What's up, you guys? Welcome back to the podcast. If you are new, a special welcome to you. Thanks for hanging out with me. It's crazy, I was thinking about this. I've been podcasting for years and I should look at the date of when I started, but my process is so interesting. I actually wanted to talk a little bit about it before we jump into the garden episode because I think it might be interesting.
A lot of my clients also have podcasts and like anything you create, especially if it's something that you've never created before, like I started with a lot of resistance. I remember getting really excited about the idea of a podcast and then sitting on the idea and not doing anything with it. I can't remember who I was listening to, it was like, you're going to wish you started today.
And it wasn't even about podcasting, it was about more of like motivation and mindset and stuff. Like in five years, you're going to wish you started earlier. And I remember just being like, that was exactly what I needed to hear.
And for me, I made it least effort. Like the law of least effort is something that I live in my business, which basically means I choose the path that feels easiest for me to deliver that still gets results. So like today, I am sitting at my desk. I was pondering for a few minutes about what I wanted to talk about and I just hit record. I do not spend exorbitant amount of time preparing for this podcast. I don't.
Could I? Possibly. But this is what's interesting. I do what I do. I coach, I mentor, I train, I teach, I speak. And the podcast is part of that. But I do not have a podcasting business, I run a coaching business. And so I do not let my podcast take a lot of time. I use it to nurture my relationships with you, whoever you're listening to this, with potential clients, with clients, with people in my community, with people who just are here for the podcast. And that's totally fine.
But it's not the central part of my business. And so I do not let myself fill my time spinning out, planning episodes, worrying about it. I just hit record and go. And I send it to Allyse, my amazing editor, and she gets it all ready to roll. But why am I sharing this? Because all of you have different areas in your business where you are making it harder than it needs to be. And instead of choosing the law of least effort, you allow your brain to spin.
And I've been there. So this isn't coming from a place of judgment. It's just I want to help you.
I want to help you transcend wherever you're feeling stuck in a rut, especially if it's something that you are creating. There's a great book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He talks about resistance, and I feel a little bit of resistance every time I hit record.
But I have learned and trained myself to move beyond it so that I can create this weekly episode for you. And I think it's important that we are aware of the mental space that things are taking up versus the reward. If I had a top 10 podcast and I made money from my podcast, I don't. I don't do sponsorships, as you know. I don't run ads. I don't get paid to do this.
I do this because, one, podcasts changed my life. Podcasts absolutely changed my life. Before I started making money, before I started turning my financial situation around, before I found my calling as a co, and writer, and speaker, and all these things, I listened to podcasts to help me change my own life.
So it is very important to me to give back in this way. I also know the podcast is one of those leading indicators in my business that people often listen to my podcast for a while before they either join the matrix or work with me one-on-one or come to one of my other programs. We have a relationship, and I believe that.
In fact, I ran an abundance workshop this past week, and it was so fun. I had so much fun meeting people in person. If you were there, thanks for coming. It was so much fun. We did it in person in Utah County, and I would meet people, and they would tell me, I've been listening to your podcast. I love your podcast. It was just a buoying up of my belief in podcasting and making connections and building relationships. But like I said, this isn't how I make money. I make money coaching and doing my work, not talking about my work necessarily.
But either way, coming back to my process, I don't have notes today. Sometimes I do. I sometimes jot them down, but I wanted to just experiment with what would come out. And it's interesting that this is what was coming out was like this law of least effort and making it easier, especially depending on the word.
There might be a future day where I spend more time preparing for a podcast and researching and things like that. I'm not saying I'm not against it, but relative to the other things that I do in my business, I don't want my podcast to be inflated with too much time or pressure or worry because it's not useful to me and my podcast, the role that it plays in my business, it might not be important enough to spend that much time preparing and planning and tweaking and all these things.
So I say that to you so that you can kind of take that into your own business and your own creative process. Like, where are you spending an exorbitant amount of time on things that actually don't give you the payoff that it could? I think Instagram is another place like this where it's like, if you spend hours trying to make a reel perfect and the reel is 15 seconds, it may or may not go viral if viral is your game.
But especially if you're like doing the word of mouth business or you're in the beginning stages, virality is not all it's cracked up to be. So I think doing it with the awareness like, is this serving what I ultimately want? And can I make it easier on myself so that it's sustainable? And that's been my whole business. So I want to just kind of say that to start off, because today we're going to talk about is creating.
But the metaphor that has been so powerful for me my whole business career, but like, especially now, because like I said, I'm calling this episode The Garden, I actually have a garden. And so the metaphor is like coming to life for me in ways that are very powerful. And in full disclosure, my garden is not at the end result. And so I'm sure I'll have like the garden part two. This is the garden part one, garden part two coming later this summer.
So garden part one. Wesley and I, my husband decided to plant a garden in our backyard for the fun of it. And it was so cute. My girls have really enjoyed it. We made our garden boxes ready. We bought the seeds, bought the soil, like Wesley got the sprinklers all ready to go so that they would turn on automatically. It's been very fun. And it was also a lot of work, lots of sweat, lots of planning and every day, actually, I'll get into that later.
But like to just get the garden ready was a lot of work. You can see how this translates to business, obviously. I've talked about this metaphor powerfully before, but I think it has a whole new meaning for me as I'm actually growing a garden. All this prep, right? I go to Walmart, I pick up like 12 bags of soil, we like break the open, we get them in the boxes. Wesley's tweaking the sprinklers so that they get the right amount of water. We plant the seeds.
We plant corn and squash and watermelon and cantaloupe and green beans and cucumbers. We had so much fun planting these seeds and we like read about it and studied it. A few days later, like the first seeds popped up out of the ground. And what's interesting is I went looking for these seeds. I was like, are they growing? Are they growing? Are they growing? And I'd go out every morning and like look to see signs that they're growing because we were worried one of the things that we had talked about was what if we plant this garden and nothing happens?
And I was like, it's still worth it. And that's just my mentality and my attitude about trying things. I'm very grateful that it comes pretty naturally to me to just try things. I'm not worried about failure, but like it came out so quick that I was like, oh, I say we go all in on this garden. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But like, let's do it. I have that same mentality in business. I understand I'm speaking from a place of privilege.
I was talking to Wesley about this. We were out on our porch just chatting, which we like to do in the mornings. On Sunday morning, we were just chatting. And I was like, I'm just so grateful that you have a job so that I could play in my business, so that I can create and try things without the pressure of like providing for our house.
I recognize that that is a privilege. And it just happens to be that many of the people who listen are in similar situations. So we don't have to have businesses. We don't have to make our businesses work to put food on the table or to pay the rent or the mortgage or whatever. And so it's about desire and expansion. The garden was the same way.
I don't need a garden. I can go to my grocery store and buy corn and buy squash and pick cucumbers that'll probably be way better and taste better. And it's honestly cheaper when all the things are said and done. But it's fun to have the garden. It's an experience. When you think about your business this way.
Now, if you are listening to this and you are an entrepreneur that like that is how you pay the bills, this may or may not resonate. I will say I'm in a position where like we use our income to go on trips and to buy the car that we want and things like that. We've merged my income to produce a lifestyle that we want.
But in the beginning, we were just trying to make ends meet. But my husband always had a job to provide the basic necessities of life. So I had the privilege and still do to play, to take risks, to try things without the pressure of like my children might not eat. I wanted to say that because I understand that I am very blessed to be able to say that. I don't take it for granted. So back to the garden.
We prepare for the garden. We planted. I'm just seeing all these parallels to business. This is like you getting the LLC and getting the bank account and like naming it, getting a logo, like all these preparations go into it. And then you start planting seeds and the seeds are like you're starting to make offers. You're starting to build relationships. You're starting to talk about what you do and people are interested.
So I go looking for these seeds, wondering when are they going to pop up? When are we going to start to see the evidence that it's working? Because we didn't know if it was going to work. The first time that I saw like little corn shoots out of the ground and like little green beans, I was stoked. Every day I started going out there looking for the signs of growth and also weeding. You can see where I'm going with this for business.
So I'm going out there multiple times a day. To be fully honest, I go out there like three or four times a day to weed and to like look at the plant, which is so funny. I like it. It's peaceful. It's also very abundant. I feel spaciousness when I do it. And so the fruit is good. The results of my life because of the garden are good. But I'm starting to see these parallels in business, like where you do all the prep work and you start planting seeds. And then we go out to see if it's working and we see signs of life.
But the thing that I think is fascinating is there is an art to this. As an example, the other day I was pulling out weeds that were kind of growing really close to the crops. So like really close to the corn, really close to the green beans. And I had to tenderly pick the weed out without it disturbing the soil that the crop was growing from. And I was like, this is… not like surgical. I don't think it's anywhere close to like what a brain surgeon does.
But it wasn't precise. I had to get the weed very intentionally without disturbing the crop. And I was like, this is thought work in business. We are constantly tending to the thoughts or the crop that we want with activity, with intention, with thought work. And we are weeding out the things that we don't want. There's a great book on this that I highly recommend you read. It's called As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. And he talks about your mind like the garden, where we have to weed and we have to fertilize the thoughts that we do want. Twofold, we are tending to the things we do want, water, sunlight, protection.
We're like taking care of them, protecting them from animals, protecting them from too much water, protecting them from too much sunlight. And then we are also weeding out the things that don't belong. So we are adding and subtracting to grow our garden. And business is the same. We are adding and subtracting for the ultimate success of our garden. I think about that in my own business.
My garden has grown. Depending on where you're at in life, like your garden might be small, that might be what you want, and you might be wanting to grow a bigger one. When I got started, my business garden was teeny tiny. I would go out, I had like two plants, and I would nurture them and water them and go back. And now I have a decently sized garden of business where I have one-on-one clients, I have group coaching clients, I have this podcast, I have a social media presence, I have events and masterclasses and automations and email marketing, all these complex systems that make my business work. That's not how it started, but it happened line upon line, precept upon precept.
I grew my capacity as a business gardener by trial and error, by working the things, by reading about business. I just can't help but see the parallels because as I'm gardening, like I see how much diligence is required to grow a garden well, so that you know that you can trust that it's working. So one of the examples that I talked about before that I want to bring up, and I think I talked about the gardener archetypes, this is an old episode, but when I saw the green beans growing out, like the little seedling popping through the grass, it was such like a, hey, moment, I got so excited.
But in business, this is what I see entrepreneurs doing. They plant seeds, and because there's not a timeline that we can actually predict success, entrepreneurs want to dig up the seed to see if it's working. It's like planting the green beans and then like every day you go out and like dig up and look at the seed and see if it's working, and then you cover it again.
It's like that will not grow crop like you want it to, and I think business is the same. It's an energetic thing though for us, where we plant seeds. If you go out every day and dig it up, and what it sounds like is like, I don't know if it's working. People don't want what I have. People don't care about my Instagram. My posts aren't getting engagement. Why isn't this working? I don't know if I'm cut out for this.
That's the internal dialogue that represents the digging up of the seeds. It also looks like double checking your phone, even though you don't want to when your kids are going to bed, or like you're on vacation and you're like, I'm going to take the week off, but you are sneakily checking Voxer, checking Instagram, checking email, seeing if it's working. That is the energetic equivalent of digging up seeds. One of the things that I teach my clients is creative faith.
Creative faith is choosing thoughts and beliefs on purpose that are creative in nature. So I'm going to give you an example. Let's say I send a client an invoice. We're going to work together.
I'm so excited. And I send it over. I send my little message. It would be easy for me to double check my email over and over and over again to see if she paid or to see if she had questions, but I use creative faith. So I send the invoice and I almost say in my mind, we're going to have so much fun working together. I'm so excited to get started.
And I stop myself from double checking, from obsessing, from worrying. It's moment by moment. And this is like the weeding process. While I'm waiting for the seeds to grow, I am also weeding out the thoughts that I don't want. So if I notice my brain saying something like, maybe you should check in with her, I weed that thought out of my brain. I'm like, no, I trust our work together. I know she saw my email. I'm going to let it go.
We could do this with any number of examples in business, whether that's like content, whether that's clients ghosting you, invoices not being paid, or like you're in a launch. Like there's so many different places that this can look, but the creative faith piece is required at every level. Like the garden. I trust that my garden with the divine intelligence that is placed in seeds that I did not place there, that God placed there.
It was so amazing to me. This just shows you how city girl I am. I'm like looking at these seeds telling Wesley, I'm like, these are going to grow into plants. And I know it sounds so silly, but like it's been a while since I've done this kind of like dirt labor. And so it felt like a miracle to me to like see the seeds, put them in the earth and now they're growing. That's not me.
That's divine intelligence. That is God's plan working to think that we don't also have those principles is silly. Of course we live by those principles to the problem with business. Unlike I can look up the gestation of like a corn plant, how many days it takes to pop through the dirt, how many days it takes to grow to its full height, how many days it takes to produce the crop. I can look that up on Google. But what I can't look up on Google is if I'm looking at an entrepreneur who started a business three months ago and has had one paying client for a hundred dollars, like how long it's going to take her to make a 100K. I cannot look that up on Google.
And this is why people work with me. Not because I'm like a fortune teller or anything, but because I know how to take your ideas and help you choose creative faith with aligned action. I help you weed out the thoughts that are not serving you and to nurture the thoughts that are serving you.
I help you believe when you can't believe. I'm with you through the hard times and we're taking inspired action and we're evaluating. Is it working? Is it not? What can I do differently? We're combining powerful thought work with business strategies that work so that you grow your business garden.
Like I said, it's not that I have this like timetable in my mind that like, oh, this person started their business three months ago. So according to my algorithm, you will have a six figure business in 17 months. It's not like that. I wish it was. A lot of people try to make it seem like that's how it is, but it's not. Some of my favorite examples of entrepreneurs are people that took like decades to figure their stuff out.
I loved Shoe Dog, the book about Nike's founder and how grassroots he had to go to make Nike work and how many times he almost lost the company and how many times he had to brainstorm. Great book because I think it normalizes failure and normalizes looking like it's not working or the seeds don't grow or they get drowned out by water. Like all these examples in business that happen not because you're bad, not because you're not cut out for it, but because you are becoming the gardener of your business through trial and error and there is no timeline.
And so we have to have faith through the ups and the downs, through the things that we can see and the things that we can't see. This is where I love beliefs like clients come to me from places known and unknown because it helped me open to possibilities I could not see. A lot of you are looking at the seed and only looking at the seed right now as it is. Not for what it could be, not for what it will be in five years.
And so this pit of despair happens when we've been planting seeds and gardening in business that looks like maybe you've been posting on social media and making offers and trying things and taking courses and investing in coaching and buying programs and listening to podcasts like this and you're trying so hard to make something happen and it's not working.
What I would tell you is it will work. I cannot tell you when, but you will learn the skill sets, the mindsets, the tactics, the strategies to make it work. You just can't quit. And that's where the phrase, if you're new to my world, I've been saying this for years where it's like, I'm here until it works. That level of commitment. And it's something that me and my client, Jillian, talked about is unconditional commitment.
A few episodes back, she did an amazing job teaching the business sweet spot. I love her words, unconditional commitment. The way that I like to teach it is like, who are you going to be regardless of circumstances? I have learned to develop my thoughts on purpose and my activities on purpose despite circumstances.
So this is what's interesting. There are always seasons in business, no matter what level you're at where it's like, holy crap, what am I going to do here? I don't know what to do. This feels hard.
Why isn't this working? I didn't expect that. This is new. Oh, I actually don't have the capacity for the season that I'm in.
I need to grow myself. I need to expand my mind or I need to develop skills or I need to hire someone or I need to get help. I need coaching or I need mentorship. I need a VA. I need a social media manager. Like whatever it is, we have to expand our capacity. The expanded capacity comes in hardship and that's the hard truth that I wish more people knew going into entrepreneurship. Like if everyone could be an entrepreneur, everyone would be, but entrepreneurship is freaking hard and it weeds us out.
There is a refining process that you either really commit and figure it out or you quit. And I've seen this happen. I've seen friends, I've seen colleagues get to a pit of despair and they quit. Sad to me because it's like if they just kept going, they would have developed the skillset, the grit, the expansive mindset, the skills, the strategies, the tactics, the ideas, the possibilities, the opportunities. They would have developed those by staying with it. You don't develop them when you quit. You develop with them when you have commitment and commitment is hard to teach. I wish I could teach it better.
It's an internal game though. This is why I like having people in my corner who see me bigger than I am. Well, not that they see me bigger than I am. That's not the right way to say it. They see my potential and they believe in it. And the people who don't, I don't take business advice from.
That's a hard reality to have to face sometimes where it's like, are you putting people in your corner who believe bigger than you? That you have a potential that you are working on achieving every day where you're making it possible and you're making it real every day and they're not going to settle with you. They're not going to say, you know, yeah, I know it's hard. You should probably just do something different.
I think it's tempting to think that and not even saying it's bad to do that. I don't think entrepreneurship is for everyone, but for the people who feel called to it, I think it's hard to just turn your brain off that way. It's like, no, like this is where I'm supposed to be. I know I have that feeling where it's like this is where I'm supposed to be. I remember the first time I found out all about the life coaching industry and I'm like, where has this been all my life?
Because I had studied psychology. I had gone to college. I had worked at a residential treatment center. I always felt like I wanted to help people, but I didn't know that this world existed. And so I'm so grateful that the seeds had been planted in my heart from the time that I was young. Wanting to help people, wanting to speak, wanting to be an author, wanting to at the time do therapy, the desire to talk to people in the way that I talk to people, their life changes. What a freaking gift.
But I had to increase my capacity to do this. And I still am, right? There's still things that I want to achieve. I recognize that I am very young in this game. So I think really big. And my capacity isn't there, or else I would have the things that I want in the future right now, but I don't have it. And that's the game of expansion is growing our capacity through, like I said, beliefs, skill sets, strategies, tactics, being, commitment. All those things have to expand with us. The person that I am when I started my business is not the person I am today.
And I guarantee the person that you are is not the person that you will be as you start to achieve the things that feel impossible right now. So one of my favorite things is making something that feels impossible into possible, into predictable, and then into reality for people. One of my favorite things in life is like hearing a client share a dream, share a vision, share an idea, and then us creating it in our sessions first with our words and beliefs.
And then they go out and do the work to make it real with their actions. One day they wake up and they have the things. What's interesting is progress feels slow if you're always looking at the future. And this concept I got from Dan Sullivan, The Gap and the Gain, it's like, you have to watch where you used to be. One of the things to go back to the garden metaphor, if I look at my garden, cause my garden's not big right now. It's growing for sure, but it’s got a long way.
There's like no signs of fruit or like there's no signs of crop, right? Like it's just like the green shoots and they're a little bit big, but they're not big enough to like actually produce green beans or produce watermelon. If I keep comparing my garden to what it will be, I will be like, it is not growing fast enough. But if I compare my garden to where it was, which was literally nothing, there was dirt and there was seeds. It has gone through exponential transformation.
And so have you. But it only feels that way if you compare yourself to where you used to be, not to where you could be. And this is the delicate balance that we have as entrepreneurs is holding our future as a possibility, knowing what we are capable of, knowing the dreams and the seeds that God planted in our hearts could come true.
Catching glimpses. I don't know if you're like me. I like to think I'm visionary and I don't mean that in a weird way. I mean visionaries. And like I see things that haven't happened yet for myself and for others. Like I said, I don't mean that in like this prophetic way, but I do catch glimpses of myself, whether that's like in my imagination or just concepts that come to me for me and for other people where it hasn't happened yet.
There's this like game of future self that we're always playing, but there's also this game of like reflection and being proud of yourself and acknowledging all the growth. And what's interesting is this is abundance. When we think abundantly, we look back to our past and we're like, look at how far I've come. And it gives us the assurance and the faith and the trust and the expansive process to go forward and create what's next.
I think where entrepreneurs get it wrong or they bring out is they're always looking at the future and they never feel good enough. They never feel like they're measuring up. They always feel like there's something to do, which is true. There's always something to do. There's always something to become. There's always something to learn, which is true.
And that's what is so compelling about that is yes, there's always something to learn and always something you could do. But at a certain point you have to declare what you've done as enough so that you can build from abundance. This concept changed my life. Building to abundance.
We're not waiting to feel abundant until we reach our checklists. We're not waiting to feel abundant until we hit the milestones, whether milestones that we set for ourselves or industry milestones. Hopefully there's milestones that are meaningful to you. That's what I teach my clients. And in fact, if you're in the matrix, you know we've been doing meaningful milestone work where it's like, but what do you want? What would be meaningful to you?
And then trusting yourself to go after it and not judging yourself against other people, but like really creating what you want playing a single player game in a multiplayer environment. Because I think it's so easy to judge ourselves against our potential, which can be useful. This is what drives us to excellence.
So, some of my perfectionist clients who are always judging themselves what they know they're capable of. I'm like, we don't want to get rid of that. That drives us to excellence. That drives us to being great and discipline and focus and growth and learning and coachability and all these things. It's a great thing to have. It just can't be the only thing that you have.
You also have to reflect in gratitude and allow yourself to be proud of yourself and allow yourself to see the growth and the development and wins that you've had along the way. Because one without the other, on the one side, if you're always judging yourself against the future, you never feel good enough. You're constantly working, you're burning out.
Maybe you're comparing yourself. That's where we like double check our Instagram before we go to bed. And we're like checking our email even though we don't want to. And we're always like obsessing over things that may or may not be helpful, but it's this feeling of like urgency to create things. On the other side, if you're always reflecting on the past, you don't have a creative vision where you're just like thinking about the good old days and you're like reflective, you may not be producing what you want to produce.
And so there's this happy medium in the middle. This is what I like to call building from abundance where we're grateful for all the lessons. We are proud of ourselves for staying in the game when it was hard. We're proud of ourselves for the development, the lesson, the coaching, the mentorship, the programs, the content that we've consumed, the action that we've taken and the results that we've gotten so that we can move forward.
We're grateful for all the past that brought us here. And we use that to buoy up our belief, to take action from abundance. So it's coming from a place of like, I believe it's working. I believe it gets better and better. I believe new people are finding me every day. I believe my capacity is expanding in the form of like business development, personal development, leadership, financial growth, money stewardship.
All the things are expanding on a day to day basis. That's the ratio that I like, which is coming from abundance, growing into what could be, but not like losing sight of where I've been because that's how we are grounded in our goodness. We're grounded in like you are good and you are doing your best and that is enough.
You will keep growing your capacity for more. That's why you don't have what your future self has right now. Your capacity isn't there. That's okay. That's not a judgment. That's time to get curious and then go to work expanding your capacity and capabilities. And I think this is the game that I love, which is like infinite expansion. I don't think it ever ends, which is so fun, but it's not a problem to be solved. It's an opportunity we get to choose.
I'm not trying to solve the problem of expansion. That doesn't make sense. I am choosing expansion because I like it, because I like growth, because I like seeing what I'm capable of. Not because I'm broken or there's something to fix, but it's like my own evolution is what I'm committed to. Not because there's a problem here, because I want to see where this takes me. I want to see my capacity and capabilities expand.
What are the big things I can believe and bring into my reality and help other people do the same thing? That's the game that I love. That's what I've been learning from the garden and I love it. So I will come back with a part two when my garden is fully grown and we're starting to like eat the food maybe that we produce. But those are my thoughts today. I hope it serves you.
If it did, please share with a friend and I will see you soon. Bye.
