243: Holly Worton ~ How to Trust Yourself in Business

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today’s topic is thanks to Louisa, who suggested it in the Facebook group. I talk about trust: how to trust yourself, your decisions, your abilities, your intuition…and also how to trust the Universe/Source/whatever you call it. This is a massive topic to go into, which is why I’ve added lots of links to supplementary materials that can help you with this.

Listen to this episode

What You’ll Learn

How to trust yourself, your decisions, and your abilities
Why a strong sense of intuition is important in trusting yourself
Why knowing yourself deeply is the key to self trust (and how to actually do that)
How to dig up the mind crap that might be getting in the way of you trusting yourself
Things you can try to help you more easily trust in the Universe/Source

The Questions

Who am I? Look at values, priorities, interests, skills, strengths
Where am I? Look at where you are in each area of your life, and also what your current mindset is like
Where am I going? Look at where you want to be headed in your business and life, and what mindset you need to make that happen

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast episode 243. This is your host Holly Worton, and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about trust. Trust in business, trusting yourself, trusting your decisions, trusting your abilities, trusting your intuition and trusting in the universe, source, whatever your call it. But before we get into today’s episode I wanted to mention the new bonus episodes you can find in this podcast feed. So, this is something that I have recently blogged about, there is a way to add episodes from another person’s podcast into your own podcast feed; so, in the situations where I have been a guest on someone else’s podcast I recently asked them for the code that I needed to insert that episode into my feed. So, if you look back through the feed for this podcast, in whatever it is that you use to subscribe to this podcast, whether it is Apple podcasts, or whatever, you will see some episodes that are marked ‘bonus’. And I think there are just three of them in there now. But they are marked ‘bonus’ and the title of the other podcasts that I was a guest on, so if you want to look for any new episodes, that perhaps you haven’t listened to, you can scroll back through the feed and find those. I have backdated all of those to the date that then went live on the other person’s podcast if that makes sense. So, you can find some extra material there.

So, in today’s episode, as I said we are going to talk about trusting yourself, trusting your decisions, your abilities, your intuition, trusting source, the universe, and I think that this is a really important topic and I think it is something that I have probably touched upon in the past but haven’t actually focussed a whole episode on. So, this episode is thanks to Louisa who recently put a couple of ideas into the Facebook group, when I called out for suggestions for a topic. So, this is really good, because like I said, it something that I have touched on the past but really haven’t gone in depth into. And, I think this is a great topic, I think this is something that is really important; and it is life-changing and business-changing. So, thanks to Louisa! If you have any ideas for topics, for things that you would like to hear me talk about, either on my own, or with Jo Casey, or with one of my quarterly co-hosts, just drop me a line, either in the Facebook group, you can go to https://www.hollyworton.com/group and pop in the Facebook group and just let me know what you think, what you would like to hear, or you can email me at [email protected], or contact me on any of the other social networks that I hang out on.

So, let’s go into the topic: trusting yourself in business – and this is not just trusting yourself in business, because of course everything is related, so this is trusting yourself deep down at the core. Now this is something that I have personally struggled with, a lot, and this is something that I have really come a long, long, way in working on. I am at a point now where I really feel like I do trust myself. And this is not just trusting my intuition, which is something that I talked about in my Business Intuition book, it is just trusting me, it is about knowing that I know what’s right for me, knowing that I know what the best decisions for me are, even if they are hard decisions. Knowing that I have all the answers within myself, and I don’t have to ask other people for advice; and this is a really powerful place to come from, this is a place of really solid, personal power. When you can trust yourself, and trust your decisions, and trust in your ability to do the things that you want to do, that feels great. And I am not saying that everything always goes your way once you get the magic trust piece in place, because there are still challenges and unexpected things coming up, but it is like you have this kind of secret tool to more easily face the challenges, because you know how to make decisions and trust those decisions and you are not constantly second-guessing yourself.

So, like I said, this has been a long road for me; and this is probably something that I gained as a result of walking down this road to improving my intuition, and getting to know myself, and accepting myself, and doing all the mindset work that I have been doing for the last almost five years now. So, it has been kind of something that I have acquired as part of this process of doing the mindset work and of doing the work to accept myself and who I am and where I am and what’s going on with me. And clearing the blocks, clearing the limiting beliefs, clearing the mind crap, that I always talk about, that was getting in the way of me trusting myself. So, for years, I was always the kind of person who would ask other people for advice and I would agonise over decisions and I never knew what was right, and it was like I would sit down and I would make those lists: the pros and the cons; and I would come at it from a very logical perspective: ‘I am going to make a logical decision here’, – and that doesn’t always work for me. Often making an intuitive decision works much better even if it doesn’t logically make sense to me at the time. I used to second-guess myself, I would make a decision, then I would kind of go back on it, or I would go back and forth in my head; and it was just so tiring, and frustrating, to not trust my decisions and not trust myself and not know if I was ever making the right decision and asking other people for help, giving other people’s perspectives and opinions priority over my own. That was really the way I did things, and it was just really not very empowering at all. You always feel like other people know more than you do. That’s how I felt, because I didn’t trust myself.

So, today we are going to talk about how you can get that trust. So, this is kind of going to be two parts, first I am going to talk about trusting yourself, your decisions, your abilities, your intuition and then finally I am going to talk about trusting the universe, the source, God, Goddess, whatever you call that higher energy, existence, whatever. Because I think those are two very different kinds of trusts, one is trusting you and then one is trusting this kind of supernatural thing, which you may or may not believe in and if you don’t believe in then you just disregard that part of the podcast. But this first bit is really the important part in my opinion, because you are you, you have always got you, you’re the only thing that you are always going to have, so you have got to trust yourself it is just absolutely life changing. So, to me, trusting yourself, a big chunk of trusting yourself comes from knowing yourself. Of knowing who you are, knowing your skills, your strengths, your values, your priorities, your interests; of knowing where you are in life, in your business, and knowing where you are going, what’s this vision that you have for yourself. And who do you need to be, what do you need to believe to get there? So, this is a big thing, and this is something that I have been working on for years, it is something that I have tried to help people with in an online course that I used to have called the Business Mindset Clarity Intensive. Terrible name, I am the first person to say that I am not great at naming things! I thought it was a great course, it was a flop. I never managed to market that thing; and this is full disclosure on that; because I want to start bringing these topics into my mindset books and into this podcast, because I think it is really useful stuff, even though I haven’t known how to package it up until now. And I think this is also really useful for you to hear, as a listener, because sometimes we create things and we think that they are just the greatest thing ever and they don’t work and I think that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is bad, or the content isn’t useful, but rather that we haven’t packaged it right, or we haven’t presented it correctly, or we haven’t shown people its value. And so sometimes we can repackage that content into other things, so that we can still use those things to help people but in a different way, in a way that is maybe more digestible, or easier to understand, or easier to work with, or whatever.

So, let’s get into this stuff that was previously packaged as: the flopped course (!) Business Mindset Clarity Intensive, this is kind of an overview of it; and I think it is a good way to approach this, because you can really delve deep into this stuff but probably a half-hour podcast is not the best place to do it. So, let’s start with knowing yourself.

First question: Who Am I? And you can get clear on this, and this is a life-long thing, really, getting to know ourselves; but you have got to do the work, you have got to get clear on: What are your values? What things are important to you? What are your priorities in life? What are your priorities in business? What are your interests, both in life and in business? What are your skills? What stuff are you good at? What are your strengths? And then you might be called, conversely to look at: What are you not good at? Because this stuff is really important to know, so you can get support with it in your business. It is like with this podcast, I always see people online and in podcast groups talking about: Oh, what was the longest you ever spent editing an episode? And one woman said: 12 hours! And I just thought: my God, if I had to edit this thing, there is no way you would have had 243 episodes of this podcast, you would have had maybe not even one. Or you would have had them, but just terrible quality. So, that’s why I have outsourced them to someone who can do this properly, because I wouldn’t want to do it. So, it is important to look at stuff that you are not good at, not so that you can improve on those things, but so you can get support and help or outsource those parts. So, who are you? And if you go on my blog and you search for these things: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? You will find some really old blog posts, I think from about 2011/2012, and those will kind of walk you through step-by-step some of those things and I will link to those in the show notes. Because I think they are old blog posts, and they are not necessarily related to business, but I think they are useful. So, who are you? What are your values? What are your priorities? What are your interests? What are your skills? What are your strengths? What are the things that you are not good at?

Next, you want to look at: Where are you? Where are you in life? Where are you in your business? I remember years ago training in coaching, and coming across the ‘Wheel of Life’, and I eventually adapted one to the ‘Wheel of Business’, to see where you are. This is such a basic life-coaching thingy, but I am a visual person, so I find it really useful to look at all the different areas of my life and the different areas of my business; and get that visual representation of where I think I am on a scale of 1-10, in each of those areas. So again, totally old school basic coaching, I find it really useful. You might find it really useful, you might not, but give it a try. So, this is looking at where you are, where are you with your marketing? Where are you with your sales? Where are you with your clients? Where are you with your income? Where are you with these different areas of your business? You can also look at areas like giving back, because I know a lot of people in heart-centred, purpose-driven businesses really like to give back to charity or to their community. Where are you in business in terms of integrity? This is an important thing, at least for me, because integrity has such a high value for me. So, in my first business I had a business partner, wasn’t always acting from a place of integrity due to decisions that I had to make based on the way thing were working with my business partner. That felt like shit, now integrity is such a huge value for me that I have made sure that is built into my business, and then I am operating a business really from a place of integrity, because that is so important to me. So, that could be one thing that you look at.

What about your network? Do you have a great network of people that can support you? And help you with your business, help you with the things that you are launching? You can look at where you are in terms of visibility? How visible do you feel like you are? What is your business-life balance like? Do you feel like you have enough ‘me’ time, or is your business taking over everything? You can look at how your business is growing, what is your business growth like, on a scale of 1-10? What’s the alignment? How is your business aligned with your values? And you can look at all of those areas and see where you are on a scale of 1-10, or however you choose to rank it. And, like I said, I think this is really important for me personally, because I am a visual person and I like to map these things out, and I like to see where I am visually because that really, really, helps.

You can also look at: where are you in terms of mindset? What are your limiting beliefs? What are your blocks? What are your fears? What’s the stuff that is keeping you stuck? And I always talk about the importance of digging this stuff up, so that you can then do the mindset work to work on it. Also look at the stuff like secondary gain, like how is this stuff serving you? How is the mind crap serving you? So, I have been doing a lot of work recently to clear stuff from my first business, and I was just working with my friend Cara Wilde on this, and something that has come up the last couple of weeks that I have had a session with her, we have been looking at frustration. And how frustration, I get a lot of secondary gain from frustration and this is something that… when I first saw it I thought: What, how is frustration serving me? So, because the way Cara works is by channeling her guides and client’s guides, and kind of getting that deeper or higher level guidance, one of the things she channeled, I am going to read this because it is an example, because like I said it didn’t make sense to me, the Guides said that: ‘Frustration is a protective emotion for me, that I feel frustration as a way of avoiding the deeper emotions that are underneath.’

So, this is something that came up last week in a session, it came up again today, and we worked on digging deeper to find out what those other trapped emotions were that I was avoiding by focussing on the frustration that I was feeling. So, that was kind of the secondary gain, frustration was serving me because it was keeping me safe from those other emotions; and this is the stuff that can be kind of hard sometimes to get to on your own, which is why I always recommend doing the mindset work on your own, but also working with someone else on a regular basis to try to dig this stuff up, because it can be hard to see stuff like secondary gain on your own. So, that’s another important part of the question: Where am I? Where am I in my life? Where am I in my business?

The third question to getting to know yourself is: Where am I going? So, what’s that vision of what you want for your ideal life, your ideal lifestyle? Your ideal business? Where do you want to be going? What is your plan? What are your goals? What do you want out of your life and your business? This is really, really, important because if you don’t know what you want, how are you going to get it? And a lot of times people tend to move away from the things that they don’t like, but they don’t necessarily know what to move towards. So, it is like: I don’t want to feel frustrated, I don’t want to feel disappointed, sad, angry, whatever… but I don’t know what I want instead. That’s why it is really, really important to spend time with the vision of what you want for your business? What do you want for your life? What do you want your business and life to look like? What do you want them to feel like? What do you want them to sound like? What do you want them to experience with your life, with your business? And this is really important to then go back and look at the mindset bit, and say: Who do I need to achieve that vision to achieve those goals? What do I need to believe about myself in order to achieve this vision and achieve those goals? And if you have my mindset books: Business Beliefs, Business Blocks, for example, you can go to the sections on self-worth, self-confidence, value, personal power, self-worth (I said that again because it is so important). Go though those sections and look at what beliefs you might have around those areas and what blocks you might have around those areas; and those two books are really short, really actionable, they can help you bring up the mind crap and bring it to the surface, so you can do the mindset work on it.

To recap, knowing yourself, and knowing yourself deeply and accepting yourself for who you are, not who you wish you were, or who you want to be, but who you are today, knowing yourself is an absolute vital step on trusting yourself. So, again, looking at who you are, where you are, where you are going and all the mindset stuff around that and doing the mindset work. I am going to say this over and over and over, because if you are not doing the mindset work at the deeper levels, at the subconscious level, at the energetic levels, you are not going to see changes. So, when I talk to you about this stuff… my books and my podcasts aren’t necessarily meant to be interesting and informative, they are meant for you to go away and do stuff, do the mindset work, I am going to say that over and over and over again.

So, again, knowing yourself: who am I, where am I and where am I going? And all the mindset stuff around that and doing the mindset stuff around that is such an important part of knowing yourself, which is going to help you to trust yourself, because when you know yourself, you know your values, you know what’s important to you, it makes it so much easier for you to trust yourself. And when it comes to trusting your intuition, again really having that deep connection to yourself and knowing yourself deeply is going to help you to trust your intuition as well. And I have got podcast episodes on trusting your intuition. I have got a whole book called: Business Intuition with really practical step-by-step stuff, so that you can learn how to trust your Intuition because that’s just so powerful. And I am going to link to all of this in the show notes as I always do.

So, that is the bit on trusting yourself, trusting your decisions, trusting your abilities, trusting your intuition. As I said, at the end I wanted to talk a little bit about trusting the universe, source, God, Goddess, Higher whatever, if you believe in that, if you don’t now is the time to say goodbye, I’ll see you next week. So, assuming that you are okay with this topic, trusting in the universe, that’s an even harder one for me, I have gotten to the point where I am really, really good at trusting myself, and trusting my intuition, and I do believe that there is a higher kind of energy thing that I call sometimes universe, sometimes source, sometimes goddess… but I don’t necessarily trust, the way I trust myself. And I am not going to get into the philosophical reasons about why I think that might be, because I don’t think that’s necessarily useful, but here are some ways that help me trust in the universe.

First one, and this one is really, really, challenging for me is to let go of the outcome and just surrender. That is so damn hard for me, I am going to be honest. This is something that I have definitely improved upon, over the years, and I have gotten better with, but any time I have been really attached to the outcome, like I send an email with a link to sign up for something, and I am like: I really want people to sign up for this thing. It doesn’t really go very well. But when I look at it from: Okay, I’ve got this thing, I am really excited about it, I am going to invite people, see if they want to play with me on this, have fun, maybe I will make some money with this new thing, maybe I won’t and I will just need to tweak it or do something else. But when I come at it from that perspective of: Have this thing, I love it, I am excited about it, I am going to invite you to see if you want to do it with me. That’s a much more kind of detached energy, and that’s when things seem to go well, and I seem to get good results. But when I have got that like: Ah I really need people to sign up for this thing, and I am just so attached to it… that’s when it is crappy, and I get zero results. {laughing} So, again, this is an attitude that I have really struggled with, and I don’t have the answers on it, but if you can keep that in mind, letting go of the outcome and just surrendering to the process. Because sometimes things don’t go the way that we want them to for a reason, because that’s not the path we were supposed to go down, we were supposed to go down this other path, and sometimes we don’t see that until we have ‘failed’ and I am saying failed with air quotes because I don’t believe in failure, I believe in feedback. So, if something doesn’t work, I look at why it didn’t work, what’s the reason, maybe I am meant to be looking somewhere else maybe I need to be looking somewhere else and that’s not that place I needed to go. But again, that comes from surrendering, letting go of the outcome and being flexible and being willing to look around and see what other pathways and options there are. And I am not going to sing the song because you don’t want to hear that!

So, gratitude, this is something that I do on and off, I don’t have a daily gratitude practice, I have in the past, not always great at keeping it up. But, when I am feeling like shit, and I am feeling like a failure, and my mind is full of ‘mind crap’ and stuff that I need to work on, but I am self-sabotaging so badly that I don’t do the mindset work because I just feel like shit, that’s when I sit down and do some gratitude work. I will sit down and do a list of maybe ten things that I am grateful for, and why, and that will help lift me out of the crap and into a more positive space. So, even if you are the sort of person who says: I don’t want to do gratitude work every day, have that in your toolkit for something that you can do to turn yourself around when you are feeling like crap, and help you to trust in that source, universe, whatever, by acknowledging the stuff you already have and that are grateful for. Because we have so much, even if we don’t see it, because we are so focussed on the stuff that we want instead.

Look at cycles, so I know that I have talked about a woman’s monthly menstrual cycle and how that relates to focus and energy in business, and I have podcast episodes on it, with Lisa Lister which I will link to the in the show notes; but, cycles, not just something that happens to our bodies, our businesses go through cycles. And sometimes you are in a dip and you are kind of going down and you are feeling like crap, and then if you just keep working on stuff or pivoting or doing something different, you will come out of that dip and come back up. Seth Godin wrote a book called The Dip, that I read years ago, I think this is a ten-year-old-book but check that out because that talks about coming out of the dip, and it talks about cycles in business. Let go of worry, letting go of worry can help you to trust in the universe, because it is clearing that crappy energy from your mind. I know we talk a lot about limiting beliefs, and blocks, but worry is something that can really mess up your mindset as well. So, if you can just let go of worrying about the things that you can’t control and focus on taking action on the things that you can control, that can help you clear your mind and help you to trust in source. Again, taking action, taking inspired action, and working towards the things that you have control on and can do something about, can also help you to trust in the universe, because it can help you see all of the opportunities that you have; and it can help you to see a positive way out of the space where you are and take actions towards where you want to be. And I know that may not seem obvious how you taking action can help with your trust in the universe, but when you are taking inspired action, based on the stuff that again is aligned with you, and comes to you as something you want to do in your business and life, rather than stuff that you think you should do, stuff starts flowing, things start happening, and you can see opportunities coming to you that you might not have seen before if you were in that stagnant place of not taking action.

So, that brings me to flow, which is the next thing. In my Business Intuition book, I talk a lot about ways you can get into flow. Flow – when you are in that flow state – it is so much easier to trust in the universe, to trust in source, because you are just going with the flow and when obstacles come up you easily find ways to go around them, or to overcome them, and everything just works right. Everything feels good, even if like I said you have challenges, it is easier to overcome them. And by working more often from that state of flow, it is easier for you to trust in the universe, to trust in source, because you can see how sometimes you need to experience something that doesn’t work so that you have more information when you get on the right path with the stuff that is going to work.

And, finally, recognising that not getting what you want can be a gift because, like I said, sometimes we really want one thing to happen, but there is this other thing that we can’t even see because we are so stuck on the one thing and it is not until we don’t get that thing that we see the second thing. And that can be such a gift sometimes to not get what we think we want, because maybe there is something better for us, maybe there is something bigger for us, that we can’t even see because we are so fixated on the thing that we want. And that kind of brings me back again to the start, which was talking about letting go of the outcome and surrendering to the process, to flow, getting in these states of mind and practising these things can really help you with your trust in the universe and source, because it helps you see that sometimes there is kind of a higher reason for things, that you might not always understand until things have happened, and then you can look back and be like: Oh, that made sense.

So, to recap, to trust in source, the universe, a little bit more, to let go of the outcome, focus on gratitude, recognise that there are cycles in things; work to let go of worry, let go of the things you can’t control, take inspired action on the things that you can control, try to get into that flow state and don’t wait for it to come to you, do stuff that will help you get into the flow state, and like I said, Business Intuition book has a lot of ideas on how you can do that. And finally, recognise not getting what you want maybe a gift because there may be a gift around the corner that you can’t see right now.

So, this is kind of a big topic to approach in a half-hour podcast, but I hope this has given you ideas on how you can trust yourself, trust your decisions, trust your abilities, trust your intuition, trust in the universe, source, whatever it is that you call it, because this is such a powerful place to come from. This is such a powerful place to operate your business from, to make decisions from in your life, to help you to create the business and life that you want.

So, if you have any thoughts about today’s episode, questions, comments, whatever, please drop me a line, you can email me at: [email protected], or you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and get in touch. I would also love to see you in the Facebook group, Business Mindset Alchemists, so we can continue the conversation there. Podcasting, as I always say, is such a one-way conversation, I just talked at you for the last 35 minutes, so I really want to know what you think of this, what your challenges are, what you have tried, what has worked, what’s not worked. Please share, I would love to hear. If you head over to https://www.hollyworton.com/group you will be redirected to the Facebook group, I am in there every day Monday through Friday, I will approve your request to join and give you a welcome in the group, I would love to see you there.

So finally, thank you so much for listening, if you enjoyed this episode please leave a quick review on iTunes, it would mean the world to me and remember to visit hollyworton.com/243 for the show notes on this episode. I have mentioned a lot of things today and I am going to be providing links to all of that in the show notes.

Next week’s episode is another fabulous co-hosted episode with Joanna Hennon, which I look forward to sharing with you, we always have so much fun when we do these episodes, so I look forward to bringing it to you again.

That’s all for today, I look forward to seeing you next week and in the Facebook group in the meantime. Thank you so much and have a great day.