Ep 67: Shrinking to Standing Tall: Find Your Inner Power

EPISODE 67

Mastering Confidence in your Social Impact Journey

 
 
 

Do you ever find yourself shrinking to fit into the world around you? I'd like to share with you one of my personal stories, my journey through 'shrinking'. You'll hear me drawing parallels between the life of a hydrangea in my garden and our lives, especially as social impactors, revealing how we often shrink into the background, surrendering to the fear of judgment. Join me for an empowering conversation as I share my personal experiences of overcoming this fear, learning how to stand tall, and not give up too soon. 

Have you ever wondered how to keep going despite the odds? Discover the inspiring stories of leaders like Sara Blakely and David Beckham who refused to accept shrinking as their destiny and, instead, embraced their main character energy. We explore the importance of daring action, positive self-talk, and the game-changing impact of having a supportive coach or mentor by your side. It's time to step into your greatness and let your inner power shine. Tune in now and prepare to stand tall with unshakable confidence! 

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TRANSCRIPT:

00:02

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go.

00:20

We've been doing some gardening around the house and whenever my kids go to water the plants in the yard, I always tell them water the ones that look like this. And I make this like shoulder drop, sad kind of look and I literally make my shoulders smaller, my body shorter, my head down, my face sad, and I'm like those are the ones. I'm like that hydrangea in the front. Give that one water, right, and they know immediately what I mean. If they don't know what a hydrangea is, they know by what I've described which ones need the water. How do they know that? They know which ones are literally sad. I sometimes will say the ones that look sad, right, they're shrinking.

01:05

I want to talk about this concept of shrinking today. How does shrinking show up for us social impactors and what we can do to stand tall to step into it. So I use this example behind Georgia, because we just painted quite a few in our yard and one of them is like shrinking. Like I hit it with some water, it perks back up. Then I walk in the house, it goes back down, right. Yeah, the ones seem to be into an okay, but this one needs a little more nurturing. It needs a little bit more love. So what is shrinking?

01:41

Shrinking is when you give up too soon. You give up before it really you really planned on giving up. It's when you tell yourself internally some sort of flavor of it's not working. You stop right before the momentum kicks in. This is something I've seen before. You just missed it. It's like people were starting to catch on and you gave up, right. It's kind of like petering out. Maybe you're thinking this is as good as it's going to get, and so you just kind of shrink. Another way it shows up is when you shrink into the background. You had planned to do this big campaign, right? Or you planned to do this big launch. Are you planning to do this?

02:23

This was the week I was going to make those asks or make those calls or send those emails. I was going to come in hot, and then I got a little bit of objections or something got in the way. I encountered some obstacles and I shrink into the background, right, and what it looks like is. Maybe you give yourself a lot of busy work instead so you can still say you worked for the week. But it's a lot of busy work. It's a lot of passive action work, and maybe when you're shrinking or like the cause behind you shrinking is, you're worried about being judged, and I get that. I think that's a huge one. That's one I personally have worked on.

02:58

Continue to work on is standing tall, thinking about sunflowers. You know how tall those things get. So, like the tallest sunflower is like is literally poking its head out of the rest, right, standing tall, it's like. It's like asking to be judged. Right Now, some people may say that's a gorgeous sunflower, right, some people may say that's beautiful, but other people may have another opinion. Wow, it's really blocking the view, right, can't see into the house or whatever, right, so it feels like you're being judged.

03:30

It may cause you to shrink when you're thinking I don't fit in here. If you've ever walked into a networking or an event or anything where you're like, oh my gosh, I don't, these are not my people, I've said that before. These aren't my people, I don't belong here, I feel overwhelmed, I feel like I'm not sure what to say. Shrinking, okay, when you think you're going to get it wrong in a pitch meeting or prospect meeting with a donor, a funder, right, like a discovery meeting, and you're like again, you're thinking, oh, I feel really intimidated or I don't feel repaired, I don't know the right things to say shrinking, shrinking, right. So what do you end up doing? You end up proving it true. You end up proving it true because you actually dim your light, you actually like turn down the volume of you and the flavor of you and you actually start showing up as this watered down kind of, you know, sad version. Right, it may not be overtly sad, but you get me, it's a watered down version. Okay, you're literally less you in this process. You're less magnetic, you're less energetic. Sometimes you're less clear. So the words you say in an email, the words you say out loud, right, are less clear because you're in your head Like just trying to think, oh, what's the right script to say here? What weird You're doing the compare thing, what would so and so say instead don't do that, okay, and ends up being less compelling and less inspiring. First thing I want to do is say Super normal.

05:00

Everyone has had a flavor when deals with a flavor shrinking and their life. It's a very, very common. And if you think you don't look for it. And if you think, well, not so, and so there at the top of their field or there the expert, blah, blah, blah I would dare you to ask them like, hey, do you ever feel kind of like you don't know what to say, or you feel kind of wobbly, or you feel worried or you feel judged? See what they say, okay, see what they say.

05:30

I often see in these meetings, in these asks, in any version of outreach, right, your stories get shorter. So if you've ever been in like a pitch meeting or a discovery meeting and you're feeling this way, you plow through the ask in the suit or you can get out of there or hang up off the call or get off the zoom. The better, right, the email is less compelling. It's just how do I get it out of there? Second, cross it off the to do list and tell Christina, tell myself, why did the action Right? You didn't really do the action right because you did the doled down version, the dim down version, okay, so don't do that, okay.

06:10

It was making me think as I was thinking about this concept of I know there was some show and I don't remember what show. It's like. Imagine you're running and you're going out for a jog and you pass by like your neighbor is walking a dog, and you pass by the mail carrier right and they're waving, and then you hit a corner, no one's on that next street and you just stop jogging and you just start walking right, instead of being like we're going for a run. I'm keeping my energy up, even if no one sees me taking the action, even if I'm not getting the cheers just yet, I'm gonna keep going. Now, if I need to walk at some point, I'll let myself walk.

06:51

It's not about that, right. It's not about, like, grinding through it. It's just about the concept of like, who are you doing it for in this, in in in the first place? Right, we're showing up standing tall. We're showing up in your unique voice. We're showing up telling the stories, that's that connect with people, that help people, that come in service. Right, make your world better. You're doing it in service of other people, right, even if your neighbor isn't seeing you, even if, right, and so often times I see people because we're siloed off. Right, we work from home. We're working. You know, heads down. We have small teams. Maybe you're even a solo pernure. You have a small staff, right? So no one's really saying, hey, did you send that fourth email? Did you follow up with the third call? Right, and see, just around that corner you just kind of Peter out. Right, that's shrinking.

07:40

No, don't do that, okay, when you stay in high energy or high belief, what happens then is you end up not doing it alone. So it's like when you stay in high energy or high belief, maybe you've got a board that's behind you, maybe you've got volunteers that behind you, maybe you just have some friends who are like, hell, yeah, you're doing it. I have no idea how, what exactly you do day to day, but I see you, I know you are doing it because you're telling them you're celebrating the winds, right. You're telling them they may not know exactly what it's like to pitch a funder. They may not know exactly what it's like to build a street team. That's okay, right, but they're with their. You stand taller. You stand taller like a flower, right, like that hydrangea made me think about the David Beckham documentary, if you haven't seen it.

08:31

On that flux, it's really, really good. Coming from somebody who knows almost nothing about soccer. I know about the spice girl, so about to Rebecca, but even that she was so private I feel like historically it was such an eye into their life and their marriage and her, her, her support of him and it was. It was really, really good. And one of the things I think so many people took away from it, including myself, was just like holy crap, I had no idea how much he was hated. I had no idea how much he had dealt with people actively just just telling him how awful he was right, telling him how much they didn't want to money their team, telling him how much they didn't like him and how he just he was hated for like two years straight and how he just kept going, and not only kept going in the sense of, well, I'm walking, kept going in training and running, in standing tall, kept going, going. I'm gonna figure this out. This is what I was meant to be meant to do and even though I have a larger group of people who don't want me here or don't think I belong here or don't think I'm great at soccer, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep going.

09:38

It was really, really inspiring and those are the people, people who are at the top of their game. Whether they're athletes where they're there, they're anything. Whether they're founders, right, they often have taken just platters and platters and platters of rejection. They've taken in a lot of your rejection but they haven't made it mean something horrible about them. So it makes me think of Sarah Blakely, right, who went door to door selling fax machines. That was her job before she founded Spinks.

10:08

She had this big idea about footless pantyhose and everybody told her it was dumb. Everybody told her it was a terrible idea. She was like this, this has, this has legs, this works. I know this has legs. I know this is something. She was inventing a product for the first time that didn't exist. There was no social proof that this was something that was gonna again be a billion dollar company. She never took investment seed money right.

10:33

What did she have? She had people, vendors, manufacturers tell you know, I'm not making that, know I'm not making that, no, I will not Do a run for you. That's dumb. And what did she say? She had to say an integrity with herself, manage her internal, internal self talk and say I'm gonna keep going. Right, I'm not going to go to these pitch meetings and tell a flavor of her invention that is watered down, less compelling, less clear, less clear, less magnetic. No, I'm gonna go full court press in these pitch meetings. I'm gonna call. I'm gonna find the buyer of Neiman Marcus. I believe that is who. Finally, that was like. The turning point is getting on the phone with the buyer of Neiman Marcus and being magnetic. All in right. Imagine if she made that exact same phone call but was the thirsty hydrangea was watered down. Hey, I've got these these painy. Oh, you don't want to. Okay, by right Course, she would have heard another.

11:28

No, think about how she refined her pitch along the way because she heard all those no same thing. Think about how good David Beckham got at winning and losing and getting better and becoming A team captain and communicating and handling all of the, the, the failures because of the triumphs, and vice versa. Like you literally get better at it right. The difference for me from from people, whether or not their celebrity doesn't matter, right doesn't matter. It matters whether you're not. You are Success story to you, whether you are top of your field, whatever that goal is, whether or not you feel like you're treading water, you really hitting where you want to be right is that internal self talk and the people you keep around you. Okay, so what that looks like is for many of us who are again solar pernures, or many of us who have small teams.

12:22

You may say to me, christina, I don't have a lot of people who are like with me along on this campaign and we're doing it together, that's okay. Okay, that's okay. The first place starts with you. It goes inward. Don't wait for everybody's approval. You've got to stand tall in yours, even when somebody tells you you blew that or no, it's a no or whatever flavor.

12:45

About every week I get some sort of unhelpful comment, whether it's on a webinar, whether it's in an email, like whatever, right, that's okay. I'm willing for some people to say, uh, you know, here's, here's an unfelt, helpful criticism. Right, that's okay. Those aren't my people, right, that's okay. In order to make sure that I help people just like you get to where you want to be right. And so how I handle that criticism is really, really important, because I could take it and I could have it way down on me literally and have it almost stop me from helping the rest of you and showing up for this podcast and showing up my courses and programs and showing up for my coaching, but instead I say to myself is this helpful? And if it is cool, then I'll take it into account, and if it's not, okay, bye, I give it back into the world.

13:40

I think Elise Myers talks about that. She's like okay, thank you, you can have that, that criticism back, it's not for me, go ahead, you can take it with you, right? So positive self-talk first. Have a coach, a mentor somewhere, a collective of people, even if it's a best friend, who doesn't do what you do, totally fine, who's just alongside cheering you on. She doesn't need to know the blow by blow, right, but just somebody who's like hell yeah, you got this, you got this, okay, don't do it alone. So that's my cue to remind you right, don't do it alone.

14:11

Sometimes we wear these heavy failures so heavily because we're not talking about it, we're not telling. You know, sarah Blakely is the first person to talk about the losses, with the wins. Right To talk about the doors and the phones slamming down. No, I don't want it right. I find too in those moments of well, I kind of bombed that or that, didn't go high, I wanted, or I flubbed that.

14:37

If I can just say it out loud. I don't need to say it out loud to everybody. I can say it out loud to a trusted group, a trusted mentor, a trusted coach, even a friend or spouse. It helps. Just take away the shame of it, right, it takes away the charge of it. It takes away the need to feel like I have to go shrink now and I have to be less me now, right, because that's not it. Being less you actually prevents you from being where you want to be right.

15:05

So think about that campaign, think about that next launch, think about your mission and where you would like to see funding for your mission. Right, think about what would it take to get there, because you probably know and I find it's actually a few actions it's not like and I need this and I need this and I need this. So, for my nonprofits, for example, it probably is. I need to make. I need to book five meetings with funders five, five people, that's it. And these could be prospects, these could be current donors and just asking for more. Right, get out there, go, do it. Right. And I need to start a street team. Or I need to tap into the revenue of my email list, because I send emails once a quarter and when I send them they're just program updates. Right, that's it. That could be the difference of 250K right there? Just those three things. That's it.

16:04

If you need help with any of this, book a call with me. We can start there and I can point you to the next best step. Whether it's coaching with me, one-on-one or one of my group programs, I'll see you next time. Go stand tall. You know how they say you should enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Have you ever wondered how do I crack the code to do that? I can help you do that. I can help you not only achieve your biggest, most daring goals, but the journey to get there. No more overwhelm, no more self-doubt. I want to invite you to book a call with me. Go to splendidatl.com/book.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impact, mindset, productivityComment