Helplessness and Arrogance for Female Entrepreneurs

Kris Plachy:  Hey, I'm Kris Plachy, host of the Lead Your Team podcast. Running a million dollar business is not easy, and whether you are just getting started with building your team or you've been at this for a while, I'm going to bring you honest, specific and clear practices you can use. Right now today to improve how well you lead your team.

Let's go ahead and get started.

Hello, who are you? Welcome to the podcast today. I'm Chris Plaquey. If we haven't met before, if this is your first time here, I'm so glad you're here. I am actually recording this my last day here in Hawaii. I have been here almost three weeks. Tomorrow will be pretty much three weeks. I'll go home tomorrow.

It's been amazing, long overdue as I know so many people who are listening to this are having the same kind of craving just to get away. My daughter and I came with Camille, who is our conscious inclusion advisor and her daughter. They are teammates on the same soccer team, and so we had a lovely time together for the first 10 days, and then I did my Hawaii gathering retreat.

With seven gorgeous, beautiful women. I'm going to do a podcast just about the retreat. It was I don't, I never have the words. And, and you know what's so funny? Neither do they. They, they're like, how do you explain this? I'm like, just come. That's all I wanna ever tell people. Like just. Come. It's just magic.

And so I will be back in the office on Monday, which is when this podcast will drop, and that means that it's actually time to register for the hat a C E O program, which I'm so excited about. We have had. The most delightful time with this last group of women. They're so fun and hardworking and gosh, so many great things have happened for so many women over the past almost 12 weeks.

I can't believe we're almost done. So we are going to open up registration the day after this podcast drops, and it's early registration. So the only way to really get notified about the options are some cool perks for registering early. You have to be on the invitation list, so you have to go to how does CEO register.com to get all the information.

But we are providing you with a couple of extra bonuses if you register early. One is the managing overwhelm class, which is a digital course that I made available last time that was very well received, super helpful. So if you're feeling like you just have a ton going on and you can't find your way through it, I think you will find this very short course, but helpful course.

Really help you navigate the moment that you're in. And then we're also compiling a resource guide for our early registrants. And this is going to have all of the key worksheets that we provide our clients. So how to delegate, how to have a difficult conversation, how to have a one-on-one. All the things that I know that you deal with pretty regularly.

We're gonna put those all in a resource guide and make those available to you when you register early. And yes, if you're listening to this and you we're in the empathics, the EEO course and you did register early, those will also be coming to you. The resource guide as well. So I know I can hear your question as you as you're asking it, so you don't wanna miss out.

I really want you to join this. I know you've been thinking about it. I appreciate it's a leap, but I know you're gonna find that we completely just take you in and support you and nurture you and also yell at you sometimes. No, we have a really good time. Go to how to c e o, register and get yourself in this program.

Let's do this. It's gonna be so fun. All right, so today I wanna talk to you about this notion that I, I, I've just really been aware of the polarizing positions that so many of my clients end up falling in. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but there's this either total helplessness or like arrogance. And so I wanna talk to you about, The extremes and how this ends up, they both end up in the same place.

So let's talk about helplessness. So helplessness comes from the thought. There's nothing I can do. I'm never gonna figure this out. This is too hard for me. I'm not good at this. I'm not cut out for this, right? So here you are. You're a woman with a successful business. And you still feel like an imposter.

You can't figure the managing people thing out. It's driving you nuts. You're overwhelmed by it, and you just feel powerless and helpless. That feeling triggers the behavior of seeking and consuming content and relying on others. And the result is then that you never figure it out, that you always find evidence for how terrible you are in something.

Okay? So this is what you have to see is that when you believe that you're never gonna figure it out. When you believe this is too hard for you, when you believe you're just not cut out for this, that triggers the emotion of helplessness, which triggers the behavior of seeking. Content consumption, advice consumption.

You go, you're like going to 400 different people asking them what to do, which then just fosters lack of action, which fosters this result of, I don't know what I'm doing, which just supports the originating thought. Okay, so helplessness comes from you believing you can never figure it out. Now I know that I've coached so many women who figure it out, so of course you can.

And one of the things I tell my clients when they start working with me if I sense this is I tell them that they really have to stop talking to everybody else, at least for the 12 weeks that they work with me. Because you can't keep getting advice from 45 people and expect to find clarity. The insight that you need, my love is in you.

It's not out there. You have to figure out who you wanna be as a leader, who you wanna be as a manager. What are your values? What are your expectations? How are you gonna hold people accountable? That's your journey. Love that is not somebody else's. Now I teach you the formula for that, but you have to apply it if you want it to work, and then you have to be willing to fail a lot.

But I watch people become like perma, helpless. If that's even a word, it isn't, but they're just, and then they're helpless everywhere. Oh, these big, strong, capable, successful women are helpless. See? And they can't figure other things out. Like, how, where do I buy water? How do I stop it. No helplessness allowed.

I know you can figure anything out. Listen to me. Look at you. Come on. Stop it. All right, so that's one side. Then we have this other side that I'm just using the word arrogance as the emotion. I don't know if that's the right one. We're gonna talk it out, but the thought that triggers that is, I shouldn't have to do this.

I shouldn't have to deal with this. I shouldn't have to figure this out. There are people who do this. I can hire someone to do this. I, this is beneath my pay grade. When it comes to managing the people like somebody else can do that. I, I'm not good at that. I need to be over here doing all these things.

I'm, I'm just, it's not my thing. Like I'm just, I shouldn't have to do that. I mean, a woman who runs this business the size of mine shouldn't have to deal with that. Which I think triggers a little bit of arrogance. Maybe you would call it something else, but it's my podcast, so I'm gonna call it that.

So what does arrogance trigger? Not investing, abdicating, avoiding. So you have this attitude like, oh, I shouldn't have to deal with this. So then your feeling is of arrogance. So then you just bring people into your company and you don't pay a lot of attention to them because you don't have to deal with it.

And then what ends up happening to you, you have to deal with it because you can't abdicate your way to success. My love. You can't. I know you want to. I know you just want someone to come and save you. I really do understand that. Listen to me. I understand that. I have felt that in so many parts of my life, no one's coming.

And your belief that someone will save you, that you shouldn't have to deal with it. All of that. All of it. So when we go from helpless and I need saving to arrogance, which is I don't wanna have to deal with this, you get the same result. You don't invest into yourself and your business and you end up not getting the results that you want.

There is a happy medium in here, which is learning and applying and practicing failing, and then eventually you can build that team. That's the whole point. And then you don't have to be in charge of everything. You don't have to be in the weeds, you don't have to have the level of involvement. But if you believe that you get to start at the finish line, and this is what happens with a lot of people who are very revenue forward.

So you have a great idea, you're a great marketer, you fill a niche that's never been filled, whatever. You're very talented. I don't take any of that away from you. It means you end up with all this revenue and then that somehow makes you think you're just beyond it. No. Too many companies, big companies have failed because their leader did not do the work to develop themselves as leaders.

Great marketers. Great salespeople, great techs, all the things we gotta learn, the people part. Now, you don't have to stay there, right? I've had plenty of clients say to me, do I have to do this forever? Absolutely not. But the sense of confidence that you get once you've built your business with a team, that once you've gone through that exercise, nobody pulls a wool over your eyes ever again.

That doubt that you feel? Is this the right decision? Is this what I should be doing? Is this the right person? Should I fire them? How do you talk to them about the all that goes away? Your confidence? It's priceless, but it is not something you can just compensate for by either hiding or abdicating. Okay, so I wonder which camp you're in.

I'm curious. I always love to know. Tell me, you can email us at [email protected] and is there maybe another one? Maybe there's something else you wanna tell us about, but please, all of this is solvable. Like my favorite is a client came to a office hours call who's in the lab. And the lab is the program that follows that had a C e O program.

And so she started with me last fall and when we first started together, she had some challenges on the team and she was very overwhelmed with the prospect of managing people through that and setting the systems up. And then she just came to a call. This week and said, okay, so here's what I'm gonna do.

This guy's not meeting expectations. I have this plan. I have this plan, I have this plan. It's all set together. She had it all figured out. It was all beautiful. She was so prepared. She knew exactly what the business needed to do to resolve it. All she was doing was coming to the call, kind of like, did he do it right?

What's super cute, which she did, she did. What she did is she practiced her own process and she had tremendous confidence. And she knew she was doing right by this employee, which maybe even is the best thing. So don't give up on yourself. Don't give up on managing people. It can be hard. Of course it can, but once you have the tools, you know how to resolve anything that's power, that's freedom.

So no more helplessness and no more arrogance. Okay? And no more waiting. Let's do this. How a c e O thing, what are you doing? Join me. All right. I'll talk to y'all later. One more thing before you go. In a world of digital courses and online content, I like to work with my clients live because I know that when you have someone you can work with, ask questions of and meet with, you're so much more likely to get the success that you want.

So head on over to how to ceo live.com. To learn more about our very exciting, very exclusive program just for female entrepreneurs. We'll see you there.