And why I want you to start reviewing yourself every single day.
One of the things I've talked about for years in my marketing is how I don't want you waiting for your annual performance review to decide whether you're finally going to take your business seriously. And I still stand beside that one thousand percent.
Because I find it fascinating how often we use these reviews as the thing that's going to finally tell us what to do with our careers, even when we already have a pretty good hunch about what we want.
Maybe you've been thinking about leaving your job for the last year, and you've already started building a business on the side. You've got your offers, you've worked with clients, and you know that eventually you'd love for this business to become the thing that pays your bills instead of your employer.
But you're still telling yourself, "I'm going to wait until my review, and if they give me a terrible one after everything I've done for this company, I swear to God I'm out of here."
Like, PEACE OUT. I'm done.
And I get it. I really do. There's something about wanting that final straw, that one thing you can point to and say, "SEE?! This is exactly why I'm leaving."
But what I want you to notice is that you're essentially waiting for your boss to give you a reason to make a decision you've already been considering for yourself.
And sometimes, the opposite happens, which I think might actually be even more frustrating.
You go into your annual review already knowing that you don't want to be working there a year from now, and your boss sits you down and tells you how wonderful you've been. They appreciate everything you're doing, they want to recognize your contributions, and SURPRISE! Here's a $10,000 raise and a new title.
And you're like, DAMN IT.
Because now what?!
You were already questioning whether you wanted to stay, and now you're making even MORE money at the job you're hoping to eventually leave.
Suddenly, leaving feels a little more irresponsible. You're thinking about the additional money, the benefits, the stability, and whether you'd be crazy to walk away from such a good thing.
Congratulations, you've just received a shiny new pair of golden handcuffs. 😂
But here's what I want you to consider.
What if that raise didn't have to change your plans at all?
What if you could accept the money, appreciate the recognition, celebrate the promotion, and STILL continue building the business that you want to become your primary source of income?
Because those things aren't mutually exclusive.
You can be really freaking good at your job, have a wonderful relationship with your boss, appreciate the salary that's supporting your family, and also know that you don't want to spend the next ten years of your life doing that work.
And what if the additional money is actually a GOOD thing for the business you're building? Maybe it gives you more money to save, more money to invest into your business, or simply a little more financial breathing room while you figure out what you want your next chapter to look like.
I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it: Your job can be the investor in the business that eventually replaces it.
I don't want you to feel like you have to hate your job to justify wanting to leave. And I certainly don't want you waiting around for a disappointing performance review before you decide to give your own business the time, love, and attention it needs to grow.
But there's another side to this annual review conversation that I want to talk about, because it came up during our very first Corporate Break-Up Accelerator coaching call, and I think it's something so many women need to hear.
One of the women in the group had recently had her annual review, and she was feeling SO good about it. She felt appreciated, seen, and validated for all the hard work she'd been putting into her job.
Which, by the way, I LOVE. I'm all about celebrating ourselves and the work we're doing, and I think we could all stand to do a whole lot more of that.
But I asked her a question.
"Did that review tell you anything you didn't already know?"
And the answer was no.
She already knew she was good at her job. She already knew how hard she'd been working. She already knew she was making a difference.
But hearing someone else say those things out loud gave her permission to really recognize them for herself.
And I thought, isn't that interesting?
Because here's a woman who's incredibly capable at what she does, but it took someone else sitting her down and telling her how good she was before she really allowed herself to appreciate it.
And I think about how this shows up for so many of the women I coach, particularly the women who have spent 10, 15, sometimes 20 years becoming REALLY good at what they do in their careers and are now building businesses of their own.
These are women who have no problem managing big projects, solving complicated problems, leading teams, and being the person everyone at work knows they can count on.
But then they go home and open their laptops to work on their own businesses, and suddenly they're questioning whether they're qualified to charge what they want to charge.
They're wondering if they need another certification, if their offer is good enough, if they're experienced enough, or whether anyone is actually going to pay them for something they've spent years becoming incredibly good at.
Meanwhile, their employer is happily paying them to do work they've somehow convinced themselves people won't pay THEM to do independently.
MAKE THIS MAKE SENSE.
Now, I realize running a business requires different skills than being an employee. Of course it does. But I also think it's worth considering how much of your expertise you've already spent years developing, and whether you've been giving yourself enough credit for what you actually know and the work you're capable of doing.
Which brings me back to the woman I was coaching.
As we continued talking about her annual review, she shared that there were three things she really wanted more of in her life and work: flexibility, growth, and creativity.
And I gave her an assignment that I want you to try, too.
I want you to start annual reviewing yourself. Except not annually. Every single day.
Here's why.
Think about how easy it is to spend your entire day paying attention to everything that still needs to be done instead of recognizing what you've already accomplished.
You finish a big project at work, but before you've even had a chance to enjoy completing it, you're already thinking about the next one. Someone asks you for help with something, you figure it out, and five minutes later your inbox is full of another 17 things that need your attention.
And if you're building a business while working full time, you've got an entirely SECOND list of things you could be telling yourself you're not doing enough of.
You haven't posted on Instagram this week. You still need to follow up with that woman who expressed interest in working with you. You haven't updated your website. You said you were going to spend two hours on your business Tuesday evening, but you were exhausted after work and ended up doing absolutely nothing.
And somehow, at the end of the day, everything you DID accomplish becomes completely overshadowed by everything you didn't.
No wonder you feel like you're constantly behind.
No wonder you're telling yourself you don't have enough flexibility or room to be creative.
You're spending so much time looking at what's missing that you're not even allowing yourself to see what's already happening.
I actually experienced a version of this in my own business this week.
I'm writing this on a Wednesday, and yesterday I barely worked at all.
I'd just come off a really full weekend and a pretty significant marketing push for two of my programs. And I'm also nearly 28 weeks pregnant with my third baby right now, so let me tell you, I was feeling it. 😂
So on Tuesday, I decided I was going to have a bit of a reset day. I cleaned my house, did some feng shui things, worked a little here and there, but mostly I just let myself have a day where I wasn't so immersed in my business.
And what was really wonderful about it was that I wasn't spending the entire day feeling guilty about not working.
I could actually enjoy it.
And that has taken practice.
It's taken coaching. It's taken time. It's taken intentionally learning how to recognize the work I'm doing, the results I'm creating, the clients I'm helping, and all the ways my business is working, even when there's still more I want to accomplish.
Because I think this is something we overlook when we talk about wanting more flexibility in our lives.
You can have an entire Friday afternoon open on your calendar and still not enjoy a single minute of it if you're spending the whole time thinking about everything you should be doing instead.
Imagine finally booking yourself that Friday afternoon massage you've been wanting, only to spend the entire hour thinking about the emails you haven't answered and the projects waiting for you on Monday.
What was the point?!
The flexibility isn't nearly as enjoyable if you're constantly questioning whether you've earned the right to have it.
And I think the same thing is true for creativity.
One of the things I say is that without capacity, there is no capability.
And when I talk about capacity, I'm not just talking about how many hours you have available on your calendar. I'm also talking about how much of your time and energy you're spending questioning yourself.
Am I doing enough? Am I doing this right? Am I good at what I do? Am I qualified to be charging this much? Should I be working more? Am I falling behind?
Imagine what you could do with all the time and energy you're currently spending wondering whether you're doing enough.
Because creativity doesn't happen when you're completely exhausted from questioning every decision you make.
It happens when you actually have some room to think, to play, to try things, to see what happens.
And sometimes that spaciousness doesn't need to happen in your calendar first. It needs to happen in your mind.
So when I say I want you to start annual reviewing yourself, here's what I actually mean.
For the woman I was coaching inside Corporate Break-Up Accelerator, I told her to go back and look at the questions her employer asked during her annual review.
What were the things they were evaluating? What were the accomplishments she was being recognized for? What did she want to see more of in her work?
And instead of waiting another twelve months for someone else to sit down and evaluate those things, I want her to start answering those questions for herself every day.
This actually came up in another coaching conversation recently, too.
I have a client who has six questions she answers as part of a quarterly self-review at work. And we'd been talking about something I have my clients do every Monday, which is to set their intentions for the week ahead.
She was having a hard time with that practice, and when she mentioned these six questions from her quarterly review, I thought, PERFECT.
Let's use those!
Instead of waiting until the end of the quarter to look backward and evaluate how things went, what if she used those exact questions on Monday morning to decide how she wanted the week ahead to look?
How do you want to work this week? What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to show up? What would you love to be celebrating by Friday?
Because when you actually decide those things ahead of time, you're much more likely to make decisions throughout your week that support them.
And if you have a business, I want you doing this for your business, too.
Especially if you're building it on the side of your full-time job.
Because nobody is going to sit you down at the end of the quarter and tell you what a fabulous job you've been doing as a business owner.
You get to do that for yourself.
You get to recognize the client who renewed with you, the proposal you sent, the sales conversation you had, the price increase you finally made, or the afternoon you protected to work on YOUR business instead of automatically agreeing to another project at work.
And I want you to look at something beyond simply what you accomplished, too.
I want you to look at the IMPACT of what you accomplished.
I was leading a panel discussion for a group of women working in real estate, development, city planning, and property management, and one of the women shared something I thought was so fabulous that I've been sharing it with clients ever since.
She talked about keeping a daily record of what you accomplished at work, but also what the impact of that work was.
So instead of just writing down that you finished a project, you're recognizing that the changes you made to the project saved your company five hours every week.
Or that something you implemented saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars.
Now imagine walking into a conversation about your compensation with that kind of information.
You're not nervously trying to convince your boss that you've been working really hard and hoping they'll agree you deserve a raise.
You're showing them the actual impact of your work.
Here's what I did. Here's what it accomplished. And here's the compensation I'm requesting.
Money isn't feelings. It's facts, figures, and data.
And this is something I especially want you to start paying attention to inside your own business, because I think it can completely change the way you approach your pricing.
I'll use my own coaching as an example.
Sometimes, in a twenty-minute coaching conversation, we can unravel something a woman has been telling herself for decades.
And the impact of that conversation doesn't just end when we hang up the phone.
It might change how she responds to her kids when they interrupt her. It might mean she stops rushing through her morning coffee. It might mean she finally makes time to work out instead of continuously putting herself at the bottom of her own priority list.
Or maybe she starts making different decisions about the work she's doing and the kind of life she wants to create.
That's the impact of the work I'm doing.
And when I can see that, when I can recognize the actual difference my coaching is making in the lives of the women I work with, it changes the way I think about what I charge.
I'm not just charging someone for an hour of my time.
And I'm not looking around at every other coach on Instagram trying to figure out whether I'm allowed to charge what they're charging.
I'm looking at the work I do, the people I help, and the difference that work makes.
And my rates get to be my rates.
Period.
I want that for you, too.
Because if you've spent the last fifteen years becoming really freaking good at something, I don't want you spending the next five questioning whether you're qualified to make money doing it inside your own business.
I want you to start recognizing what you already bring to the table, the work you're already doing, and the impact you're already making.
And I want you to think about what could happen if you spent the next six months practicing that.
What if, instead of waiting for your next performance review to tell you whether you should leave, you started making actual decisions about the business you want to build?
What if you could accept the raise, appreciate your job, and still know that you're creating something different for yourself?
What if you started giving your business the same level of consideration you've spent your entire career giving your employer?
And what if you stopped measuring the success of your day exclusively by how much you got done and started paying attention to the life you're actually creating in the process?
Because I don't want you to build a business that becomes another job where you're exhausted, overworked, constantly doubting yourself, and convinced you're never doing enough.
I want you to build something that lasts.
Something you love doing. Something that pays you really freaking well. Something that gives you the ability to enjoy your life while you're living it, not just someday when you've finally accomplished everything on your to-do list.
And I don't think that starts the day you finally quit your corporate job.
I think it starts now, while you're still employed, while you're still building, and while you're learning how to recognize everything you're already capable of.
So go ahead and give yourself some damn credit.
Review yourself.
Celebrate what you're accomplishing.
And stop waiting for somebody else's annual performance review to tell you what you already know.
Your employer isn't the only one who gets to benefit from everything you've become really freaking good at.
YOU DO, TOO.
If this is the kind of conversation you need more of, I'd love to invite you into Corporate Break-Up Accelerator, my eight-week group coaching experience for women who are building businesses alongside their full-time jobs.
We're not spending eight weeks talking about how much we hate our jobs. We're looking at the decisions we're making with our time, our work, our money, and our businesses so that we can start creating a life where leaving our employment becomes something we get to choose, not a desperate escape we need to make.
Enrollment closes November 2.
[JOIN CORPORATE BREAK-UP ACCELERATOR]
You can also listen to the full conversation on this week's episode of the Simply Own It podcast.
