When is it “relaxing” and when is it “avoidance?”

You’re always making strategic decisions about what to prioritize, and everything you do as an entrepreneur can have some negative self talk attached to it.

They hired a PR person, or a social media person, or a content person, and they found that the person they hired didn’t have a care and commitment that matched their own.

And so people “silently” move their priorities to something that makes them comfortable – and avoids the thing that’s traumatizing them.

And – whatever logjams exist in a one-person business tend to exist in that person’s own brain.

So, how can you get out of your own way?

I help coaches + consultants:

A lot of people know what they want to do in order to have the life they want – but anxiety is in the way.

The messed up thing is that anxiety co-exists, no matter what, with becoming that better version of yourself.

And it’s not something that goes away.

As we get older, life is going to always create new scenarios for us.

But really – what’s the alternative?

Most people who become clients for personal growth coaching are middle aged, and they don’t want to have spent their entire lives ruled by their fears, not showing up in life the way they were meant to.

Being uncomfortable, consistently, is the best way to create a better version of yourself.

The less willing we are to try things in our personal live, or engage with pain points, the more we stay in our own bubble:

And the new things we want don’t come in.

Now your life has gone far away from where you planned because you feared that friction and feared being told no.

Have you read my story about knocking doors during the Georgia election? I’ve had people’s dogs bark at me, I’ve had the cops called on me. It sucked!

But the big benefit of all that, and why I’m thankful for the experience, is that I know that I’m much less caring about being told no, getting called a creep, leave me alone.

Just mathematically, I must have gotten just a person telling me to my face to leave them alone about fifty times a week.

Exposure therapy.

I don’t care about it anymore.

Personally – I’m always willing to take risks and life with the consequences. The worst that can happen is feeling embarrassment, and only a handful of people will notice or care.

And I think that's how you find the difference in relaxing and avoidance.

No matter WHO is convinced in the outside world, you can't lie to your own heart.

If you're feeling anxious thinking about it and your “relaxation” hinders around avoiding it, it's avoidance.

If you know what’s coming head, have a positive expectation of the future, and know what's coming up, taking the hardships as they come, then relax!

It’s self-regard, and knowing you can handle the weird twists and turns that make up your life.

And, the more you need to do something to get to the next stage in your life, the more unknown it’s going to be, the more you’re going to have to battle old anxieties and ideas.

As an entrepreneur, you really have so much choice over where and what you’re going to build – whether it’s traffic or products or publishing.

So whatever you’re lacking in your business could VERY well be some kind of avoidance. I haven’t published a lot of my own work under my own name – I guess always feeling that I needed a whole suite of courses and products like the people I worked for.

Well first of all – when it comes to product creation – there’s really no time like the present.

I’ve got a strong advantage in that I’ve made LOTS of information products for other people – like assembly line style – so I know how to get the good together and present the strongest parts – kinda like I’m doing now.

They’re brutally hard to keep track of.

The service I use to keep track of everything is Bitwarden!

And uhhhh, I hope you don’t mind me not sharing my screencaptures here or anything!

The best way to create a password is to use a full sentence – and when I say a full sentence I mean, something that’s at least 4 words, maybe including a word that’s nonsense. Think of weird sayings or inside jokes that only you and a relative or friend know.

Now you add a couple numbers or symbols, and you’re completely secure – unless you just give the password away to people.

Now, what happens when you’re actually using your logins on a dozen different websites?

Well, in these situations, you can easily use this service:

https://simplelogin.io/

This is SimpleLogin from the folks at ProtonMail –

And hand to God, it’s saved me so much time and stress – consolidating a LOT of passwords from a lot of email addresses into one place. WHEW.

I’m in “build in public” mode right now – but I do like having a little buffer of actually useful content. By the time most people see this on social media, it’ll be a week or so.

One things I’m working on is getting my work on Gumroad. I definitely use other platforms – and I’m a fan of GoHighLevel – but Gumroad’s got a lot of the basic features I use the most – that’s just automation and continuing support for emails…

And it’s free – so it’ll hopefully remove my incentive to move my tech stack when I find some new piece of technology!

So, a few things I did on Gumroad this week –

You can see the results on the website.

Those products work and you can buy them – there's also follow-up messaging from me that goes deeper into my expertise. Wow, that’s actually a lot. I’ll get into it later.

So, at what age do we start to create limitations for ourselves?

Well, when do we start getting told no?

Our parents give us limitations when we’re young.

And it’s for a good reason – if you start thinking and feeling “unlimited” as a baby, you might stick a fork in an electrical outlet or something.

But children are all about internalizing things – and we internalize the limits from our parents, friends and peers very easily.

As kids, we take things way too seriously!

The way we internalize childhood and family trauma are instrumental to how we see this life.

Our actions in the outer world often follow the paths we program in our inner world.

Figuring out what that programming is, and where that programming come from – THAT is the subject of a lot of psychological study.

But spotting and breaking through your limitations are a constant tool in creating a life you love.

And also for using business as a vessel for creating the life you want.

Do you remember my Kindle Cash Flow case study?

We used WooCommerce as the main platform – but I’ve done some awesome work on Threadless for non-profits.

Threadless handles all of the printing and shipping.

If you have a small and devoted following online, or you have a cause that people care about – create a few designs! A little money raised can cause a big difference.

It’s also really useful if you’re a coach that’s got sayings, or a podcast that’s come across a lot of golden quotes and ideas.

The fastest way to get this kind of work done is to hire a designer – especially if you’re not a Photoshop wizard or anything.

You can look at the Threadless store I have in progress here:

At the time of this writing, there are only three pieces, but you can likely expect more to come in the future.

My new style is to just share what I'm working on in real life, and it usually meshes up with things I have experience doing.

A lot of the time it's business related, but also, I like taking a bus and riding around Atlanta, meeting local businesses and seeing sights.

It's absolutely jaw dropping how much homelessness there is in Atlanta, right across the street from City Hall.

Places like the Gateway Center try to stem the tide but the economy is terrible. People are always left out no matter what.

If you live here, you know how the situation is.

It's great to see people in the community just treat the people there with respect and autonomy.

I always encourage people who can to donate to organizations like Mosaic Atlanta who are responding to this stuff in a humane way and treating people with dignity and autonomy.

They’ve got a matching fund where you donate and they buy warming supplies for the unhoused population. No muss no fuss.

Can't say anybody can fix everything, but your money goes right to helping people who are impacted – more than something from the “non profit industrial complex” might.

I recently watched an interview from a social media guy named Tank Sinatra –

And like, I don’t know, I don’t name these guys.

Anyway, he said, he wouldn’t delete social media. The human race is just starting to process how to integrate this in a healthy way.

And technology advances so fast that we might relate to it in a brand new way in a few years –

I don’t know.

Do y’all feel like we’re integrating ANY aspect of modern life in a healthy way?

I definitely feel like social media can be a powerful tool for individual or group fulfillment – but if we’re looking at the case for it on that “big scale” human level…

Can we create a more humane social media?

I think right now, people getting the most from social media are extremely disciplined as both consumers and producers.

I know that’s the case with me. I’ve been talking about doing a podcast – and the idea of creating exactly and only the most interesting and highly valuable content has constantly been on my mind.

Not that there can’t be room to deviate, but having that kind of content together would be powerful.

I help coaches + consultants: