144. Scaling Is an Inside Job (CEO Summer School)
Running a business is like being on an upward spiral - you're continually expanding as your business expands, but the spiral isn't always smooth. You bump up against internal limits and ceilings, often of your own creation. When you understand that scaling is an inside job, you develop the toolkit to move beyond them.
Truth number four in the CEO Summer School series reveals that your business growth and all those outward markers of success start inside of you. This means your self-knowledge, intentional mindsets, and emotional capacity must be consistently developed as you expand as a business owner. Without awareness of your current beliefs and how they drive your actions - or sometimes inactions - you're stuck in default mode, unable to shift the stories that either propel you forward or keep you stuck.
This episode breaks down why personal development is business development, how to spot and dissolve limiting beliefs, and the practical ways to increase your emotional capacity for growth. You'll discover how to address root issues instead of surface-level symptoms, understand why self-awareness without self-blame is crucial, and learn to recognize when your self-concept needs an upgrade to match your business expansion.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why the you of today can't run the business of tomorrow without internal upgrades.
How to identify when you're solving surface problems instead of root causes.
The connection between emotional maturity and sustainable business growth.
What happens when your self-concept doesn't expand with your business.
Why revisiting old themes in new ways signals growth, not a setback.
How self-awareness creates the foundation for lasting business transformation.
The three-prong approach of mind, body, and strategy for sustainable scaling.
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142. Time Management: The First Domino of Success (CEO Summer School)
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, Designer, you're listening to episode 144, and it's time to share truth number four in the CEO Summer School series. What I've come to know as absolutely true is that an essential part of growing a thriving, sustainable interior design business is directly tied to you and your own path of personal development. Growth in the business, whether that's growing your revenue, your team, a product line, or even a physical footprint that's expanding in the form of a showroom or studio. Those visible signs of expansion, they start with your own internal evolution.
The opposite is true, too. If you feel like you're not fulfilling your goals or your potential, it's an inside job that needs to be addressed in order to create the outward version of success. In today's episode, we're covering self-awareness, identity upgrades, addressing the root issues that block your next level up, and so much more.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, Designer, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad to be here with you. I'm sitting down. It's a beautiful, sunny day here, and I'm coming off quite a long stretch here of being away. I was in Utah for a lacrosse tournament with my son, which was amazing. That is just such a beautiful state. And came back, and my uncle and my one and only cousin were visiting, so we had a great time at the lake. And now I'm getting my head back in the podcast, and I'm excited to record this episode for you.
Today, what I'm going to be doing is sharing the fourth truth in the What I Know For Sure CEO Summer School series. This one is all about your internal growth, your self-knowledge, and what you do with this awareness. It's directly related to what you're able to create in your interior design business and your personal life as well.
As a reminder, you can still sign up for CEO Summer School. It's free to sign up, and when you do, you get these really great journal prompts. And I'm going to toot my own horn here, but I hear it from clients too, I ask really good questions. And so these questions are aimed at helping you take what you hear here on the podcast, that particular truth, and then apply it to your unique business and take action so that you're doing something with this information, not just consuming it. You can go to desicreswell.com/resources and there'll be a link to CEO Summer School there.
And if you're loving the series, please take a second and leave a rating and review, and maybe even share it with another designer who would benefit from hearing these lessons. It really only takes a minute, and it makes a big difference in how others are able to find the show. Plus, it just brings a huge smile to my face.
Let's get going with truth number four now that we've got those logistics out of the way. And truth number four has been validated time and time again for me, both in my own growth and my own businesses that I've had throughout the years. I've also seen it in the design firms that my clients lead. This truth impacts your results, how great you can feel in your business, how you make decisions. If you're stuck at what feels like a plateau, or you're in one of those cycles of I know what I need to do, but I can't seem to get myself to do it. And it's also so necessary when you need to pivot in your business because what was working isn't working anymore, or conditions have changed, and you're ready to step out of whatever that stagnant spot is.
Truth number four is: scaling is an inside job.
Inside job, meaning that your business growth and all the results and outward markers that make up success for you, it starts inside. It starts inside of you with self-knowledge, intentional mindsets, and increasing your emotional capacity. Now, none of these things are outside of you. They are internal states of being. They must be consistently developed, and they'll continue to develop over the years as you expand as a business owner, just like your skill set as a designer would.
All of us are moving about our days, leading our businesses with mental narratives. And without awareness of your current beliefs and how they drive your actions or sometimes inactions, you're going to be in a default setting. You have to be able to spot and understand and dissolve those beliefs if they're not serving you, and be able to shift them so that you can use the story you're telling yourself to move you closer to the business you want to have. And of course, a big piece of this too is being able to increasingly tolerate emotional discomfort from going beyond your current set points. Because you'll always just stay where you're at if you don't give yourself that internal nudge and see what's in the way of you moving beyond it.
You'll always default to doing what you've always done and staying safe because that is what the brain likes to do. Growth requires change, so that's just the opposite of what I just said, which was defaulting to doing what you've always done. And you have to be aware of the thoughts, feelings, and actions that are driving your results in order to first create a change and understand what even created those results in the first place.
Scaling, which is just growing your business beyond its current iteration, we'll say, is always going to require you, as the person running the business, to uplevel first. The you of today is not the person who can have the ability to run the business of tomorrow if it's different than what you have right now. So your beliefs, your feeling states that are predominant, and your actions are going to need to shift.
If you think about this, just reflecting on your journey as a business owner over the years, you'll see that this is true. When you first started your business, that internal scaling or upgrade, that had to look like having the courage to charge for your services. But maybe you're on year 10 now and you're a leader of the company that you have, and you have to have the courage to fire a team member who isn't performing. Or maybe it's having the courage to increase your firm's visibility to become known for who you are and what you do.
Those are different types of courage, same emotion, but the ability to tolerate the discomfort of stepping into the unknown or being more seen, more vulnerable, that has to go alongside your ability to increase your emotional capacity. So it's always growing. Do you need to set goals, identify strategies, take actions, hire people to support you? Absolutely. You will do those things. Sitting with your journal and developing yourself as a person on its own won't make it all happen, but it's an essential component.
Personal development is business development. Without the evolution of you as the person, the business really can't grow to its full potential. And if you've ever known what to do, but you haven't been able to get yourself to do it, maybe you feel like you're getting in your own way, maybe you're consistent for a while, but then you take a step back, or you've even lost track of what you're building and why.
This is a really important truth to remember. That truth of scaling is an inside job. You might want to take a step back and say, I'm going to stop looking for an external thing that's going to swoop in and save me, and actually look inward and see how I'm going to save myself.
This even ties into making sure that you're solving the right problems in your business and putting your time and attention and resources towards solving for the root cause, not something that's very surface level, and you're always going to be sticking band-aids on.
Let me give you an example of this. So maybe you, as the business owner, are seeing that you're overcapacity. You're working more than you want to be working. And your initial thought is, well, I need to hire more people. But if you actually stop and look at this, it's not that you need an additional employee. What's really going on is that you need to stop people-pleasing the ones that you have and hold them accountable to their job description. You have to learn how to hold yourself in the discomfort of having those difficult conversations. You have to build the emotional capacity of saying what you need to say, and of course, doing it in a respectful way, but also letting others feel the way they're going to feel.
There is a strategy of how you set clear expectations and consequences in these accountability conversations, but then if you don't believe that you can do it and you don't have the ability to lead yourself through the discomfort, you will avoid having that talk. Or if you do end up having it, you'll do it probably in an awkward or indirect way that doesn't serve you or the employee.
When you focus on the internal work, your mindset and emotional resilience, alongside the tactical and practical next steps to reach your goals, everything becomes easier. Not necessarily easy, but more aligned and more effective. And it feels a lot better, too.
Just think about when you self-sabotage, you procrastinate, you shrink to fit into a version of you that is ready to be retired. That is very exhausting. If you want to really clear a path forward for yourself, you have to address what's going on underneath the surface. It can be uncomfortable work to look inward and look in the mirror, but it's worth it every time because of what you're able to create on the other side and who you become by moving through that internal upgrade. Because then that new version of you is the one leading the business, and it's the one that carries you forward until it's time for another upgrade.
It's one thing to have a great idea or a bold vision that you want to bring into the world. And it's an entirely different thing to have the mindset necessary to actually be able to do it and also sustain the emotional bandwidth required to lead a team and be more visible, make investments, and take action on these high-leverage decisions that you will need to be able to do as a business owner.
What you'll also see is an increasing level of confidence in holding yourself with greater levels of responsibility and success throughout the years. That's where some of that self-sabotage or shrinking back to what was can come into play, right? If we haven't caught up to where it is that we are or where we're going, then we tend to come back to what was the status quo. Because having greater levels of financial responsibility, risk, team management, all of that, it can be a lot on your system. That's where you have to ground yourself as the business owner.
The internal scaling we're talking about today is always going to start with self-knowledge and self-awareness. It's how you discover the, these are in quotes, "You are here" dot that is you. Like, if you look at the map and you see the little red dot, that is self-awareness in this case.
Often, when we think about business growth, we want to jump to the really big plans, kind of like I talked about in truth number three, which was episode 142 with planning and time management. What we do is we want to skip over the foundations and the simple practices because we hang our hat on bigger is better. Except the simple practices and the foundations, those are the exact things that support you sustainably and consistently, and it's going to help you get what you want faster, even though it doesn't seem like it.
What we think or believe, what you're thinking or believing right now, is creating an emotion for you. And when we have an emotion, I consider that fuel. It fuels our actions or inactions. And what you do or don't do is going to create results. So that means whatever narratives and emotional states are predominant for you right now, that's creating your current results.
The results you have today in your business are coming from an old operating system. And I'm not saying old as in all of it's bad or outdated, but it's basically the automatic pathway of beliefs and feelings that have just been dominating your existence. Some of these beliefs and feelings are really positive, and they're serving you, and you want to keep them, and you want to continue to lean on them. But some of them are not, or some of them were really great for the time being, but they no longer align with where you're going.
And the thing is with these operating systems, essentially our brains, the thoughts and beliefs that we are generating throughout the day are often just so automatic that we don't even realize they're happening or think to question what it is that's running through our mind. It's really important to remember that thoughts are optional, and what your brain offers up by default is not the truth. You get to decide what the truth is for you, and you want to make sure that those truths align with what you want to create.
So if you want to create emotional states and results that are different from what you're experiencing right now, you're going to have to shift your thinking and feeling patterns. You're shifting the internal computer of your brain. And you can only do that if you know what you're currently working with, which requires self-awareness. When you can take stock of what is with curiosity, compassion, and understanding, you have the option then to take radical responsibility for what's in front of you.
You can name it, whether that is, "Oh, I've been believing this about myself or what I can do, or about the people I work with." Or you can name the current results that you have or get crystal clear on, "Yeah, I'm not doing what I say I want to be doing, and I know those things are the things that are going to get me where I want to go." Name it for yourself and take responsibility without judgment or regret, but plain honesty.
This can be very much at the macro level, like the current revenue you have in the business, or a project pipeline you've established, or maybe lack of. But also on the micro level, like, how did this project get off track this week? When did that misunderstanding happen? Hmm. It was in that conversation we had. I used these words because I was maybe feeling this way, or avoidant in my communication style. Maybe that's how it got off track. Okay, I can see that's what I did, and now what am I going to do about it?
If you're self-aware without self-blaming, you can see what your part is and then can choose to empower yourself to move forward in whatever way is necessary without needing to blame yourself, first of all, because that's not helpful. You'll just feel shame and feel bad and want to hide and not do anything to change the situation. Or sometimes we end up blaming others. And that's not helpful either. Yes, maybe someone did something that created an issue, but using that energy to loop on how it's all someone else's fault and you didn't have any part is really wasted energy, and it focuses on the problem. It perpetuates the problem instead of bringing your attention back to the solution.
I get that can be hard to hear, and this goes very much back to this truth of scaling is an inside job. Running a business, leading the complex relationships that you have with clients, that requires you to have a high level of emotional maturity and emotional adulthood, meaning you take responsibility for your own emotions.
Before we move on, I want to make sure that I'm clear with you that radical responsibility works for what's going well, too. Those are the things that you're doing that work and that you want to leverage so that those lessons come with you into that next level of scaling. So go ahead and celebrate what's been amazing and supportive, and really influential in your success. And notice where you're holding yourself back, recycling old patterns, reacting out of habit. It's always going to be both. There's going to be things that we can take responsibility for that are so supportive and set ourselves up for success, and you go, hey, thanks, past me. But then there's also going to be those things that weren't so great, and we can take responsibility for those too, because there's so many lessons in both.
From this position of understanding yourself, you can then look at the new results and outcomes, and experiences you want to create. You can use this to start to see who you will need to become in the process of creating your future, and begin to close the gap. That next-level version of you probably has some of the same behaviors, habits, routines that you have now, and some will be different. And that becomes your job, is to scale within to close that gap.
It's an ever-evolving process, and you're going to continue to go through this throughout your career and also in your life if you want to expand beyond what you currently have and currently experience. I like to think of this as an upward spiral where you're continually expanding as your business expands. The spiral just continues to go and evolve and get bigger and bigger when you prioritize this internal work as an important piece of running your business.
The spiral is not always smooth. I can tell you that. You will bump up against internal limits and ceilings. And these types of limits and ceilings are often of our own creation. But when you know that scaling's an inside job, you've developed the toolkit to help move beyond them.
So some of these bumps along the way could look like you have created the vision you wanted to create, and now it's just time for a new vision, and maybe you need to push yourself to think bigger. Could also be that strategies that used to work no longer do, and you need to pivot the way that you are thinking about your business or your services. Or maybe it's that things that you once loved are no longer lighting you up, and you're at a point where it's time to make some new decisions that serve where you're going to go next, which takes a whole lot of bravery.
The other thing that's going to happen on this upward spiral is that you will end up revisiting themes. Those are the beliefs that you work through, but also then they come back. And it's often more subtle, and maybe we'll even call it sneaky or sophisticated when they show up.
I actually had a major aha during some self-coaching recently, where I saw perfectionism was showing up in a new way when I was coaching myself on some of the podcast pieces. And it's interesting, recently I've been starting to now also notice some other pieces of perfectionism showing up in areas I hadn't seen it before. And this is something I've done so much work on and have expanded on in so many different ways, and yet, here it is again.
And it's not something to be frustrated about. It's not something to say, "Gosh, you should be over this with," right? There's that self-harm. It's expected. And when they circle back, all that's going to happen, and it's happening for me, is to be invited to explore those themes with more depth and understanding of yourself and really develop the capacity to move beyond them. These moments where you say to yourself, "Ugh, this again," don't have to be a setback, but rather your next point of growth, that next spiral up, but only if you're paying attention to yourself.
I say this so that you know that even if you've been in business for a long time, you've been practicing mindset, you've been building your emotional resilience, there will be points when you need to go back in order to move forward. Maybe that is for you, fine-tuning time management practices, or building stronger communication skills, or even giving yourself more margin for high-level thinking, increasing your levels of self-trust, or trusting others. That can be a big one. Or relying on new tools or support systems, maybe even that people-pleasing is showing up for you, and it's a different type of relationship, or you're doing it in a new way. All of those fine-tuning moments can require tactics, but they first require you to be aware of what's going on. And it's going back to the root issue that's going to actually solve for the problem. So that way you don't stay stuck.
It's kind of like having a broken arm, but you refuse to go get an X-ray. And you don't ever know if the arm's actually broken, you don't know what part of the bone is broken, or if it's just fractured, and what the treatment actually is. That is why you have to do the inside work. Looking inward and viewing scaling as an internal process allows you to see what actually needs to be addressed and what actually needs to be solved for.
And sometimes that is your self-concept or your identity. That's the last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up this episode. Your self-concept is essentially how you see yourself and what you believe about yourself, about your ability to succeed, about who you are as a person, about who you are in this world. Your self-concept could be what you unconsciously believe and have never questioned. It's a story you've written about you as a person, and you aren't aware that it's there. It could also be something that you've decided to believe on purpose right now. Because remember, thoughts are optional. You get to choose what you believe.
You might have looked ahead and said, "The business that I want to have, the person, the type of person that runs that business, this is what they believe about themselves, and that's what I'm going to start believing about me and looking for evidence of how that's true." Not only is the evolution of your self-concept important so that you can start to create those new results, it's also how you create congruency in your business and help it feel sustainable. Because what happens is when your self-concept does not expand with the business, it'll feel like this internal tug of war. It's kind of like this heavy anchor that you drag around, or this disconnect between how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself.
You've probably experienced this at some point where someone is just gushing over your work, or they see what you're doing on Instagram and they're reflecting back what they believe about your success, and you notice, "Hmm, that feels a little off. I don't see myself that way." And I hear this a lot where the impostor syndrome is there, where they are worried, they can't keep it up. There's doubt or not a lot of trust in themselves and what they can do in the future.
These are all classic examples of when the self-concept has not entirely caught up with or isn't remaining consistent with the current business. And it really does feel heavy, and it's going to hold you back at a certain point. So you want to make sure this is something that you look at and address.
I'm sure that when you look back at when you first started your business and what you believed about yourself and what you believed was available to you, it's probably pretty different than where you are right now and what you believe about yourself as a designer and a business owner.
If your business has grown, I am sure that if you were to sit down and take a look at those two questions, "What did I believe then and what do I believe now?" The answers will be different. And that's great. That means you have scaled within and created an outward expansion or an upward spiral.
We know this is true because if you had continued to believe what you believed at the start of your business, you wouldn't be where you are today. The other possibility maybe is that you really pushed against those beliefs and kind of bulldozed yourself into acting as if you were that person or version of you without doing the internal work. But that probably put your nervous system through the wringer, and that does catch up with you.
So doing that internal scaling, developing yourself as a person, is how you can grow and have it feel sustainable and not something like you're tightly losing a grip on anytime something goes wrong, or where you're always anxious and operating past your edge of capacity. This is all such important work, and while sometimes it doesn't look like, outwardly, you're being super productive, it's one of the most productive things you can do to ease your path towards getting more of what you want.
That is what I have for you today. That is truth number four. What I know for sure is that scaling is an inside job. You, as the CEO, you are the most important asset. This was true when you started your business, and it's true now. Investing in yourself through cultivating your ability to be self-aware and shift your mindset, and build emotional resilience right alongside employing strategies and tools for scaling, that is priceless.
And it's why I bring this three-prong approach of mind, body, and strategy to every client I work with. It's what makes the coaching I do so impactful, so deep, and so holistic. Some of my clients will need more strategy, and some of them need more mindset, or some of them need more of the emotional work, and it's really customized to them. But you have to have all three of these pieces in place if you want to do the scaling work and have it be sustainable.
If this is something that you want to do together, if you want to do the work of scaling within and have that be such a supportive foundation for every action you take to build your business, make sure you're joining the waitlist for private coaching. By joining the waitlist, you're going to get priority over everyone else when a one-on-one spot becomes available. You can go to desicreswell.com/coaching to learn about the Design to Thrive coaching partnerships and also read about my mind, body, strategy methodology, and add your name to the waitlist.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode that's going to piggyback off this one. Mindset and emotional regulation is key to changing behaviors and patterns, and effective and long-lasting behavior change is going to require you to be kind to yourself. I alluded to that in this episode, but I want to really call it out in the next episode, where we're going to talk about compassion-forward change. And it truly is a key missing ingredient to high performers and designers with big goals.
Self-compassion allows you to see those limits that we talked about in this episode. And instead of blaming and judging yourself into changing, which frankly leads to you hiding from yourself and not changing nearly as much, you can use the practice of self-kindness to create change. It's how you actually move forward by being nice to yourself. Doesn't that sound quite nice? We're going to talk about it more. It's not going to mean that you let yourself off the hook, that you become lazy. Trust me on this one.
Make sure you're subscribed and following the show so you don't miss the next episode. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
The opposite is true, too. If you feel like you're not fulfilling your goals or your potential, it's an inside job that needs to be addressed in order to create the outward version of success. In today's episode, we're covering self-awareness, identity upgrades, addressing the root issues that block your next level up, and so much more.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, Designer, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad to be here with you. I'm sitting down. It's a beautiful, sunny day here, and I'm coming off quite a long stretch here of being away. I was in Utah for a lacrosse tournament with my son, which was amazing. That is just such a beautiful state. And came back, and my uncle and my one and only cousin were visiting, so we had a great time at the lake. And now I'm getting my head back in the podcast, and I'm excited to record this episode for you.
Today, what I'm going to be doing is sharing the fourth truth in the What I Know For Sure CEO Summer School series. This one is all about your internal growth, your self-knowledge, and what you do with this awareness. It's directly related to what you're able to create in your interior design business and your personal life as well.
As a reminder, you can still sign up for CEO Summer School. It's free to sign up, and when you do, you get these really great journal prompts. And I'm going to toot my own horn here, but I hear it from clients too, I ask really good questions. And so these questions are aimed at helping you take what you hear here on the podcast, that particular truth, and then apply it to your unique business and take action so that you're doing something with this information, not just consuming it. You can go to desicreswell.com/resources and there'll be a link to CEO Summer School there.
And if you're loving the series, please take a second and leave a rating and review, and maybe even share it with another designer who would benefit from hearing these lessons. It really only takes a minute, and it makes a big difference in how others are able to find the show. Plus, it just brings a huge smile to my face.
Let's get going with truth number four now that we've got those logistics out of the way. And truth number four has been validated time and time again for me, both in my own growth and my own businesses that I've had throughout the years. I've also seen it in the design firms that my clients lead. This truth impacts your results, how great you can feel in your business, how you make decisions. If you're stuck at what feels like a plateau, or you're in one of those cycles of I know what I need to do, but I can't seem to get myself to do it. And it's also so necessary when you need to pivot in your business because what was working isn't working anymore, or conditions have changed, and you're ready to step out of whatever that stagnant spot is.
Truth number four is: scaling is an inside job.
Inside job, meaning that your business growth and all the results and outward markers that make up success for you, it starts inside. It starts inside of you with self-knowledge, intentional mindsets, and increasing your emotional capacity. Now, none of these things are outside of you. They are internal states of being. They must be consistently developed, and they'll continue to develop over the years as you expand as a business owner, just like your skill set as a designer would.
All of us are moving about our days, leading our businesses with mental narratives. And without awareness of your current beliefs and how they drive your actions or sometimes inactions, you're going to be in a default setting. You have to be able to spot and understand and dissolve those beliefs if they're not serving you, and be able to shift them so that you can use the story you're telling yourself to move you closer to the business you want to have. And of course, a big piece of this too is being able to increasingly tolerate emotional discomfort from going beyond your current set points. Because you'll always just stay where you're at if you don't give yourself that internal nudge and see what's in the way of you moving beyond it.
You'll always default to doing what you've always done and staying safe because that is what the brain likes to do. Growth requires change, so that's just the opposite of what I just said, which was defaulting to doing what you've always done. And you have to be aware of the thoughts, feelings, and actions that are driving your results in order to first create a change and understand what even created those results in the first place.
Scaling, which is just growing your business beyond its current iteration, we'll say, is always going to require you, as the person running the business, to uplevel first. The you of today is not the person who can have the ability to run the business of tomorrow if it's different than what you have right now. So your beliefs, your feeling states that are predominant, and your actions are going to need to shift.
If you think about this, just reflecting on your journey as a business owner over the years, you'll see that this is true. When you first started your business, that internal scaling or upgrade, that had to look like having the courage to charge for your services. But maybe you're on year 10 now and you're a leader of the company that you have, and you have to have the courage to fire a team member who isn't performing. Or maybe it's having the courage to increase your firm's visibility to become known for who you are and what you do.
Those are different types of courage, same emotion, but the ability to tolerate the discomfort of stepping into the unknown or being more seen, more vulnerable, that has to go alongside your ability to increase your emotional capacity. So it's always growing. Do you need to set goals, identify strategies, take actions, hire people to support you? Absolutely. You will do those things. Sitting with your journal and developing yourself as a person on its own won't make it all happen, but it's an essential component.
Personal development is business development. Without the evolution of you as the person, the business really can't grow to its full potential. And if you've ever known what to do, but you haven't been able to get yourself to do it, maybe you feel like you're getting in your own way, maybe you're consistent for a while, but then you take a step back, or you've even lost track of what you're building and why.
This is a really important truth to remember. That truth of scaling is an inside job. You might want to take a step back and say, I'm going to stop looking for an external thing that's going to swoop in and save me, and actually look inward and see how I'm going to save myself.
This even ties into making sure that you're solving the right problems in your business and putting your time and attention and resources towards solving for the root cause, not something that's very surface level, and you're always going to be sticking band-aids on.
Let me give you an example of this. So maybe you, as the business owner, are seeing that you're overcapacity. You're working more than you want to be working. And your initial thought is, well, I need to hire more people. But if you actually stop and look at this, it's not that you need an additional employee. What's really going on is that you need to stop people-pleasing the ones that you have and hold them accountable to their job description. You have to learn how to hold yourself in the discomfort of having those difficult conversations. You have to build the emotional capacity of saying what you need to say, and of course, doing it in a respectful way, but also letting others feel the way they're going to feel.
There is a strategy of how you set clear expectations and consequences in these accountability conversations, but then if you don't believe that you can do it and you don't have the ability to lead yourself through the discomfort, you will avoid having that talk. Or if you do end up having it, you'll do it probably in an awkward or indirect way that doesn't serve you or the employee.
When you focus on the internal work, your mindset and emotional resilience, alongside the tactical and practical next steps to reach your goals, everything becomes easier. Not necessarily easy, but more aligned and more effective. And it feels a lot better, too.
Just think about when you self-sabotage, you procrastinate, you shrink to fit into a version of you that is ready to be retired. That is very exhausting. If you want to really clear a path forward for yourself, you have to address what's going on underneath the surface. It can be uncomfortable work to look inward and look in the mirror, but it's worth it every time because of what you're able to create on the other side and who you become by moving through that internal upgrade. Because then that new version of you is the one leading the business, and it's the one that carries you forward until it's time for another upgrade.
It's one thing to have a great idea or a bold vision that you want to bring into the world. And it's an entirely different thing to have the mindset necessary to actually be able to do it and also sustain the emotional bandwidth required to lead a team and be more visible, make investments, and take action on these high-leverage decisions that you will need to be able to do as a business owner.
What you'll also see is an increasing level of confidence in holding yourself with greater levels of responsibility and success throughout the years. That's where some of that self-sabotage or shrinking back to what was can come into play, right? If we haven't caught up to where it is that we are or where we're going, then we tend to come back to what was the status quo. Because having greater levels of financial responsibility, risk, team management, all of that, it can be a lot on your system. That's where you have to ground yourself as the business owner.
The internal scaling we're talking about today is always going to start with self-knowledge and self-awareness. It's how you discover the, these are in quotes, "You are here" dot that is you. Like, if you look at the map and you see the little red dot, that is self-awareness in this case.
Often, when we think about business growth, we want to jump to the really big plans, kind of like I talked about in truth number three, which was episode 142 with planning and time management. What we do is we want to skip over the foundations and the simple practices because we hang our hat on bigger is better. Except the simple practices and the foundations, those are the exact things that support you sustainably and consistently, and it's going to help you get what you want faster, even though it doesn't seem like it.
What we think or believe, what you're thinking or believing right now, is creating an emotion for you. And when we have an emotion, I consider that fuel. It fuels our actions or inactions. And what you do or don't do is going to create results. So that means whatever narratives and emotional states are predominant for you right now, that's creating your current results.
The results you have today in your business are coming from an old operating system. And I'm not saying old as in all of it's bad or outdated, but it's basically the automatic pathway of beliefs and feelings that have just been dominating your existence. Some of these beliefs and feelings are really positive, and they're serving you, and you want to keep them, and you want to continue to lean on them. But some of them are not, or some of them were really great for the time being, but they no longer align with where you're going.
And the thing is with these operating systems, essentially our brains, the thoughts and beliefs that we are generating throughout the day are often just so automatic that we don't even realize they're happening or think to question what it is that's running through our mind. It's really important to remember that thoughts are optional, and what your brain offers up by default is not the truth. You get to decide what the truth is for you, and you want to make sure that those truths align with what you want to create.
So if you want to create emotional states and results that are different from what you're experiencing right now, you're going to have to shift your thinking and feeling patterns. You're shifting the internal computer of your brain. And you can only do that if you know what you're currently working with, which requires self-awareness. When you can take stock of what is with curiosity, compassion, and understanding, you have the option then to take radical responsibility for what's in front of you.
You can name it, whether that is, "Oh, I've been believing this about myself or what I can do, or about the people I work with." Or you can name the current results that you have or get crystal clear on, "Yeah, I'm not doing what I say I want to be doing, and I know those things are the things that are going to get me where I want to go." Name it for yourself and take responsibility without judgment or regret, but plain honesty.
This can be very much at the macro level, like the current revenue you have in the business, or a project pipeline you've established, or maybe lack of. But also on the micro level, like, how did this project get off track this week? When did that misunderstanding happen? Hmm. It was in that conversation we had. I used these words because I was maybe feeling this way, or avoidant in my communication style. Maybe that's how it got off track. Okay, I can see that's what I did, and now what am I going to do about it?
If you're self-aware without self-blaming, you can see what your part is and then can choose to empower yourself to move forward in whatever way is necessary without needing to blame yourself, first of all, because that's not helpful. You'll just feel shame and feel bad and want to hide and not do anything to change the situation. Or sometimes we end up blaming others. And that's not helpful either. Yes, maybe someone did something that created an issue, but using that energy to loop on how it's all someone else's fault and you didn't have any part is really wasted energy, and it focuses on the problem. It perpetuates the problem instead of bringing your attention back to the solution.
I get that can be hard to hear, and this goes very much back to this truth of scaling is an inside job. Running a business, leading the complex relationships that you have with clients, that requires you to have a high level of emotional maturity and emotional adulthood, meaning you take responsibility for your own emotions.
Before we move on, I want to make sure that I'm clear with you that radical responsibility works for what's going well, too. Those are the things that you're doing that work and that you want to leverage so that those lessons come with you into that next level of scaling. So go ahead and celebrate what's been amazing and supportive, and really influential in your success. And notice where you're holding yourself back, recycling old patterns, reacting out of habit. It's always going to be both. There's going to be things that we can take responsibility for that are so supportive and set ourselves up for success, and you go, hey, thanks, past me. But then there's also going to be those things that weren't so great, and we can take responsibility for those too, because there's so many lessons in both.
From this position of understanding yourself, you can then look at the new results and outcomes, and experiences you want to create. You can use this to start to see who you will need to become in the process of creating your future, and begin to close the gap. That next-level version of you probably has some of the same behaviors, habits, routines that you have now, and some will be different. And that becomes your job, is to scale within to close that gap.
It's an ever-evolving process, and you're going to continue to go through this throughout your career and also in your life if you want to expand beyond what you currently have and currently experience. I like to think of this as an upward spiral where you're continually expanding as your business expands. The spiral just continues to go and evolve and get bigger and bigger when you prioritize this internal work as an important piece of running your business.
The spiral is not always smooth. I can tell you that. You will bump up against internal limits and ceilings. And these types of limits and ceilings are often of our own creation. But when you know that scaling's an inside job, you've developed the toolkit to help move beyond them.
So some of these bumps along the way could look like you have created the vision you wanted to create, and now it's just time for a new vision, and maybe you need to push yourself to think bigger. Could also be that strategies that used to work no longer do, and you need to pivot the way that you are thinking about your business or your services. Or maybe it's that things that you once loved are no longer lighting you up, and you're at a point where it's time to make some new decisions that serve where you're going to go next, which takes a whole lot of bravery.
The other thing that's going to happen on this upward spiral is that you will end up revisiting themes. Those are the beliefs that you work through, but also then they come back. And it's often more subtle, and maybe we'll even call it sneaky or sophisticated when they show up.
I actually had a major aha during some self-coaching recently, where I saw perfectionism was showing up in a new way when I was coaching myself on some of the podcast pieces. And it's interesting, recently I've been starting to now also notice some other pieces of perfectionism showing up in areas I hadn't seen it before. And this is something I've done so much work on and have expanded on in so many different ways, and yet, here it is again.
And it's not something to be frustrated about. It's not something to say, "Gosh, you should be over this with," right? There's that self-harm. It's expected. And when they circle back, all that's going to happen, and it's happening for me, is to be invited to explore those themes with more depth and understanding of yourself and really develop the capacity to move beyond them. These moments where you say to yourself, "Ugh, this again," don't have to be a setback, but rather your next point of growth, that next spiral up, but only if you're paying attention to yourself.
I say this so that you know that even if you've been in business for a long time, you've been practicing mindset, you've been building your emotional resilience, there will be points when you need to go back in order to move forward. Maybe that is for you, fine-tuning time management practices, or building stronger communication skills, or even giving yourself more margin for high-level thinking, increasing your levels of self-trust, or trusting others. That can be a big one. Or relying on new tools or support systems, maybe even that people-pleasing is showing up for you, and it's a different type of relationship, or you're doing it in a new way. All of those fine-tuning moments can require tactics, but they first require you to be aware of what's going on. And it's going back to the root issue that's going to actually solve for the problem. So that way you don't stay stuck.
It's kind of like having a broken arm, but you refuse to go get an X-ray. And you don't ever know if the arm's actually broken, you don't know what part of the bone is broken, or if it's just fractured, and what the treatment actually is. That is why you have to do the inside work. Looking inward and viewing scaling as an internal process allows you to see what actually needs to be addressed and what actually needs to be solved for.
And sometimes that is your self-concept or your identity. That's the last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up this episode. Your self-concept is essentially how you see yourself and what you believe about yourself, about your ability to succeed, about who you are as a person, about who you are in this world. Your self-concept could be what you unconsciously believe and have never questioned. It's a story you've written about you as a person, and you aren't aware that it's there. It could also be something that you've decided to believe on purpose right now. Because remember, thoughts are optional. You get to choose what you believe.
You might have looked ahead and said, "The business that I want to have, the person, the type of person that runs that business, this is what they believe about themselves, and that's what I'm going to start believing about me and looking for evidence of how that's true." Not only is the evolution of your self-concept important so that you can start to create those new results, it's also how you create congruency in your business and help it feel sustainable. Because what happens is when your self-concept does not expand with the business, it'll feel like this internal tug of war. It's kind of like this heavy anchor that you drag around, or this disconnect between how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself.
You've probably experienced this at some point where someone is just gushing over your work, or they see what you're doing on Instagram and they're reflecting back what they believe about your success, and you notice, "Hmm, that feels a little off. I don't see myself that way." And I hear this a lot where the impostor syndrome is there, where they are worried, they can't keep it up. There's doubt or not a lot of trust in themselves and what they can do in the future.
These are all classic examples of when the self-concept has not entirely caught up with or isn't remaining consistent with the current business. And it really does feel heavy, and it's going to hold you back at a certain point. So you want to make sure this is something that you look at and address.
I'm sure that when you look back at when you first started your business and what you believed about yourself and what you believed was available to you, it's probably pretty different than where you are right now and what you believe about yourself as a designer and a business owner.
If your business has grown, I am sure that if you were to sit down and take a look at those two questions, "What did I believe then and what do I believe now?" The answers will be different. And that's great. That means you have scaled within and created an outward expansion or an upward spiral.
We know this is true because if you had continued to believe what you believed at the start of your business, you wouldn't be where you are today. The other possibility maybe is that you really pushed against those beliefs and kind of bulldozed yourself into acting as if you were that person or version of you without doing the internal work. But that probably put your nervous system through the wringer, and that does catch up with you.
So doing that internal scaling, developing yourself as a person, is how you can grow and have it feel sustainable and not something like you're tightly losing a grip on anytime something goes wrong, or where you're always anxious and operating past your edge of capacity. This is all such important work, and while sometimes it doesn't look like, outwardly, you're being super productive, it's one of the most productive things you can do to ease your path towards getting more of what you want.
That is what I have for you today. That is truth number four. What I know for sure is that scaling is an inside job. You, as the CEO, you are the most important asset. This was true when you started your business, and it's true now. Investing in yourself through cultivating your ability to be self-aware and shift your mindset, and build emotional resilience right alongside employing strategies and tools for scaling, that is priceless.
And it's why I bring this three-prong approach of mind, body, and strategy to every client I work with. It's what makes the coaching I do so impactful, so deep, and so holistic. Some of my clients will need more strategy, and some of them need more mindset, or some of them need more of the emotional work, and it's really customized to them. But you have to have all three of these pieces in place if you want to do the scaling work and have it be sustainable.
If this is something that you want to do together, if you want to do the work of scaling within and have that be such a supportive foundation for every action you take to build your business, make sure you're joining the waitlist for private coaching. By joining the waitlist, you're going to get priority over everyone else when a one-on-one spot becomes available. You can go to desicreswell.com/coaching to learn about the Design to Thrive coaching partnerships and also read about my mind, body, strategy methodology, and add your name to the waitlist.
I'll be back next week with a brand new episode that's going to piggyback off this one. Mindset and emotional regulation is key to changing behaviors and patterns, and effective and long-lasting behavior change is going to require you to be kind to yourself. I alluded to that in this episode, but I want to really call it out in the next episode, where we're going to talk about compassion-forward change. And it truly is a key missing ingredient to high performers and designers with big goals.
Self-compassion allows you to see those limits that we talked about in this episode. And instead of blaming and judging yourself into changing, which frankly leads to you hiding from yourself and not changing nearly as much, you can use the practice of self-kindness to create change. It's how you actually move forward by being nice to yourself. Doesn't that sound quite nice? We're going to talk about it more. It's not going to mean that you let yourself off the hook, that you become lazy. Trust me on this one.
Make sure you're subscribed and following the show so you don't miss the next episode. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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