82: 5 Signs You’re Holding Yourself Back in Your Business

Imagine what it would feel like if you were fully yourself in your business. If you stopped holding parts of yourself back and you stopped wondering if that version of you is too much, that people won't get you or that people won't want to work with you.

In this episode I walk you through five signs you may be holding yourself back in your business, including how this can show up in your offers, your content and your voice, your client relationships, your decision-making, and the roles you play.

This is part two of the three-part series we’re in right now, and it builds on last week’s conversation about the feeling that your business is asking for a new version of you.

Key Takeaways

• An offer can still be good and yet no longer reflect the depth of your current work.
• Visibility struggles are often connected to self-permission, not just strategy.
• Your client relationships can reveal where you are still overgiving or abandoning your own standards.
• Indecision is often less about confusion and more about not yet feeling safe to honour what you already know.

Journaling Questions from This Episode

1. Where are you packaging your work smaller than it really is?
2. What part of you still doesn’t fully get to speak?
3. Where are you still softening your standards to avoid disappointing people?
4. What decision have you already made internally but haven’t honoured yet?
5. Who are you still being inside your business? What old role are you still unconsciously playing out?

Other episodes in the series

81: Your Business is Asking for a New Version of You https://www.buzzsprout.com/2004120/episodes/18938673

Keywords: holding yourself back in business, feminine embodiment, spiritual entrepreneurship, nervous system regulation, business alignment, identity shift, feminine leadership, spiritual women in business

🔥Get this free somatic audio + worksheet to untangle your business challenges so you can take clear next steps with ease ▶️ https://tertiariegler.com/embodied-expansion-practice/

📌Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only.  It does not constitute therapy, medical advice or business coaching.

Transcript

Imagine what it would feel like if you were just fully yourself in your business, if you stopped holding parts of yourself back and you stopped wondering if that version of you is too much that people won't get you or that people won't want to work with you.

Now, if you listened to last week's episode, then you'll know that this is a three-part series that we are, that you are listening to, that I'm recording for you. And last week, we started talking about your business that is asking for a new version of you. And we're diving deeper into that in these next two episodes. 

So, how to know that your business is asking for a new, different version of you? It's typically where there's nothing really wrong on paper, but you're feeling a little bit, I call it itchy. It's like there's some discomfort there, you want to scratch it, but you don't yet know how you're going to either reach the spot or ease the scratch. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I'll link it for you in the show notes.  

It's episode number 81. Your business is asking for a new version of you. That feeling, that itchy scratchiness, it doesn't mean that your business is broken. 

But what it does mean is it's a cause for celebration because it means that you are no longer available to keep leaving parts of yourself outside of your business. And there is a little voice inside of you that is saying, let me out, let me be seen, let me be heard. And so, your mind might think that you need to get more clear on your niche, or that you need to create yet another offer, or that you just need to burn it all down and start over. 

And sometimes we need to do some practical things like this to create shifts. But what's really happening is that it is much deeper than that. As I said earlier, it is a cause for celebration because as soon as you start feeling that itch, that you are ready to step into something different, it's a sign to me that you are expanding, your desires are expanding, your self-expression is expanding, and who you are being is expanding. 

And so often, we hold ourselves back out of fear, and I have deep compassion for that. And in this episode, we're going to look at some of these five signs that you are holding yourself back, that you are leaving parts of yourself, your full self out of your business. And I'm also including journaling questions in all five of these signs for you to sit with this week and to reflect so that you can begin to develop some awareness and start to notice where this is playing out in your business. 

As you know, if you have been with me for any amount of time, the first step to change is to first become aware you cannot change what you don't know. Before we dive in, this is Tersia and you are listening to the Feminine Embodiment Podcast. It is a show where I teach women entrepreneurs practises and tools to get out of your head and into your body so that you can feel more fully alive and magnetic and have the impact you are here to have with more ease. 

And here we explore what it really takes to lead, to grow and to build a business from your embodied power. And today's episode is for the woman who knows there is more of her here. There's more voice, more magic, more truth, more audacity, more edge. 

And she is done trying to contain all of that. If you are ready to step into your next level, let's dive in. So one of the hardest things about the season in business where we have that itch is that it can be very difficult to explain what is wrong because there's not really a crisis, right? It looks like everything is working. 

The clients are coming in. There's no huge emergency, but there is this discomfort, this friction that happens on the inside. And this can be very disorienting. 

So what typically happens is that our minds try to find some practical solution to this. So you want to diagnose what's going on. You want to optimise yourself. 

You want to fix what is wrong in your business. But what I want you to know is as long as we continue to leave these parts of ourselves outside the room, our wild selves, our inconvenient selves, our witchy selves, our bold selves, the selves that are less polished, the selves that are more opinionated, the selves that don't always play nice, the selves that are more fully expressed, when we let that self out to play, this is where everything changes. And I understand, I deeply understand how we tend to build our businesses and we tend to move through the world keeping those parts of ourselves tucked away because it feels safer. 

I can guarantee that most of us at some point in our lives have been accused of being too much, of being too loud, of taking up too much space. The hyper-masculine culture that we live in literally profits from us not being in our power, not standing in our full power. And what is the best way to keep someone from their power is to make them believe that their power and being seen and having an opinion and being wild and witchy and inconvenient, that that is too much and that that is undesirable.

And yet that is the truth of who we are and so we cannot deny that. And if we do deny that, if we do deny bringing these full parts of ourselves into our business, what happens is we start to feel disconnected from our work. We start to feel irritated by things that that we used to be able to tolerate. 

We start feeling resentful of our offers. We start feeling like we are always on and that we don't have a choice in it anymore. And I want you to know that that is not true. 

Of course you always have a choice. And so that's the lens that I want you to listen through today. Where are you not letting your full self lead? So the first place that this often shows up is in your offers. 

And this is quite, it can be quite difficult to to catch because from the outside your offer might look good and it sells and it's helpful and people get results. And the offer was most likely beautiful for the season that it was created in. So the season that you were in at the time that you created it, it maybe reflected your confidence at the time, your ability, your skill, your self-trust and your sense of internal safety to be seen. 

But since then, I bet your work has deepened and your medicine has matured. And so the transformation that you deeply desire to facilitate for your clients, if that has become more potent and more layered and more embodied, then at some point that old container, that old way of putting an offer together is going to start feeling too small. It's important to talk about this because often when there's a problem with our offers, what we tend to do is we tend to think we need to like tweet the messaging or we need to change our positioning or write a better sales page. 

And the thing is, messaging is super important. I spent the better part of a year working on my messaging and I'm still working on my messaging because yes, it is key, especially when we have an online business. But the messaging here is not the issue. 

This is a truth issue. It's a permission issue that you are sitting with. When you keep on ignoring this calling of your medicine and the calling of your soul, this is what creates the disconnect, right? We start creating from depletion and from emptiness and from borrowing our energy instead of creating from that full, confidently self-expressed devotion, which is the magic in our work. 

In each of these sections, I have a journaling question or a reflection question that I'm going to leave you with to ponder and explore and contemplate. I'll also leave them for you in the show notes. And so the first question that I have for you to reflect on is, are you still packaging your work smaller than it really is? Are you still offering packaging and showing up in your work, making it look smaller than what it really is? The second place that this can show up is that it shows up in our content and in our voice.

And this is one of the biggest areas where I see we abandon ourselves. You know, often I hear women say that they have a visibility problem, but I don't think it's visibility as much as self-permission that is the problem. And those are two completely different things, because often you know what it is that you want to say, you know what you're thinking, you know what your strongest perspectives are about something, you know what your opinion is, you know what wants to come through, but yet there is this break inside your body that makes it not feel safe enough to let that version of you speak. 

Right. And so what happens is you communicate through a filter. And I freely put my hand up here as someone who has deep experience with this of hiding my perspective and my opinion in how I show up in my content and in my voice.

And I deeply understand what it takes to feel fully safe in letting this full version of myself come to you when we communicate through this filter. Right. We are again this palatable, contorted, constricted version of ourselves. 

And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. It works until it doesn't, because over time it strangles our voice. 

Right. It becomes a prison that we keep ourselves locked in and not saying this to shame you at any point in time, but it is important for us to know that if you are feeling constricted, this is what is happening when we continue to communicate through filters. What happens is your voice doesn't carry the full pulse of your aliveness and your people can feel that. 

And this is why I will die on this hill of embodiment when we become sensitive to the sensations and the feelings in our body. What happens is we don't lead from only our thoughts anymore, but we lead from our whole being. We lead from the full version of ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our knowings, our emotions, our sensations.

And that's where our truest magnetism, our creativity and our power lies. And so the question that I want you to ask yourself here to contemplate and reflect on is what part of me still doesn't fully get to speak? What part of me is not fully yet expressed? The third place that it shows up that our full self is not leading is in our client standards and the relationship with our clients. Often the dynamics that you can see, the misaligned dynamics, let's call it that, that you can see in your client relationships, is often where you are still abandoning yourself, where you still neglecting yourself, where you are still leaving yourself behind, most likely to stay safe, stay chosen, to not be rejected. 

And so you might deeply desire that you want more mature client relationships where you can actually rely on your client to respect your boundaries or to pay in full or to honour the terms of your agreement with each other. And yet if your nervous system, if your subconscious, if your being is still showing up in a way where you stay safe, where you get chosen, where you don't get rejected and you protect yourself from those things through giving more and through accommodating always and through making exception and through holding everything for everyone, then that is what's going to show up in your relationships, right? When we hold this beingness in ourselves of having to overgive, it creates all kinds of power dynamics in our interactions, relationships with clients, and that is what erodes our power, right? This is how we leak our power. So we end up with clients that drain our energy. 

We end up with clients that need to be rescued all the time and clients who either consciously or unconsciously expect you to do the transformation, the heavy lifting and the work for them. So I want you to ask yourself, where am I still softening my standards to avoid disappointing people? Where am I agreeing to things that I don't want to necessarily agree to so that I don't disappoint other people? The fourth place that this often shows up is in our decision making. So this is a very big one as well because often we think that we lack clarity, but we don't actually lack clarity. 

What we lack is permission to show up like the woman who trusts herself, all right? And there's that whole permission thing again. So often deep down you already know what needs to change, how you want to show up, what needs to be created, what is complete, what you're no longer available for, and what we keep on doing is we keep on reopening the decision. We keep on treating this like an internal debate. 

We keep on circling the thing, that truth that we already know. We get stuck in these endless loops of thinking and processing and considering and asking for signs and asking for permission and asking for reassurance and asking for, you know, just a little bit more time so that we can get more clear before we move further. And again, holding up my hand here as someone who has deeply struggled with this in the past. 

So I want to say this very lovingly but very clearly. One of the clearest signs that your old self, that self that doesn't hold the fullness, your full magnetic creative power, a sign that that self is still in charge, is that you keep on negotiating with what you already know, okay? So our intuitions are not unclear. We know what it is that we want. 

We know where it is that we need to move to, but we don't feel safe yet to do that. And it makes sense. If you have spent lifetimes or a lifetime being rewarded for being careful and being responsible and being measured and being likeable and non-disruptive, then it can feel quite edgy. 

It's an act of self-reclamation. And so the question that I have for you regarding your decision making is, what decision have you already made internally but you haven't honoured that yet, right? So you have clarity already but you haven't honoured that yet externally. And then the final sign of where your full self is not fully leading is in the role that you play in your business. 

Here it's not so much about what you are doing. It's about who you believe you have to be in order to hold that success you desire. And so if you are running your business from this identity or this role that says, I'm the one who carries everything, I'm the one who makes it all work, I'm the one who can't drop the ball. 

If that identity, that role, that version of you is active, then of course your business is going to start feeling heavy. That version of you is in direct contrast to this powerful, magnetic, magnificent, sensual, witchy self of yours that desires to take the lead in the way in which you show up in your business, in the way in which you engage with your clients, and in the way that you express yourself into the world. And so stepping into your embodied CEO doesn't mean now all of a sudden you are becoming better at carrying more stress and more responsibilities and that you can hold a lot more now. 

No, you step into this version of you that is more anchored and you allow your genius to be turned on and turned up all the way in how you bring your gifts in serving the world. And so the final journaling question that I have for you to contemplate and reflect on is, who am I still being inside my business? What role am I still unconsciously performing? And the invitation is for you to sit with these five questions, to journal on them and to spend some time letting them help illuminate your truth. If this episode landed with you and you feel that what you're really craving isn't just a better strategy in your business, but to step into your most audacious, magnetic and magic leadership, then I have an invitation for you. 

I'm soon opening the doors to the first round ever of She Leads Embodied, which is my newest programme for spiritual business owners who are ready to step into their leadership. I'm super excited about this new offer that I'm bringing to you and I will soon be telling you more about it. Thank you so much for being here with me today. 

I appreciate you deeply and I'll speak to you in the next one. Bye.