Working from old wounds

Two examples of how childhood beliefs can keep our businesses stuck

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Janie wanted to write a book, but she found herself avoiding the project like the plague.

Sala was hoping to make more money, but she didn’t believe she could actually make her business work well enough to see a revenue increase.

Both Janie and Sala had one thing in common: They were working off of old beliefs, which were keeping them stuck.

Janie’s parents had been hard on her — a lot of tough love and high standards. As a kid, she was steeped in the idea that there were only two options: Perfection, or failure. When I asked Janie about her first memory of feeling like she couldn’t get moving on a project, she quickly jumped to age 5, when she didn’t win a science fair competition. Her father refused to speak to her afterward; because her work wasn’t perfect — because she didn’t win — he felt that it wasn’t worth doing.

Now, in her business, Janie was stuck on writing her book because — you guessed it — she felt like if the book wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth doing. Writing a perfect first draft is basically impossible, so Janie just didn’t do it. Of course she didn’t do it! If failure (which risks survival, for a kid) is at stake, our monkey brains will throw up a protective barrier every damn time. The result? Procrastination and perfectionism.

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Sala, on the other hand, didn’t believe that she was worthy of success. She wasn’t stuck on taking action, like Janie. But Sala was frozen because she struggled to believe in her own capability. Someone else can probably do it better than me, Sala said when we dove into a conversation about finding a new client to boost her income.

When I asked about the first time she’d felt like this, Sala took me back to age 4.