Idolizing sales and your business is hindering your growth
and your connection to self.
Your business changed everything for you.
So much has changed that you begin to idolize your expertise, your
offers, the lifestyle that you created through your business, and so on.
Thank you.
Perpetually focusing on the next level of success of or perceived success keeps
everyone unsatisfied yearning for more.
We were created to worship, but not worship our businesses.
Now when sales take a dip, you begin to feel anxious.
Now sneakily worshiping the worry.
It's time to put God to the forefront of your business.
Today, I'm sharing how to stop idolizing your sales and business.
Stay tuned.
This is the Harmonious Wealth Podcast, where we're breaking online business
owners free from chasing every next revenue milestone and instead prioritizing
lifestyle and legacy goals so you can finally have the personal wealth
to show for your business success.
I'm your host, Iyanna Vaughn, fractional CFO and bookkeeper here to guide you.
Now let's start building your financial legacy.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Harmonious Wealth.
My name is Ayanna Vaughn and I am so excited to talk to you today.
First I want to share that I will be doing another webinar Friday, June 21st at 12 p.
m.
Eastern.
It is going to be about why you know how to make money, but not maintain it.
For the next couple of episodes, I'll be sharing just like mindset things that
happen when it comes to managing our money and like the root causes of it.
So it's going to be really timely to talk about that today.
I'm going to be sharing why we idolize selling and money and
business and things like that.
But for some context, I've been studying the Bible.
I've been studying it for over a year now.
I'm still not done.
I feel like I'm more than halfway done.
Recently, as I was Starting the podcast.
I read the book of Ecclesiastes.
Basically it's about King Solomon.
He had lived his long life.
He was a little salty about how life was.
He was like, wisdom, pointless, wealth, pointless, all these
things, pointless, meaningless.
But, Really what I got out of it is what do we put so much emphasis and
us putting like idolizing wealth, idolizing our mind, idolizing our
business, idolizing our investments.
It really is meaningless if you're not putting God first.
So an idol is what takes place of your love for God.
It takes place of your higher purpose.
You're consumed with this, with your business.
It can be social media.
It can be a relationship.
You're consumed with this thing to the point where you're putting it above
you, you're putting it above God.
And when you do that, everything that happens with it.
You're distracted from who you are supposed to be.
When you connect the true wealth within, you're able to heal your
relationship with money, grow your business and dig deeper into your faith.
So if you're interested in something like that, sign up for
my email series, The Wealth Within.
Go to lovelyfinancials.
com slash wealth.
So I do want to share one that stuck out for me Ecclesiastes chapter 5
verses 10 through 13 through 11.
I'm gonna actually read it in my Bible.
So let me pull it up.
So I have the woman's study Bible in the NIV version.
I mentioned on Instagram, if you are following me there at
lovely financials, I shared that.
I'm going to get the big girl version, KJV, because that's
a whole nother language,
anyway, ecclesiastes chapter 5 verses 10 through 11 says, whoever loves money.
Never has enough.
Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
This, too, is meaningless.
As goods increase, so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owners except to feast their eyes on them?
So the whole book really was filled with gems.
If you are interested in having me do like bonus episodes where I dig
deeper into scripture as it relates to money, mindset, things of that
nature, let me know in the comments.
Let me know on Instagram.
I would love to do it as bonus episodes.
But when I read Ecclesiastes, it's really the premise of what I believe harmonious
wealth is, of course I have my Part of my title of the podcast is wealth.
However, I don't want us to be so consumed about wealth that
we forget that God is first.
We are here to serve God, serve his children, And we must give back to others.
We must be cheerful givers to others.
However, I do believe that objectively, when you do have a
business, it is supposed to serve you.
However, a lot of times when we start our businesses, we get so consumed with our
businesses that we forget about ourselves.
We make an idol of our business.
We make an idol of selling, and that is not okay.
The benefit of you being able to master your mind to stop idolizing
your business and sales and more importantly, putting God in that place
and your higher purpose in that place is you'll start looking at your business
more objectively than out of emotion.
Your business then becomes a machine and not your child, right?
While it's objective, you'll know that Okay, my business is separate from me It's
able to produce profit to pay myself But it also has systems and teams to be able
to operate and you'll have a healthier relationship with money in your business
So stay tuned while I kind of dig into how we can stop idolizing our business.
So when it comes to business, especially if you don't come from
money or if you've grown your business to heights that you would have never
imagined for yourself, there's a sense of pride that you have, right?
Like a natural, healthy sense of pride that you have, but when it
becomes excessive pride in business performance, it unintentionally,
dictates your personal value.
The first part and you removing your business or selling as an idol
is to focus on the bigger picture.
As business owners, we are often short sighted when it comes
to operating our businesses.
And we're looking at the next quarter and the next quarter, the next month ahead.
And we're distracted from what our bigger picture is, what our higher purpose is.
And That bigger picture is our why it is what we're able to create legacy
for our family, what we're able to generously give to our community.
So when we work with our clients, we have a legacy planning call and
there I'm able to help our clients understand or highlight or really
identify their life aspirations.
And once they highlight their life aspirations, I'm able to help them
create a plan for profit in their business so that they can execute on it.
So when this happens their business no longer takes precedence over their life
One thing that could be important is you know, you're idolizing
your business But what do you really have at the end of the day?
Like when you retire?
What is your nest egg looking like?
because if you're hustling every single year in your business and you're working
for the next quarter ahead, you're missing the big picture of having
investments ready for yourself and your nest egg when you're ready to retire.
So the next part is stop worrying.
When your business becomes an idol and things don't go as planned and you start
to worry, worrying becomes your idol.
You're worshiping the worry.
because you're afraid and that should not be within us.
The sales milestone that you've made your brain start to sneakily imprint that
and like, okay, this is what I'm worth.
This is what I'm valued at.
And whenever I launch, if I don't make this, then I don't deserve it.
Or I'm just going to show up in a way that's really funky.
So my approach to this is when a client is disheartened from
their launch, let's reframe it.
Let's objectively look at what's going on.
Let's review the trends so that we can immediately fill in the gaps of the
next steps for the rest of the year.
So we help our clients manage their cash flow and then we help
them to make incremental steps to increase their profit goals.
This helps them reduce their stress so that they can perform
and accomplish their goals.
So say if you launched and it didn't perform the way that you needed and you're
just like, feeling bad for yourself about the launch, you're going to lack urgency
in business and that impacts your sales.
So when you are lacking urgency, guess who else lacks urgency?
Your audience, your team, your clients, and then you're perpetually not
creating the results that you desire.
So what if instead of feeling down on yourself when you're not hitting
your goals, because your business is not an idol right, you're shifting
that, you're able to say, okay, objectively, I didn't reach my goals.
So you know, I got to bring out scripture again when it comes to worry.
One of my favorite books in the Bible is the book of Matthew.
I read it.
It's so interesting because when I started reading the Bible and I'm
taking it seriously in March of 2023, one of the books that I read that
really changed my entire life was the book of Matthew and the book of Mark.
So I was in between these two books and there was a night where
I had a dream and Jesus visited me.
And at the time I wasn't like gung ho on, like on Jesus.
But that night changed everything, but let's get into where Jesus
talks about not worrying.
Matthew chapter 6 verse 25 Therefore I tell you do not worry about your
life, what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear.
It's not life.
Is not life more than food and your body more than clothes?
Look at the birds in the air.
They do not sow or weep or store away in barns.
And yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable than they?
And then when he goes to, when Jesus goes to verse 34, he says, therefore, do
not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow.
We'll worry about itself.
Each day has trouble of its own.
So this is really key to not worrying.
No matter what your account looks like, you should not be worrying.
Because God has provisions for you and he will protect you.
And when we stop idolizing our business as the end all be all, because
it's going to always disappoint us.
We shift our minds to God, and you may be thinking, my
business absolutely needs sales.
Absolutely needs profit.
It's my lifeline, right?
Objectively.
That's true.
Yeah.
Your business definitely needs sales.
It definitely needs profit, but it doesn't supersede the importance of
God and your higher purpose in your business because it's not worth it.
It's tricky because when it becomes your idol, right?
You obsess over it and when you obsess over it, it continues to decrease and
impacts your mindset and increase how you show up and that's not helping you.
Not helping you at all.
So the third thing is more practical, right?
We have the bigger picture.
We have the worry, like stopping the worry.
And then I want to help you normalize inconsistent sales and launches.
Now I'm all about monthly recurring revenue, the real MRR, right?
But we have to normalize things fluctuate in business.
So you can have an amazing launch and when your sales decrease
again, your energy decreases too, but that should not be the case.
When I work with my intensive clients, we analyze trends, we work on goals and
we create predictions for your future.
We have a four step framework and the fourth step of our
framework is the profit plan.
And it not only gives a picture for the next calendar year, but the next three
years so that you know what to expect in sales for the next three years.
And then when we work together continuously at a fractional CFO level,
you're then able to say, okay, if things don't go the way we anticipated, how
can we in real time, highlight any gaps, fill them so that we can still
satisfy our goals and business and let's be clear, projections are great.
I love a good spreadsheet.
I love mapping things out.
However, they do nothing if we don't have the marketing metrics tied into our sales
goals because you need to know exactly what you need to do output wise for your
sales and marketing so that you can hit your goals versus just guessing, putting
numbers on a spreadsheet, getting random revenue goals, praying that we hit it.
While we are definitely praying, right?
We also have some practical goals and ways to execute on these goals.
but when it becomes excessive pride in business performance, it unintentionally,
dictates your personal value.
So every sales milestone is imprinted in your brain and
you just never feel satisfied.
You want to double your revenue every single year, a year where you
decrease in revenue, you feel like, Oh, there's something wrong with you.
When you're in launch mode, You might end up not relying on God,
not relying on your higher purpose.
And you're so consumed with your launch that you ignore everything else.
You begin to turn down your plate not for fasting, right?
But you're turning down your plate because you're not remembering to eat.
You're not remembering to sleep or you're not sleeping well.
You're just consumed by the state of the launch, you're
relying on your own strength when you should be relying on who?
When you don't make the sales that you desire in your launch you obsess
over it and now it impacts how you show up in your business overall.
I've been talking to clients about their launches, like really understanding the
metrics needed to hit their sales goals.
And then I was talking to one client in particular she launched sometime
last year and she really didn't perform the way that she wanted to.
And it really hindered how she showed up.
For her business because it was in Q4 of last year and it really impacted
how she showed up this season, like in the beginning of the year.
So when we were talking when I have these meetings with clients, it's not only like.
a console I'm advising.
It's also a mixture of some coaching where I kind of have something in mind, right?
But I really want someone to kind of dig it out for themselves so that they can
be able to kind of see what's going on.
And she realized that she was idolizing selling, right?
And her smarts and her intellect, which we all have faced in business before.
And the root cause of this, excessive pride and putting an idol in your
business or selling is that you're overcompensating for something that
you might be lacking on the inside.
Entrepreneurship just like any other relationship magnifies
your shortcomings, right?
We hear the saying that when you're in a relationship, when you're with someone
else, you're a mirror of like who you are.
Your relationship partner is a mirror of you.
When you start a business, the way that you perform in business or
your business is a mirror of you.
I started my business with like tons of unhealed trauma, right?
And it showed up in ways that I didn't expect in my business.
and when I started to depend on my own, ability to grow my
business, that led me away, that caused my spiritual rock bottom.
I mentioned this in episode, I believe six, where I talked about not
being desperate in your business.
A part of that, right?
I had grace, God gave me grace to grow my business out of the season
that I was in as a single mother with education that was different from
everyone else with a background that was extremely different from everyone else.
And he gave me the grace.
be able to use the intellect that he gifted me to help others understand
their money be ready for tax season and have the ability to reach their goals.
So when I became prideful in how I managed my business.
My reward for that idolization of my business was Spiritual Rock Bottom.
There were other things that I did throughout that time, which
I'm not going to share here, but.
For the purpose of this is to say like when we get into idolizing business
and selling, there's a reward for that.
It could be burnout.
It can be like a depletion of your profits in the next year.
Whatever is in your mind, happen in the spiritual realm first, and
then it comes to the natural world.
When you are obsessed with your business to the point where
it takes over everything else, The reward is frustration.
So the solution for ceasing idolizing your business is to lean into God for
guidance of your business and making sure that whatever you do in your
business aligns with your higher self, detaching, Sales from who you are
objectively, your business needs sales.
Your business needs to have profit, your business needs to have healthy cash flow,
but it should not be tied to your value.
And you should not make that your idol.
It should just be a goal that you have that doesn't overpower your thinking.
okay, So I shared three ways we can stop idolizing sales, our business and
our mind, like our smarts and business.
It's through focusing on the big picture.
It's through stop worrying and three, normalizing inconsistent sales in your
business and inconsistent launches because it happens to all of us.
So which one of the three really resonates with you the most?
Or is it a mixture of them or all of them?
Let me know in the comments section, if you're watching on YouTube or
just DM me, if you're like, girl, I idolize my business now, I don't thank
you, or if this resonates with you, just let me know, email me, DM me.
comment on YouTube.
I'll respond personally.
If you're ready to join a community of women striving to heal their relationship
with money, grow their businesses, and dig deeper into their faith, sign up
for my email series, The Wealth Within.
Each week on the Wealth Within series, I'll share tips on how to
face your money, improve profit, nifty tax strategies, and manage
your cashflow that you already have.
If this aligns with you, go to lovelyfinancials.
com slash wealth to get started.
If you're a woman growing your business and family and want to release the worry
around your money and business, to build personal wealth and create a legacy.
Subscribe on either YouTube or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
I'm on a mission to help a hundred women.
I'm on a mission to help a hundred women reach at least 1 million in
net worth to create generational wealth and break generational curses.
If this aligns with you, I'd love for you to be a part of the community, and join
us for future episodes on Harmonious Well.
Thank you.
Hey there girlfriend, if you're ready to finally have the lifestyle
and legacy to show for your business success, I would love for you to
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