It’s quite possibly I’m taking everyone’s story telling advice a little too far in this episode. LOL But you know what? It’s ok. What I’m about to share is how it happened. I’m going to share about my trying to get drunk from non-aholic beer and then relate that to our avoidance in business.
I identify four key areas where business owners often avoid tasks (visibility, finances, marketing, and analytics) and practical steps to confront these avoidances. Additionally, I introduce the helpful digital marketing tool of the week and recommend a podcast episode. The episode wraps up with an invitation for you to identify and share their own areas of avoidance.
Resources
- Additional Reading 👉 Atomic Habits by James Clear has the information around habit stacking. Or you can look it up and see who else has written about it. Here’s an excerpt from that book for habit stacking. But I also highly recommend the book.
- Website Power-Up Plan™
- Tool of the Week 👉 Napkin AI.
You plug in numbers, it outputs a pretty format. Literally a few seconds. It’s quite amazing. - Recommended Podcast 👉 5 Hard Truths That Changed My Design Business in 2025 from The McClain Method podcast.
It wasn’t a wrap up like some do; he went in to share specific learnings that as a business owner we can benefit from.
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For the last episode of this year… it’s quite possible that I am taking everyone’s storytelling advice just a little too far in this episode. But you know what? It’s okay.
What I’m about to share is how it happened. I’m gonna share about my trying to get drunk from non-alcoholic beer and then relate that to our avoidance in business.
I know. Funny, but I think you’re gonna like this one.
So true story.
I tried to get drunk off my non-alcoholic beer. Now, mind you, I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until the morning after. I don’t really drink anymore. I mean, I can, I’m not claiming that I’m in sobriety or anything. I just don’t enjoy it the same way that I used to, even though I still love my IPAs.
So what I keep in my fridge now sometimes is non-alcoholic beer, specifically Athletica Brewing, because somehow they totally nailed it and it actually tastes like a real IPA and I have tried quite a few brands and they’re just crap. So save yourself. If you’re looking for non-alcoholic beer, IPA specifically go with Athletica.
So this day, that I drank the non-alcoholic beers, was an especially hard one for me. Lots of client happenings that I was taking personally. And that night I had one of the beers after dinner and I felt a little bit better. Maybe it was a placebo effect, probably. So I sat down and I turned on my comfort show and did absolutely nothing.
And instead of sitting with what I was feeling, I grabbed another, then another, and I drank them fast. Not because I was celebrating or relaxing, but because some part of my brain thought maybe I could catch a buzz. Or at least keep my mind busy enough to avoid what that day had brought up for me. I’m sure you can guess that that didn’t work.
The next morning I woke up with a headache and a very familiar, “why do I feel like crap” feeling? At some point I was like, Ugh. What the shit? I wasn’t drinking beer to relax. I was doing it to avoid sitting in my discomfort. And the irony of this is that I already knew I did this from years ago. I numbed myself,
But I didn’t realize that I was trying to do that with the non-alcoholic beers. It was very interesting. And it’s a pattern I have been uncovering lately is how much I avoid uncomfortable feelings. Not in a dramatic way or anything, but in a very practical, productive looking way. I ignore it. I stay busy.
I tell myself I’ll deal with it later. And a few years ago, I totally wouldn’t have even know. I didn’t even notice. I would’ve just said, Ugh, I’m winding down or decompressing, but now I can feel when I’m dodging something.
Which got me thinking about my business and that day that I had encountered, because we do this same thing all the time in our businesses.
We avoid looking at our numbers because we don’t really know what they mean. Or we looked at ’em once and we’re like, yep, that looks fine. Or we don’t check our Google Analytics because it feels confusing or annoying or some other part of our business feels confusing and annoying, and that’s like a problem for my tomorrow self.
We put off our marketing our own business because we’re serving our clients, or because the consistency just feels ugh, too much and it brings up whatever stuff we’d rather not look at.
So here’s mine for example. I’m great at marketing my clients. I care so deeply about their results, but I don’t always treat my own business like a client.
And my numbers reflect that my business, your business won’t grow if we don’t tell people about it. That’s marketing. There was a time when I did track my marketing and it was a very simple way. It was in a Google sheet, it had some dropdown menus, and for each action it would assign points. So if I sent an email that day, I would put that as the dropdown and it would give me a point.
If I pitched a podcast, I’d put that as the dropdown. It would give me a point and then I could see all of them added up at the end. It wasn’t super fancy and it was super manual, but Wow! Did that make an impact.
Visibility changes behavior.
Avoidance on the other hand, always shows up somewhere else…
…in the sudden scrambling of a special promotion to hurry up and get the sales because that revenue decline just turned into a major cash flow issue.
…in exhaustion with the idea that we’ll get to it later, always later.
So instead of giving you a list of metrics, you quote, should be checking right now, I wanna offer something simpler.
I have four scenarios you can choose from. Read these and then we’ll go into the next step. As you read, notice which one makes you like squint and go… “uffda, that I do not want to do.”
I’ve always found this sort of vague question, difficult. What am I avoiding? I used to think, well, nothing. I get shit done when in fact, I finally got visibility on the fact that I avoided my financials, like I avoid the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon. I’m not kidding.
[1] Is it your visibility?
The example is you’ve drafted a blog post with your personal opinion, but you keep editing it and leaving it in draft status. You don’t publish it. The avoidance might be you’re avoiding to be seen as a person because being seen opens you up to judgment.
[2] Is it your finances?
You maybe haven’t opened your business credit card statement in like three months, knowing there are probably at least two or three recurring subscriptions that you haven’t used in ages but haven’t gotten around to canceling the avoidance might be fear of opening up that can of worms and needing to audit everything. Or maybe it’s shame because you haven’t looked in it so long that you’re afraid to see how much money you’ve actually wasted.
[3] Is it your marketing?
You catch yourself that you spent two hours inside Canva finding the perfect template. That alone probably took an hour, right? But tweaking fonts to match your brand, but you haven’t written the copy inside that offers your ideal client, your service. The avoidance might be that you’re using productive procrastination to feel busy and professional, specifically to avoid that icky feeling of stating your price and asking for the sale.
[4] Is it your website analytics?
So you have this specific work with me page or a sales page that you send people to, but you’ve never implemented a heat map or check the conversion rate to see if people are actually clicking the buy button or if they’re leaving the page immediately. I mean, it’s probably safe to assume that they aren’t clicking the buy button if you’re not getting the sales you want, but you get my drift. You’re ignoring the analytics of the page that will tell you how to improve the performance.
The avoidance might be that you’re avoiding the data because you’ve unknowingly attached your self worth to that page. Seeing that low conversion rate feels less like a business statistic and more like proof that your ideas aren’t good enough, or that people don’t want what you have to offer.
So did one of these make you squint and go, Ugh, I don’t wanna do that.
Like, I don’t wanna look at it. If so, I definitely recommend you pick that one for this next step. If none of them did or if they just don’t feel like what you are experiencing, sit on it for a day. Maybe one of these will pop up as something you’ve been avoiding but can’t admit it right now. Or choose something not in the list that you know you’re avoiding.
Once you’ve chosen something, decide how you’re gonna stop ignoring it.
I could give you the standard schedule 15 minutes a day tactic, or even quote, eat the frog approach. But that by itself doesn’t get at the root of the avoidance.
The avoidance comes from our making something bigger than it is. If we see the issue, we feel like we need to fix it immediately, and wow, is that a time suck? Huh? That’s not something that we scheduled into our day.
So I’d like to offer you this next step. Look and don’t act at least once a week. Every other day or daily is preferable or better. I feel like it makes more traction. Maybe you habit stack these on top of something else you do.
For the four areas, look at the bank statement, the number. Don’t go through any light items or cancellations. Just note the number on your bank statement. Just look at it for that sales page. Look at the bounce rate.
Write the bounce rate on the scratch paper, and you don’t even need to keep the paper. Just note the number. The bounce rate, by the way, is the number of the percentage of people that come to the page and immediately jump off of it. So they like bounce, whoop.
And then for the marketing, create a slide with just your price.
And then when you come back to the next day, retype the price. Each day you look at it. So just retype the same number, and then for the blog post, speak out loud the part that feels the most opinionated, or where you think people might challenge you.
For me, it’s my own marketing consistency.
My goal is to guest on more podcasts. So I’m gonna split up my researching from the, my researching tasks, from my actual actual pitching, because I’m somehow trying to do both. So I research and then pitch, but I just need to research first and then do pitching on a different day.
And for the record, I threw out those remaining non-alcoholic beers in my fridge because sometimes removing the temptation is the best thing you can do for yourself. If this resonated with you, I would love for you to contact me using the form below and tell me what you’ve been avoiding.
I won’t judge and I won’t offer a fix. This is simply for external awareness for you so that somebody can see it and it can be seen, and that helps move you to the next step. Whatever that is.
The Takeaway
If you hear yourself telling yourself, I’ll get to that later, or, I don’t have enough money, simply stop. Like literally stop whatever it is you’re doing and note those words in a notes app or, or quick, write it down in a little notebook. However you wanna do it. The key is to acknowledge the thought. See the thought. You don’t have to resolve anything at that moment. Understanding you’re avoiding something is like the corner piece of a puzzle. It’s necessary and usually the first step.
