Today I want to talk to all of you business babes about how the stories we tell ourselves can really overcomplicate things and make what we’re trying to do in our businesses really difficult. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we just let it be easy? That’s the question we’re digging into today, so let’s dive in! 

In This Episode Allie Discusses:

• Why you don’t have to have a “struggle story” to have success

• Self-sabotage 

• Working from a place of ease 

• Perfectionism 

• Inner Work 

Mentioned in this Episode:

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Courses (Use the code PURPOSESHOW for 10% off!)

The Purpose Show Facebook Community

Ep 006: How I Got My Husband Out Of His 9 To 5

Up & Up Academy

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If you have a question, comment or a suggestion about today’s episode, or the podcast in general, send me an email at hello@alliecasazza.com or connect with me over on Facebook & Instagram. 

Mom life. We’re surrounded by the message that it’s the tired life. The no-time-for-myself life. The hard life. We’re supposed to get through it. Survive. Cling on by the last little thread. And at the same time, Carpe Diem—enjoy every moment because it’s going to go by so fast. The typical mom culture that sends us all kinds of mixed, typically negative messages. We shouldn’t take care of ourselves; it’s selfish. The more ragged you run yourself, the bigger your badge of honor. But also, ditch your mom bod and work out. Don’t yell. Make more money. Show up. Be better, but not at the expense of time with your kids. I am putting a hard stop to all of this. While being a mom, running a business, and whatever else you might have going on is hard, it is a lot and there’s lots of giving of yourself, the idea that motherhood means living a joyless, nonstop-hustle-with-zero-balance kind of life, where you give and give and give and never take, needs to stop. 

I’m on a mission to help you stop counting down the minutes till bedtime (at least most days). Stop the mom guilt and shame game. Stop cleaning up after your kids’ childhood and start being present for it. I want to help you thrive in work, home and life. I believe in John 10:10 that we are called to living an abundant life and I know moms are not excluded from that promise. Join me in conversations about simplicity, some business and life hacks, spirituality and lots of other good stuff that leads to a life of less for the sake of enjoying more in your motherhood. I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hi love! The last 30 days or so have been, from my perspective, all about me launching my business teachings into the world. I was so nervous about doing this. 

I had a lot of stories made up in my head, a lot of concerns, and I really wanted it to come off well. I really wanted to help and encourage women who have business ideas and haven’t launched them into the world yet. And I also wanted to help and encourage women that have launched business ideas into the world but they’re not going the way they want. 

They’re not growing the way that they want to grow. They don’t really know what to do or who to learn from. I wanted to launch things into the world that would come alongside those people and support them.

And now it’s done! I did it and it’s all out there! 

Startup School launched and went so well. I’m working on taking those live trainings that I did and breaking them up into videos to turn into a course for you all. 

Up and Up Academy is launched! The enrollment is closed and we’re here with our first group of people working on growing their businesses. 

I’m just so happy and so proud! I am proud of myself, but I’m really proud of all of you who said “Yes!” to growing your dream, growing your business, starting something new, going a different way, breaking out of the nine to five. 

There are so many amazing stories that I’ve heard as I’ve been working with the people that enrolled in different things. Being somebody that teaches business publicly now and not just super private with one-to-one clients is something that really, really makes my heart happy.

I’ve felt this in me for so long and I just wasn’t aligning myself with it because of timing and the stories I was telling myself about my business and what I do. It’s silly and insane how we do that. 

That’s actually the perfect segue into what I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk to you about the stories that we tell ourselves in our head. This could go for moms and motherhood and being a business owner, but I really want to focus on the business side of things today. 

I want to really talk about how those stories that we tell ourselves really overcomplicate things for us. How they make things really difficult, heavy, convoluted, and stressful when it just doesn’t need to be that way. 

This is something that I have learned over and over and over again in the years that I’ve been a business owner. It’s something that I’m so much better at now, but I’m still always learning and relearning. 

And that is—what if we let it be easy? What if we stopped letting the stories in our heads make us overcomplicate things in our businesses?

I think there’s this idea out there that we have to earn it. We think we have to struggle. Who are you to have success, money, revenue, and create impact in your business without a struggle? 

I think we see a lot of struggle stories. My story is a struggle story too. But not everybody has a struggle story. 

I think people that don’t have this really severe underdog-barely-surviving-and-then-triumph story feel like they don’t deserve success or they haven’t had a hard enough life. 

And then there’s the other side where some people are so deep in the trenches, so in a struggle they feel like they’re never gonna get out of it. They feel there’s no way they could ever come from where they are now to this successful, happy business life that they desire. 

I have so much to say to both of those people, but today I want to focus on the story of how we think we have to earn it and that we have to struggle to get anything good. Maybe you’re subconsciously thinking, “Well, of course you have to struggle to get something good,” because that story is so deeply embedded into the fibers of your brain and even your soul. 

We just believe this. So many people just really believe that it’s got to be difficult or they’re not going to be deserving of the good thing that’s coming. 

They believe they’re not going to be deserving of all the things they want, all the goals they want to reach, all the success they’re craving, all the impact they want to make on the world, the things that they want to do with their business, the money that they make, and all the hopes and dreams they have. 

They still think that they have to struggle, suffer, and barely make it by for a while in order to earn those things. 

If what I’m saying is resonating with you, I want to challenge that story. I want to ask you to dive in a little bit and see where that came from. 

For me it came from a lot of stories and things that I heard as a child. I think so much of the stories that play in our head over and over that determine the way we view the world, the beliefs in things that we have and hold about the way things work come from our childhood. 

A really great place to start is to go forward. But you actually have to go backward and look at what you picked up on as a child. Stories like: You have to work hard. Money doesn’t grow on trees; You have to go out and work really hard. The harder you work, the more you make. This is the way life works. Suck it up. 

And then, in a lot of the dialogues that take place in our world—whether it is television, podcasts, the way people talk, books that we read, stories that are written—are these massive underdog stories where there’s this really big struggle and it doesn’t look like the person’s going to pull through. They’re barely making it and we wonder, “How are they going to get through this? It’s so difficult.” 

Then they finally break through and they get the success they deserve, but we feel like they deserve it because they struggled. 

If you haven’t listened to episode six, please go back and listen. It’s my story and I expand so much. It’s everybody’s favorite episode, including mine. 

That is my story. That was my experience. And that’s not true for everybody. 

You don’t have to have a struggle story to have a success story. I need this to be your new story—you don’t have to struggle to succeed. 

You don’t have to earn your success story. Yes, there’s hard work involved. Yes, there’s hustle involved. 

You have to be strategic. You have to learn. You have to grow. You have to expand. 

You have to show up. You have to get on your laptop and write the emails. You have to show up for people for sure. 

But why does that have to be a struggle? Why does that have to be hard? 

We make it so much harder than we need to because we believe this subconscious story that things have to be difficult in order for us to earn success. 

So yes, that was my story. My story was incredibly full of struggle. It’s so dramatic. 

Honestly, it should be a movie. I always say that, but I believe it. It was a literal Hollywood drama. 

It was so hard and there was such an uphill battle. I had to get over that and come through the other side in order to get to my success. 

But that’s because of where I was in my life. And even through that, I could have made a choice to work from a place of ease and flow. 

Believe it or not, even in that hardship, even beneath the US poverty line and all of the other crazy stuff that was going on in my life, I could have worked from a place of ease. 

But I didn’t know to do that yet. My life was so chaotic. That was my story. 

But I want to challenge everyone listening. If you think that you have to struggle to succeed, I want you to come up against that and ask yourself, “Where does that come from? What are the things that I picked up on as a kid, as an adult, that are leading me to believe that story?”

I think when that story cycles in our head over and over again, we prove it right because that’s what our brains are wired to do, right? To keep us safe, protect us, and help us process in a way that makes us feel good. 

If you have a story in your head that you have to struggle to earn success, then you’re going to subconsciously be making things harder for yourself to make sure that the struggle matches the amount of struggle you think is appropriate in order for you to earn the success you’re aiming for. 

This is a form of self-sabotage. Humans self-sabotage all the time. It’s just a part of our nature. 

It’s a part of our imperfect makeup. Our perfectly imperfect makeup, I should say, because obviously God doesn’t make mistakes. But this is just the way that we work.

We think, “Okay, I want to get here to this point. I’m going to have this much revenue in my company. I want to give this much of it away. I really want to help orphans. I really want to make this impact. The way I’m going to make money is by having this business that’s really going to help people, really going to solve this problem for people.” 

We’re all amped up. We believe we can achieve this thing. We’re going for it. 

But at the same time, we have this subconscious story of, “Be careful. Don’t be greedy. Be careful. Don’t do it all for the money. That’s not good. That’s wrong. That’s greed. What’s everyone going to think about you if you didn’t struggle for it? You have to earn it in order to be worthy of it.”

We create these realities where things are harder than they need to be. We are over-complicating things. 

We are being perfectionistic in our work and thinking, “I have to do this. I have to have this video come up this way. I have to write this email this way. It has to be exactly on this day. It all has to line up.” 

We overcomplicate. We stretch ourselves far too thin. 

We make our work so much harder than it needs to be because, subconsciously, we are trying to make sure that we are worthy of the success that we’re aiming for. That we’re working hard enough to be worthy of the success we want. 

I have seen this pattern in my own life so much. But with this self-awareness, this awakening to that story and to this pattern in my work life, I’ve come to this conclusion and seen this pattern because of a lot of deep inner work. So, if I can give anyone a shortcut to this, by all means, borrow this from me. 

Dive into your own story. See where you have this issue, where you have this subconscious story playing on repeat that’s making you overcomplicate. 

Here’s what this would look like on a practical level if you’re wondering, “Well, I don’t know. Am I making things harder? It feels like my business is just hard. It just is.” 

Let’s dive into what this might look like. 

In my business, there are a lot of things going on all the time. I am producing videos, IGTVs, podcast episodes, and blog posts a couple of times a month. 

I send at least one email a week. I’m really trying to provide value to people on my list.

 I’m doing all of these things and there’s a lot going on. That’s all very easy to complicate. 

I could get perfectionistic and think, “This IGTV needs to be this way. I want to film it in my office. I want to make sure that the background is beautiful and perfect. Oh my gosh, my hair is really dirty. I can’t film today because my hair is so dirty. I’m going to look terrible. People are going to say mean things to me. I want to make sure that this blog post is perfect. That this episode is about this and it’s timed with this and this.” 

It could be so complicated, but remove all of that. Let’s look at my business and think, “What if this were easy? What would it look like if this was easy?” 

Well, I wouldn’t care if my hair was not perfect; I would be authentic. I would just show up because done is better than perfect. 

I have a message to say in this video for IGTV and I want to make sure that I get it out there. So as I’m recording the video for IGTV I’m going to also have my microphone on so that I can also use the message for a podcast episode. 

That way I’m working once and making that content be a video for IGTV and also Instagram content that my assistant can pull and create captions from. She’ll run them by me and I can approve them and then they go on my Instagram feed. 

Since I have my microphone running while I’m recording that video, it could also be turned into a podcast episode. Then that podcast episode could be transcribed for a blog post. 

That would be easy because I’m only showing up one time in all my realness with my messy, dirty hair. I’m not in my office. I’m just sitting on my bed, talking to you guys, encouraging you, and giving you a life-giving message that’s been on my heart for you. Then my team can repurpose it.

If I was in my “solopreneur” days—pre-Team Allie—I would repurpose it myself. But it would still be easier because I’m not reinventing the wheel. 

I’m not thinking, “Now it’s time to write thirty Instagram captions for the month. Now it’s time to write a script for this video for IGTV. Now I have to get perfectly ready and show up for the video perfectly dressed, perfectly ready to go with a perfect background. Then I have to think of a new topic for a podcast episode. And then, oh my gosh, I was supposed to be blogging twice a month. I have to come up with that content.” 

It all goes away and just becomes simple. I’m going to show up in this one way and I’m going to lead with my strength, my heart, speak from that place, and just deliver the message. 

No script. I’m just going to talk about what I know, what I’m the expert in, and what I can do to help people. 

And then, from there, I’m going to run it through a transcription service and have it transcribed and format it myself with images into a blog post. I’m going to pull from that blog post and create a couple of Instagram captions for the next couple of weeks. 

Then I’m going to take the video, upload it to IGTV, repurpose and reuse it to make sure that the same message is being heard by as many people as possible across all my platforms. Because that’s my job.

I’m working from a place of ease because perfectionism isn’t stealing my joy and making me feel like I’m not enough or that I’m not doing this right. There’s no right way to be Allie Casazza. 

The only way that could be wrong is if I’m not being myself. The right way is what I am that day. 

There’s no right way to be you. The only wrong way is if you’re not being you.

Whatever you are in that day, in that week, whatever’s on your heart to share with your tribe, whatever message you want to spread to the people that are following you, the eyes that are on you, the ears that are listening to you, your job is to deliver that with authenticity. 

That’s one of the biggest not-so-secret secrets to my business, how I have grown so much so fast, and how I’ve built this energetic tribe around my message and my work. It’s because of authenticity and just showing up as myself. 

Yeah, most days I’m dressed. I love being put together. I love beautiful clothes and outfits. I love feeling really put together. And a lot of the time I am, but sometimes I’m not. 

Sometimes I record my podcast with a mask on my face because I’m trying to get rid of some stubborn acne. I’ve got a charcoal mask on my face and depuffing eye pads on. I haven’t brushed my teeth since yesterday and I’m just trying to show up and get stuff done because that’s working from a place of ease. 

That’s what’s good. That’s what’s going to make my content good and relatable. That’s what’s going to really allow what needs to come out of me to come out of me. 

But when I perfectionate everything, I worry. I’m trying to make everything be a highly produced, highly edited, perfect way because, “Oh my gosh, I’m Allie Casazza and now I’m at this level. Everyone’s looking at me and there are such high standards.” 

No, there are not. The only standards are the ones that I set for myself and I can do whatever I want. And so can you.

Stop the “I have to struggle to earn success” story. Ditch that right now! 

Not only is it not serving you, it’s not serving the world because the world needs your message. And when we have this BS story playing on repeat in our heads, it pulls at us, it pulls from us, and we are less equipped. 

And you can’t be less equipped to do your important work. You have to be fully, more and more and more equipped. Stop letting that story take your mental energy and put your mental energy where it matters. 

Put it on your family. Put it in your business. Put it in your ideas, your creativity and your message.

But don’t put it in this stupid story that shouldn’t even be taking anything from you in the first place. If we do, we’re allowing that. And we’re making things harder. 

We tell ourselves that we have to do this like this person does. I want my branding to look like this person. I want my videos to look really professional. 

Well, Allie doesn’t understand. She’s in the mom niche. I’m in the business niche and I need to be professional. 

You can be whatever you want. You can be wherever you want to be. 

If your brand is a certain way, fine. But what does it look like to produce your content in a branded way that feels good to you from a place of ease? What does it look like? 

Because I guarantee you, everybody listening that has a business is over-complicating their business in one way, shape, or form. It looks different for all of us. 

In what way are you over-complicating things in your business and making things way harder to produce? Maybe you’re procrastinating producing content because you’re making things so complicated. 

You can’t get anything done because you’ve set such high standards for yourself. And that comes from a place of fear. So girl, ask yourself right now, “What is it that I’m afraid of?” 

What is it that you’re afraid of if you produce that content and it’s imperfect? Are you afraid of what people are going to say? 

Are you afraid that people are going to devalue you? That people are going to think you’re stupid? 

Are you worried about somebody specific in your life seeing it? Are you judging only yourself? 

Is it yourself that you’re afraid of? What is it that you’re afraid of? What are the deep rooted issues? 

Because this is the thing that no one is really talking about—business is spiritual work. Is business a strategy? Sure. 

But a huge part of it is inner work. It’s very, very spiritual.

If we don’t look at the inside, the spirit side of us as business owners and CEOs, then we’re not going to experience the kind of growth in our business that we’re really destined for, that God really wants to give us. 

Let’s pause the strategy for a second and look internally and ask, “How am I over complicating my business?” 

And when you find those answers, ask more questions. Why are you not just working from a place of ease here? What are you afraid of happening if it was easy? 

If your business story was easy, do you feel like you don’t deserve success? If you say, “Yeah, that is my truth,” we’ve got to change that. 

The way you change that is you get deep with your inner self. You get your journal out, get ready to go for a prayer walk, whatever floats your boat. 

Some people like to talk things out. Pull out your iPhone voice memo and record yourself. 

Get it all out. Externally process. Whatever you need.

Get your journal out if that’s your thing. Pray. Go for a walk. 

Go for a drive. Turn the music off, get a latte, go for a drive and process. Whatever you need to do. 

We’ve got to get into our inner selves. We’ve got to connect. We’ve got to deal with the root of our stories. 

We have to go back to our childhood, back to where these old stories come from in order to move forward in our lives and in our businesses. If letting it be easy makes you feel like you don’t deserve the money, you’ve got a story. 

It’s probably from a parent, a grandparent, or society and the messages we see all the time about work and owning a business. We read the book by the Nike founder, and this person that founded Google is doing this, and all of these stories of, “It’s gotta be hard. You have to push through.”

Yes, there’s work. I’m going to go back to this again to clarify. I worked my butt off to start my business, but there were things that I could have done to simplify it. 

There were things that I was doing because I felt like I had to that I just didn’t know. I didn’t have the training, the experience, or the information to know this doesn’t need to be this way; this could be easier. I just didn’t know. 

Half of my struggle came from my lifestyle. The fact that we had absolutely no money. We were losing everything. 

My husband’s job was the worst. The company was liars and we were fooled into moving away from friends, family, and support systems to the Midwest where we didn’t want to be with less money, less help, less everything. 

I had to start my business from that point while I was breastfeeding my fourth baby. Yeah, that’s struggle. 

But the other half of the struggle came from me making things too complicated and not knowing that I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to do things the way that every other expert tells me I have to do things. 

I can learn, be coachable, be open to new ideas and hearing what people that have gone before me are telling me works and doesn’t work. But I can also use my gut to pick the meat out, throw out the bones, and do what’s going to work for me, my personality, and the kind of business that I want to start.

What I didn’t realize back then is that I am Allie fricking Casazza. I’m an empire builder. I didn’t know. 

And you know what, you guys? I could have embodied that version of myself back then, in that little Arkansas townhouse that we got evicted from, eventually. 

Where I was nursing Emmett and raising three other toddlers while Brian was gone all the time. When we had no money and were trying to take a cereal box and stretch it into two weeks of food. 

When all of this BS was going on I could have embodied that version of myself then, but I didn’t know to. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know that you could even do that. 

If I would have stood up and realized I am Allie frickin Casazza, I am an empire builder and today I start laying down my first brick of this empire, I am starting now, I’m going to act like the boss that I know is inside of me, things would have gone so much better.

I would have had permission to make things easier for myself. I would have had permission from myself because that’s the only permission I needed. 

But I was looking for permission from other leaders, other experts, everybody that had gone before me. At this point online business was very much still being pioneered. Courses were weird and no one knew what they were. 

Now everyone has a course. And courses are still great; don’t think it’s oversaturated. Keep going if that’s what you want to do. They’re just more normalized now. 

I didn’t know that. I was looking for validation and looking for permission from everywhere but myself and my God, and those are the places that I needed to get permission from.

If I could go back to that girl in that townhouse, I would tell her, “You are Allie f’ing Casazza! Stand up. Shake it off. Keep that baby on the boob and nurse him, but you get up! You learn how to market. You stand up and you act like a boss. You market your work. You show up. You already know, you’re already the expert. You already have everything that you need inside of you. Own it. Continue to learn. Continue to read. Continue to grow. But open up because you are the boss, girl, and you need to act like it.”

But I just didn’t know. So, if this episode can give somebody that shortcut, give somebody a way to stop letting those BS, stupid stories play in their head that you have to work really, really crazy hard and bring yourself into the ground in order to have the success that I’m having today. 

If I can get you out of that thinking, if I can give you the shortcut, if I can get you to stand up and act like the boss you are, then this episode will have fulfilled its purpose. 

What if you were to let it be easy? What if you were to relax and work from a place of ease and flow? 

What if you just poured yourself a glass of wine, sat in your backyard with your laptop and you wrote an email to your audience from that place? How much better is your content going to be when you’re working from that state of mind? 

What if you spent an hour of your work time doing inner work—meditating, praying, diving deep into yourself for what you want to say in your business? What messages have you been silencing that need to come out?

What if this was easy? What if you worked on yourself, your day, your workday, and you didn’t just get stuck in the minutia of coding your website, updating your branding, and trying to make this perfect and that perfect?

What if all of those things just got done and they were good. They weren’t perfect, but they were just done? 

What if you really spent the bulk of your day working from a place of ease. What would that look like? 

How would that impact your business and your content? How would that impact your family? Because you know what we do in our businesses echoes in the way we mom. 

What if it were easy? That’s the question of the day. 

And here’s what I want you guys to do. I want you to take a screenshot of this episode and I want you to share it on social media. 

I want you to tell me what you’ve learned from this. I want to hear from you. 

You can send me a DM if you’d rather not be public, but I would appreciate it if you screenshot it, shared it with your audience, and told people that have a business to go and listen to this. 

Because I think this needs to be said. I think people really, really need to hear this. 

What if it were easy and you just stopped over-complicating working in your business? What if you worked with your laptop or your desktop from a place of ease and flow? What if you ditched over-complicated and just showed up because you’ve got nothing to prove?

What if it were easy? 

Share with me how you’re learning. Share with me how you’re going to take action on this. I want to hear from you on Instagram.

 All right. Love you guys!

Thanks so much for hanging out with me! In case you didn’t know, there’s actually an exclusive community that’s been created solely for the purpose of continuing discussions around The Purpose Show episodes. It’s designed to get you to actually take action and make the positive changes that we talk about here. I want you to go and be a part of it. To do that, go to alliecasazza.com/facebookgroup. 

Thank you so much for tuning in! If you’d like to learn more about me, how I can help you, how you can implement all these things and more into your life to make it simpler, better, and more abundant, head to alliecasazza.com. There are free downloads, online courses, programs, and other resources to help you create the life you really want. 

I am always rooting for you, friend! See you next time! I’m Allie Casazza and this is The Purpose Show.

Hey mama! Just a quick note, this post may contain affiliate links.