CelmaBrummer.Com

I stopped posting on IG. 
Initially I thought it would be only for a few days. But it turned into 3 weeks. 

3 Weeks where I found everything possible to do, rather than work on my business. 
I felt defeated and deflated and the thing I do when I feel as if life gets too hard, is to hide away. 

I don’t reach out to friends. I don’t reach out to family. 
I go inwards and have the same conversation with myself again and again. 

Until I get fed-up.

And usually I will do the stupidest things while I hide away. I will re-organise the kitchen. I will build a bookcase I did not really need. I will clean all my shoes. 

I will do everything except make the decision I don’t want to. 

And no, I have not made the decision yet. But I have made a decision - To get off my ass and start showing up for myself.

I posted twice last week. That’s it. Not because I ran out of things to say. Because I’d rather say nothing than say something just to feed a schedule.

Every platform tells you the same thing. Post daily. Stay visible or disappear. Show up whether you’ve got something to say or not.

And I noticed what that was turning me into. Someone performing consistency. Making noise on a deadline. Measuring my worth by output, again.

That’s the exact thing I left corporate to escape. I walked out of that building once. I’m not rebuilding it by choice.

The people worth reaching don’t need you every day. They need you to mean it when you show up.

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I cleaned my entire yard this week. Sorted cupboards I hadn’t opened in a year. Threw out things I’d kept for no reason.

None of it was really about the house.

I’m waiting on an answer. A big one. It’s out of my hands, and I’m terrible at waiting. So I kept my hands busy so my head couldn’t sit in the not-knowing.

In my old corporate life there was never any waiting. Always another deadline, another fire. Busy was the whole identity. I carried that out with me.

The waiting isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the voice that says stillness means something’s wrong. It doesn’t.

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I ran my biggest-ever quote past a friend before I sent it. Not because I doubted the work. Because working alone means there’s nobody to tell you your read is sane.

I trust my instincts on what I do. I can look at a coach’s website and know what’s wrong in the first conversation.

But pricing a project bigger than anything I’d done, on my own, with no one to glance at it? That’s a different kind of alone.

So I sent it to someone who’s been around this work. He said the number was right. One sentence. And the relief told me how much I’d been carrying by myself.

Going solo doesn’t mean going without perspective. You can be certain of your work and still need a second set of eyes on the frightening calls.

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This week someone asked me to run the biggest project of my career. I quoted a number I couldn’t have said out loud two years ago.

Then the fear showed up. Just not the fear I expected.

I thought the scary part would be the price. It wasn’t. Sending it felt fine. I know what I’m worth now.

The fear that came instead was quieter. Can I actually do this. And part of me whispered I’d finally quoted for something I couldn’t deliver.

Then I remembered. I’ve run big, complicated things before. Events, teams, deadlines that didn’t care how I felt. I delivered them.

The worth question took me twenty years. The can-I question I answered in a sentence, because I have the receipts.

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The first website I ever sold, the client said yes straight away. I should have been thrilled. Instead I felt guilty, because I’d priced it so low that yes was easy.

Three hundred dollars. For an entire website. I told myself I was buying my way into the market.

What I was really doing was making sure nobody could ever say no. If it’s cheap enough, agreeing is effortless, and I never have to sit with someone deciding I’m not worth it.

That’s not a pricing strategy. That’s fear wearing a discount.

An easy yes and a real yes are different things. A yes only means something when the person could just as easily have walked.

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A referral landed in my inbox last week. I sent her my full price. Didn’t pad it, didn’t apologise for it, didn’t add a discount before she’d even replied.

Then I closed the laptop and felt completely fine.

No dread. No urge to follow up with a softer number. I sent the real price and I was okay with her saying no.

I wasn’t hoping she’d say yes so I’d feel validated. I quoted what the work is worth and left the decision with her.

A no used to feel like a verdict on me. Now it’s just information about fit. The number didn’t change. My relationship to being turned down did.

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I had a conversation with a coach I met on LinkedIn last week. He wanted to talk. An hour later I understood exactly why his website still isn’t done.

Third redo. Four months. And somewhere in that hour it came out that he’s now signed to a twelve-month retainer, the same agency also running his marketing.

He isn’t happy. He said so more than once. But he signed, so now he waits.

Four months for a website that still doesn’t exist, and eight more tied to the people who couldn’t finish it.

This is the exact part of the industry I built my business against. A website should take days, not seasons. And when it’s done, you walk away.

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The views are up. Profile visits are up. Nobody’s buying.

That’s the part of building a business nobody posts about. The month everything improves except the one thing you actually need.

The graphs look great. My bank account doesn’t. And a voice shows up right here that says maybe it’s time to stop.

Attention moves first. Trust moves second. Money moves last. Always in that order, never all at once.

The people who quit almost always quit in the gap between the first number moving and the last. They stop right before the part they were waiting for.

Slow isn’t the same as stalled. Don’t read it as a no. Read it as not yet.

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For most of my career, when I said something, it happened. I ran teams. I had a title. People did what I asked.

Now I post something and hear nothing, and I do outreach and get told no all day.

Nobody warns you about that part of leaving. You don’t just give up the salary. You give up being listened to automatically.

The no’s aren’t proof you were wrong to leave. They’re the sound of building something that’s genuinely yours, where every yes is real because none of them were guaranteed.

The authority I had came with the building. I handed the building back. What I’ve got now I earn one person at a time.

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