Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:00):
Welcome to business and the podcast for people making it
all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life,
but I'm a believer that there is still room for
some ands like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion.
On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for
scaling my nine figure business while keeping you up to
date on the latest trends, news and fun finds. This
(00:23):
is a place for business and let's dive in!
S2 (00:26):
Welcome back to business. And nobody likes being around somebody
who's nervous. Like, let's just be really honest about this.
When someone is nervous and you know that they're nervous,
it's uncomfortable. What's even worse is when somebody is nervous,
but you don't know that they're nervous, and you find
out in little ways later. So what I want to
talk to you about is how do you control nervousness?
(00:49):
How do you control your nervous system so that you
don't have these responses that aren't ideal? I find in
working with the many team members that are a part
of my team, the many business owners that everybody has
levels of self-doubt. Levels of discomfort with the goals that
they've set and what they want to achieve. But there's
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a difference between the people who have those feelings and
can still execute, and can still show up from a
place of calm, versus the ones who let their nerves
entirely take over and stop them from trying to get
to where they want to go. And to be honest
with you, I used to be this person in my
early 20s. I was so uncomfortable. I was so nervous
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and never felt like I was going to make it
good enough that I just really struggled, and it caused
me to withhold from certain situations and not show up
as my true self. To be able to contribute in
the ways that I could have contributed much sooner. So
I'd love to share with you the five ways that
I've learned to control my nervous system, so that I
(01:53):
don't come across as nervous and can actually create the
success that I'm targeting. My first rule for controlling your
nervous system is to prepare. I always try to be
the most prepared person in any room that I'm in.
That means that before I show up to meetings or
make a presentation, I review all the points that I
need to hit on. I set a clear intention for
(02:14):
what I need to communicate and what it is that
I want to make happen. This removes most of my
nervousness and instead gets me excited for what it is
that I'm doing. I've had the privilege to work around
high performing team members since the start of my career,
and one of my very first mentors was responsible for
technology in the company that I was working with. She
was a vice president of tech. She had been in
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the space for 20 years and she was always on it.
Every meeting she had an agenda for beforehand, she would
make sure that she had all of her notes ready,
and she would do reviews right before getting in with
the client. It was so impressive to me to watch
the level of preparation that she would do. And because
I was around her and she set that expectation, I
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just naturally started doing that myself. And what I see
is the difference between high performers and people who are
average is the high performers take the time. It's just
15 minutes normally to actually prepare for whatever the conversation is.
So if you have a meeting, what research have you
done on the person? Have you looked at their social
media profiles? Have you read what ChatGPT has to say
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about them? Have you googled them? What information can you
get access to that will help you drive your intention
forward for the meeting? If you are not clear on
what you want out of the meeting and you're not
prepared for the meeting, of course you're going to be
nervous going into the meeting because you're just showing up
as a spectator. If you want to be successful in
your career, if you want success in business, you have
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to know what the outcome is that you're going for
and ideally, prepare as much in advance for that opportunity
as possible so you can lead the conversation to where
you want it to go. In my 20s, I showed
up to things and just expected to be told what
to do. That's very normal because all of high school
people are telling you what to do in college. Someone's
telling you what to do. But when you're a leader,
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and especially if you expect to be a great leader,
you have to be the one who's prepared enough to
be able to tell other people what needs to happen
and ideally inspire them to do those things, because nobody
wants to be led by somebody who doesn't know where
they're going and why they're there. Next is rule number two.
You don't need a six step routine to calm your
nervous system. If you have to go through some long
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process in order for you to get mentally prepared for
you to do something big, you're always going to use
that as your crutch. You're going to set yourself up
to think that you need that you don't need anything
that is a lie that somebody has told you, that
you have to do all of these things in order
to be ready. If you practice, if you rehearse, if
you are confident in what you do because you work
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hard every single day, there's no reason that you can't
at a moment's notice, always be prepared because you know
the level of work you put in. So when people
put these rituals in or these superstitious elements into their
preparation routine, it always is a little bit of a
red flag for me, because why can't they just be
ready if you knew your numbers and if you actually
do the work, you already are ready. So needing something
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else on top of that, from my standpoint is just
a via. It's a way to say, oh, I have
to point to this thing over here that's making me successful. No,
you're making you successful. I got sold this very early
on in my career that I needed to wake up
early in the morning to have a slow morning so
that my nervous system could adjust so that I'd be
ready for work and ready to be able to have
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all the meetings and do this hard thing. And I
would actually, through that process, sell myself on why what
I was about to do was hard. Well, if you're
telling yourself that something is about to be hard, of
course you're going to feel like it's hard. And then
all you're going to talk about is how hard everything is.
Do you think anybody wants to be around people who
talk about how hard everything is all the time? Of
course not. People that are magnetic talk about all the
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opportunities and the cool things that they're doing, and the
different ways that they're attacking problems. They're not complaining and
bitching and moaning about how hard things are. But if
you have to psych yourself up to do these hard things,
and that's the only way that you get prepared. Of course,
you're just going to talk about how terrible things are,
and no one's going to want to spend time with you.
So set yourself up to know that there should always
be moments that are high stakes, whether it's a meeting
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or it's a tense situation, and that you won't have
time in those moments to have your six step routine.
When you have that mindset, then you don't create this
dependency on some sort of routine or ritual. You build
the confidence to know that you can absolutely handle yourself
and communicate effectively in any moments, but especially the moments
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that may catch you off guard. Now we're on to
one of my absolute favorites. The number one thing rule.
This is actually one of my favorite Grant Cardone quotes.
Everyone messes up no matter how much they prepare. So
even if I mess up something so important to me,
the world isn't going to end. I'm not gonna die.
No one else is gonna die. And the beautiful thing is,
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no one thing blows a deal. If you can remember
this and stay grounded in this, you can show up
authentically as yourself. Make mistakes. Have there be problems, but
you know that you can overcome them. It's not realistic
for you to say one dumb thing and have the
relationship blow up after that. If you really think about this,
you can find countless examples where you mess something up
(07:10):
in life. You missed the presentation. You didn't show up
on time. Something that you had to do, you forgot about.
When I think about this in my life, I remember
the moment when I completely blew a presentation. I was
rocking and rolling five minutes in. It was a high
stakes presentation. I didn't sleep much the night before I
was preparing, but I was ready and I was feeling
pretty confident. And then I get up there. I'm five
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minutes in. I look back at the presentation screen to
point out something, and when I turned back to the audience,
it was a room of 45 people all around this
U shaped conference table, and I returned to look at
them and instantly became nervous. And I proceeded to give
my hour long presentation in the next five minutes. So
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it was supposed to be an hour, and I ended
up giving it in all of ten, and I was
so nervous. It went so poorly, and I sat up
in the front of the room Wow. My boss gave
the presentation from the back of the room and I
was mortified. Well, no one thing blows a deal. I
didn't lose my job after that. I didn't stop my
(08:15):
career after that. I didn't die after that experience. Was
it painful? Was it uncomfortable? Sure. Did it actually introvert
me from not speaking publicly for many, many months? Yes.
So if you know that you can just keep going
after what you are trying to accomplish and realize that
it's never going to be one thing. Now, if you
have a life of hundreds of things where you continue
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to mess up, you continue to have problems. You aren't consistent.
You let people down. Of course, you're never going to
be successful, but you don't have to put so much
pressure on yourself to where you are just freaking out.
You're panicking. You're anxious all the time because you think
that you're gonna say one thing that's just gonna send
everything sideways. It never works like that. So in those
moments where you're feeling heightened anxiousness, just remember no one
(09:00):
thing blows a deal. Be prepared. Do your homework. Make
sure that you are fully ready, but give yourself the grace.
Give yourself the peace to know that there is nothing
that can happen in this moment that can totally blow
the deal forever. And you're not going to be a
colossal failure because of one mistake. You can always rebound
from a mistake. The next rule is to be still.
(09:20):
Whenever there is craziness happening around you that makes you
feel nervous and anxious and terrified of what might happen,
remember that your default position can always be to be still.
When I was 23 years old, I was in this
meeting where there was a vendor negotiation going on and
it was a high stakes meeting. I was there because
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I was the vendor liaison. I had made the introduction
to this relationship, and so I wanted things to go well.
I thought this was going to be great for my employer.
It was going to be great for the vendor. And
my employer just liked this guy. He went ruthlessly after
getting the price down, saying that the product wasn't differentiated,
saying it wasn't as great as the vendor thought it was,
(10:03):
and I was instantly anxious. And when I learned in
that moment is it's very natural when you're uncomfortable to
fidget and instantly you will just start fidgeting, it might
be you'll start playing with your fingers. You could tuck
your hair behind your ear. Maybe you just move and
you just shift around in your chair. But how you
feel internally when things are uncomfortable is visibly obvious to
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the people around you. So when you are uncomfortable, the
only thing that you can actually control is what you
do with your body. You don't have to speak, you
don't have to move. You don't have to fidget. You
can just sit there comfortably and let the situation play out.
If you don't know what to say, guess what? You
don't have to say anything. If you don't know what
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to do, you don't have to do anything. And ideally,
you can just sit there comfortably while something uncomfortable is
happening and that shows that you're actually in control. You
just being there has a level of presence that allows
your nervous system to move through the situation without all
of the additional theatrics. Finally, the last rule is that
it's just not that serious. Yes, certain things are very important,
(11:12):
and it does matter if you're able to complete the
job that you're supposed to complete or fulfill on the
promise that you made. But how can you inject humor?
How can you inject that? People are humans in high pressure,
intense situations. I am the queen of just being myself,
making a joke, having some sort of brevity added into
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the situation. Because if you don't do that, business just
feels hard and people like and respond well to somebody
who doesn't take everything so seriously. I'm not somebody who
just jokes around and isn't serious all the time. I'm
very serious. But that doesn't mean that I take everything
so seriously. Little things that I do is put my
(11:55):
personality into the meetings that I have. So I don't
just start meetings at the very beginning and start drilling
into all of the points. I love starting meetings with
a win. Why? Because hearing my team members talk about
personal wins that they're having or professional wins that they're having,
make the meeting go better. Why? Because, yes, the meeting
and the metric and the KPI, those are all serious things,
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but it doesn't have to feel serious all the time.
Other silly things that I do. I decorate our office
for the holidays. I actually have some spiders hanging out
behind me. Why? Because we're in a meeting. Sure, but
it's Halloween season and I love the holidays, and it
doesn't have to feel so tense all the time. So
how can you inject different parts of your personality into
the way that you choose to be successful? The more
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you do this, the less anxious you'll be because you
have nothing to be anxious about. You're in control of
how you want things to go. And when you have
that level of control, you feel less nervous and people
around you feel less nervous, which means that they're going
to trust you more and they're going to want to
do more business with you. Speaking of starting meetings with wins,
if you want the exact agenda that I use every
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single day for our company's daily all team meeting, go
to my Instagram at Natalie Dawson, send me a DM
saying agenda and I will send it right over. Just
remember that even if you mess something up, you just
have to not take it so seriously and try again.
Don't quit. Just keep trying. Keep going after it and
(13:22):
not taking things as seriously is the secret to having
everything work out eventually and feeling calm each step of
the way.
S3 (13:30):
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(13:50):
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