27. The Power of Emotional Awareness in Starting Your Business

Written By Jenna Rykiel

Do you ever feel like your emotions are sabotaging your business success? I know I have. Those moments when your stomach is in knots, your face is burning, and you're wondering just how exactly you ended up here.

In my corporate days, I would sit across from challenging clients, plastering on my professional smile while shame, anger, and embarrassment crashed over me like a tsunami. Little did I know, those feelings were trying to tell me something crucial about my future. This understanding makes a huge difference, so it's time to stop letting your emotions sabotage your success and start letting them drive it instead.

In this episode, I show you exactly how to decode what your feelings are telling you about yourself and your business. You'll learn how to become what I call a feeling detective, so you can uncover those hidden messages within your most uncomfortable feelings. I also show you how to transform that knot in your stomach into fuel for your next big breakthrough.

If you're looking for the right environment to start your networking journey, look no further than my group, the Mom Entrepreneurs Circle. Sign up below for mutual support, advice sharing, and the tools you need for both you and your business to thrive. We meet on the 2nd Thursday of each month and participation is totally free!

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • How to become a feeling detective and uncover hidden messages within uncomfortable feelings.

  • Why your feelings aren't random and how they're created by your thoughts.

  • The surprising truth about what really drives your actions.

  • Why the physical sensations of emotions are nothing to be afraid of and how to reframe their meaning.

  • How to use the Intentional Feeling Generator tool to create feelings that serve your business.

Listen to the Full Episode:

What if you sat down right now and asked yourself, what if I could do the holidays exactly as I wanted? What would that look like?

Do you ever feel like your emotions are just sabotaging your business success? Listen in this week because I’m going to show you how to take back control. You’ll learn how to become what I call a feeling detective and uncover those hidden messages within those uncomfortable feelings. And I show you how to transform that knot in your stomach into fuel for your next big breakthrough. It’s time to stop letting your feelings hold you back and start using them to drive the results you want. This episode is a game changer, so keep listening.

Welcome to How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. It’s a podcast that helps working moms just like you, optimize your time, manage your mind, and start a business that helps you create more freedom, flexibility, and, yes, fun. I’m business and mindset coach Jenna Rykiel. And I offer practical tips to help you ditch the nine-to-five. I have been exactly where you are and I know what it takes to make the transition without trading one form of burnout for another. So, let’s get started.

Hi mom friends. I hope everyone is feeling energized after last week’s episode with a plan to really prioritize what you need in this festive season ahead. But also remember to prioritize what you need in this season of life. It’s a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things, but it makes us work, that’s for sure. I’m so glad you’re here today because we are diving into something really important, something I wish someone had explained to me years ago and it has to do with our feelings.

Adley just got his first real book about emotions, and it’s really what inspired me to record this episode because we know how important it is to teach our kids about their feelings. And then somewhere along the way, something switches and as adults, our emotions seem to just happen. We no longer get curious about them. Sometimes we don’t even notice them. And in this episode I’m going to talk about not only how we can better understand and notice our emotions, but how we can use those emotions to drive the results we want in our lives and businesses.

In the next few minutes, you’re going to learn practical tools to transform uncomfortable feelings, or really any feelings into business fuel. I’m going to talk about how to stop letting your emotions sabotage your success and start letting them drive it instead. And I also want to talk about why that knot in your stomach might actually be your guide. Recently I was reflecting on my own emotional journey, leaving corporate to start my own business.

And you know that moment when you’re sitting in a meeting and your stomach is in knots, your face is burning and you’re wondering how the hell you got here? That was me every single week at my corporate job. I was sitting across from this particular university leader, one of our challenging clients, watching her tear into me and my team just completely belittling us and what did I do? I sat there and took it, plastering on my professional smile while shame, anger and embarrassment crashed over me like a tsunami.

Knowing that the white glove service and the customer is always right adage came with its exceptions, but also knowing very well that’s not what my boss wanted to hear. Those feelings that I experienced in those moments changed everything for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. Those feelings weren’t just random emotions, they were trying to tell me something crucial about my future. The emotions were telling me that I wasn’t in the right company, or even in the right profession. And Lord knows I wish I would have listened to those emotions six years sooner.

This is how emotions can be our guide, telling us that something needs to change. I dig into this more in episode three, which is all about when to quit your job. So, if you want to dive deeper into that, go to jenna.coach/3.

But before we decide change is needed, we really need to understand where our emotions are coming from and why. So today I’m going to show you exactly how to decode what your feelings are telling you about yourself and your business so you can start creating results right now instead of dragging out feeling stuck whether that be in your corporate job or in a certain point in your business. And in order to start using your feelings as fuel, you need to first become more aware of the feelings you’re experiencing.

I want you to turn into a feeling detective. To do this, you have to slow down and hit pause when a strong emotion hits. I know it’s almost impossible for us moms to slow down, but we have to figure out a system to make it happen if we want to be more intentional about what we feel on a daily basis. If we’re constantly feeling self-doubt or uncertainty, that will reflect in our business results. So, I want you to really try to do an emotional body scan next time a strong emotion hits you. And this can be in your business or just in life, maybe during your kid’s next tantrum.

The body scan is all about naming the feeling specifically, so not just bad or stressed. What emotions are you experiencing? I’m going to link a feelings wheel to this episode because there are so many emotions out there and most of us are limited to recalling about five in any given moment. I want you to expand your emotional vocabulary. So, make sure you check out the show, notes jenna.coach/27 to get the feelings wheel. I didn’t create it. It’ll be someone else’s that I link.

The second thing is, once you’ve named the emotion, then I want you to locate the emotion in your body. Do you have a tight chest, a churning stomach, a hot face? Knowing where it shows up helps us to decipher what we’re going through more easily down the line.

Then the third thing, the most important part, I want you to ask yourself, what thought is creating this emotion? After my first maternity leave, I went through a three month stretch where I didn’t sign a single new client. Every consultation call ended in a no. And let me tell you, the emotion I was feeling was completely deflated. It felt like a heaviness in my chest and stomach, and my thoughts went straight to, I’m not cut out for this. I should go back to my safe corporate job.

Each time I got off a consultation call, I felt this heavy weight in my chest, but the feeling wasn’t caused by the potential client saying no. It was created by my thoughts about what the no meant. When I actually got curious about these feelings instead of running from them, everything shifted. Instead of making it mean something about my worth or ability as a coach that somebody said no, I thought to myself, I must not be explaining my program clearly enough or the potential results clearly enough.

And that simple shift turned my panic and my deflated feeling into curiosity, which led to productive action. It led me to create a visual snapshot of my program’s main pillars that I could share with potential clients in the call as I talked them through it. And the next consultation call that I had, the mom signed up. And I saw her face light up when I talked through the pillars of what she would actually be learning and taking away from the program.

So, when I thought, I’m not cut out for this, I felt deflated. When I thought something’s wrong with my program, I felt discouraged. But when I thought, I must not be explaining this clearly, I felt curious and motivated. The same circumstance, potential client says no, but with different thoughts we get completely different feelings. And as you can see, very different actions and results which I’ll go into a bit deeper in a second.

This is huge because once you understand this connection, you can actually choose thoughts that create feelings that serve you and that’s the real game changer. And I’ll be providing a tool for you to be able to do that in this episode. The biggest takeaway, though, is that your feelings aren’t random, and they’re not happening to you, they’re created by your thoughts,. And if you want to dive deeper into thoughts, I go through that in episode eight, so jenna.coach/8.

Now, here’s where things get really interesting and fun, and we go beyond just thoughts and feelings. This is something I wish someone had told me years ago when I was first starting my business in 2016, my failed first start, which I talk about on the podcast as well. Our actions aren’t actually driven by our goals, our to-do lists or even our dreams. Our actions are driven by our desire to either feel or avoid feeling certain emotions. Let me show you how this plays out in real business scenarios that you might be experiencing currently.

When you keep forgetting to send that follow-up email to a potential client, you’re not actually forgetting, you’re avoiding feeling rejected. When you scroll Instagram instead of working on your business plan, you’re not gathering inspiration, you’re avoiding feeling overwhelmed or avoiding feeling like a novice. And when you spend hours perfecting your website instead of reaching out to potential clients, you’re not being thorough, you’re avoiding feeling vulnerable.

And I hate to reference yet another episode, but I talk all about websites and my strong opinions about websites and why we keep working on our websites in episode 21. Definitely take a listen, go to the show notes, all of these will be linked in there. I see these patterns with my clients all the time and this is why understanding your feelings is so crucial in business. Every action you take or don’t take is driven by a feeling you’re either seeking or avoiding. And you want to know the fastest way to grow your business? It’s to start getting curious about your feelings and which ones you are avoiding and which ones you actually need.

So, I want you to ask yourself, what feelings am I avoiding when I procrastinate on important tasks? Number two, what feelings do I actually need to generate in order to take bold action? And number three, what thoughts could I practice to create those feelings? Just recently I was working with a client, let’s call her Monique, and she was so hesitant to raise her prices. She was brilliant at her craft, so creative, but couldn’t seem to raise her prices even though the prices she was at were way below overhead. She was just starting out and felt like she needed to work her way up.

She kept telling herself she was being strategic by keeping them low. But when we dug deeper, we discovered she was actually avoiding feeling two specific emotions, guilt and unworthiness. Guilt because she wanted everyone to be able to afford her service and unworthiness because somewhere deep inside, she didn’t feel like she deserved the success in her business. Once she saw this connection and was honest about it, everything changed. We no longer talked in circles about price strategy. We started talking about the true value she was providing and why it was worth more than what she was asking for initially.

She realized instead of needing to wait until she reached a certain number of clients, she actually needed to work on feeling confident and understand her own self-worth, to take the action of raising her prices. And that second piece, understanding our self-worth, that is heavy and that is deep. And maybe it’s a coach that you work with for that, but maybe it’s a therapist you work with for that and sometimes that is what we need.

But her and I worked on many thoughts that created those feelings that she needed. My expertise saves my clients time and money and it’s possible that I’m worthy of success. She doubled her prices within a month and continued signing clients, but now she was actually covering more of her overhead, which positively impacted so many other actions she would take in her business. I think she’s even expanded into a second location now, which is amazing. And you don’t get there by not charging people and you don’t get there by keeping your prices low.

This brings us to the real difference making tool that I briefly mentioned earlier and this is the intentional feeling generator. And it’s golden for all the bold actions you’re going to take in your business and here’s how it works. I want you to pick one feeling you want more of in your business. Monique wanted more confidence and to see herself as worthy. You then write down thoughts that naturally create that feeling. For Monique, it was, my expertise saves my clients time and money and it’s possible that I’m worthy of success.

But if you want to feel motivated, it might be thinking I don’t need to have all the answers right now to take action. If you want to feel assured, it might be, everything is figure out-able and this is no different. Choose one believable thought and practice it daily. Put it on a post-it note, on your mirror, repeat it in the shower, practice it until you start feeling more of the emotion you want to drive your business forward and this type of change takes time.

So, what I also recommend in the meantime is having that thought as a mantra before you sit down to work on your business so that that’s the last thing in your mind before you start. And here’s what’s wild. The physical sensations we experience when we feel emotions, they are nothing to be afraid of. When we’re hot in the face, because we’re feeling embarrassed, that’s just increased blood flow, and it’s not a painful sensation, it’s not like our face is literally burning. And many emotions that are completely opposite, like anxiety and excitement have almost identical sensations. So, what does this mean?

First, it means we don’t have to be afraid of feelings because they can’t physically harm us. And second, we are in control of our feelings because it’s the meaning behind each that is so important. The meaning we give them changes everything. That racing heart when you’re about to pitch your services, it could mean, I’m going to fail or it could mean I’m about to grow my business. You get to choose.

So, this week I challenge you to do one daily check-in. So, I keep sticky note on my laptop as a reminder. I also have that daily grounding exercise I talked about in episode 25. I interviewed Crystal Heitzman and she talked through that exercise. And I keep bringing this up because I know you’re struggling to make time for yourself, and I can’t stress it enough. This daily feeling check-in is a great exercise to incorporate into that journaling and grounding.

The second thing I want you to do is notice which emotions you’re avoiding the most in your business. Are you avoiding feeling vulnerable? Are you avoiding feeling embarrassed? Are you avoiding feeling like a novice? Are you avoiding putting yourself out there and what is the feeling behind that?

The third thing is practice generating one supportive feeling using the tool we covered. If you want to feel more courageous, find a few thoughts that you can practice to generate that feeling. If you want to feel more motivated, practice some thoughts to get you there.

Next week I’m diving into some of the top thought patterns that keep mom entrepreneurs stuck. And I guarantee you’ll recognize at least one of them. And we’ll break down exactly how to shift these patterns to get the results you want in your business. And remember, every successful entrepreneur felt scared and uncertain at some point. The difference is they learned to use those feelings as fuel instead of letting them be stop signs.

Thank you for showing up for yourself today. Keep feeling, keep growing and remember that starting a business and growing a business doesn’t need to feel good all the time, just like motherhood doesn’t feel great all the time, but it’s of course worth it in the end. Okay, I’ll catch you next week.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.

Enjoy the Show?

Jenna Rykiel
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26. Holiday Self Care: How to Show Up for Yourself This Season