Let’s talk about the three things that might be sabotaging your dream of running a successful business.

Sounds dramatic, right?

But trust me, these aren't just minor hiccups.

These are the deal breakers, the ones that make you want to throw in the towel even before you’ve really started.

In this episode, I uncover the big taboos that not only keep you from achieving success but also attract the wrong clients, making your entrepreneurial journey a nightmare.

Hey, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and this is my podcast "The Weeniecast!"

Pssssst! Not sure if you've heard, but I'm inviting new members to the best community for business owners with ADHD - the Hyperfocused Community! You can join here - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Now, back to this episode...

We're talking all about the three key points that hold you back in your business.

These are unresolved trauma, limiting beliefs about your worth, and a defeatist mindset.

All are pitfalls that, if not addressed, will keep you stuck in a perpetual cycle of self-sabotage.

I’ll share real-world examples and actionable insights on how to identify these roadblocks in your life and, more importantly, how to start dismantling them.

You’ll learn how unresolved trauma can turn every business hurdle into an emotional Mount Everest, and how to pivot your marketing strategy so you attract clients who are ready and able to benefit from your expertise.

We also hear from Anne Hathaway who has lived experience of this!

By listening, you'll not only learn the specific ways to spot these saboteurs in your own life but also get practical tips for overcoming them.

This episode isn’t just about identifying problems; it’s about arming you with the tools you need to transform your mindset and approach.

Once you’ve listened, you’ll be better at filtering out non-ideal clients, framing your value correctly, and maintaining a mindset that propels you forward, rather than holding you back.

Don’t miss out on these essential insights.

Oh and also, make sure you download your Weeniecast bingo card!

Get it at https://weeniecast.com/bingo

Timestamped Summary:

00:00:00 - Attracting the wrong clients.

00:00:44 - Misguided marketing and drawing in clients who can’t be helped.

00:02:23 - The difference between experienced trauma and unresolved trauma.

00:05:50 - Personal experience with trauma and why I avoid sharing it in business contexts.

00:08:00 - Why unresolved trauma exacerbates business challenges.

00:14:19 - The danger of believing you have a $2,000 a month life.

00:17:53 - The importance of shifting your mindset.

00:21:52 - Perspective changes so you'll see opportunities instead of obstacles.

00:25:52 - Ensuring your beliefs align with your business dreams.

Your next steps after listening

Realizing it's time to work with me? Book your free initial strategy call with me - weeniecast.com/strategycall

Get more support in your ADHD entrepreneur life by joining my hyperfocus community! - https://weeniecast.com/hyperfocus

Wanna get this content earlier, and totally unbleeped? Subscribe to the Apple Podcasts premium version of this show - https://weeniecast.com/winners

Want to just buy me a coffee in return for some helpful insight? Thank you! Here's where you can do that - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/katiethecoach

Mentioned in this episode:

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Join the Hyperfocused Community

In this episode, we're going to talk about how you

might be attracting your wrong clients and the

three things that hold you back from ultimate success. Hi, I'm

Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the

Weeniecast. This is not going to be your

typical episode of the Weeniecast where I'm going to tell you the ADHD business owner

about all the inspiring ways that you can start your business. In this episode, I

really want to break down who should absolutely not, under any circumstances,

ever start a business. I've come to this

realization of these three types of people through a couple different

ways. So, number one, I find when I talk about

certain topics, I draw these people in and I

say, these people. I don't mean like, in a derogatory sense. I mean people who

really struggle with these things. And when I talk about these three

topics, they come into my world. They want to book sales calls,

and there's genuinely no way for me

or any other business coach to help them build their businesses, and I'll

explain why. So this is something that I've really had

to learn to shift in my marketing to break away from talking about

specific topics, because it attracts people like this. And it's really heartbreaking to

talk to folks who really want to change their life

and do not have the fundamental beliefs or situations

to be able to do it.

Recently with a lot of my clients, they've been going through very

similar situations where they're attracting people to book sales calls,

and they're not their ideal clients. The way I've started framing it up for

them is what is the pain that you're speaking to? Because there are

people out there who absolutely need your help. They're so

desperately in the hole with whatever it is that you help with.

Yes, they need you, but they need you too much. They

need you so much that they will never actually acknowledge that they

need help. They will never actually change

how they fundamentally believe what's possible for

them. And those people can never be helped unless something

real serious happens that shifts things for them. I wanna be very

clear as I'm talking through this. There are absolutely circumstances

in your life that you have no control over, things that have happened to you

that have made life harder. And just the fact that those things

have happened does not mean that these things may be true for you. What

makes them a true impediment to you ever building a multiple six

figure business as an ADHD business owner is the

fact that you believe them. You believe that it is just a part of

a greater narrative of how your life always

goes. And I do also want to shout out that I am going to be

talking about trauma. I'm not going to be getting into any details of trauma, okay?

So talking about it in a more of a theoretical way. If you're

experiencing any difficulty with PTSD,

with dealing with traumatic events, please reach out for help. There is

so much help available to you if you go into the Google machine

and look up, you know, emergency mental health services in your

area, please do it if you're really, truly struggling with this stuff. I do

also want to name. Just because I've experienced trauma in my life does not mean

I'm at all qualified to help you with trauma, okay? This is something that I've

really veered away from talking about in my social media because every single time I

open up about this, I get people in my DM's wanting help from

me to help them through their trauma, and I am not qualified.

And I'm also not in a position of my

own healing journey to be able to support anyone else. So please do not bring

your trauma to my doorstep. I love you and I support you and I want

you to heal. And also, I cannot be the healer.

There are three things that I have discovered in the last six and a half

years of me running my business that tell me that someone

is not going to be able to build a multiple six figure business.

The first of these, I'm going to be very clear, as I say,

it is trauma. And I'm not saying that if you've ever

experienced trauma in your life that you're going to be unable to be successful.

That is so far from the truth. I also want to acknowledge that if you

have ADHD, you've lived in our world, which, I mean, unless you're an alien

listening to this, everyone has. Life has been

inherently traumatic for you. The amount of gaslighting that we

experience as people with ADHD, just growing up

in a world that's designed for neurotypical brains, telling us that,

what do you mean? This should be easy? Oh, well, just try harder. Oh, just

give it more time. Just do this. Just do that. That is

inherently traumatizing. Now, it could be big t, it could be little t

depending on who you are and the circumstances of you hearing

that. So I'm not saying like, if you've ever experienced trauma in your life

that you're not going to be successful. I will say that

if you have unhealed trauma, that you are

not actually working on resolving

it will be incredibly hard for you to start a

business, to grow that business, and to keep it running successfully and

sustainably. Like I said, I'm not going to go into any details, but I've experienced

some trauma in my life. And as someone who is a big

advocate of mental health and removing the stigma of

going for help, I sometimes open up about my trials with

the process that I've gone through in overcoming PTSD.

I learned fairly quickly to stop sharing about it

because when I share about that, like I said in the beginning of this,

people come to me and they want me to help them with their PTSD. Now,

these posts that I share about my own experience, these are not sales posts,

these aren't posts being like, well, I had PTSD, so you should buy for me.

Absolutely not. These are genuinely just personal shares

that I put on LinkedIn. And I love

using this as an example of how you tell

your own story and what you incorporate into your personal

brand will actually impact the types of clients you attract and the types of

people who book sales calls with you. Because even though I don't

use my PTSD trauma story in any of my

marketing for my business, anytime I bring it up, that's what I attract.

So as a business owner who is promoting your good work

in the world, you know, if you notice that sometimes you talk about

a certain thing and it has nothing to do with your business, really, and you

start attracting clients who aren't the right fit, my question

for you is, what is the pain that you're speaking to? Because as

business owners, if we're speaking to the wrong pain,

we're not going to attract our ideal clients. If you're a realtor

and you want to sell people vacation homes, you don't talk about the

struggle of finding enough money for rent every month. Those people cannot be your

ideal clients. They may think, oh, maybe this person has a way for me to

figure out how to buy a home so I don't have to worry about rent.

I mean, that would be so nice if you could, but in the current

real estate market right now, it's highly unlikely. The pain you would

want to talk to if you're trying to attract clients who want to buy a

vacation home is perhaps like how to manage that home when you're not there,

how to make sure it's safe and secure. How do you put in an offer

so you're more likely to get picked, especially if the previous owner lived

there full time. And they may want to pass this house on to

someone who has a family and wants to raise their family there. Those are the

pains you want to speak to and say at some point, you want to share

about your own personal story and about how in your early twenties, you could barely

scratch together enough money to make rent. Know that, yes, you are

speaking truth. You are sharing vulnerably about your own life. And

also know that you're speaking to a pain that is not your ideal clients, and

it will attract people who are not your ideal clients. So back to the point.

Why is unresolved trauma something that will prevent you from starting a business

and doing so successfully? Well, I hate to break it to

you, but starting a business will exacerbate and compound

any traumatic experience you've ever had.

It will bring up any little nugget of shadow work

that you haven't delved into. Every fear that you have

about yourself, every self doubt, it will

blow up, magnify, and make it that much harder

to heal from. There's an interview that Anne Hathaway did, I think, on the Ellen

DeGeneres show years and years ago about how

she had to take a step back and do some personal work. And

she explains that before she did that work, anytime she'd see an

article about herself where someone said anything that was even remotely disparaging

of her because she didn't actually like herself,

she'd believe them. They'd say this terrible thing about her, and

she'd just say, cool. They're right. Absolutely. Here's more evidence

that I suck. Squirrel. Squirrel. I gotten out of the habit of googling

myself because that's just a bad idea to ever do that.

My friends and I had an idea for funny or die, and we wanted to,

like, do something on celebrity pregnancy rumors. So we just googled pregnancy rumors,

and then the story came up. And what was the story? The story. The title

of it was, why does everybody hate Ann Hathaway? And so how did you deal

with all that? Well,

I listened. At first. I couldn't help it, you

know, and you try to shut it off, and then I realized why I

couldn't was I hadn't learned to love myself

yet. I hadn't gotten there. And if you don't

love yourself when someone else says horrible things to you, a part of you is

always gonna believe them. Squirrel. Squirrel. When she realized that this was the thing

that was really making her ability to live her own life

hard and took that step back and really processed all the things

that she hadn't processed before and learned to like and really care about

herself and to see herself for all the good things that she had.

Once she came back out into the world and people started saying bad things

about her, she didn't believe them anymore. One of the biggest

fears new business owners have is putting themselves out

there, emailing your friends and family and telling them that you're starting a business,

opening yourself up to criticism and doubt from people who love

you and know you so deeply, posting to social media and

sharing that you can help people with something, and opening yourself up to

the high school bully who called you fat and made fun

of you, having a pimple on your nose once, that person saying, how dare

you? What do you think you're doing? There's no way you could do this, or

worse, just laughing about it behind your back to other people who

made your life miserable in high school. When someone has unresolved trauma and they

haven't even really acknowledged all the things in that trauma, what happens

is they become so terrified of any rejection,

because that unresolved trauma has really

created this rat's nest of terrible

beliefs that they have about themselves. And if they were to go out

there and put their business out there and offer their services and

ask to put flyers up in someone else's window or get on a sales

call and present their services in here, no. That

rejection will activate every single negative,

toxic belief in that rat's nest of trauma. Most people are

terrified of hearing the word no. But if you have unresolved trauma,

that no actually becomes another trauma on top of

all the other trauma. And I understand the appeal of having

something really traumatic and awful happening to you and thinking, okay,

I don't want this anymore. I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna change my life,

and I'm gonna completely change things up, and I'm going to ditch this job, and

I'm gonna start my own business, and I'm gonna start being the narrator of my

own story, and I'm 100% for it. And also, the narrator

can't be the narrator if they're still fighting the demons in the.

If that narrator is actually the protagonist who is still

working through their own, they're not going to have the ability to start writing

their own story. The risk that goes along with starting a business as

well is something that will

absolutely, even if you are 100% healthy, which I've never met, a person

who's 100% healthy, even if you're 100% healthy, will activate your

survival instincts, because this is how you make money, and you need money to be

able to buy things that help your meat suit stay alive, like food and shelter

and water. If you're already in survival mode because you have

unresolved trauma, is that going to be helpful for you?

Absolutely not. So the first thing that will

absolutely prevent your success in starting a business is if you have

trauma that you are not actively working to heal, the business will not go

well. It will not help your healing journey. It will actually make it

immeasurably worse. And I say this as someone who

started her business while on a healing journey.

Key point here. I had trauma, and I was actively

working to heal it as I started my business.

Just because you have trauma doesn't mean that you can't start the business.

But you do have to be working on making it better, or else

starting a business is going to be one of the most unhealthy decisions that you've

ever made. Well, maybe not if you. Maybe you've made some other really unhealthy

decisions, but it'll be up there. The next belief that will prevent you

from starting a successful business and having it run sustainably

is, oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening

to find out. But first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

The next belief that will prevent you from starting a successful

business and having it run sustainably is

believing that you have a $2,000

a month life. I used to say this a lot, and actually, now as I'm

talking through this, I'm like, why don't I say this more? It's so much harder

to start a business that only makes $50,000 a year than it is to start

a business that makes $150,000 a year. One of the things that

I hear sometimes on sales calls with potential clients that

makes my heart break, just crackle into a bunch of little

pieces and then fall to the floor, is when they say, well,

I just need two or $3,000 a month to survive.

And when I ask them, how much are you making in your job right

now as you're plotting out your escape and wanting to break

into working for yourself? And they tell me they're making two or

$3,000 a month, it tells me something that will be a

massive obstacle to them being successful. And that's this. That

they don't actually believe that they deserve more. They don't actually believe that

more is possible. And this is a very natural

result of being a child who

had ADHD, who is gaslit and made to think that you were

lazy and you weren't smart. And all these other things were wrong with

you, that no matter how hard you try, it's never good

enough. So by the time you become an adult and you enter the

workforce, if you're not good enough at your best, who the

f are you to ask for more than $15 an hour? How dare

you? Once a person who gets to that point where they're making

$15 an hour and they finally feel safe in their career,

they finally feel like, oh, my God, okay, well, I'm good enough doing this, two

things can happen. One is, okay, well, this is it for me.

This is it. This is just what I have to accept. I'm always going to

be at this level. It's never going to change for me. I'm not good enough

to go to the next level or okay, cool. The

other system didn't work for me. This system, something about it works for me.

What about it works for me? I want more. And the fact that I want

more, I know it's possible to have more. For some people

who get that first job out of college or after high school,

who have this belief set in their mind that

they're worth only a little bit because they don't think much of

themselves, because they don't think they're smart enough or hardworking enough or whatever

the garbage is, some of those people will just accept that.

Others will take it as a fire under their butts to get to work

to find the thing that will make the life that

they've always dreamed of possible. If you're the first person, no

business coach can help you. Because no matter how many strategies are handed

to you, no matter how many how to lessons you invest in,

you're never actually going to believe that you can build a six figure

business. You're always going to be trying to build a business that

will maintain that two to $3,000 a month,

because that's all you believe is possible for you. That's all you believe that you

deserve. Based on everything that you've gone through in your life, it doesn't

actually matter how much money you're making when you start your

business. And of course, I want to acknowledge the privilege that comes along with having

money, right? For someone who is in their mid thirties to mid

forties, who has built their career up and has made

a consistent $150,000 to $250,000

a year, and who wants to start a business, of course they have financial

backing that will allow them to do that more easily. They also

have the necessity of building that business up to

$150,000 to $250,000 a year, because

that's what they need to make to be able to maintain their

current lifestyle. I don't want you to walk away from this episode being like,

well, I just have to believe that I'm worth it, apparently, and that's going to

be the thing that's going to make it. No, that's not what I'm saying. What

I am saying is that if you're only making

two or $3,000 a month, and if there's a belief system that tells

you that that is the max that you're worth before you go and start a

business, I want you to prove yourself the wrong. I want you to prove

to yourself that you can go out and you can get a $5,000 a month

job, and that through that job, you can get a $2,000 a month raise, and

you can switch companies and jump up to $10,000 a month. I want

you to show yourself

that it's not about how deserving you are as a

human being. You deserve everything that you want as a human being. It's

about what you believe you can actually have. Because when you believe you

can have something, yeah, you're far more likely that you're gonna do

the steps to make it real. If you do not believe that you could ever

run a marathon, there's no way you're gonna start training for a marathon. There's no

way in hell. What a waste of time. It takes so much effort

to train for a marathon. Why would you put all that effort and time and

money for all the equipment and the training? Why would you put

all that into it if you didn't believe you could actually do it?

There's this story about Henry Ford, who is absolutely a problematic

historical character. So Henry Ford made cars,

if you didn't know that. And at one point in

his career, he turned to his engineering team and he said, okay, well, we have

a v four. And he's like, I want a v eight. And there's a frame

involved. And I guess it was really hard to fit whatever those v's were

in the frame. And the engineering team was like, it's not

possible. Absolutely not. You know, Mister Ford, go

and drink some more alcohol. Forget about this. Not gonna happen. And he's

like, yeah, no, it'll happen. And I'm gonna pay you guys until you make it

happen. And they tried and they tried and they tried and then tried,

and they failed a gazillion times. And then they did it. They made a v

eight, which is apparently very impressive. If you're a car person and you wanna

write a review and tell me why it's impressive, please do. It has something to

do with the car being more powerful. That sounds right. If you have more of

something, it could be more powerful. Right? So, like, lifting weights? Like, I'm

more powerful, the more weight I can lift? Maybe it has something to do with

that. Anyway, the point being is sometimes the belief doesn't actually

need to be your own. And sometimes you don't actually have to actively believe

something's possible for you. Those engineers absolutely could

have looked at Henry Ford and been like, you are on drugs.

No, like, go take your bath salt somewhere else. We

quit. You're asking something completely unreasonable of us. It's never

gonna happen. And they could have walked out the door and started working for another

car company. They could have done something else. There was a part of them, deep

down, they thought, well, this guy's a fucking nut job. But

maybe he's right. Maybe we can do that. It's worth a shot. The

point of this is that you don't necessarily have to be full throttle

believing that this is possible for you, but you need to have just enough

belief that you're not gonna quit. Then you're not gonna be like, you are a

psychopath. No way. And walk out the door.

You have to have that little voice in your head that says, you know what?

Maybe we do deserve to make another $5,000 a month.

Maybe we actually do deserve

to be able to take our family on a really nice vacation.

Maybe I could charge more than $75 an hour.

Just maybe. But if there's no maybe voice, if there's

only. You're. You're crazy. That's not possible for me. Then you

need to stick with whatever you're doing, and you need to work on your money

mindset. And you need to leave starting a business to other

people or to a later date in your own timeline, because right now, it's

just not going to work for you if you don't just have that whispering voice

that it might maybe be possible. And I don't think I have to explain to

you why that one is so particularly heartbreaking. And I share

this. To be that extra kick in the balls for you to realize

that you believing you don't deserve much doesn't just hurt you. It hurts

everyone around you. It hurts the people that you love the most. Because

the thing that you're communicating to them is that because you don't

deserve much. The fact that you're tolerating them in your life

means that they don't mean much, that they don't equate to much. So

if you're not going to shift this belief for yourself, will you please do it

for them? Otherwise, you're being a selfish and I don't want you listening to my

podcast anymore.

The final belief that I'm going to talk about today that will mean

that starting a business is never going to work out for you is. What am

I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But

first, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

The final belief that I'm going to talk about today that will mean

that starting a business is never going to work out for you is if you

believe the world is against you. If every

single negative thing, big or small, that happens to you throughout your life

feeds into this narrative of, oh, well, here we go

again. Look at that person over there. Things work out for

them, but for some reason, the universe just doesn't like me. This is just

another knot in the string of. I'm sorry, that's a weird

metaphor. David's gonna get a bingo card x for that. Where

Katie gets lost in her own metaphors. Actually, it was a sports metaphor that he

said. This is just a normal metaphor that I got lost in, that

I started down and it didn't make sense. So really, this is a new low

for me. Also, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, one of our

listeners, a former client and a current business partner of mine, David

Fryman, who's an excellent, excellent business attorney, by the

way, he decided to make my podcast into a game of

bingo. And he created bingo cards. So if you want to join the bingo game,

then please go to weeniecast.com bingo and download your

card today. Anyway, back to the world being against you. When

you believe the world is against you, you're right. You're absolutely right.

The world's against you. God hates you. Whatever greater power

you believe in is working against you at every turn. Every person in

your life wants to see you fail, and they rejoice in every

little time you do. You're right. And you will

always be right. But you know what? It's also true is if you think the

universe is for you, you're also right. If you think that God

or universal consciousness or

other deities or beings are all conspiring

for your success, you're right. If you believe that you're

surrounded by people who celebrate each and every tiny win you

ever experience, you're right. When you try to start a business thinking

that the world is against you, how are you going to deal with failure? Each

failure, instead of being just a little obstacle that you're going to have to figure

out how to either jump over, work around, or break down,

is just going to be a massive, huge wall that you can't

get over, because it's another piece of evidence that the world is against

you. And if the world's against you, even if you do get past this one

little obstacle, there's going to be another, and another and another and

another because the world doesn't want to see you succeed. But when you

believe that the world actually does want to see you succeed and you

overcome that obstacle, instead of looking for other obstacles, you'll

actually start looking for other opportunities. If you believe that the universe is

for you, you will actually start seeing obstacles as

opportunities, as chances to grow and

expand and see things that you wouldn't have seen before if you hadn't

come up against. This part of this is a perspective thing. If you have the

perspective that things are going to work out because everything's

conspiring to help you get there, you're going to start identifying all the

opportunities to make that real. If you don't believe in that,

then you're going to start looking for all the reasons why it's not

going to work. In addition to that, it's also an inner

circle thing. If you're the kind of person who's always

boohooing about life and how hard things are and how sad it is

to be you, and how nothing ever works out and all that stuff, what

kind of people do you think you're attracting to yourself? Like, who is

actually going to put up with that? Probably other people who are going to back

you up. Probably other people who aren't experiencing a whole

lot of success for themselves. So if you start experiencing success against all

odds, they will get upset about it, they won't want it for you. Because

the fact that you can have success means that they can have success. And if

there's even a question that they could have success and they're not having it, it

might reflect back that maybe the problem's them and it's not the

world versus what kinds of people does

the person attract when they believe the world is out to help

them? If you believe the world is against you, you're right. If you believe

the world is for you, you're also right. But the latter

is where you're going to be successful in business. So if I've described you

in any of these things, please never book a call with me. I can't help

you. It's going to break my heart. But I won't be able to help

you. Please go and do the work to

transform these beliefs around yourself, because no one will

be able to help you if you can't first help

yourself. And as you think through your marketing for

your business, get really conscious about the

pain that you speak to. Is it the pain of the ideal

client who can actually be successful with you? Or is it the

pain of the person who absolutely needs someone like you, but who will

never be able to be helped by you because they're just not ready for

it? And tell me, did you get bingo in this episode?

What's that saying? Birds of a feather flock together. So

what kind of bird are you being? And I'm so happy we randomly ended up

on this topic. This was not planned because this gives me an excuse to talk

about the shoebill stork, whose latin name is the balanceps

rex. They are large wading birds with massive beaks

that they use to decapitate their prey. They are also known as

whale bills, whale headed storks, and shoe billed storks.

Apparently, these birds are really unpleasant. They

aren't afraid of humans. They don't really have any natural prey, but they

also don't like each other. So they're going extinct just because they're not having

sex. Squirrel, squirrel,

squirrel, squirrel.