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To answer your question, “How do you navigate that?” You have to put integrity back in. That means you have to put agreements back in, you have to put clear communication with clear promises back in, and you have to honor those promises. And when they don't work out, you have to honor the consequences of those promises, and you have to communicate with leadership and integrity.
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The Ownership Game with Gary Montalvo. What would it take to get into the driver's seat of your life and leave your mark? The Ownership Game starts now. So for today's podcast, I thought that we would do something a little bit different.
My vision for The Ownership Game has always been that this is a co -creative process. That it's not just me sitting up here and sharing my thoughts and ideas, but that we're actually creating this journey together with your feedback, with your interactions. And together we form something that is not only special and interesting, but that it has an impact in the world. It makes a difference in the lives of others. I hope that I've been doing that. I'm really proud of what I've created over the last few months. We're approaching the 20th episode.
And a lot of podcasts don't make it past the 10th episode. Most don't. I read that statistic somewhere and it really, you know, surprised me. But it makes sense because this is a lot of work. I mean, a lot of work doing this week, week after week after week, especially when you're trying to be thoughtful and really considerate about the choices that you're making so that you're not just doing something generic or something that it's been done before.
So anyway, I hope that, you know, I'm proud of what I've done. It's been a lot of work. I've been learning a lot. And now I think it's time to start playing around with it a little bit and see what comes out of it. So for today, today's episode, I thought that we would do a mailbag. So I'm going completely unscripted here. I have no idea what I'm gonna say. So it puts a little bit more pressure on me to be unprepared, but I think it would be interesting to kind of explore.
What are some of the things that are in your mind and what are some of the things that you want to hear me talk about? So let's see what happens.
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Okay, our first question comes from Destiny. I often find that we struggle to stay consistent. How do you follow the plan and not your mood? Okay, great question. Okay, so here's the thing. I think that we struggle with this for a couple of different reasons. Number one is that we keep thinking that we're gonna arrive to some platform, some area of our lives where we no longer will have to struggle or worry about this.
I think you said something very important. You said, I think that we all struggle with this. And you're right, we all struggle with this. But mostly how we relate to it is like it's a you problem. Like it's something wrong with you, something wrong with us that this happens. When really it's a human condition where we just struggle with consistency.
I'll get into a little bit more about that, why that is later. So we struggle with consistency. We think that it's a you problem. We're trying to achieve this nirvana where we'll never gonna have to deal with the struggle anymore, but that's unattainable, right? We're always in the journey. We'll always have to work on this. I'll get more about that later. But then what happens is when the struggle shows up, when the inconsistency shows up,
Instead of dealing with how to overcome that, we now start dealing with what's wrong with me? Why am I this way? How come this keeps happening? When we just established that everybody goes through this. And I'm generalizing, maybe not everybody, but according to personality assessments, only about 3 % of the population are like the super, like super consistent, stay on focus type A personalities.
The rest of us, we struggle, right? It's not a something that is just like a given. So we fall for this trap where we start chasing this unattainable goal and we get triggered every time we struggle with it. And so now instead of chasing the goal, we're chasing this nirvana, we're chasing this state of just focus. And it puts us in a pattern of judgment, beating ourselves up, and absolutely not effective, right? It doesn't feel good.
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The thing you wanna also get is commitment is not consistent. Commitment is not consistent. That means that when you create the commitment, you're probably gonna have to create it again and again and again. And that's another place where we forget or we have a lack of awareness about. So I'll give you an example. We've all had this experience where we're like, okay, tomorrow I'm going to the gym.
Tomorrow's the day. I'm going to the gym, I'm super excited, I'm starting my workout routine, I'm starting my regimen. And you get your clothes ready, and you lay them out, and you do your planning, and you get your sneakers out ready, and you do all the things, and you're ready, okay? You go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and it's raining. And all of a sudden you're like, ooh, it's raining, ah, oh, no, I'll start tomorrow.
It's raining tonight. It's raining tonight. So you meant it when you said it that night. Like you were 100 % in the zone. You meant it. It was real for you. And, you know, in the morning that commitment is gone, right? It needs to be recreated again. Because commitment for most of us is conditional. Our level of commitment is given by the circumstances in front of us.
When the circumstances are clear, when the circumstances are convenient or favorable, then the commitment level goes higher. And then when the circumstances are the opposite, when they're challenging, when they're a struggle, when they're not fun, some of you are all about the fun, and if they're not fun, you're not interested. So when the circumstances don't meet your expectations in some way, then the commitment level goes down. So for most of us, commitment is conditional.
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commitment is depending out on something outside of us. So we have to bring that back in and have that commitment be dependent on us internally, on what we say. So the best, well, not the best, really the only way I know how to do this is through your word. Keeping your word. So for most of us, we're very sloppy with our word.
We say things all the time like, I'm going to the gym tomorrow, or we say, I'll be there in five minutes, or I'm never gonna do that again. I'm not having the cookie, or I'm gonna do sales calls tomorrow, like whatever it is, we are all really comfortable with saying things that we will not stick to when nobody's looking.
When people are looking, when other people are involved, we're usually pretty good at keeping our word, but that's not about keeping a word, that's about looking good. That's about survival again. When no one is looking, when only you know, when you gave yourself, when you told yourself secretly in your head that you were gonna do that thing tomorrow, and nobody's looking and there's no impact and nobody's waiting for you, we are pretty comfortable with the notion of passing the buck and just saying, eh, it's okay.
It occurs for us at that moment like there isn't a big impact. It occurs for us like it's no big deal. Nobody's watching, nobody's getting hurt, you know, but there is an impact. There's an impact on you and you know. And so what starts to happen is over time, this behavior starts to erode at your sense of power and your self -confidence, your self -confidence.
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So imagine if every time, think of it this way, this is the best analogy that I can think of. Every time you break your word, every time you are sloppy with your word, if I went and I withdrew 25 cents from your bank account, okay, well, you are not gonna miss that, right? You're probably not gonna miss that much if I just went and took out 25 cents. But it's not just 25 cents. We're doing this multiple times a day, right? We're doing this multiple times a day, every day.
So imagine if all of a sudden I'm taking 25 cents out about a dozen times out of your account and then all of a sudden I tally it up at the end of the month, at the end of two months, at the end of a year. Well, it's gonna be some substantial money missing and you're definitely gonna notice that. Now, if I keep that pattern going over a long period of time, well, now your account gets in a deficit.
Right, so now your power has completely depleted, your sense of confidence has depleted. This impacts your leadership, it impacts your ability to hold a vision, it impacts your ability to stand in front of others that advocate for yourself, your business, it impacts how you can sell your products, it impacts how you parent, it impacts the kind of partner you are. Again, I've just completely sucked out all the power from your reserves.
This is where very common anxiety comes in, depression comes in, you know, reactionary behavior comes in. So, you know, so it's really easy for you now to just be completely helpless, to feel like you don't really have a direction, you don't have a purpose, you don't know what you're doing. Like, it really disorients you from living a powerful life.
So the only way to really manage that, well, the thing I wanna say about that is it's impossible to be consistent in that environment, in that condition, because there isn't sufficient power to hold the consistency. And consistency requires power, because the thing about consistency is that most of the things that you want are outside of the realm of existence for you.
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So what I mean by that is that there are mostly things that you don't have. So if you wanna launch a business or if you want to grow a skillset or start an art class or you want to, you know, homeschool, like these are all things that are not within what's already there. So you're declaring something, it's outside of the world of your existence. You have to go now create that. You have to go now work towards making that happen.
That's gonna require you to break out of your box. That's gonna require you to institute new habits, to institute new ways of thinking, to transform yourself essentially so then you can work towards that. Now here's what happens is at the end of the day, your brain, the machine of your brain is not too interested in transformation. The machine of your brain is actually designed to predict.
So the way that your brain survives is by making predictions, making them really quickly, because it's trying to keep you safe. So it needs to understand what's happening, it's constantly cataloging everything that's happening and creating patterns. So when you create something new, that's out of the pattern, that part of your brain gets threatened.
Cause now you're taking me somewhere that I don't know, that I don't know that I have the ability to predict. So I don't know if I can keep you safe there. So your brain doesn't like you and it resisted and it will try to do things like, you know, confuse you, tell you, oh, I can't, your ego will get in the way and sabotage you and try to do all these things, right? So even though you want that,
There is a machine inside of you kind of working against you towards having that. So now you can absolutely manage that. We can all do something about that, but it does require you to have power. It does require you to have, you know, consistency and it does require you to hold a vision. But if you have depleted your self -esteem bank, if you have depleted your belief bank,
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by constantly breaking your word everywhere, then it makes it really difficult for you to hold that in place. So the best way for you to develop consistency is number one, understanding that commitment is not consistent. Commitment is a moment by moment choice. I made the commitment now, I have to make it in 10 seconds from now, I have to make it again. And like every second you have to choose it again.
and you have to recreate it again and you have to hold the vision again and you have to call it forward again. So the more you do this, the more muscle you have and the more ability to hold it in place you have, the more muscle strength you'll have to hold that in place. At the beginning, it's gonna feel difficult because it's a new practice. So that's the first thing is you have to really get from a distinction place that commitment is not something you create once.
is something you have to create moment by moment by moment by moment by moment by moment by moment. You have to keep choosing it. You have to keep bringing the vision alive. Okay. Now, the second part to that is understanding that the way you do that is by being really rigorous with your language. And you have to have a practice of maintaining your word. You have to have a practice of really honoring your word and seeking out.
any areas where you're not keeping your word and doing something about it. This again is a practice. So at first it's gonna seem like hard and difficult, but the more that you do this, the more facility you will have over it and the more ability you'll have to hold your word in place. So what you will notice is when you develop this practice,
of keeping your word is that the opposite will start to happen. So instead of a withdrawal, you'll start making deposits. You'll start making deposits into your self -esteem bank. And the same thing, you make one deposit, it's not gonna be that big of a deal if I put in 25 cents into your bank account, you're probably not gonna notice. But if I'm putting 25 cents over several times a day, over a period of days, over a period of months, you will start to notice that you've started to come up,
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you started to save up quite a bit of expendable cash. And you're gonna start to notice that your power, you're gonna grow your confidence. You're gonna grow your ability to manifest. You're gonna grow your ability to stay consistent in the game because now you have more power to work with. You have more power to do the mental work of managing your mindset and managing your brain when you're doing the scary stuff.
You're gonna have more power now to navigate the uncertainty of being in the unknown. And you're gonna have more confidence and power to navigate the uncertainty of your brain freaking out because it can't understand the direction that we're going. It's leaping into the unknown is work. It requires, there are some of us that are just very comfortable throwing themselves in leaping and handling, but for most of us, we need to know, have some type of understanding of what we're leaping into.
what we're leaping into and why we're leaping into it and what's gonna happen when we leap into it, this is normal. And I don't think that making ourselves wrong for having those concerns, I think it's easy to fall into social media, the social media, what do you call it? Image, right? Of like, oh, you just gotta go for it and all these inspirational videos, but it's not really how it works. And...
We have concerns and we have questions and we have things that we need to work out and I think that's human and we need to normalize that. So Destiny, I hope this helps you and just remember that you're not alone. We all struggle with this and the key to transforming this, it's really being really rigorous with your work. The last thing I wanna say is be careful that you're not playing a game of perfection.
It's not realistic to expect that you're just gonna keep your word all the time and everything's gonna be perfect and you're gonna execute perfectly. That's not how that works. In fact, the bigger your game is in life, meaning the bigger the goals that you're stretching for and the bigger, the more you take up on your plate, what you're also gonna start to notice is that yes, your ability to handle more things expands.
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but also the ability for things to go wrong and the breakdowns that happen will also expand. Just physics, you have more on your plate. So more on your plate, more things can go wrong. And as you grow and learn, you'll manage that, you'll get better at it, but it's just physics, more equals more. So the more that you have on your plate, the more that things are gonna go wrong and the more breakdowns you're gonna have. The...
understanding this and having a mindset of not trying to be perfect, but how quick can I recover? It's gonna make a world of difference in managing this. Because another thing that impacts our consistency is that now when we have a breakdown, we go into beat up about it. Instead of, okay, what can I learn from this? How can I implement what I've learned? And how do I move on?
If you look at any successful entrepreneur, any successful leader, they will tell you that it's their recovery that makes the difference. They've all had breakdowns. Some of them have had catastrophic massive breakdowns, but it's how they recovered from those breakdowns that makes a difference. And that's also part of being consistent. When you're avoiding the breakdowns or when you're fearful of the breakdowns or when you are beating yourself over the breakdowns,
It takes you out of the game and it impacts your consistency. Okay, I hope this helps. Thank you so much for your question. Okay, next question. Okay, this one's anonymous. I've been struggling to get my business off the ground for a few years. During that time, my husband has been mostly supportive, but lately he's been putting pressure on me to bring in income and doesn't want me to keep investing more money into the business.
It's made it very difficult to continue to work on my business without being able to invest. We are happy together, so I'm not trying to end my relationship or anything like that, but just trying to figure out how to navigate this. I don't want to continue disappointing him, but I also want to be able to continue to work my business, which is my dream. Okay, I totally get that. Yeah, the support of your partners is everything. It could really make or break you, and it could have a significant impact.
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on your confidence and your resources that you have to put into the business. Okay, so I'm gonna make some assumptions here, because I don't have obviously the full story and we don't have you in front of us to ask some questions. It sounds from what you're saying that this isn't like a relationship problem. So what I mean by that is you're not with a partner who doesn't support your vision or you're not with a partner that doesn't care about your dreams. It sounds more like,
you're with a partner who has been feeling the extent of you working on your business for a period of time, we don't know how long, and not yielding results. So I'm gonna assume that that's the scenario. If the problem is the latter, no, the problem is the previous, meaning that...
you know, you have a partner who doesn't support your dreams or doesn't support, well, that's a more complicated conversation, complicated topic. You'd have to kind of, and you'd have to really explore if this is a relationship for you, if this is a partner for you, and more larger existential conversations, I think. So, but I'm good, but that doesn't sound like if this is what it is. It sounds more like your partner has just been.
feeling the brunt of you working your business. And I think that's important to remember. I think a lot of times we throw ourselves into our businesses without managing the impact that it has on your partner. So if you're not bringing in income because your business is still in a startup phase, then that means that your partner has to pick up the slack, right?
It means that your partner has to carry the weight of it. And many homes need two incomes now, you know? And that's pretty much, I think, the normal scenario these days. So it is important to get buy -in from your partners and really make sure that this is something that they are on board with. And...
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And they're choosing authentically, right? Because a lot of times we say yes because we feel bad or we don't want to be a jerk or we want to be supportive, but they have to choose it authentically because entrepreneurship is a very, it's a challenging journey. It takes everything. It's one of the most difficult things that people can do is starting a business.
So you definitely wanna make sure that you have buy -in. It sounds like you had buy -in and then slowly the buy -in started to wean, wither away, get thinner. So let's go into some possible solutions why that could have happened. So if, I mean, it's normal. If we're not seeing the fruits of labor over a period of time,
It's actually not unusual for us to lose the vision, lose the hope, I guess you would say it. If you think of, if you think of, it's related to what I was talking about before, commitment is not consistent. So if you, you know, it's very possible that at the beginning of the journey, he was like, yeah, this is gonna happen. This is great. I got you. Let's do this. And then,
over a period of time, he's starting to realize, hey, I'm not so sure about this anymore. So it sounds like he's also really focused on the investment aspect of it. So I'm gonna also assume that you've been spending money that has impacted him, impacted you. So it's either money that you don't have, accumulating debt, or there's some expectation of money that he was expecting you to bring in by now.
and you have it. Okay, so operating on these assumptions, this is the most common thing that I see happens is you stop basically being accountable to your partner in the areas of your business. So let's say you started a business and you, maybe you discussed your partner, your expectations or your business plan and your goals. So maybe your partner was part of those conversations.
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Sometimes they're not and the first breakdown is there's just a lack of clarity around expectations. So your husband might've had the expectation that you were going to start making money in three or four months, you know, but you had an expectation that it was gonna take a year to start this business. Well, I think you can see the problem right there. That wasn't...
talked about, discussed, created from the beginning, agreed upon from the beginning. But more often than not, what I see happening is that there is some kind of expectation that both of you are on board about. You might have shared a business plan, you may have discussed with him some idea of when you're gonna start to have money, and you don't hit it, right? You don't hit that. And so when that happens,
You don't go and manage that with your partner, meaning you don't go, hey, I promised you that I was going to bring in money by this time and I'm not on track. And the impact of me not bringing in that money is that you have to now work harder to carry us. And the impact on me that I'm feeling like I let you down and you know what's...
can we sit down and create a new agreement or do you or, you know, or give him an option, a choice. So what probably, what most of us happens, what mostly happens in this situation is that we avoid having those conversations. Cause you're probably feeling bad. You're probably feeling ashamed. You're probably feeling like a failure in some way, which is common.
This is common experience when you're launching a business and throwing yourself into something new and you're dealing with other challenges, right? So you want to make sure that you're holding yourself accountable to the promises that you've made your partner because now you might think that it's your business and it's your business, but it's really not because you're now in a marriage and he's putting resources into your business by supporting you and giving you time and
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and investing money into the home or not investing, but covering expenses in the house, he's now putting resources into your business. So he's essentially an investor in your business. So you gotta be accountable to your investors. You have to be accountable to your investors. You have to be accountable to the promises that you're making to your investors. If it wasn't your husband, if somebody had given you cash and they're not seeing a return,
on their investment, they're gonna have a problem with that and they're gonna be upset about that. And it also puts you on the hook. Cause a lot of times that what happens is, you know, look, it's very common when you start a business to start dealing with the things that scare you about the business. So for example, one of the things that I end up working with a lot of people is confidence around selling, how to sell authentically. So.
It's very common for entrepreneurs when they launch a business to be really confronted by sales and be really confronted by having sales conversations and by reaching out and doing that work. So if you're avoiding it, if you are putting it off, if you're not following up with leads, if you're not doing that work, that is going to have an impact on your business, going to have an impact.
on your husband. So now your integrity is out because there's promises that you've made to yourself, promises that you've made to your partner in relationship to that. And now you're not honoring that. And usually they can see this pretty clearly. Like they can see that you're not doing sales calls. They can see that you're spending time mostly online or they can see that you're acting squirrely or you know,
A lot of times they might not tell you because they're trying to be nice or they don't want to be confrontational or they don't want to make you feel bad or they know that you're struggling, but they can see it. And so now you're pretending to, you know, that this isn't a problem and they're pretending that this isn't a problem. And so now you're sitting there having a conversation about not the real thing, but pretending, pretending. So all of that degrades your relationship, it degrades the intimacy.
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It degrades your power and your self -esteem and your confidence, okay? So you have to be accountable to your partner and you have to have honest conversations about what it is that you need, but you also have to have honest conversations about what they need from you and what you're gonna be accountable for. Because I'm sorry, no investor is going to just keep giving you money to...
put into your business while you are not being accountable for that, at least operating accountably, like actually acknowledging it and actually reporting the losses and reporting the breakdowns, right? But also making sure that you're doing what you said you were gonna do, that the sales calls you said you were gonna do, that the growth that you said you were gonna do, that that coaching program that you invested in gets implemented into your business.
That's something that I see very often. People keep investing in coaching programs and the work that they're learning doesn't get implemented. So it makes sense that your partner is now starting to feel like, I'm not sure I wanna keep betting on this horse. And it gets awkward as well because you're their partner, right? So.
You want to be supportive, but you also want to hold them accountable and it gets squirrely. And now you're putting your partner in a position where they have to hold you accountable to a mess that you've created. So if I'm completely off track, let me know. But I suspect that I'm not. And, and, you know, the, to answer your question, how do you navigate that? You have to put integrity back in. That means you have to put agreements back in. You have to put.
clear communication with clear promises back in and you have to honor those promises. And when they don't work out, you have to honor the consequences of those promises and you have to communicate with leadership and integrity. And you know, and I think you also have to start.
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If operating from the point of view of I'm avoiding something that scares me to my business, which again is a common pattern, you gotta get that, oh, that's not just having an impact on me, that's just having an impact on my partner who's working to keep us going. I have to show up for us. I have to show up for not just me. I have to show up for us. It no longer is.
It really is not your business. It's a shared entity with your family at this point. And I would start to look at it that way, not from a place of putting pressure on yourself. Because again, I completely understand that struggle. I've been there myself plenty of times. But if you don't hold yourself accountable, like just think about it this way. If you had a nine to five job, you would never operate that way. If you had a nine to five job,
you would, first of all, you'd probably show up and do the things you said you were gonna do because you don't wanna lose your job. You don't wanna get in trouble. And you probably, and if there was a breakdown and something didn't happen that was supposed to happen, you'd probably be communicating. You'd probably be like making sure that your superior is new, making sure you had a plan of action to handle it, making sure that...
the people that were impacted by this understood, like there was just a different level of integrity and leadership that you'd be bringing if it was a different situation. And so when you don't bring that to your business and your marriage, then you end up creating a mess, creating a mess. And then now, and now you're putting your partner in a situation where they have to be the villain and that's messed up. That's messed up.
Okay, so get sit down, acknowledge the breakdown, acknowledge the fact that you have not been keeping your word or that you have some broken agreement or that you've let them down or that you let yourself like just put it all on the table and make new requests and put new structures in place and then you got to operate with a high level of communication, like overly communicating.
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you know, like really being accountable to each other and act as if that person that your partner is an investor in your business, which means you have to have complete transparency in what's going on. Cause also what's probably happened is that trust has been eroded in some way, shape or form. So the only way for you to start to rebuild that trust is by showing consistency in your actions and over communication and really seeing that you're really showing and displaying that you're coming from a place of.
trying to maintain the relationship, like honor the relationship, grow the relationship. Okay, Anonymous, I hope this was helpful. And I mean, it sounds like your partner really wants to support you. I think it's just a matter of you putting in that integrity back in the game and really honoring your word. And if I'm completely off, just let me know and I'll try to address it the next time, okay? All right, thanks.
Okay, next question. You have had several career changes along your life. How do you handle these changes? What challenges have you faced and how do you work through overcoming them? Okay. Yeah, so those, I have had several career changes. So my first career, I was actually an art director, graphic designer. So I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York and I had a career and I worked at Rolling Stone Magazine and then I worked at
Sony Music was my first job out of college and I worked, did covers for, back when you used to have CD covers, I did marketing art for some other artists and then I worked in theater. I did theater posters, theater marketing for a while and that was a lot of fun. And then I discovered coaching and I started to transition out of coaching. I started to transition out of design. And then I had my coaching business for a couple of years and then I, from there, one of my corporate clients, Align Life, offered me a job.
I love the company, I love their mission, I love what they stood for and I really wanted to be a part of what they were doing. So I ended up closing my business and getting back to going back into the corporate world and I was with them for about five and a half years, six years. And then from there, I now I'm making another transition again, back into my business. So I've had several changes along the way. I mean, I think the challenges have been different at different stages, I think. So, you know, going from,
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I think the biggest obstacle for me personally was leaving, transitioning my identity from a designer art director to an entrepreneur or a coach. I mean, so you gotta get to, to be a designer, you, you know, to get to the level where I was, you have to work really hard. You have to be really...
focus, you have to have a certain pedigree, right? So I graduated top of my class, the School of Visual Arts. School of Visual Arts is one of the top art schools in the country. I, you know, I, first job was as an art director at Sony Music. So again, another high sort of profile position. And so, you know, I had the blessing of working in some really great places, working in some high profile places. And I was a designer.
And when you go to art school, you take that very seriously and you sit around and you critique and you give your opinion and that's really part of it, right? So I had this resume, I had this portfolio that I was really proud of, that I had worked really hard of, that I had poured a lot of sweat equity into. And all of a sudden now I'm giving all that up to be a coach.
And the funny thing is that the only, you know, to be as a designer, I had the degree, I had the resume, I had the portfolio. Like I had these, you know, I had the connections in the industry. So I had this like all these big things that supported my path, identity. And as a coach, I had nothing. I literally just had.
a business card that said I'm a coach, which I had designed myself. So, I mean, I had a certificate, but I had no resume, I had no experience, I had no nothing. So, just from an identity perspective, it was really threatening for me because my identity, my ego really liked saying that I was a designer and it was proud of the places that I had worked and what I had done. And when I had shared,
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you know, what I had accomplished, it was like, oh, you know, ooh, la, la. But as a coach, as an entrepreneur, I had none of that. So it was scary. It was so terrifying to walk into a room completely naked and just, you know, try to pitch myself, try to introduce myself. And it felt like a fraud, like such a fraud. And it was, yeah, so that was really hard.
And it took a little while for me to untether myself from my old life and tether myself to this new one and really own my new identity. And then also create it and like what that meant because if you actually look at my journey, I started out as a life coach, but I found...
after a little while that it was a little whiny for me and I didn't like, I just didn't want to talk about feelings and to like, I really wanted to empower people who were in action. Like I wanted to, I wanted to, you know, like what's your, you have to have a game. You have to be something like, I wasn't really like, it wasn't fulfilling for me to work on like finding purpose in life in that way. Like, and I'm not trying to belittle or anything. I just really found that.
I worked best and I really was very passionate about people that were like already in movement. So then I transitioned and I started calling myself an empowerment coach. And I'm like, oh, I'm an empowerment coach. That's what I am. And I was like, what the hell does that mean? And again, you're talking about like 12 years ago now. I mean, no, excuse me. I'm talking about Gary. You're talking about like 16, 17 years ago. So coaching wasn't even like a thing. Like I would still introduce myself as a coach and people would just say, well, what are you?
What is that? Are you like a basketball coach? I'm like, no, I'm definitely not that. So where was I? So yeah, so it became, it was a little bit of a transition in that way. And I went from an empowerment coach that nobody knew what that meant. Nobody kind of understood that. And eventually what I really got to is that I'm a leadership coach.
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that that's really, I really am about having people find their personal leader and bring personal leadership to all areas of their lives. And sometimes people think that a leadership coach just focuses on working with others, but you're the first person that you have to lead, right? Like you're the first person that you have to lead. And if you're not leading yourself, you can't lead others. So that's really where I found my area of like, oh my God, this is it, I'm home. Or so I thought, because...
as what also happened is as I started to focus on, well, two things happened. Number one is most of the people who kept hiring me were entrepreneurs. So I naturally found myself working with entrepreneurs. And as I said, I really was passionate about working with people who had a project, who had a purpose, who had a thing. I really love that. But the other thing that really happened was that I went through the journey and struggles of figuring out my leadership.
to grow my business. And the first five years were a real struggle. They were really hard, very difficult, very painful. And it took me about five, six years to actually start getting traction on the business and start to figuring it out. And then, it's the power of coaching. I finally had the right coach. I finally had people giving me really great advice. And within a year, I had done more than I had done in the previous five years after that.
So what happened is I went through a transition of, you know, and when I figured out how to grow my business, I started giving that to the clients that I was coaching. So I ended up kind of becoming a business coach by default because I was naturally passing that on. And I also find there's a real intersection between leadership and business.
Business requires a lot of mindset. It requires bringing yourself a bigger version of yourself, challenging yourself, reinventing yourself. All of that lives in the domain of leadership, right? And so there's a real intersection between the two. And so when all these things came together for me, it's really when I had my aha moment. It's really when I was like, oh my God, this is it. This is it. This is what I love. This is what I love doing.
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and I had a passion for it and I had a talent for it. But it took me like five, six years of me being in this entrepreneurial journey to find myself there. So to answer your question more, the other challenge that I find you have to go through,
is rediscovering who you are in this new identity and finding out what that means. And very often what you think it means is not what you think it means. When I have clients that are like new entrepreneurs, I often discourage them from investing very heavily in branding and doing a lot of deep brand exploration. Because in my experience,
the first couple of years in business, you don't know who you are, you're figuring it out, you're learning and you're evolving. So I've seen people spend like a lot of money on doing this branding work that gets outdated within two years. You spend 10, 15, $20 ,000 doing branding and it should carry you for quite a while. So it...
That's probably the the other challenge that you know, you you have to do the work of Discovering who you are and that requires play it requires struggle It requires showing up every day and being willing to be in the mess of it a lot of times We resist a mess. I resist a mess I like you know, my ego wants to hit a home run. My ego wants to just like Hit a home run without ever, you know struggling without ever
You know hitting without ever stepping foot in the mount. I want to hit a home run not realistic right that's not really how the journey goes so understanding that and being gentle with myself through that process and understanding that that has been real key in a real game changer and so.
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What you see now is that as I relaunch my business, I've been able to bring all those lessons with me because I learned those lessons through the last 15 years, 16 years. And so now I'm in a place where I can, I still have those lessons with me, plus the lessons that I've learned working at LamLam for five years. So as a result, what you see is I have accomplished in four,
you know, four to six months that I've relaunched, I've accomplished, you know, what I couldn't do in like the first two years, right? I got up and running. I have, you know, I have a coaching program that I am running right now. It took me years to have a coaching program where I had a full class and it took me years to have you know, private clients and all of that.
Like the first, like I said, the first five years were ugly. So I'm, I'm able to move now with a speed that I didn't have before. What I am having to kind of the work that I'm having to do right now is there is a bit of a discovery of rediscovery of my voice, not a rediscovery because I know at this point I've been doing this long enough and I know who I am, but I have been speaking as someone else's voice for a while.
I spent the last six years speaking in as, as Limelife, right? Like I, it was, I was myself, but I was myself within a context of, of Limelife and their agenda. Now it's me completely on my own. So I do find that there's a rediscovery and a bit of a like, oh no, I don't have to worry about that. And I can say this now. I don't, I can, I can be myself in this way, or I don't have to, the consequences aren't the same, you know, things like that. I also find that,
What I'm also doing right now that's been a challenge is just rediscovering how the market has changed, how the industries have changed, and how the tools have changed. There's been a lot of tools and a lot of new things that have come out in the last five, six years that I've been with Limelife. So that's been a bit of a challenge, but not like a struggle, just like a, oh, that's something that I have to focus on. But I think the most important lesson is that,
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I find myself, my expectations still get me. I have these moments where I'm like, oh, you know, I want it, you know, I want it. I don't know, what is the expectation? It's like a few months ago I had, oh, I know what it is. So I had, you know, my kickoff program, which I did six months ago, I was going for 50 people in the program.
Okay, I'm gonna launch, it's gonna be 50 people in this program. This is gonna be great. I think I ended up with like 20. And so my instinct was like, oh my God, it's not gonna work, what's wrong? Oh my God, how could I? Oh wow, I really am disappointed, I thought. But then I had to have this moment of like, wow, 20 people, like that's amazing. When was the last time? Like how long did it take you to put 20 people in anything when you first launched your practice? I mean, you know, back in like 2008.
Like it took me, I mean, you're talking about like six, seven years before I could pull a result like that. And now I did it in just like, you know, a month. So it's your ego still wants to come in and my ego still wants to come in and get in the way. And I think that's something that we have to be very careful about. But when I embrace the lessons and I look.
And I actually see what's happening, there's a beauty in the fact that I can implement everything that I've learned, all those struggles, all those challenges. And that's something that also I think is important to remember that sometimes we going through these, I mean, honestly, like, I'm not kidding. Those first five years were hell, scary. I, you know, bank account withdrawn, like had to move home with my parents, not sure, like no money, like really.
scary stuff, but ultimately what made the difference, you know, excuse me, I lost my turn off for a second, but at the time I was really ashamed. I was really feeling bad. I was really feeling wrong about that. But when I look back now, I'm so glad that I had those experiences. I'm so glad that I had those experiences. Those experiences has shaped me so much as a coach.
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And I've been able to take the lessons that I've learned from that time and make so, do so much good with them. And I would have never been able to see that in that moment, but God, it has shaped and informed me and given me so much compassion for the work that I do and for supporting entrepreneurs. It's given me so much passion because I know how much it means. I know how scary it is. I know how you're like putting everything in it.
So I'm really passionate about working with entrepreneurs out of that struggle that I went through. So yeah, well, I hope that this answers your question and gives you some tools. Thank you so much. Okay guys, that is all we have time for this week. I hope that you have enjoyed this format of the ownership game. I hope to start experimenting with different formats and different ways of bringing you value. If you've enjoyed this format, please let us know.
If you want me to address one of your questions on the show, please let us know. Just go over to the ownership game .com and fill out the form there and give us all the details and I will address one of your questions on the air. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Please share the episode with someone that you love and continue to shine your light in the world. Remember that all small actions do have an impact.
Until next time.