Transcript

 
Sigrun:
You’re listening to The Sigrun show, episode number 418. In this episode I talk about how to crush through your internal glass ceiling. Welcome to The Sigrun Show. I’m your host Sigrun, creator of Somba, the MBA program for online entrepreneurs. With each episode I’ll share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for spending time with me today. Building an online business takes time. I share with you proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, up level your marketing and succeed with masterminds. Have you hit an income level in your business that you don’t seem to be able to go through? Or are all your launches at the same level and you feel stuck growing your launches? Many of my high end clients come to me when they’re stuck at a certain income level or are not able to grow their launches. Together we figure out what’s holding them back and with the right mindset and the right strategies they’re able to crush through their internal glass ceilings.
In this episode I will share the strategies I have used to crush through my own internal glass ceilings and what you can do to crush yours. You’ll find the show notes of this episode at sigrun.com/418.
In the last seven years I’ve made over $8 million. And in January 2021 alone I made another million in revenue. Growing my revenue year after year has made me crush one internal ceiling after the other. It’s funny thinking of it, that in one of my first interviews I shared that there are no glass ceilings in your own business. That’s not true. There are many glass ceilings but they are created by your own mind which means they are not real. And if your mind can create those glass ceilings that means that your mind can remove them too. So where do the glass ceilings come from? The best book I read about internal glass ceilings is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He calls this internal glass ceiling an upper limit. It’s basically an invisible glass ceiling that’s stops you from achieving your dreams. You don’t notice it is there until your head hits the glass ceiling. It doesn’t matter how successful you are, everyone has an upper limit problem. We all have it. If you don’t think you have it then you just haven’t hit your glass ceiling yet. And if you’ve hit a ceiling and gone through it, then there’s another glass ceiling waiting for you.
The way Gay Hendricks describes it is that the upper limit or the internal glass ceiling is caused by a too low thermostat setting on your ability to achieve and enjoy your ultimate success. The thermostat gets set low early in our lives at a time when we could not think for ourselves. Later as we dream about big goals and move up in the realms of love, abundance and creativity that are above our old thermostat setting, we bump against it. This artificial lid that was placed on our success through unconscious childhood decisions. Unless we solve the upper limit problem we will keep finding ways to bring ourselves back down when we’ve blown past our old setting.
In the last seven years I’ve crushed through multiple internal glass ceilings and I want to share a bit of my journey with you so that you get an idea what lies ahead of you or what you might already be experiencing right now. The first time I hit an internal glass ceiling was after my first 12 months in business. I had had a slow start with no revenue in the first few months and then a little revenue for several months more. It wasn’t until in month nine in September 2014 that I started really to make money and had my first 10K month. But then another 10K month followed and December 2014 I earned $25,000. It was a shock to me. Even though I had been a CEO and managing director decades before I started my own business, this was more money than I had earned in a month. And I started to ask myself do I deserve this? Is this a fluke? Can I ever earn this kind of money again? Will someone come and take this money away? Who am I to earn this type of money? The imposter syndrome was working heavily. Do you know the imposter syndrome is when you think you’re not good enough? It typically happens with people that are actually highly educated and very experienced. But I had all these feelings.
And what did I do? I just continued to grow my business and did not address this obvious problem which were my internal thoughts. And the result was that in January 2015 I earned $1,400. I basically sabotaged my success. I proved to myself, I proved to my weird thoughts and feeling that yeah, it was just a fluke. It will never happen again. And here’s the proof. I made it happen myself. I didn’t send out emails, I posted little on social media, I didn’t follow up with people who wanted to work with me. Yeah, I made it happen. And we do this, all of us. Not all the time luckily. But we do it. And the key is to recognize. So at the end of January I was shocked to discover I had only earned $1,400 compared to the $25,000 the month before. So I realized what was happening and I spoke to people. I went into Facebook groups that I was a part of and asked them what was going on. I kind of realized quickly that I was doing this to myself. I was just wondering, what can I do to make this not happen? How can I get myself out of this?
I read a book by Denise Duffield Thomas at the time. And just by talking to a few people and attending her bootcamp actually in February 2015 I was able to solve this problem pretty much on my own. I basically noticed what was happening and I was able to get myself back into gear. And in February I had another 10K month and I was quickly able to grow back to having 20K months. The second time I realized I was having an internal glass ceiling or an upper limit problem was when I started to launch. I launched group programs in my second year and third year of business and then I started to do bigger launches in my fourth year for my Somba program. And after every launch I got sick. It was like I was getting a cold and honestly in the first few launches I thought it was just a regular cold. I thought it was like maybe I was getting the cold during the launch but somehow the body was able to fight it until I calmed down after the launch and was not so full of energy. But it was weird. It happened after every single launch.
And then I heard other people talk about it and that’s why it’s so important to share these things and not just keep them to yourself as if it’s something that you need to be ashamed of. You do not need to be ashamed of your upper limit problem or your internal glass ceiling. Since everyone has it, you should be talking about it. It is through sharing that I have been able to get the help I needed and I’ve been able to help others when they share. And so when other people shared that they had this launch sickness and I saw clients have it, I realized that I had to tackle this in order to help others tackle it too. It reminds me of a nightmare I had as a child. I was reading books by Ian Fleming and I was reading Dracula. I was reading quite scary books at the age of 12 already and in English. I learned English relatively young in a language school and started read when I was 12 years old, these books. And I was a little too young for these books so sometimes I was a bit scared and I started to have this nightmare.
There was a guy following me in my dream. And this nightmare popped up almost every night. And I would wake up and I couldn’t go back to sleep in my bed. I would take the mattress out of my bed and drag it into my parents’ bed and sleep on the floor because their bed was basically two small for me to be in it too and I was already 12 years old. But I felt better sleeping on the floor next to my mother because of this nightmare. And I started to think about this. What could I do? And on my own I came up with this idea. Well, my dream is not a reality. My mind is creating this dream. Yes, I was only 12 years old but I could think these thoughts. Now, if my mind is coming up with these dreams then I am inventing this guy that is chasing me. Unconsciously obviously. Not consciously. But if my mind can create this dream I can also make it go away. I decided one night before I was going to sleep that I would turn around in the dream and tell the man that this is just a dream so he should stop following me.
Well, I did exactly that. The next time the nightmare came I turned around. Instead of running way from the man I turned around and said, “This is just a dream. Stop chasing me.” Poof, the nightmare stopped. The same I did with launch sickness. I looked it in the eye and said, “I’m not sick. I’m not going to get sick. This is just by my mind playing tricks on me. And if my mind can play these tricks on me I can also decide that the mind should not play these tricks on me.” And what do you think happened the next time I had a launch? I had no launch sickness. Sometimes you just need to accept the problem, accept that I get launch sickness, but then say to yourself, “What is the logical explanation for this? Is my mind creating this? Can I tell the mind to stop it and focus on something else instead?” Yes you can. But then I come to my third internal glass ceiling. I’m sure there have been many more but this one is by far the biggest one I’ve had in my seven years of business so I’m going to focus most of this episode on this one because this is where the big learnings are beyond those that I’ve already shared with you.
My first Somba launch in June 2017 was a six figure launch. My very first big online course launch was immediately a six figure launch. The next one only three months later was $180,000. And then in January 2018 only six months after that first launch I had a $450,000 launch with a 5% conversion. This was unheard of for at that time a $2,000 course. After this amazing launch I was convinced I could have a million dollar launch the following September, nine months later. I knew how to launch. We knew our ideal client. We knew our launch method and now we just needed to scale up our numbers. Sounded pretty easy to me. In order to have a million dollar launch we calculated that we needed 12,000 leads. We had our money ready and then we couldn’t spend it. Apparently there is an invisible ad spend limit on all Facebook ad accounts. Nobody had told us about this. Our Facebook ad manager didn’t know about it. And even when we asked Facebook if this could be the case they said it wasn’t. We chased them and were trying to figure out why we could only spend a certain amount of money every day and then our ad account seemed to be blocked. At least we couldn’t show more ads.
But the next day we could start again and again it was blocked. On the final day, on our open cart day, the last day to get some leads, Facebook finally admitted that there is an internal glass ceiling you could call it with all Facebook ad accounts and ours were set exactly at this number that we stopped at every day. So that meant we could not get our 12,000 leads. But we were able to have a $475,000 launch. So $25,000 more than our previous launch but obviously not the million dollar launch I was hoping for. I had even been doing Instagram live and Facebook lives I think or maybe Instagram TV about my upcoming million dollar launch. I was so convinced that I would do it and I was very discouraged when it didn’t happen. And how some external forces had stopped us because we were totally ready and we knew we were doing all the right things. We just couldn’t get the leads we needed to make it happen.
So January 2019 came along and I thought to myself okay, four months later, again we are ready. We are ready with the money. And now we’re going to make it happen. We aimed for 15,000 leads. And yes, at the end we actually got 15,000 leads but we got them very late because this is when the ad rejections started to happen. We didn’t have any ad rejections I think back in 2017 and ’18. You could run ads and talk about almost anything. Especially when it came to business coaching. It was no problem. But in 2019 they started to go after almost all businesses. You couldn’t say how to make six figures in 12 months even if your program literally could do that. They were basically deciding what kind of a marketing message you could put out there. So it came as a surprise to many and it was really the people who had more experience, bigger ad agencies, maybe bigger teams or many copywriters on a team were able to quickly react to these changes. But we were not prepared and although we got our 15,000 leads at the end, they came so late.
The thing in a launch, you want to nurture the people who sign up for your launch list. And when you have too little time to nurture them they’re not going to buy. So we had also some issues with our launch training. I was trying something new. Typical entrepreneur. I always want to try something new. And that didn’t work out. So yeah, I can try to blame it on Facebook but also our new launch strategy was somehow too heavy and didn’t work in the way that I expected. So we ended with 570,000 which is of course great results. But with 15,000 leads it is not. And it was probably due to our new launch method that didn’t work so well. I was determined to get more out of my launches in 2019. So we decided to launch in June. Typically I would launch in January and September but I decided it would be better to have just six months between the launches instead of nine months so June sounded like a good idea. Well, this is when the ad rejections really went through the roof. They maybe started a bit in January but in June they went absolutely crazy. Almost anything we try to get through as an ad got rejected. It was very hard for us to get the leads that we were aiming for. And we weren’t even trying to have a million dollar launch. That was not even on the radar.
I was just hoping for another $500,000 launch if possible. We didn’t get the leads we wanted and then a heat wave hit us. During open cart, the phase where people should have been signing up for our program, there was a heat wave in central Europe with over 30 degrees. People obviously outside and enjoying time at the swimming pool and not thinking about signing up for an online course. It really had an impact I noticed. Both the heatwave and obviously our super small launch list. Still, we did a couple of very cool things. We started doing social selling which we do a lot of today. But back then this was exactly when I remember we started social selling when we sold through Messenger. The launch results were 330,000. That was disappointing and it was the first time that our launch results were lower than in a previous launch. In all the launches before we had always had a higher and higher result. Even if the result was not that much higher, sometimes just $25,000 more. But this time it was a big drop. It was a big drop of $250,000 lower launch result. So to say that I was disappointed, let’s put that mildly.
But I want to emphasize even though I say here I’m disappointed, I do not drag things on. I don’t wonder about them forever. If I was honestly like super super disappointed I don’t wonder about them forever. If I was honestly like super super disappointed and would cry myself to sleep, I would probably not be sharing this on a podcast episode. So yeah, you can be disappointed without it ruining your life or without you thinking about it for days and weeks. It is okay to be disappointed. And that’s what happens when I say I’m disappointed. I had somehow had this belief that my launches would always grow. I didn’t even entertain the idea that a launch could be lower. So that was a surprise to me and maybe something I had to experience. It’s just like when you see a sports team that has enjoyed a win after win after win. And suddenly they lose. There is a kind of a surprise and disappointment, yeah. Huge disappointment. And I don’t think it’s bad for us to have those setbacks. I think when you have a setback, just like when you lose a match in sports or you have a launch that is lower than your previous launch, it actually gives you a chance to take look at everything.
I think our launch debriefs are much more important when we have those launches than if we have a very successful launch when everything works out. Because you’re analyzing more. You’re learning more from it. I think we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. So in hindsight I can be thankful but in the moment it’s not exactly what you want. With those disappointing launch results in June I decided during the launch itself as I saw how things were heading, to do another launch in September. Now, when you launch a big program it is not good to launch so quickly but I still wanted to go for it. This time I was in New York. We spent a month in New York in September 2019. I am so grateful that we took the chance and made this dream of ours come true. It was exciting to launch from New York. And again, sadly we had still our Facebook issues. Ads were being rejected. We had still not cracked the nut there and just couldn’t get the leads that we wanted again.
And I was like ugh, not again. At the same time I was feeling so much excitement being in New York. The backdrop in my launch was the skyline. But without the number of leads, plus I got blocked on Facebook. That happened for the first time. I was so eager to make the most of the few leads we had that I was commenting on every comment. Basically I would ask a question in our Facebook group for instance, what’s your revenue this year or what is your goal for this year? And people would reply. And then based on the comment I replied and I made it one of my goals for that launch to reply to every comment. Well, Facebook does not like that so I got blocked from posting. I got blocked from posting in groups. And in the middle of a launch that is not good. I had to log in as my husband in order to go live and do some of the launch training. So yeah, we tried our best but we only had a $250,000 launch. Now you can imagine my disappointment. Again, I had a lower launch than the previous one and that was already a lower launch than the previous one so this did not look good.
Was I losing my touch for launching? The lizard brain can ask you the nastiest question. I knew how to launch but somehow things were just not working out for us. And of course Facebook ads seemed to be the big monster in the room. So why were we having all these issues? I didn’t see others have the same issues. Of course there was a lot of discussion on the internet about Facebook ad rejections but I didn’t generally see launches go down. I was wondering after these two lower launches … I don’t want to say failed launches because we did the best we could with the leads we had and everything. But these two were lower launches. I started to ask myself, is this something in my mind? Am I creating this reality? Our next launch was in January 2020 and our ad issues continued. Although, I did feel we’re getting better. We had switched Facebook ad adjacency. We had a new Facebook ad manager. And it was going a bit better with our copy. Less rejections but still not completely the way I wanted. The launch results were $357,000. Not really what I wanted. Better than the September launch yeah, which was 220,000. And a tiny bit better than our June launch the previous year, 330,000. But 357,000.
I was starting to doubt if I could ever have a million dollar launch. Instead of it being a little hill that I needed to climb in September 2018, it was starting to look like Mt. Everest. It was so far away from our results and we just didn’t seem to be able to get it. My lizard brain was confirming my thoughts. Yep, this is not for you Sigrun. No, you can’t do it. But then COVID-19 happened. And something happened to me and to a lot of people but I want to explain it this way that I felt called to step up as a leader and I created new programs, I did smaller launches. I created resources for my community and my clients. I stepped up for my team. I stepped up for myself. I was willing to postpone my conference before I saw anyone else postponing a conference. I did a lot of things that I would not have done if we didn’t have these other circumstances. Basically there was a crisis and I felt called to step up and lead in the crisis instead watching others and waiting to see what others would do, I took charge. And that made a big shift in my mind. And I think in other people’s minds too.
I saw a lot of people being inspired to step up too in their communities and for their clients. And somehow it also brought my team together. Having like this enemy which we could call COVID-19 and sticking together and we did a lot of work. We worked very hard. Basically from March to June we were on full swing providing value. So it shouldn’t come as surprise although it did a bit that our June 2020 launch was our biggest launch so far. $665,000. Now with all my launch experience and having these ups and down with my launches even I was surprised. Why? Because we only had 3,500 leads and that’s almost impossible to achieve. We had a 5.3% conversion which is unheard of for a price point of $3,000. Typically average conversion rate is 3% when it comes to that price of a program. And when I looked back I saw what we had done. We had created this amazing launch runway. Three month launch runway with lots of activities. Lots of reasons to sign up for the email list. Lots of reasons to show up and lots of ways for me to show and demonstrate all the amazing things that I can help people with and how the programs work.
So consciously and unconsciously I had created this launch runway and people were more than ready to sign up. That was truly amazing and I started to believe that the million dollar launch was actually possible. The lizard brain didn’t have as much as a chance to talk me down as before. So in January 2020 we made sure we had a launch runway. A long one of course. And we actually did it. We had the million dollar launch that I’ve been waiting for so long. I get goose bumps sharing it with you. We knew the leads we wanted but it was the same story again and again. And we’ve had the leads in the past and it still didn’t workout. But this time it did. Everything worked out. We had the most amazing launch and now I did it. And you might think it’s about the money but it’s not. Why was it so important for me crush this internal ceiling? It’s because I constantly want to grow. I want to grow as a business person, as a launch strategist, but also as a human being. I believe that we’re capable of anything. The only thing holding us back is our own mind.
If we can believe it, we can do it. I believed in September 2018 I could have a million dollar launch. But something wasn’t right. And now we did it. And I’m so proud of my team, my community, my clients who stepped up, our affiliate partners, everyone involved. Because we finally did it. But I have to admit, I needed to do some work on my mindset to get there. I could of course blame Facebook and Facebook ads for the reasons why it took me so long to crush this ceiling. But that would be an easy way out. It is easy to blame others. Blame your coach, blame the program you’re in, blame the environment, blame the economic conditions, blame COVID-19, you name it. It is very easy and very lazy to blame others. I honestly believe that I had an internal ceiling because I have again and again proven that I can convert at over 5% in my launches. That I can turn a tiny list into a multiple six figure launch. The explanation I have is that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for a million dollar launch until now.
So what did I actually do to have this massive growth in the last six to nine months? I want to take you through the things that I see that have happened that helped me crush this big ceiling. First of all COVID-19 happened. And something inside of me called me to be a leader. Instead of watching and waiting for others I stepped up. I took charge, I took decisions. I did a podcast on the looming recession before anyone in my industry was talking about it. We created a brand new program that we run three times right now. Basically I was stepping up for me, for my team, for the community. There was a crisis and I knew I had to lead. I had been a turnaround CEO many, many moons ago and now I could benefit from that and step up in the leadership role that I need to be in. And yes I saw myself as a leader before but this time I really stepped up. Second, I had kind of given up on a million dollar launch. So when I went into the June launch I was just doing the best job that I could. We only had 3,500 leads so a million dollar launch was impossible. Even a 500,000 launch didn’t seem doable at all. But we did the best we could.
I think you can have a million dollar goal or whatever goal or whatever goal that you’re aiming for and just do the best you could and make the goal not so crazy. Like you don’t have to achieve it but you work in the way that you would as if the goal was achievable. And I think that’s what we did. Since I had to postpone my conference that I was planning to do in June 2020 I asked all the speakers to come and speak during my launch activities and they said yes. So I created a five day course which included three speakers a day plus other launch activities and somehow I created a new way for me to launch. And that worked out so well that we had this $665,000 launch in June which made me believe I could do more. I had basically crushed another ceiling that I had, a smaller ceiling that I had had in my launches before. The third one. Once I have had this $665,000 launch this million dollar launch was just like okay, that’s within reach. But first enjoyed a good summer vacation and all my team when on holiday too.
And it gave my mind time to, let’s say, recharge, recover, explore new things. Not think of business all the time. Because we had had very busy time after COVID. And then as I’m browsing I think I’m in the cottage of my parents and I’m browsing through Facebook … Yeah, Facebook again. And I discover an apartment. I had for years had a dream to upgrade and move to a newer and nicer apartment. But I either hadn’t had the funds to do it or I didn’t find anything that I liked. And without actively looking during my summer vacation I stumbled upon a dream apartment only five minutes away from my old one. This was the one. And realizing that I could actually buy it, it was a new thing for me. It was like another upper limit. Like I can actually buy a dream apartment. I have the funds and this is now available on the market. Dreams do come true.
Fourth, I had to start a realistic business to get a loan to buy the new apartment. I know it sounds weird but the banks in Iceland didn’t want to lend me money because I officially live in Switzerland. My company is registered in Switzerland and I get paid from a Swiss company. It was less risky for them to lend a brand new real estate company. I could of course have bought the apartment without a loan by selling my old apartment but I didn’t want to sell the old one. I wanted to keep them both because I saw an opportunity to start to build assets. Something that I have not focused on and I even didn’t see this in my near future as something that I would do. Having an apartment to rent out. Wow, lizard brain thought that was a bit crazy. It is smart to have a mortgage so it made sense for me to make sure I could keep both apartments. So within a few weeks even from the idea to actually doing it, there was only a couple of weeks. I had started a new company. I had paid off $100,000 mortgage on my own apartment. I had taken a loan and paid a down payment on a new apartment.
There was massive, massive growth in just these activities. Even more than I imagined as I was doing them. The fifth thing that has happened, after my new real estate purchase I realized I had only one more debt in my name. I have four masters degrees and I took student loans for most of my studies. Not for the study itself but for living costs. It is a 40 year loan that has low interest but it is tied to inflation so it’s indexed. So in the last few years as I’ve been paying and paying and paying, it didn’t go down. It was always $100,000 left. I decided to pay it off. This was an idea that I would not have entertained a few months earlier but I think the whole thing … COVID, having a big launch, buying a apartment, starting a real estate company, suddenly my mind just got bigger and bigger. I had bigger ideas and I could implement them instead of just thinking about them. Yes, it’s great to have ideas but I could actually execute them. Paying off that mortgage was more than just paying 100,000 loan off. I started to study when I was 20 years old. This was like a massive thing to just finally have this off my plate and I’m personally debt free. Personally debt free. Just imagine that.
There’s not many people that can say they’re personally debt free. Yes, I have mortgage on my new apartment but that is under the name of company. I don’t have a debt to my name anymore. This expanded my mind again. You start to believe anything’s possible when you have these insights and are able to do things that were unimaginable even just a few weeks earlier. The biggest upgrade and the sixth reason or the sixth thing that happened in the last six to nine months which I think explains this big expansion that’s been happening for me is actually moving into the new apartment. It’s a penthouse apartment. Relatively new one. Three years old so I’m the second owner. Everything is new. Stylish. There’s a garage for my car. There’s an elevator. Like all the things you imagine in a brand new house which my old apartment did not have. But I had also rented out my old apartment with all the old furniture. I originally decorated everything with Ikea furniture. I had recently bought a new sofa or a couple of years ago. I must be honest. Three years ago I bought a new sofa for the apartment but I bought the cheapest one. It was maybe not Ikea, but similar price point.
It was basically inexpensively decorated. And in a style that did not fit me anymore. It was the style of someone who was 29 years old when they bought the apartment. And now I felt I deserved something better and something new. And it was great to be able to rent my apartment to an embassy. They wanted it with furniture so I moved into the new apartment with no furniture. And it was like a new world to me. And the lizard brain has been working heavily like, “Who are you to deserve this? Can you buy everything new? Can you go to the best designer stores? Can you just pick anything you want?” Yes, I can. And it’s time for this upgrade. And I felt so ready. And at the same there was these internal demons working. Working on holding you back and telling you you don’t deserve it, that you’re not good enough, that maybe this is a fluke. Sounds familiar to my first big month in business.
As an architect I’ve always loved modern classic furniture. And now, I’ve been able to buy the best of the best. The things that I want. So it takes time to decorate the apartment. I’ve been here now a couple of months. Moved in in November. Now I’m recording this in February. So it’s still only half furnished because I’m waiting on some furniture. It takes about three months to ship furniture typically now. And I have no paintings on the wall. So there’s a part of me feeling a little bit frustrated about the slow progress. But I’m holding the vision for my dream apartment being perfect, just the way I want it to be. And it’s been a massive upgrade. I was trying to explain this to someone recently. It is bigger than you can imagine. And it’s bigger than I can imagine. I would not have thought that just moving in here and starting to realize some of the dreams of how I want this to look like would have so massive effect on me. But I think this is what I needed to grow.
The seventh and the last point in all the things that I’ve seen happen in the last six to nine months to help me crush through that internal ceiling is I’ve been physically stressed on and off through this COVID thing since March. And I thought first I maybe had some financial worries. Even if we had cash I was like, “Do we have enough cash? If no one buys our courses, do we have enough cash?” I thought it was that. And then I thought it was COVID. Like worried about getting sick. But now I know it’s been growth. It’s just like the launch sickness. It all comes back in cycles. The symptoms you have for your glass ceilings are going to be similar. Even if the ceiling is higher and higher, it’s going to be similar things happening. And I’ve been physically feeling it. I’ve felt stressed. Not all the time, but it comes. It’s on and off. And I wake sometimes up in the middle of the night sweating or I cannot sleep very well. But it goes. Comes and goes. It’s like this just expansion. It grows and then it retracts together and it grows again.
And as I’m coming out of this, yeah, my apartment is not finished so I’m still feeling the growing pains internally, but I’m feeling there’s something being released. Because I’ve crushed my biggest internal glass ceiling. And I feel like I’m coming on the other end like a new person. I’m still Sigrun, but I’ve somehow changed. I’ve crushed a ceiling that was hanging over my head since September, 2018 and now it’s no longer there. I’m sure there will be another ceiling at some point, but now I celebrate that I crushed the biggest one to date.
By sharing my story I hope you have seen how you can crush your internal glass ceiling too. The key is to admit that you have a glass ceiling. Then look for stories you’re telling yourself about that glass ceiling. Is there any reason you shouldn’t break through some old beliefs or stories that you carry with you? Or maybe you’re just feeling too comfortable below your glass ceiling. Or you might be afraid of the unknown that is behind the glass ceiling. Coming back to Gay Hendricks, he talks about four barriers. Four barriers in your upper limit. The first one is the false belief that we’re fundamentally flawed in some ways. If we carry this feeling within us we sabotage our success because we think we’re essentially bad. If something good happens we must mess it up to offset it because good things cannot happen to bad people.
Second barrier is the false belief that by succeeding we are being disloyal to and leaving people behind. If we harbor this feeling within us we sabotage our success because we think it’s disloyal to our roots to soar too far into the stratosphere. The third barrier is the false belief that we are a burden in the world. We carry this feeling inside of us. We sabotage our success so that we won’t be a bigger burden. And the fourth barrier is the false belief that we must dim the bright lights of our brilliance so that we won’t outshine someone in our past. If we hold this feeling inside of us, we tend to hold ourselves back from expressing the full potential of our innate genius. Wise words from Gay Hendricks and from his book, The Big Leap.
As you can imagine, all these barriers are limiting beliefs that you have created in your mind. And since you have created these stories, you can also change these stories. Gay Hendricks suggests four steps to work through your upper limit. First acknowledge the upper limit. I even say hi to it and make fun of it. Second, breathe when you feel fear. Breathe through the fear. Take a deep breath. If you really think about it, fear is excitement without the breath and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully into it. Third, turn worry into a positive idea. I’ve noticed myself worrying about something. I let go of the worry thoughts by shifting my focus away from them. I wonder what positive new thing is trying to come into being? So instead of worrying, what is the positive idea that’s trying to get to me and I’m not seeing it? Find it. And the fourth step in working through your upper limit is to think of good things happening in your life right now. Basically being grateful. Focus on good things that you can focus on in that moment. Find some place in your heart that feels good right now. Your task is to give the positive feelings a chance to grow. As I said before, this expansion. Give it your full attention. Let yourself enjoy it as long as you can.
I expect my next big glass ceiling to be an eight figure revenue year. But that is still a few years away and until then I’ll keep working on the smaller glass ceilings that pop up now and again. So after hearing my stories and the steps from Gay Hendricks, I would love to hear from you what is currently your internal glass ceiling and how you plan to crush through it based on this episode. Send me a DM on Instagram and share with me. I would love to hear from you.
You’ll find the show notes of this episode at sigrun.com/418. Thank you for listening to The Sigrun Show. Are you following me on Instagram? I’m starting a weekly Instagram live on Mondays at 6 p.m. central European time where I will be continuing the discussion from my podcast and taking people on the hot seat. Follow me on Instagram and maybe you’ll come on the next hot seat with me. See you in the next episode.