Sometimes the reason that you're not making sales has nothing to do with strategy or your offer. This is when you already know what you need to do, you're really clear about it, and you're ready to do it, right? You need to follow up with that person or send an email or post about the offer or just make the ask and say the price out loud. But suddenly you find that list of 12 other things that your business desperately needs you to do before you can do any of those things, right? So today, in keeping with our theme about sales in the month of September, we are gonna talk about how to recognize when the thing that you are calling a strategy problem is actually just plain old fear And I'm gonna share with you a really simple practice that I personally use to move through those moments, because the goal is not necessarily to get rid of our fear. We talked about this last week. It's that we need to stop letting fear run the business. All right, rock stars, let's get into it. Hey there. Welcome to the Mindset to Market podcast, your go-to space for practical tools and solutions to the everyday challenges of being a creative and soulful entrepreneur living in a material world. I'm your host, Deborah Smith, a holistic business coach and marketing strategist with 17 years of experience. I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and learn daily marketing practices that balance personal wellness with financial growth and impact. I'm here to offer you support with creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect, messy action so you can experience daily breakthroughs as you grow. If you're a purpose-driven entrepreneur building an online business, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Let's address the elephant in the room, which is that my voice sounds husky and rusky and like I was screaming at the top of my lungs, because I was. Last week I was in New York City for back-to-back events, including a two-day podcast event followed by Saturday night I went to see David Byrne perform the final show of his Who Is This Sky? tour at Forest Hill Stadium, and you better believe I was screaming as loud as I could during the standing ovation, and I just I was like, " worth it, and I would do it again if I could. So here we are. I'm gonna do my best to speak clearly. So I wanna start by sharing something that happened while I was at Podcast Movement. This was a two-day industry event, and I met tons of amazing people, a lot of whom have been in this industry for a long time. And, I just learned so much. And I had several conversations where I used the phrase ethical sales, and I noticed every single time. Women would practically stop me mid-conversation and be like, "Wait. Ethical sales? Say more." And it kept happening- And so I started paying attention and talking with these women a little bit more because these weren't just people who didn't understand business, right? They were running very successful podcast businesses. They were smart, accomplished, experienced women who have a lot of years of experience, but there was so much emotional charge around the word sales. And when I would pair that with ethical, they were, magnetized to that. So underneath all of those conversations, I kept hearing versions of the same fear that was surfacing, which is "I don't wanna bother people. I don't wanna sound pushy. I don't want somebody to think that I'm only talking to them because I want their money. One person said, my biggest issue is that I, I wanna talk more about my offers, but what if nobody responds? And then it's out there hanging out there in the public with no likes and no comments. What if I send the email and nobody clicks? What if I make an offer and nobody buys?" Just all of this is the same thing, right? It's fear. What if people think I'm full of myself? And so here's what I want you to notice that I noticed, which is that n- again, none of these were marketing problems, right? None of these were concerns about their offer or their copy or their sales page. It was just fear of rejection, fear of seeming, a certain way in the eyes of the potential consumer. And that's important because, if we're trying to solve fear with more strategy, we could spend a tremendous amount of time working on the wrong problem. So We talked a little bit about this in episode 139. I, I, I, I talked a little bit about, the different ways that we disguise fear as strategy, right? So it's tricky because fear rarely walks into your office on a Monday morning and is- announces itself, right? It's not like, "Hello, Debra, I'm fear. I'll be sabotaging your revenue this week." No, it's much sneakier than that. It's much more sophisticated, honestly. Fear can sound extremely reasonable. It could sound like, in your head, the voice in your head is saying something like, "I should probably go through the sales page one last time before I start sharing it and make sure that everything sounds right. Make sure, grammar check it one more time. Double-check, the industry pricing and make sure my price really hangs in there." Or, "I'm not completely sure about this offer. Maybe I should wait until I have more followers before I start talking about it. I need a better post before I promote this. I'm gonna tweak the images a little bit more." I, I can't tell you the number of times I've had a client spend days on the images and the fonts and things before they posted about their offer. And sometimes it's j- just, "I just emailed people three days ago. I don't wanna keep bothering them." These things go through all of our heads, and my personal favorite is, "I just need to get more clear before I do this." And sometimes we do need more clarity. I mean, a big part of my work with people is about clarity. So sometimes our offers do need more work. Sometimes our messaging truly is not landing. But I want this to be data-driven, not just a guess that you're making. So sometimes you know exactly what you need to do, but you're just afraid to do it. You're scared that the outcome will not be the one that you're desiring. And so there's a question that you can ask yourself that can cut through a lot of this noise really quickly. And that question is, if I knew with absolute certainty that the person on the other side of this conversation wanted what I was offering, then what would I do? Right? So if the person on the receiving end of your content or that you're scheduling a sales call with or reading your email, if you knew that they wanted your offer, if you knew that they wanted to buy, what would you do? What would you do next? What would be your next move? And if you stop and really think about that or maybe stop this recording and actually journal about that, if you knew that she wanted your offer, would you send the email? Would you follow up with that person? Would you just shoot a quick DM Then check in. Would you tell her the exact price without hesitating? Would you post the invitation? Would you ask her if she is ready to start working? When does she wanna begin? Right? Because if you ask yourself that question, and the next action that you should take suddenly becomes incredibly obvious, then you probably don't have a strategy or offer problem. This is about fear, and fear requires a very different type of intervention. So the first litmus test is to ask yourself, "If I knew without question with absolute certainty that the person on the other end of this interaction wants to buy, what's my next move?" If the answer comes quickly, then we need to diagnose something different. We need to look at what is happening inside your head that may be a fear-based reaction. Okay, so I wanna give you a very simple practice that you can use when you recognize yourself having fear. This is three simple steps, and this could not be easier, and so you can't tell me that you can't do it. Step one, you're gonna name the fear. Step two, we're gonna ground it. Pull it down out of the ether and, and level it, okay? And then step three is to move it. We're gonna name it, ground it, and move it, okay? So let's walk through each one of these. Step one is to name it. And so first I just want you to get very specific about what you're actually afraid will happen. Really picture the worst case scenario, right? So this is not, "Sales just feel icky to me," or, "I don't like being visible," or, "Something just feels off," right? Those are all super vague and not gonna help you. And these are big atmospheric clouds of dread that have no business in your head. So when you get specific, that shifts. So what am I actually afraid will happen if I take this action, if I m- name my price or if I send the follow-up DM? And here's a couple things that I have personally thought in those scenarios. Number one, I'm afraid to send this email and nobody will respond to it. I'm afraid to follow up and they say no I'm afraid people are going to think I'm desperate because I'm talking about my offer a lot. Oof, that's a big one. I'm afraid I'm gonna launch this publicly and make no sales, and then what does that say about me? Uh, I'm afraid someone's gonna think I'm charging too much. I'm afraid that I'm gonna look stupid. I'm afraid my peers will see me doing this and feel bad for me or think that I'm, too pushy. Okay, so we have something now that we can work with. We have real, real specific thoughts. Because when fear is this big undefined feeling that lives in our bodies, it can control the entire room. It can run you ragged. But once we name it, we can actually look at those specific details and then start to work with it. So name it. What am I actually afraid will happen? All right, step two is to ground it, and what do I mean by that? So we're gonna come back to what you actually know, not what the fear is telling you, but what you know as a practitioner, as an expert, as a person with some expertise and experience. So is my offer real? Can this actually work to help someone? Do I understand the problem that they have, and can I actually help them solve it? Do I believe in my transformation, the thing that I'm promising? Do I believe in my ability to deliver on the promise if somebody were to buy? Am I making an honest invitation, right? So just ground it in reality, because if you can actually help somebody, you actually understand their problem, you actually have a solution for it. If you believe in your solution, if you believe in your ability to deliver on that, then we're talking about something tr- real and very grounded. And it connects directly to what we talked about on the podcast last week, which is that believing in your work doesn't necessarily make the fear disappear, but connecting to that belief gives you something to work with. And you can believe deeply in your work and still feel the butterflies in your stomach when you go to sell. This is a pretty common experience that we need to get used to. So you don't need to become fearless. You just need something that you believe in enough to sell it while you are scared. And so step two is just to ground yourself back into what you already know to be true. It's not, will everybody buy this? Who knows? You'll never know. You'll never know what other people are gonna do. It's not about, will this post work to magically go viral and get me a million new clients. Who knows? You're not gonna be able to know that. But if you start with, do I believe this is good? Do I believe it can help the right person? Am I proud to invite somebody to come work with me? If the answer to those questions are yes, that's something that you can stand on, and that can help you to get into motion, and that's our next step, right? To move. So now you've named the fear. It's a little bit less scary. You've grounded it in something real, which is your belief in your work. And then this part is really important. I want you to do one physical revenue-producing action before your brain gets to have another vote. So we're not gonna do the 12 things on the list. We're just gonna do one simple movement. So just send the email. Send one follow-up DM. Post one story that relates to your sales. Message one person who you know might be interested. Put up a checkout link in your bio that leads to your offer. Make a direct invitation to someone that you've been chatting with and ask for the sale, right? These are sales tasks that we hide from when we feel fear. And so when you're feeling grounded, that's the time to take action. And again, you don't have to transform your entire relationship with sales at, at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday morning when you're listening to this. You just need to move one little inch towards it. And that one little inch gets bigger each time, and it starts to compound. And, I think we get this idea that first we're gonna have this big burst of confidence, and then we're gonna take action. But so often confidence is created by getting into motion and taking the action and then realizing that you survived. And, hey, maybe you get lucky and somebody actually responds, or maybe they don't. Maybe somebody says, "No, I'm not interested." But then you're in the clear, right? Because then you can move on and talk to somebody else. Or guess what? Maybe somebody says yes, and then your nervous system has some new information. "Oh, okay, I can do this." And then you do it again. And that's how this starts to become a practice instead of just, winging it, right? We start to practice naming it, grounding it, and moving into action So, and this is where I wanna talk about the energetic piece of selling, which is something that I think about a lot, and I practice myself, and I share a lot with my clients. Because fear creates contraction in our lives, and when we're afraid, we tend to pull back, right? We restrict ourselves. We become less specific. We let those big cloudy things, you know, judgment and self-criticism pop up, and then we hide our offers. We soften the call to action until nobody actually knows what we're even talking about or what we're selling. Or we don't follow up. We stop talking about the thing that matters most, and we make ourselves smaller. And that can cause you to start to spiral out and sort of look at the lack of sales that you have and then start to think, "See? There's the proof. I knew this wasn't working." Meanwhile, you never even gave yourself a clean opportunity to make it work, right? You never did the sales task that was going to give you the data on whether or not your offer was good in the first place. So the energetic shift that I want you to make, again, it's not from fear to fearlessness. It's from fear to grounded action, and that's extremely different. And to me, embodied sales doesn't mean that I feel amazing every time that I sell. It means that I can notice what's happening inside my body, and I can tell the truth about what is scaring me or what I feel afraid of. And I can reconnect with what I know to be true about my own work and my own purpose here. And then I can still take action regardless of that fear. That's agency. That's an embodied practice, and it's eventually gonna build confidence So if you've been listening to these episodes recently over the last few weeks and thinking, "Okay, Deb, I get it. This is part of my business that I really do need help with," \ I am teaching the Solopreneur Sales System. Live. At 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. And what this is gonna be is a working masterclass. So we're gonna map out the actual sales pieces or the parts of a sales system that I teach so that you can see what you already have in place, what is missing, and what needs your attention. And I'm also going to open the doors just a little bit wider and show you what I have been working on. I'll share more about foundations. We do have a fall cohort that's gonna start mid-October. I'm gonna share the sales studio, and the different ways that I'm creating for women to actually get support doing this work of sales. So yes, it is a masterclass, it's a workshop, and also there's gonna be a little bit of an open house and a peek into my world. You can register at the URL that's in my show notes. And if you're listening to this after September 22nd, I will put up a replay link where you can access the class or whatever I'm working on next. So that will lead you someplace. So don't worry if you missed the actual live class. All right, so for today, I just want you to remember three things. Name the fear. What am I actually afraid will happen if I make a sales piece of content, if I make an ask, if I share my price? Ground it. Pull it back into reality. What do I know to be true about myself and my work? And then move. Take action while you're in that grounded place. What is one real action I can take towards the sale? And don't wait till tomorrow. Don't wait till you're more confident, and definitely don't wait till you're not feeling afraid because that might never come. Do it now when you're feeling that grounded, embodied experience, right? Take the action. All right, so I will see you inside the masterclass. For everybody that's already registered, thank you. I'm so excited to connect with you. We're gonna have some fun. Yes, I am on a mission to make sales more fun for myself and for everyone that I work with and anyone that listens to this podcast. So join me in that crusade, please. And thanks again to everyone who has been sending me messages and giving me feedback on the work that I'm doing with the podcast. It means the world to me. I got some wonderful emails last week, and it just really shifted my vibe. I'm so grateful for you. All right, my friends, thank you for listening. Thank you for being on this journey with me. Hope to see you later tonight. And whether or not you can make it, may you be vibrant
