Many coaches say the hardest part of entrepreneurship is building your business in such a way that allows for entrepreneurial freedom and autonomy.
But, for many of us, building a freedom-focused lifestyle isn’t the hard part—it’s experiencing the freedom we already have.
In this article, I’ll introduce three ways in which the stories we tell ourselves stop us from enjoying the entrepreneurial freedom we’ve worked hard to obtain, with tools to help.
1. Postponing being yourself as a form of self-punishment.
One story you may tell yourself is: “I can’t be myself because I don’t deserve it”.
When you let this story guide your life, you delay being yourself as a form of punishment—usually for things you’ve said or done that you still feel bad about.
This isn’t necessarily something you’re aware of doing, so here are the signs:
- Keeping busy to avoid how you really feel or what you really want.
- Avoiding or restricting activities that make you feel like yourself.
- Not feeling deserving of doing pleasurable things you love.
The things that give us the most pleasure in life are those that make us feel most like ourselves (e.g. living a freedom-focused lifestyle). This is because a strong sense of self-identity gives us meaning and this, in turn, leads to happiness.
I know I’ve fallen into this particular guilt trap when I stop putting on makeup, getting my nails done, wearing my favourite clothes (or anything besides PJs for that matter), going swimming, and meeting new people.
These signs that I’m perpetually mad at myself often explain why I have periods of general dissatisfaction in life and business—I’m not enjoying the entrepreneurial freedom I’ve made possible and it’s going to waste.
If this story is playing on repeat in the back of your mind or keeps rearing its ugly head, try taking these steps:
- Separate the “shoulds” from the “wants”.
- Recognize that taking action leads to desired feelings—not the other way around.
Whenever you think or say the word “should”, it means your brain is operating on a surface level. Your relationship with yourself is strained because trying to do “the right thing” all the time is stripping the pleasure from your life.
Instead, dig deeper by tapping into your intuition to discover your underlying “wants”. This exercise will instantly make it clear why you’ve been feeling so deprived of freedom and fun lately.
But you’ll need to take things a step further to actually be able to pursue these “wants”; otherwise, that undeserving feeling will keep getting in the way.
Next, you must stop waiting to feel better before you do things that make you feel like yourself. It’s a catch 22 because the second you start being the person who does the things you do, you start to feel like you again (and happiness ensues). But the action must come first.
At this point, it’s important to remind yourself that you can’t completely overhaul all of your habits or propensities in the blink of an eye—it takes time to change.
Asking yourself this will help: “What’s one thing I can do right now to make me feel more like me?”. Take one step in the right direction—towards you—and you’ll start to feel more connected to yourself again.
Irrespective of how we feel about ourselves, we are still ourselves. Therefore, there is nothing to earn back.
‘New Mindset’ is what I call the version of me that always knows what’s best for me, wants me to be happy, and knows the truth about what I really want versus what others’ expect of me.
Whenever I’m stuck in a funk of undeserving thoughts, I ask New Mindset “What’s one thing I can do to feel more like me?” and it always knows the answer. It helps me tap into my intuition very intentionally, and this clarity brings me back to a place of grounded peace and me-ness.
So, the next time you’re feeling lost and like you haven’t been yourself for a while, dig deeper to see if this “I’m not good enough to be me” story is shaping your decisions, uncover it for what it is, and focus on taking an action step towards being you again.
2. Feeling too guilty to experience the benefits of an outcome.
Another story that can stop you from enjoying entrepreneurial freedom is: “I’m not allowed to benefit from this outcome because I’m to blame”.
You know those movies where someone winds up with “blood money” because they’re forced or driven to kill and/or steal from people, then it just sits there in their bank account? It’s a great example to illustrate how this story works. The protagonist feels undeserving of the money because of how it came to be, so they never spend it—it’s a constant reminder of their guilt.
When you feel guilty for how something came to be, you can’t enjoy it. So if your brain associates freedom with something negative, you won’t reap the benefits.
This leads to self-sabotaging behaviours, whereby you don’t let yourself enjoy the fruits of your labour or feel as much peace or happiness as you’d like to. In other words, your subconscious sets you up for failure and disappointment, whether you like it or not.
After terminating a pregnancy in the summer, I was ridden with guilt. My grief for the loss of the baby, which felt unjustified, and the blame I put on myself for making that decision was a destructive combination.
While the rational part of my brain knew I’d made the right decision and that that was ok, the emotional part felt horrible and so the story began: “You can’t enjoy the freedom you have from choosing to not have a baby because you’re a bad person.”
As with many irrational stories (that also make complete sense), this particular one also went a level deeper: “You can’t have fun and enjoy life because then you’ll get pregnant again and have to undergo all of this pain and suffering for a second time”.
The pregnancy occurred when I was in a peak state of mental and physical health. So my brain, in its traumatized, highly emotional state, made the connection between happiness and unwanted pregnancy.
As a result, I was sabotaging myself because my brain wanted to protect me from more pain and suffering. But in doing so, I was experiencing another form of pain and suffering from not enjoying the entrepreneurial freedom I’ve worked so hard to obtain.
What helped me the most in overcoming this major obstacle was doing parts work with one of my coaches.
Parts work involves creating an entity for different emotional parts of you—in my case, it was grief and shame—and forming a relationship with them.
First, you identify what the emotion is. Then, you give it a name, colour, form, and voice. When you can visualize the emotion very clearly in your mind, you can start a conversation with it.
The idea is to hear what it has to say—why it’s so present in your life, what its agenda or need is, and what it’s asking of you—and then come to a mutual understanding (because it’s not going anywhere).
For example, when I met with grief, I saw a dark cloak without a face that floats and hovers over people, making it difficult for them to see the world in colour.
Grief’s overall message was that it didn’t want me to forget the baby. It wanted me to honour who he/she was and how they came to be—through love and connection and joy, so it showed up to remind me of that.
When I realized grief had good intentions and wasn’t trying to be malicious or ruin my life, I came to accept its place in my brain and learned to co-exist with it.
One person’s suffering doesn’t counter balance another’s.
There are always good and bad sides to every emotion. Both will be present whether we like it or not, so we may as well learn to accept this.
By listening to each part of you, recognizing the good intentions behind its message, and finding a way to live with it harmoniously, you can begin to enjoy your entrepreneurial freedom again, too.
3. Letting your “failures” accumulate to make one giant failure.
A third story to look out for that may explain why you’re not enjoying the entrepreneurial freedom you’ve created in your life is one of dramatization: “Every time I mess up, I add it to a long list of mess-ups to make it mean that I’m a failure”.-
When this story dictates your decision-making and behaviours, you’ll notice some or all of the following thoughts or struggles:
- Always seeing flaws in your actions or faults in your decisions.
- Not being able to recognize your progress or successes.
- Catastrophizing (exaggerating bad outcomes) and spiralling negative thoughts.
Deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy lead to an accumulation of perceived failures such that each time you “do something wrong”, your brain immediately adds it to an ever-growing list of reasons why you suck as a person and don’t deserve happiness. Before you know it, you aren’t enjoying your entrepreneurial freedom as much as you could or want to be.
For example, yesterday I discovered that despite spending a long time researching and planning ahead for an upcoming Europe trip, I wasn’t allowed to bring my kitty, Nala on some of my flights. It turns out the UK has its own law that prevents all non-assistance animals from entering via plane, irrespective of their health, size, breed, etc. So now she has to stay in Canada while I travel.
Instead of seeing this as an isolated event, my brain went into full-on story mode: “You’re useless. You didn’t plan this trip properly, you still don’t have enough money to buy a house, you haven’t made your finance AirTables, you haven’t finished training your team members yet, you’re behind on writing projects, you haven’t fixed those bookkeeping errors…” The list went on.
What helped me move past it was thinking back to a conversation I had with Imposter Syndrome Therapist & Coach, Sophie Fraser on Monday. One of my biggest takeaways from this Careers Academy interview was that understanding the difference between beliefs and truth is incredibly powerful:
- beliefs are formed in childhood, when the rational part of our brain hasn’t developed yet, whereas
- truth comes from the rational part of our brain, as intelligent, experienced, and capable adults.
What we think of as “truth” is often actually a belief that arose from a traumatic past experience that now shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours but isn’t who we are.
These events become stories that our brains keep revisiting in a juvenile but well-intentioned effort to protect us from experiencing additional emotional pain.
An effective way to combat this common phenomenon is to do some inner child work. This involves listening to the hurt part of ourselves—the voice of the child that still lives within us—and providing compassion and comfort, instead of ignoring or shutting it down (which, like a real child, only makes the voice louder).
The goal is to heal the pain that keeps causing these negative stories to resurface, allowing us to experience more pleasure and joy in our lives.
As an exercise, the next time you notice yourself catastrophizing, see if you can trace the feeling back to a time in your childhood when you felt shamed or hurt. Then, try to identify what you learned from that negative experience that’s stayed with you to this day.
In my case, I was frequently made to feel like I was incapable of accomplishing things, in childhood. I was often shamed for making errors, and always expected to be further ahead than my peers in reaching developmental or academic milestones. So now, I’m really hard on myself and quick to feel defeated.
But, when I recognize that Little Sophie is feeling upset because she made a mistake, I don’t want to make her feel even worse by piling on the blame for everything that’s ever happened like this in the past (as my parents did). That’s not my voice, nor my belief.
Instead, Adult Sophie is able to look at the event through a rational lens of understanding and forgiveness, then separate it from all that came before it and let it go.
If we’re always keeping a running tab of our mistakes, life becomes exhausting and there’s no room for fun or freedom.
This is another important facet of building a stronger relationship with yourself.
Self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion are central to your ability to enjoy everything that entrepreneurship and life has to offer.
By taking care of the child inside you, you’re able to re-parent yourself in a way that better serves your present and future.
To conclude: stop playing the shame game.
You get to change the stories you tell yourself to allow more pleasure into your life.
The next time you don’t feel deserving of entrepreneurial freedom:
- Ignore “shoulds” and do one thing that makes you feel like you.
- Talk to the emotional parts of you and learn how you can co-exist.
- Separate beliefs from the truth, and view each incident in isolation.
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