The Many Ways in Which I Suck

I am blessed to have a never-ending skip chat open on my desktop with Allison Nazarian and Sarah Robinson called “the daily confessional” where I can share all of my insanities, the snarks about who’s annoying me, the bizarre yet amusing serendipities of life, everything that’s going wonky in my business or with my daughter or with my love life …

… and be free.

Because hiding behind an artifice of perfection is tiring.

Hiding drains my life energy until I have nothing left to give.

Hiding is a slow progression to death of my soul.

But there is this incessant voice inside my head who constantly judges me, who wants … no, who demands that I be perfect.

Or, at least that I appear to be perfect.

As if that is the only way to succeed.

The only way to get people to read my blog. To follow me on twitter. To buy my stuff.

As if that is the only way to get someone to love me.

Yet in a fundamental irony of life, the exact opposite is true.

Only by confessing my inadequacies, only by revealing the ways in which I deviate from the norm, only by letting out the part of myself that is my greatest fear to be shared … only then can profound, intimate connections be made with other like souls.

So here are some of the things I don’t want to confess to you.

I’m taking alimony.

I can’t afford this amazing apartment in San Francisco, to pay for groceries and clothes for my daughter and plane tickets and new furniture … completely on my own. Yet. Right now a majority of my living expenses are paid for via spousal & child support.

I hate that I’m taking this money. Feels like I’m a failure of feminism, that I’m one of the lame gold-diggerish women who live from ex-husband to ex-husband, instead of financing my own life. Feels like a failure as an entrepreneur, that my newly-profitable business doesn’t yet produce enough cash to support my live-your-truth life.

My secret plan is the very second my business can replace the alimony, I’m releasing my ex-husband of any future obligations.

And from then on, I will be financially independent. Never ask a man to support my life. Always keep money separate from love.

But until that day, this is how I pay a majority of my bills.

I have raised my voice to my child.

Two weeks ago I taught the preview upstream class for the 6 Weeks to Live Your Truth program with my 4 1/2 year old daughter in the house.

Now usually (always) when I teach a class, my daughter is with her dad, or in childcare, or being watched by another person … never in the house with me. But it was a national holiday that are not in my current awareness, meaning that childcare was not available. And I thought, oh, I’m sure she can be quiet for just an hour. And I discussed the situation with her and she agreed (the agreement of a 4 year old? yeah. exactly.).

It did not go well. And everyone listening to the ustream got to hear me get impatient with my daughter. Lovely.

The thing is, I’m an introvert living with an extrovert child. And as much as I need private time to recharge, physical space every day, to energize myself … she needs constant connection, she needs other humans who love and care about her, to energize herself.

And after 3 weeks of being together almost 24-7 … both of us were energy deprived.

So every time people say, oh, you’re such a great mom, look at what you are doing as a mompreneur, it’s so amazing how you balance your life … I am saying to myself, yeah, if you only knew. If you only knew when I stick a DVD in her iMac and shut the door to my bedroom to gain a few minutes of peace. How relieved I am to drop her off with her dad for the weekend so I can have 48 continuous hours to simply be myself.

There are women where being a mom is their calling in life, where they can raise a dozen children and spend 24-7 with them and play all the time and homeschool them and cook them organic food and never run out of hugs.

But that is not me. Sometimes, I am full out of hugs. And sometimes, I just need a freaking break.

I have not been doing my bookkeeping.

Remember how I’m a financial expert? How I teach that “Money Meetings” thing, where you look at your numbers every week, keep on top of your finances, track your marketing stats, use cash flow projections to make important decisions about your business?

Yeah. I agree with all that. I teach all that. But I don’t necessarily do all that.

I mean, I have done it. But the last few months, I’ve been running around on adventures and moving and launching new programs and various other stories I could tell blah blah blah, and stopped doing my weekly money meetings, and even stopped inputting stuff into my bookkeeping program.

Not that I don’t look at my numbers, but it’s random and not I’m tracking historical trends more than late night obsessions over my google analytics.

And … I’m still deciding what I think about that, whether the way I was teaching weekly money meetings (as useful as it is for many people) actually works for me.

I forget most of my marketing.

I have dozen of affiliates that I forget to tell about launches. The last two launch preview calls, I forgot to tell my list about it until 48 hours before. I don’t remember or have a place to track who makes special inquiries about which upcoming program. I rarely remember to follow up.

Doing guest posts has been on my to do list for 9 months. I am a guest on radio shows and teleclasses and get press, but I don’t know why or how they found me and I don’t follow up with them or seek out such opportunities.

I launch programs without any upsells to something afterwards. I don’t let anything get out of beta before I abandon it and move onto the next thing. I even launch free programs with no upsell to a paid program. Up until very recently, I neglected to have anything for sale on my website.

It’s a wonder I any money at all.

And if one of my clients was doing this, I would flip out at them.

This is something I’m working on, and I know (for the most part) what to do. But it’s important for me to let you know … just because I know something doesn’t mean I always do it.

My websites are completely screwed up.

So most of you are on my website right now (and for the few of you reading the RSS feed, go ahead, click through to my site) … and let me ask you a question — what do I do?

rflol.

Yeah, exactly. When people go to my website, they can’t tell what I do.

And that’s not the only thing that’s screwed up. There’s no picture of me in the header or anywhere above the fold. There’s not even a real header. Half the stuff in the sidebar is broken. There are 64 different links off my homepage. There’s no way to buy anything.

And don’t even get me started on my sales pages.

Everything is in one column because I did it all myself. Too much white space in random places. It’s almost impossible to find the buy links. The copy is probably way too long. I forgot to ask for testimonials and didn’t put in pictures or any borders around the testimonials I do have on there. There are no buttons or graphics or colors of any kind.

I’m going to launch a new website soon, and get all of those sales pages revamped. But, in the meanwhile, they are out there on the interwebz, completely screwed up.

I don’t answer all of your emails.

I preach connecting with your tribe, building relationships with your community. Making that your priority.

But I miss emails from you. I have dozens sitting in multiple inboxes and follow up queues on multiple computers. And I don’t think I’ll ever catch up. And I just can’t let go to delegate to an assistant or automate anything.

I miss your @ replies. I miss your DMs. I have thousands of stuff sitting in my Facebook message box.

Sometimes it’s because I’m overwhelmed with amazing replies and just can’t get to all of them. Sometimes it’s because I can’t decide what to respond, so I put it off until the situation resolves itself or the opportunity passes me by. And sometimes it’s because I’m chickening out on conflict.

So yeah, I need to figure out how to balance connection with freaking getting stuff done.

And those confession are just the start of everything I fear you could learn about me.

The hearts of men that I have broken. How I’ve texted while driving. The dirty dishes left in my sink. That I didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year. I can’t iron. I don’t play with my cat. My car is a mess. The mail is piled up. I don’t always recycle. I’ve deleted my entire website by accident. I’ve filed tax returns late.

And I feel so much better from writing this down. And posting it. And that you’re reading this right now.

Because the secret is … some of you will be offended or lose faith in me.

And you will leave. As you should, because we were never meant to be.

But some of you will stay.

And here’s the awesome, amazing, delicious thing … with you I get to be myself. And not only is that okay with you … that’s why you like me, for the whole of me, including those parts of myself that I was afraid to share.

So … what are you afraid to share with us?

What are you thinking and not saying? What are you hiding that is leaching energy and life away from you? Who can’t you tell? What are you not speaking?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider signing up for my latest free law class for small business owners or downloading the Legal Checklist to Setup & Run Your One-Person Business.