The 3 Deadly Sins of Entrepreneurship (Part 3)

00:00:00 - Courtney Elmer
If you're just now joining us, this is the last installment of a three-part series on the three deadly sins that keep most entrepreneurs from making the impact they want to make in the world. Now, today's episode is dedicated to sin number three, what it is, and how to conquer it so that you don't run the risk of unknowingly letting it sabotage you as an entrepreneur. That's all coming up next, so stay tuned. Globally ranked among the top shows in business and education. We're known for helping overcommit online business owners navigate the ups and downs on the way to seven figures each week. You're going to learn how to get the right systems, structure, and support in place so you can build a self-sustaining business that thrives in a rapidly changing digital environment and grow through what you go through to create the greater income, influence, and impact you deserve. This is AntiFragile Entrepreneurship™. Of all the deadly sins we've been talking about in this three-part series, this is the one that will make the biggest difference for you in the shortest amount of time. And as I mentioned in the last episode, these episodes are not sequential. So, if you haven't gone back and listened to what deadly sin number one and deadly Sin number two are, you still have time to catch up.

00:01:20 - Courtney Elmer
You can listen to this episode today and then go back and listen to those if you need to. But if you did listen to the last two episodes, then you learned that the first two sins are ones that are going to require you to let go of some old ways of thinking and create some new habits. But the third deadly sin of entrepreneurship that we're exploring in today's episode is one that will require you to do things differently than you've been doing them. But it's going to give you an immediate impact, one that you will feel, literally feel, in your work week. Because for the longest time in my business, I struggled with an overcommit calendar. My son is the reason that I started my business. I wanted to be able to have the flexibility to be home with him, to be able to take off of work and go on field trips and pick him up whenever I needed to to be a mom. At the same time, trying to scale a business from six to seven figures while being a mom, with school time restraints, I can only work when he's in school. That has been a struggle because my working hours are 930 to 230 most weekdays, and if he's out of school, I'm out of work. And I love that.

00:02:43 - Courtney Elmer
That is the reason that I started my business. But in the world that we live in, at least here in our Western culture, this is not the norm. Now, there are a lot of people who'll post on Instagram and say, Hey, if you can get off of work at 230 every day to pick your kid up from school. That's freedom. You've already made it. And I don't disagree. I take it very seriously. And at the same time, there are people out there who expect me to be working every day and working eight or more hours a day. So, we have run into issues with scheduling things on my calendar. We've had team members who have given me lots of pushback on the boundaries on my calendar.
And that's because deadly sin number three is one that affected me personally for far too long. And it's the sin of overcommit. Here's how you know if this is you. You sit down at your desk, you open up your laptop, you open Google Calendar, and you see that you have a completely stacked day. And then you glance over at your to-do list, and you realize you got a full page of to-do's to tackle, too. And if you're someone like me who is juggling work life and home life, then you might glance ahead at the rest of your week and see that there's no relief. You've got stacked days the rest of the week, too. Even on weekends, you might find yourself squeezing in just a few hours of work to try to catch up, which causes you to sacrifice valuable time that you'd rather be spending with your family. I'm guilty of it. Chances are you're guilty of it, too.

00:04:26 - Courtney Elmer
There's nothing wrong with it. It happens to all of us as entrepreneurs. And let's face it, many of us love what we do. We love our work. So it's hard to put our foot down and draw a line in the sand and say, hey, no more. I need some margin. I need some white space for me and for my family. But you don't need me to tell you that overcommit. Saying yes when you want to say no. Saying yes out of fear of letting someone down, disappointing someone, missing out on an opportunity, or not holding your personal boundaries around work is the thing that's causing you to wake up with low energy to dread work because you know you're not going to accomplish everything you need to do.

00:05:09 - Courtney Elmer
So, instead of sitting down at your desk and tackling your most important tasks with energy and focus as all the gurus tell you you should be doing, you prioritize the less important tasks, like checking your email first thing in the morning and scrolling through social media when you need a break, when something feels hard, when you're staring at the blank screen trying to figure out what to write to your email list this week. And you reach for your phone out of habit and start scrolling through Instagram. And then you beat yourself up about it because you realize what you've just done, and your day ends, and you've only scratched one or two things off your list. But here's the thing I promise you.

00:05:47 - Courtney Elmer
People like Amy Porterfield or Alex Hormosi aren't waking up in the morning and checking their email. They sit down at their desk energized, but not because they drank three and a half cups of coffee. Because they've got a plan, and they execute the plan. They focus on the important tasks that only they can do, and they allow their team to support them, with the rest of the keywords being allowed. But what if you don't have a team at all? Or what if you don't have a team that's as big as Amy's or Alex's? Let me let you in on a secret. Alex and Amy and people like them aren't experts at delegating because they have a team. It's not a skill they just magically learned when they made their first hire. What they're experts at is protecting their time.

00:06:40 - Courtney Elmer
Their team simply further helps them protect it. But this was a habit that they had to develop long before hiring anyone. But how did they develop that habit? If they started out like you and me, wearing all the hats and not knowing what to give their attention to in a day, how many times have you sat down and looked at your list and not known what to focus on because everything felt like such a huge undertaking? Now, there are two things that Alex and Amy and people like them do that you need to also consider doing if you want to overcome the habit of overcommit so that you can free up your time and finally experience the freedom in your business that you want, to spend that time how you want, to do what I do if you want, and start work at 930 and quit at 230 to pick up your kid from school if you want, or to never work another weekend in your life.

00:07:34 - Courtney Elmer
First, you've got to get to the root of the problem. You've got to identify the fear that causes you to say yes in the first place. Here's the thing that most people don't realize about overcommit: overcommit is actually a trauma response. We see this often in people pleasers. I'm one of them. People who say yes when they want to say no but who don't realize that by saying yes to something they don't want to do means that they're automatically saying no to something else they'd rather be doing.

00:08:14 - Courtney Elmer
And they grow to resent that. They begin to resent other people for encroaching upon their time when really it's up to them to set and hold the boundary in the first place. And I'm speaking as someone who had to learn this the hard way and still have to catch myself sometimes when I have that tendency, that knee-jerk response of yes, absolutely, I'd love to do that, even if on some level inside of me, no, maybe I really don't want to. Maybe I really want to reserve that time for something else that matters more to me. But why do we do this?

00:08:51 - Courtney Elmer
Why do we say yes when we want to say no? If you relate to this at all, what's the reason for it? Most often, it's tied to a much, much deeper fear usually instilled in childhood, a fear of rejection or abandonment. People-pleasing behavior as it relates to the fear of abandonment or rejection can be understood through the lens of psychology, and it's supported by scientific research. Sometimes, it can be as simple as receiving praise or attention or some sort of validation from others after engaging in people-pleasing behaviors, which reinforces the belief that pleasing others is necessary to avoid rejection or abandonment. So, as a child especially, this just creates a cycle of behavior where they might continue to seek validation through people pleasing to alleviate their fear. I can tell you that as someone whose love language is words of affirmation, I often did whatever it took as a kid to earn love for my mom. And I put earn in air quotes. But it was because I often felt like I had to earn it. I came from a stout religious family, and we were taught we have to be obedient and God is always watching.

00:10:21 - Courtney Elmer
And all of these things, while my parents were well intended, instilled a lot of fear in me that if I wasn't obedient or that if I spoke my mind, then I would be rejected. I might risk abandonment. I might risk losing the love of my parents and of my mother in particular. So this was a behavior that I developed early on, and maybe you can relate to this, too. Now, this can also be related to deriving a sense of self-worth from external validation and the approval of others.
Research has shown that individuals who base their self-esteem on external factors such as social acceptance or other people's opinions or approval are more prone to people-pleasing behaviors. And what this does is it creates a reliance on external validation to feel okay, to feel safe. It becomes a neural pathway in your brain that completely unconsciously becomes a mechanism that you fall back on in order to have a sense of self-worth and avoid the fear of rejection or disapproval, which would threaten that sense of self-worth. Maybe you've had an experience of this too. Maybe you relate to one of these more than the other.

00:11:58 - Courtney Elmer
People pleasing can also serve as a strategy for managing anxiety, especially as children grow up and are more responsible, now have to accept more responsibility. It can become a strategy for managing anxiety and maintaining a sense of control in social situations by constantly trying to meet others' expectations and avoid conflict or rejection. Hello? Entrepreneurship. Serving your clients, not letting people down, not wanting to cancel that call on your client because your kid is homesick, and you really need to be home with your kid. But really you've said yes to your client and you don't want to risk their judgment or their disappointment or their disapproval. That's just one example. But here's the thing. People pleasers often believe they can regulate their own emotions and reduce their anxiety levels by saying yes to others, by giving in to what others want of them, which, yeah, sure, might temporarily alleviate that fear of abandonment or rejection. But we both know this is not a sustainable long-term solution.

00:13:10 - Courtney Elmer
So, I want to be clear here. People pleasing is not the deadly sin that we're talking about. We're talking about the deadly sin of overcommit, which at its root is usually connected to a deeper fear, often of abandonment or rejection. People pleasing is simply a strategy that a lot of people use to mitigate that fear. And it's what causes us to overcommit in the first place. Or to say it another way. Overcommit is like a byproduct of people-pleasing behavior, which is rooted in fear, which is not an effective strategy for growing a business. Now, I know that there are people in the world who shall not be named here that would tell you that you have got to hustle and you got to work your butt off if you want to succeed. And even though I understand why you might think that hard work equals success, we've been told that for a really long time. And I know these people mean well.

00:14:10 - Courtney Elmer
They're trying to help people move through whatever's keeping them stuck or slowing them down or fear. But you and I both know that hard work doesn't guarantee your success. Filling up your calendar with hundreds of commitments every month doesn't mean that you will automatically become successful. It might give you a false sense of self-worth and importance to have that many events on your calendar. But at the end of the day, if it were true that hard work equals success, there wouldn't be people out there right now working half as hard as you are and making twice as much. In fact, most of the successful people I know are the least busy people I know. So, does everyone who works hard see success? Look at your business right now. You're working hard. I know you're working hard.

00:15:04 - Courtney Elmer
Do you feel like you're where you want to be? Yet, working hard doesn't guarantee success. So what does guarantee success? So, what do successful people do? Well, first, they recognize that there's a fear that often causes us to overcommit ourselves in the first place.
And they address the fear. They get their mind right. Then, they identify the exact tasks that they need to be working on, and they focus on those, and they let go of the rest. So, step one is addressing the fear. Step two is identifying what to focus on and committing to focusing on that and nothing else. So, for you, that might mean focusing on tasks that only you can do and delegating the overcommit task. To your team, or if you don't have a team, it might mean letting go of those tasks for the time being. There's a lot in my business that I would like to be doing, but I do not have the capacity myself. And my team also does not have the capacity to do those things at this point in time, at this season, in our business. So, I have let them go for the time being.

00:16:20 - Courtney Elmer
Yeah, it's hard, but sometimes it's what's necessary. So if you need help, or if you are someone who struggles to identify what your most important tasks are that you should be focusing on, then I strongly recommend going back and listening to Episode 180, where I walk you through a very easy, very straightforward process for figuring out where your time as the CEO needs to be going. Then, if you really want to take this to the next level, let's say you've addressed the fear you've figured out and identified what it is you need to be focusing on. Here's my next challenge to you. Let someone else manage your calendar. If you don't have someone who can do this, you're going to have to be extra diligent. You're going to have to block off days and not take appointments. On those days, you're going to have to set yourself some boundaries, and you're going to have to hold them. But I will tell you this. If you can allow someone else to manage your calendar, then you can work with that person to create your schedule.

00:17:30 - Courtney Elmer
When are you working? What types of calls are you taking on certain days of the week? And what days of the week do you want to have free to focus on the work that you want to focus on and then let that person fill your schedule for you according to the outline, the guidelines, and the parameters that you've created? And I've done this both ways. Back when it was just me managing my calendar, I would block off certain days, literally block them off, and mark it as an event in my Google Calendar that I was busy all day doing content creation or podcast recording or whatever it might be.

00:18:13 - Courtney Elmer
That way, nobody could book anything from my live calendar on those days. Those days were reserved for me. Now that I have someone managing my calendar, we've got it very structured to where, on certain days of the month, I'm doing podcast interviews with guests for this podcast. On other days of the month, I'm doing guest interviews as the expert on other people's podcasts. Some days of the month, I'm teaching workshops, and on other days, I'm doing sales calls, and on the days I'm not doing any of that, that's Courtney time. That's Courtney's time for content creation and deep work that only I can do to either coach clients or prepare content in order to teach, educate, and help facilitate the transformation of the people that we work with. So feel free to borrow from this. I'm a huge fan of Batching. I'm a huge fan of time-blocking. You've got to find what works for you.

00:19:17 - Courtney Elmer
But the bottom line is you have to set yourself some boundaries, and you have to start practicing. Saying no to overcommit, it will feel so uncomfortable at first. There are times I still struggle with it. But that's why it helps to have someone manage this because you've already set the parameters, and they can help hold you accountable. So if you're listening to this and you're like, yeah, this is great, Courtney, this is helpful, this is valuable, I relate to this. You might also be asking, where do we go from here? Because here's the thing. You have a choice.

00:19:56 - Courtney Elmer
You can keep doing things the way that you've always done them, on the brink of a panic attack every time you look at your calendar, when really all you want is a day with nothing planned to focus on the work that lights you up. Or you can do the work to overcome the fear of abandonment and rejection. It's going to take work. It's a mindset shift that has to happen. But when that happens, it will be much, much easier to set and hold boundaries for yourself around your business without feeling like you're letting people down. And if you need help in this area, because I don't consider myself a qualified boundary expert, this is absolutely something I am still working on in many ways in my own life. But Nedra Tawab is a fantastic resource for this. She has a book out called Set Boundaries and Find Peace, which is an incredible, very practical, very actionable read. And her IG account has over a million followers. She's there releasing content.

00:21:03 - Courtney Elmer
She releases short videos every day, helping you learn how to better set boundaries for yourself. So look up her book or check her out on Instagram. We can link both of those things in the show notes for you. And then, finally, take the time to figure out what is the work that really lights you up, what drives the revenue, and what you need to focus on. Like I walk you through how to do in episode 180, and then to take it up a notch, implement some sort of calendar strategy, borrow from the one that I shared with you, or whatever it takes to help you stay laser-focused. When all is said and done, what it really boils down to is how much you value your time. Are you willing to continue sacrificing time with your family, saying you'll spend it with them one day when you're successful? If it is, how do you know if you'll be successful when you hit that? If you've never been there before? And you have no idea how you'll feel when you're at that level.

00:22:11 - Courtney Elmer
Because just like hard work doesn't guarantee success, success doesn't guarantee freedom. Because wherever you go, there you are. So if you're overcommit and overworking yourself right now at six figures, who's to say you'll magically stop when you hit seven? It's an illusion. It's one of the biggest lies in this world of entrepreneurship. There is no breathing room coming to you. You have to create the breathing room. And the habits that got you here certainly won't get you there. I believe that freedom is our birthright as entrepreneurs, and I believe that the freedom that we all got into business for as entrepreneurs can be found today, right here, right now, by taking full ownership of your mindset as well as your calendar. It's worked for me, and I am 99.99% certain it's going to work for you, too.

00:23:21 - Courtney Elmer
All right, my friend. This officially wraps up our three-part series on the deadly sins of entrepreneurship. So, if you haven't listened to all three episodes, I highly encourage you to go back and do so. Make time for that. Go download them now. Do whatever you need to do. Add them to your queue so that you remember to go back and listen. And if you listen to all of them all the way through, and you find them insightful, and you find them valuable, then there are two things that I encourage you to do. Number one, I would love, love, love it if you scroll down in your Apple app, tap the five stars, and write a sentence or two, letting me know if these were valuable for you. What this does is it helps other people who are looking for podcasts to listen to know that this show is worth their time. And then the second thing is that I encourage you to go back and listen to these episodes. Let these episodes be your companion as you go forth on your business journey because these are things that will pop up from time to time, especially if they've been habits of yours in the past. They're going to pop up again at some point in the future. They will likely be most likely to pop up in times of stress, anxiety, or adversity. So pay extra close attention during those times.

00:24:40 - Courtney Elmer
And then, last but not least, coming up next week, I have someone really special joining me on the show, and I am so excited to share him with you. This is someone who escaped bullying and became America's number-one heavyweight boxer. He is an expert on mental toughness and on, gratitude, and on how to develop a championship mindset. And he's going to be joining me next week right here on the show to teach you his secrets to remaining resilient during times of uncertainty. We're going to be digging into the psychology behind antifragility and how you can apply these science-backed principles to build an antifragile mindset and embrace your fear and your failure all the way to success. So join me back here next week. And until then, let's go out and grow through what we go through together.