Imposter Syndrome enters the chat.. Day 3 Audio Diary

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Transcript

0:12

Welcome to Designing Success from Study to Studio. I'm your host, Rhiannon Lee, founder of the Oleander Finch Design Studio. I've lived the transformation from study to studio and then stripped it bare and wrote down the framework so you don't have to overthink it. In this podcast, you could expect real talk with industry friends, community, connection, and actionable tips to help you conquer whatever's holding you back. Now let's get designing your own success. All right, today I am taking us back to day three of my restructuring of the framework, splitting it into a course for emerging designers and a course for established designers. I imagine that on day three I was still working on the established designer stuff because that is an all new course. I had to write so much. I've not finished it and I am still three weeks ahead of when this audio diary was recorded and it's still going. Still not finished. I'm building out AI assistants. Yesterday I built an AI assistant where you upload the pin image that you've created in Canva and it supplies you with keywords, captions, and hashtags relevant to your ideal client as the interior designer. It's pretty cool. I'm not going to lie. That one's such a game changer. It's a game changer in my business too. Last night I sat in front of the TV and I spent 45 minutes and I scheduled two months worth of pins just using the AI assistant to run the captions. And they're really good. Like they're not like unleash the treasure trove of blah, blah, blah. They were pulling out a whole bunch of keywords around business startup. Emerging, established, like it knew who I was talking to and what you would be searching for in Pinterest. So pretty impressed with him. His name is Marius. He was named after a Les Mis character and you're going to love him. He is inside of the framework, obviously. And if you have any questions about these AI assistants, cause they can sound pretty scary. I'd be happy to chat to you about them because they're really not. They're just based on chatting to me and I'm not scary. So come and talk to me anytime in my DMs over on Instagram at oleander underscore and underscore finch. But for today, let's go back to day three of restructuring the framework and find out what's going down. Okay. Day three today was a little bit different because I had a meeting with my web developer this morning. My website is a hot mess express. It hasn't been touched since I pretty much solely worked with design clients. It's been in the back wings. I've been like, Oh, it's yeah, it's not showcasing my podcast well enough. It doesn't talk about who I'm for. It doesn't position me with all of the knowledge and like ability to help designers that I have. It just makes me look like an e designer which is fantastic because that is the crux and core of who I am, but it's not how I help. So it really, it's been In development for over six months, and I've had a copywriter write all the copy and she delivered it. And the week after she delivered me the copy, which I absolutely loved shout out to Jesse at wholesome by design, but she delivered it. And the week later I went, Oh my God, I know what I need to do. I need to savagely like smash this course into two. I don't want to deliver it as one anymore. This is what I want to do. And I had obviously given her the. The brief of when it was one. Apologies, Jesse, if you see so much of it is usable and certainly all of it is great for what will go on the website for emerging designers, but I'm going to have to do. I'm probably going to have to. Have some more stuff done around established. So all of my modding this morning was taking the mainframe of what the web developer delivered to me back then. And I uploaded it into Canva and I just made comments on absolutely everything. Can I have this in this font? I want it bigger. It needs to be moodier. See this, see that. So bossy for those wondering my web developer is actually my dad. Shout out to dad. I am very lucky to have him be so handy and helpful and has always taken care of that side of my business. But in saying that it's why probably the Canva, like the shared notion document and the Canva feedback that I have is so bossy because it's like different, it hits differently when it's your dad, isn't it? And that probably a little bit. yeah, more open around what I want and less Oh yeah, if you think so, it's very much no, off brand, no, not going to do this. I want this, I want that. And I sound like Veruca Salt, but I promise I was like, I'm also so grateful for everything that he has done and will continue to do for my business, for absolutely everything, for my life and my business. So thank you, Dab. Interestingly, I did the website stuff this morning and then I Really was a bit hard on myself, I think, because my husband's taken the two kids away camping and my third child is at daycare. And so I was given like all this child free time that I don't normally have with the specific intention of mapping out every single slide and every single script and every single thing ready for me to do. For filming next week. And I forgot that this took me three months to do the original one. Like it's actually huge. It's a huge amount of work. Today I edited all the websites up and gave all my feedback and it took me till about 1. 30, then I ran and grabbed lunch, and then I came back in the studio and I was actually doing that panic thing where I'm like, ah, I haven't been as productive as I wanted to be, oh my god, I haven't, I'm not up to module 3, I haven't got all these slides, and then sometimes you can And this happens to me all the time. Sometimes you can get yourself in such a fluster that you need to be productive, that you can't be productive. It's like when you wake up in the night and you know you need to get a good rest, you know you need to sleep and you can't sleep, but all you can think about is how you can't sleep, which in turn means you can't sleep. So I was doing that spiral with my productivity today, and I was feeling very much ah, then my husband FaceTimed with the boys and was like, how did you go? And it feels like pressure Oh my God, you have to get this course done in the like day and a half that I've been given. It's not like I've got a three week break. And so I decided to be a little bit kinder to myself because I was really starting to spiral and I wasn't getting stuff done. done properly. So I had a break for dinner with Marley and he and I had a little Mummy Marley one on one date and we had fish and salad and corn and he was able to squeeze his little lemon on his fish himself and I set it up with like candles and we had a little date at home which was cute because he's two and he loved, oh he's nearly three, but he absolutely loved it because we don't do a lot of one on one stuff that was beautiful. Then I popped him to sleep, which was good timing having him in daycare worn out all day. He went back to sleep by seven 30 and then the night shift started. And can I tell you, I was watching selling Manhattan in the background. I put a foot spa down. I put my feet in a foot spa, had the computer on a like laptop table and I was working through them and I was getting through the slides, but this one's a lot slower because I'm not reading. Like refilming and redesigning an original, amazing framework that already works. I'm actually creating a new course. So this one it's slower and I needed to give myself that sort of permission to be like good quality stuff takes time. You don't want to just smash out a bunch of slides and talk nonsense when you film and deliver a crappy course. Like I'd rather delay the making of it for two weeks and be really proud of it to market then rush it. I gave myself a little talk and then I think I'd say about 9 45, 10 o'clock tonight, I really got a flood of imposter syndrome and you're not writing a course and you're not a business owner or course creator or thought leader or anything. If this doesn't happen to you, like absolutely. I just got to a point where I was teaching like omni channel marketing. I was making the slides and I know this stuff. I've been, I remember being in boardrooms and What 2014 talking about this like omni channel approach and how do we be consistent across all customer touch points and la. But all of a sudden I just got hit with this imposter syndrome. Oh my God, like my business doesn't make a hundred K a month. So who am I to teach designers how to scale? And what does that mean? Am I in the right spot? And then I. Like slap to myself out of it. Cause I was like, look at how many designers you've worked with and actually got results for them. And my business isn't at a hundred K a month because I am designing the success that's right for my young family. I don't have time, not even if it was all automated. I would need staff. I would need customer service. I would need a level of growth that I don't want right now. I'm never going to say never when they're all in primary school, I might look at my business differently, but right now I don't want the kind of success that some of you inside of this course might want, but the roadmap of what I'm teaching. Can be applied whether you want to have, whether you want to go from 5k months to 10k months, 10k months to 30k months, 30k months to 50k months, whatever that looks like for you, this can be applied. But just because I haven't applied it in my business, there is a reason. And when I say I'm very happy with the subscription model that I have with my framework and with the ability the space that I leave to be high touch inside of these courses I'm chatting to these girls in Slack every day, they're sending me documents, I've just done my investment guide. Can you take a look and give me feedback? And Actually, in their Canva document, making comments, the same with my private coaching clients, we're doing market research, they're doing a SWOT analysis, we're doing this, they upload it, I go in, I review it, I give my feedback. It's important to me that I am available for that level of support because it is what makes the framework so different to other courses where it's very self paced and you might see the course creator once a month or once a week or whatever on the calls. But not much in between. I know, and every frameworker will attest to this, that I know their names, their businesses, their kids names. I know what, where they're up to in the course. Probably how you get 60 percent of them to actually finish the courses. You're right there being like, how did you go on Saturday? What did you get done? There's an accountability and an awareness that I don't see across other courses. Having said that, I'm not in other courses, so who knows, but I assume from the feedback that I get, and I've had a lot of people in my course that have done other courses that exist in this exact group, Membership for Interior Design as Space, and have given me that sort of feedback, so it's nice to know. What else did I do today? I didn't spiral too long on the imposter syndrome thing, but I wanted to be really honest about the fact that it came up because I think it's important that people know that imposter syndrome isn't just like sharing your work when you're a newbie or like when you're first starting and imposter syndrome isn't just every now and again, because I have. Perhaps you have diagnosed anxiety, for example, that's not why you have imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, I believe, comes from a deep care for something to be fantastic and I get imposter syndrome whenever I'm really passionate about what I want to deliver and who I want to support and what I want to give to them. And my imposter syndrome comes from being like, am I enough? Is there something else that they, that I haven't given them that would help them? Have I thought of every single need and desire that this Client has or this student will need and then I get doubtful that Oh my gosh, what if I've forgotten what it's like, because it's been six years since I started or in the case of this one, the established designer, it's like, Oh, what if someone comes in and they're established and they've got 10 years experience, how will I teach them? And that's where I need to go deep and really think to myself, you've got six years experience in interior design. But you've got another 15 in business before that. So you put those together, you've got over 20 years experience in a combined skill set that is incredibly relevant to what you're teaching. So I'm not just teaching, What I did in my e design business in the last six years, because that would only get you that same result. I'm actually teaching you like when I used to be a national sales manager and when I used to work in senior leadership in the Australian division of STA travel. This is like stuff that you learn. Over years and years of leadership conferences and management conferences and training programs and two weeks learning how to do this and that. Like we did so much upscaling. It's one thing I'm really grateful for when I worked for that company. I got sent overseas. All the time for free on amazing trips, sailing the Greek islands, going to Europe, like just doing all these things and they were very big on paid skill development for the staff. We always do like personal development days and they were really fantastic and I've been able to bring a lot of that knowledge to place into this established designer thing. I thought I would record this one tonight to, I'm curious to go back and listen to this at some point probably when I decide to make changes in another two years or build another cause and really listen to the process again and remind myself that the imposter syndrome piece is so normal and it happens every single time and it will happen again probably just in the lead up to the launching and going, do I really want to do this again? Do I have the energy to sell this if nobody's buying? Do I have the resilience basically to sell this in the face of no one buying? Because that's always something that's in the back of your head. What if I build this incredible thing and I've sacrificed my school holidays with my babies. I'm not spending time with them. They're with their dad. They're having core memories, time of their life. Please know that they're well looked after, but I am in this studio hoping to better the financial outcome for my family for the second half of the year, because things have been really slow this year and like all things in business, you look at it and you go, how can I, my main objective to splitting it out was to make it cheaper so that it could have better greater impact and more volume and more people will be able to say yes, because of all the conversations I've had in the last six months, where there are people who need what is inside of each of these courses, but they can't say yes, because they cannot physically commit to 200 a month to get it done. Anyway, that was a lot, wasn't it? So what, so recap, what did we do? We did the website today and I built out the slides for the foundation module and the first two slides of advanced marketing, which were about what is the difference between advanced intermediate and beginner marketing? And what am I going to teach you? What are you going to learn? There's things about, as I said, lead magnets, there's websites, webinars, live webinars and launches. There's thing, all sorts of things. You gotta be in it to experience it. I don't need to tell you everything. It's not about a case of it's got X modules and this many video lessons. It's more, I want to explain the science behind the learning outcomes that I'm teaching and what I want you to have at the end, which is really clean, designed business that operationally. That is operationally excellent, that ticks all the boxes, and that utilizes the automations and the systems and advances in technology that exist to make things easier for you and to put this all to bed, all this nonsense, mucky, middle, muddy, treadmill y kind of feeling stuff. bit stuff, it's out of the way so that you can be intentional and targeted with who you're talking to, what you're doing and how you're going to bring on more clients because you just have the space for it. All right. I need to go to bed. Oh my gosh. Another big day. Okay. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye. That wraps up another episode of Designing Success from Study to Studio. Thanks for lending me your ears. Remember, progress over perfection is the key. If you found value in today's episode, go ahead and hit subscribe or share it with a friend. Your feedback means so much to me and it helps me improve, but it also helps this podcast reach more emerging and evolving designers. For your daily dose of design business tips and to get a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes, follow at oleander underscore and underscore finch on Instagram. You'll find tons of resources available at www. oleanderandfinch. com to support you on your journey. Remember, this is your path, your vision, your future, and your business. Now let's get out there and start designing your success.