Some weeks, life feels subtle. Other weeks, it feels like life is standing in front of me with a giant neon sign that says, “Allie, are you seeing this?” Last week was one of the neon-sign weeks, and almost everything that happened came back to one thing I’ve been learning about myself as I scale my business again: how much I rely on control to feel safe.
The feeling I hadn’t felt since 2020
I’m going to keep the details vague, because other people are involved and some of them listen to the podcast. Something happened in my business that brought up a very specific kind of fear and scarcity. It was a mix of protectiveness, comparison, and almost territorial energy around what I’ve built. There was fear that something could be taken from me, and fear that someone else was becoming more valuable and that it was somehow making me less valuable.
I recognized that feeling almost immediately. The last time I felt it this strongly was around 2020, during one of the biggest growth periods of my business.
I’ve spent years looking back at that period trying to understand what happened. Why did I burn out? Why did I pull back so dramatically and dismantle things that were actually working? When there were more opportunities, more people, and more money, why did I end up making my business smaller?
There are probably a hundred answers, but I’m starting to think one of them is that the success started to feel unsafe. I wanted it and I felt I deserved it. But more success meant more exposure, more personalities, more responsibility, more opinions, more chances to be disappointed, copied, or compared, and more chances for someone to get close enough to what I’d built that I could lose a piece of it. Somewhere in my brain, growth got connected to danger, and contraction started to feel like safety. So I stopped the weekly webinar that was scaling my business, and I let go of team members who were helping me grow.
Scarcity can be quieter than “not enough”
We usually think of scarcity as not enough money, not enough clients, or not enough opportunity. For me, it often sounds more like this:
- What if what I already have isn’t safe?
- What if someone learns what I know and starts competing with me?
- What if someone else is becoming more important to my clients than I am?
- What if I’m too generous?
- What if what I’ve built is more fragile than I realize?
None of those things is necessarily happening. Scarcity, at least for me, is often an attempt to protect today from an imagined future loss. My brain is five steps ahead, trying to make sure the loss never happens. And that’s where control comes in.
What a dog attack showed me about control
The day after the business stuff came up, I took my dog Griffin out for an early morning walk by the lake. He’s a 10-year-old Australian Shepherd, and with construction near our house, I hadn’t been walking him. That morning I decided I was done waiting.
Partway through the walk, we came up on a woman with two off-leash dogs. They sprinted at Griffin, growling and snarling, jumping on him and baring their teeth at his face. I was pulling him back, yelling swear words, and screaming at the woman. Griffin was fine, not a scratch on him (thank you, Aussie fluff). I was furious, and I walked away without saying another word.
What surprised me was what I replayed afterward. I kept going over my own reaction: what I said, how I sounded, whether I was too much, whether I should have told her it was okay.
I’m extremely aware of my own responses, probably too aware. I always have an observer in my head asking, “Okay, Allie, how are we doing here? Are we being reasonable?” When I was in labor with one of my kids, a nurse looked at my husband and said, “She’s scary,” because I was so composed through the pain. That’s very me. During the dog attack, though, there was no pause. My body responded before my intellect did. When the observer came back online and reviewed the footage, I realized I kept replaying it because I had experienced myself out of control, and that was deeply uncomfortable.
Control has been one of my safety nets for a long time. I feel safer when I understand what’s happening, when I can anticipate what people will do, when I know everyone’s motivations, and when I can predict the outcome. In business, that can look like wanting to control who joins my group coaching programs and courses so I can make sure they’ll like it, and like me.
Rumination is a form of control
Why replay something that’s already over? Griffin was okay and the moment had passed. I think rumination is one more way of trying to get control back. If I replay it enough, maybe I find the perfect response and I’m ready next time.
That isn’t how life works, though. Some things you can’t prepare your way out of, and sometimes your nervous system gets there before your brain does. Growing a business works the same way. You can’t predict every scenario that walks in your door, shows up in your Slack channel, or comes across as a comment on your ads. Scaling is, by and large, an uncontrolled situation. Something will always come out of left field.
A different definition of safety while you grow
I’ve been talking a lot about capacity on the podcast lately. It’s tempting to believe the most evolved version of ourselves is calm all the time: never rattled, never jealous or scared or angry, always regulated and measured. Honestly, that sounds exhausting.
Maybe capacity is trusting yourself even when you temporarily lose it. Maybe it’s being able to have a messy, 100% fear-based human reaction without turning it into a crisis about who you are.
Once I saw that, I could see the same pattern in my business. When I feel threatened, I want to know everyone’s intentions, what’s happening behind the scenes, and what comes next. I want to pull things closer and not share them. That’s exactly what I did in 2020: protect more, watch closely, reduce the variables, make my world smaller. Underneath it was the belief that I’d be okay as long as I controlled everything around me.
You can’t hire people and control every aspect of their work. You can’t have a community full of different personalities and control every interaction. You can’t run ads to strangers and expect everyone to respond the same way. So the definition of safety I’m practicing now is this: I’ll be okay even when I’m not in control.
That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to feel threatened. Feelings happen. And abundance doesn’t mean abandoning discernment.
Two opposite answers to the copycat problem
In 2020, copycats were everywhere. Everybody had their own version of Tiny Offers: mini offers, pocket offers, you name it. People sent me DMs and screenshots of sales pages that ripped off mine. Some of them were people in a peer mastermind I’d looked up to for more than five years, and they copied my copy word for word. That copy came straight out of my brain at 2 a.m. in a Google Doc, so I knew it.
I asked two people for advice. Frank Kern, who I was doing one-on-one coaching with, said, “Forget it, dude. You’re so far ahead of them, they’re never going to be able to keep up. Create another product. Let them copy you.” Todd Herman said to sue them, get as many attorneys involved as possible, and make an example of them.
Ultimately I’m more of a Frank Kern vibe. I put my policies in place and sent the cease and desists I needed to send (at roughly $600 each, sending about 10 a month really sucks). What I took from it is that the two responses were wildly different, each one was right for the person giving it, and I had to find my own way.
What’s different this time
The biggest difference between 2020 Allie and 2026 Allie is that I’m not abandoning my feelings, and I recognize my patterns a lot faster. This time I felt the feeling in my gut before I’d fully figured out what was happening in the business, and I knew: I’ve been here before, and I remember how I reacted. After six years of thinking about that, I don’t want to let it shrink me again.
So now I’m practicing being able to:
- Notice a behavior I don’t like without catastrophizing what it means
- Put a boundary in place without building it out of panic
- Protect things without being territorial
- Let other people in my world be brilliant without deciding their brilliance is a threat
- Let someone else help my clients without it meaning I’m being replaced
When clients get even better results than I’ve gotten, I should celebrate that. There’s enough for everybody, and everybody gets to win.
I have a lot of compassion for 2020 Allie. She was holding more than she’d ever held. Our biggest sales day was a $200,000 day, and it blew my mind. She was doing the best she could to make herself feel safe. I’ve already lived the ending that path leads to, and this time I’m choosing a different response.
Letting yourself receive
The rest of that Sunday kept proving I’m not in control of anything. Right after the dog attack, a neighbor I’d never met stopped me to ask how I looked so beautiful at 8 a.m. (with day-and-a-half-old makeup). She ended up telling me her husband of 24 years had just moved out, and I gave her a long Disney hug. At Starbucks, while I was getting her a gift card with my daughter, my high school crush, who I hadn’t seen since I was 17, asked, “Is your name Allie?” The day before, at an open house, the agent had recognized me from my college dorm. And that evening, a client messaged out of the blue asking for a payment link for a VIP day. There was $5,000 in my Stripe account within 20 minutes.
I believe in energy and synchronicities, and I’ve been consistent. This is the first time I’ve ever posted seven podcast episodes in a row. When I turn my energy all the way on, I see it reflected back in my content, my sales, and the people who show up.
Part of that is learning to receive: compliments without immediately deflecting, new leads I deserve, and payments I don’t need to feel bad about. My nervous system tends to say, “Okay, that’s enough, you can stop now.” Growth is going to come with moments you can’t control, and you’re going to be okay.
Questions to sit with
- When you feel threatened in your business, what do you reach to control?
- Are your boundaries coming from discernment or from panic?
- Is there a feeling you recognize from a past growth season, and how did you respond last time?
Listen to the full episode
I tell the whole story in this week’s episode of Start Tiny with Allie Bjerk, including more about the 2020 copycat chapter and what I’m practicing now as I scale. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube.
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