Cavewoman vs. CEO

Episode 15 of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast

 

Today on the Self-Made Mamas Podcast I want to talk to you about one of the core CEO mindset concepts that I teach my clients—something that has changed my life and the way I do business drastically for the better, and something that I’ve recently found myself working on again during a bit of a difficult period in my life. Once you learn and implement this concept you will forever make decisions differently, and I think you’ll be amazed by the results.

 

 

 

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Before we start I want to add an important disclaimer to this episode. I am a business coach, not a psychologist. While I can offer anecdotal advice and personal development exercises, no coach or self-designated entrepreneur of any kind can or should be crossing the line between coaching and psychological or therapeutic support. The mindset support I offer my clients is purely for personal development and business development purposes and can not replace psychological interventions when they are needed. If you think they might be, I encourage you to seek professional support as soon as possible.

 

Last week was a launch week for me because we opened the doors to The Society for the last time this year. Last week was also…a week. October has been a bit stressful for me personally, and last week a few things kind of came to a head that really caused my anxiety levels to spike and as a result, my capacity and energy levels plummetted. I’m not telling you this so you feel bad for me or anything like that, because overall I am very happy with the launch (and I’ll talk more about that later on) but because I want to explain to you what was going on in my brain, what I would have done even one or two years ago, and what I actually did this time instead.

 

Let me paint a picture of the last month for you. September was a shitshow—my big one starting Kindergarten was so much more stressful than I anticipated, my nanny became unavailable for half her shifts because she went back to school, my little one couldn’t nap properly because his naps go just past school pickup time and I was doing almost all the pickups by myself, and as we entered October, Instagram crashed. That sounds like a stupid thing to add in there, but here’s the thing…after the crash, my account engagement and reach never came back. A week, then two weeks after that blissful day of no Instagram (which was actually kind of nice) my engagement and reach were still hovering around 10% of what they are normally, and nothing I did seemed to change that. I tried every trick in the book. My story views in particular were affected, which is a big deal for me as I do a lot of sales in stories and DMs so my business relies fairly heavily on a very engaged core following that watches all my stories. You are probably part of that following if you listen to the podcast. These are the people that buy my products, engage my services, and are a core part of my business community. My stories being down is a really big deal for me in the context of the launch. Also in mid-October, we finally made the call I had been stressing over for 6 weeks and pulled my eldest from his class to place him in a different school. He is a highly sensitive kid with some sensory needs, and his teacher was just not a good fit for him. I was pretty distraught over the way she approached things with him and it was not improving over time, and we didn’t want to leave it too long so we made the very difficult decision to move him a couple of weeks ago. I’m feeling really good about that decision now, but we’re basically starting again with the start of school transition and it’s not like his needs have changed, he’s just in a better environment which is less upsetting but still super exhausting. In addition to all this, there have been a couple of other family things going on this month that are been weighing on me quite heavily, and overall it has just felt really difficult. Kind of like trying to walk uphill through quicksand.

 

I am someone who has lived in extremely high states of stress for several extended periods of my life, so my typical trauma response to something like this is to go into a state of over-functioning, start to numb out a bit emotionally and just hustle myself into oblivion trying to get through it. This behaviour is something that has bled into all areas of my life and business over the years. I want to be transparent about that because I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you will relate to this, and that’s why I really felt pulled to do this episode. Even if you’re having a pretty good time in your life right now, we are all still 18+ months into a global pandemic and experiencing collective exhaustion of sorts.

 

 

Cavewoman Brain

 

Now, I have worked really, really hard to recognize that over-functioning response in myself, that almost automatic switch into “survival mode”. I call it Cavewoman Brain because it’s an instinctive, almost primal brain-based response to environmental and circumstantial factors. It’s the result of our biological wiring, which is essentially just trying to keep us alive.

 

Now, this part is important. Our Cavewoman Brain is our default state. Society has advanced rapidly and drastically in the last few thousand years, but our brains have more or less worked the same way for about 40,000 years. This means that while you are waking up in your warm house, getting dressed in your synthetic factory-made clothes, packing everyone into your compact SUV, driving to the nearest Starbucks and paying with an app on your smartphone, your brain is pretty much ready for a sabre-toothed tiger to launch itself at you in the school dropoff line. If you’re like me, your body is definitely not ready to outrun a sabre-toothed tiger, so it’s ultimately irrelevant, but you get the idea.

 

Your brain is wired for survival. You are wired for survival. Your brain’s job is to keep you safe. Since we are no longer under threat from the same things we were when this instinct was wired into us, our brains now try to keep us safe from slightly less life-threatening things, like discomfort and rejection, instead of giant tigers.

 

Most of the stress responses we experience in our modern lives are our Cavewoman Brain’s way of keeping us safe from perceived threats. If you have experienced trauma and/or suffer from post-traumatic stress or complex post-traumatic stress, these responses are likely much more easily triggered in you. If you’re in that camp especially, you’ll know it doesn’t have to be a big traumatic event to trigger them, but it can be the tiniest thing. 

 

This is a side note, but if you have or think you have PTSD or cPTSD and you are experiencing unmanageable stress responses in your daily life, I want to gently encourage you to seek psychological support as soon as you are able. Your mental health is irreplaceable and of paramount importance, and a good clinical counsellor or therapist will change your life. If you’re taking in this episode and it’s pushing the buttons a little too hard, I really want to encourage you to seek that kind of support.

 

I asked my Instagram followers to tell me what triggers a stress response for them as working or self-employed moms. I got hundreds of responses and these were the most common answers that came up over and over:

• Unexpected changes to childcare
• Loss of expected childcare
• Being the default parent
• Sensory overload from noise
• Kids being sick
• Always being behind on something
• Last minute plan changes
• Knowing you have work to do while trying to focus on mom time
• Neverending emails/pointless emails
• Interruptions
• Feeling like you have to “manage” your partner as well as your kids
• Mess or clutter
• Difficult clients you’re afraid will be unhappy
• Trying everything to get sales and not getting any

 

Then I asked them to describe what happens in their brain and body when one of these things happens. Here’s what they said:

• Getting overwhelmed and stopping work completely 
• Getting irrationally ragey or angry (almost every other response was about anger)
• Heart pounding and tight chest
• Feeling physically heated or hot and bothered
• Resentful thoughts, tension and irritation
• Crying
• Feeling frustrated and negative
• Becoming unproductive even if working
• Just shutting down completely
• Becoming even more sensitive to noise and mess
• Angry jitters
• Feeling super scattered and unable to focus
• Panic
• Unable to concentrate 
• Insomnia
• Becoming apathetic, feeling like “what’s the point”
• Feeling desperate (related to work and marketing)

 

I know I can relate to every single answer on that list in one way or another, and I’m sure you can too. Most of the responses on this list are either Fight or Freeze responses because anger is really just a fight response with nowhere to go. The freeze responses are ones like overwhelm, paralysis, and not being able to do anything.

 

Those instinctive responses are your Cavewoman Brain. Something that is really important, as an entrepreneur, as someone hoping to achieve a high level of success in their life, is recognizing what belongs to your Cavewoman Brain. What it’s doing, what it’s telling you to do, how it’s making you feel, and making the conscious decision to switch into CEO Brain. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about my launch this last week. 

 

I was up against a lot of personal stress and Instagram malfunctioned for me quite badly. I obviously experience, just like everyone does, up and down engagement and metrics on Instagram, but to have that significant of a cut so suddenly and at that time was very stressful in terms of being able to hit the goals I had set. It definitely triggered my Cavewoman Brain. A couple of years ago I probably would’ve done all the things on those response lists. Freaking out, behaving almost desperately, or I would’ve just packed it in and called off the launch because I would’ve felt like there’s no point. 

 

 

CEO Brain

 

I’ve done a lot of work since then and what I did this time was I recognized that this was my Cavewoman Brain bringing up these thoughts and feelings and I decided to override it and flick the switch and turn on my CEO Brain. My CEO Brain is calm and collected. It’s always looking for a solution rather than focusing on the problem. I think that’s what makes me a good entrepreneur and understanding that concept will help make you a better entrepreneur as well. My CEO Brain looked at the situation and said, “Okay, you are tapped out right now. You’re overwhelmed, feeling physically and mentally exhausted by life. Not by your business, but life at this time. We have this issue where your organic marketing is not reaching even 10% of the people it normally would. So what can we do about that?” 

 

The fact is that only 10% of your core following is even seeing your content on Instagram and as you probably know if you have an email list, the average open rate is about 20-25% at the moment. My email list has a 30-40% open rate which is pretty good. Still, it’s only a percentage of people. My podcast is still fairly new, so I had to really look at this and say, “How am I going to get my messaging out to the people who care about it? Out to the people who are interested?” We had quite a few people on the waitlist but not all those people are even opening the emails. A lot of people sign up for things and then forget they ever did, or they see you in their inbox and it’s just not a priority to them so they don’t open it. 

 

Going into this launch I didn’t have a huge, gigantic goal, but I did have some numbers in mind as you always should when you go into a launch. I knew that if I wanted to even come close to the kind of launch I wanted to have, I was going to have to be really calm and driven about what I wanted to happen. What I did was I decided to amp up my podcasting and to start running paid ads. The podcasts are a really good tool because people that really care about your message listen to and consume your long-form content. My podcast is my long-form content. Some people have YouTube channels, some people write blog posts. Whatever it is, long-form content is where the people that really give a shit about what you have to say are going to be consuming your content. 

 

For me, I know that not only my biggest fans (I hate that word) but also my hottest leads are listening to my podcast. From a sales perspective, pouring energy into my podcast and effort into the quality of my podcasting is a good idea because it’s going to increase the likelihood that those hot leads listening to the podcast who are thinking, “I really like what this girl has to say, I can tell she’s my kind of person, I can tell she knows what she’s talking about,” etc, those people are there listening to the podcast. Nurturing them by delivering as much value and high-quality content as possible is a logical CEO Brain step in this situation. 

 

The next thing is that I started running paid ads. Ideally in a perfect world, we’d be able to get as much organic traction as we wanted at any time of the year, day, night, whatever. The reality is that social media doesn’t work like that, especially not anymore. As I mentioned, Instagram wasn’t treating me super well going into the launch. I knew I’d have to incorporate a paid strategy if I wanted to reach my followers. I started running some ads with my messaging and just promoting it to my existing warm Instagram audience. That allowed me to reach more of the people who were already following me and who had engaged with my stuff sometime in the last six months because they weren’t seeing it organically. Again, it would be nice to have my content reach those people without having to pay to promote it but that wasn’t the reality of the situation. If I had stayed in Cavewoman Brain I would’ve been so frustrated by this and irritated that I had to pay to reach people who were already following me that I might not have done it. 

 

When I switch to CEO brain, I just do the math. I can just crunch the numbers and say, “If I hit this conversion percentage, I’m going to create this much profit, so I can afford to spend this much on ads, and I’ll still come out on top.” I can easily crunch those numbers, decide what my ads budget and the most effective use of money is, and put it to work. That’s what I did and as a result, I was able to have what I consider to be a really successful launch. We were able to welcome a group of people into The Society and most of them joined within literally minutes of the doors opening, which I consider such a huge win and I’m so excited to have them in the group. 

 

That wouldn’t have been possible if I had let myself stay in Cavewoman Brain because it’s very likely that I just wouldn’t have done anything during my launch. Maybe I wouldn’t have promoted anything, or I would have desperately put out content that didn’t necessarily make sense and let my messaging go all over the place, or taken steps that didn’t necessarily feel aligned and weren’t part of the plan for my content and launch. I was able to switch back into CEO brain, though, and so I didn’t do any of that. I just calmly executed on the revised plan that I came up with based on the facts that were presented to me and as a result, I basically got the results I wanted in the first place which is really excellent. I now have clear data that I can use to improve my next launch as well. Those are all good things. 

 

Obviously, I think any entrepreneur feels this way, but I always think, “What could I have done to make it bigger and better, how could I have served people better, how could I have made more sales?” all that kind of stuff. I think the reality is that I really had to acknowledge that I was already beyond maximum capacity emotionally which had led to physical exhaustion, so I really just had to execute on the plan and strategy that I had already created rather than pushing myself to the brink of burnout. I took really good care of myself during launch week and while I was definitely still tired afterwards (because, you know, kids) I took good care of myself. I spent lots of time outside with my kids, I made sure I ate really well, I drank lots of water, I was careful not to over-caffeinate, things like that. All of that comes from CEO Brain, from knowing, “I have to come back at this next week and tackle client work and be with my kids and plan for November, all these things.” Those are CEO Brain decisions. I wouldn’t have been able to make them if I didn’t consciously choose to switch into that mode of thinking. 

 

That’s what I’m going to leave you with today. I want you to start thinking about how Cavewoman Brain shows up in your life and how you can make a conscious decision to switch into that CEO Brain mode, which is going to serve you so much better as an entrepreneur, produce so much better results in your life, and allow you to make so much better decisions.

 

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Self-Made Mamas Podcast. You can find more information about working with us at theselfmademama.com or connect with us on Instagram at @selfmademama_. I can’t wait to chat.