When You Feel Ashamed Of Your Goals
A few weeks ago, in my 6 Month Business Check In, I shared a new goal that had come up from the planning process: to start making six figures and scale from next year. What’s interesting, though, is just how hard it is for me to say that out loud. Even writing it just now made me shudder a little bit and, when I first came to talk about the goal publicly my excitement was replaced with a different emotion: shame. A feeling that made me stop and think “oh ok, this is interesting”, and I wanted to unpack some of the whys and wherefores here.
I think deep down I have really known that to grow the business is a dream for me. It’s the thing that all the people I look up to have in common, it’s the topic that always draws me to read or listen too something. But for a long time I’ve played it down, not really looking it in the eye or palming it off with a “some day”.
Ordinarily a post like this would talk about imposter syndrome being the root cause, but for me that doesn’t ring true. When I look back, it wasn’t a hand-wringing feeling of wanting it but not thinking I was good enough; I could see that it was quite possible with some shimmies and new products and hard work. No, for me, I was worried that people would judge me, dislike me even, for wanting what I wanted.
In the loud and brash areas of the self-employed internet, striving for six figures is the norm with the assumption being that that’s what everyone wants and if it’s not, what are they even doing here? There has been, in the last year or so, an emergence of a welcome alternative view – that you can have a business that is fulfilling and provides the lifestyle you want to live without seeking perpetual growth. It was a rhetoric that said all dreams are valid.
However, I’ve recently felt the fingers of tribalism take hold in this alternative. That the six-figure crowd are more and more becoming an enemy of sorts, an ‘other’ to posit ourselves against; “I’m not like that, my only ambition is to be happy” has become a moral standpoint that insinuates that any other dream is inherently crass or less evolved. It has become a competition, almost – no longer are we comparing bank balances but who is the most visibly self-actualised.
reward; I advocate for finding a system of achieving and working that feels right for you, rather than the one you feel you should do. But I realised that I was doing what I thought I ‘should do’ according to the rules of the tribe I was in – I should be staying small and only earning what was necessary for my fulfilment, I shouldn’t be pushing for more. I worried what people would think of me: perhaps that I’d sold out, that I was ‘just like those others’, that I was a hypocrite and not soulful at all.
For the early part of my career, I wore aversion to money as a badge of honour. I gleefully told bosses “I’m not motivated by money” and looked down on the colleagues who chased it. It’s something I think we are, as women and as creatives, conditioned to believe is somehow immoral or the black to the white of decency. We worship at the altar of ‘money can’t buy you happiness’ believing that the two are mutually exclusive. No, you can’t buy happiness, but you can buy the things that help you get there – a space of your own when you’re worn down by your neighbours, freedom from financial worry, travel, food, art supplies.
This is the basis of my six figure dream. It’s not just because I want to see the zeros in my bank account. It’s because I worked out that that figure was the one that would help me live a more fulfilling life – scaling will help me to worry less about taking time off because I can outsource more. It’s not about ‘being motivated by money’ at all; it’s being motivated by the life you want but being realistic about what that looks like financially. It’s accepting that money is an integral part of your goals and dreams and that you’re not somehow morally corrupt to embrace that.
It is part of being a human that we want to fit in with our tribe, and that means there will be times that we feel ashamed of our desires. Maybe you feel shame because your hobby isn’t Instagrammable, or because you love city life but everyone around you dreams of a country cottage. Maybe you feel shame because you’ve never wanted to earn six-figures!
Yes you can quietly work away at that shameful dream in secret, but secrecy festers and the more you hide it the more you will convince yourself that it’s wrong. I’m not saying you need a big public announcement, but taking action on a dream requires openness, commitment and truth, and it’s hard to do that when you’re keeping it locked away in the proverbial attic. What’s the worst that can happen if you start to truly strive toward your goal? For me, I thought that I’d be shunned and kicked out of the tribe, but really most people didn’t care (because we’re all too worried about our own position in the tribe to worry about someone else’s).
I’m trying to wrap this up into a neat conclusion, but I don’t know if I have one. I’d love to promise you that you won’t lose friends over owning your dream, but I can’t. I’d love to promise that ‘if you dream it you can do it’ and you’ll never have any problems again, but I can’t. But I can say that living and working towards you what you truthfully want is a more freeing existence than the life under the weight of the shame. And if you just lift up the corner of it, you’ll realise that your mind has being playing tricks on you: it’s not a heavy blanket of chainmail but a thin summer duvet. You can shrug it off and it will barely make a sound as it hits the floor; it’s unlikely that anyone will notice.
