Let me start by saying this:

You get to define what success looks like for you.

Period.

No guru, no expert, no thought leader, no best friends, no significant others, no moms, no dads, no one can tell you that you are only successful at XYZ arbitrary benchmark that truly doesn’t matter.

You’ve probably subconsciously have adopted some beliefs of what you think success means, whether it be 6 figures, or 4 hour work weeks, or living in Bali, or whatever.

I want to challenge you to take some time to assess where those beliefs maybe came from and if those are what success truly means to you or if it’s just what you think it’s supposed to mean to you.

To help you out a bit, here is what success means to me. For me, success to me looks different every day. What that truly means is that success is the freedom to choose.

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I am overall a successful person because I’ve created a life where I have that choice. There’s no money measurement, no time measurement, no wedding ring, no house bought, no kids, no clients tied to my version of success.

In my definition of success, it means having the choice. That might seem really woo to some of you and deep and weird, but just being honest.

Yours? Yours could look like you make 6 figures. Yours could look like you sleep in until 9 am every day. Yours could look like a fancy car. Or first-class flights. Or time to volunteer at your kid’s school. It’s up to you!

If you’ve ever read my content, you’ve read my disclaimer that everything is based on my experiences.  I have some very distinct thoughts and ideas about how to run your business online. It’s a combination of my experiences, what I’ve read, what I’ve studied, what my mentors and coaches have instilled in me, and most importantly: what I value.

Notice how those are all things that are personal to me and my experience? Yeah. I’m more than happy to give ideas, to share things, to even teach things, to give feedback, etc., but I always always always put the disclaimer out there that these are my thoughts and experiences.

I always want my audience to read what I have to say - take what they need from it - and put their own spin on it.

Now I know a lot of that is easier said than done, but I believe in creative problem solving and I believe that everyone has the ability to figure out their own shit in the way that best serves them.

Maybe my ideas or insights will help you in that process, but it’s not my role or my job to just straight up say ‘do step 1. Do step 2. Do step 3.’ but rather, here are the steps that I took, how do those feel or work for you? Is there anything from that that you can take and adjust for yourself?

You define your success.

You define what it means to be successful.

It is ever-evolving. And it is not up to any marketing guru or thought leader or bullshit con artist.

My point here is that it’s completely 100% up to you whether or not you want to see your days, your weeks, your months, your business as successful. And that you get to set whatever milestones you want and feel proud of whatever thing you’ve done or are doing and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And to build on that more, I want to point out that even if successful to you means having a huge corporation and 500 employees and you’re not even remotely close to that goal yet, that doesn’t mean you AREN’T successful. You don’t have to hold back or wait to feel good.

You don’t have to deprive yourself of the good feels because you are in progress. Set milestones. Set smaller goals. Let success happen more along the way and like we talked about last week, take time to celebrate the wins so that you can keep having more and more wins during your journey!

How are you defining success for your life and business? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Instagram!

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I’ve shared bits and pieces of this idea around before, but it deserves its whole own blog post because this is an important lesson. We’re talking about answering your own questions!

Okay so how this breaks down for-realsies, is acknowledging how powerful and wildly capable you actually are. The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that we aren’t good enough, smart enough, capable enough, worthy enough.

This shows up in a hundred different ways in your day to day life but one of the biggest ways I’ve noticed in our online business space is seeking so much external validation and answers, rather than knowing our own truths.

In my coaching practice, we spend a lot of time on this, I label it under the word confidence. We’re conditioned to think we have to find the answer to everything. I think in large part that is due to our education system, at least here in the US, for teaching us how to research instead of necessarily how to think and problem solve. 

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Actually, interestingly enough Will and I were watching Chef’s Table the other night and a chef on there was talking about this idea in his own world and industry. He was saying how good chefs can cook well, but great chefs invent new ways of cooking.

It was super powerful, and so relevant to my thoughts as of late so it felt like a message I was meant to receive, you know?

You can be a good business owner. You can follow the rules, check the boxes, and probably make some decent money. But I believe there’s a need in all of us, deep down, to be great. Maybe a great business owner, maybe a great friend, maybe a great mother, I can’t answer that for you… but to be great.  

So anyway, we’re taught to research, right? To just Google it. To, hold on, let me look it up real quick. And while that does serve us for some smaller things that maybe you just don’t know - like the definition of ubiquitous or the distance from Charleston to Palm Springs, sure, fine, look that ish up all day.

I see a problem starting when we start to look up ways of existing, things we’re supposed to believe, the right way to do stuff in business… when a client comes to me and asks, well how should I do it? Am I ready? Is this a good idea? Those kinds of questions…

They aren’t for me.

They aren’t for Google. 

They are just for you.

When I first came around to this idea and realization I used a pendulum a lot. If you’re not familiar it’s a tool for communicating with your subconscious. It won’t move on its own, but it will move based on your true intentions. So it’s limited in what it can answer, right?

Generally gotta stick with like Yes/No type questions but what it’s so powerful for is learning to trust that instinct or gut feeling as actually just your intuition. Inner being. Source.

So say you ask, “is launching this right now a good idea?” Well first of all - the question alone speaks volumes.

Clearly some part of you feels it’s not a good idea or you wouldn’t be questioning it at all.

Acknowledge that, first and foremost. Then the pendulum will move to indicate Yes or No — it’s not magic, it’s your subconscious affecting the tiniest muscle movements in your body. You could do this even without a pendulum and just use your body as long as you determine what is a Yes and what is a No.  

Let’s say it moves Yes. Okay — then at a subconscious level you know it is a good idea BUT that doesn’t mean you still don’t have some resistance, or else you wouldn’t have even asked the question, right? So I’d take that as an indicator to still dive in and explore why you are worried about it, why you think it may not be a good time, etc.

Let’s say it moves No. Okay — then at a subconscious level, you don’t think it’s right to launch now. That doesn’t mean don’t launch EVER, it probably means that you know you will self-sabotage, so still, work on why you are scared of launching first. Either way, there’s work to be done or you wouldn’t have asked the question at all, right?

Okay, that was a bit of a tangent about pendulums, but I think it’s a great practice if you are wanting to learn to hear your intuition or source better and recognize it for what it is, versus brushing it off all the time (like we tend to do).

But my point here is that you have the answers inside of you.

You know what to do or not to do. I believe so fully that we all know exactly the next step to take, it’s just a matter of getting out of our own ways and that’s where the inner work comes into play. 

A big issue that I see come up time and time again when it comes to hearing that voice and honoring it is that we struggle to trust ourselves. 

I don’t know of a study on this, but I’d assume that the people we see out there who are very successful in whatever ways have a high amount of trust in their abilities. They trust that they’ll do what they say they’ll do. They trust they are capable enough of doing it well. 

The opposite of that may be where you are struggling right now.

You want 10 clients, or you want a half a million dollars, or you want to launch that program… but at a deep level, you don’t trust you can do it. And therefore you don’t take the actions to make it happen, or you self sabotage. 

So to get back to the point of this post, part of answering questions on your own is hearing the answer and trusting that it is the right answer for you, in that moment. To get there, you’ve gotta build up that trust. An exercise I’ve helped people through is taking time to first find what the real distrust is: 

• Is it your ability to follow through?

• Your ability to make the right decision?

• Your ability to commit wholly?

And when you know what the real issue is — find proof otherwise. So if you’ve come to the conclusion that you actually don’t believe in yourself to follow through, find 10 examples in your life when you did.

It doesn’t have to be ground-breaking, it can be that you followed through on your decision to eat Chipotle for dinner. But start to find evidence that directly opposes that limiting belief. 

When I work with clients 1:1  we also use techniques to release those kinds of limiting beliefs entirely, which is a powerful practice. This actually gets a whole session in my 1:1 program and we work through multiple limiting beliefs that are holding the client back and the results are so incredible.

A belief that I think we all struggle with from time to time and the reason we look outside of ourselves for answers so often is that we assume someone else can do it better than we can. Someone else knows more than we do.

And what that truly does is put the blame or pressure on THEM to be correct, it’s us deflecting and not taking ownership over our lives, right? When we do that we are no longer living at cause and reverting back to old patterns of living at effect.

I want to bring up a pretty WOO topic to talk through my belief about diverting to other people for answers.

Here’s what I believe at this point in my life. We are all souls having a human experience, and the same energy that flows through you flows through me and it also heck, it flows through Beyonce too, y’all.

And all of that energy comes from a source, or the divine, or even God to some people, and it’s the same. It’s the same electric current floating through all of us and by that acceptance alone, no one can answer my questions better than me, because when my answers are everyone else’s answers too.

I know that’s diving a bit deep right now, and it’s okay if that idea doesn’t resonate with you fully. But I do think about this: why would anybody else know what’s best for you?

Nobody else knows you as well as you know yourself, so you are clearly the expert when it comes to you.

I love sharing these ideas and concepts with you because I know first hand just how powerful and life-changing these things are.

What do you think about this idea of answering your own questions?! Let me know over on Instagram!

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Attention all online business owners and entrepreneurs: let’s band together and stop hustling in 2020. I’m serious. Let’s say no to the rise and grind mentality, the 80 hour work weeks, and the “I’ll just bring my laptop onto the couch while we watch this movie, babe” mindset. You in? No? Still a little on the fence and attached to the workaholic identity? It’s okay… keep reading!

People say you have to hustle because they believe they have to hustle, and you know that ol’ misery-loves-company-thing? Yeah, it’s true. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, studied, and learned in this online space is that some of the loudest voices saying you have to hustle and work-work-work are speaking from THEIR experience of hustling way too hard and work-work-work-ing themselves to death. In their paradigm, in their reality, they believe that is the truth because… for them it is. But here are the facts: THAT’S not a fact.

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Hustling 25/8 to run your business gets you…

Nowhere fast. 

Nowhere long-term.

And nowhere good, healthy, exciting, fun, sustainable, inspirational…. You catch my drift?

It gets you on the burnt out, overwhelmed, dreading work train which makes stops very often at procastination-station, throw-in-the-towel-city, and hate-my-business-land. 

But don’t take MY word for it. Literally Google burnout, adrenal fatigue, or exhaustion.

These things are real, and you are really going to have a hard time building that incredible empire, impacting people, and changing the world if you actually physically cannot get off the couch because the sense of impending doom hovering over you.

So yeah, real anti-hustle over here.

What I’ve noticed: a lot of people that get caught up in hustling through their business (and their lives) have…

1. No idea what they are actually doing. They’ve ended up half-assing a lot of strategies that they don’t fully understand (because they are mimicking what they see others doing, but don’t know the behind-the-scenes).

2. A lack of belief in their abilities to actually create their dream life or business. They are band-aiding over their fear and mindset issues with WORK-WORK-WORK messages that might get a quick win here or there but won’t last.

3. A dependency on sheer willpower, grit (whatever the f* that is), and caffeine (or essential oils, whatever) that has completely clouded out WHY they actually started their business in the first place and has just become an almost-drug-like-addiction to the hustle. 

It’s honestly super sad to think about, because I think we all have incredible messages to get out there, to share, to help people, to make a positive impact… yet that cannot happen from a place of unhealthy hustle. It’s sad, dangerous, and straight up poisonous to think that all that matters is how hard you work. The truth of that is someone will always work harder than you — someone has less kids, more time, more money, a more supportive spouse, etc. than you — so if that’s all that matters… well, honestly, you’re f*cked. 

So now that you might feel a bit personally attacked (I’m sorry, it’s tough love!) let's talk about an alternative way to approach this thing called being a business owner. 

It’s called alignment, and y’all, it’s really nice. It’s lets you take breaks, rest, and be inspired. It lets you create something that matters, that you are proud of, and that will actually last you the rest of your working-life (if you want that). It lets you watch TV at night with your partner with no guilt, and wake up and like… enjoy your morning (what the what?!). 

Alignment allows you to take deliberate and inspired action that actually moves the needle in your business. It allows you to stop comparing yourself (and your work ethic, or ability to ‘power-through’) to others. It allows you to see big, overwhelming projects as a set of smaller, intentional steps that are so, so, so doable. It allows you to BE the version of yourself that runs the sustainable, healthy, happy business you so desire. It’s the magical solution you’ve been hunting for on all those nights you couldn’t sleep because you drank too many cups of coffee and your brain is racing.

So here’s the thing that pisses people off about this conversation: they’ll cry out — YOU CAN’T JUST MEDITATE YOUR WAY TO A PROFITABLE BUSINESS.

Okay, so true. First of all, I didn’t say that. Second of all, you should try meditating with all that anger and yelling (sheesh!)

Alignment brings about inspired or aligned action. There’s still action. There’s still the ACT of doing things. You still gotta put something up for sale, work with clients, sell a product, whatever. But it doesn’t have to be ridden with this negative, anxious, overwhelming energy that makes you hate your business. It can feel good. Fun, even!

Deep down, you know what I am saying is true. It’s the truest truth there is: we overcomplicate things, make things way harder than they have to be, and generally like to run on this adrenaline-rush-cortisol-overload mixture because… well, because it’s all we really know. But there is another way, I promise you that.

If you’re ready to explore that other way, here are some things for you to reflect on:

First: What are you doing in your business right now that you absolutely hate and dread doing and like optionally choose to fold laundry or scoop the catbox instead of doing? Do you have to be doing that? Who said you had to do it? Is that 100% true?

Second: What about your business do you love doing? What gets pushed to the top of the to-do list because you are excited about it? How can you do more of that or explore more opportunities like that

Disclaimer, for the haters: Yes, you still have to do taxes and boring ish like that. I’m not saying to tell the IRS that it wasn’t in alignment for you. But, if it’s a really big issue for you… that should be on the top of your outsource list! (Check out Bench.co* — best decision I ever made!)

Third: What do you think will happen if you actually stopped hustling and made an effort to focus on alignment? What’s the worst case scenario? What’s the best? Explore your limiting beliefs here to see what you are actually resisting (because logically you can accept that alignment > hustle, but unconsciously you are probably still resisting it. We tend not to like change. That’s why I coach people through these concepts!)

And if you’re looking to really start changing your beliefs and thoughts around this idea, I have a few of my own personal mantras that you could use (or adapt, whatever):

1. The Rest Is The Work

2. It Is Safe For Me To Say No

3. How Can I Allow This To Be More Fun?

4. This Gets To be Easy

Obviously feel free to come up with your own, but “having to hustle” is a belief that I want to encourage everyone to rewrite. Your business depends on it!

Are you ready to give up the hustle-mentality? Share with me in a comment or on Instagram what this brings up for you!

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In the wild, wild web there are two contrasting messages that get a lot of attention. The first is the guru telling you that by following their steps, “business will be easy.” The second is an attempt to motivate you through a bit of negativity, that says “it’s not easy, but it’s worth it.”

Then there’s me, that put a lot of eggs into the “effortless” word basket and truly I feel nervous from time to time that this idea will get misconstrued or taken in a way that ultimately isn’t helpful or serving.

Thus, this blog post was born.

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Okay, here’s the tea: I think everything is a choice and a belief and that we are shaping our reality constantly. Our perceptions of events as “hard” or “easy” is what makes something actually hard or easy. I think it’s hard to put on pants and DRIVE to Chipotle, Will thinks it’s easy. Will think it’s HARD to have a stranger come to your front door after being alone with your food for an hour, and I think it’s easy. It’s a perception. 

Now, disclaimer: YES, there are really big circumstances like illness, mental health, etc. that are important to remember and include into this conversation but I’m zooming WAY out here and saying that I ultimately think our perceptions are what dictates how hard or easy something is. And I’m not saying one perception is wrong or right or good or bad. I just want to say that it IS a perception that you can control.

A quick example to that that’s impacted my entire life: I never got sick as a kid. It just wasn’t… a thing. It’s not that I didn’t get colds here and there or whatever, but my mom was always operating under the perception that this wasn’t going to be a big thing, right? It’s just a small cold, it will pass quickly, and I would be fine. And I was. Always. I literally can’t tell you a single time I was super sick growing up. 

As an adult, the first time that Will got sick when we started living together, he was like *out*. Like, laying on the couch, very needy, etc. And I was like “uhm. What is this?” because in MY reality colds were not a big deal. They didn’t require stopping everything to BE sick. Now you could make a lot of arguments that my attitude was right or wrong or good or bad, but none of those matter, truly. It just is an example of MY perception of a cold versus HIS. And neither of us truly decided those. They were just adopted from our parents (who probably adopted it from their parents, and so on).

But I digress. Anyway, here’s a business-y example. Let’s say for the sake of an argument we see anything “techy” as hard. So you decide to learn a new email marketing software and you’re like “welp, techy shit is hard!” before you even dive in. Well, I operate under the pretense that you will create a reality in which learning that new software IS hard.

I don’t mean you’ll suddenly, like, “get dumb” or something. I mean you’ll put up all this resistance. You’ll put it off until it’s crunch time and you’re in a panic and you’ve already built it up to be this big THING in your head and it’ll be a frustrating experience. But that came from a series of decisions, right? You decided it was going to be hard, so you decided to put it off until the last second, and then you decided to feel angry the whole time, and so on.

And all of this is OKAY. There’s not a right or wrong, it just IS. You’re not flawed, or imperfect, or wrong for any of this. It’s just a thing that happened and now it’s data and information.

Now in another reality you could’ve also decided this would be easy and take about 30 minutes to set up so you’ll just crank through it real quick right now. You might even decide to instead outsource it, or watch a video about it, or something to make the whole thing flow easier. There might end up still being bumps (because, hey, maybe tech really isn’t your thing), but it won’t derail you. And that’s because you made a decision that it would be fine and simple. The thing is: many of us… MOST of us never make that decision.

Our default programming at this point is that “things are hard” (like, as humanity) and so when we don’t make a choice for them to be easy, or effortless, or fun, or exciting…. It defaults back to being hard. This comes from generations on generations of believing “you gotta work hard.” This shit runs deep. But you can choose differently.

Now, at first, when we start to dabble in this idea of letting things BE easy and effortless… it might not be so automatic. We haven’t adjusted the deeper programming. At a certain level, deep down, we don’t believe it’s going to truly work and we are looking to prove the idea WRONG and that it is in fact hard. Sounds crazy, right?! Why would we DO that?! Well… think about it this way:

Your brain is like a freaking… it’s the jungle. And for your entire life (and past lives or generations if you believe that) there’s been this one path hacked through the jungle. The path of hard. So like… it kinda sucks because it’s still the jungle and there’s a lot of bugs and shit, but it’s a path. That you can navigate. And survive on (mostly). It’s not GREAT, but you’re alive, so you stick to it.

But then you start to recognize other paths. And you notice one that is like… “hey I’m alternative path #2 — path of ease and fun. You can’t really tell right now but it’ll be WAY better. There’s no bugs. There’s a tour guide. We have snacks.”

But like… it’s not totally carved yet. It’s possible, but right now, standing there looking at the two paths… well the shittier path actually looks easier because at least it’s been traveled before. So you keep to that path because you can’t really like… deal with carving the other one right now. Then you repeat that forever and nothing ever changes or improves, the end.

(Note: This is one of the issues with this whole “just be positive” mantra because just being positive is like putting a bandaid on a stab wound. You have to heal all that other deeper ish before you can “just be positive.” AKA you can’t just *CHOOSE THE OTHER PATH* randomly one day without doing any sort of inner work, because, spoiler alert: we’re actually super resistant to change.)

(While we’re on parenthetical notes, I’ll also mention this: the people who say “business can be easy” but don’t actually do anything to help you change your views on easy versus hard — aka business can be easy just follow my 3 step plan to being a millionaire in 2 weeks — are, as my grandma says, full of bean soup and this conversation is NOT that.) 

EHN-KNEE-WAY… I’m talking about rewiring your entire subconscious programming. I’m asking you to evolve a bit here, to raise your consciousness. And a lot of people (most people) will say that’s too hard and stay on the well-worn-but-buggy-and-scary-path. They’ll DECIDE to do that. They won’t DECIDE to take the significantly better path that is way more fun and exciting, but just takes a bit of carving. 

Because they DECIDE the carving is too hard.

BUT THAT IS ALSO A DECISION.

Do you see what’s happening here!? It’s ALL A DECISION.

Yes — changing years and years of beliefs is not necessarily as easy as snapping your fingers if you just sit down one day and decide to do it. I’ll give you that. It requires some inner-work. But the thought that the inner-work will be too hard, or take too long (I legit don’t get that because wtf is too long compared to living the rest of your life barely scraping by…?)... that’s some BS decision making skills.

In my experience: doing the work starts yielding results immediately. Doing the work is fun and interesting and eye-opening. Doing the work leads to results you can only barely dream about right now. OH AND ALSO, doing the work CAN be simple…

NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) allows it to be simple. Transformations, rewiring, rewriting old beliefs… done within minutes. It’s incredible. And it’s easy. If you LET it be easy. 

There are a loooot of things I love about my coaching and NLP in particular, but the one main thing is that it eliminates right or wrong or good or bad. It instead offers OPTIONS. What I get to do as a coach is to help you to see those options when right now you are operating in a world that you think is fact-fact-fact-fact. Want to hear something mind-blowing? There aren’t a ton of facts in your reality. Here’s an example: you might think, “fact: sky is blue.”

But is it? What color is it at night? Or when it’s overcast? Furthermore what is blue, even? How do you know if you understand blue the same that I do? And I get that that is going really far down a rabbit hole, but it’s just to show you that the facts you are operating under actually don’t exist. It’s not a fact that business is hard, it’s not a fact that making money is hard, it’s not a fact that you’re going to be broke for 5 years before you turn a profit. None of those are facts. You can prove them wrong easily. It’s not 100% true 100% of the time.

And, my gooooodness, I find that SO FLIPPING exciting. Because that means you can abandon ALL of these ideas that things are hard. If business was truly SO hard, we would all just be in a competition to see who could work the hardest. And guess what? Someone can always work harder than you, so you might as well give up now. Do you want to operate like that? I sure as hell don’t.

I’ll wrap this up by saying this: if you want to disagree and believe that business is hard, that’s totally your choice. It’s not my job to force change onto you. But I want to extend an invitation to you to explore if and how that idea is serving you (or not serving you). Decide if that is a choice that truly helps you and improves your life. If it is serving you, cool. Great! If it’s not… then things are about to change for you and open up in ways you never expected!

Share with me in a comment or on Instagram what these ideas open up for you! It's a mindblowing and exciting way to live your life and run your business, right?!

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