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Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

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Hello and welcome to the show. Today, I’m going to be talking to you about the lie about success that nobody tells you, or at least that’s what I perceive it to be. Now let’s just rewind things slightly before we dive into all of that, like, how why am I even talking about this today?  Well, to be honest with you, as a strategist, occasionally, I will think about what have I got coming up that I’m promoting, or what is it that people are regularly, you know, wanting to know the answers to when I look back at my old podcast episodes, what are the themes that went down the best, and all that kind of stuff. And I’m sharing that because, if you have a podcast, or if you’re thinking about launching a podcast, you know, it’s wise to take these things into consideration, right? 

But you know this podcast, if you’ve been listening a while, you’ll know that it’s something I love. It’s just I really enjoy expressing my thoughts and ideas this way, and I love the connection it creates with my listeners. I love the conversations I get to have on the other side with with my listeners. And so every so often, I will just have a moment in the shower where I’ll be reflecting on something, and I’ll be like, This is what today’s episode needs to be. And in today’s case, I was simply messaging a peer of mine, and I just touched on I was like, I just wish more people understood this about business growth, because I think one of the things that people assume about me that is entirely incorrect. And I don’t think they just assume this about me. I think they assume this about a lot of businesses that they perceive to be more established. I think that a lot of people assume once you are making consistent revenue once you’ve gotten over that kind of visibility hurdle, and you’re starting to show up more on social media, once you’ve kind of started advertising, and you know you’ve got funnels and all that jazz, and you know you’ve just been in the game a few years that we no longer have to sit or be with discomfort. That discomfort has left the chat, and that is what they are aspiring towards. That is often what they are investing in. When they choose to invest. I’m not going to say this, by the way. This is not a reflection of my clients. This is what I see in the industry as a whole, right? So, and this is where I perceive a lot of the frustrations people have with coaches or mentors. Now, sometimes it genuinely boils down to a crappy experience with that coach or mentor. And I’m not by any means dismissing that. And there is also, and this is where I perceive it from. Look at it from the other side, and I’m like, there is also the very valid argument that coaches and mentors share with me behind the scenes about their frustration around the fact that people often want to buy their way out of discomfort. And I just wanted to take a little deep dive around that, because you may have heard the phrase, and I think I’ve written it down somewhere, something like, yeah, the level of success that you’re able to hold is the same as your capacity to be with discomfort. 

That’s not exactly the phrase, but that is something that you see kind of thrown around as a meme in various parts of the Internet all the time. And you know, we reflect upon it for a moment and go, oh yeah, maybe I should try and do that, but I don’t think it really lands. So I was like, why not just explore this as a theme in this episode so we can really get to the crux of, like, Where does this sense of entitlement around comfort come from? And what can we do to grow our capacity to be with discomfort, because I will share with you, as I shared with my friend, as I voice noted her earlier, I was like, I have not outgrown discomfort, and I don’t perceive that to be the case in any of my multi six figure business clients or seven figure clients. Even like, what they have is the capacity to be with that discomfort and to still be able to feel fulfillment, still be able to feel joy, still be able to be content. They can ride alongside the discomfort without it needing to be their whole experience, and that is where true business growth happens. So let’s dive into it a bit. More. Okay, so let’s talk about why we are wired to avoid discomfort in the first place. I feel like if we have, like, a comprehensive understanding of all of this, it’s much easier to kind of help our brain think differently. So let’s, let’s remove business from the chat for a moment, right? Keep on using the chat analogy. But here we are. Just roll with me. Guys. You know, I’m just an old woman trying to sound cool and roll. Cool and relevant. Just let me have these moments. But let’s think about discomfort. If you were right now sat in a really uncomfortable pair of trainers, you could, within the next few minutes, order a pair of trainers that would relieve that discomfort for you, and they could arrive within 24 hours, you could have a fresh pair of trainers and be feeling a million times better. 

So why wouldn’t you? Right? And that’s what a lot of us do. We either jump, jump, go into town quickly, or we order them online, and our problem is solved in moments. We hand over our cash and quickly have exactly what we desire. But there’s none of that stuff like the older generations who would go along and get a new Sol in, put in and, you know, buff up the outside and have it done over by, I mean, a cobbler. I mean, yeah, you know what I’m saying? Like older generations would find shoes that would last for them a lot longer, and they would look after those shoes, and they would pay for somebody to look after them, and sometimes they’d be without that pair of boots for a week while they sat at the cobblers waiting to be healed or whatever, right? But we don’t do that anymore. We like comfort, and we like the results to be immediate, right? So if you get home and you’ve got your new trainers on, you’re feeling great, and you bound right over to your mirror and you’re like, oh, oh, hold on a second, that face of mine. I don’t know where this is coming from. Is it coming from me? He’s about to turn 40 next year, suddenly has wrinkles that I wasn’t seeing before. Like, what are we going to do about those wrinkles? You know, some people who are a bit more patient, perhaps, or, you know, less inclined to go the cosmetic route, will go buy some skincare, and in a week’s time, will look at their skin and be like, Oh, it’s looking loads better. Or go get some Botox, and again, in a few days time, you’re going to be looking the way you desire to, with a less, you know, wrinkly face. The challenge with that, of course, is that, uh, then you notice the other things, like that gray hair that’s sprouting out the top of your head, and that needs dealing with too. So we’re constantly finding new areas where we’re finding a level of discomfort, but the relief is we’ve got capitalism on our side, we’ve got Amazon Prime on our side, we’ve got the internet on our side. We can buy the thing that fixes that problem, and we will no longer feel insecure about it, right? Like we’re in this day and age where marketing constantly tells us you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough. 

And here’s the product that’s going to solve that problem. So we’re putting a place of discomfort regularly by the media, and not just around like products, but just everything in the life in general, and you know, and and we’re given the solution, spend your money. You’re going to be feeling better if you have an a core pain. Go book a massage. Go see a physiotherapist. Now, some things are obviously not immediate, but we still have that immediate satisfaction from It’s okay. It’s booked in. Now the check is in the mail. It’s coming like that. Bad back of mine will not be bad soon, because I’m seeing a physiotherapist. I’ve got my sessions booked in. It is inevitable. I will be feeling better. So is it any surprise that we are in that mindset of, if there is something wrong with me, I will throw my money at it, because to be in a state of discomfort is not normal, and what is normal is to take my wallet or purse or card out and fix it in a heartbeat, And herein lies the problem. Right? You know, we link comfort to safety, and we link discomfort to failure or danger, and in a world of social media where we’re increasingly whether we know it or not, consciously or subconsciously, we are constantly comparing ourselves to other people and wanting to be better. 

Now, let’s take a moment to think about where that comfort seeking reflex shows up in business and in business growth, and it’s not just the obvious thing. So earlier on, I talked about, you know, when you hire that coach or when you hire that mentor, but really, it can look like any investment. I’ve heard it so often. You know what? I’m going to come back to, you, Polly, because I’ve just had a brand photo shoot, and I feel like that brand photo shoot is going to change everything, because, I mean, it better do, because I just spent the last three, 3000 pounds of my profit on it. So it’s got to work like it, but it is because I know it’s going to be the different thing. And then they get them back, and they’re like, oh, oh, well, I thought I would, I don’t know. I don’t feel confident sharing those photos. I look more overweight or more old, or just not as cool as I thought I’d look in those photos. Or do. I look amazing on this photos. But why? Why is that not actually changing very much for my social media right now, I’ve just hired that VA, why is everything suddenly not really efficient? Why are the sales not coming flying in because I’ve got a VA now, who’s there, ready to deal with them? I’ve just started running ads. Why are the ads not suddenly making me a millionaire, like I hear everyone else who’s running ads who are making loads of money, I’ve just invested in a funnel. Why is that funnel not converting? Immediately, think about the areas in your business where we’ve done this. And by the way, I’m not immune to this. I am not immune.

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I’ve also, I think it’s pretty much the status quo. You know, it’s the it’s the dopamine we get when we first invest in something and go, This is it? This is going to be the game changer. And I think the beauty and the gift of having run my business now for oh my goodness, I’ve been saying five years all this year, but I’m now realizing I’m closer to six and five now. But the beauty of having done it for so long is recognizing that actually no with all business growth, it’s the sum of the parts. It’s all of these things working together, and they’re rarely all working entirely efficiently all at once. You just need enough of them. You just need enough cogs turning in the business for one to be doing well, and you’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. But, you know, ultimately, it’s, you know, it’s recognizing that most of these things that we do in business do not work all at once. Nothing, in the same way with Amazon Prime just suddenly works overnight and and, you know, this is the other thing to say, even when they are working, there’s always that next level, or there is that commitment. So in the same way you look at someone who’s gone to the gym and they’ve now got to the stage where they’ve got the abs, they’ve got the muscles, they look amazing. They can wear pretty much any outfit they could. They could be stealing dresses off their 20 year old daughter and look amazing in them, because they’ve done all the work in the gym. But have they arrived there and it’s like, oh, job done. Now gonna put those barbells away. I’m just going to say bye to the gym. I’m just going to go back to my life of just slobbing out on the sofa every night. No, they keep on being disciplined. They keep on going back, because they know if they don’t, they’re going to lose it. 

And chances are, they are pushing themselves to new levels of discomfort, because that is the only way to stay engaged, stay motivated and feel excited in about what they’re doing. And I’d say it’s really similar in online business, the person who has successful ADS has to do the stretchy thing of either hiring an agency or an ads manager or bravely going about understanding them and learning them and spending big sums of money on ads. You know that is not a small thing, particularly, because, like in all things in marketing, ads tend to fluctuate. They can do amazingly one week and then suddenly the next week. You can wonder if the whole funnel is broke. I mean, when you look at it closer, you’ll learn that it hasn’t. But the challenges don’t go away. They just take on a different form. They just look different. And of course, at every level of success we have, there’s the opportunity to be like, Am I happy here, or do I want to push it another level? And I want to be really clear here that I’m not for any like, you know, one of the things I’ve given myself a big fat permission set for this year was last year, and the beginning of this year, I was all over in person, networking. I was really trying to show up to at least one event every month to two months, and that often involved travel. So it often eat, you know, sometimes three to four days out of a month, dependent on where it was and how long it was and all of those things. But it was taking up a lot of time. 

And because I’m neurodiverse, and I find massive groups full of like, massive rooms full of people, pretty overwhelming. And so I have the tendency to find one or two people and chat to them massively and ignore nearly everyone else. They’re not really I mean, it’s never worked badly for me. I’ve always, always, even when I’ve not meant to, ended up with a client off the back of attending these events, which is why I made a why I made a point of doing them more. But one of the things I had to recognize is and I can still be successful without needing to do that. And it doesn’t need to be my whole identity. This doesn’t mean forever, but what I am doing is giving myself a big fat permission slip, to not think about them, to not book them, to not be looking out for them for the next year, and to not be thinking about getting myself on stages or anything like that, and not allowing it to mean too much about me or my growth or my business, because what I know to be true is one of my clients who I was mentoring this year, who’s on the pathway to half a million pounds this year, doesn’t touch a networking event, doesn’t attend mastermind Days, doesn’t do any of those things and is absolutely killing it. She likewise finds those kind of events overwhelming and will probably never engage in those kind of events. She just doesn’t need to. Nobody needs to. 

So, you know, one of the so when I talk about discomfort, I’m not saying we have to do all the things. Things that make us feel discomfort. You know, we get to be in conversation with that discomfort and be like, well, you know, for example, in my case, it was like, those situations make me feel discomfort. I go along to them anyway, because there is also joy. Don’t get me wrong. I love meeting people. I love being there. I just always feel a massive side dose of bit of shame. I’m so crap at working a room. I just, I mean, I don’t even try to work a room, because it just looks exhausting to me. I can just about handle being in the room, let alone working it. So, you know. But that was a moment of recognizing, in some ways, that discomfort was a distraction from the real discomfort, which was actually, really, genuinely spending more time in my business and actually doing the braver thing of just spending some money on ads and getting discovered that way. And so the money that used to go towards travel and events and hotel rooms is going towards advertising instead. And last month was, you know, 30k cash in the bank month. So I’d say it’s working pretty well friends. 

So I will say, you know, if you’re looking for a permission slip to not do all the uncomfortable things, then you know, like 100% but be in conversation with that discomfort. Recognize, like, yes, it’s uncomfortable. And is it being particularly productive? No, it’s not. Sometimes we go for a discomfort that looks sexier than the one that actually, you know, I was like, oh, ads, feels like work. I know it’s going to require tweaking. I know it’s going to require refining. And I don’t know, there was obviously some story there where I was holding myself back and now I’m doing it. I was like, Why was I not doing this sooner? So look, the cost of avoiding discomfort is huge. We can fall into the trap of overthinking and analyzing instead of acting. I see this so regularly. People going, do you think this sales page will do? Well, just share the sales page with an actual client. I’m not your client. I can assess it. I can tell you if you’re ticking all the marketing boxes, but ultimately, the conversation with your ideal client and getting their feedback is worth so much more, and we will do so much to avoid that. Discover. We’ll share it with our husband. We’ll share it with our mentor or our coach. 

Now I’m not saying there’s not a value in obviously, one of the things I do is help people with their marketing assets, but if we find ourselves doing that more often than actually just having the conversation with our client, then we’re falling into a trap like I’ll share. From my own experience, I have a mentor, and he’s a marketing mentor I’ve shared I don’t know one asset with him. The last two months we work together. I don’t share most of my stuff with him, because I know that really, ultimately, the chief judge and jury is my ideal client, and that the time I spend waiting on him to feed back to me is time I could just be having a conversation with someone I’d love to work with and get their feedback. So if you want to know what it looks like in action, I really, and again, that genuinely has contributed to me making 30k cash in the bank without launching last month. Okay, so I really, recommend just have the have the conversation, make the invitation. If you’re excited about your offer, why wouldn’t you want to do that? The other thing we can do is overwork, trying to out effort, the discomfort I was guilty of that as again, at some point I was, you know, like, oh, how can I learn how to go viral with reels? How can I learn how to make my carousels more compelling. I was getting a bit distracted and, weirdly enough, kind of avoiding the thing that actually was just going to be easier, which was switching on ads, which, again, the moment I did it, I was like, Why didn’t I do this sooner? Like, I don’t need to do that part. But there was a part of me that was like, if I just spend extra hours on this one thing, maybe it will fix it. And spending more hours on anything is is not the solution. 

Usually, if you find yourself doing that, take a moment to think about, what am I distracting myself from actually doing? Because usually there is something uncomfortable that you just don’t want to wrap your legs around, straddle and rock and rock and back and forth like you’re on some rodeo. You’re scared to do that, so you’re doing the other thing that is more immediate, more available, more easy to do. Okay? So take a moment to think, like, what is the thing I’m actually putting off here that is actually going to be a bigger lever in getting me towards my goals? Okay? Over investing, thinking the next thing will make it feel easier is the other mistake we make so kind of pushing ourselves to the very brink of what is manageable, assuming that that will get us there. Now I have to be honest here, like I invest very boldly and always have in my business, and it served me really, really well. So I’m not here to say, don’t invest boldly, if that feels in alignment to where you are right now. And there’s a really important caveat here, I invest boldly, but I don’t then just kind of kind. My hands together and go, job done. Okay, no. Need to do it like I’ve done the thing now. 

Success is inevitable. I’m very aware that the journey has only just gotten started, that that investment is there to really sharpen my gaze on my business, sharpen my actions, sharpen my focus so that I show up to it at a level that I didn’t previously. It’s not that I’ve now bought the thing that’s going to save everything. It’s that I’ve bought the thing that’s going to motivate me to feel even more excited about my business and show up with even more passion and excitement and probably a million times more motivation to actually want to make invitations to my clients. So yes, if you want to invest, invest, and obviously a lot of people invest in working with me. But the important piece here is understanding that that investment is in yourself, not in the thing you just invested in. So you’ve invested in the brand photography to make yourself more visible, but you’re not going to be more visible if you don’t use the brand photography. That should be obvious, but the amount of people I see who sit on their brand photographs or brand videography and don’t actually use it, because in the moment they got the dopamine investing in the shoot, and then they don’t actually use the photographs or, you know, invest in the ads, but then don’t follow up with the leads that come through those ads and wonder why nobody’s buying or invest in the ads. But don’t invest in fixing the time and fixing the funnel to get the funnel operating as well as it needs to. 

So often we invest in the one thing, wanting it to have a 360 holistic impact on what we’re doing in our business, but it’s going to help one part. So like, if you hire a mentor, the mentor is going to help you feel focus and clarity and accountability and be able to feedback and support you with the assets that you’re developing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to remove the discomfort. You’re still going to need to have conversations, you’re still going to need to make invitations, you’re still going to have to look down the barrel of, oh my goodness, this doesn’t feel like it’s working. When’s it ever going to work? And trust that it gets better on the other side, and keep on showing up, even when it feels like it’s not working. And believe me, again, that doesn’t ever go away. I’m trying new things all the time. Sometimes I look at it, I’m like, oh my goodness, this is not having the impact I thought it would. And things like the auction last month, which I had no clue if it do well, and it did phenomenally, you know? But the thing is, I have enough. What’s the word when they talk about having enough things in the fire, like enough, it’s not a stick. How do I run a business? 

And I can’t even come up with these phrases, but you know what I mean, I have enough things going on that I don’t need them all to work really, really well, and that loosens my attachment to the outcome, and that also softens my feelings around discomfort. The other thing, of course, we can do is avoidance that can look like pivoting, pausing and people pleasing to escape feeling exposed or actually, another thing we can do with avoidance is blame it on the brand photos, blame it on the ads, blame it on the funnel, blame it on the coach. Blame it on you know, blame it on your husband who was getting in the way. No radical responsibility is so important in business. Understanding the role we had in that decision is so important not to gaslight ourselves, because, of course, there’s a lot we do in business which is just sheer frickin luck, right? And again, that’s where, if you do enough things, something will take off at some point. 

You just need to keep on showing up to the process, right? So we don’t want to be hard on ourselves. But you know, in the same way that I’m trying to think of an example here why I’ve done this, like, I invested in brand photography, and the first reaction it got when I first launched, it was amazing. I had a video, I had loads of likes, and I was like, right? That’s it. Moving forward, everything’s going to do amazingly. And I didn’t really take much time thinking about my social strategy around the brand photography. And so that initial reaction was wonderful, but it quickly kind of went a bit quiet on the other side, and there was a lot of figuring out how to use that brand imagery alongside me and my business and who I actually am today, and ultimately, for example, when I then ran ads without brand photography, that’s when the brand photography really shone. That’s when suddenly my cost per lead went down to a quarter of what it used to be, because the images jumped off the feed in the way that they did. And that got me a really big launch. 

So the brand photography, in and as of itself, wasn’t doing very much, but I didn’t ever go well, that was a waste of money. I was committed to finding a way to make it make its money back, and I did every investment I’ve ever made. I’ve committed to the outcome on the other side, and that’s not a responsibility. I’m outsourcing to my ads. That’s not responsibility. I’m outsourcing to any part of my business, or any person in my business that comes down to me, and I’m okay with that, because nobody is going to be as interested or invested. Invested in my business as I am, and it’s exactly the same for you, and never, ever allow yourself to believe otherwise. So here’s the thing that we need to remember, discomfort isn’t a sign that something’s going wrong. Discomfort is a sign that we are expanding, and that doesn’t that’s not going to feel comfortable, because what is comfortable is what we already know, but what we already know is getting us the results we already know. And if we don’t like those results, we’re going to need to do things differently. And even where we get the temporary relief of investing in something that we feel is going to get us there with more ease, which in many ways it most likely will. 

That doesn’t mean that we no longer have any discomfort. In that scenario, there will be discomfort, maybe a different kind of discomfort, or a different level of discomfort that you’ve not dealt with before, alongside that decision. So here are a few reflection prompts I would love you to think about where am I trying to buy fix or rush my way out of discomfort. Another one is, what would I change if I saw discomfort as proof that I am on the right path? So I want to say, I want to share. You know, next time you’re feeling that knot in your stomach or the urge to make it all go away, because take a breath, okay, take a moment to be with it, because this is a moment your success is being built. I really, really, really believe in you, and I really know when I sit in a room, I know I pay to go be at a mastermind where I’m with 10 other very established multi six figure business owners, none of them are any different to any of you, my dear listeners, they really aren’t. So often we look at people’s glossy Instagram accounts and imagine a lifestyle and a human that is well outside of, you know, our own lived experience and who we are and what we’re dealing with. But believe me, so many of these wonderful, exceptional business owners are dealing with the horrible things that so many of us deal with, illness, Ill family members, caretaking, duties, fear, our own mind, gremlins. The difference is they don’t allow those to be a reason why they can’t be successful. And I’m going to be honest, I have days, you know, as a carer to two additional needs kids, I have days where it feels very fucking unfair. There are days where I just think, I can’t carry this all. I don’t want to carry this all. I’m tired, and I think any female listener will relate to that. The mental load is a lot, and I also see it as a massive privilege that I get to run my business, that I get to do what I do. Sometimes I allow the discomfort to rule me. Sometimes I have a day where I shout and I scream and I cry, or I just take a day off and eat cake, go to a sauna or do something nice for myself, because it’s exhausting sometimes being with discomfort, but most days, most days, it just feels fine. It feels exciting, but it is learning to be with it. It’s developing a capacity for it. I suspect I probably at some point need to record a separate podcast. Separate podcast on the things I’ve done to help grow my capacity to be with discomfort. But I hope with some of the examples I’ve shared today, you will feel more confident about your ability to be with discomfort, to know that discomfort, I guess ultimately, it boils down to this one thing I said earlier, which is, learn to be a co passenger with discomfort. Don’t let it be the thing that colors your day, colors your experience, colors your life, because that’s too much and too heavy when you can observe it and go, Oh, okay, that’s what that is. 

Can I be with this, yes? Can I still feel gratitude? Yes? Can I feel excited about the possibility of where we’re going? Yes? And can I be committed to not needing success to look like a particular path, but can I commit to knowing that when I’m consistent and I persevere and I show up and I learn to be alongside that discomfort, that I will get what I desire, that my friend is, what will get you there the soonest. Biggest love to you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did enjoy it, or if you have any particular themes you’d love me to talk about, please just hit me up in the DMS. I got a few DMS about the podcast I recorded, not the last guest episode, but the one before that, where I talked about the five things I’ve learned in five years of running my business. That was so lovely to hear. So if you have any other feedback, do let me know. If you know anyone who is vastly, massively trying to outrun discomfort right now and you think this episode will help them, please, do share it with them. Please. Do you know review and do all the good stuff with this podcast to help. It be heard by more people, and I’ll be in your ears next week talking about the levers to profitability in your business. I’ll be your ears then.