We recently connected with Brandy Lawson and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brandy, thanks for joining us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed

Letting “Should” Trample Plans & Mental Space

In my first few years of business, I chased around all of the “shoulds.”

I let everyone else’s perceived successes, perceived expectations, and my fears of being seen, and fears of failing, drive my actions. This resulted in “shoulding” all over myself a lot.

Marie Forleo was just rising to fame and launched B School. I didn’t enroll because I didn’t have the money to invest. Danielle LaPorte seemed to have it all together, and a celebrity brand, all the “successful” people were using Ontraport, Tim Ferris figured out how to have a 4-hour work week and published a book on it.

I didn’t have a well thought out plan to leave corporate, or some revolutionary system I designed. I couldn’t even find a way to be consistent with anything I was doing, so even though I really wanted to help more people, speak, and be published, I was afraid that if I tried everyone would then see what a hot mess I really was, and then I would fail to accomplish what I wanted. So it was a lot safer not to try, and to just resent those who did pursue what they wanted.

Not trusting in myself and what I wanted to find my own way left the space for everyone else’s perceptions and expectations to insert themselves in the form of “shoulds” – after 2 years, I “should” be at $250K in revenue, Facebook Groups where everyone was running courses, programs & launches made me think “that is what I should be doing to get the business I want” [WRONG], so I chased after the “shoulds” instead of using my time & energy to discover what I wanted and create cornerstones and foundations that would support me and what I had to offer.

It didn’t end there. When things didn’t go well, well, I thought, “I shouldn’t have done that.” “Should” had me, coming and going.

The thing is, shoulding gives away your power and agency. And worse yet, it gives it to people who don’t even care, or know you for that matter.

With some time, experience and perspective, I’ve now come to term this thrashing around, looking outside of ourselves and “shoulding” all over everything as the “crocodile death roll of no self trust”. For me, this looks like the inability to make a decision, so energy & resources get spent in a million different, disconnected directions researching, examining and investigating possible solutions, without actually doing anything valuable. So a bunch of energy is spent doing essentially nothing. For clients, this can look like wanting every tactic, rushing around to do things last minute and changing their mind endlessly on things that don’t ultimately matter towards their big goals. Things like changing button colors, image spacing, adding more stuff to a page or graphic.

I now understand the reason I lacked the ability to look inside and decide what I wanted to do, and then use my intellect and skill to connect that to the actions I actually wanted to take: I didn’t trust myself.

I was out of my depth and couldn’t figure out how to not be out of my depth, but being out of my depth meant that I wasn’t achieving anything. And that was an identity crisis.

Now I know, and share with you, that instead of doing the crocodile death roll of no self trust; trying everything and anything and just spinning, we are all better served to connect with the root cause of a lack of self-trust. The good news is that once you stop thrashing, you can build self-trust.

My root cause was fear – fear of failure and fear of success. To get out of the fear, I needed to see my actions for what they were, reactions to fear. Once I could see that, then I could define and take steps to either work through or work around my actions that were a result of fear. This was a new skill I needed to learn and practice. Also, I needed support, someone I could call on when I needed help building this skill and taking the necessary actions – like a spotter for a weightlifter.

While I do think that fear is in the mix for the root cause of self-trust issues, my experience tells me that the recipe for each of us is a little bit different. But the thrashing feels like doing something, even when it isn’t. Directing energy towards self-discovery and being brave enough to really see into the source of the lack of self-trust is the first step to unwinding its hold.

At least, that’s what I did, and it has helped me stay in the “faster” lane for a long time.

Brandy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For folks who may not have read about you before, can you please tell our readers about yourself, how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft etc, what type of products/services/creative works you provide, what problems you solve for your clients and/or what you think sets you apart from others. What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc. Please provide as much detail as you feel relevant as this is one of the core questions where the reader will get to know about you and your brand/organization/etc

FieryFX is a boutique marketing operations agency. We help growth-oriented businesses and scrappy marketing teams harness websites, analytics, smart business & technology to expand their reach and impact by working better, faster, and smarter.

Using our proprietary framework, companies first get clear on what success looks like. Then we use, remodel or reinvent their existing processes, technology and systems to set them on the path to achieving success. Getting value from technology is 30% the tech, and 70% how it is used.

We don’t believe in business as usual. Instead, we help you ignite the value of your…
Time – Make the right decision easier and faster. Know for a fact that all the effort you’re expending is building momentum in the right direction. How? It all starts with a plan.
Effort – No business can survive without delegating. Automation is exponential delegation. Focus on the places in your business where you add the maximum value and let the robots help you do the rest.
Impact – Make sure that what you are doing with your technology is converting into real business.

We offer a no-bs approach to our work, helping our clients prioritize and take action. Our work is results-focused, which is why we don’t ever ask our clients if they “like” something because that isn’t an evaluation that gets business results.

The Services we provide are:

WEBSITES
Strategy
Brand & Design
Development (WordPress and other platforms)
Search Engine Optimization/Marketing
Assessments & Consulting

MARKETING OPERATIONS
Systems Review & Tuneups
½ & Full Day Intensives
Workshops
Trainings
Assessments & Consulting

ANALYTICS
Define & implement metrics
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Operationalize data for better decision making

TECHNOLOGY
Platform selection
Maximizing use of existing tech
Email system change/migration
Assessments & Consulting

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There are two books and takeaways I’d like to share. Both have significantly impacted my leadership and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy.

The first book is Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown. My biggest take away from this book is that it is okay if the goal is sometimes to just show up. That can be enough and is an act of courage.

The second book is The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle. My biggest takeaway from this book was the intentional thinking around how people work best together and what I can do to create that type of environment.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Change is Uncomfortable & Hard

I should really file this failure under business AND life: the tendency to hold onto things long after they stopped serving us.

And I’m not talking about the low-rider jeans in the back of the closet or Aunt Edna’s silver. More along the lines of communities, team members, roles, coaches, clients, software and processes.

Ok, let’s back up a second. If I had to sum up my lessons over these last 10 years running a business, it would be “change is hard”.

I mean you get it, right? It’s uncomfortable. No one likes it. It requires energy that feels like it’s being spent wastefully, because you could just keep doing the same thing.

It would be sooo much easier to just do things the same way.

One of the places that was hardest for me to change was when I had something, but it was no longer serving me, and so I needed to release it or change it.

That was terribly hard, and I still find myself tending to favor inertia over change.

The status quo is always the biggest competitor. But it’s not actually beneficial to live and make decisions based on what is easiest.

We outgrow things. Circumstances change. And in business when you find the right people and create relationships, and then things change, you need to change by either ending the relationship or moving out of the community, or finding a different coach, etc.

It’s really uncomfortable. But so necessary.

And every time I finally got brave enough to have that type of conversation, the other party was very relieved.

Putting off what needed to be done, didn’t serve anyone it turns out.

Glennon Doyle recently reminded me in her podcast We Can Do Hard Things that our greatest suffering comes between having made the decision and taking the action.

Many times the decision was obvious – you know, kinda the elephant in the room – but the action was where I was failing, and continue to fail sometimes.

My point is, it doesn’t matter what it is. It can be something as simple as technology or a process, or as complicated as a community or a coach or client, but there’s no benefit in continuing to do things when they no longer serve you. Take it from someone who’s made (and sometimes still makes) that mistake.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://fieryfx.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fieryfx
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandylawson/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefieryfx
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/Tekgrl

Image Credits
Sarah Hoag Photography