269. Journal With Me: From ‘I’m Not Ready’ to Letting Yourself Be Seen

Samantha Hawley (: 00:00

Welcome back to Beyond Awareness. If you listened to Tuesday's episode with Morgan Spect, this is the strategic journaling companion episode. We talked about branding on Tuesday, but the logos, the content and websites weren't really the point and what we talked about mostly. The point was that so many of us are sitting on something like a business, a book, a dream project.

And we keep finding a reason that it's not ready yet. The website isn't right, or the logo needs work, or we say I'll start putting myself out there once it looks more like me, or when I have more mental capacity. And Morgan said something right towards the end that I haven't stopped thinking about since she said it. She said, you're almost never as far behind as you think you are. And another thing she said,

is that we should give our audience and ourselves permission to shift and evolve. And so today we're not talking about your brand. We are going to the belief underneath the delay because again, the actual brand is rarely the reason that we aren't putting ourselves out there and afraid of the visibility. So we're going to find out what is. Go ahead and grab your journal and as always the

prompts that I'm about to share will also be in the show notes for you to come back to later.

Prompt number one. Think about the project, the business, the offer, the thing that you've been sitting on, or maybe the update that you want to make to it. What is the reason that you've been giving yourself for why it's not ready to share yet, or why you're not ready to work on it yet?

prompt to. Now go one layer deeper. If that reason disappeared tomorrow, if the website was perfect and the logo was done and you knew that the offer is perfect, what would you be afraid of then?

Prompt three, where did that fear come from? Think back, like was there a time that you put yourself out there and it didn't go the way that you had hoped? Or someone whose opinion made you shrink? What did you decide about yourself after that? And maybe this is related to a past business experience or something that happened in high school or when you were eight years old.

Prompt four. Finish this sentence honestly. If people actually see me and what I'm building, they might think, and don't filter it. Write the thing that you haven't said out loud yet, and give yourself a moment to really think through it.

Prompt five. How long have you been letting that thought make decisions for you?

And what has staying invisible, not putting this thing out there, actually cost you? Not just in business, but in how you feel about yourself.

And finally, prompt six. What is one small, specific way that you could show up or share your work this week? And not perfectly, not fully branded, but just real. Write it down. And that's not a someday plan, by the way. That's this week, potentially even today.

Amazing job. That is your full journal entry for today. And I want you to notice something. I want you to notice that the brand really wasn't the problem. That is just a cover that we say. We say it's kind of like we don't have enough time. Very rarely is time actually the problem. It's always the belief underneath, right? The story that you've been telling yourself about what happens.

when people actually see you. Morgan gave us permission on Tuesday to start messy, to evolve as we go and to give our audience more credit than we do and even to use Canva to create your logo and also to hire help. now I'm giving you permission to do the same thing, but with yourself. You don't have to have it all figured out to be worth seeing. You just have to start, start messy, start somewhere.

If this resonates with you, save this episode so that you can come back to it because this is the kind of thing that we need to hear more than once and that you need to journal through more than once because I promise something will come up in the future where this belief will be tested and you can always come back to journal through it and something new will pop up for you because you just did the work and something new, like you broke through something today and the same thing.

won't come up again. So congratulations on that. But follow along with Beyond Awareness so that you don't miss next Tuesday.

And if you're ready to clear some of the mental clutter that's been keeping you stuck in other areas of your life, grab the Calm Mind Blueprint. That's the free resource that I have with five strategic journal prompts that will take you only two to five minutes a day. The link is in the show notes for that as well. Thank you for journaling with me today, and I will see you next week.