start an online business

Hello friends! This week I’m sitting down with the amazing Jahaan Blake. Jahaan is a sports expert turned career coach who helps high-achieving women in the sports and entertainment industries lose the feeling of being stuck, frustrated and defeated and finally find their voice so they can tackle whatever is keeping them from getting exactly what they want in their career. 

During Jahaan’s 18-year career working in sports, including working with 3 major league teams (Red Sox, Dodgers, & Cubs), her favorite part of her job was always helping others see their full potential. She loved it so much that she finally made the leap and made a business out of it. Whether her clients want to break into the sports industry, take their performance to the next level, or own a place at the executive table, Jahaan provides incredible coaching programs to help them accelerate their career.

Jahaan also is the host of her own podcast, but this time she is sitting on the other side of the mic getting to answer the questions herself, which is always so fun to do!

Throughout her years in the industry Jahaan has learned that when working within your industry you can actually gain a very unique perspective, knowledge and experience - much different than what you would learn in a college classroom setting. She learned valuable life skills and lessons that she still uses to this day like how to navigate the internal politics of an organization, how to advocate for yourself, and how to lead a meeting. These are the things that no one likes to talk about, but things you need to know.

“You can either learn just by trial by fire, and some people just want to accelerate their career and get support on those core things and help them to have that dream career and get exactly what they want.”

When Jahaan started down her career path working for the Boston Red Sox, she was making $6 an hour (what?!) as an ambassador at Fenway Park. At that time she was also working on getting her masters degree so she was focused on working part time, getting her feet wet in the industry. She quickly decided that she wanted to transition into a full-time role with the organization and advocated for herself to do exactly that. She took her part-time position and created a new role for the organization as a coordinator, a much needed position that they were lacking. She learned how to manage a team of her peers, where she led them to consistently deliver positive fan experiences at the park.

Eventually, it was time for her to move on, and Jahaan’s boss moved to LA to work for the Dodgers. After convincing him it was a good move for him, she decided it could also be an excellent move for her. She took her own advice, moved to LA and began working for the Dodgers as well. She also made her biggest salary jump and took a huge promotion in her new role. 

When a divorce struck the owners of the team, things quickly turned ugly. This allowed Jahaan to pivot once again, setting her sights on Chicago to work for the Cubs. This position didn’t come quite as easily as the others, but she was so passionate about what she had to offer that she reached out directly to the new team owners to apply for their open position as a Chief Hospitality Officer. This was her job, and she was doing what it took to get it. In fact, she was so passionate about it that she not only emailed the Cubs to get it, but she also FedEX’ed them a letter. This struck a chord and a week later she had an interview scheduled and two weeks later an official job offer was made.

In the back of her mind, Jahaan had always thought about starting her own business. After all, it ran in her blood with her father also being an entrepreneur, but she was always just afraid to make that big leap. Every time she had thoughts about it she talked herself out of it saying ‘I need more experience’. After someone reminded her how great she was at consulting, and she saw all of the invoices teams were paying people for services like what she could offer, she decided it was time to start working on her own, gaining experience by building her business while still working her full-time job. 

Unfortunately, the company she was working with on the side just wasn’t a good fit and when she jokingly asked a friend/ colleague if they wanted to hire someone as a consultant she received a shocking response - YES. Her friend talked her up to her boss about the position and within hours Jahaan had only 30 seconds to accept an offer that could change the trajectory of her entire future. She said yes.

With no safety net, LLC, or real plan formulated, Jahaan had made her leap. After spending so many years in corporate, feeling like something was missing, she decided that she was just going to figure things out, do what makes her happy and feel fulfilled, while putting money into her pocket.

Jahaan began to pivot into coaching because so many friends and colleagues came to her for advice (they still do!). She realized how much she enjoyed helping women deal with things she too had gone through, and teaching them how to advocate for themselves. She started by interviewing a handful of women, and the trade off was her giving them the opportunity to ask her any questions they had and offer up advice. 

Friends, the very first person she talked to asked about her coaching packages. 

She quickly put together a proposal and consulting contract, offering three levels of services. Now Jahaan offers paid services, alongside her podcast, a tremendous value (for free!). Jahaan is super passionate about her clients and the services she offers and while she doesn’t love the feeling of selling herself, she has adopted the mindset of:

“I’m helping you. If you need help, I’m here”.

This helps to keep her mindset balanced when selling her services. 

When organizations approach her, she reminds herself (and them) how she can help their staff perform better and gain better results for the company by consistently offering up value.

You can connect with Jahaan on Instagram and LinkedIn, get more information on her services on her website, and gain tremendous value through her podcast.

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “You can either learn just by trial by fire, and some people just want to accelerate their career and get support on those core things and help them to have that dream career and get exactly what they want.”
• “This was her job, and she was doing what it took to get it.“
• “Every time she had thoughts about it she talked herself out of it saying ‘I need more experience’.”
• “After spending so many years in corporate, feeling like something was missing, she decided that she was just going to figure things out, do what makes her happy and feel fulfilled, while putting money into her pocket.”

Resources:

• Find Jahaan on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jahaan on Instagram
• Check out Jahaan’s website
• Listen to A Game of Her Own with Jahaan Blake
• Get more information on Jahaan’s Group Coaching program
• Work 1:1 with Jahaan in her Private Coaching program
• Trello
• Dave to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown

Hey friends! If you listened to yesterday’s episode then you heard the news! We are going on summer break for the month of July and will resume regular episodes starting in August. 

While the podcast may be on summer break, my team and I will still be working behind the scenes, serving our clients and planning for the second half of 2021. That being said, we have and will continue to add new trainings and downloads to our website to support you on your journey of building your online business while working a full-time job. 

You can head to www.shediditherway.com and click “Free Trainings.” I hope you have an amazing July and will talk to you in August! 

Hey friends! Today on the podcast I want to talk to you about a fun topic that I absolutely love: goal setting. As we are coming up on the half-way mark for 2021 it’s the perfect time to dive into this topic. In this episode, I’m going to talk about the exact process of setting goals and using results planning to guarantee you get those results.

When it comes to goal setting, there is the process (tactical) side and then the emotional side. The tactical side is reviewing results, planning your goals, creating massive action lists, putting your activities on your calendar and executing. The emotional side of goal setting is...our thoughts, the feelings that drive our actions in how we set goals, and how we think about our goals and the results we create. 

Tactical (Actionable) Steps

1. Reflect on the results you have created thus far in 2021. These results will be facts. For example, the amount of money you made, the size of your email list, the number of clients you have or have worked with.
2. Decide the one main goal you want to achieve by the end of 2021. If you’re already in business, I recommend making it a financial goal. 
3. Then break your one main goal into 6 mini goals, one for each month that will help you achieve your main goal. 
4. Create a massive action list.
5. Schedule and plan your results on your calendar.
6. Execute.

Emotional Steps

1. When you reflect on your goals, do it from a clean and neutral place. Maybe you hit the goals you set out for yourself at the beginning of 2021 - amazing. Maybe you didn’t - that’s okay. You want to avoid judgment, shame, frustration on the results you achieved or didn’t achieve. For example, let’s say you set a financial goal that you didn’t hit, rather than shaming or judging yourself for not hitting your goal (which will cause you to think negative, non-supportive thoughts), we want to remain as neutral as possible during this step. It is important to set your future goals from a clean place and not carry emotions that don’t benefit you. 
2. Decide the one main goal you want to achieve by the end of 2021. If you’ve already launched your business, I recommend making it a financial goal. I recommend setting one that inspires you and stretches you. One that gets you excited about the next 6 months but doesn’t overwhelm you at the same time. 
3. Then break your one main goal into 6 mini goals, one for each month that will help you achieve your main goal. Here you might use a tool that I call “timeline tool.” When you’re starting out building your business, you don’t have as much evidence or track record to plan the future with. When this happens, attempting to plan in detail the next 6 months or 12 months can be overwhelming and leave you feeling uncertain. Anytime you experience that, I recommend bringing the timeline in closer to you. Here, you know what your goal is at the end of 2021 but rather than trying to plan a mini goal for each month, start with the next 30 days and trust that at the end of the 30 days, you’ll know how to plan the next 30 days. For some of you, you’ll know the focus for the next 6 months and some of you won’t. That is okay, nothing has gone wrong. Meet yourself where you are. 
4. Create a massive action list. Let’s say you’ve decided on your mini-goal for the month ahead. Create a massive action list of everything you need to do in order to achieve the goal you set out for yourself. 
5. Schedule and plan your results on your calendar. When you do this, focus on what you’re going to produce, not just do. 
6. Execute. You can do all the other steps in the planning process but if you don’t take action, you will not produce the results you desire nor achieve your goals. If you have activities scheduled on your calendar but not taking action there could be a few different things at play:

• Is what is on your calendar specific enough for your brain to easily take action?
• Time of day
• Need to create a track record of success
• Identify supporting thoughts which I’m going to dive into in just a moment
   

Now that you know the results you’ve created thus far, let’s shift and focus on who you want to be, who is your future self? Take space and time to vision who your future self is (what does her life look like, how does she feel, what is she thinking?). If you’re not used to doing this exercise it may feel a little uncomfortable at first and your brain may resist the idea of you creating any life that you want but I promise you that the more you practice invision and getting to know your future self the more it will come naturally. For this step you want to really tap into the emotions of what she feels on a regular basis. If at any point you do feel heavy resistance, zoom out, get less specific. 

The last step is to create a list of thoughts to think on purpose. Decide your top 3 feelings you want to feel on purpose that allows you to take action so that you produce your results. Next, create a list of thoughts to think that generate that feeling. 

If you want to feel confident, you could think:

“I know what I’m doing.” “I can handle anything.” “I can do hard things.”

The more supportive thoughts you have listed out the more you can pull from when you need them.

For example, going back to the execution step, maybe you’re not taking action because you’re thinking about how tired you are after working a full day at your corporate job. How can you replace that thought with a supporting thought that inspires you to get motivated? What thoughts do you want to think on purpose when you run into a roadblock as you build your business (whether it be tech not working, no one signing up for your offers)? 

 

A Final Note

Anticipate and expect challenges and problems along the way. Plan ahead of time how you want to think about the problems and challenges. Will you make them mean that you’re not cut out to do what you’re doing OR will you accept them as part of the process and press on? Remember that problems are forever and you’ll learn how to navigate them.

The future only exists in your mind and you can either create your future from your future or from your past. Your brain loves to create from your past because of what it already knows.

Finally, Have fun. If you wait to have fun until you reach a certain milestone you will always be waiting. Don’t wait for a condition to be fulfilled in order to be a certain way. Behave a certain way regardless of the external circumstance and that is how you become your future self.

Until next time, friends, keep doing it your way!

Hello, hello friends! Today I’m excited to share with you my 20 minute rule. The 20 minute rule is very simple and it goes like this, “20 minutes is better than zero minutes”.

This is a rule that I’ve used for years in my own life and I coach my students to use this rule. 

Here’s why this works…because when it comes to doing something (let’s say ‘work on your business’) and you find that you only have 20 minutes, your brain defaults to simply thinking, “that’s not enough time to make a difference.” It automatically discounts the impact it could make in just 20 minutes. 

But the truth is, absolutely, yes it is. 20 minutes is more than enough to make headway. 

We tend to discount the time it takes to do something because we think inherently it may take longer to complete than it actually does. Partly the reason why we think it takes longer to complete something than it actually does is because it is too vague and not specific enough. 

Take for example, tax season. For years I would think that if I didn’t have a 4-hour chunk of time there is no way I could get anything worthwhile done as it related to taxes and that was simply not the case. The goal is to break down your overall intention into bite-sized, action steps with a very clear result at the end of the 20 minutes.

Rather than “working on your business,” how can you get more specific?

For example, instead of saying work on…

Business website, you’d say….write first draft for “about me page”

Email sequence for X product, you’d say….write outline for the email sequence or write the drafts of the first 2 emails

Launch sequence, you’d say...write outline for launch sequence or decide dates for launch sequence

Podcast episode, you’d say...write first draft of next week’s episode

Opt-in, you’d say...write outline, or pick Creative Template.

We focus on this inside Her Way to $75K because the majority of the members are building their online business while working their full-time job, so it is even more important to take advantage of those 20 minute opportunities than to dismiss them as simply not useful. 

I also recommend that if you are building your online business while working full-time and find it challenging to get into a routine when it comes to working on your business, start with 20 or 25 minutes a day for just 2 days a week. 

It is kind of like working out. If you haven’t worked out in months and try to go from zero days or minutes of working out to working out 60 minutes a day 5 days a week, it is going to be hard to maintain that routine for long and you may find yourself giving up and not sticking with it. If you’re not used to working your business in addition to your full-time job, I would not recommend setting a goal to work on your business for 2 hours a day, 4 days a week. That is a lot for your brain to take on. 

Instead, start small and build the routine and track record of success for your brain. 

Start with 20 minutes a day for 2 days. 

Be very clear and specific what you want the outcome to be at the end of those 20 minutes.

By doing this you are building your capacity which will then allow you to increase it in a more sustainable way because you’ll be able to stay consistent and follow through. 

If you’re not sure what to work on, where, or how to get started, join us inside Her Way to $75K where I coach you on all things online business. 

You could also apply the 20 minute rule to your personal life...whether that is cleaning, taking the garbage out, you name it. Think about all the things you may potentially be procrastinating on because your brain thinks it needs more time than it actually does to make an impact. 

Consistent action overtime is what makes the biggest difference. 

So next time your brain thinks, “Ahhh that isn’t enough time to get X done…” challenge yourself to see what you CAN get done in that time you have...even if it is 20 minutes, 15, 10, 5 minutes. 

The action you take today, even if it is only for 20 minutes, will put you further ahead tomorrow. 

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, until next week, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “We tend to discount the time it takes to do something because we think inherently it may take longer to complete than it actually does.”
• “Consistent action overtime is what makes the biggest difference.”
• “Instead, start small and build the routine and track record of success for your brain.”
• “The action you take today, even if it is only for 20 minutes, will put you further ahead tomorrow.”

Resources:

• Join me inside Her Way to $75K

Welcome back to another episode! This week I’m so excited to be hanging out with Destinee and Aisha from Creative Label. This powerhouse duo started Creative Label when Aisha was getting ready to graduate from law school and Destinee was working in production for Dr. Phil, with HGTV, YouTube, and more. But it just wasn’t filling their cup. They were both also dating professional athletes at the time which caused them to relocate frequently.

They began doing small projects on the side like logo and website design. They decided to pitch their business to a few people who had approached them to do marketing work for them in-house. Despite not having officially launched their business, they decided to take the chance. They pitched them both, and both gave them a resounding ‘YES’.

They hadn’t officially even put together a scope of work, rates, etc., and made decisions as they went along, but the companies both recognized them as people they wanted on their team.

Aisha and Destinee have learned many lessons along the way in their business journey, including difficult lessons (like needing to open a business banking account before depositing a business check), but that is what I love about their journey, that they didn’t let these small things set them back from taking huge steps forward. Building a business is anything but perfect and their story demonstrates exactly how much we can do without having all of the logistical administrative tasks finished before we take that first step. 

After almost 5 years in business, their team has grown to include several key team members including assistants, accountants, attorneys, and more. They have learned as they went along and are still learning and pivoting as needed every single day. Their business continues to thrive and are consistently being referred to new potential clients. 

Looking back, they remember times in the first few years where they were resistant to hop on calls with new potential clients. While those uncomfortable conversations are so much easier via email, they have learned that they are essential. Sales calls aren’t comfortable to most people - how do you just ‘ask’ people for money? This was something Destinee and Aisha navigated through, along with so many other high-level elements of building a business.

During their second and third years in business, they navigated through things like boundaries. Setting, maintaining, and respecting them. In years three and four they learned how to manage their team in a more effective and efficient way (including firing employees) and also learned the legal ropes of owning a business.

When they first launched their business they recognized that they were very much ‘green’. They went in with no business plan, no financial goals, etc. They just started doing it because it was something they genuinely loved (and bonus, were amazing at!). They were willing to figure it out as they went along in the process. That made it really easy to just continuously go with the flow each step of the way, propelling their business forward. 

In hindsight, they realized they needed a business plan but at the same time it gave them the freedom of owning their mindset. They went full force from their passion and just enjoyed the process.

“We had no expectations, so we weren't being let down.”

Since then, Creative Label has grown from a small scale Etsy shop selling Snapchat Geofilters to a full service agency, specializing in branding, marketing, and public relations, helping their clients to execute their vision in the digital space.

They have also learned how to divide and conquer - trusting each other fully along the way. Additionally, they allow one another the autonomy to make executive decisions for the good of the company to ensure their boundaries are maintained while still providing a high-level service. They step away when needed and respect one another by keeping their friend time and business time separate and always maintain a united front for the team.

Want to hear more from Destinee & Aisha? Check out The Label Podcast. You can also connect with them individually (Aisha + Destinee). You can also text POD to 310-982-2662 to get high-level tips right from these incredible ladies! Lastly, you can head over to their website to learn how you can work with them.

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “Despite not having officially launched their business, they decided to take the chance.”
• “We had no expectations, so we weren't being let down.”
• “They just started doing it because it was something they genuinely loved (and bonus, were amazing at!).”
• “They have also learned how to divide and conquer - trusting each other fully along the way.”

Resources:

• Find Creative Label on Instagram
• Visit their website
• Reach out to Aisha
• Connect with Des
• Listen to The Label Podcast
• To get free high-value tips and more (no spam here!), text POD to 310-982-2662
• Traction by Gino Wickman
• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
• Slack
• ClickUp

Hello friends! I’m so excited to share this week’s podcast guest with you, Kristi Frank. After graduating college with an engineering degree, Kristi did what all good engineers do and went straight to LA to become an actress. Along the way she began to really crave money and in true entrepreneurial spirit she opened what has become a very famous restaurant. At the same time she also had her hands on a few real estate properties and around that time a show you might remember called The Apprentice made its TV debut which Kristi pioneered as a season one contestant. 

This led her down the path of eventually appearing on Oprah, and ultimately leading her to her dream life working with fellow female entrepreneurs. Long story short, Kristi was asked to participate in what has become her dream project hosting a docu series, Millionaire Within Her, about women and money. 

Kristi’s journey is very colorful in that it is anything but linear and she truly followed what felt good to her and what she truly enjoyed doing, rather than following what was expected of her. She wants to teach her son that whatever he puts his energy and time into should also be something fun, that he is passionate about and an adventure. 

Another thing Kristi leans into is knowing that our feelings are there for a reason. They are always trying to tell us something and in Kristi’s journey those two things are fear and fun. If it is something that makes her ‘spidey-senses’ tingle, it's something she should definitely be diving into. She has realized over the years that you should be waking up every day with passion and excitement doing something you absolutely love. 

‘That is where your gifts truly shine. That's where you can really explore yourself, because you're just in your bliss.’

One gift Kristi’s acting journey has given her is learning that rejection is the norm. She was turned down many times and this essentially gave her a thicker skin to keep pushing forward, gently reminding herself, ‘you will be fine’.

Kristi knows exactly what it means to fill her own cup and demonstrate that making a commitment to yourself can bring so much self-awareness.

Kristi has also found herself dealing with imposter syndrome (sound familiar?) on occasion. She has learned that there are so many incredible people out there but to stop comparing herself and continue connecting with our own valuable gifts. 

She often finds herself reminding herself;

 ‘It's not going to be perfect. It's going to be messy, but it’s me. It's going to be who I am.’

But over everything, Kristi prioritizes her authenticity and is simply focused on just showing up.

Through her entrepreneurial circle, Kristi met a man who asked if she would host a series about women and money. The catch was that he was having trouble finding the women. Kristi knew exactly where to start.

I said, ‘Jeff, it's not about women and money. It's it's whole conversation about women stepping into who they are, and their worth, and their passion and their purpose.’

Kristi is the host of an incredible docu series, the Millionaire Within Her. In this series you will meet 45 incredible women who teach and inspire you through their unique stories and journeys. They range from best selling authors to high-powered business women. You’ll meet relationship experts, health experts, and more. But it doesn’t matter who it was - simply listening to each of these powerful stories truly changed Kristi, for the better.

It was truly humbling and an honor to be able to participate in this series with Kristi, alongside so many inspiring women. I’m so excited to binge watch every single episode myself and ‘meet’ these other incredible women. 

The Millionaire Within Her docu series is totally free to watch but it’s only available to watch for a short time and I highly recommend taking the time to check out each unique story.

One final thought from Kristi...

‘We are all on a journey. Nobody starts at the top, we all started somewhere.’

Until next time, keep doing it your way.

Insights:

• “Another thing Kristi leans into is knowing that our feelings are there for a reason.”
• “You will be fine.”
• “She has learned that there are so many incredible people out there but to stop comparing herself and continue connecting with our own valuable gifts.”
• “[It's] not about women and money. It's it's whole conversation about women stepping into who they are, and their worth, and their passion and their purpose.”

Resources:

• Check out Millionaire Within Her
• Connect with Kristi Frank on Instagram

Hello friends, welcome back! This week I’m so excited to talk to you about how to get the most out of the coaching programs and courses that you invest in. For this episode, I’m not referring to those which you host, but rather those that you have decided to invest in for yourself. The programs that you raised your hands and turned over your money to invest in order to grow your business and your life.

Over the past six years I have invested thousands of dollars to grow my business and myself. I have learned so much about myself and why I made certain investment decisions along the way and I hope this podcast episode will serve as a bit of a roadmap to help you assess which program or course is a good fit for you. I also want this to serve as a tool for a healthy mindset to approach that program, course, or investment that you have made and help you discover how to set up a routine and structure for the programs and courses you enroll in so that it doesn’t become a product that collects digital dust.

If you have listened to (any) previous episodes you already know how much I love my routines. Laying the foundation and having the proper systems in place is what allows us to be successful.

In this episode I’m diving into how to get the most out of your coaching programs and courses that you have or are considering investing in and for the sake of this episode, I’d like to call them ‘investments’. 

Over the past six years I have enrolled in over $60,000 worth of coaching and trainings and when I began to write the outline for this episode I really considered my approach, my mindset, the results, why I did or did not achieve results, and the answers all fell into three specific buckets.
 

The 3 Buckets

• How to cultivate a healthy and inspiring mindset towards courses and programs
• How to decide which program or course is actually the best fit at that time
• How to get the most out of any coaching program

Additionally, I want to acknowledge that you may be listening to this podcast and have yet to make a financial investment in yourself and in your future and that alone can be scary, exciting, and overwhelming, all at the same time and I hope that this podcast episode can serve as inspiration and guidance for you in that capacity. 

You could be listening to this podcast and have enrolled in a previous course or program, gotten mediocre results or results that you didn’t expect or hope for. Maybe that was in part because you had the best of intentions but life got busy and so you never fully followed through. I have certainly been there. Maybe the next time you considered making a similar investment you questioned yourself because the voice in the back of your head reminded you that last time you paid money for a program you didn’t actually finish it. So why would this time be different? The self-doubt sets in and you’re already failing to take action because you've created that negative thought loop. Or maybe you decided to enroll in a course or program, and you look for evidence of what happened in the past, finding holes are gaps, and then you create the same mediocre results versus the results that you want to achieve.

What I have learned is that if we can create a routine and structure around these programs and courses we are more likely to keep ourselves accountable to it.

Mindset:

Own your results

Pay attention to the thoughts that you have when considering the course or program you want to enroll in and make sure you are approaching it thinking that this is going to be THE ONE. 

Avoid assuming that the course or coaching program is going to fix your problems or challenges. For example, it can be easy to enroll in an email marketing course and think that you’ll soon wake up with an email list of 1,000 subscribers. The course and coach provides the vehicle and assistance towards achieving your goals but they can’t create the result for you. 

Expect challenges along with highs and lows; not to attract them but to not be thrown off when they happen, because they will. Stay committed to the result and your why for signing up for the course or program in the first place. 

Learn one, implement one. 

I highly recommend sticking to one course or coaching program at a time unless they are complimentary of one another. If you enroll in an email marketing course, I would make email marketing your focus for the next 30-60-90 days, depending upon your schedule. 

Avoid enrolling in a new course every single month without fully implementing the course work from the previous investment you made. It can get overwhelming and this can leave you with opening a loop but never actually finishing or closing that loop leaving you feeling depleted and overwhelmed. I think this is what happens a lot when you’re starting out trying to do all the things and start so many things that actually leads to burnout because you’re starting something but not finishing it. 

Where this may be different is if you’re in two programs that are not competing with each other. Example: Grow You vs a Facebook Ads program. Sometimes we think we’re producing a lot or being productive because we’re in a lot of programs but what matters is not just the consumption of content but the implementation of it. 

In Her Way to $75K members use the membership to the fullest extent taking advantage of the courses, coaching and community. For some, they’re enrolled in Her Way to $75K to help keep them accountable with what they’re working on and to get access to coaching and community, but they’re not actively going through all the content. Think of it like someone with a gym membership but also works with a nutritional coach in conjunction on their fitness journey.

Don’t just show up to show up. Show up to learn. Lean into group coaching calls, listen to the replay if you couldn’t make it live, if you can make it live, think of a question you want to have, avoid being passive if possible, submit questions.

How to decide which course or program is the best fit:

First, I think this varies based on which stage of business you’re in. 

When you’re first starting out, if you’re overwhelmed and not sure which direction you want to go, the key is to just start and create SOME sort of track record. For example, even if you don't know exactly who you want to help or how, creating content is a great way to produce work and practice being consistent and diligent and in turn build up an audience. If you commit to creating content for 6 months consistently and showing up, you’ll be further along in building an audience than if you never started. So while it might not be the exact place (or maybe it is) that you want to end up, the whole point is to get started.

What do you need to do in this moment to take you to the next level? Always be asking yourself this as you continue on your growth plan. In some seasons it may be to simply learn to be consistent and just start. For others, it may be focusing on your email marketing for a quarter, and others may decide you want to start a podcast and so you focus on that for 3 months, or maybe it is Facebook ads.

A few quick notes on getting the most out of a program or course:

• Decide how long you want to make that course or program a focus. Some coaching programs might be a predetermined length of time; 6, 8, 9 weeks, etc. If that is the case, make that your sole focus for that period of time. 
• Always have a goal or an outcome that you’re working towards in mind. What would success look like at the end of the program? Always own your results. 
• If you’ve enrolled in a course that is one where you can go at your own pace…give yourself a 30/60/90 day window to focus only on that one thing. In Her Way to $75K we help our members create focus and accountability on their one monthly thing and area of focus.

Laying Your Foundation For Success:

• Put any coaching calls with Zoom links on your calendar right away
• Carve out specific time blocks on your calendar for when you’re going to focus on that program's content. Maybe it is every Monday from 6-8 PM or every Tuesday from 5-7 AM, whenever it is put it on your calendar. As you start the program you’ll begin to figure out exactly what you’re going to do and what you can produce during those time blocks.
• Create a folder inside your email inbox. In our onboarding emails anytime a student signs up or enrolls in Podcast Your Way or Her Way to $75K we make this part of their onboarding checklist. This way any emails that come through from the program can be neatly organized and easy to be found from weekly recaps, username/password, you name it. 
• Create a bookmark on your browser making it easy to locate course/program content. 
• Don’t rely on the program to motivate, inspire or produce your results - those are all up to YOU! 

A Final Note:

Make sure you create constraints to not get distracted by other offers that are out there. Trust me, it can be really easy to think you NEED something that someone is marketing to you because they’re marketing is just that GOOD and while it may be beneficial and THAT good. The question is, 

“Does this aid in my focus or create split focus?”

I think sometimes we think we need something because we are subconsciously thinking “What if I don’t get it now? What will happen” and there becomes this scarcity thinking that surrounds our decision. There will always be offers, there will always be opportunities, you just need to decide which one you are going to focus on in this moment. 

Lastly, be careful of what you make the investment mean. If you expect it to solve everything for you, you could find yourself disappointed. Instead, focus on finding ONE thing. Sometimes it was the smallest shifts that actually made the biggest change later on that I didn't see right away.

Recap:

1. Own your results from the beginning, no matter what program you decide to invest in.
2. Make sure that you decide which program is the best fit for you based on where you're at in your journey and asking ‘what do I need in this moment in order to get to that next stage?’.
3. Ensure that you set up systems and structures in place so that you can set yourself up for success when it comes to that coaching course or program.

As always, if you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to tag us on Instagram (@shediditherway) and share what you loved most or what you’re implementing into your own life!

If you are someone who is starting early stages of building your business while working full time and you need help (maybe it's getting clear, maybe you need structure or even accountability) I invite you to check out Her Way to $75k. Her Way to $75k is our monthly membership program with over 50 trainings already inside, includes weekly coaching calls and a private Facebook Community, and every quarter you’ll get new templates for Instagram and Pinterest. I would love to work with you! To learn more just head to our website to learn more!

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “If we can create a routine and structure around these programs and courses we are more likely to keep ourselves accountable to it.”
• “Don’t just show up to show up. Show up to learn. Lean into group coaching calls, listen to the replay if you couldn’t make it live, if you can make it live, think of a question you want to have, avoid being passive if possible, submit questions.”
• “It can be really easy to think you NEED something that someone is marketing to you because they’re marketing is just that GOOD and while it may be beneficial and THAT good.”
• “Sometimes it was the smallest shifts that actually made the biggest change later on that I didn't see right away.”

Resources:

• Join Her Way to $75K
• Find out about Podcast Your Way
• Connect with me on Instagram

Hello my beautiful friends! This week I’m so excited to welcome Ashley Kirkwood to the show. Ashley is a successful attorney who owns an innovative subscription based law firm, Mobile General Counsel, and her firm has negotiated and landed several multi six-figure licensing deals and corporate contracts.

After being consistently asked how her company landed such deals, she launched the Speak Your Way To Cash brand, with the book launching at the end of this year! Speak Your Way To Cash is one of the most unique and successful speaker training programs on the planet. Inside, Ashley teaches speakers how to start at the top of their speaking market with a five or six-figure corporate speaking offer.

Ashley is extremely passionate about her business and truly loves her life’s work and what it has afforded her. She loves impacting listeners both internally with her employees and team members as well as externally.
 

The Short Story…

Ashley has always thrived on certainty. She liked knowing that if she did A, B, and C, she would get D. She likes progression and felt that corporate was the way to go. However, she wanted to figure out how to make more money in the corporate world. Once she learned the art of salary negotiation it became easy for her to make more money as a corporate professional. 

Around the age of 25-26, Ashley’s salary was already at $200K and with her savvy skills she negotiated a $100K raise, bringing her salary to $300K per year. She began working for someone who had been recruiting her for years, but after starting to work together, it just didn’t align; ‘It was like straight out of Horrible Bosses’. It was just not the best dynamic.

Knowing that it wasn’t a good fit, Ashley began to hype herself up, knowing what her worth was and trying to get her brain to realize that no matter what they were already paying her, she was worth more. They were just paying her to keep her there.

While working in the corporate world Ashley began putting herself up for awards and national publications and also had her own YouTube show. On her production level quality YouTube show, Passion, Purpose & Paychecks, she interviewed entrepreneurs who had left their jobs to do something they were passionate about - but they also dove into their financial journey and how much they were making.

Ashley put a lot into her YouTube channel working with producers from the Steve Harvey Show and NBC Universal as well as having a professional videographer, cue cards, call times, and a full hair and makeup team. 

“One of my goals was to be Oprah. I want to have my own talk show.”

Despite already working in corporate, Ashley knew there was something else she wanted to do, but just couldn’t determine how to monetize it or what it actually looked like. Realizing that she was becoming stagnant, she decided to make a change, put her money where her mouth is and go all in. 

However, people still saw her as a lawyer and didn’t know they could actually do business with her because she wasn’t selling anything, just connecting to and meeting people. 
 

The Tipping Point

Feeling tired of being unheard and disrespected at work Ashley began to really look outside her corporate bubble to see where she could go, how she could build and grow a business, and do what she was passionate about. She had seen so many of her mentors, peers and people whom she admired take the disrespect because they were trapped by the money. When she had become consistently unheard and brushed off when bringing up concerns Ashley decided she did not want that life, or the life of those at the top either.

Ashley had written a book in college called The Law School Hustle, all about her journey becoming an attorney. At some point in her time in college she nearly gave up but pushed her way through and wound up graduating at the top of her class from Northwestern Law School. She took her speaking experience as a trial lawyer, her experience from writing her book, and started speaking while building her own law firm.

It took roughly six months for her law firm to start generating any revenue, but in the last six months of her first year in business her gamble had paid off and she had generated over $100,000 in revenue. The following year her business grew 400%, and again the year after that. She continued on with her momentum building her law firm and landing speaking contracts. Ashley took what she knew she was good at and her transferable skills to create something she truly was passionate about.

Ashley and her team are hosting their 6th Speak Your Way To Cash (virtual) event this year and offers a high-level six-month coaching program called The Academy, where she builds out five and six figure offers with her clients. They continue to evolve the business by listening to exactly what their clients want and need and never resting on their laurels.

One thing Ashley does admit to wishing she would have done sooner was offer people a way to work with her after speaking engagements. At the time she would offer paid speaking engagements where she would give people the tools they needed but in many cases they still felt stuck on where to start after that. Looking back, Ashley wishes she would have offered some kind of coaching to those people because they were walking away with all of this high-level information and super excited about their journey, but felt stuck and needed that push and validation to get started. 
 

The PAID Method (Ashley’s Proprietary Coaching Method)

P = Press
It's great to have a brand, all corporate clients will Google you and they're not going to just look at what you send them. They're going to go to Google and Google something. So it's great if you have a press strategy and a way to showcase what other people are saying about how great you are. 

A = Assemble
Then you want to assemble your offer. It should be a package - the ultimate package. Don't just sell someone on one speech. They may need two or three speeches to get their end result, or they may need a couple of consulting sessions to get their end result. Assemble that offer together and have it ready to go for your clients. They know that you can't just do one thing, you can do a lot of different things and continue to serve them for a long time. 

I = Invite
Have a strategy for inviting people to work with you. Know your sales plan, how you plan to sell your service, and what you want to make money on. 

D = Deliver
Deliver amazing service and a really good product that is memorable and impactful. Have a way to deliver that information that you've thought out and formulate in a way you’re confident in.
 

Ashley now lives a modest lifestyle, but the one thing she and her family love to splurge on is travel (especially to Thailand!). Having a business that has afforded her the ability to mold her lifestyle so it fits how she and her family want to live has been something that makes her never look back. It motivates her to keep moving forward and helps her business continue to thrive. 

Want to hear more about Ashley’s upcoming book launch or connect with her one-on-one? Check out her website or email her directly (she still loves to handle her own emails!).

Until next time, friends, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “She began working for someone who had been recruiting her for years, but after starting to work together, it just didn’t align; ‘It was like straight out of Horrible Bosses’.”
• “Cultivate that confidence.”
• “One thing Ashley does admit to wishing she would have done sooner was offer people a way to work with her after speaking engagements.”
• “Your price is always talking. I didn't like what my prices were saying to my clients, when my prices were lower. I wanted them to know they're getting the best of the best. We are world class. We have trained all over the world. I have spoken in other countries, like they needed to know that and not from just what I said, but from the price they were paying me to do business with them.”

Resources:

• Check out Speak Your Way To Cash
• Join the Speak Your Way To Cash Facebook group
• Grab Your Copy of The Law School Hustle by Ashley Nicole Kirkwood
• Contact Ashley via Email

Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of the She Did It Her Way Podcast. It has been so long since I have done a solocast and I’m excited for it to be just me and my mic today sharing the ONE thing I did in my business (and personal life) that changed everything and I cannot wait to dive into it with you!

For years I have spent time always being in a rushed state. Being in this rushed state controlled how I ran my business and my life. It wasn’t until I shifted who I was being and how I showed up that ultimately shifted the results I could create in my business. That is, I went from being this person who was always in a state of rushing, to slowing down. Now, just because I started to slow down and I stopped rushing, it didn't mean that my results and outcomes started to slow down as well. Actually, it did the opposite; because when we take massive action, we get massive results.

However, if the place in which we are taking action from, is rushing, then it's going to change the type of results we get. I know that when starting a business, there can be the sense of ‘I need to hurry up, I need to get over there’, and it creates a rushing energy because we so badly want to quit our job.

In the beginning stage of building your business there are a lot of emotions, the feeling of imposter syndrome, fear, self-doubt, highs, and lows. You question whether or not you have what it takes and want to rush to get somewhere different. Whereas consistent, steady, massive, and intentional action can actually allow us to get to a good place and do it in a way that feels good. 

In today's episode, I want to talk about why we rush into action, what happens when we rush into action, and also some of our fears around slowing down. What happens when you shift from taking action from a place of being rushed to a place of confidence and steadiness is that it will positively impact your results. It allows you to show up differently and be more constructive and intentional with how you are spending your time.
 

Why Do We Rush Into Action?

Typically, I have found that when I think about why I was rushing is because I thought I would get somewhere faster. Maybe if I rushed, I would achieve something faster. It could be from a sense of time scarcity, or feeling like I don’t have enough time, so I have to hurry up and produce and take action. If we don't think that we have enough time, we're rushing around the desire to be anywhere other than where we are right now. This is really common in the beginning stages of building your business we think that if we take action faster and we hurry up and rush, that we are going to be able to leave our corporate job sooner. So it's this desire to be anywhere except where we are at that point. Alternatively, sometimes we want to avoid being uncomfortable and we think that ‘over there’ is better, so we try to action our way ‘over there’.

You might also find that you have a belief that rushing equals hustle, which equals the result you want, and that slowing down is equated to believing that you will not achieve the outcome you want in a timely manner. 

These are all different reasons why we rush into action and all of them stemming from the thoughts we think.
 

What Actually Happens When We Rush Into Action?

When we operate from a place of rushing, we can potentially go down a path that we don't actually even want to be on, not realizing that it is not the right path until we get to the end. At that point, we’ve invested so much time and energy into rushing down path A that you don’t even realize you should have taken path B. 

This ultimately puts us into a state of overwhelm and puts us into self-sabotaging thought loops (‘I did this wrong’, ‘I should have known better’, etc.).

We also need to learn to evaluate what is working and what isn’t working along the way and if you are rushing through, you won’t give yourself space to stop and do this because we think that we just need to keep taking action. Mistakes are often made when we go down a path of rushing and what happens is that we’re moving down the path so quickly that we don’t stop to acknowledge those mistakes and learn from them, or worse yet, correct them before moving on. 

Food For Thought

Here are some thoughts you can borrow to get your brain out of the habit of rushing and retrain it to start slowing down:

• I have plenty of time. I am not in a rush.
• Everything is happening at the exact time it is supposed to happen.
• I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
• I am making progress. I am trusting the process.
• I learn so much more when I slow down.
• It's okay to grow slow.

These are thoughts that I personally use and want to share with you to help teach you to slow down and operate from a place of taking consistent and steady action. I encourage you to see where those areas are in your business and in your life that can benefit from slowing down and just take inventory of them. Take note of what your beliefs are around slowing down as well. 

I have two quotes I want to leave you with this week (both came up as author unknown or anonymous) but I really like them and want to share them with you:

“I've learned to stop rushing things that need time to grow.”

Remember, your business needs time and space to grow. 

The second one is:

“Once she stopped rushing through life, she was amazed how much more life she had time for.”

Yes, it can be a really crazy period in your life of building your business, but it's also such an amazing and fun time of building your business. Approach it from a place of curiosity and what am I going to learn? How much impact can I serve? What transformation can I offer to my clients? This will really allow us to operate from a place of consistent, steady action. 

I’d love for you to come hang out with me on Instagram and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. 

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “When we operate from a place of rushing, we can potentially go down a path that we don't actually even want to be on, not realizing that it is not the right path until we get to the end.“
• “Typically, I have found that when I think about why I was rushing is because I thought I would get somewhere faster. Maybe if I rushed, I would achieve something faster. It could be from a sense of time scarcity, or feeling like I don’t have enough time, so I have to hurry up and produce and take action.“
• “I've learned to stop rushing things that need time to grow.“
• “Once she stopped rushing through life, she was amazed how much more life she had time for.”

Hello my beautiful listeners! Today I’m sitting down with Jenny Singh, someone who I have ‘known’ in passing for several years and am so inspired by and pumped to introduce you to! Jenny is a Facebook and Instagram Ads genius and helps entrepreneurs create the right ads to get their target audience buying from them instead of anyone else.

Jenny’s business is multi-pronged and offers her clients a ‘done for you services’ side of the business as well as running full funnel, Facebook and Instagram ads, and in addition, offering courses and other digital products. Over the past 18 months, Jenny and her team have spent time launching courses, masterminds and new digital products to really have something for everyone. They identified gaps and knew their services could fill them and really became hyper focused on serving entrepreneurs helping them get started using ads. 

Starting her journey by going to college for advertising, Jenny literally saw herself making Gatorade commercials one day, eventually making her way into a big agency. That was her plan. She graduated college on a Friday and started working at her first agency job that following Monday. From the time she graduated college through the first few years in corporate, she continued to shift or pivot to something a bit different. After a few years she began to wonder why she felt this pull to transition every 18 months she needed to change up her path. She started to reflect on how she could really do things her own way and what route she should take.

Jenny is the type of person who responds well to what she refers to as the ‘parachute’ method (which she doesn’t necessarily to everyone). As stressful as it sounds, she literally shows up and takes action with no afterthought to the possibility of failure, thriving under pressure. She woke up one day and told her fiance that it was finally her time, put in her two-weeks notice and made her leap. She knew that to make massive change she needed to simply rip off the bandaid and go all in. 

For 3-6 months prior to making her leap, however, Jenny had started working with her own clients (smart, right?). This helped her brain to know that she could do this and felt safer when making this transition. Her side hustling helped her to grow as a person and she was able to  learn to serve her own clients even better. During this time, Jenny also learned that she enjoyed working on making sales, while doing it in her own way, and still learning how to grow. 

The day after Jenny made her leap, she wrote herself a letter. She dated it and has kept it with her ever since as a reminder of why she started. She still takes it out maybe once a year and lets it fuel her to keep moving forward on her dreams while keeping her grounded as well. 

“As an entrepreneur I feel like the farther you get away from day one, you kind of have days that are just not like you're in your zone. And in alignment, you can kind of get away from like, here's why we're doing the thing. Keep coming back to it.”

This year, Jenny has been in business for right around 5 years. But right around year 3 she experienced a phase where you’ve been in it for long enough that you’re learning what is working and what isn’t and could pivot her business accordingly. 

Now, Jenny works with a team of amazing people who are all very process oriented (a weaker spot for Jenny). She knows she is not going to go all-in on the processes so she has brought in team members who can fill that void. She also learned who her niche was, who she enjoyed working with the most and “wading through buckets of humans within a larger realm”. 

“The closer you get to yourself and getting really good at your craft, typically, the smaller your niche gets in general.”

Jenny is now in the mindspace where she (and her team) are hyper-focused on traction, or in her words, they’re “locked and loaded”. They know who they can help and they know they’re good at it. They believe so deeply that the transformations they can provide are immeasurable. She has learned how to reset people's mindsets so they aren’t intimidated by running Facebook or Instagram ads but has taught them how to approach them confidently and successfully and looks at every opportunity as an opportunity to help someone. 

“There's a high that comes with seeing someone get results.”

Jenny attributes much of her success to slow growth. Her business evolved over time to really grow into the six-figure business it is today. 

Jenny also thrives on and highly values her freedom, from so many viewpoints. Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of location, etc. The way Jenny has built her business has afforded her to live all of these freedoms, maintaining her passion for what she does. 

Three actionable things Jenny recommends to new entrepreneurs are:

Get to know yourself and be okay with that person

Pay attention to how you perform at your best

Crack open a business book or a book from an ‘expert’ and start reading!

If you want to learn more about Jenny and her amazing business check out her website, visit her at Have Them At Hello, or hang out with her on Instagram!

Until next time friends, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• After a few years she began to wonder why she felt this pull to transition every 18 months she needed to change up her path.“
• “As stressful as it sounds, she literally shows up and takes action with no afterthought to the possibility of failure, thriving under pressure.”
• “There's a high that comes with seeing someone get results.”

Resources:

• Visit Jenny’s Website
• Have Them At Hello
• Connect with Jenny on Instagram @jennysingh
• Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
• Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss & Tahl Raz

Hello my beautiful friends! I am so excited because today I am sitting down with Trina Little, a YouTube Strategist with a master's degree in business who helps online owners business owners develop a YouTube strategy that allows them to scale their business by driving more leads using the right videos. Being a busy business owner herself, she understands the importance of making videos simply and effortlessly, but effective and lasting at the same time. Her YouTube videos are her sales team and they do the heavy lifting for free working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. 

Trena has a background in business and she began to see exactly how powerful the YouTube platform was while watching videos. She also saw all of the limiting beliefs a lot of people had surrounding YouTube and decided to make her mark by helping business owners learn to use the platform in a very simple way, by making it easy to understand and helping them to create the right videos to get their content to show up in Google searches and last longer.  

One thing Trena also recognizes is the rat race that is social media and while on other platforms content has a shorter shelf-life YouTube videos can last much, much longer. Being able to help business owners realize that if they put the time into creating a quality video it will absolutely live a much longer life than other social media platform content. While an Instagram caption takes only seconds or minutes to write, YouTube media takes significantly longer. The difference is that the YouTube video’s shelf-life is significantly longer. Here is what Trena found:

Shelf-Life of Social Media Posts:

• Instagram grid post: 48-hours
• Facebook post: 6-hours
• YouTube video: 20+ DAYS

In fact, Trena has a video on YouTube that she posted in 2018 and still drives traffic to her email list now, 3 years later. 

Before Trena took the YouTube world by storm, she worked for the federal government (one of the largest employers in her town). While she did that she was still on the ‘hunt’ to find a way to create her own future the way she wanted it. The problem was that the path she was on was the ‘safe’ route. It came with a 401k, a retirement plan, and medical benefits. It was what she should be doing, according to everyone around her. Except it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Eventually her job began sucking her soul and she became more and more detached from her day-to-day role. 

After her daughter was born she decided to teach her daughter how to forge her own path and live life doing something she loved. She no longer wanted her job to affect her mental health and using her daughter as one point of inspiration, she decided it was time to create something of her own. 

Trena had watched webinars about creating courses and convinced her husband that she could do it too. She was determined to replace her income and two weeks before Christmas, Trena gave her two-weeks notice and left her job on New Year’s Eve.

While being a stay at home mom is an amazing responsibility Trena knew it wasn’t her calling. She needed something else to call her own and it to be something she actually enjoyed doing. Trena had dabbled in some client work and taken a few courses but wasn’t ready to put all of her eggs in one basket. She launched a course and had only 3 sales, one of which was a friend who wanted to support her. 

Backing up to when Trena was still pregnant, she had spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos researching items and other products she would need for her newborn. In 2016, not many businesses used YouTube yet and Trena realized she was really investing her time into what these people on the platform had to say and really bought into it. There was something here and saw how YouTube could be used as a marketing tool. 

With Trena’s first launch not doing as well as she had hoped, she feared she had made the wrong choice in leaving her 9-5. Her saving grace was that one of the clients she had been working with remembered her and she became known as the ‘YouTube video girl’. People began to reach out to her to help them with their own videos and through several of life's twists and turns here we are. No matter what, Trena just kept going. She eliminated what didn’t work and tweaked what did. She put on her blinders to keep herself from focusing on those around her and what they were doing so she could focus on what she needed to do.

During that time the hustle mentality was in full swing. Trena’s challenge was that she was competing with those around her who didn’t have to balance launching an empire and raising two kids. She knew the hustle mentality wasn’t going to work for her so she needed to find something that did. Finally in 2019 she felt like things just started to click and she became even more pumped for 2020 (we all know how that turned out).

2020 totally changed how Trena operated as a business owner and she learned how to transform her business to operate in the way she needed it to so she could balance her passion for what she did with her family’s needs. She learned what she needed to focus on each day to accomplish tasks and reach goals and how to really dedicate her time in a new and efficient way. Thus, 2020 was a banner year for Trena and her team and she was able to hire her first full-time employee.

One of the biggest lessons Trena has learned along the way is that mistakes are inevitable. She says:

“I think one of the biggest lessons is [that] you're going to make mistakes all the time. But you have to be able to recover from them. If I would have let myself sulk over hundreds of mistakes that I've made, or hundreds of failed pages that went up or didn't redirect, I literally would have been out of business years ago. So I think the biggest lesson is mistakes are always going to happen. Just learn from it and figure out how you can correct it moving forward.“

Trena is also highly focused on showing up in the most authentic way possible, even ditching the use of Instagram filters (big props here!). She wants others to see her show up as herself so that her clients (and everyone else) learns they too can show up as themselves, whether it’s on YouTube or otherwise. 

Another message Trena shares is that whether we like it or not, video is here to stay so start showing up there. 

“The only way people are going to buy from you or work with you is if they like you. And the only way they can figure out is if they like you is if they see you on video.”

Trena also wants to share a few key steps someone can take to get started using YouTube:

1. Use ‘greenlight’ videos 
2. Prepare a video game-plan
3. Create a video thumbnail and title

Unsurprisingly, Trena draws her inspiration from YouTube. She enjoys seeing what others are doing, seeing their successes and journeys and gaining inspiration from their stories and seeing where they started and where they are now.

Finally, Trena also dished with us her YouTube vs her Instagram strategy when it comes to posting content:

“One thing that I have been doing on Instagram is taking our YouTube video on the day it goes live. We have a carousel post and then the next day we do a reel from that video. We just chop it up and use the reel then the next day we do an IGTV. Then the following day we do a quote. We have about five pieces or five posts on Instagram and every Tuesday I've been trying to post like a selfie photo or taking a more personal picture and sharing more of a story. So it's not all informative but it's a way for people to connect with me. That's the only way I've really been using Instagram right now because I'd rather put the time that I have, again, like onions, add the layers that you can right now we just have the time to repurpose the YouTube video and create one special Instagram post a week.”

To connect with or learn more about Trena check out her YouTube channel or reach out to her on Instagram.

Until next time, keep doing it your way!
 

Insights:

• “Trena’s YouTube videos are her sales team and they do the heavy lifting for free working 24 hours a day and seven days a week.”
• “One thing Trena also recognizes is the rat race that is social media and while on other platforms content has a shorter shelf-life YouTube videos can last much, much longer.“
• “Trena knew the hustle mentality wasn’t going to work for her so she needed to find something that did.”
• “Trena wants others to see her show up as herself so that her clients (and everyone else) learns they too can show up as themselves, whether it’s on YouTube or otherwise.”

Resources:

• Check Out Trena’s YouTube Channel
• Visit Trena’s Website
• Connect with Trena on Instagram @trena_little
• Built To Sell by John Warrillow

Welcome back, my beautiful She Did It Her Way listeners. Today I have the pleasure of being joined by Nikki Nash, a marketing expert, author, and creator of Market Your Genius. After a decade-long career in marketing fortune 100 brands and tech startups, Nikki set out to help women build profitable online businesses.

Nikki considers herself a content creator and marketing mentor. She knows what it feels like to be in an unfulfilling job and wants to help others make a huge impact in the world. If you find yourself asking: “How the heck do I get my name out there?”, “How do I reach more people?”, or “How do I sign more clients and customers”, Nikki is your girl. Many people feel like they have already tried ev)erything and feel like they have exhausted all of their options and aren’t sure where (or how to best spend their time and they come to her asking for help. 

Nikki found that she could do what she loves and make money doing it and started her membership community called the Genius Profit Society (GPS). Inside, Nikki helps her members navigate their journey from where they are now to where they want to go, whether it’s writing books, speaking, coaching, consulting, freelancing - whatever that looks like for them, she helps them grow their ideal business. 

In 2014, after many years of working in corporate, Nikki decided it was time to branch out and start her own business. She knew that she was helping someone else build their dream and while she loved what she did, she wanted to build something of her own. She began to put away money and that fall she left behind her 6-figure career.

Nikki quit her job and headed on her annual family vacation to Mexico where she spent the first week enjoying fun in the sun with her loved ones, until her brain intercepted her fun in week two and got in her way. She began ‘thinking’ of all of the ‘what if’s’ that could possibly happen, started to panic and began to look for other jobs. Despite not wanting to go back to corporate, that is what her brain was telling her to do from its rational perspective. 

She decided to look for a job at a tech startup because she could learn how to build a business from the early stages. She had already worked for the big brands and this would give her an opportunity to learn how to market something smaller. She found a job as head of marketing, took a few months off, and started her new job that summer. 

After about a year and a half Nikki realized her job had once again consumed her life and she had become a walking zombie, simply going through the motions of life. It was time to start feeling fulfilled and just go for it. Nikki made her final leap, finally leaving behind her corporate career and launching her own business and heading right back to Mexico for their annual family vacation, but this time she enjoyed every moment of the trip celebrating her mom’s birthday.

Nikki was living in downtown Boston at the time and while she had some savings she also knew she was living in one of the most expensive places in the city. She got herself into a positive mindset reminding herself,

“I’ve got this.”

 Nikki’s passion and strength for networking pushed her to meet some of her biggest advocates and new clients. In her first year of business, she admittedly made some mistakes, but she didn’t let them hold her back from moving forward. She reminded herself,

“You're gonna continue making mistakes. It's okay, just learn and be kind to yourself through.”

Her business continued to evolve and she learned so many lessons along the way, many of which revolved around ensuring that her finances and income remained steady. She also continued to make sure that the clients she was working with were people she not only enjoyed working with, but were her target audience. Working with mostly startup companies in the beginning, Nikki has since made the pivot to working solely with female entrepreneurs who are looking to monetize their message. 

The biggest difference that she sees between her business now and when she first started out is how she has accomplished things to afford the opportunities, flexible schedule, and life that she always dreamed of. 

Nikki’s business has grown immeasurably, and her team has expanded as well, allowing her to make decisions that puts her priorities first. 

While Nike has coined the phrase ‘Just Do It, Nikki lives her life through that mantra saying, 

“Embrace failure. It's going to happen so you might as well. If you embrace it, it's going to hurt less than if you resist it.”

To learn more about Nikki, check out her podcast or connect with her on Instagram.

Insights:

• “You're gonna continue making mistakes. It's okay, just learn and be kind to yourself through.”
• “She knew that she was helping someone else build their dream and while she loved what she did, she wanted to build something of her own.”
• “Embrace failure. It's going to happen so you might as well. If you embrace it, it's going to hurt less than if you resist it.”

Resources:

• Listen to The Market Your Genius Podcast
• Connect with Nikki on Instagram @marketyourgenius
• Visit Nikki’s Website
• Join the Genius Profit Society
• The Game of Life And How To Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn

Hello friends! Welcome back to another episode of the podcast! Today I am sitting down with Stephanie Booth, success coach for entrepreneurs who helps her clients get the results they want by rewiring their unconscious minds. Her signature program that teaches them everything they need to know about using their unconscious mind to create success is called Magnetic Minds. The ripple effect is all about how to harness your energy to magnetize your results.

I wanted to bring Stephanie onto the podcast because I think there are so many things that we can unpack about the power of our mindset. Being an entrepreneur is 80% mindset and if you’re in the right mindset we can be in the right state to get into action and create the results we want. So much of being an entrepreneur is 80% mindset; if we're in the right mindset, we can be in the right state, we take the right action, and we get into action to create the results.

Stephanie’s Process

Most of Stephanie’s clients first come to her with the thought that they want to increase their monthly revenue in their businesses. However, what comes along with that is all about mindset. The reason they aren’t bringing in the revenue they want is because they are usually caught up in self-sabotage, comparison, and even self-doubt. They must first create their feelings, which will trigger their actions and eventually gets them the results they want. She starts at the beginning and helps them to rewire their brains for success. They then move into ‘modeling’ where they follow successful people and model what they do to help them achieve results they personally value. 
 

How It All Started

Going back about ten years, Stephanie was teaching 5th grade making roughly $20,000 a year. She ‘thought’ that is what she was supposed to be doing and her whole life was really based around following the rules. She was barely making ends meat and just thought that was they way it was ‘supposed’ to be because someone else was giving her a paycheck and paying for her benefits package. What more could she want? 

Looking back, however, Stephanie can see how genuinely unhappy she was. She was struggling with stress dreams and while she was only contracted to work 30-35 hours per week she generally found herself working closer to 50 or even 60 hours per week.

Around the same time Stephanie married her husband, whom was in the process of starting his own photography business. During the wedding planning process he would occasionally slip in a logo he wanted her opinion on and because she was deep in ‘decision-making-mode’ she would quickly answer, not thinking much about it. It hasn’t occurred to her that he was hoping she would join his business. Eventually she realized she could provide some value in this business and began assisting in the process. 

In 2015, Stephanie lost her teaching job and financially they were stable and she had replaced her income, had landed them amazing opportunities to photograph all over the world, and secured them space in top publications and magazines. But at the same time something was holding her back. She suddenly couldn’t seem to secure new bookings and didn’t know why. The reality was, she was only doing things that she knew she could do. Anything that could result in a possible rejection, she wouldn’t follow through with. 

This was what self-sabotage looked like through her lens. It looks different for each of us but for Stephanie, she believed that if she overfilled her schedule and then started with the easy stuff she would eventually build up momentum to tackle reach the hard stuff. It wasn’t working and she never actually followed through. Those tasks just got moved to the next day. So every day there would be 4-5 things that never got done and would again be moved to the following day. All of these tasks revolved around sales and marketing activities. She had become so focused on what her peers might think of her that she forgot about the bigger picture, realizing they weren’t her ideal clients in the first place. The good thing is Stephanie learned how to turn that around in the future.

Stephanie’s mental health began to struggle during this time more as well and she began having daily panic attacks, until finally it all came to a head. One day she was so anxious about a conversation with her husband that she passed out on the stairs. At that point, she realized she had a problem.  

Now, Stephanie uses her personal experience to help others achieve their breakthroughs. She firmly believes that breakthroughs are a foundational element in each of our personal growth and that sometimes part of breaking through is breaking down. What she learned was if you're going to have a breakdown, you might as well make it into a breakthrough.

Stephanie has also become a firm believer in the power of journaling. She started by simply pouring her heart out and getting all of her emotions onto the page. She eventually started having ‘ideas’. She could see hope, began setting goals, and began writing about what she wanted in her future, rather than about the pain in her past. She began creating results for herself relatively quickly and rebuilt their business to over six figures in only four months. 

It wasn’t until someone reached out to her asking if they could pick her brain over coffee did she really begin to see her future coming together. It was her dream job, and despite not knowing what she was doing or where it would take her, she was all in. Stephanie truly loves working with clients and cares about the art form of coaching. 

From here, she began to build her business, and began getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Stephanie learned that changing her thoughts and changing her feelings it would change everything. She has built a life they absolutely love, and don’t need a vacation from. 

 Stephanie leaves us with this thought:

“Know that you can have the results. You don't have to follow conventional wisdom necessarily to get the life or the results you want in your business. You can get it the way that you show up best that is possible for you. You can have whatever income level you desire, and have a lifestyle that you personally thoroughly love and value.”

Thank you for joining me again this week beautiful friends! Until next time, keep doing it your way.

Insights:

• “Being an entrepreneur is 80% mindset and if you’re in the right mindset we can be in the right state to get into action and create the results we want.“
• “She firmly believes that breakthroughs are a foundational element in each of our personal growth and that sometimes part of breaking through is breaking down.“
• “If you're going to have a breakdown, you might as well make it into a breakthrough.”
• “Know that you can have the results. You don't have to follow conventional wisdom necessarily to get the life or the results you want in your business. You can get it the way that you show up best that is possible for you. You can have whatever income level you desire, and have a lifestyle that you personally thoroughly love and value.”

Resources:

• Connect with Stephanie on Instagram @thestephaniebooth
• Visit Stephanie’s Website
• Canva Pro
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

Welcome back for another episode of the podcast. This week, I am sitting down with our amazing guest, Kelly Butler and I'm so excited for you to hear  how we met, her story and journey of making her ultimate leap.

Kelly is an interior stylist, coach, and the passionate founder of Gratify Home where she teaches women to sustainably style homes they love while leaving a positive impact in this world. She does this through virtual one-on-one interior style coaching, designing directly with her clients, and virtual room design that is designed and done for you.

Kelly helps women overcome their sense of overwhelm in their own homes. They are generally curious about how they can also leave a positive legacy, about the food they eat, and where things are sourced from. They want to translate those values into their homes but feel stuck in knowing how to do this. 

That’s where Kelly comes in. She teaches them how to invest in themselves to be their own sustainable interior stylist and create a space they can be proud of. 

It all started when Kelly was still working in her corporate 9-5. Walking through her office one day she heard a voice call out to her in a loud whisper saying:

“You're not supposed to be here.”

She realized that her heart was not in her job and she was meant to do something completely different. She had a lot of pent up creativity that wanted nothing more than to be fulfilled. She began journaling to see where her journey would take her. She knew change could be scary, but she made her decision and was ready to face it. 

The year prior, Kelly had applied to participate in a program sponsored by her company. She hadn’t heard anything about it and had almost forgotten about the opportunity when one phone call changed the direction of her life. She was offered the opportunity to travel to India for 30 days doing pro bono work for her company. She accepted and traveled to Mumbai where she worked in what would be considered the poorest slums and worked with an education nonprofit and local mothers learning to be advocates for their children's education. 

The entire experience was incredibly transformational, very uncomfortable, and very emotional. She became obsessed with sustainable business models, how to use commerce and business as a way to alleviate poverty in a way that went beyond giving or volunteering, but rather in a way that is sustainable for artisans that preserves cultural craft.

The Creation of Gratify Home

She allowed her intuition to take over and filled her journal with things on her mind - ultimately questioning how she could funnel her passion and discomfort into something productive. 

She decided that the first step was to open an online boutique, selling goods for women and home. The items were fair trade and artisan made and really uplifted the makers from across the world. She wanted to introduce these beautiful goods to women and into their homes. She began hosting parties with her products in friend's homes all while still working her corporate 9-5. 

Kelly was admittedly a ‘corporate perfectionist’ and was trained to believe that the final product should always be perfect. That meant pushing back deadlines if need be. She knew this was something that she would need to retrain her brain to no longer believe. She needed to get comfortable with imperfection.   

Kelly finally realized that she was filling a much-needed industry void and decided it was her turn to really take that and run with it. She combined her industry experience and her passion to develop her own business model. She had also learned the part of business she didn’t like and how she could pivot her business from that. 

In early 2020, Kelly decided she no longer wanted to ship physical inventory and had planned to host a closing sale to clean out her inventory. She was going to cut the cord and transition into a fully virtual and digital business model. However, in March of 2020, Kelly’s health threw her a curveball. She initially assumed it was probably COVID and would be sick for a few weeks. A few weeks turned into much longer and she noticed that while she was recovering in some aspects, she was actually getting worse in others. It got to the point where one day she could no longer stand on her own, chew her meals, and even had trouble speaking. Kelly was diagnosed with a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome. 

Because of COVID, Kelly was completely alone in the hospital. During her time in the hospital and during her months of recovery Kelly decided that this disorder would not define or defeat her. She decided that it was ultimately up to her to choose how to see what was happening to her and how she would deal with it. Leaning into losing her freedom during this time really set her on fire to move herself forward, even with baby steps. She began working even for just 15 minutes at a time. 

During our interview, Kelly said:

“It's not always easy. It's different for every person. But I just hope that sharing all that I've been through to make that leap reinforces the commitment, the drive, the fire, the choice that I felt. And I just hope that it will inspire you listening to know that you can also do it no matter what comes your way if it's in your heart, if it's the burning desire that you feel it as possible.“

Kelly’s Leap

Earlier this year (now into 2021), Kelly finally made the decision to not return to corporate America and to make it work, no matter what that looked like. It was a sense of relief mixed with fear, but Kelly has learned that fear is not necessarily a bad thing if you work through it. 

Kelly began pitching herself and despite her fear has made some incredible connections along her journey. She collaborates with other business owners doing Facebook or Instagram  Lives and through collaborative blog posts, like this one with Elizabeth Joy (whom she met at a SDIHW Summit!). She takes every opportunity to expand the scope, scale and exposure of her own audience. She has learned to focus on the ‘no’s’ and use them as learning experiences. 

Something Kelly and I have in common is that we both firmly believe in the Wayne Dyer quote,

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Kelly says,

“I always have a choice. And I am not the victim of life circumstances.”

Kelly looks at the world around her and is filled with gratitude by this world of possibilities she has opened herself up to. She has finally learned to overcome her fear and found her drive and determination. 

Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “You're not supposed to be here.”
• “She needed to get comfortable with imperfection.“
• “Kelly finally realized that she was filling a much-needed industry void and decided it was her turn to really take that and run with it.”
• “It was a sense of relief mixed with fear, but Kelly has learned that fear is not necessarily a bad thing if you work through it.”

Resources:

• Connect with Kelly on Instagram @gratify_home
• Shop Kelly’s Website
• Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
• Google Drive

Hello my fabulous She Did It Her Way listeners! In this week’s podcast episde I have the absolute pleasure of interviewing online mogul, Allie Bjerk.

When Allie first launched her business there were definitely a lot of ups and downs, getting to where she is today. As of right now, her business is generating about $3 million a year in digital products and coaching programs. 

Allie’s Journey:

Allie went to school for graphic design and marketing and while she initially started as a service provider, it took seven years to hit six figures. But when she was not in school, she was out socializing. She was studying people and would be the one like having conversations just to see what people would say and feeding off of that energy.

After graduation, the recession hit. She took a job selling cell phones in northern Minnesota and eventually married her husband whom she had dated through college. She finally landed her (then) dream job working at an agency doing SEO, which she discovered to be not a very fun topic. After suffering through nearly 3 years of corporate drama she had her first child and realized that the agency was charging the clients $95 an hour and only paying her $17 per hour. She knew there was something to be done on her own. 

A few months later her strong-willed son was kicked out of daycare and she was expecting baby #2. She knew this was the time to leap and make it work. For Allie, having her back against the wall propels her into action. Within two months she had more than replaced her corporate income. She spent time getting her feet wet and networking and she finally found her community.

Allie worked with clients offering various online business services, mostly social media and helping online business owners with their launches. At one point, one of Allie’s clients made a charge-back to her credit card (yikes!). After receiving a notification that $6,000 was going to be debited from her account Allie had to make a massive pivot, quickly. Through quick thinking, Allie realized that she needed to convert her cold traffic into buyers, with a low price point. She knew how to run ads and build funnels and combined those to create her original Tiny Offer - a live stream calendar. It was 365 ideas of live streams people could offer their audience. She made her money back quickly and kept reinvesting what she was making into more and more ads. 

Along the way Allie dealt with imposter syndrome feeling that she was not worthy of making this passive income, or growing and scaling her business. It became a very emotional and mental journey, as well as a professional one. She realized she was going to screw up. It was part of the process. Ad’s would be rejected, she would get nervous, not everyone would love the program...all things that were just part of the process. 

Allie has taken her natural talent of learning and really listening to what people want and giving them exactly what they are asking for. She has learned what gets their brains ticking, all about the dopamine rush and why buying products creates serotonin in our brains. 
 

Allie’s Relationship With Money

Allie decided she needed to give her money a job. She created a spreadsheet and spent time being intentional and deciding what she wanted to use the money for. She broke it down into sections: 

• how long until she wanted to achieve this/ make this purchase
• how many people did she need to join her 6k program
• how many people need to purchase her Tiny Offer

Allie has now turned her relationship with money into a positive one where she finds fulfillment and gratitude with each purchase someone makes. It helps her to stay focused and realize that it is more about the overall picture, not just about the money she is bringing in. 

If you want to learn more about Allie, head on over to her website or connect with her on Instagram (@alliebjerk).

 As always, until next time, keep doing it your way.

Insights:

• “She was studying people and would be the one like having conversations just to see what people would say and feeding off of that energy.”
• “She knew this was the time to leap and make it work.”
• “She realized she was going to screw up. It was part of the process. Ad’s would be rejected, she would get nervous, not everyone would love the program...all things that were just part of the process.”
• “Allie decided she needed to give her money a job.”

Resources:

• Find Allie on Instagram @alliebjerk
• Check Out Allie’s Tiny Offers
• Tiny Offer Lab
• Zapier
• Peak by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
• Millionaires Fastlane by MJ DeMarco
• Books by Denise Duffield Thomas

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the She Did It Her Way podcast. This week I am joined once again by the lovely Christine McAllister. Christine joined us originally in 2020 for episode 372.

I wanted to have Christine on the podcast again because I have spent a few episodes talking about how to start a podcast to leverage and grow your business, inviting guests on, solocasts, etc. Christine teaches people the strategies and tactics behind being an exceptional podcast guest and does podcast guesting so incredibly well. Christine is going to walk through some of the things that she teaches her students about how to get on podcast shows to grow your business and why it is important to create a game plan to get on other podcast episodes.

Christine is a business coach and her company is called Life With Passion. She helps impact driven entrepreneurs to go from best kept secret to making six figures and beyond doing what they love. She leveraged doing all of this in just 10 hours a week. She works with  service providers like coaches, consultants, VA’s, and OBM’s. They know that they're good at what they do, but they don't have all the clients that they want. She comes alongside them and helps them have more impact and income and it is truly her life's work.
 

Christine’s Podcasting Journey

Christine first considered going on podcasts back in 2015 as a way of growing her reach. After a friend sent her a pitch as an example she realized she was super intimidated and quickly put it on the back burner. It was new. It was scary. About a year later someone reached out to her again while she was guest posting on other blogs (Today Show, Huffington Post, etc.) inviting her to come onto their podcast. 

At the time she was eight months pregnant with her rainbow baby and she had been sent to labor and delivery triage for additional monitoring since everyone was a bit anxious. They sent her to the hospital and she realized that she was going to miss the podcast interview she was scheduled to be a guest on before she would be discharged. While laying in her hospital bed she realized that she was fine, and convinced the nurses to turn down the noise from the monitors so she could honor the commitment for her interview. And that’s exactly what she did. She had the conversation with the host from her hospital bed and loved it. She realized that if she could have a super fun conversation in that environment from her hospital bed, while dealing with anxiety, PTSD, and all these things, then after her baby was born this could be a whole lot more fun. She decided to start proactively pitching, because now she knew what was on the other side.

She started to pitch the people who were in her world that she was connected to, maybe someone whose podcast she enjoyed or maybe one her friends loved. To her, it became a really fun game. Along the way she developed her own method of pitching, making the host her friend, and what she found was that this came naturally to her.

What she learned was that she was not the norm. Podcast hosts loved how she approached them and handled herself and all she could think was “Really? It’s really easy to be a good human!” She first realized this could be something when podcaster Jeff Brown had her on his show when her book launched in 2018. While visiting her parents in Nashville, she asked if she could take him out to lunch. Reluctantly he agreed and while chatting over sushi he said: “I was just at one of the big podcast conferences and I was asked to give a presentation on what it is to be a great guest. I basically just took your process and I shared it from the stage.” He continued saying, “I have done hundreds of interviews and I can count on one hand, the number of times that people have done what you've done.” At this point Christine really began to lean in to this process. She knew it was something good. 

Christine has made over $100,000 directly from being on podcasts from clients coming to her. But moreover, she has made amazing friends and met people all over the world because of this incredible medium.

How To Take Meaningful Action

In her experience, podcast guesting is the fastest strategy to go from cold to sold faster than any other strategy. The reason is, think about what you're doing when you're listening to podcasts. She asked me what I do when I listen to podcasts, myself. I replied:

• Going for a walk
• Cleaning up my space
• Working out

When you consider that you are listening while taking a 30-minute walk, you are using your brain to hear or learn something new. You are in it listening only to that one (maybe two) people. You aren’t consuming information from anywhere else. There are no competing ads like when you are scrolling through Facebook. There are no popup messages. No content to create. No money to spend. No new tech to learn. No DM’s. You just enjoy the conversation. Christine realized how this is actually such a strategic way to build her business, build her network, connect with influencers, etc. You'll never run out of places to pitch. 

5 Best Tips

1. Do your research; tap into who your audience is listening to
2. Craft your pitch and make it genuine; tailor it to the host
3. Promote the hosts products/ services/ events and tie it into what you have to offer
4. Connect with smaller and newer podcasts who don’t get as many pitches
5. Show up and be as you as you can be. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.

A few things that make a great guest before the interview:

• Have a prep-chat with the host to find out what they are promoting right now. Do they have a launch coming up? Do they have a membership you can promote?
• Confirm who their exact audience is. Ask about the pain points, the problems, the objections that their audience has, so you can determine how you can best help solve their problem.
• Even if you don’t have an opt-in, website, etc., don’t let that stop you. Let the audience engage with you on Instagram or via email.

How to be a great guest after the interview:

• Leave a review on iTunes
• Send the host/ hostess a gift (NOT swag from your own company!)

Thank you again for your time and energy my friends. Until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “Christine teaches people the strategies and tactics behind being an exceptional podcast guest and does podcast guesting so incredibly well.“
• “When you consider that you are listening while taking a 30-minute walk, you are using your brain to hear or learn something new.“
• “You'll never run out of places to pitch.”

Resources:

• 90 Minutes to Book 100 Interviews in 90 Days Masterclass
• Organic Online Growth + Sales Secrets For Entrepreneurs: Leverage Up! Private Facebook Community
• Life With Passion
• @lifewithpassion
• The Body: A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson
• Elevate University
• Google Sheets

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode!

Today's episode is going to be short, sweet, strong, and impactful. I think it's a message that a lot of you may need to hear and a message in order to feel like you have that permission to not have it all figured out. 

When you make your first step towards building your business, what I see often is this ‘undercurrent of control’. When we do something that is completely outside of the norm our brain wants to jump in and protect us. What it does when it senses fear, is it will try to control everything, it will try to predict everything, it will want to know steps one through ten. Even though in the beginning you realistically can only see steps one and two. When you can't see steps one through ten or two through ten your brain freaks out. What typically happens is that it then causes a problem at step eleven when you haven't even taken that first step. Now because you've created a problem in your brain you don't even take that first step. 

This is one of the common themes and things that I see happen most often, with new business owners trying to get started. They are trying to get their business off the ground and it begins with this sense of this undercurrent of control, then wanting to know what their business will look like in a year, wanting to know all the problems so that they can control it, wanting to have something be so perfect and a certain way and the thought that it's if it's not going to be exactly the way that they want it, then what's the point of even getting started in the first place. 

It's the fear of not getting it right, the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of what if it doesn't succeed, the fear of this problem is going to arrive at step X, Y and Z. The feel of ‘It's overwhelming and I don't know how to solve it. So why even start in the first place?’. That fear keeps a lot of people stuck. 

Your brain doesn't have that past experience to know what unfolds. Instead, it freaks out. It's just like learning to ride a bike or learning to drive a stick shift. Any said ‘failure’ you experience is magnified in the beginning because it is so new. But it's learning to fail, learning to put yourself out there, learning to push past and move through the fear is exactly the same thing as riding a bicycle or learning to drive a stick shift. When you start building your own business, thinking that there is a right way and a wrong way to do something can also keep you stuck. Because what happens is if you put yourself out there and it ends in a ‘failure’ our brain thinks, ‘Well, that was wrong, there must be a right way to do it’. The challenge with the right way and the wrong way of thinking is that it can oftentimes paralyze you from taking any action in the beginning. 

If you're a high performer, you don't want to be wrong. You're not used to being wrong. You are used to doing your due diligence, you are used to doing your research. So for you being wrong or getting it wrong is not something that probably happens often. But in this world of building your business, I want you to practice and try on the thought of ‘what if there is no right or wrong?’. What if there is only experience, learnings, and outcomes? The thought of thinking that there's a right or wrong way is going to keep you stuck, and is going to keep you from taking action. 

I can tell you after being in the online business space for years, there are so many different ways that you can get to your first 100k. You will find coaches that will teach you so many different strategies in so many different ways on how to get to 100k, that there is no right or wrong way to get to 100k. There is just a way. The one thing that is common between all of these multiple ways, is that they just started and they figured it out along the way. It was a messy, massive action.

If you're focused on doing it right you're going to overanalyze in your head thinking there's a right way, when there are so many ways to do one thing. Just pick one way of doing it, do it that way, and execute. Remember there's a difference between asking questions because you're curious and because you want to understand, but there's also asking questions from a place of trying to control because you don't want to get it wrong. 

If you are coming from this place of wanting to control things because you don't want to be wrong, I want to offer you a few different thoughts. One is thinking that there is no right or wrong way of doing something. The thought of failure simply just means data. That's it. The sooner that I get started, the sooner I take action, the sooner I can understand what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes we get so laser focused on how something needs to be, we create that narrowness and if you focus on something so intensely you ignore everything else that's happening around you. Sometimes that can be the magic piece. 

The second is to trust that what unfolds is meant to be. So it's really practicing this letting go of control, and letting go of this need for it to be right or wrong.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Come hang out with me on Instagram and until next time, keep doing it your way!

Insights:

• “The thought of thinking that there's a right or wrong way is going to keep you stuck, and is going to keep you from taking action.“
• “The one thing that is common between all of these multiple ways, is that they just started and they figured it out along the way. It was a messy, massive action.”
• “If you're focused on doing it right you're going to overanalyze in your head thinking there's a right way, when there are so many ways to do one thing.”
• “The thought of failure simply just means data."

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. There may never be a perfect time to take action to start your business or to grow your business. The only thing that we know for sure is that by taking massive action today, you're going to be further along tomorrow than you would be if you didn't do it. 

Today's topic is all about scarcity versus abundance. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart because I have worked with so many women and I have experienced the shift from scarcity to abundance myself, whether that be in money or time and relationships and love. Today I want to dive into this topic from the lens of being a new entrepreneur. As you embark on building your business and putting yourself out there and doing things that you've never done before your brain can have a little bit of a freakout, and that's okay because it's there to protect us. 

We want to be equipped with tools that can help us navigate the freakout so that we don't make it mean that we should quit or that we should pack up and go home. Scarcity is living and operating out of this mindset that there's not enough whereas abundance is operating from a place of more than enough. You can tell you're in scarcity mode by just how you feel if you're tense if you're in a fight or flight. If your focus narrows, if you might find yourself on edge, that can easily be an indication that you're in a scarcity mindset. An abundant mindset can feel light; it's joyful, you're inspired, you're at ease, you're open, you are looking forward to all of these opportunities. 

Being in a scarcity versus abundance state is really determined by our level of awareness when it comes to our thinking. As it relates to money specifically, this is something that is really key.

The biggest pitfall that I see in the beginning stages of building a business is getting into a state of scarcity and not being able to get out because it's a closed loop of scarcity. As a new business owner, putting yourself out there, doing your first launch thinking you're going to enroll 10 people into your program, and instead you get maybe one, or even zero...so your brain freaks out. It thinks, ‘Oh my gosh, like, Are you kidding me? I spent all this time energy I put myself out there. No one wants my offer. No one wants to work with me.’ 

We end up attaching a meaning to that result, which doesn't serve us and we start to close up, tense up, freak out, and get emotional. We make it mean that maybe we're not cut out to do this, maybe I need to make a different offer. Maybe someone else should be doing this not me. It puts us in this state of scarcity so that every time we go to take action beyond that launch we take action from a place of doubt and a place from uncertainty and trepidation. We spiral out in a closed thought loop of scarcity as to why things are not working. What's dangerous about this is that if we do this enough, over time we start to really create this habit within ourselves of operating from scarcity. 

What I want to offer up today is 1) how we change our thoughts so that we don’t go into that scarcity closed loop, and 2) if you do find yourself in this scarcity closed loop, a way to think about it so that you can start to shift out of scarcity and into abundance. 

I can speak to this because I spent the first two years of my online business in a state of trying everything in anything. Every time something didn't work I would make it mean that I wasn't supposed to be doing it. So I wasted so much time and energy, thinking about how I wasn't supposed to be doing that, that nobody wanted my offers, where if I just changed the way that I looked at it. If I would have changed the way I thought about it, I would have been able to be in a position today, potentially further along, because I would have taken massive action from a place of being inspired, rather than defeated or frustrated. 

First let’s talk a little bit about Brooke Castillo's the model, so she's the founder of The Life Coach School. It's very similar to Think & Grow Rich, the book by Napoleon Hill, where our thoughts create our feelings that produce an action and or that create an action that produces a result. What Brooke Brooke has done with her model is that she's actually added on top of the circumstance. We all have circumstances in our life, whether it’s how much we make, our family, where we live, circumstances are facts. 

It's one thing to say, ‘I'm unhealthy’. You think that thought to yourself, making it subjective, because healthy to you has a different definition than healthy to another person. But if you say ‘I weigh XYZ’, what you weigh is a circumstance. It is a fact. So now I want to bring this into a real life example of being a new business owner. Take for example going into a launch and having these expectations that you are going to do your launch, and you're going to enroll 10 students and you're going to make $10,000. When you go through your launch and you end up enrolling one student. 

The fact is that you set a goal for 10 and you enrolled 1. You can choose to think an abundant thought, or a scarcity thought. If you choose to think a scarcity thought, it might sound something like this, ‘why isn't this working? Only one person enrolled, I spent so much time and now only one person liked this is not worth my time’. That's the scarcity thought. 

The abundant thought might think, ‘Oh, my gosh, I got one student enrolled. This is amazing. I'm going to deliver so much value and help them achieve the results they're looking for’. Now because you’re thinking that abundant thought, you feel excited and motivated, versus if you are thinking in lag, you feel frustrated and annoyed. If you're frustrated and annoyed, you're probably going to take action from a place of lack and frustration, which again feels heavy. You're going to question everything, you're not going to show up for your one student who did enroll. The result is that you may have asked to deliver the content and now your student doesn't get the results that they had expected. You don't get a great testimonial, again, putting you in this loop. With abundance thinking, you feel excited, motivated and you cannot wait to deliver this. You cannot wait to help them get the results that they're looking for. The action you take is light, it's massive, you show up, you move faster, and your student has massive success in your program, that then he/ she provides you a testimonial, which then goes on your sales page, which then is used in your next launch. It becomes this snowball effect.

Another book I recommend is by Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. He talks about how we get into this closed loop state of mind breaking that habit of being ourselves. It takes conscientious work and deliberate practice. It takes showing up every single day even though we don't think that things are happening or changing in which they really, truly are. I resonate with that so much because there was a period of time where I was in the scarcity mindset, where I look at my bank account, and I thought, ‘why isn't there more money in it? Oh, my gosh, how am I still here? Oh my gosh, I should be further along’. If you're thinking the ‘shoulds’, or you're looking at your bank account thinking ‘why is there not more money?’ Another tool to shift out of scarcity and lack and into abundance is being grateful for what is. What really changed for me was not looking at my bank account and looking at the debt and freaking out and saying, ‘Why isn't there more money’ or ‘I shouldn't be in debt’. It was deciding ahead of time, who I want it to be in the future and the person who I was in the future wasn't focused on debt, she was focused on growth. She was also very grateful for what she had in the present moment. That changed everything. 

Simply just being grateful is one of the things my coach talks about. If you aren’t happy with where you're at, rather than trying to go from a thought of, ‘I don't like my body’ to ‘I love my body’, you go from the thought of ‘I don't like my body’ to ‘I have a body’. If you can't find yourself going from ‘oh my gosh, I'm so frustrated by the amount of money in my account, there should be more’ to the ‘oh my gosh, I love my money’. It's simply finding that intermediate transition thought that allows you to get to that abundant place.

If you take only one or two things away from today's episode, how can I practice more gratitude and be thankful for what I have, and what is, in order to attract more abundance into my world. That's one. The second piece is there is a difference between human value and economic value. As you're starting your business and you're shifting out of being an employee for a corporate company and becoming your own boss, things can get crossed. Human value is that you are already worthy and valuable, because you're a human being you don't need to make more money, you don't need to look a certain way, you don't need to weigh a certain amount, you don't need to do anything, you're already worthy, that's your human value. 

The economic value is ‘I'm going to go out and produce something and be of service to the world and in return, I'm going to make money’. The danger is that it can be so easy to wrap the human and the economic value into one so that when we have a failed launch, or when no one signs up for our services, we attach the lack to our value as human beings. If you are out there and you're hustling and you are focused on creating in your business, you're putting yourself out there to be really keenly aware, to not confuse your value as a human, and the economic value of your business and what it is that you offer. 

The third thing that I'm going to leave you with is that when we put our first offer out there (I'm certainly guilty of this), go through a launch, have that one person sign up when we expected 10, the habit and the default is ‘oh my gosh, I need to fix this, I need to relaunch the program, I need to change the offer, I need to change the product. Instead, I encourage you to realize that it's probably not the product that needs to be changed. It's probably the marketing that needs to be changed. So before you spend time, energy and thinking that your product is terrible, or that no one wants it, I encourage you to stick with that product. Just change the marketing.

That’s all for this week my friends!

Until next time, keep doing it your way.

Insights:

• “Being in a scarcity versus abundance state is really determined by our level of awareness when it comes to our thinking.”
• “The biggest pitfall that I see in the beginning stages of building a business is getting into a state of scarcity and not being able to get out because it's a closed loop of scarcity.”
• “If I would have changed the way I thought about it, I would have been able to be in a position today, potentially further along, because I would have taken massive action from a place of being inspired, rather than defeated or frustrated.“
• “It's simply finding that intermediate transition thought that allows you to get to that abundant place.”

Resources:

• Brooke Castillo’s The Life Coach School
• Think & Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
• Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Dr. Joe Dispenza

One of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to podcasting is ‘how do I work with sponsors?’ and on today's podcast episode, I'm going to walk you through the three ways on how to make money with your podcast. I’ll also be diving into why sponsorship should be the last way in which you approach making money with your podcast. 

A few of the questions I hear most often are:

How do I make money? 

How do I work with sponsors? 

How many downloads do I need?

What I'm going to share with you today is my personal opinion after running and producing a podcast since 2015. There are three key ways (buckets) to make money from your podcast. They are:

Marketing Your Own Products & Services

Affiliate Marketing

Sponsorships

Marketing Your Own Products & Services

Do you sell courses or digital services such as group coaching or copywriting? Market these. Promote them to your listeners and allow them to gain traction with your audience. Spend time building out your own offerings rather than spending hours looking for sponsors. 

If you don't have a business yet, no worries. If you simply have an idea of the type of business you want to start it doesn't necessarily commit you to figuring out the product right away. If you're clear on the direction you want to go with your business you could set up the content of your podcast to provide value and solutions for the pain points of your audience. What you would do is invite your audience to engage with you beyond the podcast. This could be in the form of a free guide/ download, an offer for a free training, the offer to join a free Facebook group, etc., so that you can really begin to nurture and build that stronger relationship with them before you even try to sell them anything. When you are ready to start selling to them, you’ve already built that ‘Know, Like & Trust’ factor with them.

Affiliate Marketing

Maybe you don’t have a product or service yet, but you know about a software that would benefit your audience. By sharing a software/ product/ service of someone else's using a unique URL code, you get a piece of that revenue by sharing. This is affiliate marketing. 

When I first got into online business, I remember learning about affiliate marketing and I thought, ‘oh my god, this is so gross’; and the truth is, you're going to find whatever you look for in life and I think I was looking for that.

Now, I look at affiliate marketing and think, ‘okay, this totally makes sense’. The thing I love about affiliate marketing is when you share a product or service with your audience, it's simply the business's way of compensating you. So rather than the company paying for their own marketing, by you sharing their product or service with your audience, they're essentially redirecting that money to you.

A great example of this is a few years ago my friend Natalie Bacon had a blogging course. She started her online business blogging about finance and she created a course. I had people in my audience asking me if I could talk about blogging and essentially, I was like, ‘No, I actually can't because I can talk about podcasting’, just not about blogging. So Natalie and I partnered together to do a webinar training for anyone who wanted to learn how to blog. For me it was truly an aligned fit because she taught people how to start a blog, and she was successful at it, and with the podcast I was able to then share with my audience about the free training. Once the training was over Natalie then promoted her (paid) course to all of the attendees and anyone who enrolled in her course using my link, I then received an affiliate commission.

An example of a software service that I'm an affiliate of is Podia. If you go to the She Did It Her Way website and look under ‘Start A Business’ you'll see Podia listed. If you click that link, it is an affiliate link. There are two reasons why I promote Podia:

I use it personally

I love it 

These are excellent examples of aligned affiliate marketing and having integrity behind who you partner up with. Affiliate marketing, when you do it right and you do it intentionally, can be lucrative. Lastly, you can certainly be able to create revenue in your business from using affiliate marketing.

Sponsorships

Sponsorships are a wonderful way to generate revenue and we have generated 1,000s of dollars in sponsorship revenue with the podcast. I am so grateful to be able to have so many of you to tune in and listen to the show, which then allows for brands to reach out to us to say, ‘hey, your audience and what we offer is in line, can we do a partnership?’.

There are highs and lows with sponsorships. 95% of the time sponsors and brands have reached out to us, so I wasn't investing my time or energy trying to seek out sponsorships. I think that's something that's really key is that in the beginning, your time is so limited. You should always be assessing our time in terms of ‘if I say yes to one thing, then what am I indirectly saying no to?’. 

I recommend that the time that you're going to spend reaching out to sponsorships and cultivating that relationship and finding those that are going to sponsor your podcast and instead use those hours and really invest in marketing your own products or services. So the way that I like to look at sponsorship is it's great when it's there and it comes in a supplemental, but it's not the backbone of how I make money. 

Do we still work with sponsors when it's a good fit and it's aligned? Yes, absolutely. I always want to make sure 1) I am protecting your ears. I'm not just going to serve up a ton of ads on my show. 2) It has to make sense and feel really good. Sponsorship is a great supplement, but I would not consider it the end-all-be-all.
 

Upcoming Training

Inside my upcoming training, How to Launch Your Podcast In 5 Easy Steps, I'm covering my exact plug-and-play content planning framework. I'm going through the specific tech setup that you need and also some of the specifics I teach to my students inside Podcast Your Way. This way you can actually start recording the day after you leave the training, and have specific tangible next steps laid out for you. Grab your seat here.

I am so grateful that you tuned into it another podcast episode and until next time, keep doing it your way,

Insights:

• “Spend time building out your own offerings rather than spending hours looking for sponsors.”
• “The thing I love about affiliate marketing is when you share a product or service with your audience, it's simply the business's way of compensating you.”
• “Affiliate marketing, when you do it right and you do it intentionally, can be lucrative.”
• “So the way that I like to look at sponsorship is it's great when it's there and it comes in a supplemental, but it's not the backbone of how I make money.”

Resources:

• Podcast Your Way
• Podia
• Launch Your Podcast in 5 Easy Steps!

Hey friend, how are you doing? Welcome to another episode. It is a new month, how exciting. Lots of exciting things happening behind the scenes for She Did it her Way, we’re gearing up for our free training at the end of the month about how to launch your podcast in 5 easy steps, so if you’re thinking about starting a podcast, then you definitely need to be there. I’m hosting two webinars the 3rd week of March. You can head to www.shediditherway.com to register and learn more about what I’m covering.

Today I'm sharing the 4 lies you may be telling yourself that are holding you back from launching your podcast! 

Tune in to hear them!