Episode 5:

How your teacher identity is keeping you broke in business

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Summary

This is probably one of my favourite topics to talk about: identity work and how it can truly change the game in your business. There is a big internal shift that needs to take place as you evolve from being an educator who earns from a boss to being an edupreneur who earns for themselves. Not only do you have to build new skills, but you have to step into a new version of yourself that can run a profitable business.


You have to start identifying as a business owner and CEO, not "just a teacher". This can be one of the biggest blocks in scaling your business. It doesn't matter how much strategy you have, your teacher identity and the energy that you bring will shape your results in business (and often sabotage them). 


In this episode, I share my story of how I had to really step into my CEO self and let go of my old ''teacher'' identity for me to rise up in my business. I will show you how your energy will trump strategy over and over again, and that strategy cannot outperform a poor mindset and "struggling / victim" identity.


You are going to learn:


  • How important the way you perceive yourself / identify yourself is in your business success.
  • How 'just a teacher' identity is most likely going to sabotage your success and cause repeat cycles that you don't want.
  • How your identity and your 'beingness' is more sometimes more important than the 'doing'.
  • Tips on how to start shifting your identity from ''I am just a teacher'' to ''I'm a badass CEO and entrepreneur who makes their own money''. And how this can transform your business results.


If this episode inspired you in some way then take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories, and tag me @_digiteach_.

If you would like to leave a review then you can do so on iTunes or Spotify. This helps my podcast grow and I appreciate the support.


If you are wanting help in creating a course that you can sell for years to come (and escape the 1x1 teaching treadmill) then join the waitlist for the Educators Income Booster Bootcamp HERE. This is my $37 live 10-day training experience where we take your knowledge and map it out into an irresistible offer that can scale your income and impact. The next enrollment will be in January 2023 and if you're on the waitlist you will receive a special early bird bonus

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 Welcome to the Empowered Edupreneur Podcast. My name is Michelle Smit and I am an ex-teacher turned online business coach for Edupreneur the owner of Digiteach and a six-figure entrepreneur. I am in love with empowering educators just like you to create freedom filled online businesses and lives they love.


If you are looking to up level your skills, your finances, your mindset, and change the trajectory of your life as an educator in business, then you are in the right place. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of business and mindset development to help unlock the infinite potential within you. To play bigger with your life and go after your dreams. We are going to have so much fun together. So thank you so much for pushing play today. Now let's dive in.


Hello, hello, hello, beautiful human. I hope you are doing so well today and you're having a great day and a great week today. I have a very important topic to talk to you about, something that can really sabotage your success. In your business and really limit your potential. And this topic. I love this topic so much.


I am going to create lots of podcast episodes on this topic and I, yeah, I actually plan on creating an entire offer around this topic because I think it's that important in the success of your business. Alrighty. So this topic is all about how your current teacher identity is keeping you broke and struggling in your business.


So if you are listening, you are most likely an educator of some sort. Maybe you teach online or you teach in classrooms. But most of you listening, you either have a business on the side of your teaching job or you have left teaching and you have started this business and you're still growing it. And maybe you are making money, but it's not really taking off exactly how you want it to.


Or maybe you're struggling to lift it off the ground and you're doing all the strategy and you're applying all the how to and all the shoulds that you see, but you're not seeing results. This podcast is for you. So it's for the beginner who hasn't even started business, or maybe you've just started. And it's for the business owner who is not seeing the results, and particularly for the educator business owners, okay?


There is only so much strategy that will get you to a certain point, okay? So strategy can get you to a certain point, and then there is something else that you're going to need to push past that, because strategy can only get you so far, right? And often people in their business, if they're not seeing results or they have a launch that wasn't great, the first thing that they look at or blame is their strategy or their niche.


But a lot of the time, I'm not saying all the time, but a lot of the time there's something else that's contributing to the problem that you're not acknowledging. It's really easy to blame the strategy. It's really easy to blame your niche and say they don't have money, that's the best one. Oh, my niche just doesn't have money.


This is a great story we like to tell ourselves, but I really have some truth bombs for you today. And that is that the strategy and the niche, or whatever it is, is most likely not the issue. And the issue can very well be how you're currently perceiving and identifying yourself as right now in your business.


So identity, the way you're identifying and perceiving yourself. Who you are in your business and who you are in this world and how you're showing up. So if you're an educator building a business, there is a big shift in how you identify and view yourself, because you need to shift from being a teacher to being a business owner.


And this can be really one of the biggest blocks in business growth. Is that internal shift hasn't taken place and you're operating from an old identity as opposed to this new identity. And I totally get it because I have walked this exact journey. As you know, I was an online teacher who earned $20 an hour for five years of my life.


I taught ESL lessons online and I made up to $2,000. Every month. And in 2018, I started my business on the side of that job, right? And suddenly I was doing all these other things that weren't teaching related. So in my business, I had to start selling. I had to start creating content. I was launching, I was doing copywriting, I was doing branding.


I wore every single hat in my business. I did Facebook advertising, everything. In that first year and a half of my business, I did everything with Mike, my partner, and in that time, in that like first year and a half, I can really say that I totally identified as just a teacher. I really never wanted to tell people about my business.


I never introduced myself as like a business owner. I didn't view myself as a business owner. I viewed my business almost like a passion project on the side, and I felt really scared to claim it as a business and to declare myself a business owner, an entrepreneur like that word, entrepreneur. I did not ever want to, like say that I was an entrepreneur.


My identity at that point was wrapped up in being an educator, because that's what I was doing for many, many years before, and I can tell you right now that that was one of the biggest reasons as to why it took me a while to get things going in my business and to see results because some people can just get going and start, you know, being profitable and making a lot of money within six months.


I took about a year and a. Right. I had the strategy. I was doing all the right things by the books. I promise you. I was really good at the strategy stuff. Okay? I had invested in mentorship that gave me the exact strategy I needed to sell this thing and do whatever, whatever, but I was hitting like a wall.


The whole time where, yes, I was making money, but I wasn't making the kind of money that I wanted and that I knew I could be making. So this was like pre, before I was making a hundred thousand a year. This was like when I was just making, you know, smaller amounts, like let's say 50,000 a year or whatever.


I wanted to hit six figures and there was a time. In that phase, in that year and a half phase where the penny dropped for me and I realized, shit, I am operating as a teacher in my business and I am sabotaging myself without even realizing it. I started doing a lot of money mindset work. That year and that money mindset work helped me identify the way that I was sort of identifying myself and how I viewed myself and how I viewed myself and my business, and how I viewed my business and everything.


And then I just did like, you know, identity work and I, I started to.

Adopt the lens of being a business owner primarily and not a teacher. This was one of my goals is that I wanted to step into that identity. I wanted to step into that new version of myself and I wanted to let go because at that point I was, yeah, I was still teaching, so I was still identifying as a teacher.


And my business was making some money on the side, not what I wanted. And at that point I was doing all the right things, but the way that I was showing up was from a teaching space, and not from like a business owner. I'm a CEO kind of space, and so my actions were different. Okay. So I started really consciously seeing that and I started shifting that for myself.


And it was uncomfortable, you know, in that process of, you know, trying to view yourself in this new way. It takes time. And over some time that shift happened and I started to view myself as a true entrepreneur who owned a business. Who made their own money and I started introducing myself to people.


As a business owner, I was introducing myself as a business coach, and I was really stepping into that. And being a teacher was just part of my story. It wasn't who I was in the world anymore. Now, of course, I'm not saying we need to shut down that we are teachers. There's nothing wrong with that, that is a part of ourselves that exists, that is our background.

That maybe is what you've studied, and maybe you're still teaching in your business as a language coach. So identifying as a teacher is okay, but if you want to grow a business, like make your own money, you need to start making space for that part of yourself as. You want that new business identity to start taking place as well, because that's so important and that identity is as a entrepreneur, it's as a business owner, it's as the CEO of your life.


You know, the person who makes their own money. That identity. It's a very different way of seeing yourself, right? And perceiving yourself in the world. And here's the thing, it all starts with you. If you want the world to take your business seriously and invest in your products and your courses and your services, you need to take your business seriously and invest in how you view yourself and how you show up in the world, and how you show up in your business.


From the moment you can step into that boss CEO version of yourself, that energy, the moment you can start viewing yourself as a business owner and stepping into that role, that's when the powerful shifts in business will happen, because you're going to take very different actions with a very different conviction.


That's going to generate a very different result. So here's an example of how your teaching identity can keep you broke in business, and I see this all the time, I think it's a good example. I help educators build and launch courses online and group programs. And whenever we get to pricing their programs, they literally take their teaching hourly rate and they calculate the number of hours it will take them to deliver the course.


And then they. Decide that's their price. And I see this all the time. All the time, and that is the kind of logic that a teacher would carry and possess, of course. But is that the kind of logic that a business owner would use to price their products from? Not really, no. Not so much. Maybe to some extent, but not completely.


And honestly, that kind of thought process and taking action from that head space is going to keep you burnt out and broke. That's why Edupreneurs are forever undercharging, massively and overdelivering, because that's what we as teachers have been programmed and conditioned to. Our whole lives, we are programmed to charge a set hourly rate, and we are programmed to not make more money, and we are programmed to give everything of ourselves mostly in return for probably less


Now if you bring that programming, that identity in your business, you know the identity of, oh, this is my hourly rate, this is how much I made as a teacher, this is how much I'm going to make in my business. Guess how you're going to show. You're going to undercharge, you're going to overdeliver keep yourself on the teaching treadmill until you burn yourself out in your own business.


And when you're burnt out, you can't show up as well in your business. You can't show up as well for the students that you are looking after, and that will really reflect in your business revenue. So you will perpetuate the exact cycle that you're trying to. From your job, you're going to perpetuate the same cycle in your business.


And that's because of the conditioning and the, the identity stuff and the way that we believe we need to do things is because we thought that's how we were meant to do things our whole lives. Right? So it's very strange, right? It's very strange, but this is really what happens. And I did this for a while and I'm not going to lie, you might be doing this in some capacity.

If you are a teacher and you've started a business in some way, there's a huge chance that a part of you is still very much identifying as being just a teacher and you're not really taking you're not really taking that power of being a business owner and stepping into that version of you and like shifting that identity.


And it's something that's really overlooked. But it's really important to look at it. It can make the biggest difference. So what can we do to start helping ourselves shift from identifying as just a teacher with a side hustle or a hobby? If you want to think of your business like a hobby, which is awful, but I hope you don't to a successful.


And badass business owner who makes their own money, how can we facilitate that shift in ourselves? So here are some things you can do. The first thing is a future self or inner mental visualization. This is when you. Visualize your future self or the version of you that is your mentor, like that highest level version of you.


The person who has everything that you want has the business goal you want, is living the life you want. You want to visualize that version of you and you want to really paint a picture of what that version of you looks like, how that version of you. Thinks of themselves, how they think of their business, how they perceive themselves in the world their belief system, their mindset and then also just like what do they wear?


What do they eat? How do they spend their day? How many hours are they working a day? Like, where are they living? What are they wearing? Like, I want you to paint a picture of that version of you that you want to create that has the business that you want to create. Say it's a goal of, say it's a goal of a six-figure business, let's just say for example, sake.


Obviously, you can have whatever goal you want, but you want to visualize that six-figure version of. And I want you, when you visualize this, it's, you can do this just for five minutes. I want you to really put yourself in the space of how do you feel, how do you feel about yourself? How do you feel about your work?


How do you feel about your business? How do you and that feeling part is really important. It's tapping into that feeling. Of how you're literally operating on a day-to-day basis and how you're feeling, and I wanted to be a very clear picture so that it's vivid. It's vivid in its feeling.


Maybe you can smell something, your favourite scent. Maybe it's the ocean. For me, I've always wanted to live next to the sea, and for me, I always. Visualize my sort of future self. It's always by the ocean. I can smell the sea air and I can feel the sun on my skin and I can very much put myself in that place.


I can smell sun cream. Sun cream is such an amazing smell for me has got such good, so associations to it. I can smell sun cream and coconut and I really have a vivid. Experience of this future self, of my, of my own, right? I want you to do that for yourself. I want you to literally anchor yourself into maybe just like a three minute to five-minute visualization of that version of you, and just put yourself in that place right now.


That's really powerful. Okay, so that's number. You can probably go on Google and type in future self-meditation, or you can use Inside timer, I think they have quite a few. You'll probably find something just to get into that meditative state and then help guide this process as well. Okay. And then the second thing that you can do is you can journal from your future self or your CEO self-perspective.


And you can literally. Right as if you are living that life right now and you are writing from that place. So you're stepping into yourself and you're writing from that space and you're talking about your day and the things that you did and the amazing experiences that you had, and all the amazing results maybe your students had in your program or working with you and how you went for a walk on the beach and this and that.


Like you can literally write that. As if it was your ideal day, ideal vision with the ideal business. And like you want to write down in this journal, you want to write down also what kind of actions you're taking from. That space. So if you're talking that you have a six-figure business, this is your life, la la la, what kind of actions are you taking in that space?


It's probably going to look quite different to the actions you're taking right now. And that's powerful because it will show you the disconnect between what it is you are desiring and trying to manifest and pull into this world in your business and what it, and how you're showing up. So there's a disconnect between what you want and how you're showing up in the world.


And that is really powerful to see. Cause once you see that, you can start bridging that gap and you can start being the version of you who can create that business that you want. It's, it's going to, it's going to require a certain. Version of you and that version exists. I believe it's in you. It's just about acknowledging that you're not really there and unlocking parts of you and this future self-meditation and that journaling is going to help you see a little bit of where you're not showing up in the right way for you to be having that business that you desire.


So you want to decide on the six-figure business version of you? Okay. How do you show up daily? What actions do you take? How do you perceive yourself? How much are you working? Maybe what kind of clothes you would wear that maybe that's not important to you. What would your day look like? How would you sell in your business? 


How do you view investing in mentorship and coaching and investing in your business? Are you, are you super scared to invest out of scarcity and worried about investing and panicked to part ways with your money? Or do you invest from a place of power knowing that when you make a business investment into yourself, into your skills and into your business, you know that that return on investment is already on its way back to you?

Do you see the difference? Mindset and way of thinking. The one would be more teacher entrenched, where it's like, oh, I'm super scared to invest out of scarcity. That's a very common teacher mindset. Money scarcity is huge. But if you carry that into your business, that's going to be a problem. As a business owner, you typically are willing to invest.


You're investing into your skills, you're investing into whatever marketing, advertising. You're investing into your business because you know, that is what it takes to grow a business. That is a business decision. Okay. So do you see how different those things. Okay. How different you would show up based on how you're perceiving yourself and who you're taking, or how you're taking action, rather.


Okay. So that's number three. And then number four is basically go and create a list of the things that, for example, six Figure self would do based on that visualization and that journaling and like the actions that you've sort of brainstormed down. Go and actually create a list of those things.

And then simply do them. Now, this is the thing, you want to be that version of yourself now, and this is where doing becomes less important. And the doing is like the strategy stuff. Like building my list. I have to build my list, I have to launch my course, I have to create the content that's doing right.


So you've got the strategy, you've got the doing, and this is when, where being. Your being becomes super important. And that is more how you are identifying with yourself, how you are perceiving yourself and that from that place how you are being in the world. Okay? So you want to be the version of yourself that builds a profitable business in order to build a profitable business.


Then you are being. Needs to be in congruence with that desire. So for example, if you desire, say your goal is to make $50,000 a year in your business, who do you have to be now to become a 50 K a year business owner? Write a list down of those things that you would need to do. How you'd have to view yourself.


Okay. Or say it's six figures, maybe you have a goal to hit six figures. Who do you have to be now to own a six-figure business? Your being emits a frequency into the world and that frequency becomes a match or mismatch for your desires in the manifestations that you're trying to create. This is the law of the universe, you know, law of attraction type thing.


So if you are being a teacher in your business and you're operating from that space and you're highly scarce in your money mindset, you're highly indecisive in your business decisions. You're viewing yourself as worth only $20 an hour or $30 an hour in an hourly rate, and you're pricing your products like that, and that's just how you're operating.


And you're only willing to invest a very low amount of money and because you don't have faith in yourself. Guess what you're going to get more of? You're going to get more of the same reality, okay? The same reality that you're trying to escape in your job. You're going to just keep perpetuating the same thing, so your reality shifts and your business results will shift when your identity and your beingness shifts in alignment with the desires that you want to create.


There needs to be true congruence between who you are being, how you perceive yourself and how you show up in life and in business. There needs to be congruent with that and the business goals you want to manifest. Okay? There need to be incongruence. There needs to be alignment. And there is so often misalignment in this.


I see. I've seen people who are like, I want to sell. I want to, they've never done any launch. They've never sold anything in their life. They come in and they're like, I want to make $60,000 a year replace my job in the first year of my business. I'm like, cool. That's a freaking amazing goal. Let's go for it.


And then they are like, cool, I'm going to set my product price to $150. And I'm like, okay, well we need to sell like 5 million of those to get you to 60K. So that is firstly a decision that's completely misaligned from the goal. And that's just, you know, a strategy decision. But then who they are being is like, they're super indecisive.


They can't make a decision for themselves. They are not actually making time for their business. They don't, they panic about every decision they make. They are super scarce in the way they spend their money, and they're just like, there's so many. And the way they're being is completely out of alignment with the goal that they're trying to create and manifest.

And that is a problem. And that happens a lot, right? When you can become the version of yourself that is already that version. So six figure version of you now, when you can become that person now. You collapse time and you will quantum leap your results in your business. Okay, so my love work for you and I call it love work because it's homework, but really you are loving yourself enough to do the work is for you to start looking at what are your business goals.


And observe whether you are showing up and being the version of yourself, who would create that business goal? Who would achieve that goal? Is there a disconnect between who you are being on a daily basis and what you are trying to create and manifest for yourself and your business? And this can also be with your life.


For example, if you have a goal to lose 50 kilograms. Are you taking, like who are you being right now? Are you eating all the junk food and doing no exercise? Is that incongruence with that goal? Or are you taking being, you know, mindful of your food and, you know, getting as much exercise in as you can and taking the stairs instead of the lift?


Like maybe that version of you does that. So it can even apply to your life and things like that. You need to have congruence for it to manifest and for you to create it. Okay? So love work. Do a future self-meditation. You can probably find it on Inside Timer, even if you type it into Google future self-meditation or my successful future self-meditation, something like that.

Claim your goal or your desire for your business. Say you want to hit six figures. Do it, man. Visualize it. Look at yourself as that person. See how you invest. See how you view yourself. See how you show up in your business. See how you identify with yourself and the world and your business. How do, what do you believe and how do you act and how do you feel, and all of those things.


Okay? Do the meditation. Then after that, I want you to make a list. Of the things that you can do right now that will help you step into that version of yourself. It could be going and doing exercise in the morning because that optimizes you for the rest of your day. Or you're like, cool, my six-figure self has a green smoothie every day.


I mean, that's really good for my brain and makes me feel good, which means I can create better from that space. And so that's what I'm going to. Well, my six-figure self invests in this mentor because this is the mentor I actually want to work with and I really dig her. And yes, she is way out of my comfort zone in price, but the six-figure version of me invests with this mentor because she's going to get me, she's going to help me get to where I want to be.


And I'm going to go create, make that happen. I'm going to go work with this person. So that is going to be really cool. Create the list, look at things that you can do. And then my challenge for you is to actually go embody that version of you now. So a part of this process is going to move you away from identifying yourself as the past version of you who was maybe just a teacher that's past version of you.


We are shifting identities from that. And this is going to help you start identifying yourself as the future version of you, which is a badass business owner who makes their own money and is really profitable in their business and is just, you know, doing the thing. And that's going to shift you from being an educator who earns from a boss to an entrepreneur who earns for themselves.


That is going to help that shift in a massive way. And this isn't about saying that you aren't good enough right now to have the results you want and that you need to change who you are to create the results you want. You are enough. You are a hundred percent enough. You are perfect and enough as you are. But the truth is, is that we are conditioned, especially as educators, into believing we are not.


And we have these scarce limitations and these weird stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and that we're not good at this and we're not good at marketing, and I can't sell. I'm bad at selling. And all these stories that really limit ourselves in our business, and we really need to be conscious of this, and we need to start untangling ourselves from that conditioning.


We have to start rewriting our stories. It's really important. If you want business success, you're going to have to rewrite the story. You're going to have to shift from that identity that is very limiting and the teacher identity it, it can be really limiting business. Okay? And when you are trying to grow business, you're trying to grow business, right?


You're going to want do the things that are going to help you with that. And a really big part of growing your business is rewriting how. You identify with yourself in your business and how you view yourself and the actions you take as a result. Okay? So do this love work, and really consciously, continuously bring yourself back to who you are being right now and make the decision that six-figure version of you would make.


Not past teacher version of you. It's going to be uncomfortable. It's meant to be uncomfortable. This is not meant to feel easy, but this will shift you and you will see results in your business because you, when you internally shift and you make that shift in in yourself, you're going to take action from a whole different energy and space, okay?


And that is going to make a massive difference. Now this is a topic I am super passionate about. Remember, strategy can only get you so far in business, okay? Yes, strategy is important. We always need it, but your energy and your identity is so important actually, and it's so important. Most people don't realize that who they are being is completely misaligned to what they're trying to create.


And no wonder they're not creating. And what? No wonder they're perpetuating all these other weird cycles in their business. It's from that conditioning as being a teacher. And we need to, we need to rewrite that. We need to reinvent ourselves as business owners, okay? And that's part of this journey, and that's what I help people do.


I help educators shift into business owners and entrepreneurs and think from that place, and I'm so passionate about how important your identity and energy is in business, that I'm going to create a whole offer on this. Something that's going to help not the beginner business. But someone who's launched and sold and wants to scale up.


So I'm going to create an offer on how to scale up your business using energy and identity as one of the main things, and not just strategy. So really focusing on all of it holistically and, and. But specifically the energy and identity stuff. So that is something that's coming. So I don't know when it's coming yet, but that's a little breadcrumb for you.


Those of you who have sold something, you are making money, but you are ready to really quantum leap your results. I'm hoping to get this out by 2004 before 2023 so we can gear you up for a powerful 2023 because this. This is going to make a huge difference in your business. I promise you that. All right.


Very exciting stuff. Go do the love work. Please make space for it. And then shoot me a message of this episode resonated with you. If you enjoyed this topic, I'm mad passionate about it. I'll probably create lots of podcast’s episodes on it. Much, much love, and I will see you next time. Bye.


Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you haven't yet joined the waitlist for the Educators Income Booster Bootcamp, then head to my website at digiteach.biz to sign up. This is going to be the best live training experience helping you take your knowledge and map it out into a desirable course that can sell for years to come so that you can scale your income and impact like crazy.


I appreciate you so much, and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode. In the meantime, go create a business and life you love.

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ABOUT THE PODCAST

The Empowered Edupreneur is your weekly dose of business and mindset development geared towards educators in online business. 

Michelle's mission is simple: To help educators unlock their infinite potential within, take back their power, and make their own money online. In this podcast, you can expect weekly inspiration, relatable stories, and business advice to help you grow your online business with more ease and joy (and fewer teaching hours). 

Be sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode! 

Tags: online business, make money online, growing a business, niche, business niche, how to choose a niche, niching down, finding your niche in business, online education business, online teaching business, teachers in business, online business, teachers in business

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