She Breaks The Mold

Business planning for 2020 is a hot topic this month! So there's no better time than now for some mindset tips to help you think about your plans with a future focus.

We get into trouble when we allow the part of our brain that likes safety, assurances and security to work with us on our plans ;) Today's episode is going to start you on a path to using your planning brain - your future focused mind - to move you in the direction of success.

One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is Starting with the end in mind – or creating now what you want to have in the future. Doing your business now the way you want to be doing it in the future. Starting your business now with a clear idea of how you want it to look in the future. It’s based on the idea that we create everything twice: once in our minds, and again in reality, once we know the direction we want to head in, and a potential path to get there. If you know you want your business to hold specific values or exist within a particular model, why would you start out any other way?

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Most of us have grown up without a key skill - the ability to ask  questions that empower either ourselves or the listener to take responsibility to solve a problem or find an answer. 

We think it's all about the Who, Where, Why, How and What of every situation, but there's more to this skill. So much more.

If it was all about getting the facts, we'd be close. Still not perfect, given our penchant as humans to confuse our thoughts with facts, but that's a topic for another day.

There's more to this because depending on how we ask, the words we choose to include and exclude from our questions and our intention overall, we end up with either a very empowered team, co-worker (or even ourself), or we create space and discomfort and even distrust between ourselves and everyone around us.

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Shana Recker is an entrepreneur, a coach and a passionate advisor to people (especially women) who have an idea for a business, but don't know the right steps to get them moving down the startup path.

Shana's business started with an idea while on a vacation in a Chicago hotel room, but ended up on a shelf at home once the vacation ended. Like most of us, she worried she didn't have what she needed to pull it off, wondered "who was she" to try to do it, and that she had to be someone other than who she really was to pull it off.

What to hear what she wants you to know now?

"This is YOUR LIFE and you only get ONE. If you've been stuffing down a dream because of thoughts of "who am I to do that... or I'm not qualified to do that" I'm here to say YOU ARE the right person, you were giving the dream, the idea because you are the EXACT PERSON to pull it off."

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I'm welcoming my friend Lisa Pezik to the podcast this week to talk about what happened when she decided to make a 180 degree pivot in her business and completely switch her business model, her target audience and her offering all at once.

Lisa has made two huge pivots in her career so far and we talk about both today: the first from ICU nurse to online health & fitness coach, and more recently, to business and content strategist for online marketers.

Her story is a fantastic example of how your past is never a predictor of your future path. As Lisa says, who would have ever thought this is what she would be doing, looking back at her early life in Pennsylvania being told what to take in college by her mom, who had her ideal life already planned out for her. 

Book a FREE 30-minute business coaching session with me and let's see if we're a fit: beambitiousforher.com/calendar

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Today's episode of the She Breaks The Mold podcast will help you figure out where to start, and give you a few tips and tricks so you can be well on your way to your first consumer insights project! 

You've probably heard advice about creating your ideal customer avatar, or buyer persona. But do you really know what that means? Or how to use this "character" you've created to help with your business?

Or have you heard about interviews you should be conducting with your ideal customers to figure out what problems they're having, what's missing in their toolkit of current solutions, or even what they're satisfied (or unsatisfied) about with your current offering?

All of this CAN be helpful for you as a small business, as long as you keep your expectations clear about what your customer's answers are really telling you.

Britta Schell joins me today to talk about how entrepreneurs with small budgets can get started learning consumer insights about their brand and their offering, all without a big corporate budget.

Britta has been a consumer insights expert for many years, and a solopreneur for seven. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, she served as Director, Digital Strategic Insights at MTV.

She started her career in innovative brand strategy and advertising agencies which grounded her in the power of insights in supercharging growth and loyalty for brands - and in the idea that research must be actionable and engaging to be useful.

She gives us insight not only into her insights work, but also into what it's been like for her as an entrepreneur including a few of the mistakes she made along the way. 

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What do you think - is it better to give or receive?

We present this topic to children early to help them understand the virtues of generosity and kindness without really considering the delicate balance between these two actions. Sometimes, we go so far as to suggest to kids that it's selfish to say you'd rather receive. I've only arrived at this mindset recently, but I think we do our kids a disservice by suggesting this. In fact, I think it can sometimes be exactly the opposite of selfish.

I hope this podcast, Episode #36 - The Art of Receiving, sheds a little light on the importance of both.

Particularly for girls and women, who are taught to nurture and not be selfish, receiving can be a loaded word. It has become almost a stereotype that women can be terrible at receiving compliments - on our appearance, our cooking, our parenting and our businesses.

And when we offhandedly reject a compliment (thinking we're being humble), or an offer of help (even when we could really use it) we offend the person offering and make it less likely they'll want to offer it again.

The interesting thing is how this behaviour extends to receiving money in our businesses. When we don't believe our work is worthy, when we say we love our work so much we'd do it for free, when we offer discounts to potential clients (before they even object to our price!) because we don't want them to think we're greedy, we effectively shun money from our businesses.

I believe receiving is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur can have and I tell you why in this episode.

To download the Free Money Tracking Worksheet mentioned in this episode: https://beambitiousforher.com/moneytracking

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To quote Marie Kondo of the KonMari method fame, “what sparks joy” for you when you think about your business? Lots of you will answer this with perfectly wonderful thoughts like, “Serving my customers”, or “Doing what I love every day”, or “Following my passion and setting my own schedule”. 

But what about the financial results and impact of your business? If that part doesn’t spark joy for you, you should be asking yourself why not? And how it’s supposed to unless you give it a little love in return?

If you love what you do, love serving your customers and love being your own boss, you want to protect your ability to do that and focus on how to make enough revenue to stay in business. This is really hard to do for a lot of women. We’ve been conditioned to think about anything (and everything!) but money in our business. We don’t want to be referred to as a “rich bitch” or as someone who values money over people. As if those things are mutually exclusive.

This episode is all about the work — the deep dive, the looking inside — that’s important before you can release the beliefs you hold about money that prevent you from moving forward and instead, keep you stuck in an unhelpful, unprofitable place.

Visit beambitiousforher.com/35 for a free worksheet with SIX exercises you can do to get started on decluttering your money mindset, and stay tuned for more details about my group, online course starting October 1!

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Elenna Mosoff and Danika Zoe created Deep Dive Dinners as “an opportunity to disconnect from the echo chamber of the online world and have a lively, multi-faceted conversation with people you may not ever meet. We seek not to solve or come to consensus around our topics, but rather to give them space, breath, and perspective that you might not otherwise get in your day to day existence, or in your immediate circles.”

What we discuss:

• Our personal fears about money, as women and business owners
• A little behind the scenes on what it’s really like to build a coaching business
• How we conflate self-worth with net-worth in typical money conversations and why that’s not helpful
• How the first years of business building can be a bit of a crap-shoot and the work each of us has done on our money mindsets to make it a little less crappy
• Why these conversations about important topics are essential for social connectedness
• What’s next for Deep Dive Dinners
• What Elenna and Danika want you to do next with this conversation!

Links to Deep Dive Dinners and Elenna and Danika's sites here: https://beambitiousforher.com/deep-dive-dinners

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Mai-kee is a Launch Strategist and Conversion Copywriter for purpose driven online businesses. She helps them build their authority in business, and discover their Brand DNA so that they can thrive when they launch their signature courses.

We talk a lot about what that means and how she can help you in this episode, but first we dig into the name of her podcast - The Quiet Rebel - and how it came to be. It's a story of growth, acknowledgement of purpose and authenticity that will inspire you if you're in the same place, looking to find just the right wording or feeling to describe yourself and how you serve your clients.

But Mai-kee brings more than just the touchy-feely to this episode! She give us a mini-masterclass in several areas:

1. Her Brand DNA™ framework - a key process she uses to help clients identify and integrate their brand voice, their pillars of influence and persuasion, their values and the story behind their brand
2. How to Convert With Courage - identifying the five levels of courage in entrepreneurship and where you fall in the pyramid so you know exactly where to step up next
3. A primer on her mentor, Ry Schwartz' process called "Conversion Copywriting" or "Coaching the Conversion" and how it's completely different from most sales based copywriting you've seen. It's all about abundance and serving vs. fear or scarcity. In short, it's based on the art of pull marketing vs. the traditional "push" we're used to seeing and that feels a little icky to most of us.

To top it off, Mai-kee is offering you her "Ultimate Guide to Writing Your Own Website Copy" - a FREE actionable guide to writing the Home, About and Services pages for your website.

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When you know what's most important to you, even the toughest decisions are easier to make. Not easy, but easier. For my guest this week, operating a business steeped in her values was fundamental to her definition of success. 

Amanda Munday is the Founder & CEO of The Workaround which is a co-working space in east Toronto offering something many other workspaces don't - quality childcare. This offering isn't just an add-on, though. It's an intentional part of Amanda's business design and one she doesn't compromise on.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Amanda holds her values close, even in the midst of tough financial decisions;
• How she is shifting her mindset to see money as a tool that helps her help more families to succeed, rather than a negative force that comes with all sorts of emotional baggage attached;
• How she handles shiny object-itis as an entrepreneur and instead focuses on the compound growth effect of seemingly doing the same things repetitively;
• Her view of the "long-suffering-workaholic-entrepreneur" archetype and why we need to find another way; and
• Why she wrote her important book: "Day Nine: A Post-Partum Depression Memoir" and how her experience with severe post-partum depression informs the "Why" of her business and how she serves her customers now

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