Ep. 02: Why Some Tasks Have Felt Impossible (And How to Make Them Feel Easier)

You know that feeling when you've sat down to do something in your business, write the email, post on social media, reach out to that potential client and your whole body just... resists?

Maybe you've frozen up completely. Maybe you've suddenly need to organize your entire desk. Maybe you've spent 3 hours on something that should take 30 minutes.

If you've ever wondered why building your business has felt so much harder than it should, then this episode is for you.

In this episode, you'll discover:

—The real reason business tasks have felt 10x harder than they should (hint: it has nothing to do with discipline or strategy)

—My $4 Instagram caption story and why I'd spend 30+ minutes frozen at my computer, unable to finish a simple post

—The 4 nervous system responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and exactly what they look like in your business

—Why some entrepreneurs seem to glide through things that feel impossible for you (and why that doesn't mean something's wrong with you)

—The body check-in practice that will completely change how you make decisions and take action

—How I went from spending 12-hour Sundays forcing myself through work to launching a podcast and building a funnel in 2.5 months while being a mom with only part-time childcare

Here's the truth: You don't need more strategy. You don't need more discipline. You don't need to push harder.

You need to understand what's actually happening in your body when you do hard things.

This episode will help you see the patterns and give you practical tools to start shifting them today.

Resources mentioned:

• Rapid Resolution Therapy with Dr. John Connelly
• Human Design

If this episode gave you that "oh my god, THAT'S what's been happening" moment, please leave a 5-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Your support helps me get this work to the entrepreneurs who need it most.

Transcript

1:06

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to In Your Bones. So last episode, we talked a lot about beliefs. It was a lot about where our beliefs come from and how they might be showing up in our day-to-day world. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I highly recommend going back and listening to it. There's a lot of good stuff there. So go ahead and click back into that episode after you're done listening to this one. And today I want to talk to you about how those beliefs show up in real time in our body as we're building our business. And this will happen anytime you start doing something that feels unfamiliar to you, something that you haven't done before. This is what would happen to me when I would think about taking that next step that I knew I wanted to do. I knew where my vision was, but I couldn't get myself to do it. Like I knew I wanted to start a podcast months, years ago. I knew I wanted to create a digital product. Months ago, but why couldn't I get myself to do it? And before I share that with you, I want to ask you if this sounds familiar because this is where I was in my own business for so long. I would go sit down in my office and I would try to do something that I knew would help my business in the long run, and instead I would find myself either freezing up completely not able to do it, or I would start doing something that wouldn't actually get me to where I wanted to go. Like working on Canva, creating some perfect graphic for some social media post, or thinking about writing an email for my email list or scrolling Pinterest for inspiration. I couldn't get myself to do the thing, and that's where I lived for so long in my business, It would feel like my feet were stuck in cement and I had to push myself every single tiny centimeter of the way there. And I thought. There was something wrong with me. I just thought, oh, maybe I don't have what it takes, or I'm just not built that way. But it took me years to figure out that if I'm sitting down to do something and I find myself getting distracted or procrastinating or suddenly very interested in organizing my desk or researching some random thing that doesn't actually matter at that moment. It's not that I'm not meant to do the thing. It's not about discipline, it's not about motivation. It's not even about the task itself. It is all about my nervous system responding to my unconscious beliefs. And once you understand this piece, everything changes. So let's dig in. I wanna start by telling you a story. This was at the beginning of the pandemic. I had just gotten laid off from my job as a sommelier at this fancy old school Italian restaurant in Ura, Florida, and I had a friend who was starting a social media management company. And so she said I'll hire you to help me write captions for my clients, and she paid me $4 a caption to start. Now I want you to think about that for a second. It was $4 per caption. These weren't like long elaborate things. They were Instagram captions, maybe three to four sentences. Some of them had a little bit more detail to it, but if you're doing that efficiently, it should take maybe 15, 20 minutes max. Right? I would spend 30 minutes per caption, sometimes longer, and it wasn't because the task was complicated. It was because it felt so intense to me, to my system to sit there. I was working from my computer at home for the first time. I didn't have a boss looking over my shoulder. I had complete freedom to manage my own time. And I would sit there my whole body would feel tense. I'd type a sentence, delete it, type it again. Wait. Well, is that the right word? You my mind would start thinking, maybe I should use a different word there. Let me go check some other Instagram account to see what their captions say. Those were the things that my mind would come up with, or maybe I should research this topic a little bit more, or is that even good, or, this just doesn't feel perfect yet. And I'd go down these rabbit holes and the whole thing would take so much more time and energy then it should have. These were at the end of the day, $4 captions, at the time I thought, I'm just not good at this yet. I need to try harder. I need to be more focused. I need more strategy. I need more motivation. But looking back now, I see exactly what was happening, and it was my nervous system that was dysregulated. It didn't feel comfortable with where I was going because of beliefs I had about what was possible for me. Beliefs about making money, beliefs about working from home, beliefs about being my own boss, beliefs about what I was capable of, earning beliefs about what I deserved to earn. Beliefs about my own skillset, and all of this was happening completely outside of my conscious awareness. I wasn't sitting there thinking, oh, I have a belief that making money is hard, so this feels threatening. I was sitting there thinking, why can't I finish this stupid caption? But my body was picking up on something that felt unfamiliar, unsafe, and it was trying to protect me. And that's really what I wanna shine light on today. This isn't in your head, it's in your body and it's sneaky as hell. So let me explain what's actually going on here. When you have a belief, let's say you believe making money is hard or money requires a lot of hard work, or it's not possible for me to make easy money, a lot of us grow up with these beliefs. I mean, we have a parent who. Maybe worked two jobs or worked long hours and we saw them come home exhausted and they told us that is what it takes to make money. They told us you have to go to college and you have to work your way up the corporate ladder, and it's going to take a lot of putting in the work and being disciplined and being strategic and pushing yourself every step of the way. That's what was modeled to us from a lot of adults in our life. I can speak from my experience that was modeled to me from a lot of adults in my life, So then what happens is our mind absorbs that belief and then trying to do something that goes against that belief will feel like a threat to our body. And that's when we start getting into a dysregulated state. A, because it's unfamiliar, we're doing something that's never been modeled to us before and we've never done it before. And B, because we have subconsciously absorbed a belief that it's not possible to do the thing, even though on a conscious level we know that it is possible to do the thing and we have a desire to do this thing, this new thing that we know will expand our business. It's not logical. It's not a conscious threat. But your nervous system works based on your unconscious beliefs and your body goes, wait, this is unfamiliar. This doesn't match what we believe is safe, and I need to protect you, and I want you to know that there is nothing wrong here, that this is deeply human to be going through this experience. There's absolutely nothing wrong with me. There's absolutely nothing wrong with you. This is just the process that we go through when we're doing something unfamiliar. When we step into the edge of anything we've ever known, it will activate a response, a nervous system, sympathetic response, and that's the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. For the longest time, I was stuck in freeze. I would freeze up and procrastinate. There are other people who might respond with a fight. Push through by all means necessary with massive amounts of willpower that leave them exhausted at the end of the day, or you can flee. Suddenly you're scrolling through social media and organizing things around the house or doing laundry. Or maybe you fawn. The Fawn response is when we start looking for external validation. Okay. So maybe that means lowering your prices because someone asked you to, or maybe that means doing everything that someone else has told you to do, some strategy that they told you, even when it doesn't feel right to do it for you. Or maybe that means trying to make everything perfect. That perfect social media caption that was me, or that perfect sales page, or that perfect podcast episode so that nobody can criticize you. And all of this is just a nervous system response, trying to keep us safe from a threat and it's a threat that doesn't actually exist. Here's the really tricky part, our unconscious beliefs. Are not something that we are aware of. Beliefs about what we deserve, beliefs about what we are worthy of, beliefs about whether we will lose the love and the respect of people. If we get what we want, if we become successful. Beliefs about whether you are allowed to have tons of money. Now some people, and you've probably seen this, they seem to just glide through things They post on social media every day without overthinking it, or at least that's what it appears to be. Or they charge high prices without appearing to feel guilty about it, or they sell all the time without shying away from doing that. And there might be the propensity to think, what's wrong with me? Why is this so hard for me? I know I felt that way when I could see other people doing the thing that I knew I wanted to do. But here's what's happening. Those people, have either done this work and continue to do this work of rewiring their subconscious beliefs and regulating their nervous system, or they grew up with different beliefs to begin with. Maybe they grew up believing, making money was their birthright. That making money was actually easy to make, that they're the kind of person who deserves success. Maybe they had parents that modeled that, or other adults in their life that modeled that. So their nervous system isn't sending out alarm bells when they go to do the thing. That doesn't mean that they're better than you. It just means that they have different programming. But here's the truth, everyone, every single entrepreneur eventually comes up against some belief about what they think is possible for them. We all have to face those things on this journey. There is no escaping it, and that's why it is such a beautiful journey because you end up unraveling and unearthing all of these things that we're essentially holding you back. So you get to face them, you get to smooth them out so that they're no longer running in your system What a privilege it is to be able to do this work. I'm seriously so grateful to face all of the things that have held me back, because I can tell you. Every single time I do it, I feel lighter on the other end of it. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it takes time and being your biggest cheerleader and being so tender and compassionate towards yourself but I'm so glad because six, seven years ago I was someone who couldn't speak my mind. I was someone who would flinch when I was talking to an authority figure, especially if that authority figure was a white male. I was someone who had a hard time saying no, and I would over give and I would do things that I genuinely didn't wanna do. And once I started dealing with the pattern of all of that. All of a sudden, not only am I a better business owner and more capable of doing the hard things in my business, now I am someone who can confront things face to face and I can say what I'm really feeling and I can do more of what I actually wanna do, and I can set time aside for myself and all of that makes me feel more alive, more creative, more compassionate, more loving to the people in my life. It stopped taking so much time and energy to do the hard thing in my business. I stopped trying to get there through pure force and friction and pressure I think there's always a little bit of pressure being an entrepreneur. You can't add more pressure to that pressure and expect there to be flow and ease and creativity and expect it to feel good once you get there. I think it's our job. As entrepreneurs to learn how to work with ourselves to relieve some of that pressure so that we don't wanna burn down our businesses in five years so that we don't get burnt out. And I wanna keep emphasizing, there is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with me. This is just part of being human. And if you have found yourself, on a path of, it feeling hard and pressurized and you feel burnt out from being an entrepreneur, I know what that feels like. I deeply know, and I also know that it just comes from how we have learned to do things. And if we have learned to do things that way, then the amazing news is that we can learn to do things another way. We can learn to teach our nervous system something new because the threat that your nervous system is trying to protect you from, it's not real. It's just unfamiliarity. And if it's not real, the threat, then we can teach it that. We can show it little by little that the threat doesn't exist. And once you start to see that, once you start to do that work, that's when things start to shift in your business. All right, so let me give you some more example of what this looks like in real life, so after the caption writing a social media job, I continued on and became a copywriter and a marketing strategist, and I ended up contracting under a boutique marketing agency. It was wonderful. The owner of that agency was so lovely and she was a dream to work with, and at the time I was like, this is an amazing opportunity. I got to work with six and seven figure entrepreneurs underneath her brand. It was such good exposure. I got to meet with these business owners that were reaching the milestones that I wanted to reach, and I also got to see that they were deeply human too, and that their systems were by no means perfect and that they were figuring it out as they went, and that they weren't actually waiting to feel ready. They were doing things scared and unsure of themselves every step of the way. So it got me to open my eyes to what success actually looks like in this industry. But eventually I bumped up against the money that I was receiving in that position. I knew that the work I was doing and the time I was putting into it, was of more value than what I was receiving, being contracted under someone else. But it was hard for me to put myself out there to sell my business, to want to talk about copywriting, and at the end of the day, there was two things going on. I wasn't ultimately super passionate about copywriting anymore at that point, and I was bumping up against these beliefs and my nervous system and all of that without realizing that that's where I was. Getting my own clients felt terrifying, overwhelming, like something I wasn't ready for. And I would try in little bursts, I would send out emails to potential clients for a few weeks. I'd post on social media for a few weeks. But I could never really, truly keep it up. It would always fizzle out. And I thought, that there was something wrong with me. I thought, I just don't have what it takes to put myself out there, or I'm not cut out for this. And I had started in social media management and I was a business strategist, so I knew the strategy side of things. I dug into that side so hard because I thought if I could only learn enough strategy. Then I could actually get my own clients. So when I learned strategy and I learned it well, and I still wasn't able to get more than a handful of my own clients. I. then I thought there's something wrong with me. But that's not what was actually happening. It was that there was so much that felt unfamiliar and unsafe to my nervous system, that my nervous system would then rebel against doing the work. It wasn't until I learned to show my body that there's no actual threat here, that it started to feel safer to show up and, for example, record this podcast episode And it's kind of sneaky because your nervous system isn't showing up and saying, Hey, I feel dysregulated right now. Instead, what's happening is you start getting all these ideas about what you should be doing instead. I know I would spend hours on Canva making graphics for my business or I'd scroll Pinterest looking for inspiration, or I'd do all these tasks where it felt productive. 'cause I would be sitting in front of my computer for hours on end and I would say, okay, I sat down and I actually did something today. But they weren't actually moving the needle toward making more money. Another example of how this showed up for me, is I would feel activated by someone who was already further along in their business than me. If I saw their perfect social media post with a bunch of likes and comments, it would do something internally like, why can't I have that? Now when I see that, I feel. Genuinely inspired, like, oh my gosh, these other women are showing me what is possible. I feel an expansion when I see their posts. I feel inspired like they're doing it and I can do it too. When before it was. They're doing it and I'm not, I would also feel so fatigued at the end of my day sitting in front of the computer and working on copywriting and business strategy. Where it would feel like I couldn't actually do the thing even if I wanted to. And I would actually sit in front of my computer for like an hour pushing myself to try to do something. And I couldn't actually do it. I knew what I wanted to do. I could see it so clearly all the steps I needed to take in order to get there. But some days for an hour or so at a time, I truly couldn't do anything. And that's because my body was going into that freeze response, just constant low level stress. I would put so much pressure on. Writing and what I was creating for my clients, and it had to be a hundred percent perfect before it could go out. Like I would spend 12 hour days on a Sunday while my husband would watch the kids making sure that everything was exactly how I wanted it to be. But here's what happens when you do that. You're putting pressure on top of pressure and you're trying to force your way through something. While your body is actively resisting it and that will leave you feeling so drained so fast. It's crazy. I know that these patterns exist for so many of us. I worked with someone earlier this year. I was hired as his va, so I was hired to help him set up the systems in his business. He left corporate life and started his own consulting business. He was a really smart guy, tons of experience, and every time we'd get on our weekly call, he would have a new strategy he would want to implement Instead of following through on one strategy, first one path. First, he was starting a podcast and starting a nonprofit and then buying leads to do cold outreach and then starting a whole LinkedIn strategy. And then we started creating a course together, and then he also went back to school to get his doctorate. Again, there's no judgment here. This is so human to be going through this and looking to see what strategy might solve the problem, the friction, the pressure that we're feeling. It's so understandable to think that if I just try one more strategy, then it'll feel like I can. Push through and get to where I wanna go, and sometimes you absolutely can by just sheer force and willpower, but I'm suggesting that there is another way, and that is removing the resistance to doing the hard thing in the first place. And it's tricky because having all of these balls in the air, trying all of these different strategies at once can feel like you're making a lot of progress. But the true marker of progress is to see, does it feel good to me to have done the things that I have done in my business today? Does it feel good at the end of the day or am I feeling burnt out, depleted, like I haven't gotten enough done and like everyone else is figuring it out other than me. I know that I have been there more times than I can count in my business, and I know that I no longer feel that way at the end of the day, if I put in eight hours of work. I actually leave my day feeling energized and like I've accomplished so much and lit up inside because of the work that I am doing, and I'm suggesting that that is possible for everyone else too. I'm not saying that it doesn't feel hard to do the work. It has felt hard to get up and do the thing that I've never done before, but I also feel energized after doing it What happens is when we reach an edge of what we're familiar with, it starts to feel uncomfortable. Now we're in unknown territory and our body will perceive what's unknown as a threat. It will always want to go back to what feels familiar, even though. Everything we want is on the other side of what's familiar as an entrepreneur. If we wanna make more money than we're currently making, that's unfamiliar. If we wanna have a different caliber of clients than we currently have, that's going to be unfamiliar. If we wanna have more impact, that's going to be unfamiliar. So we have to learn to develop a system of how to regulate our bodies when we are walking into unfamiliar territory. And I know what it is to reach the edge of what's familiar and to have your nervous system dysregulated and to not even know that that was happening for me. I have had that happen more times than I can count in my five years of being an entrepreneur. So I understand that constantly looking for more strategy feels like the answer, like, if I can just have the perfect email sequence, or the perfect funnel or the perfect website, then it will all feel easier. But it's never about the strategy. Like strategy helps. Yes, it, There needs to be some structure in your business, but if your nervous system isn't on board, then there is no strategy in the world that is going to make it feel good to actually do the hard thing if you wanna have a business that feels good, like you can just devote hours to it and time flies and you just feel so passionate about showing up every single day, which is how I feel now. Then it has to be an inside job that's what shifted everything for me, like I was able to create a funnel in my business and launch this podcast that I have been dreaming of for months, if not years, and I did it in a little over two months. While being a mom, while only having part-time childcare for my youngest and while still working on other projects for clients, I could not have done that before, not without rewiring my beliefs and not without getting my nervous system on board. And it isn't because I didn't have the discipline to do the hard thing, I did have the discipline. I knew what I wanted to do, but because my nervous system wasn't on board, it wasn't possible for me yet. I needed to learn how to regulate my system each step of the way. Instead of trying to override and push and force my way there, And I learned subconscious reprogramming through rapid resolution therapy. I studied under its founder, Dr. John Connolly, and what I found was that I had a lot of beliefs that I wasn't even aware of. But working with him, we were able to get to the root of the beliefs and bring them up into my conscious awareness and then look at them objectively. And when you look at it in the presence of what is actually true, then that belief cannot hold up any longer and it just dissolves. And every time you do that, you're claiming back more of your energy because before there was a part of your energy that was being used to protect yourself from this perceived threat. And now you have that energy back. Okay, so if you're listening to this and you're like, all of this makes sense, where do I start? And the very first thing, and I think this is so important, is learning to rely less on logic and systems. And this is how it should be done. And this is what people have told me to do. And learn to listen to your body because if it's not on board, if your body isn't regulated as you're trying to do something, then it's going to feel like climbing Mount Everest. Yes, you can force it. Yes, you can push through. Yes, you can tell yourself, no, I don't need to stop for a lunch break or a snack, or I don't need to refill my water bottle right now. I'm too busy doing the thing I'm trying to do. Yes, you can choose that, but it's going to not feel good once you get there. And again, there's no judgment. But I think it's really important to be aware that there is another way, a way that won't come at such a big cost to your future self. Alright, so let's do something right now. If you're in a place where you can do this, not driving, not operating heavy machinery, I want you to do this with me. I want you to take three deep breaths. Good. Now I want you to slowly close your eyes. And start bringing your attention to your heart or your chest. Start bringing your attention inward. You're noticing your breath, you're noticing your heartbeat. And just be here for one second. Now ask your body. Show me. What a yes feels like. Just notice what comes up. Maybe it's a warmth or it's an expansion, or it's a lightness. Maybe it's something else entirely. There is no right answer. Just notice now ask. Show me what a no feels like. Again, just notice. Maybe it's a contraction or a heaviness or a tightness or a pulling away, whatever it is, just notice it. And this. This right here. This is your guide. As you're making decisions in your business, you can come back to this. You can check in with your body and ask, does this feel like a yes or a no? Now I want to add, there's a little nuance here. Human design, which is a system with roots in astrology and Kabbalah and the itching, it teaches you about your energetic blueprint based on your time and your place of birth. Science is now catching up on this. They're starting to know what every astrologer has known for years, which is that we are impacted by the stars and the planets. And you can even see the waves of the ocean impacted by the moon. Our bodies are mostly filled with water, so of course we're also being impacted. So going back to human design, you might be someone who has emotional authority. That's me. I have emotional authority and we are the majority of the population. So if you have emotional authority, you don't always feel a direct yes or no in the moment. You might need a day or two, and even then you won't always be certain, just reaching a 70 or 80% certainty is good enough to go ahead and move forward. So I've learned to work with my energy by giving myself space to make decisions, and also not sticking to one firm structure every single day. I learned to follow what feels most alive for me in the moment, and it's a practice. It's not perfect, but it's so much better than constantly overriding myself with logic and shoulds. The point is. When you learn what feels true for you, you are no longer relying on outside gurus or strategists to tell you their way of doing things, and you start to move through the world following what lights you up and when you run your business that way. That is the opposite of a pressure filled business that will lead to burnout Here's what I've realized. You have so many more answers than you think you do. The body is so wise, it is so wise. It picks up on more than our logical mind can. It picks up on the energy all around us. It picks up on what is true and what isn't true when we're speaking to someone. And if we're constantly trying to override it with the mind because something else feels like the logical thing to do, that's exhausting and that's unsustainable. The alternative is to build a business that works with your body. A business that listens to what feels alive and what's true and what feels like a yes. That doesn't mean you never do hard things. It doesn't mean you only do what's comfortable. It just means that you're not constantly fighting yourself or forcing yourself through things while your nervous system is like screaming for a break. You're working together, you and your body as a team. And when you do that, things start to flow in a way that they never did before. You get to the end of your day and you can't wait to do it all over again tomorrow. And tasks that you to take hours, start to take a fraction of that and things that used to feel impossible start to feel very doable. Like you can see yourself getting there and you start to take action in the small steps to actually reaching that, that endpoint, and you have more energy at the end of the day, Alright, so here's what I invite you to do this week. Start noticing when your body tenses up around business tasks. Or notice when something starts to feel heavy or when you're procrastinating or distracting or starting to make things feel way more complicated than they need to be. Just start getting curious. Start to notice the patterns. There's no shame here. There's nothing wrong with you. This is just part of the human experience, and I invite you to practice checking in with yourself, taking those deep breaths, doing like a full body hug, going on a walk when things start to feel tense. You can talk to yourself like you are doing great. Talk to how you would talk to a child who is getting frustrated by something that they can't do yet. You know how when a child starts to learn how to tie their shoes or something that feels really complicated to them, you know that they're gonna figure it out. That's the energy that you can start using on your own self. You start to become your own biggest cheerleader. You start to acknowledge all of the steps that you are taking. And you start building this relationship with listening to your body, you start learning its language. So for now, just practice noticing, practice listening. All right. That is it for now. If you found this valuable, please give it a five star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I am on a mission to get this out to people who really need it. Okay, until next time. Bye.