From Hustle to Hell Yes

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown talks about applying biomimicry to her work - using the models, systems, and elements of nature to solve all kinds of complex problems. Creativity, whether in our businesses or elsewhere, has phases. In this podcast, we explore pawpaw trees, the phases of creating through the lens of biomimicry, and what creative blocks are really about.

Ellen Yin, founder and podcast host of Cubicle to CEO™ joins me this week on From Hustle to Hell Yes!

Her journey from "Cubicle to CEO" began when she quit her corporate marketing job at the end of 2017...without a backup plan. Ellen is a self-described accidental entrepreneur: she landed her first client a month into the job search and decided she'd never submit another resume again.

I’m so thrilled that she joined me to dish on all things marketing and more!

Some highlights to listen for:

[3:30] So let's get straight to one of the reasons I love what Ellen does: Marketing minimalism. What it is and the secret to mastering it.

[9:00] Ellen’s philosophy on being productive: Urgent + Important + her secret ingredient that takes your effort to next-level effectiveness.

[12:15] Selling to a small audience and the opportunity you have as an entrepreneur to engage meaningfully with your audience and listen for the ways you can serve them as individuals.

[21:54] What to do to engage your network when you don’t have a network.

[28:35] One of the reasons that I fell in love with what Ellen does is that she is so incredibly transparent about her numbers. (You can check out her financial latest report here). Not only does she give us a peek behind the curtain of her finances and how she takes stock of her business every quarter.

I'm hosting the Profit, Purpose, & Pleasure summit this fall. Our businesses are microcosms of the world we're building and that through them we can achieve personal freedom, AND we can also create real, lasting, impactful change on the most insidious problems the world is facing. Get on the waitlist and I'll let you know when it's time to create your blueprint for more money, influence, and time freedom! https://change-agent-studio.ck.page/49b5798ae3

This week the wisdom of Beatrice Dixon of the Honey Pot Co is on my mind!

Listen up as Bea shares:

-> How Honey Pot came to be

-> Taking the right kind of risks in business

-> Managing the rollercoaster journey of entrepreneurship

AND a lot more. Whenever there’s a hard decision I have to make about my business, when I’m feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I think about this interview from the Ideal Paying Clients summit this past spring.  I hope YOU enjoy listening in on it as much I as I love revisiting it.

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown talks about cultivating play and rest, which she equates to letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth. She says, "The same gremlins that tell us we're too busy to play and waste time fooling around are the ones that whisper... "Napping is for slackers."

In this episode, we unpack opportunity cost AND I share a weekly practice that saves you hours of indecision or distraction every week!

This is the very FIRST interview I’m hosting here and I’m thrilled that it’s with Cait Donovan. Cait is a burnout expert - and when I say expert, I mean that she is the #1 go to source for information on burnout and recovery from burnout. She’s the author of The Bouncebackability Factor, host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, and highly sought-after speaker.

Listen up as we dive RIGHT into identifying burnout, what brought Cait to this work on burnout recovery, and we explore how entrepreneurs are prone to burnout because of the situations that are SO PREVALENT in running a business But we don’t stop there – this episode is so full of excellent information. You can’t see me nodding, because this  is podcast, but I’m nodding my head in agreement so much during our conversation! 

Entrepreneurship is about building a business, but it’s also about a LOT of other stuff too. It’s also about re-defining our relationship to work and being really clear on our ethics. Because HOW we do business - the values and ethics behind our tactics and our marketing, is just as important as WHAT we’re doing - whether we’re a done-for-you service provider or selling doodads or digital products.

In this episode, we're talking about something that I learned the hard way - and I’m still a little embarrassed about it, but I think it’s of the utmost  importance that I share this with you, because I want you know that you can screw up in a lot of different ways, and it’s never really The End. The mistakes you make won’t necessarily define your business, but how you handle mistakes in your business absolutely will.

When you hear the phrase “core values” do visions of posters with quotes in script-y font dance in your head? Do they seem a little… fake? There’s a good reason you feel that way. Lots of companies talk good game about core values, but then we find out that there’s really no trace of them anywhere when you dig just below the surface of their slick website, right? 

That’s unfortunate because if there is one thing that makes business easier, it’s using what you stand for to simplify. Here are 6 problems you might be facing that what you stand for can help you solve.

One of the things that we learn growing up, that we’re told again and again, is that hard work is the only path to success. Just work hard and all that effort will be rewarded with material success. You can’t hardly high five an entrepreneur without hitting a speech on hard work and hustle and dedication, but there's a really important piece to hard work that we've been ignoring.

In this episode, I answer a question from my Facebook Group community.

“With my day job, it was easy to feel like getting right to work. I had the structure of an office and coworkers to reinforce that. As an entrepreneur, I find myself procrastinating on what needs to be done, avoiding doing my client work until the last minute. How do I tame my procrastination and re-gain focus?”

Let's talk about ways to jumpstart productivity when you just can’t get going.