More Than Anxiety

Ep 89 - Growing Yourself And Your Business When You're Anxious

• Megan Devito • Episode 89

Share episode

Join me in Episode 89 as I talk about how you're sabotaging your career, your growth, and giving up on your dreams when you let anxiety make your decisions for you. 

I'm sharing how you can use the feeling of anxiety in your body to check and challenge your thoughts, 
find evidence that you're already succeeding, 
and take steps forward even and especially when you feel anxious - on purpose.

You want to grow and expand - to get the promotion, to build your business, to have time for more fun but it feels scary.

  • You see all the roadblocks that you think are too big
  • You have great ideas on what you want but they feel impossible because of where you are now - you brain only has the past to go on and what you’re living in now was built on the past.
  • You feel anxious when you think about trying new things
    • Spending money that you haven’t made yet
    • Asking for what you want because you’re afraid of what someone else will say or think about you for asking.

You keep doing side projects that feel productive but when it comes to promoting yourself, you hold back. You work but you don’t make changes because they make you feel anxious - again based on what you think you’re capable of or what other people will think of you.

You have to learn to feel anxious and not believe what you think. You have to learn to choose the things that feel uncomfortable and believe in yourself before anyone else will believe in you - even if you have the cutest cupcakes on the planet - yes, you’ll sell some but you won’t grow and eventually you’ll fade away only because you aren’t truly believing in yourself.

  1. Learn how to calm your body and stop thinking.
  2. Decide what you want to believe about yourself and start gathering evidence to show you that you already have it.
  3. Make a first step plan that makes you uncomfortable and take the step - even and especially if it scares you.
  4. Repeat.

You use your problems and anxiety as a notification and motivation instead of rolling around in feeling defeated, angry, or small - which are okay to feel but not a place you want to or can stay in for long if you truly want to grow and expand personally or in your career.



Send us a text

Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.

Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!

Thanks for listening!

You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety Podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take actio so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it.

Megan Devito:

Hey there, welcome to episode 89 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name's Megan, I'm a life coach and I help ambitious women stop overthinking, calm the anxiety in their bodies so that they can start thinking clearly, problem solving and achieving their goals. I'm really glad you're here this week. Whether you're listening on YouTube or wherever you catch your podcasts, it's great to have you here. So let's go ahead and get started. This week. I want to talk to you about trying to go after your goals but really feeling anxious and out of control, so that you start that process of overthinking and then sabotaging yourself with those thoughts, so that you never quite get what you actually came for. Even when you have the best laid plans, and even when you know exactly what you want, you just can't get past it. This is really what I do as a coach is help people find the thoughts that are keeping them stuck and help them reframe those thoughts by calming down their nervous system. Because when you feel anxious, your brain is not working properly and we just need to break that habit so that you can move forward. It sounds really complicated. It's super simple. That doesn't necessarily mean easy, but I can walk you through all of that when we work together. I will talk about that more later.

Megan Devito:

But let's talk about feeling stuck and anxious. Let's say that you want to grow and expand. Whether you're thinking about starting a business, about asking for a promotion, or maybe just even in your personal life and deciding, you know what I really want to start running, whatever it is that comes up for you. When you want to grow or expand, to do these things, you start to notice that it feels really uncomfortable, because anytime we change what we've always done, your brain is going to see that as a threat. It likes the stuff that it already knows. Yes, even if you're stuck, even if you want these bigger things. It's gonna feel really weird inside of your body and, depending what you think about the way that your body feels, you can interpret that as excited or anxious, or apprehensive. All kinds of different emotions come up.

Megan Devito:

But when you have that feeling and your brain starts making it a problem or a negative thing, you're going to start to overthink and you'll start to see all of these roadblocks that you're imagining, that may or may not be there, and for sure there are going to be hard things about expanding. If it was easy, you would have already done it. It wouldn't be a problem. You'd just hop, skip and jump over to the next thing that you wanted to do and we wouldn't be talking about this. You wouldn't be listening.

Megan Devito:

But that's not the case, because your nervous system can fire up and make up a big story about how what you want is dangerous and it will start coming up with a bunch of different problems to make you just give up on purpose, even when you don't want to. So let's say you have these great ideas and you want them, but they feel really impossible because of where you are now or what you've experienced in the past. Honestly, your brain only has the past to go on. So it's going to look back to the past and what you've experienced then as a reference point and when it sees that, oh yeah, you've quit a couple of other things or you usually give up pretty easily. Or this is a lot of math, are you sure you want to do math? These are all scenarios that I've had in my past. I've done several different multi-level marketing things that I just kind of got out of really easily. It wasn't my thing, so I just gave up. I was actually decent at one of them. I've also told myself oh, I could never do that. I'm really bad at math which is funny because I've taught math in high school before but I would say I'm really bad at math.

Megan Devito:

Just these really crazy stories that your brain comes up with to make you quit because it feels uncomfortable to move forward. So you'll notice that you feel anxious and when you think about trying new things, things like oh, I have this business and I'm really going to do this, but I don't know Like I got all the certifications, I did everything I needed, but I don't know. Paying for that seems really expensive. I guess I can't do it. Let's say that you buy a bakery and you get in and it's a bakery that someone else had owned previously, and you get in there and the oven's broken and you're like, dang, I just spent all this money on the bakery and then the oven went out. I guess that's it. I have to sell the building.

Megan Devito:

People do this kind of sabotage or this kind of like hard stop because it feels uncomfortable to spend the money and to really go it all in on yourself. That's really what spending money is about, right. It's investing more energy or more resources into something that you're really excited about. So it tells you, your brain tells you that's never going to work out, it's not worth it. This was a giant, this was a terrible mistake. You should just quit now, and you might. If you can't challenge those feelings of having the broken oven and feeling like you can't work through it. We just have to get clear on what you're actually thinking.

Megan Devito:

It could also show up in a way that like you want to asking for what you want or asking for what you need, because you get really nervous about what somebody else will think. So again back to the bakery example. You bought a bakery, things are great, you have great ideas but you might need some help and you need to hire an employee. But you hire this employee to come in and work for you and whether they're going to clean or they're going to take orders or they're going to bake the cupcakes, whatever it is that you hire them for, you feel really shy about bossing them around, so you don't really put those boundaries down and you certainly don't ask for help when you're overwhelmed. So that doesn't really work out either and they eventually quit.

Megan Devito:

These are all just really kind of silent ways that you're giving up on what you want because you feel uncomfortable about asking for help, or because you feel uncomfortable having to try big, new, scary things that you've never done before. Again, this all comes from the past, being a reference point. Your brain doesn't know, so it says that's new, freak out, because this is probably going to kill you. And none of that is necessarily true, right? We know, we know it's not true, because if it were, people would never start new businesses, they would never go after promotions, they would never do the things they want to do because it would feel uncomfortable. So let's just notice right now that if that's what you're thinking, that doesn't have to be true, because if it was, nobody would ever do it. And when I talk about true, I'm talking about all or nothing here. Usually, I'm discouraging people from being an all or nothing thinker, but today I just want you to pay attention to that that. That's like sink or swim, right, there's a lot of in between. You could tread some water for a while.

Megan Devito:

So I want to tell you a story about someone that I was thinking about recently, who she had started a business, and I'm just going to use the I'm going to continue with the cake story as a frame of reference, because the cake story, I think, is really exactly where the inspiration for this episode came from. So, with this bakery, I want to give you this example of. I want you to put yourself in this situation. Pretend with me for a minute that you want to open a cake shop. I'm not saying you actually want to open a cake shop, right, you can apply this to your own life. Maybe you want to, I don't know. Maybe you want to quit your business and work at the zoo, or maybe you just want to ask for a promotion that would give you a new position at your job. Maybe you want to start a home-based business. Whatever it is that you want to do, let's just frame it from the cake shop example. Make it fit your own life. This is one of the benefits with coaching is that when I ask you questions and when I give you examples, you can take the information I'm giving you and you can apply it to yourself.

Megan Devito:

But for this podcast episode's purposes, I'm going to pretend like we're opening a bake shop and so you buy the building and everything's good and you've made this gorgeous cake Like. This thing is beautiful. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Cake Bake, but I'm from Indiana and there's this amazing cake shop in down in the Indianapolis and Carmel area that is like to die for. I mean, it's like the stuff of your Disney, Windsor Palace, Hollywood kind of dreams, with fairy lights and tulle, and like amazing cakes that are huge and covered in like this gold glitter. It's like. I can't even describe it. You should definitely Google it because it's amazing.

Megan Devito:

So you have this big dream of having a cake shop that's going to be like rivaling Cake Bake. It's the best example I can give you right now. The place is magnificent, okay, but you make a cake and it's beautiful and it's good, like it's a really good cake. So you make this beautiful window in front of your cake shop and you set this cake. Let's pretend like it's refrigerated or something I don't really know how you display cakes but let's pretend. You set it out there for everybody to see and then you wait and it's like your best kept secret, right, like that cake, if y'all knew about that cake, you would be here, but I'm definitely not about ready to tell you that it's there. Okay, maybe I'll post a picture on Facebook or Instagram and some people will see it and maybe somebody comes in and buys the cake, which is amazing, like you've had success, right.

Megan Devito:

But you're really discouraged because it's not what you imagined in your head. You thought you were going to make this cake and it was just like God was going to beam a light down on the cake and be like check out our cake. But that's not the way it worked. So you're discouraged because I don't know. I mean, I made this beautiful cake and I even told, I told my friends and they liked my cakes. They said I make great cakes. They tried one when I had them over for dinner one night, or this one person came and they said it was amazing. They even said thank you or whatever. The problem is, but you're holding back and you're feeling really discouraged because you're not seeing the success that you had imagined.

Megan Devito:

Another thing that could happen would be that you're really struggling with learning how to ask for what you need. So let's go back to the example of you hired an employee, so I have these things that I need to do to be able to get to where I want to go, whether it is I need to take a course on business, maybe, maybe you need to learn how to do business, maybe you need to learn how to code or something like that if you're going to ask for a promotion. I've been working on this thing, but I could really use a little bit of help in the background. So I've been working really, really hard to tell people. I've decided I have to get out there and tell people about my cake shop, and I'm working really hard to do that.

Megan Devito:

But because I'm out telling people about my cake shop, I don't have time to get all of the groceries into the bakery. I need somebody to clean, I need somebody to take care of the orders and do all of this back-end stuff so I can tell people about my cakes and bake the cakes. Somebody else needs to do the other things. But I'm afraid, if I ask them to go to the grocery or to clean the oven, that that they're going to get really upset. Like what if they think I hired them for a bake shop and then they're mad and they quit? What if they tell other people I'm a terrible boss? What if they tell people that I don't know what I'm doing?

Megan Devito:

All of these thoughts you have about asking for help whether it's what somebody will think of you for asking for help maybe they'll say she asked for help because she doesn't know what she's doing, or she asked this question and it just shows that her stuff isn't that great. Or who does she think she is to be asking for this promotion or to be having this bake shop if she is doing that? So all of these thoughts you have about asking for help or asking for what you want, whether it's a promotion, whether it's an opportunity to take part in this big event that you've always wanted to do, again, relate this back to your own life. But for cake shop purposes, for demonstration or example purposes, let's just say you have an employee that you're afraid to ask them to do something because you don't want to upset them and you don't want to have anyone upset with you or hear bad things about you. So you hold back.

Megan Devito:

Another way could be is if you find a bunch of other things to do that feel really super productive instead of working on telling people about your cakes and baking cakes. And I've been guilty of this right, like before. I was a coach. I had no experience in business whatsoever. I was a teacher and basically people hand you clients when you're teacher. You get like 27 of them at a time and they're like here are your clients for the year. So building a business was really hard for me, and I'm certainly not a business coach, but I do know what it's like to feel like you're being really productive doing other things and this is a really common experience for people who are trying to do anything that moves them forward. We find other things that feel really really good and safe to do.

Megan Devito:

So back to the bakery example, let's say that you notice that the bakery hasn't really been redecorated since like 1973 and it's so gross in there. You know what this place needs. It needs better paint. We need to rip this ugly wallpaper off or maybe even find some really new beautiful wallpaper. I should probably put new flooring in here. That's definitely going to make people want to come buy my cakes. But it's not, is it? Because when people are coming to buy your cakes, they don't give a crap about your wallpaper. I mean for sure you could make it beautiful. Again, back to my cake bake example. That place is amazing. It is like the most beautiful place you could ever eat cake in your life. But they can sell those cakes at a pawn shop and still make money. Yes, the experience is part of it with a cake, but their cakes are amazing.

Megan Devito:

The same could be true for you. Whether it's that you're trying to get the promotion or anything else, your work is incredible, and believing in your work feels scarier than doing other little side projects to make it better. Am I being clear about that? I hope so. So another thing that could happen that you're doing to try and make yourself grow and to feel really good and to feel more in control instead of feeling so anxious when you're trying to expand yourself is that you start checking out what other people do, and we're all guilty of this, right. I wonder what that life coach over there is doing. I wonder what that bakery down the street is doing. Is that a cheesecake cake that looks like a regular cake? How did they do that? How did they make a blueberry muffin into a cake? Whatever it is that you're thinking, or if you're asking, you know, I don't know. You know, this is what I could bring to this new level that I want to go to in my business, but I mean this other person, they're more qualified than me.

Megan Devito:

You start comparing yourself to other people, and when you do that, you start noticing all the things that you think you don't have, instead of paying attention to the things that you're really amazing and good at, which is where you need to keep your focus. You feel really inadequate, and when you feel inadequate, it's not inspiring, it's not making you take action, it's making you pull back even further and it just goes back to those thoughts that you have about yourself, but also what you think about somebody else and why you think they're better than you. But none of that is actually true. It's just what you're afraid of, and if you knew that you felt anxious inside, you could check your thoughts. And that's where I'm getting with this.

Megan Devito:

Another problem that you might notice is that you really think that the problem is what you're afraid will or won't happen. And let me explain this a little bit. Let's say that we go back to the boundaries example. You're afraid to set boundaries with your employee, or maybe with your time or how you run your business, or saying no to people who are asking you to help out, because what if I make someone mad and they quit? I talked about that a minute ago. What if I don't work all the time? What if you have a time boundary and your thought is, if I don't come in at 5 am and leave at 10 pm, nothing will get done? One, because you're not asking for help, but two, you're taking all the responsibility on yourself and you're not giving yourself space to get away from your work.

Megan Devito:

And what I know to be true, and what you will learn to be true, is that the more space that you can give yourself, the more creative you can feel and the more calm you have, and when you get away for a little bit, your body calms down. It might take a little bit but your body will calm down and you'll have bigger ideas and your confidence will start to grow. But when you're in the middle of it and you feel like you have to do, do, do all the time, that can be really stifling. It can actually shut down your progress, whether it's asking for a promotion because you're all hyped up, trying to work all the time, but you feel like you're never getting where you need to be, or whether it's trying to grow a business where you think, if I don't work all the time, everything will fall apart. And neither of those things is actually true.

Megan Devito:

The other thought could be that if this new bakery comes in down the street, they're going to steal all of my ideas and I have to be very protective and real, graspy and scarce, like scarcity minded and I will have to fight them off because I can be the only baker and nobody's coming here and I only have a few clients that are coming to buy cakes and if they don't come back and buy more cakes, I'm going to go out of business. Maybe, but looking at what they're doing and comparing yourself to the new bakery isn't selling your cakes and that comes from confidence and a belief in what you're doing and really having faith that you started this bakery because you're going to be secure and you deserve to do those things. But you're not going to be able to get to the level you want to go to when you feel so anxious that your brain is all locked up in everything that could go wrong and will go wrong, even if none of it's true. So here's what has to happen instead.

Megan Devito:

First thing we need to do is we need to understand that anxiety is a totally normal response to any of these things. It's new, it's unfamiliar, it's putting you outside of your comfort zone and your brain is going to tell you everything that could possibly go wrong. It's like a really overdramatic teenager or toddler and it just throws a fit and says you should not do any of this because certain death. That's how quickly your brain's going to spiral out of control. So what we want to do is we just want to notice that, like, oh, wait a second, I feel anxious because I'm actually succeeding, because I actually dared to say yes to something that I wanted to do, instead of sitting back and staying uncomfortable and just feeling bad about myself because I didn't do what I wanted, because you had the option. You could have said no to opening the bakery. You could say I really want the promotion but I'm never gonna ask for it, but you didn't. You decided you wanted to do this thing and you've actually taken steps to get there, and that's a huge beginning and you should congratulate yourself for that. That is a really big deal.

Megan Devito:

A lot of people don't get that far, and when you can do that, you can just notice that anxiety in this situation is normal, and I'm going to teach you how to use that feeling as a motivator instead of using it as a roadblock. Okay, we're going to learn to use the feelings inside of your body to check your thoughts, because when you feel anxious, when you notice that your heart is pounding or your stomach is in knots or you feel like you can't swallow or you've just got all of these like bats in your chest, however, you describe anxiety, and we'll get really clear on that when we work together. However, that description is for you. When you feel that way, you're not allowed to believe the things that you think, because those are fear-based thoughts, they're limiting thoughts, they're thoughts that aren't going to help you move forward, because the whole intention of those thoughts is to explain why you feel so afraid and to keep you from feeling that way. So you're going to pull back, you're not going to take the next step, you're not going to put down the boundary, you're not going to ask for help. You're not even going to ask for the raise or the promotion. You're not going to go tell people about how amazing your bakery is and how you would be more than happy to do their wedding cake. You're just going to shut up and hope that nobody finds out you're a fraud or sees you fail, or maybe even notice that you opened a bakery at all, because, oh my God, what would they think?

Megan Devito:

Let's get past those thoughts and it really goes back to how you're feeling. This is the step that I use with my clients. It is incredible how quickly you catch onto yourself and how quickly you can change your thoughts. And this is really the power of coaching, because when we can calm your body down, I'm going to ask you well, tell me more about your story, like why, why are you? What's up with you? Why won't you tell anybody about that amazing cake?

Megan Devito:

And you can say well, I mean, I made the cake, but one time I took a cake to a family reunion and somebody told me it was the worst cake they ever had. And I know that's not true and this cake looks really good. And I'm going to say hold up, wait, what was that? Somebody told you what? Tell me that thought again. Do you believe that thought? What if that wasn't true? What if that was just that one person's opinion? And we're going to start looking at all the things that just fly out of your mouth like the truth and really sink back into them Like okay, so that thought right there. How often do you think about that thought? How much control does that thought have over you?

Megan Devito:

And it's funny those thoughts feel very real to us because we feel anxious or we feel embarrassed or small or whatever it is that the thought is, so we believe it and we take it as truth. But it's really just the thought that somebody said once that hurt your feelings, that your body just remembered. So we're going to notice that when you think that thought, oh, I feel anxious, but that doesn't mean it's a true thought. I'm going to help you find the sticky thoughts so that you can move past them and really get into what you want to ask for. What you want to ask for what you need and move forward, even if you still feel anxious, because feeling anxious isn't a problem unless you believe what you're thinking. It's okay to feel anxious. Some people would call that feeling excited. It's really just back to what you're thinking about when you feel it. So we're going to focus on small steps, one step at a time.

Megan Devito:

Okay, you bought the bakery. What do you want to do with it? What's your dream? Let's talk about one thing you could do. Who could you tell today? What's one thing you can do today that would help you feel more confident about the bakery? You tell me what you think. I'm not going to tell you what to do because I know the inside of you is the right plan. Otherwise, you would never have had the idea. That's kind of the thing about ideas and this divine inspiration, right? It's in you. You're just afraid to admit it. I say this with love, because I've done it myself multiple times and really you have to have somebody help you work through this sometimes, because we can be our own worst enemies or our own greatest cheerleaders. I'm going to teach you how to use that anxiety to your benefit so you can be your cheerleader, so you can say I feel that and that means go all in. That means don't believe my thoughts. It means I'm getting really close to what I want. And we start this by really deciding what you want. We're going to just talk about what's your goal. What do you want to do? Let's get super clear on what you want and why you want it. That way it's harder to quit, and I know what I can say. Wait a second, remember why you wanted this thing. Don't forget about that. That's really important.

Megan Devito:

We're going to challenge your thoughts. We're going to recognize what you're thinking and we're just going to confront it and say is that actually true? Is it true that you're a loser? Is it true that you're not as good as your coworker? Is it actually true that your cakes suck? We're going to challenge that and we're going to say, no, that's not true. We're going to find evidence for what is true so that you can use that to your benefits.

Megan Devito:

And while you do this, you're going to notice that your confidence starts to grow naturally. You don't have to try to build your confidence. You're going to do things while you feel kind of nervous about them and then we're going to go back and we're going to see what worked for you. We're going to take time to say tell me what worked from your step. What did you notice? Okay, that's great, you need to celebrate that stuff. And I'm going to say, okay, what didn't work? Like what do you? What didn't work? Why do you think it didn't work? What can we change a little bit next time? Let's just do one thing different. And when we change one thing, let's do it again. Let's say, okay, how did it go? What did you think? What went well? And we're going to start collecting these little Easter eggs of amazing things that are always working out for you so that you start to feel motivated.

Megan Devito:

And suddenly people are knocking at your door and they're like, hey, I thought of you with this promotion. I think you're doing amazing things. Or I heard that you had a bakery. I had no idea this was here. Whatever it is, you're going to start noticing that people are paying attention and that you're believing in yourself. So you're not afraid to ask for what you want. You're not afraid to ask for what you want. You're not afraid to ask for help. You're not afraid to tell people that you make some amazing, freaking cakes and that you deserve the promotion and that you're going to take some time off to explore this other hobby that you wanted to do.

Megan Devito:

Again, make this fit for your own life, because the process is the same you have to know what you want, you have to challenge what you're thinking, you have to build your confidence and you have to be willing to take action. This is what I can help you with, and if you want to talk to me about how we can work together, it's so super simple. You can find me on Instagram or on threads, or on Facebook at @coachm egand evito. All one word, no underscores, no hyphens, no anything in between. My name is Megan Devito. Put the coach in front of it and message me, because my DMs are always open and I will get back with you. You can also find me on LinkedIn it's just under Megan DvVito, without the coach, and you can message me there too.

Megan Devito:

So I would love to talk with you more about how I can help you get what you want. It is the most fun thing, the biggest blessing, and I absolutely believe that you are here for the purpose of doing the things that you want. I think everybody was put on this planet for a reason and when we can knock out that anxious thinking and the anxious feeling, everybody benefits. So if I don't talk to you before, I will be back next week with another episode. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon.