95. Business Blind Spots (CEO Summer School)

Where do you often find yourself getting in your own way? We all have areas that trip us up or hold us back from reaching our full potential as interior design business owners. The problem is, these blind spots are often hard to see on our own, and they’re delaying the results we want most.

In this episode, I share examples of common blind spots and provide strategies to help you proactively identify what might be getting in your way. By cultivating greater self-awareness and learning to compassionately examine your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you can skillfully navigate challenges and achieve the outcomes you desire in your business.

Tune in to discover how business blind spots limit your growth and a powerful reflection question that will give you clarity on your current blind spots. With this knowledge, you learn how to make looking for blind spots a regular part of your business-building activities so you can make profound changes to accelerate your growth.


CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!

If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!


What You’ll Discover from this Episode:

  • Why everyone has business blind spots and how they limit your success.

  • The top signs that a blind spot is present in your interior design business.

  • How to cultivate self-awareness to identify your unique blind spots.

  • Strategies to compassionately examine your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

  • A powerful question to gain clarity on your current business blind spots.

  • How addressing blind spots at the root cause leads to profound change.

  • The importance of checking your blind spots regularly as your business evolves.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Full Episode Transcript:

Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 95. This is our fifth lesson in the CEO Summer School series. And in this one we’re going to talk about blind spots, those things you cannot see but are actively getting in the way of what you want to create in your interior design business.

Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.

Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I can’t believe it, but we’re already here with the fifth lesson in the CEO Summer School series. We’re getting close to wrapping up, but it is not too late to join us. If you go to desiid.com/summerschool, you’ll get instant access to all of the one sheet reflection guides that pair with each of the lessons so you can go back through and work through CEO Summer School at your own pace.

It’s completely free to get those guides, but you do need to sign up with your email at desiid.com/summerschool. I’m providing these one sheet reflection guides, whether you’ve already signed up or signed up but have kind of gotten off track with printing those when the episodes release, because I really want you to apply what you’re hearing on the podcast directly to yourself and to your own business.

It can feel really inspiring to listen and you’ll definitely have a mindset shift, but there’s so much more value in putting pen to paper to see how this clearly relates to your interior design business and your goals and decide how you’re going to use what you’re hearing and put it into action.

Today what I want to talk to you about are business blind spots. To begin introducing this concept and how you can work with the idea of blind spots in your own interior design business, I want you to bring to mind an actual blind spot. Like the kind that you have when you’re out on the road driving.

I have a new car and we’re now a fully electric vehicle family, which is really exciting. And I’m getting used to all of the new features, both the ones I want to use and then the ones I accidentally turn on and can’t figure out how to turn off. But one of those features is a blind spot detector.

I had this on my old car, but it wasn’t nearly as noticeable. There was just this little white light that would kind of turn on. And now in my new car, the light is a big red triangle and it also makes some noise. So it’s very clearly alerting me to a car being in my blind spot. It gives me some advanced warning that there’s another car approaching. And it also tells me, yep, it’s definitely in your blind spot. You are not going to be able to see this unless you turn around and take a look.

Of course, over the years of driving in much less techie cars, I’ve of course learned to look for the blind spots. I mean, driver’s ed 101. I know blind spots exist, and I know it’s really important to take a look over my shoulder and around me before I merge. If I’m not looking back and around for vehicles that might be soon entering or have already entered into my blind spot, I’m going to end up in an accident.

Just like in our car, we all have our own mental blind spots. But unless you train yourself to look for them, to identify them and watch for their signals, you are going to trip yourself up and cause issues for yourself and your business and for those around you. Your mental blind spots are the things that you just can’t easily see or see at all and they get in the way of you making progress towards your own goals.

So often when I’m working with clients, they say the phrase, I’m getting in my own way. I need to get out of my own way. And that is identifying these blind spots and then working with them to understand them and also develop strategies for how you navigate them.

When you think about getting in your own way and those mental blind spots, which is how you do that, it really boils down to the thoughts, feelings, and actions that are driving outcomes and experiences in your interior design business without understanding why things are the way they are.

Sometimes this is totally fine because if the outcomes and experiences you’re creating are unconsciously being created by you and you like all of those outcomes and experiences, great. I would suggest that’s always still a great time to look at how you’re creating those things for yourself so that you can leverage those lessons and do more of them, do them more efficiently, think of other ways that you could leverage those strengths.

But especially when things are not going the way that you want them to be going, whether that’s in tangible results or just your emotional state working in the business, we really want to understand the root cause of the thoughts, feelings, and actions or behaviors that are leading to those outcomes and experiences you’d prefer to change.

We can really look at how the thoughts, feelings, and actions are working together, how they’re all interconnected and creating this mental blind spot. I want to give you some examples of what these blind spots might look or sound like so that you can start thinking of ways that this is showing up in your business.

And it for sure is showing up. We all have these types of blind spots. Everyone’s blind spots will be a little bit different. They might be nuanced. They might be very similar. But I guarantee you have blind spots and so I want to give you some of these examples to get you thinking about it and pique your awareness a little bit so you can start looking for them.

A prime, prime example of a blind spot is when you’re in that state of knowing what to do and not doing it. Having the tools, having the knowledge, having the resources, and simply doing nothing with it. That is one that I see a lot. Another one is if you’re noticing avoidant behaviors in yourself, maybe ignoring tasks or distracting yourself with anything but what your real priority is or what you say you want to do.

Another one might be blaming others without looking at your part in how that circumstance was created. But also on the flip side, another blind spot could also be you blaming and judging yourself for everything, for not taking a look at what is mine and what is theirs. Another blind spot signal could be acting out emotions in unskillful ways, ways that are going to make the situation worse, not better.

Another blind spot could be believing everything you think, especially when you have positive supportive evidence of the contrary. If what you’re believing about you serves you and supports the goals and direction you want to be headed, excellent. But often we’re believing old narratives and old stories that don’t even align with the results that we’ve created.

It’s like the success that you have in your business, you haven’t allowed yourself to see it. And so you’re coming from problem solving and goal setting from a place of things aren’t working or it’s not good enough instead of coming from the place of all that I’ve created and what is going well. Okay. So don’t believe everything you think, but we need to know what you’re thinking, that blind spot, in order to do something about it.

Other examples of blind spots might be needing to be right above all else or defaulting into defensiveness or possibly unconscious decision-making based on biases or limiting beliefs. More blind spot examples could be repeating the same behavior over and over again, hoping that you’ll get a different outcome. Or another one might be not honoring commitments to yourself or others.

All of these examples of blind spots are times when you as the business owner are delaying you getting what you want, either in the now as in today, maybe in the near future, next week, next month, next quarter, or in the longer term future, because you haven’t learned to look for these blind spots and solve for the root cause of the thinking, feeling, and behaviors.

Sometimes you will see your blind spots. You might be hearing me share these examples and go, “Yep, I know exactly what you’re talking about,” but you keep acting as if you didn’t see them. Or maybe you haven’t wanted to look at them or haven’t made time to look at them. So often with my clients, they’re moving a million miles an hour and they just haven’t slowed down enough to turn their head, look over their shoulder and see what’s going on around them and inside of them.

And if that’s you, that’s okay. This isn’t an opportunity for judgment. It’s an invitation to make looking for blind spots a regular part of your business building activities. Just like when you’re driving your car, you’re going to have to keep looking for blind spots. You’re going along on the highway and all the other cars are shifting, you’re shifting, you’re changing direction. It’s not like all the cars just go away and you’re in your own lane forever and ever.

In business, we have to continue to look for the blind spots we don’t yet have access to or awareness of because new blind spots are going to appear as your goals get bigger. Maybe the economy is shifting again, your staff, your clientele changes, your personal life season changes. There’s always going to be blind spots and you can make business a lot easier on yourself if you learn to spot them and skillfully navigate them.

The continual development of self-awareness, cultivating the ability to notice what beliefs, behaviors and emotions are creating your current results, that is learning to check your blind spot in your interior design business. This is such an important skill. If you do not have self-awareness and if you do not cultivate a relationship with yourself where you can reflect with curiosity and interest in what it is that’s driving your behaviors in the business and what is creating the results that you currently have, the ones you like and the ones you don’t like, it’s going to not just limit your personal growth, but it’s absolutely going to limit your business growth.

One of the things I find with blind spots, especially if you’re new to looking for them, is that it’s so much easier to pinpoint them in hindsight. My guess is that you can probably look to your past as a business owner, maybe a year, a few years, 10 years ago, and identify a few blind spots or mistaken beliefs that held you back at that time.

I want you to just take a second and reflect on that. What is a blind spot that maybe you had in the past that you can now see with clarity? That’s really valuable, practicing that skill, seeing the ways you were holding yourself back and getting in your own way in the past. And now I want you to start proactively looking for and understanding the blind spots you currently have so you can address them before they’re an issue, or address them in the moment as you start to notice these belief and emotional and behavioral patterns that play out in a way that maybe you would prefer them not to.

Self-awareness and the ability to reflect on one’s thinking, feeling, and actions is so much of what I do as a coach and working with my clients and also teaching them to do this for themselves through self-coaching. So that would absolutely be a way that you could work on spotting your blind spots. And I do have my wait list open for one-on-one coaching, I’ll put the link in the show notes if you want to add your name to that list.

And you can also do it on your own. You can do this through journaling, through mindfulness-based meditation or body centered or somatic practices. There are many ways to tune in to be aware of what’s happening so that you can skillfully respond and redirect yourself as necessary.

For today’s CEO Summer School lesson, I’m going to give you a question that’s going to help you look for and identify your blind spots in a proactive way. What I want you to do is fast forward a year from now today in your business. Picture yourself, your business. And now I want you to picture yourself looking back to the you of right now. What would you say would be your blind spots?

I’m going to give you some ideas to get you thinking, but I really want you to give this some consideration. And remember, you can always go back and rewind this and you’ll have the reflection guide to dig into this a little bit more.

So one question you could think about is, what am I not spending enough time thinking about or not enough time doing, or maybe even too much time thinking about something or too much time doing? What are you willfully ignoring, turning the blind eye on your blind spot? Where are you causing unnecessary stress and friction in your day to day? Maybe in your relationships in the business, maybe in the way that you’re approaching projects.

Which responsibilities or relationships or projects are weighing heavily on you now? And you could give yourself permission to let them go or modify how that relationship is structured? The last one I want you to think about is the story you’re telling yourself about you as the leader of your business, supporting you or holding you back?

You might come up with other ideas on how to look for your own blind spots, and that is totally amazing. But I wanted to just give you a few seeds of thought to get you going because you might not have ever done this before, and I want to give you a little momentum under your feet.

So the question was to look forward a year from today in your business, and then if you were looking back to the you right now, what would be your blind spots?

If you’re already enrolled in CEO Summer School, check your email, print that reflection guide and answer this question for yourself along with the two other bonus prompts.

And if you aren’t already in CEO Summer School, make sure you subscribe to the show and then go to desiid.com/summerschool. You’ll enter your email and then you’ll get instant access to today’s guide along with all of the other guides that have been released so you can apply the CEO Summer School concepts directly to your design business.

Before we go, I want to make one important note about looking for blind spots and that process. And that is to do this with compassion. We all have blind spots. We always will have them. And we all have come from a past where we’ve encountered our own blind spots. When we look at the ways we get in our own way or trip over ourselves, we want to do that with understanding and self-kindness so that we can better work with whatever these patterns are to make a change.

Even if you’ve been in the pattern of harsh self criticism to keep yourself in check or try and like force or willpower your way to change, you can learn to take a softer approach and lessen that critical internal dialogue. And trust me, this is going to be how you make profound changes in both your life and your business.

So please, please remember that as you look for blind spots now and in the future, approach them with compassion and kindness.

That is what I have for you today. Next week on the podcast, you will have an episode that’s going to further support implementing this topic. And the week after that, I’ll be back with another brand new episode of the CEO Summer School series. Until next Wednesday, when I’m in your podcast feed again, I am wishing you a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

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Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.

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96. Becoming Your Future Self: A Leadership Journey

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94. Beyond Later: How to Overcome Procrastination