Business Is Personal — What Your Business Is Really Showing You

When you’ve built a business from the ground up, of course it feels personal.

You found the clients.
You did the work.
You took the risks.
You paid the wages.
You carried the responsibility.

So when someone says, “Don’t take it personally,” that advice can feel almost impossible to follow.

In this episode, Sharon explores why business decisions are rarely just practical.

A price increase can bring up fear of rejection.
A marketing post can trigger fear of judgment.
A boundary can feel like risking approval.
Delegating can challenge trust and control.

The numbers may be clear, but the woman behind them still has to find the courage to act.

In this episode we cover:
• Why business feels so deeply personal
• What really sits underneath pricing decisions
• Why visibility can feel uncomfortable, even when you have something valuable to say
• How people-pleasing shows up through overdelivering and weak boundaries
• Why being helpful can become tied to feeling safe, liked, and needed
• The role emotions play in judgment and decision-making
• Why psychological safety matters in leadership
• The four areas your business reflects back to you
• Your relationship with money, visibility, boundaries, and leadership
• How to use emotional reactions as information rather than evidence that something is wrong

Key insights:
• The practical decision is often not the real challenge
• Your business reveals where you feel solid and where you still feel wobbly
• Boundaries are about more than saying no
• Pricing confidence begins with self-trust
• Business does not only grow your income — it grows you

Where is your business feeling more personal than practical right now?

And what might it be trying to show you?

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts
https://www.sharonfrancisco.com/podcast

Questions for the podcast? hello@sharonfrancisco.com

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👉  Also: The Entrepreneurial Bookkeeper — grow your business without sacrificing your health: sharonfrancisco.com/program

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Have a question for the podcast? Email hello@sharonfrancisco.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Sharon Francisco Show. Business is a reflection of you: the good, the bad, and the ugly. So when people say to you, don't take it so personally, of course you're going to take it personally. And I get why we would take it personally. When you've built the business from the ground up, you've found the clients, you've done the work, you've taken the risk, you paid the wages, you've done all the stuff to grow the business. And of course, then it feels personal. So it doesn't mean you're being silly by thinking that, you know, you take things to heart. It means that you care. And I think this is where we need to be a little bit more honest with our conversations. A woman will come to me and say something like, Yeah, I need help with pricing. I just need to figure out how I can then either do a price increase or how to do that and what that might look like. Beautiful. We can do the price increase. We can figure out the pricing. We look at the numbers. We usually go through a process and have a look at what they're charging. Now it's all pretty clear. It's probably usually pretty key that she's underpricing. She's doing too much work. She has clients that are getting a lot more than what they're paying for. So there's scope creep there, and she knows the prices need to go up. So on paper, it's pretty simple. Put the prices up, clean up the scope creep, send the email, done. Except she's got to send the email. And suddenly it's not just about price anymore. And we know this, right? Now it's about what if they leave when I send the email? What if they're thinking when I send the email? She's a bit greedy. What if they feel annoyed? They know that, you know, the bookkeeper knows that I'm struggling at the moment here, she's sending a price increase. What if they actually say no? What if I'm not worth that? This is why I say business is personal. The spreadsheet or the process might feel absolutely clear, but the woman behind the spreadsheet still has to find the courage to ask herself and to back herself into putting the prices up. And this is the bit I really love in my coaching sessions where we get to get to the real stuff. It's not about the spreadsheet, it's not about the process to put out in prices, it's the stuff behind that. Because the real problem is often not that she doesn't know what to do. She actually does. The problem is that doing it brings up every little bit of fear, guilt, doubt, people pleasing, and old conditioning she's been carrying possibly for many, many years. And it does not only happen with pricing, it can happen with marketing too. Think about when you've gone to do a video. I know for me this is this one hit home of all say, Oh, I need to show up more on socials. And then you go to do a video or a post and you just freeze. Not because we don't have anything to say. We've got plenty of things to say, but being seen might feel a little bit weird. She worries that people might judge her. She worries that she might sound too much. You know, I've had that before, feeling like, whew, maybe it's too much. Then she worries about wolf, what do people think? So the post stays in the drafts, and I know I'm guilty of that on many occasions. And then she tells the stealth, I'm bad at marketing. I don't think she's bad at marketing at all. I think visibility is pressing on something very, very personal. And it's the same with boundaries, setting boundaries. A client messages late at night and she decides to answer it. A client asks for just one quick thing and she actually does it. A client might push the scope a little bit and she absorbs it. But the issue is not just the client here. The issue is somewhere along the way she learned that being helpful keeps her safe, keeps her liked, and keeps her needed. I'm going to say that again. She learned that along the way, being helpful keeps her safe, keeps her liked, and keeps her needed. That is not business strategy. That's a pattern. And this is not just about my opinion. Research in the annual review of psychology found emotions have a strong and predictable effect on judgment and decision making. So when we act like business decisions are purely logical, we're missing a huge part of what's really going on behind the scenes and a lot of it's subconscious. Google's work on team effectiveness also found that psychological safety was one of the key things that helped teams work well. So when people feel psychologically safe. So they need that psychological safety before they'll do that. Amy Edmondson, her research describes psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. That matters because leadership is not just jobs, checklists, and KPIs, it's conversations, trust, and behavior. So here's a model I want to give you. Your business shows you four things about you. So this is where, you know, how I said at the beginning, business is a reflection of you, the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is where this comes to life. So first, your business will show you your relationship with money, how you price, how you invoice, how you feel when somebody questions your fee. Do you hold steady or do you panic and just start justifying yourself as to why you're putting your prices up when you that's your fee? The second thing that business puts a light on is your relationship with visibility, how you show up. Are you willing to be seen? Are you waiting until you'll feel where you feel perfectly confident before you do a video, a post or whatever? Because we know the day of you feeling perfectly confident never arrives. So we need to do things where we don't feel perfectly confident. The third thing our business will show us is our relationship with our boundaries that we set. So can someone be disappointed and you still stay kind and clear? Can someone ask for something and you not automatically give it? Can you stop confusing being nice with endlessly being available? That's your boundaries. So making sure that we set those boundaries is really important. And the fourth thing is your business shows you your relationship with your leadership, your leadership. Can you have a hard conversation with people that you know you need to have that will give you your outcome, the thing that you're after? That's leadership. Can you stop rescuing? That might be your clients, it might be your team, it might be somebody in your world that you continue to rescue. Can you give clear expectations about the way you play the game to potential clients, bookkeepers, etc.? Can you let people grow instead of carrying everything yourself, knowing that people are quite capable, if there's a system that they can follow, they're quite capable of doing the work the same as you. That is the work, the money, the visibility, the boundaries, the leadership. These are shining a light on those four things about you. And every one of those will show you where you are solid and where you might be still a little bit wobbly. So today I want you to stop beating yourself up about this. If something in your business feels emotional, do not just say, What's wrong with me? Ask yourself a better question. What is this showing me? Is this about value? Is it about being seen? Is it about disappointing somebody? Is it about wanting to be light? Or is it about trusting myself? Because once you see the patterns, you can start changing them. But if you keep it buried, it's really hard to change. That's where your business becomes so powerful. It does not just grow your income, it actually grows you. And that's what I always say about growing a business. You grow personally yourself. And this is the personal stuff, all these areas. And yes, sometimes that's darn annoying. So, because you might also have just wanted a nice little business, and suddenly you're getting the personal development seminar with your invoices. But that's actually a gift, too. Your business will keep showing you the next version of you it needs. So the question for you today with this is where is your business feeling more personal than practical right now? And what's it trying to show you about you? Hopefully, this has been helpful. That's the Sean Francisco show. And these are the kind of conversations that I'm going to keep having because I love them, because these are the conversations beneath the practical stuff. And they're the things that really make beneath in your business. Till next time, talk to you soon.

unknown 9:59

Bye.