Live and Earn

“You have to start big if you’re going to go big.” - Mary Grace Allerdice

Mary Grace Allerdice, Founder of Be Well Studio,  explains how she got sick and tired of telling herself she couldn't afford a $2 coffee or even groceries at times! Budgeting and prioritizing is of course important, especially when you're starting up a new business. But sometimes habits die hard - and we come to realize that "affording" things we want or need isn't always as simple as being in the black or red. 

Over the next year we're chronicling the ins and outs & ups and downs of her first year in starting a business from scratch.  In part 1, she shares her financial insecurities in starting a business and what it means to make peace with your fears in order to go after what you deserve.

What we tackle in this episode:

• Why the tiny details of running a business really matters
• The importance of financial management drives business success
• How to take risks and overcome fears
• How confidence plays into starting your own business
• How to not let others project their fears onto you
• How you define personal financial freedom

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

We are so good with our ‘yes’ scripts. We don’t work hard enough on our ‘no’ scripts because saying ‘no’ to someone feels like we are rejecting them.”   – Helen Ngo

Have you become a “Yes Woman” without even realizing it?

You’re saying ‘yes’ to clients who you know are going to bulldoze right through your boundaries. ‘Yes’ to projects that aren’t in alignment with your business goals. ‘Yes’ to PR opportunities that will require hours of your time without much return for your bottomline. 

I’ve identified two common business scenarios where I’m almost always tempted to say ‘yes’. But the problem with saying ‘yes’ to someone else is that it usually means saying ‘no’ to me.

So how do we flex our ‘no’ muscle in a kind way without eliminating all possibilities of collaboration and reciprocity in the future? How do we learn to say ‘no’ to others so we can say ‘yes’ more to ourselves?

What we tackle in this episode:

• Why saying ‘no’ can really be an act of kindness for others and for yourself
• The importance of practicing saying ‘no’ more often than saying ‘yes’

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

Success in this day and age includes failure. The people who will succeed are the ones who are fragile enough to hop around and figure out what works until it works.

--Mary Grace Allerdice

If you ask any business owner, the first two years are the most grueling.  It will break you down to your core. Almost every day feels like a battlefield of self-doubt and uncertainty.

Had a bad day? Well, guess what? Those bills still have to be paid. Where’s the next dollar going to come from?

You feel like giving up so many times. But when do you know when it’s time to let go and move on? How do you know it’s time to pivot?

Mary Grace shares her tough financial journey through the initial stages of starting a business and how she’s learning to embrace the test of her mental endurance and resilience.

What we tackle in this episode:

• Handling rejection and failure
• Allowing yourself to say “no” and how to take it from others
• Determining which noise to filter out and who to actually listen to
• Identifying when you should move on to another career or opportunity when what you’re working on no longer serves you

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“What’s more important to you now? Driving a Benz now to look a certain way or pursue the thing you love most at all costs?” -- Stefanie Jewett

Starting your own business is difficult by design; that’s why it’s not meant for everyone.  But this notion that starting your own business is difficult doesn’t deter our guest this week, Stefanie Jewett, Founder of Activvely, a social app that helps individuals find workout partners.

She went from collecting a comfortable salary at CNN, driving around town in a fancy Benz - to leaving her job to follow her passion and build her tech startup from the ground up. No Investors. No Partners. All #Grit and #WomanPower.

Hear her candid story of bootstrapping her tech startup and what it takes mentally, and socially, to make it.

What we tackle in this episode:

• What you have to sacrifice to start a business
• How to be exposed and vulnerable when starting a business
• Why it’s important to be true to yourself and confident in who you are an how it plays into success
• The importance of community building and leaning into your strengths for success
• Why owning a business is difficult by design

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“I loved investment banking, and I loved New York. But I knew I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life.”

Serial entrepreneur, Ashley Williams, shares her experience leaving a 6-figure job (right out of college!) to tackle marriage, motherhood, and the uncertainties of being an entrepreneur.

Juggling all the things that life as a wife, mother, and business owner brings is enough to make most people’s heads spin. And while she’ll tell you she’s far from having mastered it, Ashley does a phenomenal job at navigating it all gracefully. Through her experience operating The League with her husband Terry, she also shares invaluable relationship advice that will help anyone who runs a business with their spouse. 

Join Helen as she interviews one of the business owners she considers to be a “superwoman”.

What we tackle in this episode:

• Staying in your lane when working with a partner
• Leaving a well-paying corporate job for the uncertainty of entrepreneurship
• The importance of surrounding yourself with a team of advisors
• How self-care is so much more than pampering
• Dealing with imposter syndrome

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“You must fall in love with the constant challenges of running a business.”

--Merel Kriegsman

Merel Kriegsman is the founder and CEO of Merel Kriegsman Media. She provides high-end mentorship to women business owners, plus runs a conversion copywriting agency.

While Merel is now on the verge of her first 7-figure year (in less than 5 years in business!), her story starts with: being in debt and underpaid, and scrubbing toilets to make ends meet… while 8 months pregnant.

Helen and Merel talk about the unique relationship between power and money and why women shouldn’t be afraid to go after both.

What we tackle in this episode:

• Learning how to sell is a rite of passage
• How essential it is to understand your ‘why’ when it comes to persevering in business
• The give and take of juggling your personal life while owning a business
• The benefits of peer mastermind groups
• Ways women keep themselves small and how to break out of it

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Grab your free training!

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

"Don’t tie your self-worth in with how many ‘followers’ and ‘likes’ you have." 

--Amber Dee

Do you ever get slightly jealous when you look at someone’s social media page and see that they have more followers than you?

It’s natural to feel this way. Actually, there’s a term for it in psychology and they call it the Social Comparison Theory . It states that “we determine our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up against others we perceive as somehow faring better or worse.”

Social media is great in that it keeps us so closely connected to our friends, family, and offers us many business opportunities — always staying up to date with what everyone is up to. 

But the detrimental side of it occurs when we constantly compare ourselves to others on there, even stacking ourselves up to complete strangers.

We compare ourselves to others as a way of fostering self-improvement or self-motivation. But it can also promote judgmental, biased and overly competitive or superior attitudes that in the long-term can be detrimental to your mental health, ultimately affecting your performance.

I sat down with Amber Dee, an online marketing strategist and therapist, to discuss the side effects — good and bad— of constantly comparing ourselves to others on social media.

The bottom-line is to not tie your self-worth into how many followers and likes you get.

Just because someone has a lot of followers and “likes” on Instagram doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making any real money.

 What we tackle in this episode:

• What metrics really matter in determining someone’s success on social media
• How people can buy “followers” and “likes” on social media
• How to improve your online engagement
• How we can avoid the comparison paralysis with others online and keep yourself in check

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Grab your free video course! 

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“When you are able to overcome financial guilt, you will be able to accept yourself and celebrate yourself.” -- J.

Have you ever felt guilty about spending money on yourself?  As if, you don’t deserve to buy that “one thing?"

What we tell ourselves we deserve financially is shaped by our upbringing and childhood.

What we grew up with, has so much influence on who we become, all the way down to how we spend money and what we tell ourselves we deserve.

Growing up in poverty, J shares her personal story of how she was constantly told by her mother as a child that the family doesn’t have enough money. That she couldn’t have this. Or that.

As a grown woman who’s making well into the 6-figures today, she’s still telling herself that she doesn’t have “enough money” and spins into a cycle of self guilt when she does spend on herself.

Whether it’s about spending money on ourselves or trying to earn more money, each of us at some point in time has told ourselves “I don’t deserve this.”

 What we tackle in this episode: 

• How does your upbringing impact your financial future?
• How do you overcome financial self-shaming? What is it and how can you detect it?
• Is spending a lot when you have money a bad thing?
• Can you become financially responsible and not feel guilt?

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Grab your free video course! 

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“Removing more responsibilities off my plate also meant I had to do the hard job of removing people who no longer serve me in a positive way.” 

-- Helen Ngo

Who you surround yourself  with either raise or lower your standards. You don’t become great on your own. The people around you who make you even better than who you think you are... they’re the ones who genuinely have you in their best intentions, always wanting to uplift your spirits and see you succeed. But also being the toughest on you when you need a reality check.

Take a close look at the people around you. 

Are they raising your standards and challenging you to become the best version of yourself, encouraging you to make more money for yourself?

If we are who we surround ourselves with, then why keep those who rob us of our potential, lower our standards, and steal our time and energy?

Throughout my journey, I’ve learned that removing more responsibilities off my plate also meant I had to do the hard job of removing people -- even the friends whom I’ve known for a long time. They were no longer serving any positive influence on the person I want to be or become. I call them toxic influencers -- those who damper your soul for their own personal gain.

When someone continues to fill your mental space with jealousy and status quo mentality, you begin to become the stories you listen to.

 What we tackle in this episode: 

• Who are toxic influencers
• When to get rid of toxic influencers
• How you become like those who’s around you
• Why stressing over people is unhealthy for your mental health
• How can you tell when a person is toxic
• How to pull away from toxic influencers

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Grab your free video course! 

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse

“I realized I needed to define success for myself, not for someone else.” Awilda Rivera

You ever thought to yourself: what would happen if I did something else?

Something that you weren’t trained to do in school or use your degree.

Perhaps we set those ideas and dreams to the back burner because we’re afraid of being judged by others. Perhaps we will even judge ourselves for being financially irresponsible.

In this episode, you’ll meet Awilda Rivera. She went into $100k+ of student loan debt to earn her law degree and ended up not even using it. Instead, she became a Yogi and Spiritual Advisor.

That’s pretty damn bold considering the level of financial risks involved.

 What we tackle in this episode:

• Why she left her law degree behind to pursue what she’s truly interested in
• How she started a business from scratch, even with $100k+ of student loan debt
• How she bridges passion and purpose
• The 6 essential tools to define your own success

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Grab your free video course! 

The Money Maker Mindset: 4 Strategies to Focus Your Mind to Make More Money

https://HelenNgo.com/FreeCourse