3 Mindset Shifts You Need as a New (Anxious) Web Designer
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I actually had a different topic scheduled for today, but changed it last minute to address a lot the questions, fears, nervousness, and anxiety about market saturation, and imposter syndrome, fear of niching down, etc– that I've been seeing in comment threads of various design groups I’m in lately.
So I have a little bit of a pep talk for you today!
Busting the Web Design Market Saturation Myth
The questions that I've been seeing are things like:
is the market oversaturated? (no)
are there too many web designers? (no)
is there enough demand? (yes)
can I actually charge more than $5,000 for a “Squarespace website?” (yes)
I firmly believe the fear of over-saturation in the web design industry is unfounded. Why?
Because there are millions of businesses, and the internet moves at lightning speed, which means things designs become outdated or not as effective within 3-5 years, with the speed of technological changes, new features, platform advances, etc. That means every business not only likely needs a website to start with, but after they get one, they’ll need maintenance & regular redesigns every few years to keep up!
So there may be a lot of us web designers out there, but there are even more businesses that need new or redesigned websites as their business grows & changes.
If you're afraid there's not enough demand, then I've got two stats that will help alleviate that fear for you by putting it into perspective.
The Commerce Institute says 4.7 million businesses are started every year.
The US Chamber of Commerce said “a record-breaking 5.5 million new business applications were filed in 2023” alone!
And that’s not even covering all the bases (every country, etc) so I would say that there's plenty of work to go around!
However, if market saturation is not the base of your fear and instead you're mostly afraid that you can't do it well enough, or that people don't want whatever skill you have, then that's most likely just a story you're telling yourself, which is a mindset related issue not based in fact.
To help you with this, I wanted to share with you some of the mindset tips that have helped me overcome my own imposter syndrome and fears, because like you (probably), I'm a very problem-solving oriented person.
Learning Your Strengths & Weakness is Important
I am equal parts idealist, dreamer, visionary, analytical, logical, and problem solver. So my brain, as an Enneagram 6, is constantly whirring trying to solve problems that don't even exist yet with the goal of creating a ‘stable’ environment. Seems kind of laughable on the face, for us entrepreneurs, right?!
I’m talking about big & little things though. Like, if we went to the beach I would be planning for how many towels we needed for just two people: just in case someone spilled a drink, just in case someone dropped their towel in the water, just in case our dog needed to be dried off too. So I'm that person that's planning five steps ahead to make sure that there's no problems within those five steps at all times.
It's exhausting at times, I admit! I've learned to work with it, by knowing my Enneagram and that has helped me in my business because I understand my base behaviors. I know more or less what my strengths and weaknesses are related to those behaviors, so I can work with those aspects of my personality and find ways to use them to my advantage, where they don't hurt my business, but they actually strengthen my business.
If you're into that kind of thing, go check out Abby Howe’s YouTube channel. She's an Enneagram expert and she has really interesting and entertaining videos to watch so that you can understand more about your personality type.
When I got furloughed in 2020, It was kind of do or die.
We were about to move out of the state and across the country. A family member had just passed away, and my husband & I needed a rest, –to start somewhere fresh & new.
But it kind of felt like… Wherever we moved to, because I knew it was going to be rural, either I would have to commute quite a distance to have a design job in a bigger city nearby (at least 30-45 minutes away), or I'd have to get a job at a local coffee shop, restaurant, or retail shop, because there's really just not a whole lot of job variation where we’d be.
While there’s nothing wrong with those jobs, I’m 37 this year, have a very specific skill set in a specialized industry that can charge a very fair rate, ––and those jobs would have felt like a step backward for me. One I knew I’d be very unhappy with.
So with more limited options, it was kind of like, I have to make this work or all of my career dreams may be dashed. And as a problem-solver, you can imagine that if my entire personality &/or my entire brain power is devoted to creating a stable environment for myself and eliminating potential problems, that this prospect was terrifying for me.
This is how I got myself through that experience, positively!
Embracing the Experiment: A Crucial Mindset Shift
Prior to all of this happening (the furlough, the death of a family member, a cross-country move), I had bought Business by Design from James Wedmore. (Highly recommend by the way; it's a great and very comprehensive course program. He’s very “woo-woo” these days, but it works!)
There are two things that he often said, either in the course or on his free Mind Your Business podcast because I was binging both at the time. They were:
Treat your business like an experiment.
That resonated with me! In the U.S., grade schoolers have science fair projects where we have to pick a topic, then hypothesize how it's going to work, what we think will happen, and how it's going to function scientifically using what we’ve learned so far in our science classes. Then we actually create the experiment and see if we were right, then report our findings at a school-wide fair or grade-wide competition. For example, if you hypothesized that you could generate light through a potato because they can conduct electricity, then you’d do exactly that, and report if it actually worked, or if not why you think it didn’t.
James was saying, if you treat your business like that, then you will act based on the data and NOT just your emotions.
That was a huge mindset shift for me because, before, it WAS all about my emotions! How I didn't feel like I knew enough, didn't feel like I could “do” enough, felt like I was too “new,” that nobody knew I existed, and/or that my business might not work simply because I just didn't know what the hell I was doing to market myself & find clients.
But I found that if I came at it from a perspective of “what are the facts,” then I wasn’t so emotional about my decisions.
For example, asking questions like: what is the data telling me? where is most of my website traffic (people) coming from vs inquiries? where are they telling me that they find me? If I did a survey or some basic market research, could I pick people's brain and figure out how they feel about price ranges, etc?
Base your decisions on actual facts. Real data! Talk to people; look at your analytics. Make decisions based on that kind of information, vs what the survive-not-thrive part of your brain is telling you.
Don't let your emotions override whatever is the actual truth.
So that was one really big takeway that helped!
Show up Every Day & Take Action with Confidence
The second thing is a lot more conceptual, so hang in there with me!
When we wake up in the morning and our alarm goes off, we're not laying in bed wondering whether the sun will come up that day. We know it will. So we get out of bed and we go about our day planning around the idea that the sun will be in the sky at some point. Even if we get up before the sun, we know it's going to be up there eventually. If we get up after the sun, then we know it's going to be shining outside when we leave our dark bedroom.
Our work, education & play hours are generally during daylight. Think about how that might change if daylight wasn’t a known and reliable part of our day. Would we still get up at the same time? Go to school for the same duration each day? When would we shift our play hours if it was dark all the time? We might be a lot less certain about everything!
We should treat our business in a similarly confident way.
Don't delude yourself, of course, but if you go about your business planning & acting like it CAN succeed… then you make daily decisions from a place of confidence vs fear or anxiety.
Why should we be confident of in success? There is plenty of evidence to show that businesses can succeed, right? It's not a question of whether it can in most cases. That part's up to you. You’ve got to put in the work! But whether it can? Yes, it absolutely can; that's a fact. Thousands, ––maybe even millions of people have shown that businesses like yours can work, right?
Let’s look at an example!
Think about skydiving. Surely, no one would actually jump out of a plane flying thousands upon thousands of feet/meters in the air, –if they WEREN’T confident that their parachute would work before they went SPLAT on the ground. 😳😒 They made an informed decision before they stepped onto the plane, before it ever even took off. Yes, it’s a risk! But it’s a risk based on known factors, and those known factors help give us confidence to take the risk anyway.
If you go about your day acting AS IF success CAN happen, AND while treating your business like an experiment (basing your decisions on data instead of your emotions), then you will put yourself in a better place to make more confident and informed decisions, from a better frame of mind.
Eventually that's actually going to help you start reaching your goals!
If instead, you get up and you're always afraid that whatever you try won't work, you'll take action from a place of scarcity, lack, and fear. If this is how you operate day-to-day, you won't be in the right frame of mind to make risky decisions, because you also won’t have the data you need to make informed decisions confidently. Decisions you need to make in order to help your business grow and eventually succeed.
And that's the only way to guarantee that you will fail. 🥺
The Power of Positive Self-Talk
I’ll leave you with one more game-changing idea that I came across in the past year or so from one of Marie Forleo's event speeches. I actually found it via a reel on her Instagram profile so you can watch it if you prefer; it's really, really short.
In that clip, she says our brain is a super computer, and essentially it’s programmed to do what we tell it to do.
I know that scientists in the room are rolling their eyes way back into the back of their head, but let's boil it down for us non-science-guys who didn't study all that neuroplasticity stuff. I'm sure you can find more accurate information from actual scientists (vs Marie), but her spin on it was really powerful for me!
The ‘stories’ that we tell ourselves are powerful, and this is kind of tying back to the thing James said about how we act when we get up and assume the sun will rise.
She says,
Our self-talk shapes our brain.
Which shapes your beliefs.
Which drives your behavior.
Which creates your thoughts, feelings, and experiences.And that creates your reality.
So, basically, whatever we tell our brain MOST, is what it believes.
And whatever it believes, it's going to help us achieve or create, ––because it. has. no. choice.
We are the ones that have the choice! 🤯
Also, check out this post next, where I shared something I learned from Mel Robbins, to stop calling it “imposter syndrome” because we’re NOT actually imposters!
Finding Truth & What Works for you
With all of the fear that I've been hearing lately, thoughts of scarcity and other negative self-talk, for anyone hoping to jump into this web design industry but feeling like you're unqualified, –– ultimately, you have to decide how you will show up in your life.
You have to decide: will you be the person who’s too afraid to take the risks you’ll need to take in order to succeed, –or will you be the person who takes calculated risks, learns & eventually wins?
The fact is, only you can decide.
If you’re not sure, or don’t trust your decisions, then ask yourself these 4 questions from Byron Katie:
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?
If you want to hear more about that, you need to go check out Byron Katie’s work. She wrote a book called Loving What Is* and she had a great interview with Marie Forleo.
That's all I have for you today! I hope that was really helpful for you!
As you saw in last week's post about my content creation process, this shit takes a long time. time to produce for you and I am happy to do it, but I'm even happier to do it when I know it's actually helping! So let me know in the comments below! 😃
