256: How to Let Go of Fear and Be Brave with Your Business: Fan Favorite Replay

Hi there. You’re listening to the Leading Lady podcast. I’m your host, AliceAnne Loftus, and I’m a certified professional coach specializing in leadership and work-life balance. I work with clients to shift their limiting beliefs, insecurities, and self-doubt. This podcast will be filled with tools and strategies to help high-achieving women like you feel connected, empowered, and in the lead of your life, both personally and professionally. Let’s transform your life starting now. Lead yourself, the rest will follow.

Hi there, leading ladies, and welcome to today’s episode.

I’m going to be talking with you today about how to run your business without fear. And of course, it’s scary to run your business. Of course, there are going to be times when we are scared, and we do react out of fear. When you have put so much into your business to grow it, to nurture it, when you’re depending on other people, you’re putting yourself out there. It is scary.

So I don’t want to say we’re fearless, because fearless is actually something that really triggers me. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe that as women, we should be fearless, because fear is a very real emotion. It’s something that happens, and we can’t deny it. This shit is scary. Sorry, I’m probably gonna get an “E” for explicit on my podcast now. But running a business is scary. It’s hard.

But when we start to operate and run our businesses and our organizations out of fear, it can actually derail us from running our businesses in alignment with our core mission, vision, and values.

The Staffing Crisis in Child Care

So I want to share with you that, especially in the childcare industry, we’ve been in a constant crisis. I’m in my 19th year of childcare, and I’ve been in this business for a long time. We’ve been in a constant crisis of a shortage of teachers and educators, and then insert COVID. And we’re suffering more than ever with a lack of teachers.

It’s been really hard to retain staff. I lost, I want to say, maybe 80% of my staff, and I had to rebuild. It’s really hard to find good employees, to find qualified employees, and to keep teachers teaching, specifically in child care and preschool. It’s hard work and low pay. I’m not a government-subsidized program, I’m a for-profit program, so 100% of our revenue comes from tuition from parents. And in order to pay teachers higher wages, we have to charge parents higher tuition. It really is a vicious cycle that nobody wins.

So you can appreciate that I know how hard it is to retain our teachers, and we’re having the hardest time ever. And we began to operate from a place of fear, of not wanting to lose teachers, of really doing anything that we could to keep teachers, even if they were asking for unrealistic things.

Everybody wants to work the 9 to 3 hours. In childcare, we’re open 6:30 to 6:30, so we have rotating shifts. You’re sometimes going to have an early shift of 6:30 to 3, and you’re sometimes going to have a later shift of 9:30 to 6:30 or 10 to 6. So you can’t give in to those demands, because there are shifts or times or job responsibilities that people don’t want to do but have to be done. And it’s hard to hold people to those things, because if they don’t like it, they leave.

Operating Out of Fear After the Great Resignation

2021 was the Great Resignation. People were leaving their jobs. And I think that a lot of business owners began to operate out of fear, because we didn’t want to lose employees. So we were giving in, trying to accommodate requests, demands, things that employees were saying that they needed to have in order to continue working. And if you didn’t give in, then you didn’t have an employee. And we began to really compromise the standards of our organizations, because we were operating out of fear of losing employees.

As we’re wrapping up 2022, we’re about to enter the fourth quarter. I had to personally take a look at my organization, specifically child care, and say, “Am I operating my business at a place that meets the standards, the values, and the quality that I have committed to families? Or am I operating out of fear? Am I allowing my employees to dictate how I run my business?”

Healthy Work Environments Versus Toxic Ones

And I want to caution this. I don’t want to say that our employees shouldn’t have opinions or needs or expectations or requests of their employer. I think that in order to have a healthy work environment, everyone has to feel valued, seen, understood, appreciated, and respected. And it has to be a win-win for all. You as an employer should feel good about your employees, and you as an employee should feel good about what your employer is offering. If it ever comes to a situation where one party does not feel valued or appreciated, and it’s no longer a win-win for everyone involved, then it’s no longer a healthy work environment.

So I want to caution you to be aware of toxic work environments. Toxic work environments are when employers have unrealistic expectations of their employees, and they don’t value their employees, they don’t appreciate work-life balance, and they don’t respect employees as individual people.

And I want to caution that I am not saying that as employers, we should be able to dictate what we want in our organization, and employees need to just do whatever we ask of them. That’s not healthy. That’s a very toxic work environment, and that is not at all what I’m saying.

What I’m saying, though, is that as employers, as business owners, it is our responsibility to set the mission, vision, and values of our organization, and to hold people accountable, to build a team that is accountable and is fully invested in the mission, vision, and values of your organization. It’s important to hire the right people and to build a team that is in alignment with your mission, vision, and values.

When Fear Pulls You Away From Your Mission, Vision, and Values

When we operate out of fear, however, we start to step away from our mission, vision, and values. We start to try to accommodate other people that might not be in alignment with our business, and then our quality and our standards suffer, because we’re not staying true to the authentic mission, vision, and values of the organization that we built.

And when that begins to happen, you start catering towards these unrealistic things that employees are asking for. Everybody wants to work the perfect shift. Everybody wants more money, more benefits, more leeway, and the boundaries start to blur. Maybe they don’t understand your business, the cost of business. Not all employees understand, nor should they understand, what it costs to run a business and what it takes to run a business. So when they begin to ask for things that are out of alignment with your business’s mission, vision, and values, or the integrity of your business, and you give in out of fear of losing them, you’re beginning to compromise the integrity of your business.

So I had to take a look, and I had to say, “Okay, am I operating out of fear here? Or am I in alignment with the core values of my business?” I had to have some real honest conversations with myself and with my admin team, and we had to say, “Hey, maybe this person isn’t the right fit for this organization. Maybe our values aren’t aligned. And if that means we’re going to have to lose a teacher or be short-staffed, or an admin is going to have to step into a classroom to right the ship, then that’s what it’s going to take.”

But we can’t hold on to someone out of fear that we’re going to be short-staffed, out of fear that we’re going to lose an employee. Because when you compromise your values, your standards, and the quality out of fear, then you are no longer being an authentic leader. You are no longer honoring what you built.

Letting Go of the Wrong Fit

Sometimes you just have to admit that somebody’s not the right fit. And oftentimes, you hold on to something that isn’t the right fit out of fear, and you miss out on an opportunity to find or hire the right person who is the right fit. But it is scary. It’s hard to step out into the unknown.

I talk to my directors a lot, and they say, “I don’t want to let this person go, because the person behind her, the person who might take her place, might be worse. And at least with this, I know what I’ve got.” And I have to remind them that we have been short-staffed before. We have had to make sacrifices in our business because we don’t have the right person in place. But that doesn’t mean you hold on to the wrong person.

So I think if we as business owners collectively started holding our standard and started saying, “You know what, I’m not going to operate out of fear. I’m not going to hold on to somebody because I’m scared of being short-staffed. I’m not going to put my feelers out there or start the hiring process again, because I’m scared that I’m just not going to find anybody.” If we as business owners just started going back to our values and holding the standard and the quality that we started our businesses for, I think that it would change, even in a very small increment, the idea that people could just leave jobs.

In truth, people could leave jobs anytime, and people do. And we’re seeing a trend where more and more people are starting their own businesses or freelancing or going independent. And that’s okay. That’s great. What a lot of people will find is that it’s much harder to run a business than you think it is, and that it’s not for everybody. And we need good employees. We need people who aren’t business owners, who are just wanting to work for somebody else. That’s how our businesses survive.

Everybody Wins or We Don’t Play

But we have to step away from operating out of fear and go back to the premise that everybody wins or we don’t play. It has to make sense for the employer, and it has to make sense for the employee. And that’s really key in identifying what job descriptions are, what roles and responsibilities are, and stepping away from job expectations and going into job agreements, where employers and employees can be mutually in agreement and invested in their commitment to one another. And it has to make sense to the organization. It has to be in alignment with their core mission, vision, and values. We have to stop operating our businesses out of fear.

If you are thinking about your business, and you know that you have tough decisions that need to be made, you know that you have an employee that maybe isn’t the right fit, or a customer that isn’t the right fit. Because this goes the customer way too. We hold on to customers out of fear, out of a scarcity mindset, because we need the money, and we hold on to things that are not right for our organization.

And when we choose to step away from fear and step towards our core values, I promise you, you will win. In the end, I promise you, you will win. In the end, you will find the employees that match your mission, vision, and values. You will find the customers that you really love working with and who know the value of your work.

Be Brave and Ask Yourself the Hard Question

So you have to be brave. You have to be brave and say, “I’m not going to run my business out of fear here. I’m going to run my business in alignment with my core values, and with the mission, vision, and values that I set forth in my business.”

So if you’re listening to this, and you know you have tough decisions that need to be made in your business, I want you to ask yourself the hard question: “Am I operating out of fear? Or am I in alignment with my core mission, vision, and values?” And if you answer, “I am operating out of fear,” let’s talk. Let’s figure out how you can step out of that and how you can get back to leading your business, rather than your business leading you in fear.

I hope that this is helpful. I hope that it resonates with you, and reach out. I read and answer every email quickly and will get back to you. I don’t want you to run your business in fear. That’s not why we got into business.

Until next time, take the lead.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the Leading Lady podcast. You can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at www.leadinglady-coaching.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss any future episodes. And while you’re there, it would mean the world to me if you would take a few seconds and leave me an honest review. This will allow me to help other high-achieving women find inspiration, connection, and develop strategies to live and lead with purpose and intention. See you here next week.