Are you looking at the same revenue number as last year? Is it the same as the year before that, too? It’s beyond frustrating and confusing when nothing moves significantly despite changing your marketing, investing in a new hire (or more), and restructuring your offers.
Most of us who have been in this situation wind up asking again and again and again, “What am I missing? I’ve got to be missing something…” After all, things were going so well a couple of years ago, why aren’t they now?
It is entirely normal to start wondering whether your business is broken or if it’s you and your head trash. I know, because I’ve been there.
When I talk with business owners in this predicament, I find it’s rarely an either-or situation. It’s usually an “and” as in your business is broken and you’re getting in the way.
But most can’t tell the difference, or which is causing what.
What Does Head Trash Mean for Business Owners?
Head trash is more complicated than negativity, a bad mood, or a rough quarter. It’s insidious mental programming that you’re completely unaware of. It’s running in the background of every decision you make and everything you experience. It’s a distorted point of view that feels completely and unquestionably true.
In other words, to you, it’s a fact. But it’s your fact and not necessarily anyone else’s.
You might recognize it as the internal voice that tells you things like:
- You can’t raise your prices. What you’re offering isn’t worth more.
- That difficult client is difficult because they see through the “lies” and know the “truth” about how unworthy or unvaluable what you’re offering is.
- You’ll never land a quality prospect.
Head trash shapes every decision you make without your conscious awareness. It’s the same mechanism driving imposter syndrome, and it’s what makes it so expensive and difficult to catch.
How Do You Know If It’s a Real Business Problem or Head Trash?
The truth is messier than this question implies. Head trash and real business problems layer on top of each other.
However, most business owners assume it’s one or the other. They want a quick fix that allows them to move on. If it’s a business problem, they need structural solutions. If it’s a mindset issue, they’ll just work through it.
And, honestly, from the inside, it does just look like an either-or situation. That’s the problem.
Let’s say you’re not closing enough sales. Is that a pricing problem? A positioning problem? Or, are you walking into every sales conversation convinced that your prospect won’t say yes?
Maybe your revenue has plateaued for the 3rd straight year. Is that a market ceiling, or one you installed yourself without knowing it? (T. Harv Eker calls this the inner-money thermostat.)
I learned this the hard way.
When I left the corporate world to start my entrepreneurial journey, I was both naïve and arrogant. I had a PhD in engineering. I assumed I could figure anything out, and when it didn’t work, I assumed I could buy my way out. Course after course. Coaching program after coaching program. Then tens of thousands of dollars later, I was still stuck.
What I kept missing was that I wasn’t addressing the correct problem. I wasn’t aware of what it actually took to run a business. I wasn’t aware that my ideal client was completely different from the typical, because I was one of the original divorce coaches. The market I thought I understood wasn’t mine. So, I flipped between blaming the programs and blaming myself. Back and forth with no forward progress because neither answer was right.
For me, the shift came completely out of the blue and from an unexpected place. A new online magazine reached out and said they like my writing. For $350 a year, I could write as much as I wanted, and they’d edit and publish it. I justified the cost as the equivalent of one client’s monthly fee. It took me some serious internal debate, but I eventually said yes.
Clients started coming in. Visibility grew. I ended up syndicated on well-known national platforms and eventually had my own column.
Although it felt like magic, it wasn’t. What really changed was that someone outside of the noise of my own thinking could see something I couldn’t. And for the first time as a business owner, I let them.
Why Can’t You Identify Your Own Head Trash and Fix it?
You’ve probably seen the step-by-step process that’s out there as a fix. Write down your limiting beliefs. Journal the negative thoughts. Notice when your inner voice is being unkind. Obviously, this all sounds reasonable, and I’m sure it’s well-intentioned. However, it rarely works when you’re seriously struggling with a distorted view of reality.
And that’s because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything there besides reality. Your distorted point of view isn’t jumping up and down saying, “I’m distorted!” It just presents itself as reasonable and true based on everything you know.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias. You interpret every new piece of evidence through the lens of what you already believe.
For example, if you believe on some level that you may not even be aware of that you’re not quite enough, your brain will find proof that you’re not enough everywhere you look. The client who didn’t call back, the proposal that didn’t close, and the competitor who seems to be doing better are all “proof” your brain collects as evidence.
Your brain is just doing its job of pattern-matching and not purposefully deceiving you.
You can understand all of this intellectually and still not be able to identify your head trash. In other words, it’s hiding in your blind spots. And blind spots, by definition, are impossible to identify on your own.
What Does Unchecked Head Trash Actually Cost You?
It can cost you a whole lot of time, money, emotions, your health, and maybe even your relationship.
Let me tell you about a client.
She had been running her business for 3 years. She wasn’t exactly failing or thriving. She was grinding and gutting it out with a low hum of not quite feeling like enough perpetually present.
She’d hear herself shooting herself in the foot in sales conversations. She’d compare herself to people she assumed were more successful and find herself lacking before the conversation even started. Her internal voice reached the same conclusion every time. There must be something wrong with me.
Outside of her business, she felt the strain. Her husband told her she didn’t have a real business because she couldn’t contribute to the household income. He told her she was wasting her time and their life together.
Somehow, she kept going. But in every client interaction, every sales conversation, and every decision she made, that story of not being enough was there, coloring everything a depressing shade of almost failure.
THREE years! That’s what unchecked head trash cost her. Three years of a business that could have been thriving, running at a fraction of what it was capable of. Three years compounded in revenue not made, prospects not converted, and opportunities ignored.
Her business wasn’t broken. The profit was hiding in plain sight. She just couldn’t see it through the lens that told her it was broken.
What Changes When Someone Else Can Finally See What You Can’t?
When you finally get a clearer view of the world, it is like night and day. You hardly recognize who you used to be because it’s not who you are now.
Fortunately, that’s what happened for this client. She took action. She surrounded herself with the right people, went to therapy, and rebuilt slowly. Then, one day, she woke up and something had shifted. It was like a switch had flipped. She finally understood what all of these people were reflecting to her.
Then she almost doubled her revenue in one day. The circumstances didn’t change. The market didn’t change. The business model didn’t change. What changed was the story she was telling herself.
That’s how it goes when you throw out the head trash. Your business (and life) can change in dramatic ways.
For me, it was a magazine editor who saw value in my writing and said so. I was able to see myself from her vantage point instead of continuing to listen to my own limiting beliefs that I didn’t even know were there. That $350 decision created more momentum than tens of thousands in courses and coaching combined.
And that’s how it works. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s story This Is Water. Two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish passes them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” They swim on, and one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
You can read every book, understand every framework, work through every step of every process, and still not be able to apply it to yourself.
What you need to eliminate the false reality you’ve been struggling with is someone outside to help you identify what’s holding you back.
If you’ve been working hard, doing all the right things, and still feel stuck, then there’s likely something else getting in the way. Sometimes it only takes one outside perspective to show you what years of trying to see it yourself couldn’t.
Karen Finn, PhD, is an author and business growth strategist. Schedule a 15-minute call to see if you’re a fit for her process.
