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The construction industry knows how to talk about the tangible—build your team; get off the tools; scale.
What gets less airtime is the internal work running underneath all of it — the identity shifts, the competing forces, the particular experience of the femme founder building alongside and within a male-dominated industry.
The Holistic Home Service Podcast is that conversation.
Energetics and strategy and everything in between for the women leading home service businesses.
As we rise, everything built around us does too.
Hello hello and welcome.
So if you find yourself needing to make a decision, maybe when I say that there's one that immediately comes to mind, and you've been polling all the people around you, you've been thinking, making pros and cons lists, sitting up at night, waking up in the middle of the night, waking up early with this on your mind, this episode is for you.
Here's the hard truth.
When you are experiencing paralysis around making a decision, especially around business, clarity doesn't come from cogitating, from thinking, from theorizing.
That is often our way of trying to maintain safety by being good little girls and boys and making the quote unquote right decision.
Clarity comes through experimentation.
It comes through momentum.
It comes through taking a step, getting the feedback, and then course correcting.
I know that's a really hard thing to grasp, especially for those of us who are perfectionists, who may be eldest children, who come from a background that really emphasizes perfection and performance.
Entrepreneurship can feel like the most massive ego death ever, right?
Because we want to be right.
We want to mitigate our risks.
We want to have as much upside for everybody.
And I think that's profound and amazing, and we do need strategic, concerned, compassionate people at the helms of companies.
And we cannot use this concern and what often falls into fear, we cannot use this fear to constrict us and to make ourselves prisoners of this decision.
How I like to think about decision making is like an arrow.
So we're not saying completely throw out your brain, just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks.
Like, absolutely not.
We have enough people doing that in this world.
But there is a balance of your strategy and your execution.
So back to the arrow, okay?
The arrow is the strategy.
It's how you fashion the little feathers on it and you sharpen the head of it and it's the bow and you're analyzing the wind speed and the execution as you're firing it.
Most of archery learning is not, okay, my bow and my arrow and this and that.
It's taking the shots, the repetitions, putting a few repetitions in and then course correcting and seeing, okay, actually they're landing low.
I need to increase up.
I need to account for this and that.
But the wrong thing to do, try not to say wrong, but if your desire is to move as swiftly and smoothly to your end state of the problem solved, the bottom line increased, whatever, then the way you don't want to do that is spending so much time in the strategy.
You don't want to spend 90% of your time polishing the bow, analyzing the wind speed, like I said, perfecting your stance, but being so terrified to release the string.
And I know there are so many fucking cliches about this, right?
You miss 100% of the shot you don't take, et cetera, et cetera.
But what does this mean when the rubber meets the road?
It does mean that first and foremost, there needs to be disarmament because going back to the arrow analogy, it doesn't mean the arrow, the way you stand doesn't matter at all.
And we may approach certain problems or situations where we're just shooting off arrows, but all we need to do is adjust our arm and everything flows more smoothly, right?
There's the whole parable of two lumberjacks racing to cut down more trees and the one paused every four hours and he was sharpening his axe and he got further ahead.
That absolutely matters.
And if we find ourselves stuck, we might need to overcorrect a little bit.
So that's where the discernment comes in to release, look at your situation and say, okay, this is a decision that needs to be made.
I have been cycling around this.
I have been asking, I have been on Reddit, I have been listening to podcast episodes.
I feel tight when I think about it, I feel anxious.
I'm worried about making the wrong mistake.
I'm worried about making the wrong decision and it being a mistake.
In those moments, there are a whole host of things we can do, but I think one of the quickest ways to dispel that frozen state is to move.
When we talk about somatics and the nervous system and we talk about our different states, there's fight and flight we talk about, but there's so many other states, there's freeze, there's fawn, there's shutdown.
When you're in that freeze state, like a deer in a headlight where you see something oncoming or something feels like a threat, but you are stuck in the spot, adrenaline rushing through you.
Somatic practitioners tell us that one of the best things we can do is just add a little bit of warmth, a little bit of warmth, a little bit of motion, a little bit of friction, a little bit of energy.
So when we're dealing with nervous system overwhelm, that might mean quite literally adding heat, go to the sauna, snuggling in blankets, or adding a little bit of movement, a quick walk on the treadmill, shaking your arms even, tapping your body to get out of that frozen state.
And I think it's similar for business.
We get into these states where the stakes feel so high and sometimes they are high, but oftentimes not as high as we think.
And the best thing we can do for ourselves is to take a deep breath and ask, which direction do I want to experiment in?
This is a big experiment.
Nothing is come back from a bowl, right?
We have seen people make heinous decisions, heinous decisions, crazy decisions, kooky out there, wild decisions, and come back from them.
You can too.
You are special, but also you're not.
Sometimes we need to remember we're not that special that making a decision that eventually might feel like a mistake means we can't have redemption and nothing good can come out of it.
People have, for all of humanity, I'm sure, had this experience and come out okay on the end.
And really, this is what business ownership is made of.
Their willingness to try, to risk, to look stupid, to have cringey moments, to lose a contract, to fail to meet certain terms.
We never set out to do that, but we have to be willing to risk failure to see that high reward.
I know something that is super supportive for me when I am engaging with and wrestling with a concept that might be difficult for me, is to just have a whole bunch of different analogies and ways to look at thrown at me, and so that's what I'm going to do.
Another way to look at this is acute versus chronic pain.
I love ...
Anybody who knows me knows I stay talking about this, because it is such an apt dichotomy to look at so many things in life.
Acute pain is terrible, terrible pain, but it's typically shorter lived.
Chronic pain is longer term.
It's not always less painful, but in general, the sense is it's more persistent, but perhaps not so stabbing and debilitating.
I know chronic pain is debilitating, absolutely, for those who have it.
Hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say here, right?
There's a difference between being stabbed by a knife and having multiple pinpricks every day.
In business, we can choose the acute path and the chronic path, and there isn't a correct one every single time.
I will try my best to never be so dogmatic as to say something like that, but what I have noticed in situations like this where we are frozen, where we are trapped in this cycle of experimentation, feeling tight, feeling like we can't trust our own direction and guidance and falling into this perfectionistic trap, we are experiencing this chronic pain.
We are looking at the immediate potential pain of messing up, looking silly, disappointing somebody, looking like we don't know at all, letting down our crew, not meeting a deadline, trying something that we spent energy on and it fails.
We're seeing that acute pain and feeling like it's so insurmountable that we're willing to put ourselves in chronic pain because give it two, three, four, five years maybe of putting off this decision or picking something less aligned because it feels safer.
In five years, we look back and we see like, hey, I'm at this decision point again.
I actually still need to make this decision, but now I've spent five years creating a life, creating a business, creating my psyche, creating my nervous system around something that isn't aligned and now instead of just having made that decision at that point before and dealing with that intense pain, the disorientation, I now have five years of undoing all the things that I built around this misaligned decision in addition to actually still having to make the decision.
And so this is not to scare us, this is not to in any way make things feel final because that's one thing I'm trying to emphasize in all of this is that most things are not final.
While there may be particular opportunities that may not present themselves in the exact same way again, though many do, the outcome, the impact, et cetera, is not gone forever.
Maybe there's a news report interview thing that just doesn't feel aligned, but you feel like you should take it and you're stuck between these two and you don't know what to do.
Also remind yourself that there is not only one newspaper news outlet in the world and they don't just interview people once.
There's options, you have flexibility and you can experiment.
You can say, maybe this time I'm making the decision to trust my intuition and I don't want to do it.
But for you, experimentation looks like, hey, I'm just going to get on this thing and do it because this is the growth edge I want to be leaning into.
For two different people, it can look so different.
The key though is that movement and not spending so much time in our heads laying out the different paths that we don't get the data we need.
To drive this point home, I want to just emphasize that so often I see business owners, especially when it comes to serving their clients, attracting clients and serving clients, I see so many business owners fall into this trap.
It's one thing to say, okay, do I want this tech or that tech?
That can be a little bit easier of a decision slash easier to kind of overcome that inertia because it affects you and your team.
But once we start getting into sales, marketing, client delivery, this is where I see a lot of the tension and the fragility and the rigidity come in because we're afraid of letting people down externally, losing money, our reputation, all very important things.
But the thing is that we don't know how people will respond.
We don't know how people are thinking.
And even if we know our market in one year, it might shift in the next year and maybe you're moving into a different market.
Maybe you have shifted and your business has shifted in a way where even if your target audience has stayed the same, your relationship to them has changed.
And so when we are dealing with these decisions, especially these decisions that really involve external parties that we feel like are high stakes relationships, experimentation is actually one of the fastest ways to get them what they need and to get ourselves what we need.
The data, the correct understanding of how to proceed.
So I hope that this admonition has been helpful.
I want to reiterate.
I'm not saying leave your logic at the door, leave your strategic mind, leave your intuition at the door.
I'm saying absolutely bring them along, but don't let the spiral of perfectionism mask itself and tell you that it is you just being strategic when you're tense and you've been stuck in this decision.
Give yourself the gift of experimentation.
Give yourself the gift of being able to say, I'm human and this is what entrepreneurship is all about.
I get to test and see and play and learn from what arrives from that.
It has been delightful to spend this time with you.
As always, we love to hear from you.
Feel free to connect on any of the platforms listed below.
And as always, until next time.