty amazing things have happened. And so I wanted to take this episode to celebrate them.

I'm gonna focus on three of my clients, and I'm gonna share some of the stuff. And when they listen to this, they'll know, they'll recognize that I'm talking about them. I'm not gonna give away too much because I want to respect their privacy. But when you start to believe in yourself, it deserves to be celebrated. And I want to recognize these people.

I want to share some of these breakthroughs because I think as you are trying to figure out your own personal self-belief that hearing some of these shifts and what they went through to get to these ships may help you so you can figure out how you can help yourself to get these shifts. Because self-belief, if you don't have it, it's gonna be so hard for you to create your business and to get it actually running and working the way that you want to.

And the people that you serve, they need you; they've been waiting for you. We need to get you believing in you.

Taking the Big Challenge For Less Money

The first topic of self-confidence that I want to talk about is the audience that you work with. Now, you may be an entrepreneur that wants to work with a single individual, or you might want to be someone that goes and works with big corporations.

Corporations tend to have a little bit more funds where they can invest in either helping their own business or helping themselves as, like leadership development or helping their employees. It can be kind of intimidating to go and approach these large corporations because we have this idea of what it's like to work with a corporation.

Many of us have already had that life. We did work in corporations, and then we decided to go and start our own business. Now it's like, okay, we're just one individual. Or we have a really small team, and we're gonna go and approach the corporations that it might not feel totally comfortable. One of my clients, he started off a membership of working with individuals and he does a great job in this membership and we're working on developing the rest of the product, making sure it's all nice and neat and tidy, and then working on the scaling plans for it.

But he also decided to do a done-for-you service for a corporation. Now, this is how he was able to go and dip his toe into the corporation world because it can seem kind of intimidating. These are a lot bigger contracts than working with individuals.

What he did is he knew that he had the skill set to do the thing that the company needed, but they also had some other bidders for this project. He looked at what they were charging, and he decided that since he was coming in as his own business, doing this really for the first time, from the outside perspective, as opposed to being within a corporation and creating it for them, there's a lot of variables that you don't know, right?

When you're working with a new corporation, you don't know all of their systems, all of their people, all of their processes, but you have a process on how you've done this before.

So it's like, okay, I think I can do this, but can you really feel confident in charging the same amount as the competitors who this is the thing they've been doing over and over and over again.

So he got really brave, really bold and he offered to do it, but he gave it for a lesser amount than what the competition was doing. And this was great because the corporation got the benefit of having a lower price. He got the benefit of having a corporation to experiment with.

Now, they may not have realized that it was kind of an experiment, but that's really what it was. So as he was doing all of this, we were still mapping out what his process was. We were doing some little check-ins, but he wasn't totally sure if he could hit the deadline that they needed.

Because again, it's a brand new thing. He'd never done it before.

And there's so much pressure when it's a big ticket project, but I'm so proud of him. He got this thing done, and he got it done on time, and his clients were completely happy. And now, since we spent the time mapping out what that process was, now we can go back, we're doing a little bit of a lessons learned on how he would tweak it and do a few things here or there so that he's ready to go and offer this to the next corporation.

And as he does this more and more, his confidence level is gonna raise. His self-belief is already there, like the fact that he was able to do this and the big ticket amount and get it done on time, like the doing of the thing and providing evidence to yourself that you can do it. And that it's possible.

Oh my gosh, self-confidence, self-belief, so much more than it was at the beginning of the year.

I couldn't be happier for him.

So is there a way that you could do this?

If you're considering offering a product or service to a corporation that might be paying a larger ticket price for your product and service, but you've never done it before. Would you be willing to do it as an experiment for a lower cost, just so that you have that opportunity, knowing that you're gonna work out your products and service as you go along, you're gonna map it all out, and you're gonna figure it out. And that you'll get the confidence by doing it. And then you'll be able to do it over and over and start charging the same prices your competitors, or maybe even more.

Second Chance Skillset Pivot

Another self-belief challenge that people can have, especially if they've tried the entrepreneur thing before is when their self-belief has been eroded because their previous attempt didn't quite work out.

So I'm celebrating one of my clients that has had phenomenal success this year. She had a previous business that she had started in the wellness industry, but it was using a new skillset. And when you have a new skillset, and you're going into a new industry, your confidence is gonna probably be kind of low and a little shaky in the beginning because you haven't done it.

Well as an entrepreneur, when you're trying to sell your products and services and you're trying to market it, If you don't have the confidence in what you do, it makes it that much harder to market it and to sell it. So it definitely possible that a business wouldn't take off just because you were kind of new in that new skill set that you were using.

She had a pivot at the beginning of the year of how could she still help the wellness industry, but maybe she could do it using a different skillset.

She happened to have an excellent track record at a particular skill set for 15 years in corporate. She was the VP of one particular organizational sector within corporate, and she was killing it like she is so good at this stuff. So she decided to just pivot a little bit and start a whole different type of business. And, oh my gosh, the thing just took off.

She didn't even have to worry about a website or marketing or anything because people really wanted this skillset. And it just took off like wildfire. In fact, she was able to go and hire on employees to help her to keep this thing going because she had the skillset and she had the confidence to be able to put together high =-quality material for presenting it.

So she's marketing it, not in the social realm, but offline, directly to them. And when they saw it, like the quality is amazing. And so her business just took off. And so a huge shift in her own self-belief, she now knows she's going to be a successful entrepreneur. She just shifted what her skillset was that she was going to be offering.

She still gets to work in the industry that she wanted to work in. She's just applying a different skillset doesn't mean that she's let go of the skillset that she wanted to develop. She's still gonna be doing some of that too, but she decided to go first with the thing she was super confident in.

Incidentally, that was something that I also did. I started off an entrepreneur, just working on the mental health part of it. And although I had the skillset built up on that, my skillset at everything business process and business models and flows and metrics and all that stuff was so strong after 25 years in the industry that it felt a lot better to help out the mental health industry by offering my skillset of that plus mental health.

We get to do that little fusion. But when you can feel that confidence in the thing that you're really, really good at, maybe you can still offer that as your contribution to the people that you want to work with. It's a pretty great shift to have.

And then your self-belief woosh through the ceiling. Again, you're feeling great. You're feeling confident. And then the entrepreneur uncertainty stuff isn't quite so scary anymore because you know that you're really good at what you do.

Scope of What You're Delivering

The next self-belief challenge is in thinking about what you're delivering. The scope of what you're delivering. So this one actually is a shared breakthrough.

My client and I both had this breakthrough in the last month. And we were talking about it in the last couple of weeks about how we just want to give everything we've got to try to help our client. What that can lead to though, is overwhelm and starting to feel like it's not possible.

Your self-confidence starts to go down a little bit, your self-belief, you might start your inner critic starting to judge you that, how are you ever gonna be able to help people? Because there's just so much to help them with. So both of us knew that we needed a shift.

When you're really good at so many things, why would you feel bad about yourself? The shift came in thinking about a buffet analogy. You know, when you go to a buffet, people love buffets, right? It's like, even if it's a high price on a buffet, if all of the food there is so good, you're thinking, oh my gosh, this is such great value. And as a buffet guest, you go there with your plate and you're seeing all of this wonderful, amazing things. And you're loading up your plate.

You're so excited that you get all the stuff and then you get to your table, and you start eating it. And it's like, oh yeah, this is so good. This is so good. But your eyes are always bigger than your stomach. And you have more on your plate than what you could possibly consume in that sitting as the buffet guest; you might leave with your stomach kind of hurting, like, oh my gosh, I ate too much. This was more than what I needed right now.

Or you might start to feel almost a little bit of FOMO. Like the fear of missing out, like here was all of this really great stuff, but my stomach could only consume this much. And I want the rest of it, but it's sitting there on the table and your time is up. It's time for you to move on the rest of your night. Your stomach can't handle it anyway. It's like, but wait; there's all of this.

As service providers, we can consider that, that maybe we are offering too much just because we're really, really good at everything doesn't mean that that's in the client's best interest. That it might be okay to just like pull back on some of it because it's just not time yet.

We can be kind to them. We may even consider instead of doing a buffet format, that it's the seated restaurant type, right? When you go to a seated restaurant, you feel really great, pretty fancy. Somebody is there serving you. And you may find a lot of things on the menu that you absolutely love, but you know that you can only have one dinner that night.

So you order just that one dinner, it comes out and it's the best quality. And it's so good. And you can focus on the quality of it. You can appreciate that one thing. And when you leave, you're satisfied because you've had a really great meal. You were probably able to finish almost the whole thing, if not all of it. And you can't wait to come back for the next thing.

So as business owners, we can consider our value ladder (listen to episode #107, Value Ladders). Do we want to offer it as a buffet style where people may not be able to consume everything that we're offering all in that sitting that they're there for? Or would we want to break it up into smaller dishes and be able to offer that?

One of the other things that we thought about with that was that Pareto Rule, the 80/20 rule. 20% of the things at the buffet give you 80% of the value. In our businesses, it could be that 20% of the work that we do gives our customers 80% of the value in their life or 80% of the benefit or breakthrough that they were looking for. Yet, we're still giving a hundred percent of the stuff, but really 20% of the things that we were giving is what gave them the 80%.

What if we allowed ourselves to drop off the extra and only offer that 20% because we know they're gonna get 80% of the value on it. 80% of their breakthrough, their progress, their benefit, whatever it was that they were looking for, it's concentrated value.

They don't have to spend all of their extra time on all of the extra stuff. They can come in, get that 80% in a shorter amount of time. And for us as business owners, we can drop all of that extra work that we were doing and focus just on that 20% and make sure that it's the best, highest quality 20%.

We can get it to them the fastest, best way for them so that they can come in, get in, get out, get their benefit and they can move on to the next thing. It's a win-win for everybody.

I think you guys all know that I love Disney movies and I always like to take little snippets out of it because I can learn so much from Disney movies.

I don't know if you ever watched the Disney movie, the Incredibles, it's all about the superheroes.

Well, there's this one kid who wanted to be a superhero so bad. And so he kept trying things, and none of it would work. And so one of the lines that he says at the end because he's captured all the superheroes and he's trying to eliminate them, and he's developed all of this really cool technology so that he could be a superhero, too. And he delivers this one line "When we're all super, nobody's super," meaning that all of those superheroes that he saw like higher on a pedestal, that they would just be ordinary.

And it's not that the bar was lowered so that the superheroes were just ordinary. It's just that everybody's bar was raised higher, so everybody is that exceptional quality, that superpower. And then it's just viewed as ordinary.

If you're one of those service providers that has the full buffet of things and you happen to have everything at that exceptional quality, you've raised the bar for every single thing that you have at the buffet. Is it possible that people come in and they can't recognize which things are the spectacular, highest quality things because everything's so good that now it's ordinary?

When you've broken your things out into smaller plates, people can focus on it. And they now have that to compare to the rest of the world, not the rest of your products and services.

They might appreciate the quality a lot more because your bar, we already know, is exceptionally high. So you can allow it to be all on its own on one plate so that people can really appreciate that.

What this does for your self-belief is it allows you to relax a little bit. You don't have to do everything thinking that you're not enough. Because the thing was is that you were extraordinary the whole time.

When The Entrepreneur Becomes The Client

The final one that I want to share, I am so freaking proud of her, and she better be listening to this.

I want her to hear this. There are those of us that have spent years and years perfecting our craft, but we still worry like, oh wait, maybe I still need to perfect it a little bit more before I deliver it to people. And we can spend all sorts of time on mindset shifts. We can spend so much time perfecting the perfect product or service just to make sure that it has that absolute quality.

And yet, since we haven't been actually giving it to anyone, there's always that little bit of doubt in our head. What if once I do this with someone, they're gonna not get a benefit out of it. And we allow that fear to kind of take over a little bit. Now, I'm not saying that she had the fear, but I think that we've all felt this at some point.

So she ended up doing a great experiment, and you know, I love experiments, and I highly encourage all of my clients to do experiments. Some experiments are lower cost. Some experiments are higher cost. Well this particular experiment was kind of a high cost one.

And it was like, oh, I don't know if I really want to do this. But what it was is she went to another service provider's conference and she was able to see a variety of people delivering some of the same type of help that she would help other people with.

Now she was gonna go as a participant, which is great. What she got though was seeing how the competition did it and you know what she saw, they weren't delivering it at the same quality that she would've delivered it.

Have you ever encountered that? Have you ever seen somebody else doing your service, your modality, whatever it is that you do to help people. And you've noticed that their quality isn't anywhere close to what you do? This can be one of the best experiences ever.

Or maybe their quality was pretty close to what you do, but maybe their scope was significantly less than how you would do it. It becomes a very unexpected boost to your self-esteem and your self-confidence and your belief in yourself.

Because when you can see other people, other customers or guests or clients there experiencing the service and they're still getting benefit from it. You can see their breakthroughs happening right there. And it was from somebody else's quality or service that was less than yours. They're still getting a benefit. It's like, why would you question yours anymore? People are already getting the benefit.

This whole time you might have been uncomfortable thinking that people wouldn't get the benefit, but they did here was proof. And you already know that your own product or service does even better than this.

The problem is is that we spend so much time developing our own skillset that we're in rooms full of other experts, just like us. So we're comparing our skillset to them and thinking, oh wait, I need to get a little bit better. I need to get a little bit better. What we don't realize is that our customers have not been studying the stuff that we've been studying. They haven't been developing those skill sets.

In fact, they may not have even started their journey. They need someone there that can help them at all phases of their journey. We may think a lot about how can we get them all the way completed with their journey.

I know I've thought this too. I want to get everybody from very early beginning, starting point all the way to like super, super successful.

There are so many stages in between, and these people need someone to help them with every single stage. So what my client observed at this conference was a whole collection of people in the room that had paid a really high admission to go to this event. And many of them had not even started their journey yet.

Their door of self-improvement or self growth or healing had not even started yet, but they felt so much discomfort in their life that they wanted to get there, that they wanted some type of relief. So they spent the money so that they could go to this because they needed help. And what happened was that the amount that was delivered was enough to open up the door and show them the beginning.

And she shared with me that people were crying. Like they had some significant breakthroughs, and that feeling was so significant to her.

And we talked about, like, do you want to be that person that can help people have that feeling? To get them crying, to get that first initial breakthrough? Like just opening the door is a breakthrough? It's like, yeah.

And so seeing that you can be that person, that your skillset is already so developed for people that haven't even opened the door. Oh my gosh, self-belief totally there.

And now guess what happened?

She started to have people reach out to have calls with her, the momentum, all of a sudden opened up where before that self-belief was kind of getting in the way, but now things have opened because she saw somebody else doing what she did.

So maybe that's something that could also help you. You may have tried other people's modalities to try to help you move forward in your business, but have you considered going and experiencing the modality that you actually use to help people?

What would happen if you decided to do that little experiment for yourself of submitting yourself as a client, to someone that does your modality and it could be in the type of format that you use, it could be a larger format. But go be their client, and especially if you can see other clients in the room too, go and see what happened. Because you might be holding yourself back, fearful that you're not going to be able to get these people, the breakthrough because you think your skillset needs to be something even more evolved than it is.

And it might be the right evidence to disprove that thought. And that's really where all the mindset shifts start. We have to disprove our limiting beliefs first. So then, we can make a clearing for the new thoughts to come in.

I just want to celebrate these three clients that I've shared about.

I am so incredibly proud of all three of them and the self-belief that they've discovered this year. They're now making significant progress in their business as a result of doing these experiments of allowing these little shifts to happen. And then, all of a sudden, self-belief is there. And all of the goodness that comes with self-belief finally starts to roll their way and their businesses take off.

If you or someone that is struggling with your own self-belief, it would be my honor to help you on your journey. Not only do I have a variety of tools that I use, but I also help you to design your own experiments so that we can get you out in the field experiencing real life so that you can build up your self-confidence and your self-belief. And then amazing magicals can happen.

If you would like to explore how we can work together, I'd invite you to reach out to me, to schedule a free consultation. You can easily set up a call that fits the day and time of your choosing. By going to my MyFreedomGrove.com, Go to the contact me tab, and right there is my calendar. And you can pick something that works for you.

I can't wait to see what kind of magic we can create together. All right, my friends, I hope that you have a great week and I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!