How to Overcome January Lack

Hello, and welcome to this episode, I hope you are doing extremely well, I just wanted to pop on today to talk to you about a really important thing that happens to so many amazing women and entrepreneurs, myself included and lots of other people that I know during January.

So obviously this is going out towards the end of the month. So by this point, you might be thinking okay, I’ve got through that month, and everything is going to be fine, I’m going to be able to make this work and if you are then that is fantastic. But I want you to know the actually quite a lot of us walk into January, just steeped with expectation, panic and worry about what the year ahead will bring even those of us that don’t have January as our financial year end, because so many of us do not. That doesn’t mean that we don’t use the marker of New Year as this big kind of emotional and mental boundary for things to change for the following year.

So what tends to happen, and what I see a lot is that we get to the 1st of January and we think to ourselves, how are we going to do this again? Like how are we going to make this work for another year, we start off we’ve earned nothing this year, we’ve gained no new clients this year. We’ve had no miracles this year. And I’m hoping by the time that this goes out, you will have had money, clients and miracles. But for a lot of people, January is a steeped emotional month. And there’s no way that you can stop that from bleeding into your business unless you have some really, really strong mindset boundaries and mindset practices that would allow you to do that.

So let’s talk about January the month of feeling lack. If you’ve ever done any work on your money mindset, then you’ll be very, very, very familiar with the idea of lack and scarcity. But just in case this is the first time that this has entered your consciousness, let me just explain a little bit about what the feeling of lack and scarcity actually is. So the feeling of lack is our doubt around abundance, around money and it often comes from our own money journey. I have a really fantastic blog about money mindset, which I will pop the link to the description below for this episode, do go and check it out, because it’s a free resource that will probably help you with January lack. But the idea is that we all have some sort of idea around money. And if you have a negative Money Story, if you’ve ever come from any kind of hardship, or you’ve ever had a situation where you would have considered yourself to be struggling financially, we really do hold on to those feelings of lack.

So lack can be a feeling off, we will never have enough, we will never get any clients. Oh my goodness, I’m not going to make any money. Everybody’s talking about massive financial goals around me and I can’t make that kind of money. These are all the types of things that we think about. The scarcity comes into that because it starts to feed into well, there isn’t enough clients for everybody, why would somebody buy from me, you can really feed that negative kind of energy inside yourself until you’ve talked yourself into a feeling of not being able to perform, not being able to do what you want to do, and certainly not being able to have the business or life that you’ve been working towards and dreaming of. The reason why this is such a shame is because it is totally unnecessary. I want to pick apart some of our cultural things that give us this idea of lack and scarcity in January, because it’s not all about your own inner journey. Some of it is about the messaging that happens all around us in our culture that we pick up on from being very, very small from being like a tiny child. So if you ever grew up in a family that found Christmas hard to finance, or any of the holiday seasons hard to finance. Then this is this is like a residual part of feeling January lack. Because if you have been around people who have said, like, oh, it’s going to be a long time till that January payday or well all my money went on Christmas, or any of those types of things like Christmas isn’t free you know, anything to do with that I know somebody who was told once, Santa is not made of money. And I honestly thought that was just like the most hilarious but poignant thing like Santa is not made of money. I think you’ll find Santa is very well funded, but it is one of those situations where you can take that as a child as a young person, and really kind of thing ouff, you know, Christmas is nice, but it knocks our socks off for a bit.   You may not even realise to what level you’ve subconsciously taken that on, you may not even realise to what level yourself if you’ve struggled around this time of year, how that will have affected you long term right.

So the other thing that we have all around us in January is January sales. It is completely led by the retail industry product retail industry. And the reason for why January sales are there is because January could be the leanest month for product sales without a boost to keep people buying, without a boost to keep consumerism occurring. And the reason for that is because there was a massive steep before Christmas, people go out and obviously buy lots of products before Christmas to give as gifts. And they may not feel the urge to go and spend their hard earned in January if there wasn’t an incentive. Now that incentive, of course comes from the idea that people will choose not to buy, not that they can not buy,  a lot of people, millions of people are in a position to go and buy and it not be a problem and millions of people will still purchase in January without either flickering an eyelash.  But the consumer message that we get is that people will buy in January because you know, they’ve already done it in Christmas. And we have to reduce everything, we have to make everything nearly free in order to prompt them and coerce them into that buying behaviour, that consumer behaviour.

And again, that’s just another message for you to take in for it to leak into your subconsciousness, for you to decide that actually there isn’t enough, people are struggling, nobody’s buying and you yourself don’t have enough and you might not ever have enough again. And everything that you’ve done up until this point is just a fluke. It buys into your imposter syndrome. And you see how this can snowball? It starts off just one seed of doubt. Maybe I can’t make any money this year, second seed of doubt,  got bills coming out and I need to make sure I’ve earned some money by this date.  Third seed well what if nobody ever buys from me again? And the reason they’re not buying from me is because nobody’s buying anything and also they don’t want to buy from me because I am an imposter. This is all ridiculous. And what am I even doing here snowballs into an awful, awful situation. And it’s all categorically untrue. Every single thing that you go through when you go through the stages of lack and scarcity. They’re completely made up by your mind. They’re completely made up by your brain. Okay?  

I want you to know that some of the most prestigious, secure, confident female entrepreneurs I know still suffer with January lack. They still look at that blank sheet at the beginning of the year and think puff, today is a no cash day. It might be a no cash minute, it might be a no cash hour, it might be a no cash day, it might be a no cash week, and for some of you, it might be a no cash month, it is very unlikely, but it does happen okay?   That does not mean that you can’t make money this year. It does not mean that you’re an imposter,  that you can’t do it that things aren’t going to get better.

So my top three tips for you for combatting January lack especially if you’re still feeling that scarcity feeling at this point in the month, so many of you will have probably overcome it by now, but if you haven’t, and you’re one of those people, that is still kind of feeling that, what’s going to happen, here are my top three tips.

So, tip number one, take a look around your peers. I don’t want to say competitors, because I don’t believe in competitors. But if you like the word competitors, you know what I mean, go and have a look and see that other people are making money, okay? Give yourself the evidence that you can. That’s it, just give yourself the evidence that you can.

Second of all, surround yourself with positive people. If you haven’t got a community of positive people to support you come and join my free group. We are just the most amazing community and you can come and post let us know how you’re feeling. And we will be there for you. Positive relationships in moments of uncertainty or feeling down are really, really important for you as a person, and also for your business. Like just the most amazing, priceless thing that you can do for your business.

And the third thing is when a thought comes up, that tells you negatively that you can’t do something in the next few weeks. I want you to reverse it. If you think to yourself  I can’t make any money this month, nobody’s buying from me, I want you to catch that thought and I want you to flip it and reverse it like Willy Wonka said strike it, reverse it. And I want you to say to yourself the exact opposite in a positive way. So I can’t make any money this month. Nobody is buying either up nope actually, I can make so much money this month because so many people are buying.  Make sure that you have the opportunity to really flip this switch on that thinking.

Okay, my lovelies, I have really enjoyed this episode. I wanted to keep it nice, short and sweet because I know if nothing else, January is a really busy month for us all. And thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time.