Hello, everyone. Tracie here, your resident business, rebel, and your listening to digital Hello, everyone. Tracie here, your resident business, rebel, and your listening to Digital Business Your Way podcast. The show that lets true stories and insider secrets of online entrepreneur life unfold. Our business world is growing and as an online business coach and digital product creator, I believe you didn't become an entrepreneur to grin and bear your way through business. So I'll be your guide. As we drop in on coaching calls, have intimate sit downs with online personalities. You love. And discuss ideas, opportunities and strategies circulating our online world. So pop in your earbuds, tap, follow, and join me as I demystify. This thing called business. Hello, hello and welcome to Digital Business Your Way. I'm Tracie, your resident business rebel, and today we're gonna talk about something that might just be holding your best work hostage. It's that feeling that before you can make your work real, you've gotta prove it. Prove the offer works. Prove the method is effective. Prove the idea is polished, airtight, unshakeable before anyone else sees it. Hmm. Not 'cause you're lazy or unclear. Definitely not because you are quote unquote, ready enough, but because you've been conditioned to believe that before you bring something into the world, it has to be proven. It has to have 500 testimonials and be five star reviewed and everything must be perfect. Yeah. And I get it. 'cause you know, proving looks like perfect and polished and practically peer reviewed. And if it's not, well you better slap a beta badge on it, discount it into oblivion, and make sure you say sorry on your sales page. 14 different ways. Sound familiar? Yeah. Same, but, you know, let's, let's talk about this more, and let's name what's really going on here. Because you are not a factory of perfect concepts. You're not a machine designed to churn out airtight frameworks on command. You're a creator, an entrepreneur, an experimenter. The pressure to prove something before you even build it, before you even try it, before you even get it in the hands of the people who are gonna work with it. Yeah, that's ludicrous. And it keeps you stuck at the doorway of your best work because your mind has confused perfection with leadership. Which is, it's not your fault. I mean, that's conditioning. Many of us were trained explicitly and implicitly to treat leadership as performance. To only step forward when the evidence is in to only speak, when we're sure we won't be challenged is, you know, the world has messed with us and continues to do so. Right. That's not how entrepreneurship works, and that's not the model that we have to do in our own businesses. It's not how transformation works either, and it's definitely not how you are meant to work. So let's ground this in something real because I've, I've felt this too. I have the conditioning and the other day I was building my AI models. For your lunch style and I, I had to do some pretty deep self coaching. Because these, these models, they don't just support the work, but they reflect my entire way of thinking and teaching. And they have grown. They came from this idea of, oh, wouldn't it be nice to, to being, you know, cornerstones and big marketing pieces and pillars and things that every time people hear about 'em, they're like, oh my God, I can't wait to see this. Oh my God, I can't wait to play with this. Right. And, and that builds the pressure and the feel. And as the creator, you feel that weight and that edge and you start to get those little whispers. What if they don't work? But then when you've done this and you're experienced, right? You also get kind of that immediately deeper knowing of, well of course they're gonna work 'cause I'm gonna make 'em work. I'm gonna tweak 'em and I'm gonna change 'em and I'm gonna test them and I'm gonna fix 'em and I won't know what will work and won't work until I make it and try it. But that tension that you initially feel, well that's where so many visionaries they, they stand in and it's not quite a stuckness. It's more like a pregnant with possibilities type feel. Because it's not really a feel of failure. It's more fearing what it takes to bridge the gap. That messy, gritty, non-linear process of shaping things into form, right? That gap between brilliance and delivery, between idea and implementation, between the vision in your heart and the thing people are actually gonna interact with. We're not scared so much that the thing won't be good. We're scared that we won't be able to carry it across that messy middle to get it to do what the other people need it to do. Right? And that feels so vulnerable. It feels so personal, especially when the work is tied to any part of our identity. When the tools, the methods, the models that we're creating, when they represent a, a piece of us, our ideas, our brilliance, our ethos, our hopes, well, you know, of course then our brain wants to protect us. Yeah. And it does so by giving that illusion of control, saying, prove it before you show it. And it's baked into how a lot of us were trained to succeed in corporate. In academia, even in a lot of small business and entrepreneurship, where success equals polished decks, tight frameworks, unspoken messages of, don't you dare share something until it's quote unquote ready. But real creation, that's not how it works. You know, it looks more like kindergartner's, finger painting. Where a lot of it ends up on the walls and on overalls, right, is here's the truth that we're unlearning today. You're not here to prove your ideas cause proving something that actually means trying to defend it, to justify it to impress someone with its flawlessness to make it work before it's even real. And that's not what we're about. Right? Because you're not that factory of perfect concepts. You're not that thought machine designed to get it right on the first try. We're that messy creator. We're the person with the ideas that spark light and hope, and then we have this beautiful ability to make it real. Because we're online, we refine, because we release it in the world. Where someone who leads by engaging, not by impressing, as to create means to bring it into form, to observe what it becomes to shape it by interacting with it, not thinking about it, but interacting with it. To iterate, just improve and embody. Yeah, so let, let, let's say this again. You're not here to be right. You're here to be real. And that's what builds resonance results and repeatable growth with your clients. That's trust. Not some idea, but trust in you. Right. And we can even take that a step further. 'cause once you start to realize, you don't have to prove an idea before sharing it. Well, a lot of you kind of hit another wall and one you've probably come across more than once in this online business. Well, okay, but if, if it's not fully baked, well, I, I at least need to call it beta, right? I'll just run it as a founder's round. Maybe I'll offer a first time discount so people know it's not perfect. Well, you don't have to use language that shrinks your work in order to make it acceptable to release. Now, please hear me when I say this. Those terms, they can be strategic, they can be used with intention and be very useful, but too often they're just band-aids for a deeper fear. Sometimes our own fear and sometimes labels that are put on us. Yeah. And they end up being armor. Armor that we use to protect ourselves from being seen in that messy mid process armor. We use to pre apologize for something that's already valuable right now, an armor we're told to put on. By programs and coaches and leaders that we're listening to because what? How dare we sell something straight out of the gate, even though we're fully grown humans who came into this industry from real careers with real knowledge and real skills that we're just packaging into a new way. I mean, you don't always need that armor, right. You do need presence. You do need practice, and you can't practice until you make it real. You need permission to lead in real time, which is what we're talking about, right? if your work serves people, even in its earliest iteration and your messaging is truthful. Then you're not in some weird, rough draft. Let me give you know, 15 asterisks for it and discount the crap out of it. It's a real offer. It's a living tool. It's an active contribution to the people you're here to help. So let's stop treating everything like some dissertation that needs 500 citations before it can see the light of day. You're not a student trying to impress a panel, you're a leader holding space for people's transformation. So let me offer this reframe for you. Instead of asking, is this proven enough? Let's start asking, is this real enough to meet someone in motion? Right? So think about who this offer is actually meant for. Where they are, what they're doing, and then ask, is this offer real enough to meet them with what they're doing? because your clients aren't buying flawlessness. They're not looking for the offer with the most footnotes. What they are buying is your ability to guide the experience, to show up in process, not just in Polish. Yeah. So ask, what's the real version I can build today? Not the shiny version for one day. The reality of it versus the aspirational of it. Because you learn by doing, you shape by listening, and you evolve because you're engaged in real time, not in isolation. Your people don't need some flawless idea. You're not selling philosophy. They need your steady presence in the process to support them and their feedback. Have you creating, changing, coming up with new ideas that no endless number of months thinking and toying with your offer could ever have come up with. So let the co-creation start now, and yeah. I'll even say this to myself too. These AI models I'm building, they're good. But of course they're not perfect. They're not meant to be. They themselves have to learn, right? AI models have to learn, and they can only learn by being used by having user input. So there's like a very meta lesson in it right there. Perfect isn't the goal? Devotion is using, tweaking, trying. I'm not here to impress people with shiny tools. I'm here to lead you with something useful, and that means I have to start with what's real. If I waited for perfect, I never get feedback. The friction, the collaboration that makes things better and worse. I miss out on the chance to help you right now, so I release what's real I shape by showing up. I iterate in integrity. That's creation, that's entrepreneurship. That's business my way. That's business your way, right? So let this be your reminder. You're not here to be right. You're here to be real. And that's how you build offers that truly serve. And as I always say, when you put your audience first, the money follows. Right. Real is greater than right every damn time. So say it with me. I'm not here to be right. I'm here to be real. And if this episode landed for you, I'd love to hear it. DM me, tell me what you've been holding back on, or better yet, release the thing and tag me in it. Let it out in the world. Let it serve. Let it evolve. That's leadership. That's you. Until next time, be well and have some fun. Thank you for joining me here on Digital Business Your Way. Be sure to check out the show notes for all the links mentioned today. And while you're there, I'd love for you to rate and review the show. And if you have a topic or question you want me to answer, I want to hear it. Head to Tracie Patterson dot com slash AMA and ask me anything about business. If I don't know it, I'm bringing up with one of my guests. And until next week, be well and have some fun.