Our entrepreneur mindset and thoughts can be interrupted with the business and challenges of life.  The truth is sometimes we need more than just motivation.  

Today my friends, I’m going get really personal with you because I had something happen this week that really disrupted my work. It really paused me, threw me for a little loop. 

I’m going to share this with you because I believe we all have life that happens that can knock us down, make us want to just crawl under the covers and watch Netflix for like six days. Right? 

But you can’t do that, right? Especially when you have kids, you have a job, you have responsibilities. You can’t just crawl under the covers or into the closet, even when we want to.

I have a niece, Abigail, who has had cancer for three years. It’s been most of her life and it started with kidney cancer. They treated her for that and it metastasized. They treated her, everything was good. Six months later though, it was back in her lungs and she has fought lung cancer for the last year and a half. And Tuesday, she lost her battle to cancer and passed away. My 7 year old niece, my husband’s sister’s little girl, just a beautiful, delightful little girl.

Found Myself Overwhelmed

I tell you this because I found myself knowing that I had scheduled already started my challenge for the week.  I’m in the middle of a launch and I know my people are the kind of people who if I tell them what’s going on, they’re going to understand because we’re all real women, right? We are women with jobs and kids and family and pursuing the dream.

But at the same time I was really in a limbo. It wasn’t time to pack up and go out of town that would be a frew days.  First, I had to go home and tell my children. That was a very difficult thing for me for all of us.

But I still was going be home in the evenings for a couple of days because the funeral ended up being a week later

So anyway, I’m still home and I am real upset. Sad. 

The Anxiety Builds

My husband ended up going out of town to be with his mom and his sister. I’m home, I have my two kids, I’ve got to tell them about their cousin. I have two kids who have all the events in the evenings. Some I can just reschedule, some I can just cancel, some I can get them to. I’ve got my launch without my helper, my husband.  It felt uncertain and overwhelming, and incredibly sad at the same time. Just heart breatking.

I’ve already told the group I’d go live every evening at 8:00 pm so people could schedule and be there. Which of course I know everyone would understand. 

But that little perfectionist voice in me, that little mean bitch, that’s what she was being, was like you’re not going show up one of those times because you’re going go to a funeral and you’re going to lose customers. People will not want to be your client because of this. 

So I started having all these doubts. All these worries pop in, started worrying, how am I going to get this kid to that lesson? I was worried about cooking breakfast, getting lunch, getting the clothes washed before we go out of town.

Who’s going watch the cat? Oh, my gosh I never thought about that. Who’s going watch the cat? All these thoughts start popping up. 

And it’s hard. I found myself with my anxiety, even just thinking about it right now, my anxiety just started growing and growing and growing. I was already emotional… because as women, and emotions aren’t bad, but as a woman I can easily get emotional.

But with the loss of my niece I was just devastated. my heart was broken. My heart is breaking for my sister in law and her husband and their family and for telling my boys everything.

I needed a strategy!

And I got to this place where I was like, OK, I’m a life coach. I’m a mindset coach. I help women change their mindset so they can have their six figure business.

I can take care of this because what I know is having emotions aren’t bad. Feeling sad? Not bad, right?

The worst thing we go through life and do is feel. Emotions are the hardest part, and having those negative emotions wasn’t bad, it just meant I was human. And I had to process that.

I found myself thinking of all the strategies I had.

First I breathed!

So I decided, you know what, I’m going to first feel these emotions. 

I let myself feel, I let myself cry, and I just completely stepped in and embraced that. And the next place I found myself was ok I don’t want to feel this nervousness and this anxiety over what might or might not happen over the next couple of days as all the events laid out. Because at this point, I didn’t even know what day the funeral would be. I didn’t know any of the information. I was just starting to worry. Worry? What if? What if? What if?

So I took some deep breaths. That’s the first thing I did. I was like, “Just breathe.”  So I sat there and I took my 5, 5, 7 breathes where I breathe in for five seconds, hold it for five, and then breathe out for seven. And that calmed me. That was amazing. 

Second I Remembered!

After that I went into a little time of meditation. Did not spend long, ten minutes to just really feel. Just close my eyes and I thought about my gratitude memories. I have a couple of memories that are my go to memories when I need to change my state of mind, when I need to feel love, when I need to feel gratitude, when I need to feel just joy.

I immediately went there. So one of those memories is, I can get choked up talking about it, when my Noah was born. They couldn’t regulate his body temperature and they wouldn’t hand him to me for 15, 20 minutes.

Finally, I had to kind of like raise my voice and insist that they give him to me and let me put him skin to skin with me. When I did that, the whole room, and I’m talking there’s like four or five neonatal people in there rushing all around the nurses and doctors with me, and the room went silent.

The neonatal doctor was like let’s try it. They brought him in, we did skin to skin contact with him, they put a warm blanket, and all of a sudden his body temperature started regulating. He started breathing the way they wanted.  Everything he needed was me. 

That’s one of my most precious memories, because I can just get teary and choked up just thinking about it. So I went straight into that memory, feeling that feeling, because when I could not feel that anxiety and feel that gratitude and that love and that joy at the same time. 

Conclusion:

When you are starting to feel anxious, nervous, overwhelmed, where you can’t be your highest version of yourself, that is going to be that confident, courageous CEO. You have to shift into gratitude. You have to shift into joy, and that’s what I had to do. 

Next Steps:

Until Next week.  Go grab your dreams and don’t let go.

XOXO,

Angela