She Did It Her Way

She Did It Her Way

By Amanda BoleynBusinessEntrepreneurshipEducationSelf-ImprovementMarketing
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She Did It Her Way episodes

  • SDH226: Tapping Into Your Gifts and Living According to Your Purpose with Mary Shores
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    How did you figure out strengths in your personality? What were they? Did you begin to embrace them, and build them even more? Where did that take you in life? How did you grow?

    Our guest today, Mary Shores, gets into that as we learn about her mission as a motivational speaker and a writer. Her first book, Conscious Communications, was born from her love of personal development, and she helps teach it from a place where science and spirituality meet. She believes that once you tap into your subconscious and harness your words, you have the ability to change your choices, behaviors and mind. From there, you will be able to bring areas of your life into alignment, begin to find yourself, and grow as an entrepreneur and a person. Her take on personal development really struck a chord with readers, and within six weeks of her book’s release, it became the number one Best Seller for Self Esteem, Communications, and Happiness on Amazon! 

    Before she wrote her book, at 24 she became the youngest person to become a CEO in communication strategy in 1999. She also created her own strategy that’s been used in business, and the health care industry for over 10 years! She said ever since she was a little girl, she always had that entrepreneur bug. Instead of playing house, she played bank, and arranged tables in her garage, drew up her own money, and set up accounts for the neighborhood kids. She even had a drive thru so they could pull up in their tricycles to make deposits and withdrawals.  In middle school she also set up a beauty supply store in her Lutheran school’s bathroom, so she could buy a $55 swimsuit, but she was kicked out once school officials found out. 

    Once her parents took note of her entrepreneurial drive, they allowed her to work at their collection agency when she was 13, and she got paid a dollar an hour to lick stamps, and envelopes. She eventually went on to work at a real bank, but was devastated when she was fired after her 90-day evaluation. She said it was the worst thing to happen to her in her young life, and it created a scar of unworthiness in her. She felt like she wasn’t good enough to get a job with anyone, so she thought the only way for her to make a living was if she started her own company. 

    With a few clients from her mom, and her naivety and youthful confidence in tow, she opened the doors of her collection agency! She said she was willing to handle anything that came across her desk, and was determined to build a great reputation and prove to herself and others her potential. Once she accomplished becoming a successful entrepreneur, she became focused on spiritual growth and personal development. 

    She went through an existential crisis because she wanted to reach concepts of enlightenment, and self actualization, but didn’t feel it fit into her career in debt collections. She said her profession wasn’t typically looked at as a positive thing, but she wanted people to look at paying off their debt as a release of a psychological burden. To her, it could become a foundation of shame and unworthiness, and keep people from starting their own businesses, applying for homes, or pursuing relationships. She wanted people to break down those barriers to live the life of their dreams, and have the freedom to tap into their authentic gifts to begin living according to their purposes.

    She said to find those gifts, people can do simple things like taking the Myer Briggs personality test, or a Disc profile, so they can know their strongest traits and what their challenges may be. She suggests highlighting the positive traits, and begin actively applying them to your life. For her it was speaker and leader, and she started stepping heavily into those roles in her business and industry, and her mission of changing people’s viewpoint on debt expanded into changing the entire collections industry!

    See how she did just that by listening to today’s episode!

    In this episode you will…

    • Be able to find your authentic gifts
    • Know what your strongest personality traits are, and start applying them to your life
    • See how to inspire people within your industry to change their methods
    • Be able to change the public’s idea about your industry
    • Know how to create new neuropathways and understand your subconscious mind
    • Figure out the best mindset to approach self help events with
       

    INSIGHTS

    "Our mind is built up of all these neuro networks that drive our behaviors, choices, habits, fears. Everything is coming out of this subconscious, but the magic is it can be changed…the way you get from here to there, is you gotta get all these areas of your life in alignment, and moving in the direction that you want. If we can accept that infinite possibilities are available to us…[we begin to do] things we that will connect us more to the things that we want, and stop us from flowing in all the uncertainty, and negative circumstances that swallow us whole.” – Mary Shores

    “I think we’re in this place where we love to get quick fixes. We love to go away to that weekend workshop that’s going to give us a transformation…What I’ve learned is that true transformation happens in small pivots over time…if I were to come to [an] event, I would pick out the things that I knew…and I would think, how can I apply these things to my life…At an event, you’re going to learn many concepts, and my goal is to come away with one…I don’t have this expectation hang-over anymore…[and] I’ve built myself into a lot of resiliency and strength, and the ability to even see how those concepts apply to my life.” -Mary Shores

    “My mantra was, ‘I want to write a book, but I’m not a writer’. And the thing is words are like a mirror to your subconscious programming, and when I [said] the words, ‘I want to write a book’ it [was] like you were looking in and seeing it written on my soul like a purpose. But the problem is the words, ‘I’m not a writer’ are also a mirror to my subconscious and it’s revealing to me one of those blocks…and so what I needed to do to eliminate that was to invest in myself.” -Mary Shores

    RESOURCES

    Mary Shores Website
    Mary Shores Guide Book
    Mary Shores Facebook
    Mary Shores Instagram
    Mary Shores Twitter
    Conscious Communications by Mary Shores
    Start with Why by Simon Sinek Website

    36 min
  • SDH225: Creating Your Own Path and Pursuing Your Passion with Maureen Fan
    We hear Maureen Fan’s answers to those pressing questions on today’s episode! Maureen Fan is the COO and co-founder of Baobab Studios, a virtual reality animation company that makes animated shorts and films! She founded the company with Eric Darnell, the writer, and director of all four Madagascar films, and the movie Antz. Baobab’s third co-founder is Larry Cutler, who was the technical director for Toy Story 2 and Monster’s Inc. and was also the global head of character technologies for DreamWorks Studios. They all handle differently, but equal, parts of the company with Maureen managing the business aspect, Eric steering Baobab’s creative direction, and Larry representing technical. Together they have turned Baobab into the top VR animation studio, and won the 2017 Daytime Emmy for “Outstanding Interactive” for their first animation, INVASION; which will soon become a feature film!
    For Maureen, animation has been a love of hers for as long as she can remember. She even designed her own undergrad major for animation studies at Stanford called Art, Computer Science, and Psychology. Despite her passion for animation, she said her immigrant parents didn’t see it as a practical career path. So after college, she became a UI designer for eBay, and while she said she loved it, she still couldn’t shake her desire to become an animator. 
    To continue to pursue her dream career, she began taking classes on nights and weekends at De Anza College, where a lot of George Lucas’ animators taught. She also started to save money so she could eventually apply for a masters program at a fine arts school. After five years, she was ready to finally apply but found that all the deadlines for the programs she wanted had passed. However, round three of business school was available at Harvard, and due to the pressures from her mother, she applied and got in. Before she completely gave up on animation, though, her boss at eBay told her to try out Hollywood and see what it would be like to work as an animator. So she quit her job and took on as many internships and jobs as she could out in L.A. 
    She ended up landing positions as Zach Braff’s assistant and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s talent manager. From those positions, and during her time in Hollywood, she learned that everything is a business no matter what you do, and decided to start at Harvard. In between her time at school, she took an internship at Pixar and ended up working on Toy Story 3. She said she learned that animation was a mature industry full of mature businesses, so a lot of emphasis was on decreasing costs in order to increase margins. But Maureen wanted to create something new because she knew it would be hard to compete against Pixar or Disney without a lot of money or unfair distribution advantages. 
    That’s when she decided to join forces with Zenga, because it was still entertainment, but it was also a pioneer in an entirely  new industry focused on connecting the world through games. After six years with Zenga, she became VP of Games, and overlooked the Farmville franchise. Not able to keep her hands away from animation, though, she worked with art directors from Pixar on an a film called the Dam Keepers; which was nominated for an Oscar. She continued to find new ways to innovate the industry,  which eventually led to her venture into virtual reality.
    She said the first time she put on a VR headset she hated it because of it’s low resolution and bad pixilation. It was when Zenga hacked into the headset with their games, that she was convinced that VR was the future of animation, because it allowed her to be transported into a fantasy world.  She said it also made sense business-wise because it was a new industry, and no one had an advantage. Naturally an introvert, she didn’t want to be a COO, but there weren’t any companies in VR to join. But she knew she had to be a part of the VR industry, and began to pave her own way through it!
    Hear more of Baobab’s story, how she found the courage to pursue her dreams, and created her own system!
    In this episode you will…
    Know how to have confidence in pursuing your dream career
    Learn how to find the perfect co-founders
    Be able to work your network to help you start your business
    See how to educate men on the female experience in the work place
    Get over what society deems as attractive in women at work
    Figure out a way to come up with the perfect name for your company
    INSIGHTS
    “[Virtual reality] spoke to me creatively because the reason I love animation is it takes you to completely different worlds, and world’s that are only limited by the directors' imagination…and it makes you believe that the world is so real, you can reach out and touch it. And that’s also the definition of virtual reality.” – Maureen Fan
    “Animation makes me feel like I’m 5 years old again when I believed I could do anything. And for VR, if it takes you totally to that world, it brings out that 5 year-old in me even more, and makes me feel like I’m invincible. Creatively it was like magic, and I knew I needed to do it.” -Maureen Fan
    “It’s so great having co-founders, because starting a company is incredibly emotional and stressful. You have these moments [of] intense happiness, and incredible misery, and having the co-founders there, not only to share the load of work with you, but also there for you emotionally.” -Maureen Fan
    RESOURCES
    Baobab Studios Website
    Baobab Studios Facebook
    Baobab Studios Instagram
    Baobab Studios Twitter
    Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity by Kim Scott
    38 min

About She Did It Her Way

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the She Did It Her Way Podcast where we dive into all of your most important questions about starting a business and when to make the leap of going full-time as an entrepreneur. Every week, host, Amanda Boleyn delivers fresh content on productivity hacks, different business strategies, how to confidently transition out of your 9-5 and become a full-time business owner. Along with sharing her business savvy tips, she interviews women who have also gone out and done it their way (Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, Julie Solomon, Lori Harder and many more).