How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Business

I want to tell you about a conversation that stayed with me long after I stopped recording.

This week on Soul Stories, I sat down with Morgan Jannusch, one of the co-authors in our sixth book, The Rich Lady Revolution: The Embodied Era, and the owner of MJ Communications up in Toowoomba. If you've been following along, you'll know Morgan spent almost a decade as a journalist before she built her business from scratch. What you might not know is what that decade actually cost her, and what it took to write about it honestly in her chapter.

I'm not going to pretend this is a light one. But it's an important one, and by the end there's a reel with a crutch in it, so stick around.

How Morgan and I actually met

I love how this one played out, because it's such a good reminder that your people don't always arrive with fireworks. I sent Morgan a Facebook friend request before a Sarah Cordiner event, off the back of a mutual connection. Her honest reaction? She thought it might be a hacker.

"I don't even know if this is a real person or not," Morgan told me. "I'm just gonna hit accept and we'll see what happens, and if I get hacked, it's okay."

We never actually spoke at that event. I just remember her presence in the room, six foot tall and impossible to miss. It wasn't until my sister Diane mentioned her name later that the dots connected. That's the bit I keep coming back to. Fate doesn't usually announce itself.

Sometimes it just looks like a slightly suspicious friend request you said yes to anyway.

Eleven days that changed everything

Morgan spent close to ten years in journalism. In late 2022, she was rostered on early the week the Wieambilla siege happened, the ambush near Tara that killed two police officers and a neighbour who'd gone to help. For the next eleven days, that story was her whole world. Ringing families. Chasing whoever she could find connected to Tara and Chinchilla. Trying to understand people whose worst day had just become the entire nation's news cycle.

She wasn't even on location, and it still got into her body. Not sleeping properly. Hearing gunshots that weren't there. By February, she'd handed in her notice.

What struck me most wasn't the decision to leave. It was something she told me about a completely different story, a fatal car crash the same year, where her editor told her to get a comment from the mother of the 20 year old who'd died. Morgan could have chased the details of how it happened. Instead she told the grieving mother, "I don't want to know how she died. I want to know who she was."

That's the whole of Morgan, right there, in one sentence.

"You move forward, you don't always move on"

This is the line from her chapter I haven't stopped thinking about.

"It takes strength to actually allow yourself to feel everything you need to process and move forward. You may not always move on because sometimes you don't move on or get over it, but you move forward in life with that feeling beside you."

People in her industry told her to bury it. Have a drink, move on, don't let it bother you. And she just didn't buy it. She still doesn't. She talks about it now the way we talk about the ego in our coaching work, not something you kick out of the car, but something you put in the back seat. Still there. Not driving.

If that lands for you the way it landed for me, that's a lot of what we work through inside the Rich Lady Revolution Membership, not shoving the hard stuff down, but learning to carry it without it running the show. Come and find us: https://www.those2sisters.au/membership

"Why would someone pay me when they could pay someone else"

This is the part of the conversation every business owner listening is going to feel in their chest.

Morgan told me she never intended to start a business. The thought terrified her. In her own words from the chapter, "there was no way I was smart enough to do that... why would someone pay me when they could pay someone else?"

I hear a version of this every single week. Clever, capable women who assume that because something is easy for them, it must be easy for everyone. It isn't. What's close to your nose is invisible to you and exactly what someone else needs.

Morgan's pricing has changed more than once since she started, and she said something I'm going to keep quoting for a long time. Your prices should evolve the same way you do. Every retreat, every bit of coaching, every version of yourself you've invested in belongs in the number, not apologised for in it.

Writing the chapter, and the fear that came with it

Morgan told me the fear of writing her chapter was real. Not the polished, "here's my highlight reel" kind of fear. The other kind. "Am I just going to trauma dump on someone? How much do I say?"

She messaged Diane while she was writing it, trying to work out how to get the weight of it onto the page without flattening the reader under it. What she landed on was simple. Stop asking what happened to me and start asking what do I want the reader to feel, think, and leave with.

Her advice to any woman sitting on a story she's scared to tell was just as simple. Write it messy first. It's not the final edit. Close the door, put music on, cry if you need to, and just get it down. Shape it later.

Good boobs, Morgan, and the reel that hit 25,500 views

I can't write about this episode without mentioning the photoshoot.

Morgan turned up to our collective shoot with Natty Lou halfway through her pregnancy, hot, anxious, and convinced the whole thing was going to look horrendous because she couldn't find a single outfit that fit properly that week. She very nearly didn't get in the car.

And then she did. And somewhere in the middle of it, I ended up spinning another woman around by a crutch with a phone in my mouth, while someone else filmed from a balcony and accidentally got an angle that had all of us crying with laughter. That reel is sitting at 25,500 views. ☺️

But underneath the fun, something real happened. Morgan needed someone to hold up the mirror before she could see what everyone else in that room could already see. That's not a weakness. That's what community is for.

I'll leave you with the line from Morgan's chapter that made me go quiet for a second when I read it back to her on the podcast.

"The very thing I thought would break me became the thing that built me."

You don't have to be the world's leading expert to make an impact. Everything you've survived has already qualified you.

Are you ready for more profit AND peace in your business? Join the Rich Lady Revolution Membership: https://www.those2sisters.au/membership

Michelle Anne x