Breaking Free from Limiting Habits: Insights for Fractional Executives with Anna Shilina

As a fractional executive, your personal habits directly impact your professional success. The way you manage your time, how you speak to yourself, and your ability to take consistent action all determine whether you'll reach your potential - or remain trapped in patterns that limit your growth.

In a recent conversation with Anna Shilina, author of Habit Freedom and founder of RelatingAcademy.com, we explored the critical relationship between personal habits and professional achievement. Anna has spent over a decade guiding thousands of entrepreneurs to break free from limiting habits and create more fulfilling relationships, both with themselves and others.

The Foundation: Your Relationship with Yourself

For fractional executives, who must continually sell their services and deliver exceptional results, the relationship with yourself forms the foundation of everything else. As Anna explained, this relationship can be measured in two concrete ways:

1. Your ability to keep promises to yourself

"A lot of that relationship with yourself is about self-respect and self-trust," Anna noted. "Can you trust yourself and do you respect yourself? The first thing to look at is what are the promises that I am able to keep to myself? And then where am I breaking promises to myself?"

This self-trust becomes particularly important when building a consulting practice, where consistent business development is essential. If you continually promise yourself you'll reach out to prospects or create content, but repeatedly break those promises, your relationship with yourself deteriorates - just as it would with any other relationship.

2. Your internal dialogue

The second tangible factor is your self-talk - how you speak to yourself in times of success and failure. Do you act as your own cheerleader? Do you show compassion when you make mistakes? Or do you engage in harsh self-criticism that undermines your confidence?

This internal dialogue has direct business implications. As Anna explained, entrepreneurship requires repeatedly getting knocked down and getting back up again. Self-compassion makes this resilience possible, while excessive self-criticism can keep you stuck.

Creating Space Between Stimulus and Response

For fractional executives who struggle with self-criticism, Anna recommends what she calls the "Frankel Pause," based on Viktor Frankl's insight: "Between the stimulus and the response, there's a pause or a space, and in that space lies your freedom."

The more we can create that pause between a trigger and our habitual response, the more we can choose a new response. This doesn't happen instantly - when first practicing this pause, your default reaction will likely still occur. But with practice, you can extend that space and choose a more supportive response.

Anna recommends meditation as a concrete tool for developing this ability - not the "pop culture meditation" of silencing your mind, but the practice of sitting with discomfort and understanding your inner landscape. This creates the spaciousness needed to rewire your reactions.

Overcoming Perfectionism in Business Development

For many fractional executives, perfectionism becomes a major barrier to consistent marketing and sales efforts. They know they should be posting on LinkedIn or reaching out to potential clients, but they get caught in a cycle of "it's not ready yet" or "I don't want to put myself out there."

Anna offered a powerful reframe for this situation: "You have a choice. You're either going to have the discomfort of learning to put yourself out there, or you're going to have the discomfort of not having any money. So which discomfort do you choose?"

Many fractional executives unconsciously choose the discomfort of financial struggle, using perfectionism as a shield against the vulnerability of putting themselves out there. But Anna emphasized that discomfort is inevitable - you simply get to choose which type you prefer.

More importantly, avoiding this discomfort today only makes it harder tomorrow. "If you don't do it today, it's going to be harder tomorrow because today you've reinforced that neural pathway of not doing it and you haven't built that muscle," Anna explained.

The key insight? "What if the life of your dreams is on the other side of 3,000 nos? How quickly would you get those nos?"

Breaking the Distraction Habit

Another common challenge for fractional executives is the habit of distraction - particularly with smartphones. Between social media, email, news, and other digital temptations, it's easy to interrupt focused work every few minutes.

Anna's perspective cuts through the excuses: "At the end of the day, it's all a numbing behavior. Every single thing that you do is either going to move you towards your goal or away from your goal. There's no in between. There's no neutral."

When we pick up our phones between work sessions, we're often avoiding discomfort - the discomfort of challenging work, of potential failure, or simply of sitting with our own thoughts. It's a form of self-soothing that ultimately moves us away from our goals.

The antidote? Connect with your mission and purpose. "When you have that mission, that vision that's so important, when you get up in the morning and you can't wait to serve the world with your service, with your message, when you're so lit up by your mission, then the phone can't really distract you because you have that drive."

For practical implementation, Anna suggests a simple question: "Is your future self going to thank you for this activity?" This frames each choice in terms of its impact on your long-term goals and aspirations.

The Power of Community and Accountability

One of the most actionable insights from our conversation was the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. As Anna put it, "No one is a solo success story. And the faster you realize that you need other people and surround yourself with other people who want to hold each other accountable, that's the fastest path to success."

For fractional executives, this might mean:

• Joining a mastermind group of other consultants
• Finding an accountability partner who checks in weekly
• Hiring a coach who will hold you to your commitments
• Building a community of peers who are similarly ambitious

These relationships create external motivation when internal motivation falters. They also provide perspective when you're too close to your own challenges to see clearly.

The Five-Word Lesson: Do the Hard Thing Now

When asked about her most important lesson from her own journey of breaking limiting habits, Anna offered five powerful words: "Do the hard thing now."

Whether it's a difficult conversation, a sales call you've been avoiding, or a habit you need to change, embracing the challenge immediately rather than postponing it makes everything easier in the long run.

Anna shared her personal struggle with alcohol as an example. For seven years, she was aware that drinking wasn't serving her goals, yet found it difficult to break the habit. The message that finally broke through was recognizing that the habit would have to end eventually - so why not now, when the consequences would be less severe than waiting years?

"Today's the easiest that it will get," she explained. "Every cycle, every compulsion, every habit needs to end because we're human and we're cyclical. If this limitation has to end, might as well make it end now."

Applying These Insights to Your Fractional Practice

As a fractional executive, consider these action steps to implement Anna's insights:

1. Assess your relationship with yourself
   
   • Do you keep the promises you make to yourself about business development?
   • How do you speak to yourself when client work doesn't go as planned?
   • What would change if you treated yourself with the same respect you show clients?
2. Practice the Frankel Pause
   
   • Notice your reactive patterns around client communication
   • Create space between triggers and responses
   • Consider establishing a meditation practice focused on understanding your inner landscape
3. Choose your discomfort intentionally
   
   • Acknowledge that both marketing yourself AND avoiding marketing create discomfort
   • Decide which discomfort better serves your long-term goals
   • Recognize that doing the uncomfortable thing gets easier with practice
4. Examine your relationship with distraction
   
   • Track how often you check your phone during focused work time
   • Question whether each activity moves you toward or away from your goals
   • Connect daily tasks to your larger mission and purpose
5. Build accountability structures
   
   • Identify peers who can hold you accountable to your commitments
   • Consider joining or forming a mastermind group
   • Share your goals publicly to create positive pressure
6. Do the hard thing now
   
   • Identify one challenging action you've been postponing
   • Take that action today, recognizing it only gets harder with delay
   • Celebrate the completion as evidence of your commitment to growth

Ultimately, your success as a fractional executive depends not just on your expertise, but on your ability to consistently show up, market your services, and deliver exceptional results. By improving your relationship with yourself and breaking free from limiting habits, you create the foundation for sustainable growth and fulfillment in your practice.

As Anna reminded us, "When you're so lit up by your mission, that's when the habits that don't serve you begin to fall away naturally." Connect with that mission daily, and the path forward becomes clearer with each step.

Mylance

‍This value-added article was written by Mylance. Mylance takes your marketing completely off your hands. We build the marketing machine that your Fractional Business needs, but you don't have time to run. So it operates daily, growing your brand, completely done for you.Instead of dangling numbers in front of you, our approach focuses on precise and thoughtful input: targeted outreach to the right decision makers, compelling messaging that resonates, and content creation that establishes trust and legitimacy.To apply for access, submit an application and we'll evaluate your fit for the service. If you’re not ready for lead generation, we also have a free, vetted community for top fractional talent that includes workshops, a rates database, networking, and a lot of free resources to support your fractional business.