Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the successful nurse coach podcast.
On this podcast, Laura and Shelby, both board certified nurse coaches, show you how to make as much money as you want in private practice as a nurse coach.
Foreign let's talk about something that has never made sense to me today here on the podcast, and I'm just gonna get right into it here. Team nurses do hard things every single day.
Nurses are some of the strongest, most resilient people that I know, put in insane circumstances,
expected to thrive,
and get graded by patients on their performance.
And we do this day in and day out.
Not only that,
we hold the hands of the dying.
We run codes,
we advocate for and against our patient care,
or with doctors or other members of the care team.
We stay up all night,
we work 13 hour shifts during the time change.
And yet, when it comes to stepping in to business, when stepping into entrepreneurship,
suddenly we freeze. We feel like we can't do hard things or that this is somehow too hard, or we don't know what to do, or it's too overwhelming. All. All the things.
And I want to pose a question here of why does all of the strength that nurses have seemingly run through our fingers like sand whenever we step in to doing nurse entrepreneurship,
especially when we choose nurse entrepreneurship?
And I really want to focus in on that choice here for a moment because this becoming a private practice nurse coach does not necessarily mean that,
like, it's not a part of the clinical ladder. Right? No manager is sitting you down for your quarterly review, being like, sally,
I think that you should do this next, or this would really benefit the unit. Or,
um, can you be the super user nurse coach on the, on the floor? We could really use one of those. Like, no one is forcing you to do it. It's all by choice.
And this podcast episode is really not about motivation. It's about understanding how to translate the hard things that we do in the hospital, the hard things that we do every day, some of you, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years,
and how to do them here.
This episode isn't about motivation. It's about understanding why we know how to do hard things and still avoid it here in nurse entrepreneur land.
Okay, so I want to tell you a story. I want to kick off this podcast episode with a personal story of mine.
I think this could be helpful context on where I'm coming from here.
I have known how to do hard things my entire life,
and I really do think that this was as a result of, of the relationship that I had with my dad and my mom. I do think that they Encouraged me from a young age to try.
Failure was safe for me, which I know is probably a luxury for most. Like I, I was encouraged to try new things and fail often.
And whenever I did fail, and I did a lot of that, I wasn't punished for it. My worth as like a human wasn't tied to this,
you know, learning process.
It was never like life or death for me to fail at something.
And so I created a safety with failure from a very young age.
And whenever I got older and I started competitively swimming,
it was hard. And I know that this is a pretty low stakes example,
but I want to,
I want to start here. I want to equate this to doing hard things in the realm of sports. Um, so I, I started competitively swimming when I was nine.
Um, I remember my first swim meet as a nine year old. I could barely like swim 50 yards. And then I was ****** that I didn't win the swim meet at my very first race ever.
I was mad that I got last and,
but you know, over the years,
I, I don't even know how many miles I swam, y'. All. I did two a days. I was in the water for four to five hours every day for most of my childhood.
And the water was cold almost every day. I smelled like chlorine for years. Even after I stopped swimming. I got up before the sun almost year round and I dealt with the feeling of not wanting to, and not wanting to go anywhere every single day,
every single day. And the expectation was set for me.
You're still going. You are going to try. You don't have to win, but you are going to try.
And I think that this taught me from a really early age that you can survive discomfort. That discomfort did not mean to quit. That discomfort didn't mean that anything was going wrong.
In fact, if I was like cool, calm, cozy,
warm in the water at swim practice, it probably meant that I wasn't pushing myself hard enough and I wasn't getting any stronger or faster, which is kind of the whole point of being a competitive swimmer.
And I did not have this conscious thought when I was a teen that like, ooh,
pushing myself harder during practice is going to translate into life skills when I'm older. That I was not that self aware as a 16 year old,
but looking back on it now, I was teaching myself, I was programming my subconscious. That discomfort comes with growth,
discomfort comes with speed. Discomfort comes when you are going and attacking the goal that you want.
And coasting, especially in swimming, you never coast. There's a Reason that swimmers practice 365 days a year. It is a full time sport.
We worry about this thing to where if you take like more than a few days off, you lose the feel for the water.
Your body starts to disorient if you are not in the water often.
And I know that probably training methods have updated quite a bit since I was in the pool.
My coaches really just believed that like,
you know,
just swim an insane amount of distance as much as you can every day, and that's how you condition. There's probably more science behind it now, but I did hard things for a really, really long time.
In my most rebellious years, when I really didn't want to, I did it anyway.
And I wasn't like the most innately like talented swimmer. I think that I had like a baseline athleticism, but I was not like one of those kids that was great.
I wasn't born a natural. I had to work for it. And I worked really hard.
And in, in the realm of swimming,
I did learn that the more you try, the more effort you put in, the more reliable you are on game day or on race day.
And the more reliable you are for your teammates, your relay members,
the faster that you got over time in swimming, since it's not really like a team sport,
it's just you and the clock and clock is pretty black and white. So I think that this has served me both in nursing and in business ownership as well. There.
The concept of like hours put in to output to success experienced,
like, that's not a mystery to me. That's pretty easy to get on board with,
but kind of like on another side of the coin. When I was a teenager in high school,
I really sucked at math. Like I was really bad at math. It was my lowest performing thing from as long as I can remember, not just in high school.
There was no emotional reward. I had zero confidence around math.
This belief of I can do hard things, I can learn hard things, I can accomplish hard things did not translate into the realm of math. I had enough negative experiences piled up where math was like not fun for me and pretty much still isn't.
This lesson, this knowing, didn't automatically pop from one category of my life to the other.
And that's kind of the point I want to make right here is yes, you can do hard things as a nurse. Yes, you do it every day. I bet you did it today or yesterday or the day before.
Within 72 hours you have done something hard, you have done something you didn't want to do.
You Might have been yelled at, barfed on, bled on, peed on.
Those are all inherently not fun things.
But yet you might still be sitting down at your business being like, what the heck, I have no confidence here. What am I doing here?
And yeah, I just want to maybe normalize this hear out of the beginning. If you are also experiencing this, hopefully we can bridge the gap today between one point and another.
Okay.
In nursing, you know, we have,
like, in traditional nursing we have rules, we have hierarchy, we have protocols, deadlines, and we have consequences if you don't meet those things right,
if you repetitively are like staying on shift late to chart or if you repetitively miss the antibiotics dose, if they track you and your patients are constantly getting UTIs after putting in Foley,
like there's someone hovering over you, watching your performance,
even at a really high level.
And that's a lot of accountability. To show up and do it correctly, to follow hand hygiene, to wear your mask whenever you walk into a room with someone on,
you know, airborne precautions. Like, there's all of these structures and systems and frameworks in place for you to step into and have a high level of accountability not just for yourself, but also for patient outcomes as well.
Every nurse that I've ever met wants to do a good job, does not want to be the source of infection,
and wants to take care of the people in the bed in front of them.
So the social accountability,
the conscious, like your inner conscious accountability of like, I'm, I want to do a good job when no one's looking.
And the professional accountability are all really high. In traditional nursing roles and in nurse entrepreneurship,
it's unstructured, it's self led.
No one is watching you. Even inside of our business coaching programs, I make everybody self report their numbers every week and still some people don't.
They say they want the accountability, but not really.
And it's really hard to self report numbers when they're zero. I get it.
And also the only way to really get better is to lean in and play full out and leverage the accountability that you're paying for.
So confidence usually means expectations of success based on prior mastery.
In new environments, your nervous system treats this uncertainty as danger. Okay.
And the translation here is your brain's job is to keep you alive,
not make you brave.
So we are actively fighting against conditioning,
programming,
evolution, like we are actively stepping into. Nurse entrepreneurship is hard on all the levels for every reason I just mentioned before.
But I think people are always waiting for confidence to come or they're waiting to feel confident and as new coaches, if you've coached less than, like, two to 300 hours,
you are unlikely a master at your skill yet. You're probably really good and you're creeping up on greatness. But we have not touched, like, mastery level yet.
Just because not enough time has passed. Not because you are not capable or you don't have it in you or that you're not a good learner,
but simply because we haven't had enough time or repetition under our belt.
And I want to give you a framework here on how to do hard things. Okay. I don't want to leave you with, like, okay, Shelby, thanks for beating me down and leaving me with no place to go.
I want to give you a way to move through this if you are experiencing it right now.
Okay? So for step one, awareness, I want you to notice the resistance.
I want you to label the emotion.
An easy way to do this is like, label like, I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling unsure.
I feel like I might fail.
Um, be careful not to tie this to your worth in any kind of way.
Just because you're scared doesn't mean you're broken. Just because you're overwhelmed doesn't mean you're dumb.
Just because you think you might fail or that you have this fear of failure doesn't mean that you're not smart.
Okay?
Like, one does not mean the other. I want to be careful not to bypass the emotion here.
Emotions are valid. Emotions are real, but they are not fact.
Okay? They are not fact.
Stage two, acceptance. Normalize it. Hard does not equal bad. Discomfort is a learning signal.
Your body doesn't know the difference between fear and excitement.
It's the same chemical cocktail in your brain. So if we are tapping into some fear,
just take a deep breath and open up the possibility that it could just be excitement for you. Of like, I'm nervous and looking forward to this coaching call.
It can be both.
Third step here, team, is take action.
Let's take the next smallest measurable step.
Momentum rewires belief.
Momentum is created by action. So if we stand still and freeze and don't do anything, it is unlikely that you are going to curate the belief that you need that you are confident or the belief that you need.
In coaching,
we don't build a belief and then act. We act and then belief follows. Okay,
so let's maybe use an example here of I'm afraid to propose,
right? I'm afraid to propose coaching and say, you had a powerful conversation. Number one, you have the powerful Conversation number two tonight, where you're going to propose. And you sat down and you did your homework.
You came up with the framework to propose. There's nothing else we can do to prepare.
What is the next smallest thing that you can do.
This might be go for a walk,
drink some water,
have a cup of tea,
do a mindfulness practice, dance it out in your office to your favorite song.
What's the next smallest thing? Those are action steps that I just gave you. Notice how it wasn't.
Do everything within your power. Memorize all of the scripts so that you get a yes on this call so that you feel valid and worth it.
Don't sit there and chatgpt into oblivion.
Like, actively get up and do something. The next small thing.
Don't what if yourself till the cows come home.
Okay, team, so we got awareness, acceptance, action, and adaptation.
Reflect, recalibrate, and repeat. Every time you do something hard and survive, you are proving your nervous system wrong. Okay? So remember,
we want to acknowledge that it's your brain's job to keep you alive,
not make you brave.
And there's like, this inherent worry that the bear or the cougar is after us.
And whenever we do something, whenever we have a positive experience or when we survive something uncomfortable, we prove to our brain of like, I'm safe here.
This wasn't life or death.
I actually can do this.
And I'm gonna do it again,
and I'm gonna do it again. And that's how you build safety over and over and over. We increase our comfort zone to be bigger and bigger.
And you also increase your nervous system to be able to hold more.
Okay, part four, team.
Here we are. What do we do when the hard feels harder than you thought?
This is something that I've coached around for five years is Shelby. I didn't know it was going to be this hard.
And I know that I've told you this story or many stories like this a hundred times. I've told you my own stories. I've told you client journeys. I've told you all the things.
But there is no way that I can accurately just, like,
verbally distill to you how hard entrepreneurship is.
Because you have to feel it. I can tell you, and your brain will clock it as true. But until you are feeling doesn't fully hit.
And if you have not started your business yet,
this is not. This is not a negative. You just don't know what I'm talking about yet. And that's okay.
But most nurse coaches quit not because they can't do it because they can't learn. But. But it. Because it's harder than they thought it was going to be. It's harder than they expected,
and they make that hardness mean something about themselves.
And if you have failed in the past and it has cost you big, like, if you failed in the past and it cost you a job or you had to, like, drop out of a class or,
you know, maybe there was even more negative consequences floating around in your bubble from your parents. Like, like this has potential to get dark and twisty pretty quick. Like, if you had a rough upbringing, I can totally see how this fear of failure can be all consuming.
But we cannot change the past, team. We can only reframe where we are now.
So I don't want to bypass your experience, your story, your journey, but I'm inviting you in to start to reframe now. Or else we will always stay here.
It will always be this hard. And if we don't build new structures or frameworks in your brain to get you over this hump, we will always quit when it gets hard.
And you will always be 25% complete on any goal that you set. And that sucks. We don't want to be here forever.
So if you are in the middle of it right now, business or otherwise, and life feels harder than you thought,
look at this as an invitation for life to develop your skills. Life is challenging you to increase your capacity.
It is saying, hey, you have this big dream and goal right now. The person sitting across from me does not have the tools and resources or nervous system support in order to have that reality, in order to see that dream accomplished.
And these challenges right now are opportunities for you to build your skill, to build your nervous system,
to try something new.
The version of you that got you here is not gonna be the version of you that gets you to the next step,
to the next phase, to the next part of the dream.
It's just not.
And the version of you did a really good job getting you here. And now it's time to put some new tools in your tool belt. It's time to look at the world through a new lens and put one foot in front of the other.
So reframing failure.
What if it's just data?
What if the failure is just data? It doesn't mean anything about you as a person. You are still lovable. You are still worthy, you are still smart.
You are still amazing.
What if the failure is just data?
What if the hard part is the curriculum?
Okay,
example.
When nurses start their business, they think the hardest part is a website and like getting their branding colors to match. But it's actually the part where you face rejection, where you experience self doubt, where you don't have instant results.
That is the real hard part.
I was talking with a year long client last week and I love, I love this long term client. She's going to know exactly who I'm talking about whenever I start to tell her story.
She jumped in with us and I've been coaching her for over a year and she has been through hell and back with some family stuff this year and she has shown up, she has grown, she has acted.
It's been hard, but she's been true to her values, she has been authentic. I've seen her grow her voice, her boundaries and her ballsiness. Like she has grown through so much and her business is still not where she wants it to be.
And she was asking me a question and I turned the question back on her and I could tell that it made her frazzled. And I can like see in her eyes that she experienced real resistance.
And she was like, it's just so hard.
It's all so hard as like tears are like streaming down her face.
I was like, yeah, this,
this is the hard part right here.
Being in the mud,
riding this feeling of like pure discomfort and such overwhelm. Like this is actually what it looks like to be going through hard ****.
We're gonna be right here. I'm not gonna like pull you out of it or give you the answer or give you what I think about it. We're just gonna sit right here because your in the mud is so much more important than the action steps we're going to talk about.
So we sat there,
we took a few deep breaths,
we regulated back to neutral and actually just got a message from her last night that one of her posts popped off in one of the community Facebook groups she's in and she was playing inspirational movie music as she was connecting and inviting people to coaching calls.
Um, she was like, I'm the main character, I'm gonna do it. And so every hard moment usually has a juicy payoff. Sometimes you have to wait longer than like a week to experience that.
But it was a really cool moment to reflect on this morning and your ability to be in the mud, your capacity to be in the mud for longer than you thought.
We have to learn how to do that. We have to learn what tools you need, what resources you need, what people you need in your corner so that if life gives you the opportunity to be in the mud.
You don't freak out and drown yourself in the mud. You learn how to like, take a deep breath,
think how to problem solve and get yourself out of it.
Okay, so let's talk about some things we can do to build capacity for hard things. Okay? I don't expect you to listen to this podcast and be like completely solved,
completely fixed on how to do hard things, that you'll just feel 100% fine on how to do hard things.
But now it is your job. Now it is your responsibility.
Now you are accountable to build the skill on how to do hard things to increase your tolerance for hard things.
And here's four things that we can do to start to build that muscle.
I want you to do one uncomfortable thing a day to train your tolerance.
This could be cold shower in the morning.
This could be waking up before the sun comes up. This could be not drinking caffeine for an hour after you wake up.
This could be committing to taking a walk every morning before you sit down at your computer. Whatever,
whatever this can be, I want it to feel or like sound on paper. Kind of like a micro challenge,
but something that you can ring the bell on every day and say, I did that.
And I want you to keep that promise to yourself because you will also build self trust in the process,
which is also important long term.
I want you to start to reframe setbacks so every failed attempt adds to your hard thing resume.
And this is important because if you stay in the game of entrepreneurship for very long, you will repeat Entrepreneurship is just solving problems team. And the longer you're in it, the harder the problems the get.
So start keeping track of all of the hard things that you've ever done.
And whenever you come up on the next problem, you can look back at this resume and be like, because I did all this hard **** over X amount of years, I know that I can do this too.
I don't know the answer yet. I don't know how I'm going to do it yet. But I believe in my ability to figure it out because I have done xyz.
If your resume is full of attempts, but no completions, no executions,
it is full of things that you tried 25% on and then quit.
We have a big hill to climb here and it's really important that you do that micro challenge that I mentioned before because we gotta build back some self trust in your ability to do things in general,
not just hard things.
Third thing you can do here is I want you to celebrate the evidence every time you do something,
celebrate. Tell your husband, tell your partner, tell your best friend of like, hey, I did a hard thing today.
I rung that bell and I'm really proud of myself. And they may not fully understand and that doesn't matter. But begin this practice of gratitude and celebration.
It helps give you the good hormones in your brain.
And finally, team, I want you to do an environment audit. You need to start hanging out with people who do hard things all the time so that if you are lacking in your belief to do hard things, you can borrow theirs until you have your own.
This is one of the biggest selling points I think for our business containers is that you're just surrounded by people who are failing often who are moving forward no matter what, who are doing hard things.
Their voice is shaking, but they are doing it anyway.
And being in that kind of environment is inspiring.
It really fuels your growth mindset. And if you are surrounded by people in your day to day life that do not have this, that don't have this as a value, it is harder.
So get yourself in a community where people are also doing hardship and do it with them.
Okay team,
final thoughts here. Your hard isn't a sign that you are failing.
It's not a sign that you're failing. It's a sign that you are growing.
Doing hard things is how we remember who we are.
Underneath the fear, underneath the conditioning, underneath the what ifs,
it's how we remember who we actually are.
If you can handle death, trauma and chaos for an hourly wage,
you can absolutely handle a Facebook live or a sales call or going and knocking on the door of a business in your town.
The only difference is the story that you tell yourself about it.
If you are waiting to feel easy before you start,
you'll never start.
The hard thing is the whole entire point.
