I’ll admit that I am uneducated in the traditional sense. I have a high school diploma and one year of acting school. That’s it. It wasn’t an issue when I was an event planner, because people were hiring me for my skill with design and organization. Nobody cared about whether I had an MBA. But over the last handful of years my company has grown exponentially, and with that exponential growth has come more revenue and expenses, and you guys, I am freaking terrible at math. Because it’s not an area I felt confident in, I did my best to ignore the financials of my business. The more revenue we brought in, the more I struggled to understand a balance sheet that suddenly resembled the budget intricacies of a small island nation. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It pains me to admit this to you, but a couple of years into this process of building my company, I had barely looked at our books. They overwhelmed me, and I didn’t understand what I was looking at. So I hardly even glanced at the financial reports our accountant would run for us. As long as I had enough money to cover payroll and clients were paying their bills on time, I didn’t really pay attention. Truthfully, it wasn’t laziness or complacency that was driving this decision. It was fear. Every time I looked at a financial statement and didn’t understand it, that voice in my head—you know the one, that jerk version of yourself that likes to point out all your flaws—would list out all the things I was deeply worried about. You’re not smart enough to run a company at this level. Who do you think you are? These people are trusting you with their livelihoods, and you can’t even read a balance sheet. You’re going to fail. This fear and this circle of self-recrimination went on for years, and then one day I just got sick of it.
I was reading an excellent book on sales, and I was super fired up about all these ideas I was gathering about growing our revenue and lowering our overhead. But in order to do those things, I understood that I had to—absolutely had to—get a handle on where we were financially. Immediately the fears started to creep in, but my excitement over where I wanted to go was greater than my fear. My loud Okie family has a saying, and that morning, as I was sitting at my desk, it popped into my head.
“Rach,” I said out loud to myself. “Either piss or get off the pot.”
Crude? Absolutely. But sometimes you need to hear your grandpa’s straightforward, no-nonsense voice in your head to remind you of who you really are. I was either going to run this business and scale it with courage and determination and faith in myself, or I needed to stop playing at it. My limiting belief was that I wasn’t smart enough because I lacked an education in business finances to help me understand. I needed to counteract this limiting belief with a truth that took away its power.
The truth I reminded myself of was that I had always figured things out in the past. Always. I’d owned my own company for fourteen years and had never one time shrunk from a challenge. So what? Now that I was actually becoming successful on a large scale, I was suddenly going to give up? Just because I was unsure? No way! As I started to pump myself up with this truth, I got enough clarity to ask myself a better question. Instead of accepting that I wasn’t smart enough, I worked the specific problem in front of me. How could I better understand this? Was there a class I could take?
Of course there was! I immediately applied for and got accepted to an online business accounting program through Harvard Business School. The idea, of course, was that if I felt I wasn’t smart enough, the antidote to that must be applying for one of the most difficult online programs available for me that day. Once I passed that class, I told myself, that would prove to me—nay, to the world!—that I was good at numbers. A psychologist would have a field day.
Taking that class was an abysmal failure.
For one thing, it was freaking expensive. For another, I aced my tests and pulled good grades, but it was only because I studied and tested well. Once it was over, I truly had no greater knowledge about any of the concepts than I did when I started. Also, it was hugely time-consuming, which actually made me way more anxious about successfully leading my company, because I was spending a good chunk of my day on schoolwork.
I’m telling you this part of the story because I think it’s a pitfall that many of us make on the road to personal growth of any kind. We identify the problem. We decide that we’re going to fix it. We attempt to fix our personal problem by doing something that in no way resembles us personally.
It’s like Sara deciding she’s going to get in shape and signing up for a series of crazy-expensive SoulCycle classes. Her sister loves spin class, so there must be something great about it. Never mind that Sara hates group exercise and that the SoulCycle studio is forty minutes across town. Or maybe it’s Megan who needs to make more money as a single mom, so she decides to take on a side hustle in direct sales. She’s not really into the product and is mortified at the idea selling in front of a crowd, but her best friend has been really successful at it and she’s sure she can be too. Or maybe you’re an entrepreneur who dropped out of college because you struggled to learn in a classroom environment. You learned every single thing you know about business on the job through your own research, but when you need that learning the most, you decide that the best thing to do is pursue the one type of learning you absolutely hate.
Friends, personal growth is supposed to be personal.
It’s not one size fits all. It has to be customized to you and the way you learn best, or it’s never going to stick. Be strict about your goal but flexible in how you get there. Sara should have committed to putting on her favorite music and training for a race. She loves hip-hop and being outside, so she could have customized her workouts to her personality and achieved real results. Megan should have gotten a job at her favorite local coffee shop. She can pick up extra hours while the kids are with their dad, and she gets to chat with the people who come in and be in an environment that she loves.
And me? It took me a minute (and several thousand dollars in nonrefundable tuition), but I eventually recognized that I needed to learn this skill for my business the same way I’d learned every other skill. I asked myself, Are there books I could read? Conferences I could attend? Could I hire someone? Could I be more honest about what I did and didn’t understand in order to get clarity?
The answer to all of these was, of course!
Was it easy to learn about a topic I’m not particularly interested in without a clear outline about what to do next? No. Was it comfortable to admit to people that I couldn’t understand the financials I’d pretended to comprehend before? Absolutely not. But what was the alternative?
My grandpa’s voice in my head rang out—louder than my negative self-talk.
I had always figured it out before. I will always figure it out. So I got to work. I learned the difference between a balance sheet and a P&L in a YouTube video. I went to business conference after business conference and sat down front for every session on accounting—even though it seemed duller to me than watching paint dry. At one such business conference I happened to take a class by Keith J. Cunningham. (I’m listing him by name in case any of you happen to struggle with this same insecurity. Find a way to see him speak live!) I have never had someone explain business finances to me as clearly or as simply as he did that day. I literally cried like a baby because I finally understood things I hadn’t before. I mean, who in the world sobs over basic accounting principles?
Someone who thought she wasn’t smart enough to ever comprehend them.
That’s the craziest part about not feeling like we’re enough to achieve our dreams. The only way to prove that you are is to get yourself to the other side of doubt. That’s much harder to do if you’re following someone else’s path. You need to focus on what has worked for you in the past and apply those ideas to this new venture. You also need to believe in your possibility instead of focusing on the probability.