Ep# 96: Tough Economy? What The Best Strategy for Business Growth During Challenges Really Is, and How Managing Pre-Traumatic Stress Will Set You Free
Episode Summary
Are you feeling the pressure of tough times impacting your business?
Dive into this episode where we unravel the secrets to navigating economic contractions and other setbacks, both immediately and long-term.
In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to get caught up in the fear and uncertainty of business downturns.
But what if I told you that even in the midst of contraction, there are strategies to not only survive but thrive?
Join us as we flip everything on its head and explore the hidden opportunities within tough times. Learn how to steer your business towards success, regardless of external challenges.
In this episode,you will:
Gain clarity on how economic contractions can trigger reactive behaviors in your business, and learn how to interrupt this pattern to maintain growth and stability
Discover the most effective business strategies for navigating tough selling moments, ensuring your business remains resilient and adaptable.
Master the mindset tactics necessary to stay calm and focused amidst uncertainty, allowing you to make strategic decisions and unlock new levels of creativity and self-concept
Scroll up and press play now to unlock the keys to thriving in tough times and emerge as an unflappable CEO ready to conquer any challenge.
Want to detox your reactivity and unlock your full potential in business?
Listen to the full episode now and download the free Somatics in Your Pocket tool at theuncommonway.com/reactivity-cleanse.
Schedule a call with Jenna about joining the Clarity Accelerator to dial in signature offers and strategies and a first-rate mindset.
https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule
Sign up here to get on the waitlist for Power & Potency, the new mastermind for highly accomplished women entrepreneurs, and hear all new information as it's released:
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Leave a voicemail for Jenna and get her personalized advice for your business:
https://www.theuncommonway.com/talk
Episodes mentioned
#95 Spring Cleanse: Eliminate Reactivity in Your Business to Manifest Steady Growth and Abundance.
#94 Spring Cleanse: 7 Day Guided Thought Cleanse to Detox Your Mindset & Encourage Growth for a Successful Business
#92. Get Through High Stress and Overwhelm Quickly for Peak Performance & Mindset Growth, Joy and Better Results as a Service-Based Entrepreneur
#67. Revelations from the Clarity Collective with Women Entrepreneurs Amanda, Gabi, Ale and Kat
The Uncommon Way is led by business coach Jenna Harrison, who helps women entrepreneurs feel confident, find their ideal clients effortlessly and avoid overwork so they can manifest abundance in their business and life.
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Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] If you are anywhere near the online space, you've probably heard people letting you know that times are tough. Buyers aren't buying right now. So we're going to talk strategy, mindset, and yes, even energetics to help your business thrive and so that you know how to navigate any tough times in the future.
You're listening to the Uncommon Way business and life coaching podcast. The podcast that helps women entrepreneurs get clear on signature offers and strategies that sell themselves so you can lean back and stop the hustle. You will learn to maximize your mindset, messaging, and strategy, and step into the uncommonly successful business and life you are creating.
Here's your host, top ranked business coach and reformed over analyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison.[00:01:00]
Welcome back everyone. How are you? I am very passionate about this topic and things might get a little heated. So strap in. Remember how in school, you'd learn something in theory, but then your class would go out and see it applied in the real world, and it would just make so much more sense? That's what we're doing today.
Because last episode, we talked all about reactivity in business, which is when we make decisions and take actions based on reaction rather than intention. And now, we're going to talk about We're going to observe it in the wild, specifically relating to the fear of business revenue declining due to economic contraction or whatever other factors.
By the end of this episode, you will understand how moments of economic contraction, or even worries about future economic contraction, will [00:02:00] make you reactive if you don't interrupt that pattern. Causing your business to contract. You'll gain clarity on the most important business strategy for getting through tough selling moments, and the most important mindset tactic to calm yourself.
And you'll get the opportunity to realign your business, recommit to the principles and values that you hold dear, and open yourself to new levels of trust and creativity and self concept. Wow, even just saying these things got me all passionate. But we've only just started. Okay, in this episode, I'll be speaking specifically to my girls in the online marketing space, but it really applies to everyone because we all get into fear cycles about our business.
And life, of course. Now, here's some quick background. I was on Instagram the other day. Right now happens once every week or two, but that will change soon because [00:03:00] social media is something that I'm looking forward to playing with more this summer. But anyway, this ad caught my eye, and I just noticed, I've seen several of these kinds of things lately, whether they are in emails or on ads, and, and I'm sure you've seen them too.
Basically, they're saying, everything is changing. Selling isn't easy anymore. Hardly anybody's buying. The bubble done popped. The sky's falling. Now, regardless of whether or not you, too, are hearing this in your particular industry, listen up. Because, at some point, there will be fears of economic contraction, or new disruptive technologies, or whatever it is, and I want you to be prepared.
Now, notice when I say things like economic contraction and disruptive technologies. I don't know, purchasing behavior, ads costs rising, algorithm difficulties. Notice that creates a little heartbeat [00:04:00] increase as you're hearing it. And now imagine that multiplied by all the people who are feeling the same.
And then when they start talking about it, it seems even bigger. And then there's a vibration of fear that's just lingering in the air, like the smell of french fries around a fast food restaurant. And it gets to the point that even if your business has not experienced any drop in revenue whatsoever, nothing has actually changed for you.
You're stressed in advance because maybe something will happen. This, my friend, is called pre traumatic stress. It happens outside of business, of course. It can cause sleeplessness and awful flash forwards. Maybe it's about a member of your family being harmed, or you pee your pants right as you're giving a keynote speech, or your business revenue isn't what you wanted it to be, dun dun dun.
Once you're feeling this way, what do you do? You spend lots of [00:05:00] brain space worrying about it that you could spend creating value for people. Maybe you stay up late drinking wine and watching Palm Royale because Emily in Paris hasn't started yet. So you're tired the next day and your work isn't your best.
Maybe your messaging shifts slightly and you become more pushy because you're feeling desperate. Maybe you say things that aren't in your fullest integrity. You start working extra hours and resting less, in part because you're not as productive anymore, but also because your old belief that only those who work hard have success has now been triggered.
And then when your dear husband casually asks, How's business? You snap and bite his head off. I'm working as hard as I can, okay? And guess what? Your business revenue does go down. Or, even if it doesn't, you've created a life you despise with clients you dislike or feel guilty about. So it's all the same.
Now you might be tempted to blame the [00:06:00] economy for that and those quote unquote difficult times. But said with love, the true cause was your reactivity due to pre traumatic stress, and your inability to manage it and access your highest level thinking, creativity, and problem solving. You can't create a business where you lean back more and hustle less when you're getting panicked and leaning forward in that anxious, hustly energy.
You can hold that leaned back energy no matter what's going on in the world or your business. I promise, you have that power and you can do so wherever you are in your business. Even though, yes, in the earlier stages you're usually doing more than later on, but it's about the energy you hold and even how all of that relates to manifestation if you're into that.
But plus it gives you tools to detox that tendency, specifically from the vantage point of your body, of your nervous system, [00:07:00] which we won't be going into as much in this episode, but really contributes to your resilience and your calmness. I want to help you be the unflappable CEO with the calm nervous system and the military grade mindset.
It was like, okay, we've got some incoming from the rear flank. We've got hills and rough terrain to the northwest. These are the conditions on the battlefield, here's how we're going to proceed. Hey, if you want true clarity about your secret sauce, your people, your best way of doing business, and how you talk about your offer, then I invite you to join us in the Clarity Accelerator.
I'll teach you to connect all the dots, the dots that have always been there for you, so that you can show up like you were born for exactly this. Come join us and supercharge every other tool or tactic you'll ever learn. Clarity From Facebook ads to manifestation, just go to theuncommonway. com [00:08:00] slash schedule and set up a time to talk.
I can't wait to be your coach. Okay, I first started hearing the doom and gloom talk back in 2023, and it was from people who have seven figure or higher businesses that I was in groups with. It was like, Okay, we can talk about this behind the scenes, one to another, like, I feel like people aren't buying like they used to.
But my business was tracking along fine, so I was just curious, I was just listening. And a few things were happening in the digital landscape that I could see as facts. Yes, at that time, there was recession uncertainty and inflation shock that had people thinking twice about what they were buying in the short term.
Kind of a wait and see. Especially when they were on the fence about things, or things weren't really that important to them. Also, people were becoming desensitized a bit to a tactic which has been a driver of the selling of [00:09:00] courses a lot, which is urgency. You have to buy now. Doors are closing. Now, buyers became increasingly sophisticated, and they knew that if they just waited a couple months, they could join then.
I personally don't choose to bring in people who are driven by FOMO. I want their urgency to be internally driven by their deep desire for change and growth. Which is why I have the always open model that I have, and I don't use a lot of urgency when I'm talking. But for some people that had relied on this, they were seeing a change.
Now, hardly any of my clients sell low ticket courses, so I really didn't think about addressing it. But I need to now. Because I'm seeing it permeate. So here's what I can tell happened. Those entrepreneurs who were feeling a contraction because maybe they had been selling with urgency and maybe they were selling things that were kind of like, eh, this would be good to have, [00:10:00] maybe.
Well, guess what? Those are the very people with the big advertising budgets and the big lists and the big follower counts. So they started sharing their experiences and very human thoughts. And with that broad reach and that sense of authority, it really started creating a feeling of fear in the people who were listening to them.
And then what happened after that is possibly something like those people started freaking out, even though, like I said before, nothing was necessarily going wrong with their businesses. And so then the ones with big budgets were listening to them, and hearing that reflected back for them, so they start talking about it as a given.
And then it just becomes a fact, and it's coming into their Facebook ads, and unfortunately, the most successful ads are the ones that really drove that fear home. Because fear does capture people's attention, as we know from the news. [00:11:00] Until finally, we get to where we are now. Where you might be happily going about your day on Instagram looking for cat reels, when there in your feed is an ad talking about how many businesses fail, how dire the situation is, and how if you don't know exactly what's working at this moment, Then your business might fail.
So let's just take a breath collectively. Know that you and every other person listening to this podcast is taking a breath and choosing to step back and get the big picture view so we can manage our very human emotions rather than react the discomfort of that panic. It reminds me so much of the pandemic.
There was so much fear in business and personal. It was a huge lesson in pre traumatic stress, because so many fears never came to pass. Will the economy tank? Will I end up living under a [00:12:00] bridge? Will I lose all my retirement savings? Am I going to die? All of you listening to this, thankfully, did not die.
And yet emotionally, many of us went through the hell of those things in advance. Because our brains fool themselves into thinking we'll have a better chance of controlling negative outcomes if we worry about them a lot. When usually the opposite is true. So here's the big picture. Listen up. Any recession or contraction is generalized scarcity.
It's people thinking they might not have enough and hanging onto their money rather than spending it and letting it flow through the economy. Businesses decide not to invest, they hang onto their money, individuals hold off on buying decisions, they hang onto their money. So it's not a given that there is less money, necessarily.
Unless you were coming off a boom economy, and then the government's [00:13:00] purposely pulling money out of circulation to cool things off. But often, by the time you know about a recession, the government's doing the opposite. They're pumping money into the economy. So, if money doesn't actually disappear, but there's less floating around, where does it go?
Well, of course, there are monetary distribution problems. Where it ends up clumping around certain groups of individuals, but typically it goes into savings or lower risk investments like treasury bonds or gold. This is why how we think is so critical. When we think nobody has money, or when we think there's not enough collectively, that creates recession.
When we think there's abundance, collectively, and we're all spending, there's expansion. It all starts with thoughts, which is precisely why I began the three part cleanse that we're in the [00:14:00] middle of now with a thought detox. Expansion doesn't happen and can't happen in our businesses when we have unhelpful, unexamined thoughts.
So before we expect to enter a new phase of growth in our businesses, we need to shed some of them. You can do that for yourself by listening to podcast number 94, there's a link in the show notes. And there's also a free 7 day guided process that you can access. And if you want support to uncover helpful thoughts you might not even realize are holding you back, and really create new more powerful ways of thinking that become like a full butterfly style reinvention and transformation, then join us in the Clarity Accelerator.
Because you'll do that for both your mind and your business. Now that you've got the big picture, let's talk the mindset tactic to calm yourself and remain neutral, rather than getting swept up in panic. And it is the [00:15:00] concept of equal airtime. You just make sure you're directing your brain into non negative thoughts at least half the time, and therefore you're also giving your body a chance to calm itself half the time.
So, in these times, sometimes it's really challenging to just be in the positive. And if that's you, that's okay, but at least give equal airtime so that you can approach a level of neutrality and stay out of reactivity. Which is critical for manifestation anyway, because what you focus on grows, so you don't want to constantly be focusing on the negative.
Now, I get this is challenging when there's a threat, right? I'm not saying it's a walk in the park. A well functioning brain will pay attention to threat. It's designed that way. But we can do hard things. We are entrepreneurs who are choosing an uncommon way. And we know that in order to be an effective CEO of our [00:16:00] company, we need to be the CEO of our mind.
So we won't stay with the easy path, which is just letting our thoughts ruminate and spiral and go wherever they want. We will choose, on purpose, to redirect. And if you're thinking, well, like, redirect to what? Again, I recommend you get yourself a coach who's going to help you find alternative thoughts that your brain isn't naturally considering about everything in your life.
But I'm going to give you some of mine that you are free to borrow as well. For one, it is a false narrative when you automatically think, the economy is contracting, therefore my business will contract. It's a thought error. You haven't lived through that future moment, so you don't know. Look at the pandemic, again, and how many industries, entire industries had blockbuster years.
The stock market did amazingly well. We did not enter into a [00:17:00] global economic depression. And that's possible for you, too. It doesn't matter if your entire industry's tanking, you can still do well. Most of the people I work with are working with their clients one to one or in small groups and you only, therefore, need to find 10, 20, maybe 40 humans.
In however many billions who want your solution or product now, not they need to be convinced or scared into it, not who grudgingly decide to get it done, but who genuinely want to and are so happy that you or your company cross their paths. This is not an insurmountable problem. You can find a few humans.
I personally would also choose to focus on how I'm in this for the long haul, so anything that challenges me helps me grow. And therefore, ultimately benefits me and the business. Now my clients are in it for [00:18:00] life, too, I know, and I'm sure you are as well. So this should be a relatively easy thought for you to adopt.
That moments like these are the best times. And that's true whether you're just starting out or you've been in the game for years. Now's the best time to be in it for a couple reasons. If there is in fact some contraction in your business, you'll really learn how to think like an entrepreneur. To remain resilient, problem solve, to really build up that mindset, 3D, to experience human sensations and really play this game of life, I would want a little variety, right?
I wouldn't want boring, I'd want some challenges. And then if your business does well, then you really get to internalize how important your mindset is. And how you are the one that determines your results, not generic economic indicators, or industry gossip, [00:19:00] or whatever's going on with your friend to your right and to your left.
You'll witness how staying cool headed is a game changer. And very importantly, this, right now, this time when you might be tempted to compromise yourself in some way, is an opportunity to question everything and to Realign and become more of who you are, which is the best possible business strategy in hard times.
In any time, really. But it's to become more aligned, become more of who you are. What is your uncommon way? That is what the universe is waiting for you to find out in these moments. And what that strategy of realignment looks like if we break it down is really just the three simple steps that I teach and talk about all the time here.
Which is, the first part, know yourself, right? But [00:20:00] now, it's like you're going even more so with all of these things in times like these. And so, you're getting truer about what you are really about, what you really want, right? What you are, what your superpowers are. And then the second prong, know your people, you're getting to define and get to know your ideal people even more and create signature offers.
That they excitedly want to exchange money for, and that you can deliver with total integrity. And then the third part is just marrying those two things in your messaging. You're talking about why you, and why them, and why this way of working towards a solution. And hopefully talking about it in a way that doesn't compromise your principles and values.
Because, again, that's the whole purpose. of this period if we are in a growth mentality, right? We are really recommitting [00:21:00] to these things for ourselves. Because sure, those things are easy to do when you're feeling completely relaxed and sure that your business will grow and that everything's going along fine.
But in more challenging times, are you going to start selling with fear based marketing? Are you Are you going to start trashing other people and other businesses in the industry in order to make yourself look better? That can be a tendency when your back is against the wall to say it's because these other people were doing it wrong that you haven't gotten your solution, or That you need to work with me, or that the problems that are happening now in the industry are due to them.
And by the way, if you have noticed yourself doing any of these things, or something more benign like chastising the people that are in your audience, it's okay. You get to choose this moment to ground back into a different way of being. All of us have sent out an email or [00:22:00] two that have made us cringe afterwards.
And we sometimes need to go to that dark place to really clarify for ourselves why we never want to go there again. Like when I speak with people on discovery calls, sometimes they'll tell me that they Regret purchases that they've made, that they haven't gotten the results because this kind of program that they invested in didn't offer this thing, and it would be really easy for me to be like, you're right, that's why you need to work with me.
But I don't choose to do that. I almost always will stop the call and have a conversation about it because I think it's important enough for their mindset to really believe in the decisions they make, for one thing. for listening. And I really do believe that most people that are creating courses or putting any kind of service business out there are actually good people trying the best they can to help people find solutions.
I generally believe that. [00:23:00] Of course there are a couple bad apples, but everybody that I interact with are people that also want to create good in the world. And those courses and things do provide information and systems and tactics that, if implemented and implemented properly, would bring you massive value.
But it may be that you aren't able to implement them just yet, maybe because of your mindset or other reasons. But you can in the future, and by then the impact will be even larger for your business. This is kind of a tangent, but again, I've talked to so many women who tell me they regret prior purchases, and carrying around shame over your decisions, and more importantly, skepticism about your decision making capability, is totally toxic for your business.
And you. And if you don't yet have the bandwidth to really have your back regarding those past [00:24:00] decisions, I will. I've got your back. You can't blame yourself for information you didn't have at the time. I remember purchasing Amy Porterfield webinar courses way back in the beginning of my business when I wasn't able to implement them.
That doesn't mean there's not great information in there for me now. If there's thing that you've purchased that gave you zero value, even sometimes in knowing what you didn't want or what not to do. Then really, you need to go back and reflect because you're missing out on something. There are always lessons.
And all of your decisions are moving you forward because you learn more. You're more likely to succeed after a string of things that didn't go your way than you are if you hadn't had those things because you've been learning what doesn't work or what you do need at that moment. And the lessons that are there stay with you always.
Whether or not you're implementing [00:25:00] them now. And then my friend, when you are no longer trying to solve your discomfort by actions that you'll later regret, or diminish your pain through wine or any other diversionary tactic, that's when you get to ask the big questions. Okay, how am I moving through this?
Right? Where do I need to uplevel my trust? What new creativity is available to me? What new things can I think of that I might not otherwise have thought of? And how can I watch my self concept, the opinion that I have about myself, and the thoughts that I have about myself, blossom as I step into new levels of power and new levels of who I'm meant to be?
You got this, my friend. And remember, deep down, you know who you are, and each day you are stepping further into what you're here to create.[00:26:00]
Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the Clarity First strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit theuncommonway. com. See you next time.
