In this week’s episode, Anna Lundberg, your host and former corporate insider turned business mentor, turns her attention to the ‘corporate recovery phase’. Explore why shifting to independent work is often more about unlearning than learning. Discover the five mindset traps that may be keeping you from thriving and gain five valuable tips to embrace autonomy, confidence, and true ownership of your business. Whether you’re a solopreneur, coach, speaker, or consultant, this episode offers insights to help you redefine success and build the business you truly love.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction to the episode and theme

[01:00] The biggest struggle: From employee to business owner

[02:21] Five mindset traps Identified

[09:15] New mindset habits for entrepreneurs

[13:24] Conclusion and reflection

Resources mentioned:

• The Business Accelerator Programme: Learn more about supporting your transition with this tailored programme and join the waitlist OneStepOutside.com/accelerate.
• Connect with Anna Lundberg: Reach out for personalised support on Instagram or LinkedIn.

From employee to entrepreneur

Leaving corporate isn’t just about changing jobs. It’s about changing how you think, how you behave. Because the hardest part isn’t actually setting up the business. That’s almost the easy part. It’s rather unlearning the habits, the beliefs, the identity of being an employee, and before that, a student, a pupil. So a lot of us think that the hardest part of going solo is probably setting up a website, picking a niche, designing, pricing your services. But the real challenge is actually shifting from that employee identity to being a business owner.

Because in corporate, your value is really tied to external validation as it was at school, your title, salary, performance reviews. And as an independent, you actually have to self validate. You’re not doing a job anymore, you’re running a business. And yes, even if you’re a solopreneur, an independent expert, a fractional consultant, call that running a business. Right? The mindset shift holds true. So I wanted to explore what are some of these identity shifts that we struggle with? How does that loss of structure and feedback affect us? And what’s the difference between thinking like an employee and like a business owner? So look, what are those mindset traps that keep people stuck? I suppose. Well, let’s go through a few of them. Let’s have a look at my notes to see how many I’ve got.

I’ve got five. Five is always a good number, isn’t it? So the first one is needing permission. Corporate rewards following processes and asking permission. You know, following the approvals. We used to have all sorts of acronyms and things for, for showing when you needed to escalate something, you know, going through the proper process. And of course from school, and I’ve talked about the good girl syndrome before. We’re taught to perform to a certain level to get the grade, the mark, the gold star from the teacher and arguably as children with parents as well.

That’s just kind of the approach that has been ingrained in us since childhood. As a business owner working for yourself, no one is coming to approve your decisions, I’m sorry to say. So sometimes I say, oh, here is your permission too. But I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, because no one needs to give you permission. You have to be the authority. And gosh, it can go into all sorts of rabbit holes here, but you want to be the authority. That’s the whole point, right? We want to have the freedom. That’s why we left corporate in the first place.

So you want to have that freedom and yet the dark side of that is that you have to make all the decisions yourself. So bad news, but also good news. So that’s the first one needing permission. The second one is overvaluing credentials. And I see you or you hear me listening to this, you know who you are and I was there too. And still now the temptation know in corporate and when you’re writing a CV to send to someone to apply to jobs and so on, it’s all about those, you know, university degrees and your grades and your titles, your achievements, you’ve got to focus on your results. And of course, promotions come from that too. And when we go independent, we do tend to collect lots of credentials.

Now I have clients, colleagues who have PhDs and this, that and the other, qualification and certification. And I so admire it. And my gosh, how could you not be in awe of such academic prowess? And I’ve also kind of collected, you know, little micromasters here and an extra course there and so on. However, clients care about results, not the letters after your name. So by all means, if you are a coach and you feel like the coaching credentials are really important for your sake, for your confidence and integrity and so on, keep investing in that. On the other hand, if you want to be commercially smart, really look at the other side and see, okay, does my client care? Now, they may not know that they should care, in which case you can educate them by all means, but it’s just reminding you to be commercially smart about it and not overvaluing just the fact that you happen to have, or in some cases don’t have the Credentials, but you do have the real case studies and experience to back it up. Number two. So number three is charging for effort instead of outcomes.

And to be honest, this is the whole, you know, return to office mandates and so on.

We get paid for showing up at work, but consultants, coaches, experts get paid for results. Yes. Some of you are still perhaps charging day rates and half day rates and hours and so on. And I’ll have potential clients ask me, okay, how many hours do I get? But that’s not the point. An example I always think of is going to the dentist. You don’t go to the dentist and they say, oh, okay, well, there’s an option for a three hour session or, you know, six hours or nine. You can choose the package that suits you. No, it’s like, my tooth hurts, Please fix it.

And it’s not quite that black and white, perhaps in some areas of work that we do, but actually perhaps it should be right. We’re talking about the. Even if it’s things like confidence and clarity, we can still put a kind of measure on that. So charging for effort instead of outcomes, I think is one of those traps, again, that keeps us stuck. Number four is fear of visibility to some extent, fear of success, actually, if we’re going to extend this, because in corporate, you’re part of a team and you can hide behind the business name and the big celebrities, in my case, and, you know, the big corporate history and legacy and everyone behind you as an independent and, you know, today is not about personal branding, but you are the brand. You are the thing, the one, the one true ruler. No, you are the, the be all and end.

And that can be terrifying for some. I was just seeing a post about Reese Witherspoon that she sold her business for I think $900 million. And that’s, you know, without putting in a single dollar of her own investment. She’s not built, you know this from, from bootstrapping, I suppose. She’s, she’s built a personal brand. Yes. An extreme case of 1 as, as an actress. But, you know, she’s kind of built that whole ecosystem rather than just be the actress or just have the book club or whatever, which is so incredibly impressive and inspiring.

We don’t all have to be famous actresses. We don’t have to have massive followings and we don’t even need to have that on, on LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever. But you do need to be more visible than perhaps you were in your own role as an employee. And by the way, if you’re an employee, as you may have heard me say before, you also need to be more visible than you think. Finally waiting for work to come to you, being there, my friend, especially with all this LinkedIn stuff. You know, I came from a content and marketing background, but even I had to realise that it’s not just about putting out content and waiting for the clients to come to you. Even worst is sort of in that corporate world where we got assigned tasks at least when we were more junior, but even senior, you know, there are certain priorities, unless with a CEO, that have come from on high, but we get assigned those, we translate those goals into actions for our teams and so on, and we get told what meetings to come to and what we need to do. Business owners, not so much, which is great news.

It’s again, the freedom, but it means we have to generate our own demand. And that’s, you know, quite a different beast. So those are the five biggest traps, I suppose. Do let me know if you think of others that you’re experiencing but needing permission over, valuing credentials, charging for effort instead of outcomes, fear of visibility and waiting for work to come to you. So perhaps have a think about this and, you know, have you ever caught yourself in one of these traps, you know, waiting for permission, for example, you just want a mentor or even, you know, if you’re part of a programme or something, you want another peer to tell you, yeah, that’s the right thing to do. Are you just waiting for someone to, to tell you, yes, that’s the right strategy, or yes, you can go bigger than you thought? What is the one corporate habit that you really have had to unlearn and maybe what you still need to unlearn? Okay, that’s sort of the dark side. But let’s rewire our thinking. Let’s think about, okay, what are the new mindset habits and frames and so on that we should be trying to take on board, I suppose, working for ourselves? Well, the first one is to reframe uncertainty as a normal part of the business.

Uncertainty, I know, is seen as a risk in corporate, but really it’s just part of the process. Now, my whole coaching concept to begin with was all based around, around getting out of your comfort zone. Everything you’ve ever wanted is one step outside your comfort zone. And I say that scary and exciting come together and it’s a truly uncertain, crazy world at the moment. And that’s sort of true for everybody, in fact, now. So we just have to think, you know, yeah, change is the only constant that’s how it is. What, what am I in control of? Where can I focus? We in fact can’t even control, let’s say, how many clients I get, how much money I make. What I can control is how I show up and how many outbound messages I send, how many calls I make, how many people I follow up with, how many posts I do, etc, etc.

Right? So uncertainty is a normal part of business. The second one is to make faster decisions. And you know, as a libra, this is one I struggle with. Corporate and academic peeps like myself tend to be overthinking. So we, you know, we’re trained to really analyse and think about the pros and the cons and what’s the ROI and so on. Because, because we need to do that in order to get the buy in of senior leadership. But we kind of need to just trust our instincts and move. There’s no bigger guru who’s going to approve our decisions or not, except yourself, which becomes a bit schizophrenic.

So you need to just go with the decision, do it and then roll with it. Right. Really, really important shift. Easier said than done. Related to that and perhaps making that a little bit easier is to test and learn. So instead of waiting for the right answer, spoiler alert, there isn’t one. No one’s going to give you a syllabus or a blueprint or anything like that.

Clarity is going to come from action, not more research. So if you’re caught in that, oh, I just need to learn a little bit more. No, you need to take action, you need to move forwards. And then again, related to that, I suppose, and I encourage people to do this all the time, especially early on, but actually always is to have a bit of an experimental mindset and certainly again at the beginning, your first offer, sometimes even your whole first business idea isn’t going to work exactly as you think will, probably definitely won’t. Your first offer price marketing strategy is definitely not going to be perfect. So if it works in any kind of imperfect form, you’re already way ahead of the curve, completely normal. It’s about tweaking. And my new thing is it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Right? It’s just a matter of when and how this is going to work. It’s going to work. It just might not work exactly as you thought it would when you sat there painting this idealistic picture. And then finally, really important, detaching your self worth from business outcomes just because a proposal didn’t land doesn’t mean you’re bad at this. Okay? First of all, it means you’re learning. But also, there’s so many reasons why a client will ghost you, not reply to you. Those are probably the same things where say no to you, say maybe later, budgets being cut, you know, there’s all sorts of things in their personal life, professional, political, global, tectonic plates shifting. They have nothing to do with how good you are at your work, let alone, my goodness, how wonderful and, and worthwhile you are as a human being.

So yes, we are personal brand and yes, it’s all about us, but the business outcomes, whether or not someone says yes to my programme, even when my programme is yes, working with me does not detract from me being a nice person. Okay, so if someone says no, you just need to go, right, okay, let’s collect no’s as I think Rich Lippman, a big sort of coaching figure, says, you know, you’ve got to get to the other side of the nose. That’s where you get the yes. If you haven’t had any no’s, it means you’re not making enough proposals to begin with. Okay? So really think about those. So again, uncertainty, totally normal. Try to make faster decisions. You don’t need to put a perfect PowerPoint deck together, putting the business case forwards.

Just go with it. If you think, yep, this sounds like it could work, let’s try it. Test and learn. Clarity comes from action. Be experimental. It’s not going to be perfect at the start. That’s okay. And above all, detach your self worth from whether or not clients are coming or not, or paying or not, and so on.

There’s so many things that are at stake and at play, rather there. Okay, so really, again, the point I’m making is that, yes, of course there are challenges with understanding the tech and getting to terms with coming to terms with, you know, websites and okay, what’s the right way to post on LinkedIn, what’s my strategy, what’s the platform, how should I pitch this, what’s the pricing and so on, that’s totally figureoutable, as Marie Forlea, I think called her book. And the harder thing is unlearning how to be an employee. And that in fact isn’t just these sort of business strategies in day to day, but it’s really in building a business that’s going to work for you, that’s going to give you the life and lifestyle you wanted. Because as much as I used to at least talk about escaping the nine to five. If you bring those habits with you, you are just going to recreate yourself a lonelier, harder version of a job. And then you might as well go to a normal job in a 9 to 5. You have my permission to do that.

Okay, so we need to unlearn how to be an employee, which also makes us unemployable to some extent, but I think also arguably makes us even more employable. But that’s another topic for another day. But really, the faster you can shift your thinking, your habits, your behaviour is, the faster you’re going to be able to build something that truly works for you. Like I said. Okay, so again, think about what’s one corporate habit that you’re unlearning right now? If you want to ping it over to me on Instagram, Anna SE Lundberg or wherever you’re listening to this, if you’re able to comment on that platform, please do. You can always send me an email as well. Podcastonestepoutside.com and of course, if you’re in this transition and want my support, then you hopefully know I am. There’ll be a little outro, I’m sure, at the end of this episode and I’d love to chat with you.

So do get in touch, let me know how you’re experiencing this transition, whether you’re in the early days or later. You know, it was 12 years since I left, so believe me, it can take time to unlearn some of those habits. But really look forward to hearing your insights and I will see you next week. Bye for now.

All right, so if any of this resonates and you’re ready to build a business that truly works for you, without the overwhelm, without the hustle, all that constant second guessing, then I’d love for you to join us in the business accelerator. I’m bringing together a small group of like minded experts, coaches, consultants, solopreneurs who want that personalised support, clear action step and above all, real accountability. If you want to get in early, then head on over to onestepoutside.com/accelerate to register your interest or join the waitlist. Let’s create the business and the life that you have always wanted. Can’t wait to see you inside.

WORK WITH ANNA

Let us help you design a business and a life that gives you freedom from the 9 to 5. There are several options for how you can work with us. Choose the programme that’s right for you.

The Outsiders Business Accelerator

A mastermind for service-based business owners, freelancers and online entrepreneurs who are ready to achieve success on their own terms. onestepoutside.com/accelerate

The Outsiders Business Academy

A self-paced course for you to work through in your own time, to learn – and implement – the foundations of building a profitable business that lets you escape the 9 to 5. onestepoutside.com/course

1:1 Coaching & Mentoring

If you’re looking for one-to-one support to help you achieve your specific life and business goals, Anna has a limited number of spots for individual coaching and mentoring. onestepoutside.com/coaching