Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.

The title of this post (also in the graphic I created below) is from Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown. In it, she tells a story about her daughter not wanting to compete in a particular heat at a swim meet because her daughter thought she wasn’t good enough for that race.

Brené said those words to her kid as a reminder that showing up can be the bravest thing to do.

So many of us choose not to.

We worry that if we aren’t immediately great at something, it means we suck. We extrapolate further to worry that it’s possible we suck at everything.

We have the desire to do something, or to learn a new skill, craft, job, or hobby, but we chicken out when it comes time to make a start. We don’t choose ourselves, we choose to opt out.

Last week I chose to do something to show up for myself and my business, and I hired myself a business coach and mentor.

That’s right. Life and business coaches hire coaches, too.

This here business isn’t even a year old yet, and while I’m super proud of all I’ve built with it, including developing The Declutter Course that opens for registration this Saturday, I am 100% positive that there are things I could be doing differently. Ways to do things better, to communicate more clearly with my community, and to work things out in a way that is sustainable for me, given my autoimmune issues and my desire not to burn out.

It was a little scary for me to make the commitment and hire a coach. For one, it was a bunch of money, so I almost talked myself out of it by saying I’d wait “until I could afford it.” Then it occurred to me that getting help might make life so much better and improve things for me so that I could attract more business and afford it sooner.

For another thing, I took a look at what my monetary goals for the business are for next year, and asked myself how a person who owned a business making that amount of money (just above six figures) would behave. Would they hesitate to hire help if they needed it?

I figured that if the business were bringing in that amount, I would not, in fact, hesitate to hire assistance to become better established and run more smoothly. So I channeled my own future me and leveled up.

As I said in last week’s tip, “if you change nothing, nothing changes.” (I mean, technically, Dr. Joyce Brothers said that and I quoted her, but you know what I mean.)

I took my own advice and figured that if I only kept doing what I know to do, I might not really get where I need to go. To get someplace new, I need to choose different paths or optimize the ones I’m on, and in order to do that, I need a guide.

So I hired one.

I’m excited, and doing the work, and hoping it all works out for the very best. I am confident that it will, of course, because I believe in this business, and I trust the process. Because actually, I can.