If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I’m so behind… My business isn’t working… Today was a waste as I got nothing done,” this episode is for you.
In today’s solo episode, I dive into how binary thinking, though comforting on the surface, can quietly sabotage your momentum, ESPECIALLY if you’re a high-achieving introvert. I share how this pattern shows up in my clients, and how to begin shifting into a more powerful, nuanced mindset that actually supports sustainable success.
You’ll learn:
- Why the brain defaults to black-and-white thinking to create certainty
- How to spot all-or-nothing patterns like “success vs. failure,” “productive vs. lazy,” and “ahead vs. behind”
- The hidden harm of comparing your business journey to a linear curriculum
- What counts as “progress” when the work is invisible
- The trap of misaligned metrics (and what to track instead)
- A simple mindset shift to move from doubt into trust
This is what you really need to grow a sustainable business – especially when you don’t always see the results right away.
CONNECT WITH EMMA-LOUISE:
Website: https://theambitiousintrovert.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmalouparkes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmalouparkes
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And she, she was. Like I say, absolutely distraught. Like I failed my business is a failure. Can’t believe it. I, you know, I’d set myself a goal to make a hundred grand. I haven’t done it. And you know, I think it’s something like 5% of female owned businesses ever make six figures. So someone wanted to do it in their first year.
It was a lot of pressure on themselves. So I said, well, how much did you make? And she said, 86,000. Now without the a hundred grand metric. Which also is internalized capitalism, of course, and also comparing ahead and behind of course. But without that metric, that metric never existed. I said to her, how would you have felt if you, you didn’t have social media and your business wasn’t an online business.
Let’s say it was in person and you set up and you had, you know, minimal overheads, you know, no office space, no team or anything. And you made like $86,000 in your first year, and she was like, oh my God, be thrilled. And she needed to zoom out and see it from a different perspective rather than judging herself against everyone else.
So you get to choose your lens. You get to choose the lens that you look through, and she got to choose the lens that if she had done that in her first year, imagine what she could do. In her second year, and of course in her second year, she did make six figures. And then guess what? She decided that she wanted a business that was at that kind of level.
She had a great number of clients. She had a good, good amount of time off. So all of this that she internalized about having to scale and, and grow and do this, by year three, she was like, yeah, no, this is great. Like this is better than I ever could have imagined. And so it’s so important that. We get out of that like this is success and this is failure.
Because I think to most people, if you’d made like 86% of your goal in your first year in business, you if someone else had done that, she would’ve been thrilled for them. But it does distort us cognitively, our judgment gets clouded, and when we do feel that pressure, like I say, we do slip into this binary thinking of I’ve passed or I’ve failed.
So I heard that was helpful. I just wanted to share some thoughts on that because I think that being able to hold that space is massive. As an entrepreneur, it’s a lesson that we almost all have to learn, especially if we come from a background that is more corporate, more academic, because. We are given grades, we are told pass fail.
You know, this is good enough, this isn’t, you got in, you didn’t there. That’s the way most of society is designed. But when it comes to our own business, it’s completely different. And we get to, we get to write the rules. And the biggest takeaway that I would want you to have from this is if you can have that flexibility, that psychological flexibility to be able to sit.
In something that’s unknown and know that you’re okay with it. Either way you can know what you want. This isn’t about not wanting to be successful, but it’s about not making your definition of success so specific and niche that. It’s a pass fail, a yes no, but understanding that success comes in so many aspects in our business from yes, the external results, but how much we enjoy it, how we feel.
Is it lighting us up? Is it giving us the time off that we want? Is it allowing us to. Express ourselves. Are we doing work that we feel is, is worthy and a mission to us? Are we enjoying the process? Are we enjoying learning? There are so many different ways that often when we look at those other metrics, quite often it’s a yes on, on all or most of them.
And if that’s the case, then. We don’t need to have a tick box exercise and we don’t need to put ourselves in the, you know, low 1% in the failure in the not achieved because we get to decide that we have achieved and we get to decide that it’s working and we get to decide that it carries on that way.
Thank you once again for tuning in and I’ll see you on the next episode.
