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My Digital Farmer Podcast
372 Dealing with Dread: The Hidden Marketing Obstacle That's Keeping Farmers Stuck
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I have a feeling that many of you already know what it is that you should be working on to become a more profitable farm. The problem is that many of those things feel heavy. We dread doing them. We're telling ourselves a story about what we think is going to happen. Dread has a grip on us, and today I want us to walk around this feeling of dread and talk about how to overcome it. Let's dive in. Hey there. This is Karina Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product, you've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 372 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of you who listen every week. My super fans, welcome. I'm really glad you're here today. Make sure you subscribe to the show if you haven't already subscribed and if you need some help learning the marketing lingo and just get onboarded into what we talk about here. I recommend you go check out my first 10 episodes because I actually strategically designed them to be listened to in that order many years ago when I first started the podcast because I wanted to give you a basic foundation of some of the concepts that would come up over and over again in future episodes. So go do that. You could also get on my email list because when you do that, I'm going to send you a weekly email telling you about what the podcast is for that week. I'm also going to send you some very intentional emails that I designed for my brand new audience. They jump into your inbox roughly every five days for about two or three months and they're going to walk you through the basic foundational principles of marketing. I'm going to point to prior episodes, teach you the key things you need to know first, show you influencers you should be following, give you some freebies, really good Tips. That's another great way to just get some free marketing education. So that's something you can get by subscribing@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline. If you run a CSA, sell direct or wholesale, or manage all three, summer is when it all happens at once. Packed markets, weekly CSA boxes, and a harvest that keeps coming. Localline helps you handle your busiest season with less stress and more control. In 2025, farms and food hubs using localline grew their sales by 33% with average order values up 31%. That's real results across operations of all sizes. On the platform, LocalLine brings everything together in one platform. CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, box builder and POS. Run all your direct channels from the same place, whether that's your csa, market, sales, farm stop, or a food hub. And through their marketplace partnerships now you can reach chefs and buyers nationwide through Cisco Gordon Foodservice and US Foods. With a low barrier to entry, switching is easy too. There are no setup fees, no sales commissions, and their team will migrate your storefront for free, even mid season. And it only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll get one premium feature free for a full year when you use my coupon code MDF2026 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com forward slash, local line, all one word and then enter that coupon code MDF 2026 at checkout. Make the most of peak season with Local Line. It's streamlined, it's efficient, and it's built for growth. And now back to the show. All right everyone, I am back. I'm recording this on July 16th and it was really weird this morning. We woke up and it looked like it was really foggy outside, and then when we went outside, it smelled like smoke. I've never seen the visibility like this before in northwest Ohio. It reminded me of the time that I went up to Canada to the Cold Lake Air show and they were dealing with a bunch of forest fires actually, and the smoke was so bad that they actually had to ground the planes and there was no air show on the days that we were there. It actually feels like that and it's just strange. It's really uncanny. I never thought that would happen in Ohio, but I guess the Canadian wildfires are pretty bad and they're blowing this direction. It's really messed up the air quality here. We actually sent our guys home after a few hours. My packing Team was having a little bit of trouble packing our, our store orders this morning. I was helping them out there. Had a lot of compassion on them. I'm like, man, how do we, how do we do this if this sticks around? So I just bought some air filters and air purifiers online, get those in my home. So for all of you people who are dealing with wildfires, air quality, I have a lot of empathy and compassion for you now, and I'm going to be praying for you. So what's going on? What else is going on in my life before I get started today? My son has been at boot camp for a week, actually eight days now. I had a really hard time on the day he left you guys. I cried like crazy. I was a hot mess that whole day. Actually, the next day too, All I could think about was him. And I would think about him in weird ways. Like at weird moments when I was preparing dinner and I only had to get out 1 pound of ground beef to make the spaghetti sauce instead of two pounds. And I started crying. Little things like that that catch you off guard where you notice his absence. It's getting easier now, though. He was able to call us and he didn't sound like he was suffering when I talked to him, so that made me feel better. It's funny because the second day after he left, I just got into like psycho mode and I, I went upstairs into the attic and it just looked messy. There were piles everywhere. You know how that happens in your upstairs storage areas. And I just decided I needed to start cleaning up. And my mother in law had told me they were doing a garage sale at her business at her greenhouse that weekend. And I just thought, awesome, I can get rid of all this stuff at her garage sale. So I spent like six hours up in the hot attic, organizing, throwing things away, going through stuff, deciding, we don't need this anymore. And now it was all nice and beautiful and organized. At the end of the day, my husband's like, what is happening? What is going on? I thought about it later. I'm like, I think I just went through like another version of nesting, like preparing my nest. But this time it was after I kicked one of my kids out of my nest and I had to like, resettle the nest. Has anyone else gone through that? Like when you, when you said goodbye to one of your kids and they left your home and went off into the wild blue yonder, like, is anyone else doing that? I just, I just wonder if that's, if that's a phase Anyway, I'm doing okay over here. Today we're switching gears a little bit, and our topic is not going to be so much a marketing tactic or strategy. I wanted to do a little bit of mindset stuff, and I want to talk about dread. You know, like when you dread doing something. What are you dreading right now? What's one thing sitting on your to do list that every time you look at it, you feel your shoulders tense up just a little bit, you feel yourself pulling away. You know the one, you see it on your calendar and you think, ugh, I really don't want to do that today. But at the same time, you sense it's important to finally get done. Maybe it's writing your weekly email, or finally making that sales page or launching that new product, or planning a really big promotion that has the potential to turn things around for you. Or maybe this one comes up for me. It's having a difficult conversation with one of your employees today. I want to talk about dread because over the last few weeks, I have noticed something about myself and I've been kind of walking around it, become aware of it, studying it, journaling about it. And I have a feeling that if you are an entrepreneur like me, especially if you're trying to grow your farm business, you've probably experienced this too. Here's one of the things that has come up for me in the last week. Marketing asks us to do uncomfortable things, doesn't it? All the time. Just when you've mastered something, a new uncomfortable thing comes along. Marketing asks us to sell, to put ourselves out there. To make offers that we're not sure are going to work. To try something we've never done before. To risk hearing a no. To risk looking foolish. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. To launch something that might flop and not work out after you've put a ton of time into it. To write emails that people never open. I hear that one a lot. To make a reel that only 12 people watch. It asks us to leave the familiar tasks that are comfortable and we know how to do and go and do something that feels new. And every time that we do that, there's this feeling that shows up. And that feeling is dread. Now, here's what I think is so interesting. Most of us assume that if we dread something, that feeling must be telling us something true. Maybe this is really a bad idea. Maybe this really is too hard. Maybe I really am not ready. Maybe I really shouldn't do this, right? But over the last few weeks, as I have Been going through a couple of scenarios I'll be sharing with them with you in this podcast that have caused me to dread and to delay and to not take action. I've started wondering, what if dread is lying to us? Or maybe that's too strong of a word. What if dread is simply telling us a story and you and I have forgotten that stories aren't always true. So let me tell you what happened. We've been working here at Shared Legacy Farms on a brand new beta test program that we're launching starting August 7th. It's called the Farmer's Bag Toledo. I literally came up with that name a few days ago. That was part of what I had to do as part of this project, is come up with the entire promotion, figure out what we're going to name it, build a sales page, build the emails, build the offer. Anyway, it was something that we dreamed up last fall after the SNAP benefits ran out or were paused for a while there. And we kind of came to the rescue as a farm. And we did this real quick, last minute spontaneous initiative where we got a bunch of volunteers to come out. Like our crew had already left for Mexico, so we didn't have anyone to harvest food, but we had food in the field. So we just organized a bunch of volunteers to come out and harvest all this food and they all packed it up into bags and we brought it to people in Toledo who were in need of food and we just passed out bags of food. We did it like three different times and it was so well received and it created all this energy and we're like, why aren't we doing this more often? And so it spawned this idea that we've been sitting on and spinning on all winter long. What if we could make local organic produce accessible to families in Toledo like that on a regular basis by creating essentially a lower cost membership where people get to choose what goes in their bag. So like a choice CSA market style, but that would be subsidized. And so we spent a lot of time this summer. We found a. We had a foundation that ended up supporting us. We're basically growing the produce. The foundation is paying us to grow it. And we're trying to sell this offer to people and giving them like a sliding scale or giving them two options like full price or really discounted rate. So that's kind of what the idea was. And I love the project. I absolutely love it. I was super excited about it. I believe in it. I think it has the potential to make a real difference. And I think it actually could spawn a whole bunch of satellites. Like, we could have the farmer's bag, Columbus, the farmer's bag, Cleveland, if this goes well. So when it came time to actually work on this project, though, like, like I said, we'd been sitting on it all winter. It kind of lost some steam. And then at the last minute, there was this revival of energy and somebody stepped in to say, I'll take care and be the administra. And all of a sudden it like, fell in my lap. Like, you've got to put together the marketing for this. And I had like four days to build the whole thing. Like, come up with the name, try to come up with a branding, a logo, everything, how to sell it. And. And we needed to distribute the bags for the first time on August 7th. I was told. And when I. When I heard about it, it was July 11th is when I was told, we're starting on August 7th. You're gonna have to do the marketing for this so that we can start talking about it in time. And I was like, what? I didn't realize that this was gonna fall in my lap. And I felt overwhelmed. And I knew that I was gonna have to do it. And I knew I had to kind of start working on it and pre launch it if we wanted it to be successful. My mind was telling me, you better get this out there and you better start pre launching it or talking about it and having it ready to buy. Buy July 20th using the method that I use everywhere else. Like, I knew I needed to have a Runway and then I needed to have, you know, it open at a certain time and be open for a certain number of days. So, like, there were these deadline days that I had to hit. And when I looked at the calendar, I was like, oh, well, I need to have the sales page ready to go. Everything in place, the subscription, you know, ordered through local line, figure out how subscriptions work, create the products, create a zap, get. Get the email. Like, all of it had to be ready by basically July 14th. And I was given this project on July 11th, right? And I'm just like, oh, my gosh. And so I found myself that weekend putting off the project. There was the landing page, the emails, the sales copy, the tech that I had to figure out. And every day I would look at it on my to do list and I would say to myself, no, not today. I'd find excuses of other things to work on, like, oh, no, this is. This is the day when I need to work on this other thing. Like, oh, I Always do my payroll and accounting. On this day, I'm not going to have time. I need to give that a big. A big chunk of time to do this. Well, Right. So there would be other things that seemed more urgent. I would get lost answering emails. Has that ever happened to you? You open the email inbox and all of a sudden you've been in there for 90 minutes. I would organize something. Oh, yeah. I actually went up and organized my closet or the attic that I was just telling you about. I spent a whole day doing that. I would just tell myself I wasn't in the right head space. Maybe tomorrow. And tomorrow became the next day and the next day until it was literally July 13, the morning of July 13, when by the end of that day, in my mind, I had sort of set this deadline. Really need to have it done by now because, like, Sonya, my collaborator, is going to be calling, like, reporters and we're going to be on the news stations and we need to have a sales page to, like, point reporters to by, you know, tomorrow. And finally I just kind of was like, what is going on here? Because this wasn't me being lazy. I. I would. I would eventually do it. I knew I would eventually do it. I work hard. And it wasn't even that I didn't know what to do because I've built sales pages before. I've built launches, I've launched lots of new beta tests before. I've written hundreds and maybe even a thousand emails by this time. So why was I dreading this? And that's actually what kind of kicked off this episode. It was such a, like, yeah, it was such a brutal, like, realization that I was dealing with dread in a big way. And it hadn't really hit me like this before. It wasn't the landing page, it wasn't the emails. It wasn't even the work. It was the meaning that I had attached to the work. Does that ever happen to you? Do you know what I mean by that? I was trying to figure out how to describe it. I was talking about it with my Farm Marketing school students during our coaching call this month. And I think what it was is that I was feeling a lot of pressure because I felt responsible for whatever reason, I personally felt responsible for whether the program succeeded. Like it lived and died on the marketing, not on the idea, not on Sonya's incredible network and ability to reach reporters and get us on a radio station. And she had the connections with TV stations, which is probably going to do way more work than what I'm doing. Over here. But I was putting all the pressure on me, like, wasn't going to succeed unless I got all this stuff buttoned up. And I wanted it to work. I really wanted this to work because I believe in it. I believe in what we're creating. And I just see so much potential for this to do good and to spark energy and momentum and, yeah, I wanted our community partners, the people I was working with, to feel proud of what we were building together. And. And I wanted us all to feel like our hard work mattered, that we were collaborating together and I was pulling my weight. Right? And I think underneath all of it, I was afraid that it would fail, that when we launched it, maybe only five people would sign up. And so there was this little voice of, what if it doesn't actually attract customers? What if it doesn't work? What if hardly anybody signs up? And then what if everyone says under their breath, well, Corinna just didn't market it very well. Must have been because Corinna didn't pull that together. Must have been that Corinna doesn't actually know what she's doing. She says she does, but it didn't work this time. Right? And so I was making all of that story mean something about me personally, like, personal rejection. Do you guys hear that? I don't know if you do that. I mean, I feel like. I feel like this is probably a pretty common thing. If we could actually dig down deep to the root cause of why we dread, why we stall, why we don't take action. There's usually a fear or a feeling under there, isn't it? And when I took the time to really investigate it, that's some of the stuff that I was seeing. Now, here's the funny thing. Nobody had actually said any of this. Nobody has ever even hinted at it. This entire conversation was happening in my head. I was imagining a future that hadn't happened. I was predicting an outcome that I had absolutely no evidence for. And because that imagined future felt painful, I avoided beginning. Do you ever do that? I don't know. I just find this really fascinating. And so today I want to walk around this concept of dread, because I think it's affecting a lot of us. I wasn't avoiding building a sales page. I was avoiding the possibility of disappointment. I was avoiding a feeling that I thought the project would create. And that was kind of a big aha moment for me when I. When I noticed that. I think we often tell ourselves that we're procrastinating a task when really we're procrastinating in emotion. So how, how did I break through the dread spiral? Well, there was a deadline. I had to start promoting that product by July 20th. Like Sonya was going to be talking about it to her social media people. She was already talking to reporters. Like July 20, 8am is when it was supposed to begin. So I had a deadline. And so that forced me to finally block off an afternoon and just get started. So on July 13, seven days before, I literally said to myself, just sit down and start. Just work on it for two hours. I gave myself a two hour window. I'm like, let's just try to do the basic. It doesn't need to be super fancy, doesn't even need to be like the kind of sales pages that you teach about in farm marketing school. It just seems to be good enough. So give it a two hour container. And I sat down and I began. And that, that seemed to give me a little less pressure. And I was like, okay, it doesn't have to be amazing. And do you know how long the whole project took? Because I did eventually finish it. And you know what? It was an amazing sales page. By the end of it. You know how long it took? It took me four hours. That's right, four. And I was really proud of it. Like, it's a beautiful piece of work. And when I finished, I was really reflecting. I felt so relieved first of all. And then I was reflecting on, wow, you know what just happened? Because I made this out to be a huge mountain in my mind and it wasn't nearly as difficult to climb as I had imagined. I mean, it wasn't a breeze. I had to, I had to give it some attention. And I was a little discouraged. Halfway I'm like, oh, this feels a little heavy. But you know what? Four hours isn't too bad. That's actually about right. That's how long these things take. And so as I reflected, reflected on that experience, I asked myself this question and I want you to ask yourself this question. How many of the things that I have dreaded in my life, the things that I put off and avoid and find ways of not doing, how many of those things have actually become a doorway to something really cool, something new, something life giving? I want you to think about that. How many things have you dreaded that ended up changing the course of your business in some significant way? Like maybe you launched a new value added product and it really helped you turn a corner. Maybe you hired your first employee. That's a common one. The first time you went to the farmer's market. And you were super nervous about it, but you did it anyway. The first time you raised your prices and you were freaking out, but you did it. And it was a great decision, right? How many of those things felt terrifying beforehand and you questioned yourself, but then they were obvious afterwards? That question has been rattling around in my brain ever since. And it. It led me to an observation that I want to share with you today. I think I have this theory now that dread is a storyteller. I want you to think about what moments of dread do. Dread. Dread starts narrating this is going to take forever. You're probably going to fail. This isn't going to work. People aren't going to buy. You don't know what you're doing. This is going to be exhausting. You're going to look weak, like a failure when it flops. You're going to be exposed as a fraud, as someone who doesn't actually know what they're doing. Sound familiar? Do you ever say any of those things to yourself? Fill in the blank? I mean, you probably got another phrase. And I want you to consider this. Many of us don't realize that those little phrases rolling around in our head, they're just stories. We experience them as fact. We don't stop and ask, hey, wait a minute, where's the evidence for any of that? We just believe the narrator. Now, I want to put on my science nerd hat on for just a minute because understanding what's happening in our brains has actually helped me with this concept of dread and stop taking it so personally. Your brain is constantly trying to predict the future. That is one of its primary jobs. Every second of the day, your brain is asking questions like, is this safe? How much energy is this going to cost me? Could this hurt me? Is this familiar? Is there risk here? And when your brain doesn't know the answer, it will fill in the blanks. It makes a prediction. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's actually efficient. That's brilliant. Thousands of years ago, predicting danger helped keep us alive. But today, our brains often react to any kind of emotional discomfort the same way they once reacted to a physical danger. Your brain doesn't always distinguish between running from a tiger and pressing send on your promo email, right? It simply senses uncertainty, and uncertainty will get translated into danger. And so your brain starts telling you stories designed to keep you safe, like, stay where it's familiar. Don't risk embarrassment. Don't risk rejection, don't risk failure. So I want you to write, write this Principle down. Because I think this will help you as you work through your own daily experiences of dread. A prediction that your brain is trying to make is not necessarily fact. A prediction is not a fact. It's simply your brain trying to fill in the blank, fill in missing information. Which means just because your brain is predicting that something will be miserable or will be a failure, doesn't mean it will be. And that's why I think dread deserves a second look. Because maybe, just maybe, the feeling of dread isn't telling us to stop. Maybe it's telling us that we're standing at the edge of something we've never done before. That's a huge paradigm shift. We're going to come back to that in a minute. So what have I been learning the last couple weeks as I've been dealing with some of these different scenarios, as I've been reflecting on my experience? The Farmer's Bag Toledo project. And then I'm going to share another one in a minute. I started writing down a few observations in my journal. And these aren't things that I read in a book. They're just things that I was noticing about myself. And I'm curious if you recognize them in yourself, too. That's why I'm doing a podcast about them. So I'm going to go through some of these observations one by one and just talk them out. Number one, dread is a prediction. It is not reality. Okay, so we just kind of already covered that dread isn't the event. It's your brain's prediction about the event. So before you've written the email, before you've made that phone call, before you've built a landing page, before you launched an offer, your brain has already decided how it's going to go. It starts making predictions like, this is. This is going to be terrible. You're going to fail. People aren't going to buy. You're going to look stupid. And we just don't realize that those are predictions. We experience them as facts. We don't stop and ask, is that actually true? We just assume it is. But what if your brain is wrong? What if this isn't going to take all day? What if people actually love your offer? What if the conversation goes really well? What if the project ends up being fun to put together? And that's exactly what happened, actually, with Farmer's Bag Toledo. My brain predicted one experience, and. And then when I actually got started working on it, reality gave me a slightly different version of the events. And that's when I kind of saw something Maybe I shouldn't believe every story that my brain is telling me. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School, my monthly membership for farmers. Before we dive back into the episode, I want to speak to a very specific kind of farmer for a second. If you're a year or two into your business and things are working, but your marketing still feels kind of scattered, like you're posting, you're sending some emails, you're running promotions, but it all feels disconnected and you're not sure what's actually driving sales, I just want to say that's not a lack of effort, that's just a lack of structure. Because most farmers don't need more ideas. What they need is a system that connects everything together. And that's exactly why I built Farm Marketing School Inside. I teach you how to actually design your marketing so that it works like a machine, a system, not a bunch of random tactics. We map out your full customer journey. We build your email engine. We create intentional promotions and product pathways so your marketing starts handing off from one piece to the next like a relay race, instead of you running every leg yourself. And we do it through 30 day project builds. So you're not just learning about marketing, you're actually finishing things. You're actually building the marketing assets in your marketing machine. Your sales funnel, your promotions, your lead magnet, your weekly email rhythm, all your marketing assets. And that's when the shift happens. Marketing starts to feel lighter, the flywheel starts to spin. Sales start to feel more predictable, and you finally feel like, okay, I'm on the right track. I know what I'm doing. If that's what you've been longing for and what you've been missing, then I want to invite you to join Farm Marketing School. Just for a month. Come inside and see what it's all about. You can learn more@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and now back to the show. Okay, Dren is a storyteller. Observation number two that I wrote down here is that we often confuse something being difficult with something being uncertain. So I kept telling myself, I don't know if you do this when you come up against dread. Oh, this project is going to be so hard. Do you ever say that? It's going to be so hard. But was it actually hard? I mean, objectively, if I zoom up and look at the things I literally had to do to do the job, was. Was it hard? No, it was just a series of very specific tasks that I had to complete and I just had to go through the actions of doing them. It's just that it was unfamiliar tasks, and those are two very different things. So I want you to think about the first time you ever set up your market stand, the first time you hired an employee, the first time you tried to get a florist to buy your flowers, the first time that you raised your prices significantly. Right? None of those things ever felt easy the first time you did them. But were they, objectively speaking, actually difficult to do, or were they just things you had never done before and so they felt heavy? I think our brains lump the two together. New equals hard. Unfamiliar equals dangerous. But they're not the same thing sometimes. The task itself is actually pretty simple to do. It's just our lack of familiarity that makes it feel like it's heavy. And the more we do it and repeat it, it's actually not heavy after you've done it a few times. And there's something really freeing about recognizing that, because if the problem is just unfamiliarity, then the solution isn't confidence. The solution is just repetition, having more reps every time you do the thing, it's going to become more familiar. And as it becomes more familiar, your brain is going to stop treating it like a threat. I've been coaching this to my son as he's been going in boot camp. I'm writing him every day, and I'm just sort of mentally coaching him through this. Like, hey, everything is feeling new to you. Your brain is having to learn a lot of stuff. And that's. I mean, it is literally a little difficult for you to learn a new skill, but it's feeling more difficult because it is brand new and you haven't practiced it enough. But the more you practice this thing, it's to going. Going to start feeling lighter, it's going to start feeling more familiar, and so it won't be as heavy. Observation number three, Action is what shrank the dread for me. And I've seen this over and over again. Action shrinks dread when you think about it. Thinking feeds it. I don't know about you, but I've noticed that dread really grows well in isolation. The longer it sits on my to do list, the bigger it becomes in my mind, like this huge mountain. It's like my imagination starts adding layers to it. Now it's not just a phone call. It's a phone call. It's going to be awkward. It's going to take forever, and they're going to say no, and I'm going to have to call 20 people to find my yes and I'm gonna have to really convince them, and it's gonna feel icky and it's not gonna be fun and, you know, so on and so forth. Have you ever done that? You build this whole movie in your head and you haven't even, like, dialed the phone yet? So this happened. This is the other scenario that happened to me, that caused this, that spawned this episode. I am the leader of my church's women's midweek Bible study ministry. And there's like 75 to 100 women that come every Thursday morning for two hours. We have breakfast together, we have a speaker, and we have. Then we break up into small groups. And so I. I'm like the point guard. I oversee the core team. And I. I'm also the. The small group leader. So the person who was recruiting these people, I have to train them. I have to give them the questions every week. I just make sure they know what they're doing. I pray for them. Yeah, it's kind of a big deal. And so every year, I have to hire or recruit new people to be small group leaders because there's always some people that don't sign up. And we're growing, we're expanding, and so I'm constantly having to spawn new groups and find new people to lead. And so I have to reach out to women and invite them to become small group leaders. And this is just terrifying for me, for whatever reason, because it feels like a cold call. Right? Like, I just assume that people are going to say no. This is. It's a lot like sales. And so this month, like, we're starting in the end of August, so we're kind of organizing all this. We got to get this together. I had my list sitting on my desk. I knew the four women that I needed to call my new. My four new recruits. And I just kept walking past it. I kept coming up with excuses for why I wasn't going to do it. I'll do it tomorrow. I need a bigger block of time. And finally I just outright admitted, I'm scared to do this. I don't know what I'm going to say. Right. I just putting it off. And so finally, it was three days before our core team was going to meet again, and they were expecting me to have this all buttoned up and have the team ready. There was a deadline. Once again, the deadline helped me, and I mustered up the courage, and I finally just said, just get started. I made a little deal with myself. I wasn't going to call everyone. I was just going to Call one person. I was going to call the person I thought was most likely to say yes. It was the person I knew. I was pretty sure she was coming back. I thought it was kind of weird that she hadn't gotten back to me. I'm like, I'll start with her. And. And she answered. And she said, oh, I thought I emailed you. I thought I said yes. Well, that conversation went way better than I imagined. It was over in a matter of minutes. And suddenly that second call didn't look so scary. And I was like, you know what? I'll go ahead and make the second call. Because that first one, that almost didn't really count. That wasn't really hard. So I did the second one and the third and the fours. Two out of the four women said yes, two said no. And we had delightful conversations. Like, their reasons were really great. They actually felt bad that they had to say no. I prayed with them on the phone. It was awesome. It was like a moment of ministry. And you know how long it took, the whole process? It was 20 minutes. 20 minutes. I had spent two weeks dreading something, expending all kinds of energy, dreading something that ended up taking 20 minutes. And nothing changed, except that I finally took action. I stopped listening to the story, and I started going out and doing something and collecting actual evidence. And I think that's. That's an important distinction, because when you take action, it does something that thinking can never do. Action is going to give your brain new information. It's going to give you data. If you're just thinking about the thing you have to do and dreading it, it keeps replaying the same old story. And I've started reminding myself of this whenever I notice dread creeping in. And I want to give you this little wisdom here. My brain can't update the story that I'm writing in my head until I give it new evidence. Your brain is working with yesterday's assumptions. And the only way that you're going to rewrite that story is if you go and gather fresh data. And action is how we do that. So I have one more observation. I wonder how many of us have concluded that I am just bad at marketing. Is that something that you tell yourself? I hate marketing. I'm not good at sales. I'm not a natural marketer. I don't know how to sell. I mean, those are some of the ways that this thought manifests. And I hear farmers say it a lot of time. I said it myself. But what if that's not actually true? What if you and I are not bad at marketing, what if you've simply become really good at avoiding the marketing tasks that make you uncomfortable? Those are two completely different things. I want you to think about it. If you avoid sending the weekly email, of course your email marketing isn't going to work. If you never make an offer, of course your sales aren't going to increase. If you never practice checking your data and your numbers, you're not going to have a barometer. You're not going to know if you're getting better or not. You're not going to know how to change what you're doing. If you keep putting off list building, you're never going to grow your list. And that doesn't mean that you're bad at marketing. It just means you've been listening to dread, you've been believing the storyteller. And I'm raising my hand here, guys. Like, I do it too. But I want to put a positive spin on this because I think that this is, this can be good news. Because if the problem isn't your ability, then the solution isn't becoming a different person. The solution is just learning how to respond differently when the dread shows up. That feels helpful to me. This is something we can actually practice and get better at. This is all in our minds. This is all mindset. We have to practice managing our thoughts. So this is another cool thought that I think is going to get you excited. I don't think it's always true, but I've noticed it to be true a fair amount. I want you to think about what if instead of seeing dread as a warning sign, to start looking at it as a growth sign. I want you to think about your own farm business journey and what have been the biggest leaps that you've ever taken. I mean, the first time we launched our CSA to 12 customers like that was a leap of faith. It was just a crazy leap of faith. We didn't know what we were doing. We made so many mistakes. Hiring our first employee, that felt like a huge risk. I remember when we switched to online ordering and it wasn't just a CSA anymore. I thought we were going to lose so many customers and they were going to jump from the CSA to the store and that didn't happen. It actually increased our revenue. I remember every time we raised our CSA price. Ugh, that felt so hard. A few years ago when we decided to invest in H2A labor, I just thought that was really risky. Yeah, I mean, how many of those things did you dread before you did them, and I'm raising my hand here, and I would say all of them. And yet look at what was waiting on the other side. In all of those cases, there was growth. I learned new skills. I grew in my confidence. My business eventually became more profitable. I had a bigger impact. My audience grew. I've started realizing that a lot of the things that I have dreaded have ended up becoming very important moments in my business. Isn't that interesting? So I don't know if that's always the case, but it happens often enough that I think it's something to pay attention to, something to pay attention to. So the very thing that my brain was trying to protect me from was often something that God was using to grow me. So now here's kind of the relevance. Whenever I feel that familiar feeling of dread, I pause. And I'm not immediately asking, how do I make this feeling go away? If I become aware that I'm feeling dread, I'm starting to ask myself something different. I'm putting a different spin on it. What if this feeling means that I'm standing at the edge of a growth spurt? And what if dread isn't a stop sign? What if it's like an indicator light that something really cool has the potential to happen? What if it's a doorway? What if it's simply the feeling of leaving the familiar that I've bumped up against my edges and I'm going to step into the fog? I'm going to step into the next version of myself, which is outside the fog. I'm going to expand my edges. You cannot level up without leaving your current level. And so leaving your current level is always going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel uncertain, it's going to feel vulnerable. It's going to feel like dread. This was a big aha for me. Can you tell? Maybe dread, moments of dread, Feelings of dread isn't announcing, like, imminent failure or something you need to run away from. Maybe it's actually announcing an upcoming transformation if you have the courage to keep going. Maybe it's saying you're about to become the kind of person who can do something you've never done before. I don't know about you, but I would rather interpret dread that way. That gets me excited. Because if that is possible, then the next time dread shows up, instead of shrinking from it, I might actually lean in. I might even smile a little bit and say, bring it on. Because I'm noticing a pattern that growth, personal growth, growth in your business, it has a feeling and Maybe that feeling is dread. So what do we actually do when Dread shows up? I want to finish up with this because, let's be honest, it's going to show up. If you are growing a business, if you're trying new things, if you're stretching yourself, you're not going to eliminate dread. And I don't actually think that's the goal anymore. I think the goal isn't. Isn't to stop feeling dread. The goal is to stop letting dread make our decisions. Amen. So here are four practices that I'm trying to build into my life because I really want to. I want to deal with this because I feel like if I can deal with dread, so many more cool things are going to be possible for my business. I'm going to be able to deal with fear. I'm going to be able to manifest things I never thought possible. So practice number one, write these down. I'm going to challenge you to pick one and do it this week. Practice number one is question the storyteller. When I hear my brain say, this is going to take forever or this probably isn't going to work or you're going to fail, I want to practice responding with a question like, really? How do I know that's true? What evidence do I actually have? What if there's another possible future story than the one I'm saying right now? Sometimes I even change the language. So instead of saying, this is going to be hard, I'll say my brain is predicting this will be hard, or this is the story that my brain is telling me right now, or I don't actually know how this is going to turn out, or there are infinite numbers of ways that this could go. Do you hear the difference? That's all like switching your mindset, switching your thought. And it will change how you feel. It will change how you act. One of those statements sounds like a fact. The other one is more just questioning. It's curiosity. So I'm practicing some phrases like, maybe this won't be as difficult as I imagine I've been wrong before. I'm going to wait for evidence before I believe the story. This feels heavy because it's new, not necessarily because it actually is hard. Okay, practice number two, shrink. The first step. I already talked about this, but one of the biggest lies that Dread tells us is that we have to finish the whole project. But we don't. We just have to get started. With farmers back Toledo, I didn't have to create the entire launch. I just sat down and started writing the product. Description with ChatGPT When I was recruiting my grounded leaders for small group, I didn't tell myself I had to call everyone today. I called the person I was most confident would say yes. And that first yes gave me momentum for the second call and then the third. Momentum doesn't usually come right away. Momentum comes because of action. And sometimes I even put a container around my work. This is a tip that my coach gave me early on when I first started working with her, and I love it. What that means is that you. You give a time limit. Like, what if I only work on this for 20 minutes? What if I just do this launch for five days? What if we have a beta test and we beta test this project or this product line for four weeks? That's putting a container around it. What if I just make one phone call? Our brains like small commitments, and once we start, we'll often keep going. We just need a starting point. So that's practice number two is to shrink the first step. Number three, go get some evidence. I've started thinking about myself more like a scientist instead of a fortune teller. So instead of predicting the future, I'm trying to practice running experiments. Instead of asking like, what if this fails? I am practicing using words like, what happens if I try? What data can I collect? What might I learn? What does the situation want to teach me? What lesson do I have to learn from this before I can level up? My imagination has never really been a very reliable source of data. Remember what I said earlier? My brain cannot update the story until I give it new evidence. And so action is how we're going to collect that new evidence. Not overthinking, not worrying about it, not planning for the 10th time, we're going to do something. Practice number four is just to expect dread to show up. I think it's easy for us to believe that if I feel dread, something must be wrong. I want you to expect it. Especially if you are trying something new. I want you to start treating dread like a yellow flag instead of a red one. It doesn't mean stop. It means pay attention. You're leaving the familiar zone. You're entering a place where growth is likely to happen. And that's actually really exciting. Be excited about that. I have noticed a pattern. These projects that I've dreaded the most, they become the things that I am most grateful for that I'm most grateful that I did. And I want you to think about your own journey. I bet that if you made a list, many of your biggest breakthroughs have come Wrapped in discomfort. Because growth rarely arrives in the comfort zone. It usually arrives disguised as resistance, disguised as dread. So maybe the next time you feel dreadful, instead of asking, how do I make this go away? Or avoiding it, you could ask, what if this feeling is standing guard over something really good? What if the opportunity you've been praying for is waiting on the other side of this uncomfortable conversation, of this launch, of this email, of this new tech? I have to learn of this decision, of this risk. Instead of seeing dread as an enemy or a bad thing, what if it's an invitation now? Not always. I know there are sometimes legitimate reasons to slow down or rethink something. And Dread can be like, hey, put the pause. Be wise. But a lot of times I think dread is just announcing that I'm about to leave my comfort zone. And that is where growth lives on your horizon line. So let me leave you with three questions because I don't want you to just listen to this episode. I want you to do something with it. Okay, so here's your homework Number one. What marketing task have you been avoiding this week? I want you to name it. I want you to be honest. Maybe it's not a marketing task. Maybe this is something else in your business that you've been avoiding. Maybe something in your personal life. What has been sitting on your to do list for weeks and you need to deal with it and you've been avoiding it. Question number two. What story is Dread telling you about that task? I want you to talk it out or write it down. This is going to take forever. No one's going to buy. I'm going to fail. She's going to hate me when I say this. This is going to end my marriage. I'm not good at marketing. I don't know what I'm doing. What's the story? Get the story out of your head. Get it onto paper. What's the feeling that you are avoiding? Once you can see the story, you can question the story and you can take the next step, which is question number three. What is one tiny action that you can take in the next 24 hours? To attack Dread, to gather evidence instead of fortune telling, instead of making predictions all the time. And then just do it. Get started. You don't have to finish. You don't have to perfect it. You don't have to cross the finish line. Just start, write the first headline, make the call, block out 20 minutes for an email. Let it be good enough. Here is what I hope you're going to remember from today's episode. Dread is a storyteller, but you don't have to believe every story that it tells. Your brain is just trying to predict the future, but it doesn't actually know the future. The only way to discover what's true is to take action, to gather evidence, to rewrite the story. And who knows? The the very thing that you are dreading today may end up being the doorway to leveling yourself up to the very next level on your farm. It may become the story that you're telling a year from now about the moment that changed everything. So don't let dread write the ending. You write it. You write it yourself. Write it defiantly. I'll see you next week. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 372 if you found this episode inspiring, please share it with another farmer. Go leave me a rating or a review wherever you heard this podcast. That's another great way to support the show. And if you want to be inside my community where we talk about stuff like this in our coaching calls where I help farmers get it done and build their marketing machine, I'd love to have you in my farm marketing school community. If this isn't the right time because it's the middle of season, then join me in the fall. I'll be waiting there for you, but you can learn more@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS the battle is going to be won in your mind, my friend. It's not not just about learning the strategy and putting the machine together. We have to actually get into our heads and start dealing with the thoughts that are holding us back. You can also get on my email list if you aren't already. I'd love to be in your inbox every week and let you know what I talked about on the show. I have some free stuff to send your way to make your marketing better too, so you can get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com Subscriber thank you for sitting with me. This turned into a much longer episode than I imagined, but I'm passionate about it and I appreciate you going on this journey with me. I want to encourage you to stop fearing dread and when you see it rear its ugly head, I want you to just consider maybe it's actually the doorway into your next greatest breakthrough. Don't fear it, step into it. Remember, I believe in you. Have a great week everyone.