Why Successful Women Still Feel Like Something Is Missing in Their Business [ep. #293]
Have you ever had that feeling like something is missing in your business? No matter how much progress you've made, how many clients you've worked with, how many courses you've invested in, there's still a little voice telling you that you haven't quite found it yet.
I hear this a lot. And it always comes from women who are doing incredibly well on paper. So they convince themselves they need to improve their messaging, find a new strategy, or that they've outgrown their positioning.
No, you don't.
There's something deeper going on in your subconscious mind, and it has everything to do with your reticular activating system and the limiting beliefs underneath that keep you stuck in that "I'm still missing something" feeling. It's time to overcome that self doubt!
Topics covered on Feeling Like Something Is Missing:
Why do you still feel like something is missing even though your business is doing well?
What is the reticular activating system filter and why does it matter for your business?
The reason comparison gets so loud when you're already wondering what you're missing.
The question to ask instead if you want to overcome that self doubt once and for all.
Connect with Rebecca Haydon:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quote:
"Your business can only give you information. The meaning will always come from you." - Rebecca Haydon
Transcription:
Our AI tried its best, but expect a few quirky typos in the transcript. Embrace the imperfections and enjoy the read!
[00:00:00] Have you ever had that feeling in your business where, no matter how much progress you have made, no matter how many clients you have worked with, how many courses you have invested in, all of the things, there is still a little voice or a little feeling or a little something something telling you that you are still missing something?
Why You Feel Like Something Is Missing Even When Your Business Is Doing Well
[00:00:33] Am I missing something? And I do not necessarily mean that thought where you decide your business is failing. To be honest, the reason why I decided to record this podcast episode is because I quite often hear this from business owners who feel like something is missing even though they are doing incredibly well on paper. Their clients are getting fantastic results. They are making money.
[00:00:58] If someone else looked at their business, they would probably say, "Wow, you are doing so well." However, their internal experience tells me a very different story, because underneath everything they are achieving sits this feeling or thought that there is another piece of the puzzle they have not quite found.
[00:01:24] Sometimes that feeling sounds like, "I think I need to improve my messaging." Sometimes it is, "Maybe I have outgrown my positioning." Sometimes it is, "I wonder if everyone else knows something that I don't fucking know." The explanation changes depending on what is happening in their business at that time, but the feeling itself is remarkably consistent, and that is the feeling I want to explore with you today, because I do not think it is telling you what you think it is telling you.
The Missing Piece Is Not Another Strategy Or Another Mentor
[00:02:03] I hear this a lot. What am I missing, the missing piece of the puzzle, and it is out there somewhere, if only I could find it. The reason I truly wanted to record this episode is because I have noticed so many women, and you have probably gone through this yourself, assume that when they feel like something is missing it is pointing them towards the next strategy or the next mentor or the next answer, when in my experience it is pointing us towards something far more interesting, which we are obviously going to talk about.
[00:02:47] When a client brings me that question, it shows me how her subconscious mind is organising her experience of business, and I am going to explain what I mean by that. I truly believe that once you really understand that distinction, you will start to see the self doubt I hear in this question, the comparison I hear in this question, and the uncertainty I hear in this question through a completely different lens, and that lens is the first step to overcoming self doubt rather than managing it.
You Respond To Your Map Of The World, Not To Reality
[00:03:19] Within the subconscious world, one of the principles is that we do not respond directly to reality. We do not respond to what is happening. We respond to our map of the world. You will have heard me say that if you have been around and binging the podcast for a while now.
[00:03:46] We respond to our internal representation of reality. That might sound like a subtle difference, but it is one of the most important distinctions you will ever understand, because it explains why 2 people can experience the exact same event and create completely different emotional experiences from it. It also explains why 2 people can look at the same set of numbers and only 1 of them walks away feeling like something is missing.
Why 2 People Can Live The Same Event And Have Completely Different Experiences
[00:04:13] Imagine I have 2 business owners sitting in front of me and both of them have had a quieter sales week than they were expecting. One of them, and they are never really sitting opposite me, they are always on Zoom, but imagine that they were, looks at the numbers or the lack of numbers and thinks, "That is really interesting. I wonder what has changed."
[00:04:45] "Let me have a look at the data. Let me see what I can learn before I decide what to do next." The other one looks at the exact same type of week and immediately feels a knot in her stomach. Literally before she has consciously realised it, her mind has already started making the week mean something about her.
[00:05:10] Maybe she is making it mean that she is losing momentum, or that her strategy has stopped working, or that everyone else is moving faster, or that she is still missing something. Both people experienced the same sales week, but the meaning attached to that week then became the experience of that person.
[00:05:37] I say so often, especially when I am teaching NLP practitioner and master practitioner, that we experience the meaning our subconscious creates from what happens to us. That meaning is being constructed so quickly, far quicker than you would ever realise.
What is The Reticular Activating System?
[00:06:09] If you have listened to the podcast for a while, you have definitely heard me talk about the reticular activating system. If you have not, where the hell have you been? Have you been under a rock? I will pop some links below to a couple of episodes. There is one particular episode where I spoke about this a lot, the reticular activating system, or what I will call the RAS.
[00:06:31] The reason I come back to it so often, and you might be thinking, "Please do not talk about this again, Bec," but I will, I fricking will, is because it is one of the easiest ways to really understand how the subconscious filters your experience.
Your Brain Has Its Own Personal Algorithm
[00:06:31] When we look at it, the reticular activating system works very similarly to the way the algorithm works on social media. I constantly have conversations with people who say, "I literally searched for this once."
[00:06:54] I will tell you what happened. I was searching for some new shoes for Ivy, the barefoot kind, and I literally searched once, clicked on one of the ads and bought them for her. Guess what? All I see now is barefoot shoes for my child, because I put my focus into that and now the algorithm feeds me that.
[00:07:19] Your brain is very similar. You have your own algorithm. The moment you start focusing on something you do not want, or something you do want, pick whichever one is going to help you best, your algorithm will start picking up everything that proves it to be true.
[00:07:39] The reason that happens is because we have millions of pieces of information available to us all the time. Every sound, every colour, every sensation, every conversation, me in your ears, your breathing, where you are walking, everything happening around you, is competing for your attention. We genuinely cannot process all of that through the conscious mind.
[00:08:03] If we tried, you would be overwhelmingly dead within seconds. So your subconscious solves that problem by filtering information before it reaches your conscious awareness, otherwise known as your personal algorithm. It is constantly deciding what deserves your attention. What ad have you clicked on?
[00:08:26] Or the one I hear now, which is absolutely ludicrous, where you mention something in conversation and then your phone starts showing you those ads. Have you seen those reels where a woman wants her husband to buy her something, so she keeps talking about it near his phone? It is literally that.
[00:08:42] It is constantly deciding what is deserving of your attention and what can stay in the background, like the ads it decides not to give you. The important thing to understand is that it uses your beliefs, including the limiting beliefs you have not questioned yet, and it uses your values, and it uses your identity, and probably most importantly for today's conversation, it uses the questions that you repeatedly ask yourself.
What Am I Missing Is Not A Question, It Is A Command for Your Subconscious
[00:09:09] If you are constantly asking yourself, "What am I missing?" what ads do you think the algorithm is going to give you? And I am not talking about social media now, I am talking about your own algorithm. When you feel like something is missing, that question becomes the thing you keep clicking on, so that is the content your mind keeps serving you. We tend to think that the questions we ask simply produce answers.
[00:09:33] No, you are wrong. They do something far more powerful than that, because the questions you repeatedly ask yourself literally become instructions to your personal algorithm, to your subconscious, because they tell it what information is important enough to notice.
Every Question You Ask Hides An Assumption Inside It
[00:09:57] Every question we ask ourselves contains what we call a presupposition. You do not massively need to know what that word means. If you have done NLP with me before you will know it, but you do not need to know it right now. In other words, a presupposition means that every question assumes something before your subconscious has even started looking for an answer.
[00:10:25] For example, if I asked you, "How did you become so confident?" your initial reaction did not stop and decide whether you are confident enough. It naturally began to search for experiences that answered the question, did it not? How did you become so confident?
[00:10:52] You are already going, "Oh yeah, when did I..." You have gone searching for proof that you are confident. If I asked you, "When did you begin trusting yourself?" your mind immediately starts looking for evidence that trust already exists within you. Your subconscious is responding to the assumptions hidden inside your language. So let us have a little look at the one you are running.
What Happens When Your Brain Accepts That Something Is Missing
[00:11:21] What am I missing? What am I missing? What am I missing? How many times have you asked yourself that? Literally, how many times? You would not even be able to tell me. Your subconscious is not pausing to ask whether you are genuinely missing anything at all. It accepts that this is the question you are repeatedly asking, and then it will go and find the missing piece, because that is what you have told it matters.
[00:11:48] From that moment on it starts organising your attention around answering it, because what you are putting into the algorithm in your mind is that something is missing. That does not begin with comparison or self doubt or a lack of confidence.
[00:12:15] It begins so much earlier than that, and that is the literal instruction your subconscious has accepted, and it will start filtering your experience through it. So then, da, da, da, da, what happens next? You find yourself comparing your business to someone else, and off you go, wondering why comparison keeps happening.
Comparison Is A Symptom Of An Instruction You Already Gave
[00:12:39] Perhaps it would be more useful to wonder what your subconscious has already been instructed to look for, rather than constantly hunting for what is missing. Hey, hey, hey. I know that when you feel like something is missing, comparison becomes really thick at that time, I truly believe that.
[00:13:03] When that question is being asked, of course you are going to look. Of course you are going to check. And who are you checking against? Other people, otherwise known as comparison. I have done quite a few podcast episodes on comparison as well and I will put a couple down in the show notes. There was one I remember doing quite far back, and I remember it resonating with so many of you at the time.
[00:13:27] I will pop that in the show notes for you to go and have a listen to. I truly think comparison is one of the most misunderstood experiences in business, because we assume it is the thing that creates the self doubt, when it is really the consequence of something that has already happened much earlier in the subconscious.
[00:13:52] Like I said, if your subconscious has accepted the instruction that something is missing, does comparison not suddenly make perfect sense? Of course it is pulling your attention towards other people. Of course it is directing your attention towards the people who appear to have found the answer.
[00:14:13] They have found the answer to the question you are trying to solve. That is a very different way of understanding comparison, because it immediately moves us away from judging ourselves for comparing and towards becoming curious about why our attention goes there in the first place.
You Opened Instagram To Post A Story And 20 Minutes Later You Feel Behind
[00:14:33] Think about it. If you are living in the what am I missing question, think about what happens when you open up Instagram. You might have gone in to post a little story for the day, or to reply to a few messages, or to watch your own story back, and we know how much we all love doing that. However, 20 minutes later you have looked through someone else's launch, someone else's rebrand.
[00:15:00] Someone else has fully booked their programme. Someone else has an incredible website. A record breaking month, all of it on show. And before you have consciously realised it, your mind has gone into, "What have they figured out that I am still missing? What do they know that I do not know?" That is what it looks like when you feel like something is missing and then go looking for proof of it.
The Lost Keys Example That Shows How Your Mind Searches For Answers
[00:15:24] Can you see what is happening here? Can you see what is happening here? What we really want to look at is the question you are asking underneath it all. That is what I have been getting to throughout this whole podcast episode.
[00:15:46] If I asked you, "Where did you leave your keys? Where did you leave your keys, Bec? When you came in, where did you leave your keys?" your mind would naturally begin looking for where you left them, rather than first asking whether you had lost them at all. Would it not? You would be going, "Oh yeah, where did I leave them?" You are not wondering whether you have lost them.
[00:16:10] It is exactly the same when you repeatedly ask yourself, "What am I missing?" Your subconscious is not considering whether anything is missing. It just becomes a search engine, because something is missing. Can you see where I am going with this? Can you see where I am going with this? It is so fascinating.
The Women Who Look Successful Are Still Working On Their Limiting Beliefs
[00:16:36] It is so fascinating, and I know I have segued into comparison here, but it does make sense to the episode. If you are comparing your lived experience of your own business with what we all know to be a highlight reel on social media, you are never getting an accurate answer. I can tell you that is true, because some of the people who look wildly successful are still hiring me to work through deeply rooted limiting beliefs and the things that are holding them back.
[00:16:58] That is powerful. Every difficult decision you have ever wrestled with in your business, every launch you have questioned, every sales page you have rewritten and rewritten and rewritten, every moment you have wondered whether you are heading in the right direction, you do not get that level of access to somebody else's thinking.
[00:17:15] You only ever have access to the conclusions they have chosen to share. Meanwhile your subconscious is sitting there going, "They have worked it out. They have found the fucking missing piece. They know something I do not."
[00:17:38] None of those are facts, are they? They are interpretations. They are meanings created from very limited information. However, in the moment when you are sitting in something is missing, they can feel so convincing, because they fit the instruction your subconscious has already accepted.
How To Overcome Self Doubt By Changing The Question You Ask Yourself
[00:18:03] What is missing? What is missing? Now that we know this, we can start to ask a slightly different question, can we not? And I wonder what that question might be. Now you know the old one already carries the assumption that something is missing, what could the new question be?
[00:18:35] What could that question be instead? I am not even going to give it to you. I want you to have a ponder on what it could be. I want you to start shifting how you see this, quote unquote, missing piece, because changing the question is how you overcome self doubt at the level it is actually being created. I want you to stop treating every single challenge in your business as though it is trying to tell you something about you, or your capability, or whether you will succeed.
[00:19:11] Just look at it as information. Create enough distance for your thinking to become clearer.
Your Business Cannot Tell You Whether You Are Enough
[00:19:22] Your business cannot tell you whether you are enough, whether you are capable, whether you are behind, whether you are in front, whether you are anything. That is the meaning you are giving to the situation you are going through. Your business can only give you information. The meaning will always come from you.
[00:19:41] The meaning will always come from you, and I think that is one of the most liberating things to understand. It is a very different way of leading. It is a very different way of leading.
What To Do The Next Time You Catch Yourself Asking What Am I Missing
[00:20:04] Before I finish this podcast episode up, every single time you catch yourself asking, "What am I missing?" I do not want you to fucking answer that question. I do not want you to ask that question, and I definitely do not want you to answer it immediately. I want you to become curious about what that question is inviting your subconscious to look at. Once you notice the instruction, you will begin to notice all the places it has been shaping your experience.
[00:20:33] Really start to change that question. If this is a question you are asking yourself, I want you to sit yourself down today and start to ponder on what question is going to serve you better. It might be strategy, it might be messaging, it might be positioning, but when you feel like something is missing you are too deep in the feeling to allow yourself to see that clearly.
[00:20:59] Then you go and make an investment through that lens and it ends up being the wrong investment. Of course it does. Of course it does. So if today's episode has resonated with you, I would love you to send me the word "missing" over on Instagram. First of all, I always really enjoy hearing what lands with you.
[00:21:23] It also gives me a real understanding of the patterns you are navigating in your own business. So if it has resonated, DM me the word "missing" on Instagram and tell me what question you are going to ask yourself instead. I will let you know whether that is going to give your subconscious something better to work with.
Why Focusing On What Is Missing Hides The Progress You Have Made
[00:21:45] If it is not quite right, I will help you create a better one. Remember, it is the meaning you are attaching to this that is making it feel so significant. A lot of the time when we are looking at data and reviewing numbers and all of that, the event itself is relatively small.
[00:22:06] It is the meaning you are bringing to it, and it is the way you are directing your subconscious to keep seeing that something is missing. Like I said, if the instruction is that something is missing, it is very likely that you will delete the evidence that you are already making progress, that things are already working, that you could carry on doing exactly what you are doing, because your attention is now fully occupied with looking for what is not there. That is the real cost of continuing to feel like something is missing.
[00:22:35] All right? I will see you on the next episode. I know I got a little bit spicy on your ass today, but that is what this is here for. Like I said, if this has resonated, DM me the word "missing" and DM me what your question is going to be instead. I will help you if you cannot quite get there. I love you lots, and I will see you on the next episode.
More about The Subconscious Expert:
Welcome to The Subconscious Expert, the podcast where your subconscious becomes your one-way ticket to the mind-blowing results you desire in your life and business! I’m your host, Rebecca Haydon, The Subconscious Expert who went from being stuck in victim mode to a multi 6 figure business owner. Each week, I will be giving you the subconscious tools and techniques so you can become the woman who is living out her vision with a life and business that she is truly OBSESSED with. I have said it before, and I will say it 100 times again: "Your business can't outgrow your mindset, and if you want to grow your business, it always starts with growing your subconscious." So let's dive into the subconscious breakthrough you so deeply deserve!