July 9, 2020
Regan Walsh is an NYU-certified executive and life coach who focuses on helping women who are over programmed and underwhelmed to reclaim their lives, both personally and professionally. She contributes to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and has been featured in Fast Company, NBC.com, Smart Business, and Columbus CEO.
She has coached thousands of women through her one-on-one and group coaching programs, and she is regularly asked to give keynotes, facilitate workshops, and speak on panels for Fortune 500 companies, industry associations, and foundations. She has done so for clients like Nike, QuickBooks, and JPMorgan.
Regan is located in Columbus, Ohio, and coaches people from all over the world.
In today’s conversation we chat with Regan about some pitfalls that entrepreneurs face when growing their business. She lays out three paralyzing habits that are preventing you from living out your potential, along with some practical advice and wisdom on how to squash self-doubt and kick it to the curb where it belongs. We also touched on a topic that is SO important especially as women: the difference between confidence and arrogance and how a lot of times as women we downplay our accomplishments because we’re often too afraid to raise our hand or put ourselves out there. If you deal with fear of failure, perfectionism, self-doubt, or being afraid to get in the game you need Regan’s wisdom in your life.
Regan is a born and raised Midwestern raised girl that is now based in Colombus, Ohio. She lives close to downtown with her husband and two little girls, Maeve and Dorothy.
Regan feels really fortunate that she has had several different career chapters such as working in the corporate world, startups, and creative agencies. Regan has been able to see how several different industries work. When Regan had the opportunity to work with a coach while working in the nonprofit sector, she fell in love with how her coach fostered so many women in different industries and helped them get clarity on how they could be their most confident selves and achieve what it is that they were looking to do.
It was through working with a coach that Regan decided that all of the things required to be a successful coach were her natural gifts such as listening, encouraging, asking the right questions, and helping people find clarity through what they feel like is a complicated puzzle.
Regan confided in her coach and told her that she was going to leave a job that she loved and start a business on her own because she knew that she would love it even more. Regan took a risk and told her husband (after being married for only eight weeks) that she was going to not only quit her job but that she was going to move to New York for the summer because NYU had a coaching program that she enrolled in.
After quitting her job, and before moving to New York, Regan found out she was pregnant with their first child.
It’s so important to pick the right people in your corner. You need to commit your life to surround yourself with people who believe in you and have got your back.
When it comes to paralyzing habits, there are 3 that come to mind that Regan sees with all of her clients.
The first one is perfection. When you are a perfectionist, everything that you need to do for your business has equal weight. This makes it hard to prioritize which makes it hard to move forward. Perfectionists often get paralyzed because they are so overwhelmed by every single task and they weigh them all equally. This makes it hard to prioritize and figure out what is important.
The second paralyzing habit is that entrepreneurs have the disease to please. They are so afraid to disappoint somebody that they are always taking on more than they should. When you operate in the space of wanting to please everyone, you are watering down your offer, you are exhausted at the end of the day, and you are not necessarily operating at your highest level. You are not just saying yes to your sweet spot, you are saying yes to everything that anybody says. This is a dangerous place to operate from because you can lose focus.
The third habit that can get in the way is when entrepreneurs try to be a solo pilot. They try to fly the plane by themselves and they don’t ask for help in areas that they may not be an expert in. When you don’t have the courage to ask for help, you’re just stalling or delaying your progress. You can get so much further, faster when you have help.
As you grow, you need to make sure you are still getting coached. The more you grow, the more influence you have, and the more “successful” you are, the more vital it is to have people behind you and in your corner. It’s so important, no matter what stage of life or business you are in, to have people who have access to your life and can help you grow and get stronger.
Set a timer. Give yourself a window of time to make a decision on whatever is holding you back. Thinking about something for 10 hours does not always yield a better decision. Setting a timeline and giving yourself a firm deadline to move forward is incredibly important.
Regan also highly encourages people to not always ask for feedback. Often, women, in particular, will seek validation for their ideas before making a decision. What happens is you, as the business owner, look like you don’t have the confidence to run a business and you eventually wear people down.
Instead of always checking in with people, think about what the worst thing that can happen is. If you choose wrong, then what? You make a different decision. All of us will fail every week. That is the risk of being human. Once you understand that failure is a part of human life. It is a shared human experience. No one is not impacted by failure at some point. Once you understand this, you can ask yourself, so what? Then, you can move forward faster. When it comes to overthinking, have a deadline and the courage to say, “so what?”
So what if you fail? You still stand up and do the best you can to make it right.
Waiting for other people to spontaneously reward all of your achievements is going to get you nowhere. We, as women, can do such great things but tend to sit in the corner and not talk about them.
It is so critical to share what it is you are excited about and what you have achieved because otherwise everyone is so stuck in their minds that they are going to miss it. People want to be able to celebrate and uplift what you are doing. You need to give them the material to be able to do just that.
If there is something you want, you need to tell people about it and go after it. Otherwise, people are going to assume that because you are on the sidelines, you don’t have interest. So often, opportunities pass by women because they didn’t raise their hands. You need to raise your hand. You need to say this is what I want, these are my credentials, and this is why I am a perfect fit to land the gig.
If you raise your hand, you might get it. If you don’t, you won’t. Would you rather raise your hand and be in the arena and have the chance than not to have a chance at all?
You are going to fail a lot. You’ll raise your hand and not get picked but remember the wins you do get because oftentimes they are the wins that matter.
It is so important that you, with your own genius and gifts you have been given, guide other people. In order to guide other people along that journey that you offer, you need to talk about it and be confident in what you are gifted with. Your story is unique to you. It is your duty to share that with others. There is nothing arrogant about doing that in an authentic way.
You need to get to the root of your self doubt. We all have different baggage or storage that we have carried around with us for decades that create self doubt.
The minute self doubt creeps into your brain, you need to catch it. You need to acknowledge that you had the thought, but immediately replace it with something that is true.
Get disciplined and rewire your thoughts. Call upon your past wins. Call upon all of the reasons you should feel confident.
The biggest lesson Regan has learned is to not say yes when your gut is screaming no. So often, especially as an entrepreneur, you say yes to everything because you are afraid that no one else will ever hire you again.
Early on in Regan’s career, she said yes to clients that she instinctively knew were not a perfect fit, and regretted it.
Don’t be afraid to wait for the ideal client. This is so important. When you are with your ideal client, that is when the magic happens. Anything else is going to distract you, waste your time, and hold you back from getting your ideal client faster. You have to trust your gut.
Follow the 90% rule. Anytime you have an opportunity, rank it from 1-100. If it’s below a 90%, then you instantly make it a 0. Only operate in the 90-100 zone. This is where joy resides.
When you find people, don’t ever be afraid to ask questions and ask for a consultation. Fit is the number one thing that matters. If you don’t have a good fit and chemistry with your coach, you are not going to transform. Ask people for referrals. Trust your gut and find someone that resonates with you.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
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