Craig and Meredith: Confronting Limiting Beliefs as Entrepreneurs

Summary

In this conversation, Christian Brim discusses the journey of entrepreneurship with Meredith and Craig, focusing on their experiences of self-discovery, facing limiting beliefs, and the emotional challenges that come with starting a business. They explore the interconnectedness of personal growth and business success, the importance of open communication in marriage, and how entrepreneurship can serve as a catalyst for personal development. The discussion emphasizes the need for emotional intelligence and the impact of individual growth on relationships and business dynamics.

Takeaways

• Leaving corporate life led to a loss of identity.
• Self-discovery is crucial for personal and professional growth.
• Entrepreneurship forces individuals to confront their limiting beliefs.
• Emotional intelligence is essential for navigating challenges in business.
• Open communication is vital in maintaining a healthy marriage.
• Trust and benefit of the doubt strengthen partnerships.
• Personal growth is necessary for business success.
• Avoiding emotions can lead to greater stress and issues.
• Recognizing the interconnectedness of personal and business challenges is key.
• Each partner's growth journey is unique and must be respected.

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Transcript

Christian Brim (00:00.478)
So when we left the corporate job and jumped into entrepreneurship, she alluded to, we felt, we fell flat on our face. We failed miserably at our first endeavor at this. And one of the big reasons why was we didn't know who we were. We lost who we were. Our identity was tied to our corporate life. Like I was a rule follower. I was a perfectionist. was people pleaser. was all of these things that when I left the corporate world and everything was on our shoulders. Now we.

We didn't know what we wanted or who we were anymore. And so we had to go on a, I would say an adventure of self discovery of figuring out who we were and what we wanted out of this life. And it really led us down some interesting paths on this, on the personal development side. We uncovered some really deep, limiting beliefs within ourselves. This is the Chris project where we discuss mental wellness,

self-awareness and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Christian Brim (01:16.834)
Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. My name is Christian Brim, your host. Joining me today are Meredith and Craig, whose last names have been left off to protect the innocent. No, just kidding. Welcome, Meredith and Craig. Thanks, Christian. Glad to be here. So give us just the summary of your experience. I'd love to hear why you're here together. So give us the short version of that story.

Sure. Good clarification because there is a long version of that story too. The short version is that we decided to leave our corporate jobs. We were doing the whole corporate nine to five thing, but feeling a little bit unfulfilled. We had more to offer than what we were able to in that environment. And so we both decided to leave our corporate jobs and become entrepreneurs.

We did not know what that was going to look like for us. We sort of jumped out of the plane before we actually had a parachute built to work our way down. We started figuring it out. Big decisions, brave action, trying to figure it out as we go. And we made some mistakes along the way, started some businesses that failed, but eventually sort of focused on ourselves, focused on our marriage and found our groove. And that's how we ended up here with you.

So how long ago was that that you started this journey on entrepreneurship? 2021. Okay. So fairly, fairly short. All right. And how long were you in corporate? I'm going to back into your age at some point here. Yeah. Corporate 15 years ish. Yeah. So, you know, the Chris project is about a raising awareness around entrepreneurial mental health mindset, self-awareness issues. What has been

your experience as an entrepreneur with any of those or all of those. So when we left the corporate job and jumped into entrepreneurship, she alluded to we we felt we fell flat on our face. We failed miserably at our first endeavor at this. And one of the big reasons why was we didn't know who we were. We lost who we were. Our identity was tied to our corporate life. Like I was a rule follower. I was a perfectionist. was people pleaser. I was all of these things that.

Christian Brim (03:31.938)
When I left the corporate world and everything was on our shoulders now, we didn't know what we wanted or who we were anymore. And so we had to go on a, I would say an adventure of self-discovery, of figuring out who we were and what we wanted out of this life. And it really led us down some interesting paths on the personal development side. We uncovered some really deep, limiting beliefs within ourselves.

One of which is I was a perfectionist. couldn't be wrong. I couldn't fail. And so by not being able to fail when something was challenging, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't try because I couldn't bring myself to failure. But as you know, being an entrepreneur is all about trying, failing and learning and failing forward and moving and learning fast. So that was one of the big lessons I took from them. Meredith, I want to hear your response. I want to comment on that is that

I think when entrepreneurship is one of those things, maybe like marriage or parenthood, that is kind of a blowtorch. And you can't really hide who you are in those environments. I think there are a lot of employee jobs that you can hide and not challenge or answer some of those questions that you had to ask yourself. But in the entrepreneurial world, there is nowhere to hide.

And the alternative, I guess, would be success. And then you're not forced to deal with those things, which was part of my journey was I had success out of the gate. I bought a franchise, so I had some built-in stability there, but I was successful. And because I was successful, I didn't have to answer those questions about myself. So Meredith, I'm sorry I interrupted you. No, I think it's a great point, because it's the beauty and the curse.

of entrepreneurship, especially like we did, jumped out of the plane, from scratch, didn't know what to do, started trying to build something from the ground up. The beauty and the curse of entrepreneurship is it forces you to face yourself. We had success in our corporate lives. We could have continued down that road and had the corporate success, the good job, the promotion, the raise, all those things.

Christian Brim (05:51.424)
and never had to face these limiting beliefs and never had to sort of really look at ourselves deeply in the mirror. But once we left, once we kind of took that exit off that sort of default road highway that we were on and came face to face with failure right off the bat, and then we're forced to kind of take a look inside, that's when to Craig's point we discovered there was a lot of stuff inside that we haven't really examined. And he found his and mine was really strongly tied to my self-worth.

I wasn't good enough, wasn't smart enough, wasn't, you know, didn't make good enough decisions. I fill in the blank enough. That was me. I wasn't good enough to do any of the things that I wanted to do. And so it's been a real journey of building my self-worth over the last couple of years because you don't rise to the level of your hopes and dreams. You settle for what you believe you're worthy of. And I've been working on raising that floor so that...

I can actually live the life of my dreams because I'm worthy of living that life. And I never had to face that in my corporate experience. People pleasing my, all those things served me well actually in my corporate life. Employers generally are not interested in you achieving your dreams. that's generally not the case or being, or even being your best self. Like that, you know, they want you just the way you are, cause you're doing fine. Thank you, sweetie. I mean, just keep doing that.

I had a conversation with my business coach just this morning and I think it's relevant to this conversation. I've been wrestling with this problem, business problem for, I want to say over 10 years, but really seriously working on it for seven years. And through this conversation with my business coach, I realized that

I didn't believe that a solution was possible. Now, I wasn't acting out of that. I was still trying to solve the problem. But at the core, if you put a truth serum in me, I would have said, no, this isn't possible. And the way that showed up for me was a lot of anxiety and confusion and frustration in trying to solve this business problem, right?

Christian Brim (08:06.22)
Well, I didn't get any epiphany this morning about how to solve the business problem. But what I did gain was clarity that what was holding me back first was my belief that it was not possible. And the thing that gave me clarity and hope was, well, okay, I've seen others do it in similar industries.

And so therefore I know it is possible. So it was now about reframing my mindset of it is possible. I may not know how to do it yet, but it is possible. You have any thoughts on that experience? Yeah, I mean, what came to mind for me as soon as you started speaking was, I think it was Henry Ford, whether you believe you can or you believe you can't. You're right. You're right. And so you will look for evidence to support whichever belief that you have.

And when we look for negative, we will find negative. And I think it's the same in a marriage, right? Like if I'm focused on all the things he does that annoy me, because there are some things. Which aren't a lot, there's not a lot. Yeah, just one maybe. There are some things, usually involving beard, hair in the sink and things like that, like they exist. It could be worse. It could always be worse. It could be worse. But if I look for those things, I'm gonna find those things.

flip side, if I look for all the things I appreciate and that I'm grateful for and that I love about him, which by the way, there are many, there are lots, I will see more of them. And so what you look for, you will find you weren't, you were looking for the solution, you know, consciously, but subconsciously it wasn't there. So therefore you weren't looking for it. So you were never going to find it. And I think that's been the experience of all of my entrepreneurial journey is not realizing

what's going on beneath the conscious surface, like what emotions are there. I tend to avoid or suppress those emotions, like kind of like just keep marshaling on. it doesn't really matter what you feel, just keep doing what you're doing. Cause the actions are what make the difference. Your feelings don't affect the world. You know, like I can feel like I want to do something, but until I do something, I haven't accomplished anything.

Christian Brim (10:34.018)
But the problem is that the actions are rooted in the belief and the emotions, right? So you can't separate those two. Yeah, I think for me, similar to you, I've always been kind of emotions aside, let's just do what has to be done and move forward. But I'm learning now that my emotions, they lead to all the other thoughts, the actions, they're all tied together to your point.

and you can't separate them. So it's really important to understand your emotions. Like I would say historically, my emotional intelligence quotient or EQ was probably relatively low. And over through this journey of entrepreneurship, it's forced me to focus on that. And it's now, would think personally, I think it's one of my strengths actually is that I'm more in tune with my emotions and what's going on and so that I can sit with that. So if I'm having a bad day, I can, I can sit with that for a minute, feel it.

know where it is in my body and just do something to release that. Go for a walk, meditate, grounding, whatever it is to figure out what's going on so that I can get that out of the way so that I can focus on an action that's going to move the needle, that's going to actually solve a problem that I have. Because I think similarly, I hated feeling the negative stuff, right? I avoided the negative feelings. didn't want it. So I would push them down, push them away.

And what I've come to learn over the last couple of years is if I actually just feel it, like just let myself feel that crappy feeling, it actually tends to pass fairly quickly within minutes. it's not something that sticks around. It only sticks around when I try to avoid it. When I actually just sit down and give myself a few minutes to like feel angry, feel upset, feel frustrated, feel overwhelmed, feel whatever it is, that immediate, really difficult part.

passes relatively quickly. can try and identify where I feel it in my body, put a name to it. And by the time I've done that, I can almost take a deep breath and feel better already. It's a really great point because back before I kind of got on this personal growth journey, I would bury emotions, like bury them. I would avoid them at all costs. You're a man. Of course you do. Yeah. And it did not serve me well. And to her point, when I started to actually sit with them and feel them, it's

Christian Brim (12:49.122)
way less painful. It's way less stressful when you just allow that because it does like your body just wants to process it and eliminate it. Like it sticks with you for a couple minutes at the most and then it's gone and then you can just move forward. It's way easier than just burying it and letting it come up in some other way later on. It's going to manifest and come out some way. It's better to do it in the moment in a controlled way than it is in a, know, heated 100 % something like that.

Yeah, it's amazing to me how quickly you can change your emotions. Like one of the ones that I have have practiced a lot is if I'm feeling like I'm disconnected or emotionally unattached from my wife, I can think back to a specific time. I have this specific memory of when I felt really connected to her. And it's amazing how the emotion just changes. It really is that simple.

I was, I grew up with the, I don't know generationally how this works out, but I grew up with the whole, know, boys don't cry, men don't show emotion unless it's anger. You know, that's the only emotion you should show. And I, by design, by God's design, I am a very emotional person. And

I really struggled with that for a long time because I felt like the feelings, me having a lot of feelings was somehow a flaw. And what I came to understand about myself is that that's just who I am. it's neither good nor bad that I have a lot of emotions. Sometimes it's beneficial, sometimes it's not. But just accepting the fact that that's who I am and not what

someone else expects me to be. Either my parents or society or my peer group, just being who I am, not trying to be what someone else wants me to be. Yeah, similarly to you, my emotions run really close to the surface. And so most of them come out my eyeballs, whether I want them to or not, good, bad, or ugly, that's generally my outlet for letting my emotions out. And like you, always...

Christian Brim (15:14.892)
I was frustrated by that. I didn't want to be the emotional one. I didn't want people to know when I was feeling certain feelings. I wanted to be able to bury it. And I just was never, the more I tried, worse it got. Like I just, I wasn't able to bury it. And it, I think also contributed to my self-worth internal dialogue that this is me and trying to cover parts of me and hide parts of me and be different than I am reinforces the belief that

I'm not enough the way I am. I'm not good enough. I'm not the way I'm supposed to be. And being able to accept who you are, the way God made you, the way you were intended to be is so beneficial for your self worth. And being able to accept and love yourself as you are is really the only path to living a fulfilled, happy life. I firmly believe I will never...

you know, reach my potential in my marriage, in my career, in my business, in my health, in my life, if I don't think I'm good enough as I am. So Craig, do you need to get her a shirt that says, I'm not responsible for what my face does when you speak? Yes, please. It's not my fault. I will get that shirt. That would be helpful. Yes. Let's talk about being married and working together. Well, I'm making an assumption. So do you guys work together?

Yes. So talk about how that has played out. How the let's put it this way. How has the business the process of entrepreneurship affected your marriage? So when we first jumped into entrepreneurship, that first foray into it where we fell flat on our face, it wasn't going well. That was a challenging time for us. So up until then, our marriage was

Strength of ours. It was something that was always rock-solid and when we jumped into entrepreneurship We felt the foundation shake a little bit in that first foray. It was very stressful It was hard on both of us. We were miserable We were both on very unhappy and we had to have a very difficult honest open conversation like I'm not happy. Where are you at? It feels like there's something really off here and I don't want to go down this path if this is what what it's gonna be and so right there and then we realized that

Christian Brim (17:39.178)
You know, it's this first and foremost over everything else. And so we, we put the kibosh to that first business. said, no, this is not it for us. We're not happy. This is not what we're meant for. And so we, we toss that aside and then we went on this personal growth journey and then we identified our passion and our, superpower is our marriage. And so now we, we do help other marriages, other people help. We help them with their marriage and it's been awesome.

Like we have a very strong marriage. have a very strong business where we work with each other. We wear different hats. And so I think one of the secrets to it is knowing which hat you're wearing at what time in which conversation am I wearing husband hat, which conversation am I wearing business partner hat or best friend hat. And I think that's been a key ingredient for us in this second phase of entrepreneurship. I would say.

Another two other important pieces of that is one, we make a solid effort to sort of shut business down at dinnertime and go for a walk or something, some kind of boundary in the day. It's usually a walk to kind of break up the sitting down to go get some fresh air, come back and mix up our and now we're married again. The other thing I think that's helpful is something we call just the benefit of the doubt. And so because we did the work,

after that first giant failure to decide what do we actually want our life to be? And so we created for ourselves a North Star for our whole life, for our business, for our marriage, for all aspects of it. So we know where we're going. And when we sometimes disagree on the route to get there, because that happens, we're two human beings, we know where we wanna go, but we have different ideas, we trust that we always give each other the benefit of the doubt. We're aiming for the same destination, but we may disagree on the route and so...

I know you think this is what's best and you know this is what I think is best and you know we both do want what's best for each other for the marriage for the business. So we assume positive intent instead of jumping to conclusions. We ask questions by just give each other the benefit of the doubt whether whatever hat we're wearing on that particular day because we we trust that we're on the same team always. Even when you know the other person is wrong. Even then it's tough some days but that's the

Christian Brim (20:00.386)
That's where we're at. You're coming with your own set of blinders, right? They may be very wrong to you.

in implementing some of these suggestions that you've been hearing about, or in general, you feel like there's parts of your mental game or actually your implementation strategy that you feel is lacking and you love the opportunity to actually start to build yourself into the person that can create the success that you're looking for. Please reach out vis-a-vis the link in the show notes to grab a free consultation with us to see if we can help elevate your mental or your business game. Thank you very much.

Christian Brim (20:45.184)
I think of my wife and I going to a football game last time and we've had seats in this section for over 20 years and she goes, well, this is the ramp we go up and I'm like, no, it's not. And she's like, yeah, it is. I'm like, okay. And sure enough, we were in the wrong section and I didn't say I told you so, but you know, I mean, there are some times when you're like, no, I know I'm right, but my favorite phrase and growing up, I

told this to my kids all the time. Be right and be quiet. It's all right to be right. You don't have to let everybody else know you're right unless we're, you know, walking into danger. Please tell me, but... For sure. think there's a saying like, can be right or you can be happy. Right? Well, yeah. I mean, absolutely. So, was divorce ever discussed at that point? Never. No. Okay. Excellent. It's not something that we would ever...

Joke about it's like, it's like an off limits. We've never gotten to the point that we'd ever discussed it, but it's not something that ever comes up day to day. We don't make jokes about it. It's, it's, didn't allow it to get to that point. It was, it was, there was some snippiness, some unhappiness. Like we were just not ourselves. Yeah. We weren't ourselves. It never ever got close to the point of divorce. Okay. So do you work a lot with married entrepreneurs? Yeah, we have worked with a lot of entrepreneurs.

So do you see any different challenges or maybe more magnified challenges working with entrepreneurs that are married not working? So yours is an unusual case. Most entrepreneurs don't work with their spouse. Where one is an entrepreneur and one is not, do you find any particular challenges in counseling those marriages?

Yes, I think one of the biggest challenges there is that as entrepreneurs, we are problem solvers. We see ourselves as problem solvers, not problem creators. And so we try to protect the other person. So when things are not going well in a business or there's a stress or some sort of challenge that you're dealing with, a lot of times we try to take that on ourselves and not share that burden with the other person. And when we don't do that.

Christian Brim (23:05.036)
The other person were also meaning making machines as humans. We know that there's something going on. The other spouse knows that there's something going on, but because you haven't opened up and told them what it is, their imagination runs wild. I, most of the time, their imagination is actually worse than the actual truth. So then they think it's something with them or there's it's way worse than it actually is. And if we just opened up and had an open and honest conversation and let them in and allow them to.

want to the issue and maybe they have a perspective that they can help with, but at least let them in on it so that they know that's half the battle because a lot of times they just don't know and things go south from there. Well, and every time you don't share something like that, something that didn't go well, a fear, whatever's keeping you up at night, goals, dreams, positive and negative, when you don't share the thing, every time you choose not to share, you put a brick in the wall between you and the more often you do that. Sure, you're breaking trust.

Sure. Totally. The bigger the wall gets, the harder it gets to come down. My experience, my wife and I worked together when we started and then off and on over a long period of time. she was always in a support role. She was not the one making the decisions. And I think she wouldn't have been an entrepreneur if it weren't for me.

I'll put it that way. She wouldn't have started a business on her own. And one of the things that came up in our marriage and with me for a long time was I avoided telling her things because I was afraid of her reaction, right? And that led to a lot of distance and distrust.

that we had to work real hard to repair. Unfortunately, there was the divorce term thrown around, but we both believed enough that the marriage was supposed to be. Our kids were grown, it wasn't, we didn't have that glue that sometimes hold marriages together. But, you know,

Christian Brim (25:27.614)
I've evolved to a point where I can tell her something that I know is negative that she's not going to like and that's okay. Like it's okay that she's upset. Like that's okay. I can be okay with her being upset. And more importantly, I've come to value her perspective because she and I do things, do see things very differently, right? And she sees things that I don't.

see, she asks questions that I wouldn't ask. And before it was, it was, you know, very immature of me, but I always felt like she was just, you know, telling me no, no, no, no. Like, you know, and once I grew enough to be okay with her feeling, her feelings, her feelings being her feelings and not being my responsibility to change it. And then

I was able to say, there actually is value in what she has to say. It's that's like the personification of exactly what we were just talking about. Cause you were trying to protect her from that negativity. You know, you're the provider, you're the business owner, you're the decision maker. You wanted to make sure that she felt safe and secure. And by sharing some of those, you know, insecure, unsafe, scary moments with her, she might be upset. However,

when you're both on the same team, to your point, a little bit of upset is okay. Like, it's okay that she's a little bit, you'd rather her be a little bit upset with the reality of the situation than being actively creating distance between you and her making up stories in her head about what's actually going on. Yes, because that is what actually happened is it got to the point that the distrust was such that there were things that I would tell her about that she didn't believe.

And I'm like, wait a second, something's wrong here. Because I'm like, I'm not trying to hide anything anymore. Like, I'm trying to be honest. And she had a lot of growing to do on her part too. And I think that's been probably the biggest challenge for me is we haven't grown in the same ways or at the same pace, right? And being able to recognize that

Christian Brim (27:46.606)
You know, at the end of the day, you can't fix people. You can't change their feelings. You can't wave a wand and make their problems go away. Someone you care about, that's a difficult thing to deal with. Yeah. is, yeah. And you just touched on probably the second biggest thing that we see with entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurship, like we talked about earlier on, it forces you to grow in ways that you...

probably would never have imagined when you jumped into entrepreneurship. At least that was the case for me. I didn't realize that going into entrepreneurship was going to be this whole different personal growth journey. Like I didn't realize that, but it has been that. And what we find with a lot of entrepreneurs who aren't doing it with their spouse is that they're on that journey and they're actually actively growing, but the spouse may not be growing at the same rate. So when you're not growing together, you're actually growing apart.

Like one person is growing, the other person's saying there's distance forming between you. So I would say that that is one of the other challenges, biggest challenges with entrepreneurs in a marriage where the other spouse is not an entrepreneur as well is that growth difference. Yeah, and the last thing Christian just said was, you know, I can't do it for her. I can't grow for her. I can't do lessons for her. That's a big thing that we've learned this year too. Like when I'm going through something difficult, he wants to be able to swoop in and fix things for me.

I have to figure it out for myself. I have to work through that difficult thing for me so that I get the growth, so I get the benefit from it. If he always swoops in and tries to help me and save me, I'm not growing. I'm not getting the benefit of that. And I'm robbing her of that experience because that's an experience unique to her that she needs to go through. coming in with my ego and trying to be the knight in shining Arbor to save her, it's like, am I? Like she's more than capable.

absolutely probably the more capable than I am to get out of this situation. So it's just my ego being the man wanting to protect that got in the way. And then I realized that, no, no, this we're each on our own journey. We each have our own lessons that we need to take from this whole situation. I can be there to support her, be a shoulder when she needs it. But really the nuts and bolts of it, it has to come from her. have a colleague that is working on his doctorate in psychology. He, was an entrepreneur that exited for a lot of money.

Christian Brim (30:09.792)
in his 40s and decided his next mountain to climb was to become a psychologist. And he and I were talking about this paradigm in psychology and I'm not going to name it and I'm probably going to describe it poorly, but it's something around the triangulation in a marriage with their children. like what I took from his explanation was

that the husband and wife don't address their issue between the two of them, but they triangulate through the child. And he's working his doctoral thesis on applying that to the merit, to the business. So in place of a child, it's the business becomes the thing that the entrepreneur, well, and I guess the spouse,

the business becomes the method of dealing with the problems rather than dealing with each other. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, I think we see the original problem a lot, right? Like in the marriage, working things through the kids as opposed to just going directly to each other. And I think from a business perspective, coming from the two of us, I think we are

pretty tuned in and aware of when the hats are on. Like if we've got a marriage issue, we gotta deal with it in the marriage mindset. If we've got a business issue, we've gotta deal with it there. However, I could see how that could happen. Because you're, especially if you're both involved in the business, because you're both so involved and it's such a big part of your lives, I can see how easily the transference almost happens that

instead of dealing with it over here, I'm going to transfer it over here and work it through the business, my frustration, whatever the situation is that's over here in the marriage, I'm going to work it out in the business as opposed to just going directly to it. can see how very easily that could happen. Yeah, I it all the time with marriages with kids. They use the kids as the kind of almost escape from the marriage. And eventually, over time, they...

Christian Brim (32:35.512)
drift apart completely because they've never addressed the issues in the marriage because it's always been about the kids. And you just replace the kids with a business. can absolutely. Yeah, you can absolutely see how that would happen is that, you know, everything's about the business. Everything's about figuring out what's going on with the business. Will we will, we will figure us out later. But right now the business is the biggest problem, but later never comes. It's always something with the business. There's always another problem that's going to come up with the business. And that if you don't put that intentional effort into focusing on the challenges that are in this marriage,

then they're never going to get addressed. Because we know in business, there's always the next challenge, always. And so if you keep kicking the can down the road, eventually you'll never get to the can. Would you say that if you're having problems with your marriage as an entrepreneur, that's a red flag that something's wrong in the business? wouldn't, red flag is not a word I might use as a, with such certainty.

but I would say that they're so interrelated that you have to look at both. If you're having a problem in your business, you have to also look at your marriage and vice versa. If you're having a problem in your marriage, what's going on in the business? Because chances are you are focusing all your time and attention on the business and you're neglecting your marriage because you're feeling more competent, say, in the business. so you've...

you've redirected your energy into the business because that's where you feel like you're getting the most return on your time investment versus the marriage and vice versa. If the marriage is going really well and there's a problem in the business, they're so interdependent that when there's a problem in one, you need to look at the other. I would say it's maybe not necessarily a red flag in the moment that if there's something in the business that's going on, you need to look at the marriage right away, right now, but it will eventually get there.

Like if that goes to, if, if, if we allow something to linger for so long, eventually it's the other's going to impact. One's going to impact the other for sure. Yeah. I, when I, when I first started working with my business coach and I've been working with him for three years now, probably the first six months we discussed, my marriage, my, my, personal life. and my wife was just like,

Christian Brim (34:57.614)
found that very odd. She's like, well, I thought he was a business coach. And I'm like, yeah, but who I am at work is the same person, one, and two, whatever problems I'm manifesting myself, I'm causing myself, are going to show up both places. Like, it doesn't necessarily show up the same way, but it, you know, and I think

I'm going to speak about male entrepreneurs. think male entrepreneurs have a tendency to not address their own shit because they have a business in which to create a framework that allows them not to address anything. Like they control the employees, the customers, the process, you know, everything, the finances and

It's too easy for someone that has immaturity issues, emotional issues, to not address those and just use the business as an alternate reality. If you have a bias towards avoiding your emotions and you've created this life for yourself where you're the boss, you create everything,

then you're absolutely going to create a situation where you don't have to deal with your emotion. Like you're just going to dive into and focus on the things that keep you from doing the things that you probably know you should, but absolutely do not want to do. Yeah. And, and, my ex my experience was that the things that were limiting me in my, my personal relationships were the same things that were limiting me in the business. And I,

had gotten to the point where I had avoided it to the point of I left my business for two years and went and tried to do something else, but was forced to come back into the business. And only at that point was I really forced to say, okay, what's wrong with me? Like, obviously I'm the limiting factor here. Like the business has reached my capacity. And if I want the business to go further, I've got to grow.

Christian Brim (37:27.576)
Well, it's interesting because I think you said at the beginning of this episode that you had success quickly with your business. And so you weren't forced into the level of growth that many are required to do in order to have success in their business. So your business plateaued at the level that you were at because you hadn't yet done the work that a lot of entrepreneurs are forced into on the front end so they can get to that initial level of success.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest lessons I've learned through entrepreneurship is your business goes as far as you go. If you have a cap to your growth, your business is not going to exceed it. It's just not. And I didn't bargain for that when like, you've talked to her going into entrepreneurship. That never crossed my mind when we made this decision to leave our corporate job and go into entrepreneurship. I really never considered the level of growth required as a human, as a person.

on this journey and how much it actually does, you know, impact the level that your business is going to go to. And so if you're not willing to take that next step and grow as a person and talk about your emotions and and become that self actualized human being, your business is never going to grow to the level that it could possibly grow to. Meredith and Craig, how do people reach you and find out more about working with you? You can find us on Instagram and we're at

Meredith and Craig, so that's pretty simple. Nice. And we also have a website. It's www.roadoflifecoaching.com and we're on Facebook. It's just our names so they can reach us at any of those opportunities. Well, thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for this conversation. It's been insightful. Listeners, if you like what you've heard, please subscribe.

Share the podcast with somebody else if you don't like it. Shoot us a message and let us know what you'd like to hear. Until then, ta ta for now.

Christian Brim (39:30.808)
Thank you for listening to The Chris Project. You are important. Your work is important. Do not give up.