let's talk about what do we mean by the belief shifts we are going to take a deep dive that means nerd out let's just be honest when i say deep dive i'm like we're going to nerd out on some stuff we're going to nerd out on what we mean by the belief shifts welcome to the belief shift the show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business i'm your host camille rapaz small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance and i'm george trapoe your co-host and her brother i'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective but mostly my curiosity together we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it but mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive
the number of belief shifts could be many and so i tried to condense this down to kind of a few i don't know if eight is a few maybe that's several i've heard that the number seven is the point where it becomes several versus a few we're gonna try to do this in two-part episode it might creep into a three-part we'll just see maybe our magical podcast producer katie will be able to content all of our wordiness which reminds me katie since you have joined us for this second recording of our episode do you want to introduce yourself because you're going to be popping in and out with us right and hanging out every once in a while in our podcast that's true sure people should probably know you is not just this floating face or this background voice that shows up every once in a while i don't know we're the talent you're the engine that's right uh yeah so i'm katie rempe i'm producing the podcast i have a company called light from lantern which produces my podcast knit a spell and now the belief shift i'm very excited to be on board give my perspective randomly from time to time as a small business owner who also happens to be learning from you camille i would not certainly be where i am now without your help so i'm happy to return the favor hey katie have you always been a small business owner no i used to work at another small business that actually had employees i kind of figure like a small business now in my eyes is just a one person but you know now i know it as a solopreneur yes and i think it's important to note that when we talk about small business in this podcast we do mean everything from solopreneur to like that i can't remember the exact cutoff number for what small business definition is but it's like less than some hundreds of employees i mean these can be millions of dollars of worth of you know size business revenue and still be small business so small can actually feel big to those of us who are solopreneurs right but it's not big corporate and so it's kind of a big range we're really focused on the business that are a little bit more towards the smaller end like less than 100 employees is more commonly the kind of small business that i'm working with but it really applies to any sort of small business that's just sort of trying to figure things out so welcome katie glad you're here this week all right so here's how we're going to get into this we need to talk about the belief shifts and what we mean by them we're going to be using some terms so there's some language in here that i use that i want to be able to define but also just talk about some examples and you know george between you and i just really talking about like what does this mean and why does it matter i guess is really the point why does it matter to small business owners what do they do about it because i think all of these concepts they're recurring themes and all the work i do with my clients and i think they're really important for small business owners to understand so that's what we're hoping to do today but it also is uh just introducing ideas and themes that will be throughout the pod these things will continue to show up over and over again so this is by no means the end-all be-all one-time discussion on any one of these topics it is the introduction to all of these topics let me run through the list of what we're going to talk about and i think i've also decided i'm going to do a quick reference guide on these that i'll make sure there's a link in the podcast notes so that people if you know people are like what i want to capture i know you know you're in your car you're walking the dog you're doing whatever while you're listening to the podcast you cannot take notes right now so i'll create a little quick reference guide so as you're listening to this you'll also be able to just download that and you'll have all the basic stuff we're talking about so here are the eight belief shifts that we're going to talk about the first one is foundations over quick fixes the second one is curiosity over self-criticism or hiding the third one is micro moves over massive action the fourth one is planning it over winging it the fifth is systems over chaos the sixth one is strategy over spaghetti on the wall the seventh one is trade-offs over sacrifice or hustle culture and then the last one is process over outcomes so those are the eight topics we're going to get through and let's see how many we can get through in this first episode i like these belief shifts too i'm really curious to hear how you think about how they get applied to small businesses just because even without that they're very satisfying to me you know they're not specific to small business but they definitely for me as i work with small business owners they repeatedly come up as challenges for small business owners so that's why i picked them like wow these are things we're constantly sort of grappling with on a very consistent basis and katie can probably uh hallelujah to that so the first one kardashian's over quick fixes what do we even mean by this so when i talk about foundations i mean really the fundamentals of business like how business essentially works and when i talk about quick fixes i'm talking about these sort of surfacy solutions it'll be like a surface solution to a really broad problem even a generic problem every business has like it needs to make more money and it'll just be this surfacy solution to that that really doesn't have there's no evaluation of what the core problem is or it'll be a very singular solution like do this one thing and it will magically transform your whole business and so it presumes too much in the solution right i see solutions like wow that solution only works if that business owner has a b c and d in place but they don't tell you that and you don't know that because you don't understand how business works so you get stuck so an example of this quick fix would be something like um somebody offering to help you get more clients by you know just copy the formula i used to sell on tick tock that's a very singular surfacey solution to a generic problem of i want more clients without actually going to the core of researching why why don't i have more clients based on what i'm doing now so it's a very generic so and singular solution or another one i see is in order to make more money in your business you need to start a membership so sometimes it's um it'll have you thinking about deciding to start a membership in your business just because you're getting this messaging that every online business must have a membership like it's the thing now and this is a real thing that's been happening in online business george where it's like that became a thing everybody's pushing everybody should have a membership your business your online business is nothing without one but if you make that decision just because people are telling you you should and by the way they're making money off of you doing it because they're selling that to you and you're not making it off of whether that actually fits with your desired business model because a membership is nothing to sneeze at that's a lot of work then you're just doing a quick fix instead of foundationally focusing on what is the business model i want to create and then what would best serve me and then deciding if a membership is in that business model or not so another example is from a marketing strategy standpoint it could be that you know that tick tock example is you're going to just decide you're going to start showing up on tick tock without knowing have i done any research to see does is my audience there do i even know how tick tock works like you're doing it just because everybody's like do the new thing and it's tick tock right um and so those are the that's a quick fix that you're trying to grab onto versus having an actual foundational understanding of what will work in your business yeah so question to george why does this shift matter why do we need to go from quick fixes to foundations i have two answers so one is there is there's a saying we have in software development when you're debugging which is you know fixing problems that you have in software so what will happen the behavior is software engineer has a problem to fix and they go and they change something they say i fix the problem and then the lead engineer says well how what would you change what was the problem you fixed i don't know exactly but i made this change and now the problem's gone away the so the phrase the same we have is if you don't understand how you fix the problem you haven't fixed the problem i love this belief shift because i truly believe that most things in life can't be fixed quickly your your weight isn't where you want to be your fitness and health isn't where it wanted to be where you are in your learning and career preparations and where you want to be your relationship isn't it none of these things that you actually care about can be fixed quickly you generally need to get some sort of base some sort of foundation so i think in in general this is true quick fixes ultimately will not get you where you want to go for anything that you really care about you also just brought up the the whole reason why quick fixes are so prevalent because then you know immediately like well why why are they everywhere if they don't actually work yeah well because we don't want it to take a long time i see small business owners particularly at risk and like i think it's really important for them to focus on this uh shift in belief because they're easy targets they don't know what they don't know so the foundational stuff they're probably still like if you don't know what i'm talking about you're still like i still don't understand what she means by foundations great stick around because we will help you understand that in the podcast but that means that they're really susceptible to the quick fix because that they can understand oh i should do a membership and they can grab on and and like tangibly do something and take action so uh this sort of there's this i think of it as like spoon feeding them a strategy without helping them make the right decisions to develop their own strategy it's the i'm gonna give you the fish instead of teach you to fish right it's that classic problem and i said uh my example there i was like oh and then sometimes they give you the fish it doesn't even taste good like you just said like i didn't want to eat that fish it was gross it tasted awful and why did i do it business owners are just i think more at risk in this space with the way things get marketed to them people are taking advantage of the fact that they don't know what they don't know and trying to sell them on solutions that they're not ready for or aren't right for their business or all sorts of things and it costs cost some time and money and then that could be the downfall of your business ultimately if you make enough of those bad quick fix choices how do you get the benefits of this shift now so i really want people to always be able to take some kind of action and i think on this one my thought is i remember when i first started to get the lens on what was a quick fix marketed idea versus finally started to see like oh i see what's happening there i get what that thing is they're trying to sell me so when you finally can start spotting them it's almost like you know somebody's just opened the store to this other world of seeing how the marketing and small business and online business is working and it's super awesome so i say start looking for trying to spot these how can you spot the quick fix and the copycat solutions how can you spot these things just just start to identify them whether it's every time you're on social media you see stuff in your email box or whatever it is ask yourself if this is really a quick fix solution that's just hitting on the surface is presuming a whole lot of stuff about your business or if it's actually teaching you some really fundamentals of business that is helpful and i think just starting to look at things in that way would be helpful what do you want to add to that george i was thinking so what would a rule of thumb be or a little trick to help me think have foundation over quick fixes and i guess going back to the software thing if i can't explain to you how i fix the problem then i haven't fixed it so if i'm thinking about something that i'm doing and i can't explain why i'm doing it it's probably quick fix it's probably not foundational or if i think on the positive side if i were to explain what to do to a friend or another business if i can explain here's why you'd want to do it then you're found thinking foundationally i like that those are great questions for people i think as they're looking at any of those things if they can answer those questions if their only answer to why is because it's supposed to make me money that's not a good enough answer yeah which is a really hard one for small business owners because we're all just like how do i find the way to make more money or make the money easier that is a outcome that is a result of lots of stuff going on in your business so it's not the actual problem and that's the problem of the quick fix the quick fix is selling you on the problem i don't have enough clients or enough revenue but that's not really what the problem is in your business that's happening because of other stuff other problems in your business that you don't know about that's foundational fixes we'll focus on those quick fixes we'll just try to find you know a quick way to get you more money should we talk about number two yeah i love this one curiosity over self-criticism or hiding from judgment yeah so curiosity is learning mindset that's how i think of that it's just having an open learning mindset so not being concerned with being right but with being informed seeking to understand yeah that's what i think of this the curiosity learning mindset self-criticism and hiding from judgment those aren't exactly the same thing i recognize but i put them together because i see them both as being on the counter to the curiosity right or actually i should say the other way curiosity is what can be the counter to self-criticism or hiding from judgment so self-criticism is you know you're just overly critical of your own work we're our own worst like critics hiding from judgment is that you're fearing what other people think and so they live in the same realm of i i worry about what i think of myself and then i also worry about what everybody else thinks and uh some people talk about this also as imposter syndrome so you can get this sense of like uh who am i to be out here doing all of this business coaching i'm not expert enough to do this and i'm somebody's going to find me out that i'm a fake or a fraud so that's what i mean by the curiosity versus self-criticism or hiding from judgment and in small business it shows up in a lot of different ways but some of the obvious ones will be um people not wanting to get on video or speak in an event or anything that's about publicly sharing their ideas can feel really scary especially if as a small business owner you've never had to do that before and you don't have i was thinking about this when i was moving from having to do presentations when i was in the corporate world versus when i had to do it for my own business and in the corporate world it felt safer because i had an audience that i knew which was the people that i work with and in the business and it and everybody knew it was my job to talk about these things so i didn't feel as much imposter syndrome there as i did when i went out on my own and i was like what is everybody going to think of these what are all these random strangers going to think of my ideas it was this weird challenge in thinking about how to overcome my fear of sharing my stuff that i would and it took me a while to kind of grapple with why does this feel so different from i've i've spoken in front of large groups i've been a keynote speaker i've done like i've done all these things in corporate but somehow when it was my own business it was personal because oh this is just my business and i'm just out here tuning my own horn and it felt very different it made me i was much more self-critical i had much more fear of judgment and so i think a lot of small business owners go through this but the way to combat that is to move into all of those activities with more curiosity than trying to get a specific outcome so instead of i need everybody to like me i don't want anybody to make a bad comment on my post and so i'm all worried about that instead to go i wonder what people will think of this idea right so you flip it into this curiosity space which i think um at least for me it very much when i talk to my clients about this too as soon as i switch them into this how do we approach the curiosity and and set that other stuff aside it really shifts how you approach that work and can move you away from that that hesitancy that self-criticism and hiding from judgment can create in you one thing i really like about this relationship is it's so clearly changing from a negative oriented mindset to a positive oriented mindset mindset because curiosity is at worst neutral at horse neutral so if you're into the point where you're just asking questions you're curious sort of thinking what i can learn from this you're tending not to critique yourself or attack yourself beautiful i love this camille so i've got an obvious story i think applies from last night last night he and i went to go and get pizza got a couple pizzas got a caesar salad and i asked him to carry the salad caesar salad with dressing on top and he's going back to the car and he was going to put stuff in the trunk and i was putting stuff in the front seat and then i heard something he had spilled the salad dropped the salad flipped over and fell on the ground yeah and he looked at it and i was seeing i was upset it's like we lost our salad although i had a feeling the pizza place would give us another one and they did for free and it was all great so we did that and then ivy said daddy i'm sorry i dropped the salad this is very sweet and i said you know look let's talk about what happened here that's nice of you to apologize but i don't think you need to apologize in this case you weren't distracted sometimes what happens with the obvious you get distracted by something else you're not paying attention i don't think that's what was happening here what i saw was you were walking back to the car and tell me what happened when you got there and you said well i wanted to open the trunk but i was still opening the cell and i put it on one hand i was trying to open the trunk with the other hand and it fell down i said yes you were just trying to do too many things at once to be helpful you weren't distracted so i get that so what do you think you should do in the future it's like well not do too many things at the same time exactly right you i really appreciate you wanting to try to help and you're trying to do it quickly but i think you just learned maybe slow it down a little bit and you'll be okay but you are distracted so thank you as a perfect example here how we went about it and like he felt bad he was ready for me see ah you dropped us out look at this ruin this food it's all over the ground like no none of that it was that's not helpful and there is no need for it and it's not what happened boy that theme of the also just focusing on one thing that could be threaded throughout all of these beliefs for sure like that's kind of at the heart of all of them i love this because it's such a simple way to take you out of the judgment and criticism and just into like oh well let's just talk about what happened it's the way i think to also help people um manage their fear of failure i'm not going to say eliminate it because i don't think it ever really goes away but managing fear of failure by being curious about the failure right by the way at dinner time when my wife was with us and the three of us were together we recounted that story abby wanted me to tell the story but as i told it he stopped me he said no no there was more and he gave more detail than i'd heard before even so what i like about that is that he had no fear of you know reprimand or anything and he would already he's like let's get this right about exactly what happened wrong okay great that's exactly where he wants you to be so why does this shift matter we've already talked about this a little bit but um you know with this criticism it's holding you back in your business when you are self-critical when you are hiding from judgment it is you were holding yourself back in your business unnecessarily because it's scary and you know what dang it people are judgy they just are i don't know why we're so judgy about other people but it's real so i'm not here to judge anyone about their fear of judgment because because people can be mean and judgy it's one thing to give you know good feedback but most of what people are doing when they thought just giving feedback no you're just passing your judgments along we have a whole conversation about that and what it means to be authentic in my air quotes it's holding you back and you're probably even just making yourself miserable because you're being so judgmental and self-critical all the time about your work instead of celebrating all the cool stuff that you're doing all you need is one other person a friend somebody to look at your business to tell you like how amazing and how much success you're having this happens a lot in our membership right katie so i have a membership with small business owners um and we have moments where we're just talking about like let's just talk about the small successes that you're having and they'll be well i didn't get as much done as i wanted it this is actually a theme with all my clients i didn't get as much done this week as i planned to camille and i'm sorry and i'm like well i don't know why you're apologizing to me for one but also then when they list all the stuff i'm like wow you did so many things so they're just being self-critical even about how much work they accomplished right so we're doing it at all these levels if we can focus more on being curious and you know asking like oh how did i do this week or how how did this problem come about or whatever the thing is that you're about to shift into a negative mode on i believe that will actually accelerate the growth in your business because you will stop hesitating all the time and you'll actually take action it's better for you to take an action and learn that it wasn't the right one than to just sit there and do nothing at all because that learning is progress and the sitting there over analyzing is not and you're over analyzing when you're being self-critical right oh what do i do how do i manage this it's also just good for your mental health so if you feel a lot of anxiety in your business shifting into a curious mindset i think can be really helpful i'm not going to say easy as i say this stuff is like easier said than done is also very true right it takes a little bit of effort and work but one thing you can do is just focus on what you've been avoiding because you feel like you don't know enough you're not good enough you're fearing other people's judgment find that thing that you've been avoiding and whether it's about your business or not by the way i don't care what it is so find that thing you've been avoiding and shift the goal or the objective of that thing into i just want to learn something by doing cool so you just take an action because you're just just because you're going to learn not because you're trying to impress anybody not because you're trying to do it right but just because you know the only real way you're going to learn anything is by doing the thing so that's a shift in mindset i think there a way that you can apply this shift the other thing that i thought of as we were just talking was um because i brought up the membership was to surround yourself with other people who can be curious with you how would you do that ask a question join my membership no other business owners it could be a friend it could be a colleague find those people who can enter into more of a cure you know who those people are in your life that are much more on that vein of curiosity they have those kinds of conversations versus our very judgment or the people that are always telling you the answer like spend less time with those people and more time with people who enjoy thought partnership and curiosity with you and it might take some work you might have to go out and sort of meet some people but if you already know those people you have them in your life that's another shift you can make is spend more time with them for me my question shift would be this if we spent a lot of time asking did i do well or not how did i do instead of asking that question ask what did i learn from this or did i learn anything from this or not easy question easy answer like oh wow i didn't learn anything or i don't know what i learned it'll stop you and shift your belief really yes 100 the type of question you ask matters which is i'd asked you earlier about if you read that book humble inquiry i think we'll do a whole episode on that because it's related to what you were also talking about and how to ask questions the questions we ask of others and ourselves matter more than we think and most often i find people are asking themselves the wrong questions in their business of themselves if they're performed i don't want to get into it too much here but we will definitely this will definitely be a topic because it's an important one well we've made it through two of our eight belief shifts and we're gonna pick up with number three in our next episode so make sure that you are subscribed to the podcast so that you don't miss a beat also remember in the show notes there is a link where you can download a free guide that walks you through all eight of the belief shifts and that's all we have for this week thanks for hanging out with us see ya