Keep opening those doors! The journey to what you know is meant for you in your small business

Welcome to the podcast for creative entrepreneurs!

I'm Amanda Waterstone, of QueenMee Accessories, let me take you on a journey of self- belief. 

How would you approach the highs and lows in your journey, if you knew - for certain - that your dream business was just waiting to be connected to you? That it already existed?

This idea has been on my mind a lot recently, as I keep my goals for QueenMee in my sights. 

I'm grateful to already have a 6 figure business that I love, and this was once my big goal. 

Now that goal has come to pass, I hold the dream of a 7 figure business in my heart. 

In the early days of growing QueenMee - although I did have a belief that I would get to 6 figures - I was also crippled with anxiety and doubt.

😍 How would we approach things differently if we truly believed our success was inevitable? That it was only a matter of time, if we just kept trying?

💗 This week, I'd like you to imagine you're in a room and you know, for sure, that your dream business is behind a door.

There are 30 doors in the room. 

❔Do you give up when you open the first door and your dream is not behind it? 

🤲Absolutely not! You keep trying, and keep opening doors until you open the right one!

Instagram: @AmandaWaterstone

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Bright Lips, Brave Heart, the podcast for creative entrepreneurs, bringing you inspiration and actionable steps to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Amanda Waterstone, and I'm on this journey with you. I've grown my product-based business, Queenly Accessories, from scratch whilst raising my two young daughters. I had a creative flame to design accessories burning inside me that I just couldn't put out, and so I left my corporate job and embarked on a rollercoaster entrepreneurial journey. Quite Quite a few highs and lows later, and here I am with the beautiful six-figure business of my dreams that spreads joy as I help women feel colorful and sparkling through their accessories. I'm always learning as I go along, and I'm excited to share what I've learned in Growing Queen Me with you every week so you can build your dream business perhaps a bit more quickly than I've done. My mission is to help creative entrepreneurs like you build a profitable business so you can shine your light bright I've created several free checklists and guides for you. These are the resources I wish I'd had when I was starting Queen Me. You can find them on my Instagram bio at Amanda Waterstone. So let's dive in. Get ready to be curious, brave and shine your life bright. Hello. In this episode, I want you to try thinking of your business in a completely new way. So come on this journey with me, stay with me, and I'm gonna take you through an exercise that I've been working through over the past few weeks and has made such a difference for how I feel in growing Queen Me. And when we get to the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk you through a strategy that you can use to take action now and to start feeling different about your business now. So do this exercise with me. I'm so excited to share it with you. Open up your imagination. Are you ready to come with me? Stand in a large room. It's a white room. It's cold and it's a little bit dazzling. There's strip lighting. It almost feels a bit blinding. It's so white everywhere. The room is like a giant hallway or waiting room. And facing into it, there are dozens of doors. They all look the same. They aren't marked. It's quite a shiny room, almost like a hospital waiting room or something. And from the inside of this room, there's no clear way forward. You can't really see how to move forwards or out of the room. You aren't really sure where to go next or which door to go through. So you're standing in this room, unsure of your next move, not really sure even which door to open to try to get out. And then a voice tells you that behind one of the doors, your dream business is waiting for you. a business that brings you joy and is financially very, very rewarding. So the business of your dreams. And whether your goal for your business at the moment is to reach six figures or to reach seven figures or to replace your current salary as an employee, you know when that voice speaks to you that that business, your dream business, is for certain behind one of the doors in this waiting room. What do you do next? Well if you're anything like me you just get started opening the doors and find out which the right door is. Let's say your dream business is like a giant golden box with gold wrapping paper and a big sparkly bow on it. If you opened the first door and the box wasn't behind it would you give up? No, you would not give up. If you knew for certain the voice has told you for certain that your dream business is waiting for you behind one of the doors, you would just close that door and you'd move on to the next door. You wouldn't get a sense of failure about something having gone wrong or agonized over why you chose that door. You would just get on with it. You would just keep on trying all of the doors. You would just keep on trying because you know for sure that the big golden box, the big beautiful box, your business dreams is behind one of the doors. Now, let's say you kept going. You opened 20 doors and you still hadn't found that golden box. Would you still keep trying? I know I would. This is how I've been trying to think of my business, Queen Me. So I feel like I've opened lots of different doors and tried lots of different strategies to get to my next goal, which is to reach seven figures at Queen Me. And sometimes I think, oh my goodness, you know, I've tried so many different things. When is something going to work? When is something going to stick to get me to the next level? I'm so grateful that I've reached six figures and I've got a wonderful strategy for that. But what gets you to the next level is not always what got you to the first level. And so when I heard this analysis of like a waiting room with open doors. And I thought of my business as being like this. It has really, really stayed with me and I found it to be a really incredibly powerful analogy. So I was really excited to share it with you. And just knowing that it doesn't matter how many doors I try to open to reach my next goal for Queen Me, That as long as I believe, I fully believe that my seven-figure business is waiting for me behind one of those doors, that I won't give up, that I will keep trying. And most importantly, I will feel good about trying. I'll just be excited. Okay, that didn't work. On to the next door. I won't agonize over what went wrong. You know, obviously I learn from it, think, okay, I won't go through that door again. Or if I couldn't see properly behind the door, I think, okay, well, maybe I don't think it's behind that door, but maybe I'll come back to that one. I wouldn't get caught up in any too much emotion about it or anxiety. I would just keep trying. I would keep trying. So how would you approach your business if you knew that your success was inevitable, if you would eventually reach your goals for sure, if that golden box with the big glittery bow was definitely waiting behind one of those doors? Would you make your decisions differently? What if something went wrong in your business, like a pop-up shop went badly, for example, or you did a promotion and no one bought? Would you find it easier to put things behind you? I know that in drawing on my experience, in my first year of running Queen Me full time, I was riddled with anxiety. I couldn't sleep much of the time. I just found it really hard to manage a lot of the uncertain expectations around the business. Couldn't sleep a lot of the time. Up to that point in the business, I had played it quite safe. So I had a sort of slow and steady business where I've been that I've been growing slowly and safely through Amazon and Etsy which was fantastic because it tied in with what I needed at the time my children were really really young so I started Queen Me when my eldest daughter was just a toddler and then I went on to have another baby so I needed something that was safe and steady but as they started to get a little bit older I wanted to to grow I wanted to grow my income and I wanted to grow my experience and grow my relationship with my customers. All of those things became really important. And I hadn't previously taken many risks or pushed forwards in a big way. But when I knew I wanted to grow, I decided to take on my first assistant and I took on an office and I was scared. I was really, really scared. My assistant was working 20 hours per week and I was so scared when I first took her on about covering her salary. It's not really surprising. It was a huge leap. But when I look back, I think if I had been working on my mindset more, I might have been feeling better in myself about my decision. and about where I was in the business. I remember, for example, one day walking through the park on my way to work. There was a beautiful blue sky. I was feeling inspired. by the sky and the surroundings, but I was also just wondering if I could actually carry on with the business. I had found the financial uncertainty really, really hard to carry with me. So the business was doing really well. I had just been featured on this morning. I had loads of orders coming in and things were going really well, but I found the financial uncertainty so hard to carry that I actually wondered if I could carry on. There's always been a myself safe and craves a very safe nine to five salary that's comfortable and easy as so many of us do and I was struggling with not having that so much that it was actually making me feel physically ill at some points which was just absolutely crazy. Now I did always manage to pay her salary but As I say, I think if I had been focusing on my mindset every day, then I might have actually enjoyed the experience of taking her on more. Now I know that once you work on your mindset, it's like going to the gym. So once you get fit and you've worked on your mindset... When you get fit at the gym, for example, you don't just say, OK, I'm fit now. My work is done. You have to keep going to the gym every single day. And so at this point, I had done some work on my mindset, but I wasn't working on it every single day. I was doing some work here and there and so now I know that I have to do it every single day, every single morning when I wake up and every single night before I go to sleep and I focus on that belief that the seven-figure business that I want to build is behind one of those white doors, that it is inevitable, that it is there for me and then I know that I just have to keep trying and keep opening the different doors and there's no point getting anxious about it and so if I had had that belief right from the beginning I might have enjoyed the early stage of the journey a little bit more and not felt so anxious and perhaps I would have even progressed a little bit faster too. So it's really really important for you to keep going to the mindset gym, keep up your mindset work if you want to keep yourself strong and survive the roller coaster entrepreneurial journey and keep your mind open to new ideas and success in your business and wouldn't you feel better about your business and find more joy in it if you knew that dream business the goal that you're trying to reach was for sure behind one of the white doors so my action point for you today is to create a really clear picture in your mind of a goal you're reaching for so that could be reaching six figures in your business it It could be growing your email list. It could be replacing your full-time salary. But I want you to imagine yourself at that goal and imagine all the details of what it feels like to reach the goal. All the details. I want you to imagine a visual representation of it. So perhaps you see numbers in your bank account. Perhaps you see, if it's an email list you're growing, perhaps you see numbers on your email list, on your email service provider. Something visual and then also imagine the feeling that you're going to have inside you when you reach that goal. How will you feel differently in yourself? And then one of the things that I've done, for example, is actually to create a visual representation of that goal. So I've created a little screenshot of myself. my bank account at a different number from what it is now. And I actually look at that every single morning. So you can do a little image in Canva that you put on your phone that you look at every single morning. That's just an example. So something which helps you to really reinforce that vision that you have of yourself reaching the goal. And look at this and think about it. Really think about it and really feel it every single morning When you wake up and every single evening before you go to sleep, feel yourself reaching that goal. And then your belief that you just have to keep going, that your dream business and your big goal is behind one of those doors. The more you visualize it, it will get stronger and stronger. So try and do this. Visualization has been amazing for me. It has made such a difference about how I feel about my business, about the joy I take in it and just about knowing for sure that my success is inevitable. Do let me know how you get on. Send me a message on my Instagram account at Amanda Waterstone. I would love to hear from you. Thank you for listening, Bright Heart. I so appreciate spending this time with you. If you've enjoyed this episode, I'd be very grateful if you could subscribe and write a review to help this podcast grow and spread the light. Thank you.