Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. As always, very excited and grateful to be with you. I'm actually just reflecting just on my entrepreneur journey today, just how far I've come and actually it was because I saw a Facebook post that was like in my memories and I'll just read it to you because it's so profound.
I posted it in 2012, so this is like 12 years ago. I said, forget all the reasons it won't work and believe in the one reason it will. And I didn't quote the source. I don't know who said that, but it was in quotes.
I must have heard it from somewhere. And I just was like, I was into this stuff 12 years ago, way before I graduated from college, way before I ever even had my first baby, way before I found the life coaching industry. It just made me really grateful.
I was like, I always had the desire for this kind of content. I always had the desire to do this with my life. And so I felt very humbled and grateful this morning. Just like, this is my career. Yeah, it's just wow. Talk about being in the miracle.
That phrase, if you're new to my world, I use that phrase, be in the miracle, because I think it's so easy to miss what's good. It's so easy to dismiss the things that you have now because there's always something you want on the horizon. And I think we trade living a life of joy and peace for the sake of ambition.
And my message has always been both. I want you to have peace and joy and have ambition. I think all of it can coexist. In fact, I wrote an email to my list today about the four dimensional life and how sometimes in our world, we get obsessed with one dimension of success. And I've been here. It makes me sad.
I've told this story before, but I think it might be relevant. I remember early on in my business, probably 2018, I just signed a client that I felt was a stretch client. I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I get to do this work. I think I signed for like $3,000. And it was one of my big ticket clients. And I was just really excited.
I remember not having a nanny, and I was just like really scrappy. I remember her telling me that she couldn't meet at night or on Saturdays because she worked during the day. She was a more established business owner. She wanted a mindset coach. So she was like, I can only meet during the day. And I was like, oh, okay, that will work for me.
And I made it work. I remember one of our sessions. She couldn't hear, but I could. My baby, who's now six, which is crazy, but she was a baby at the time. She bawled the whole session. And it makes me emotional still thinking about it. Because the one dimensional part of my life, the business success, I felt like I was making strides. I signed this amazing client. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life.
Here I was not being the mom that I wanted to be. And I got off of the call. It was a 45 minute call. I went and checked on baby Riley, and she was like so distraught. She had cried probably for like 25 minutes. This makes me sound like an awful mom, and I recognize that.
This is just true. I can still feel the pit of shame in my stomach when I tell this story. But I think it might be useful to someone because it's not required. It's not required to focus on one dimension of success at the cost of something else that really matters. In my work now, I always try to get my priorities straight. My business comes second to my kids.
That doesn't mean that I always choose my kids. I do have working hours, and I do choose my business. But in the priority list, if my kid is sick, they get priority. I spend time with them every day. My business is not the most important thing in my life, even though it is a very important thing in my life. This example that I'm sharing where I was on the session hearing my baby cry the whole time, but I didn't have a nanny, and I didn't know what to do.
That was the other thing. I realized back then that I felt like I was at the mercy of my client. I had to do whatever they wanted to keep them. That was not leadership. Now I know a completely different way of doing business where I lead myself and I lead my clients. If I need to cancel, if I need to rearrange, I can do that because I am the CEO of my life and my business, and I am leading my clients.
But back then, I hadn't learned that lesson. I felt mortified. I did not want to get off the call.
I did not want to tell her that I didn't have a nanny. I was really embarrassed at what was happening behind the scenes. When I went into my baby's room and I saw her just distraught, she had been crying so hard, I felt sick.
I remember thinking, never again, never again am I going to make that choice. And I never have. I've never gone back on my word like that because it was such a profound emotional experience for me to be like, is this success? My answer was no.
My answer was not like, sign fancy clients and have your baby cry. That was not success to me. So I rearranged my life and my business so that what mattered most mattered most. I did that with my actions, not just my words. I didn't just pay heed to it like in the flowery words on social media. I need to make real changes where my family is number one and my business takes a backseat and I still hit my business goals.
How can you have everything that you want at the same time? I did not have mentors showing me that at the time. It was very one-dimensional. I've talked about this before, but I think it's so important. I didn't have a mentor at that time that was a woman who was also a mom. And if you're listening to this and you're not a woman or you're not a mom, listen for how this to you.
We have to find people where what we are learning for them, we put it in the right dimension.
So I'll give you an example. At the time, this experience with my baby Riley and the session and the crying, that time period of my life, I was only learning from men. And I don't say that because I hate men.
I don't. I'm super grateful for what I learned from them. And I'll tell you, I was learning from Tony Robbins and Dean Garziosi and Russell Brunson, and I love them. They have taught me so much about marketing and success and belief and perspective and habits and productivity and physiology, like so much. And I'm so grateful.
I was only learning about one dimension of my life. This was a wake-up call that like, I have four dimensions to my life that matter. My business is one of them, like my financial life, what I produce, what I create, the money I make is one dimension. But I have three other dimensions that are just as important.
One dimension, business. Second dimension is like myself, my physical body, how I fuel myself, how I work out, my energy levels, my hormones, like all of that is another domain that is super important. Another domain is my motherhood and my marriage. And beyond that, like myself as a daughter, as a sister, as a friend, as a community member, as a neighbor.
I mostly identify as the marriage and the motherhood piece. I want to stay married and I want to have great relationships with my kids. I don't want to sacrifice my marriage for the sake of my success. I want to have both expand. And my fourth domain that I like to talk about is my connection with God, my spirituality. And if I miss those three for the sake of one, I am out of balance.
I don't think that's like the divine order of things. I don't think that's how we are meant to thrive or succeed. And so when I had that wake-up call with my baby crying, while I was experiencing at the time my highest level of success in business with this client and like I had signed a few other clients, I think it was around my first 6K month in business.
And like that was a huge milestone for me at the time. It was like the highest amount in a month I had ever made. And so I was like so proud of it. Here I am having this extremely opposite experience where I was like, is this really success? That pit in my stomach, that shame. I feel like I let my daughter down. Is this the mom I want to be? Like all this internal turmoil.
I was like, this isn't success. So then what is success to me? And I remember being really humbled but I remember praying on my knees, help me know what success means to me as a person of faith, as a person who wants more for their life, who is ambitious but also has these other desires. How do I get all four? And like I didn't have the answer right away, but over time I've developed rituals and routines in my life where I think I've created holistic success.
That's like the four dimensional way of living where all four are working in my life at the same time. Not just one dimension of success, but all four dimensions of success at the same time. And this term, you probably heard my last podcast, I called it quiet wealth.
This idea that like my wealth isn't just a financial number. It is like a state of being. It is the way I experience my life. So all four have to work in tandem. And I was just thinking about this today because my life is much more prosperous today, not just because I make more money than I did back then, but like my relationships are even better. I feel like I'm even more powerful in motherhood.
I appreciate it more. I love it more. I'm having so much fun with my kids. We do fun things. We can talk about things. I feel like our values are aligned. We have meaningful moments throughout morning, day and night where we're playing and learning together. I feel on fire in my marriage as far as like intimacy and passion and friendship and devotion to each other. All of it's working.
I'm just like really grateful for all the work that I've done. It reminds me of that meme that Snoop Dogg's like, I want to thank me. I feel like I'm doing that a little bit, but I couldn't have done it without my mentors and my coaches and the authors that I've read and the programs that I've taken part of and all the podcasts that I've listened to and all the journaling sessions and all my own coaching sessions that I've received and the pieces of content that have changed my life over time.
That to me, that's being in the miracle because I had seeds of prosperity then. And that's what I actually wanted to title this episode is seeds of prosperity that I struggled with, but I did the work. If you're new to this podcast, you might have not heard this story yet. So that was one story with Riley crying on a and another story was when I drove this old Yukon.
It was a super old car. It used to ding all the time. And here I am reading books about money and prosperity and like people making millions of dollars and I'm driving this old car with ripped seats and I was embarrassed to be seen driving it in public. And I was like, how do I actually apply what they're teaching? One of the things that showed up in multiple different books was gratitude. You have to find gratitude for what is.
And so I was like, if I'm going to take this seriously, I need to feel grateful for this car. So I used to like force myself. It did feel forced. It did not feel genuine at first, but it became more genuine the more I practiced. It was just a new way of thinking. So I was like, well, I am grateful. It gets me from point A to point B. One day, like me and my husband went on a drive up in the mountains and I was like, yeah, it has four wheel drive. It's pretty beastly. Like it's good.
It can get us over like some pretty crazy terrain. And I have two babies in the backseat. It's a big car. I feel safe in it. I started developing a genuine love for my Yukon, even though it was old and it made weird noises and cost us a lot of money to fix and all these things. I developed a genuine love for it because I did the inner work to see things with the attitude of gratitude. It is cliche and yet it is true. That's what cliche means. It's like you hear it so much because it's true.
It becomes cliche. When I saw things through the lens of gratitude, I started nurturing the seeds of prosperity in my life. And now, even though I don't have the same financial turmoil that I did then, I know it's because I nurtured the seeds of prosperity way back then, seven years ago, to build the life that I have now.
And what's cool about this is I still do this work where I'm choosing to see things with gratitude. I live a very abundant life in my own mind. I also live a very abundant life physically, but I think the real riches are it starts in my mind. I live in a very beautiful state. Tony Robbins has a distinction between a beautiful state and what I think of as a lack state.
Beautiful state is I choose to see what's working. I choose to do the work to have hard conversations, to make hard decisions, to have the life that I want. I also manage my own thinking so that I am choosing to see things through the lens of prosperity and abundance. I have trained myself to do this, and what's interesting is everything starts in our thinking.
Our thought seeds become physical fruits, and so it never stops. The prosperity has only expanded, and the amount of money that I'm making is more, and it keeps growing, but the work is the same because I'm always planting seeds of prosperity. But I did this a long time ago, and so the fruit that I'm harvesting now is evidence of the seeds that I planted seven years ago.
And what's interesting is I know I will collect fruit of the seeds that I'm planting right now, and so will you. So looking for the good. This is the other thing that I learned how to do is not only did I learn to look for the good and choose gratitude consciously, I also developed the skill that I think now is even more potent, is I look for opportunities to create value for someone else.
One of the things that I teach is MTOP, money through other people. Money does not come from the sky. This was one of my biggest hurdles early on. I used to beg God for like help with our financial situation because it was tight. We had little kids. My husband has type 1 diabetes. He was new in his career. I was not making any money. Basically, I was making like $300 a month transcribing videos, teaching English to kids in China, like just trying to scrape by basically.
I remember like praying for understanding and praying for abundance. Now looking back, I realized how limited my thinking was because like I had no idea how our financial situation could change. But one of the things that was shown to me is that money comes through other people.
That is how God answers prayers, is through other people. Money is no different. And so if I wanted more money, I had to learn how to create more value for other people. This is true for every business owner and person. Anyone who wants more financial abundance is like create more value for people. That might mean getting a job.
It might mean creating more value in your business, whether that's a new offer, a new price point, a new way of serving. It doesn't really matter. If you want more money, the easiest way to do that is to look for how to create value for someone else. And this is where we go to the other principle that I teach is needing nothing to serve someone else. You can't also need in the relationship you have to be giving. When I teach need nothing, it's a frame of mind where you are overflowing.
This is why doing gratitude, choosing to see the good, finding the seeds of prosperity that already exist in your life helps you need nothing because you are overflowing with gratitude for your life, where you feel abundant every day. And because your needs are taken care of, you are able to see the others and create value for them, which they want to pay for. And that is how you grow a business, but you have to do the inner work to need nothing.
So this is the next piece of this puzzle was to learn to be a receiver and a giver. In my business, I have learned to receive more money, but I've also learned to give more value and to pay for my own stuff at higher and higher levels. Because if you think about prosperity, almost like a portal, like if I want to receive more, one, I have to be OK with that.
I have to be comfortable with receiving more money, but I also have to be comfortable with letting go of more money because it flows in and it flows out. That has been my work as well. And so as you develop yourself in business, letting go of money might look like investing in your own coaching or mentorship, but it also might mean hiring people.
It also might mean getting support. Like if you scroll back a few episodes, I talked about CEO mode. I let go of a lot of money every month. I also make a lot of money every month. And that has been skill development and consciousness expansion. So I have had to expand my mind to one, receive more money, but to also increase where I create money from.
We can talk about that in lots of different ways. That could be your offer suite in business. That could be a job. It could be the price that you charge. It could be the type of person that you work with. Maybe you work with people longer and the price is more expensive or whatever.
But you expanding your capacity to receive also means expanding your capacity to give. And so it works in tandem. If you want to grow your seeds of prosperity, expand your capacity to receive and expand your capacity to give. That has been the biggest secret for me. Because I see and have been exposed to, because my consciousness changed, because my thinking changed, I started getting exposed to situation and circumstances that I couldn't have had access to because my mind wasn't ready to see that. But now it is.
And I see the relationship of receiving and giving. It has to work together. That's been huge for me as well as developing these seeds of prosperity. Like I said, I'm not perfect at it. I still have things that I want to achieve and create. And that's the game of life that is fun.
I love the expansion part, where it's like, back then, making money and growing my business and learning the skills was so fun. And it still is, even though I'm playing at maybe a higher level. And a lot of lessons I've had to learn along the way were hard and challenging.
But to become the person that I am and the person that I want to continue to become, it was worth it. Choosing to see opposition, choosing to see hardship, choosing to see situations that are less than ideal as an opportunity is a seed of prosperity. Because for every problem, there is a solution and the becoming.
When I think of greatness, I always use this funny example, like when people are going through something hard, it's like, well, have you ever went to a conference where the person on stage just got up and was like, I just didn't really struggle. I just had this idea and it kind of worked out great. And now I'm a multibillionaire and there were no problems.
That doesn't exist because we need the refining. If you scroll way back in my podcast library, I have an episode that is super popular, very highly downloaded, which I think is interesting. It's called The Entrepreneur's Refiner's Fire.
And no one wants to go through it, but everyone wants the result of it. Part of seeds of prosperity is also looking for where you are being refined and submitting to the process. I remember how I started this episode was talking about how I found my baby crying.
And I remember submitting. I was like, this is not success. I am willing to see this differently.
I am willing to see myself differently. I am willing to accept help and guidance and perspective that I don't have right now. That humility allowed me to see things differently, then go on to design my life and business the way that I wanted.
But it came from a moment of hardship. But I leaned into it and was willing to see things differently. And I know my clients who are the most successful lean into hardship and learn the lesson and then transcend it.
They learn the lesson and transcend it so that they can move on to the next level. Where we get stuck sometimes is we learn the same lesson over and over and over again because we actually lean into it and let it change us. We want to stop looking at it.
What I think is the deeper you look at it and learn from it, that's where the transcending comes. You learn the lesson and then you're able to evolve past it because you became someone new. It's like that famous Einstein quote, you can't solve a problem at the same level of mind it was created in.
I'm paraphrasing, but you've probably heard that before. This is why coaching and mentorship and being taught and reading books and expanding your mind is so important because the problems that you have created with your mind cannot be solved with the same level of consciousness that your mind is that created the problem. You have to have a higher level of consciousness to create the solution.
That work alone has changed my life and so that's also a seed of prosperity. So my encouragement for you to wrap this up is to look for the seeds of prosperity that already exist in your life. Whether that means it's a lesson that's showing up and it feels hard, lean in. Or it's like choosing to see things with gratitude, choosing to see things that could be expanded. Maybe it's making a hard decision. Maybe it's choosing something that you've never chosen before.
It might be doing something different or it might be like committing to the long haul and doing boring work. It can look so many different ways depending where you are, your season, and what you want. But I know if you get still and you submit to the process and you allow the lessons to show themselves to you, like you will figure out what's next and you will have the seeds of prosperity to work with and develop them and grow them and expand them for your next harvest.
That is the best game ever. So I hope this was helpful. Thank you for listening. If you feel inspired too, share it with a friend. I'll see you next time.