I have always been the girl that everyone thought had it all together. The one that is most likely to succeed, that is confident, super smart, fearless and self-assured.
If you judge this book by its cover, I am the woman we all hope to be. If you open up and peek what’s inside, there is a massive war going on in my mind that sometimes I’m not even sure I’ll ever be able to win.
For those of you who don’t know me. I’m Natasha Solae and I’m an introvert. Not only that but I’m multi-passionate, creative, I have Adult ADD and I suffer from Anxiety and Depression.
The moment I realized all of this was my life’s biggest challenge, it suddenly hit me that the odds are stacked against me.
Introverted. Multi-Passionate. ADHD. And Anxiety and Depression?
Was I doomed? Destined to fail?
It sure felt that way.
[sc name=”Lead Magnet”]If you’re like me (of course you are because you’re still reading), the one thing you and I both know is that your journey is going to be 100x more complex than even the most troubled entrepreneurs and a million times harder than the extroverted, perfect ones that show up with ease and crush it online.
And that’s just with being introverted and suffering from mental illness.
What about when you’re multi-passionate and creative and you just hate sales funnels, the thought of complex email sequences to sell your products / programs and cookie-cutter coaching programs?
Then you feel like you’ll forever be broke because you just can’t get that shit together either.
So is it possible? Can you build a profitable business when things like social media seem scary, when showing up can just seem too much?
Well— I am here to tell you yes, but you just have to do it differently.
You gotta get more self-aware and get more in touch with your intuition.
There are four ways that I have noticed that my anxiety and depression has hindered me the most.
1. Not Showing up online consistently.
2. Self-sabotaging every time I want to uplevel.
3. Getting lost in the sauce (aka not trusting yourself so you look for the answer in others)
4. Not having a defense system to bounce back!
In this post, I’ll be giving you five tips to help you combat anxiety and depression so that you can stop sabotaging and start succeeding!
Here are 5 tips on How to Build A Brand and Online Business with Anxiety and Depression.
1. Batch Content
When you’re a multi-passionate like me that also suffers from anxiety and depression, I find that your two biggest struggles are motivation and confusion.
When you’re multi-passionate, your motivation constantly goes up and down as you get bored with the monotony that inevitably occurs while creating routines in your business.
When you’re anxious or depressed, you have random attacks that come along and can last for weeks, causing so much confusion and sadness in your mind that you just go idle.
Here is a tip that I’ve learned. There is no such thing as balance in business. You’ll never have 100% balance and the pursuit of it will just drive you crazy.
The key to high-performance and showing up everyday is just to learn to accept who you are, listen to yourself, and just move where the tides go versus resisting.
Batch the things that feel hard, that give you the most anxiety, that you know you need to do but you just don’t like showing up and doing it all the time.
For me, that’s taking photos. A lot of people don’t know this but Personal Branding shoots give me sooooo much anxiety. So bad, that in order to get it done, I dedicate two days a month to getting photos of myself.
Do the things that excite you, intuitively and on the fly.
Unless you’re at a point where you’ve lost all hope and nothing excites you (at this point, I would recommend seeing a therapist), then something should still excite you.
Whatever that is, chase the hell out of it. Look for the things that set you on fire.
For me that’s YouTube and talking to my community. I hate batching those. Why build a community if you’re just going to speak to them through Buffer?
Yuck.
Do what sets you on fire on the fly. Let that be an intuitive process.
And whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up if that changes every 3 months.
Sometimes the things that I batch in January are the things that I love in July.
Sometimes the things I love, I fall out of love with but since it’s essential to the health of my business, I just batch it.
It’s okay to not be rigid, and to be free, and to change your mind.
What’s not okay is to feel so much resistance that you disappear altogether.
2. Unfollow anything and everything that is making you question yourself.
No matter how beautiful someone’s Instagram feed is, how amazing their community is, I’ve learned that the moment it stops feeling good to me and causes me to mentally beat up on myself, it’s time to stop paying attention to it.
Chances are there are thought leaders you love and gurus you can’t get enough of that are seriously draining you. They’re making you feel like who you are isn’t good enough, and so you chip away at yourself to try to be like them.
But being like them doesn’t feel good.
And nothing makes us feel more crazy than when we don’t feel like we have a good grasp on who we are.
This was me. The moment I decided I wanted to follow every individual in my industry on Facebook and Instagram so I could submerge into the community was a fast and silent downhill for me.
Less than 6 months in, I felt so confused. I was overwhelmed by all the information, tips, advice, tools, and freebies thrown my way.
It became less about making it easier for my community to find me and more about how I can learn the latest funnel or hack to increase my income.
Once I got caught in this trap, I began to question every single little decision that I made.
Simple decisions like what logo I needed to have became sooooo hard even though that was always the easiest thing for me.
I could never make a decision. I would just overthink and freak out.
I was the furthest away from my intuition. Who was she again?
And I longed for a way to get back in touch with my creative self. I stopped buying programs, courses and everything else out there.
I missed her. The old me. I prayed and hoped she was willing to take me back.
Chances are you’re not showing up as much as you can, you’re self-sabotaging and feeling a ton of confusion around who you are and what you do because you are so busy trying to keep up with what everyone else is telling you that you SHOULD do.
Unfollow what makes your soul feel empty.
It doesn’t matter if that guru or that peer didn’t do anything horrible to you. People don’t have to abuse you for them to not be right for you at this moment in time.
Unfollow what makes you lose your identity.
3. A Defense System
Every Entrepreneur but especially those suffering from depression and anxiety need a defense system.
So what is a defense system?
A defense system is a ritual or go-to activity that you have that you can reliably use to get you out of your funk.
Some days it will be easier to pull you out than others, but you need one so that you can consistently show up every day.
As an Entrepreneur, one of the worst things we can do is allow anxiety and depression to take over our life.
We must take back our power by not letting it get the best of us.
[sc name=”Lead Magnet”]When you don’t show up every day to promote your products and services, you create huge gaps of time where your audience doesn’t see you.
You do this enough, and you stop being a reliable thought leader.
Your audience stops looking to you for solutions and it makes your growth a whole lot slower.
Not only that but you never really know what day your client is actually present online.
So although you may have showed up Monday and Friday that week, what if your client was looking for you Tuesday and Wednesday?
Then you missed them.
Not only that but people aren’t always ready to invest right away even once they’ve identified you as their dream coach or thought leader.
This is why you have to show up. Everyday. And you have to keep showing up.
Those who don’t show up usually are dealing with the greatest fluctuations of income.
This is why you must push through if you want consistency and if you want to build your wealth.
You have to push through even when at times it feels hopeless.
You have to push through even when it seems like nothing is working.
You have to push through even when it seems like no one online gives a shit about what you have to say.
You have to push through even when you feel like you don’t have all the answers.
If you have yet to create a defense system for you and your business, I’m currently working on a post to teach you all about the one I have that keeps me in check and how to create one for yourself.
4. Passive Income Systems STAT!
Next tip is to YOU-Proof your business. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my business as an Entrepreneur suffering from Anxiety and Depression is that I never YOU-Proofed by business.
I completely underestimated my anxiety and the fact that my panic attacks don’t last for 45 mins. More than I’d like to admit, they last for weeks!!!
For those of you that have experienced this kind of extended attack, you know how much if affects you when it comes to showing up in your brand and biz.
Anxiety can be so smothering that it blocks you from even being able to find the words to speak to anyone, let alone yourself.
FB Lives Become that much harder.
Emails you need to send haven’t even been written because your anxiety is causing so much confusion you can’t even put a basic sentence together.
Everything feels so far away and out of alignment.
This will screw up your income bad because mentally you will be absent from your business for weeks.
To combat this — you need passive income streams. You need to make income in the background for those times you just cannot show up to sell another 1:1 coaching package or any other type of service-based job.
I remember the moment that I couldn’t sell anything for two months because I spent six weeks hyperventilating and freaking out over just pivoting in my business.
Here I’d been hitting consistent $7k-$15k months and now I’m down to my last client, freaking out and can’t move because pivoting ended up being way harder for my mental gremlin than I could ever imagined.
You know when this happened. Just over April and May of 2018. Super recent.
And I didn’t sell a thing because I was terrorized by my anxiety and I just froze.
And then my anxiety got worse when I realized, omg I can’t freeze. If I freeze then I don’t have any income for me.
Luckily, I always juggle 1-2 really high end clients even when I’m not working with really small businesses and those usually bring in at minimum $5k per month. $10k if I am working with two.
But it made me realize that I had nothing else but my 1:1 work and if you want to make your anxiety worse, add financial worries on to the top of the cake.
5. Document Your Journey
When you’re suffering from anxiety and depression, you’re not going to always want to show up and create something.
In fact, your anxiety and depression is probably going to kill all desires to create something for your audience.
This is why you need to start documenting your journey. Because when you’re feeling so under the weather, sometimes the best way to show up is just to express what’s on your heart and be honest.
I’m not an Anxiety or Depression Coach. I’m not a business coach. I’m not even a Personal Branding coach. I’m a girl that wants to show you that if I can do it, then you can too.
Yes I do mentor women, and I help them strategize how to build a Personal Brand so they can make money with their knowledge or their talents.
But at the heart of it all — I’m just a girl that has struggles every damn day, I’m pushing through and I want you to know that you can too.
Building a business with Anxiety and Depression is hard but it’s not impossible. Look at me, within 30 days of going full-force with my coaching program I did $4k in sales. A couple months later, I started hitting 5-figure months.
All of this with Anxiety and depression.
The trick is to batch, protect your energy and have a proper defense system in place for those days where things get really hard because they will.
