Living Your Life On Purpose

You guys are in for such a treat today because one of my favorite authors is joining me on the podcast and you get to hear all the juicy details. Guys, I've told you a little bit about the book the Joy of Missing out, which I think for me post Covid was such a good way to not just get back on that crazy hamster wheel we've all been on, but actually create the life I want to live on purpose. So I am so happy today that you have the opportunity to meet Tanya Dalton and the author of the Joy of Missing out and also her new book, On Purpose the Busy Women's Guide to Extraordinary Meaning and Success. And if you have some coffee, fill it up, Fill it up deep. Bring your notebook and get ready to talk through some really impactful conversations. Things like transforming our limiting beliefs and really diving into where does fear come from. And rather than using terms like fearless and trying to be adverse to fear, I actually harnessing fear for good and using that fear to push us in the right direction and what that means in terms of how we use fear in our daily habits and how to transform daily habits and also why smart goals are actually kind of out of date and why today it's more important to be using impact goals. So lots of internal conversations that I think are really the foundations for business success. If you don't have time, if you don't have mindset, if you don't have a great foundation of what's happening internally, it's really hard to find success with what's coming externally. So I hope you love this. I also hope you have an opportunity to grab Tanya's new book again. It's called On Purpose. It came out on October 12th, and I'm sure we'll link it up in the show notes for you. But you are going to get so much out of this episode and I know wherever Tonya takes you on the journey, I'm so happy she's here. You guys enjoy today's episode. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub, and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys. Welcome back. Welcome back to the podcast. If you're listening in audio or on YouTube in video this week, I'm super excited. I have one of my favorite authors on. Because after reading your first book, Tanya, I knew what you had to say. It touched my life in a way that has helped me just, like, take a step back and simplify. And I know that everyone in this community needs to hear the same thing. So now you're back. You get to share your story with everyone in this industry. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I can't tell you how much that means to me. I mean, writing a book is. It's a labor of love, for sure. It's a lot of work on the front end, just getting the book written, but then getting it out into the world and everything else. So when people say that they love Jomo or they resonate with the message, it just. It makes all of it worth it. So thank you so much for saying that.

Yeah, you're welcome. I absolutely mean it. It's called the Joy of Missing Out. If anyone has not yet read that book, you. You know, it's funny, a while back, I had some friends over and I had it sitting on my counter, and there was a gentleman at our house and he read the title and he's like, that seems like a really interesting book. I'm like, God bless. Like, we all need to read this book because it's impactful in the world we live in today and especially post Covid and stepping off of the hamster wheel that we've all been stuck on so much needed. Yes, I've started to read your second book. I. I am in the middle. I got an early copy, so I'm excited to finish it. But I would love for you to tell us about your second book called On Purpose. Tell me about the mission behind the second book.

Yeah, so it's funny. I wrote the Joy of Missing out and then HarperCollins wanted me to follow up and write a second book, which was wonderful and fabulous. And they were like, we would love for you to write a book on goal setting. And I thought, oh, no problem. I can totally do that. I have taught thousands of women how to set and achieve their goals, and totally can do that, no problem. So I sit down, February of 2020, and I write out a whole outline of what this goal setting book is going to look like, what it's going to be about. I'm like, all right, when we hit March, I'm going to be off and running. And then, of course, March 2020 happened, and there I am suddenly homeschooling my Kids, juggling my business, trying to understand how we do fulfillment for our products, how do we. All those things, right? Keeping everything afloat. So the book had to take a little bit of a backseat. So I had to really, you know, take some time away from that original plan that I had. And I think what's amazing and really beautiful about the whole thing is that when we get off the track, when we get off our path of what we think we're supposed to do or what we've marked out for ourselves, we think we failed. But this was a perfect example of having that space and that grace was exceeding exactly what I needed, exactly what the book needed, to be honest with you, because as the world was shifting and changing and evolving outside of my windows, I was doing the same thing. I was shifting and changing and growing. And I was watching other people ask the questions that I was asking, like, what is my purpose? Why am I doing these things? Is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? Why is this all happening right? And so when I did finally get the homeschooling kids kind of on a routine somewhat, got the business where it was up and running and doing okay, filled out all the PPP paperwork, you know, all the different times, and did all of that and I started to write the book, it turned out to be a very different book than I had first imagined. And it really was allowing the book to unfold in the way it needed to, allowing it to be like this organic thing that I followed the rabbit trails of where it was taking me. And so I found that the book wasn't about goal setting. There is goal setting in it, but it's not a goal setting book. And this is what I talk about in the introduction. Because goals are not the goal. I think so often we think that when I achieve X, or when I get to this level of revenue, or when I land this client, or when we have this product ready to go, all of a sudden, when we hit that goal, everything's going to be magic, everything's going to be amazing. And then it doesn't happen. And then we're like, why am I not fulfilled? I began to realize goals are the vehicle to get us to the life we want. It's really about living bigger than today. And that's, that's really what living on purpose is about. It's not about changing who you are. It's rising up to the best version of you. It's looking out at the horizon and seeing tomorrow, working towards that big, bright, beautiful north star that we have your mission, your vision, your core values, and then really aligning what we do on a daily basis with that vision of where you want to go. That's when we go to bed at night and feel fulfilled. That's when we feel satisfied. And I think that's really what's amazing, is that this is what the book has changed into being. And I think it's just the right message for where we are right now with the world shifting and everything else.

Completely as an enneagram 3 that lives the life of, oh, I'll be happy when I accomplish this thing. I completely agree. And you know, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about coming off of the hamster wheel of thinking we have to be all of these things for all of these people. And when we were going through the pandemic, the one thing I kept saying to the community was, is this happening to you or is this happening for you? And I feel like the most beautiful things have unfolded because of what we collectively went through, because so many of us had the opportunity to change and say, I no longer want to live like this. I now want to live in this new state of being, in this new state of who I am. And so I'm curious, how can busy women, I'm going to say busy women, that's a lot of our community. We have some men too. But how can busy women really begin to challenge themselves and the way they think so that they can start to live more on purpose?

Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head there. It really is about stepping back and asking some questions and really taking a look. And that is the beautiful silver lining that we've had over the course of the last year and a half. We have to look for the silver linings because otherwise we'll cry in a crumpled ball in our closet sometimes. I mean, I totally get that. I run a product based business and I know all those challenges that a lot of your listeners have been dealing with. And so, you know, honestly, it really is about aligning to what it is you want and allowing yourself to take that step backwards and ask the questions, why? Why am I doing this? Why is, why is this important? What is important? And I think we have so much going on in our lives, we're so busy chasing busy that we don't ever stop to ask that question, am I on the right track? We're just checking the things off of our list. And so that's the beautiful silver lining is that this has given us an opportunity to really take A good hard look at our businesses and our lives and say, do I like you? Am I happy with you? And if we're not happy, what is the point of being in business? Because I can tell you, I went into business for the freedoms. Lifestyle, freedom, time freedom, financial freedom. And if. If you're working 80, 100 hours a week, there's no freedom in that. Right? There's no freedom in that. So it's an opportunity for you to really lean into what you really want. And the pandemic has been a time to be perfectly imperfect. I mean, there is no better time in the history of the world where people have been so forgiving of not being able to hit deadlines. I mean, for us personally, we're weeks behind where our normal launch time is for our fall products. And we just keep telling people, well, global shipping issues are happening. You know, we're dealing with this, and people are giving so much more grace than they normally do. So it's a good time to try new things. And I think that's the thing, is we can choose to see things as obstacles or as opportunities. It's 100% the mindset and the stepping back and then saying, if this is an obstacle, where is the opportunity? How do I want to shift? What do I want to do differently? Do I want to change my team up and how we work? Do I want to change our products? Do I want to get rid of some of those products? All of those things. It's a great chance to. To dig into why that's so powerful.

I love that.

Gosh.

I think about this obstacle versus opportunity, and how you think about it is also how you speak about it. And I'm reminded of people that say, I can't afford it. Right. And if you could just switch those words around and they could be, how can I afford it? It's a simple shift in words or in framework. So if. If someone really wants to disrupt that pattern, right, and they want to start working on better, being better, not bigger, being better and defining success on their own terms, how can we start to disrupt those patterns or use different words or where does that shift start to take place for us?

Yeah, it really is in looking at how we're using our words, how we're looking at situations and what our mindset is. You know, our brain loves patterns. It loves to do the same thing. Right. In the product industry, they call it Sally, Same as last year, right? We do the same thing over and over again because it worked last year. So we're going to do it again. Right. You might be familiar with that term, Sally. Right. And so what happens is we end up just kind of punching the clock, going through the motions, just doing the things we think we're supposed to be doing instead of the things we really want to be doing, because we have this pattern that's going. And so it is really, again, going back to that question of why is this? Why do I want this? Why do I think I need this? Why do I want to work with these customers? All of those things start to play into it. Really stepping back to see the patterns, I think is powerful. When I talk to people about business, I call that the forest view. You know, we can't see the forest because of the trees. We got to zoom out. We need to be the visionary for our company, for our business, and really look at where we are going to see all the different moving parts, because that's how we get our team on board. That's how we get everybody else on board. That's how we really begin to make sure that we are aligned with what it is we want, what it is we desire. And it really is about asking those questions and then communicating them and changing the way that we talk. You know, you mentioned the I can't afford it. Which is a common excuse that we use, right? A common, common thing that we like to blame. The other thing we like to blame is time. I have a whole chapter on time because we love to use time as an excuse. So, you know, you asked me about the words we're using. One of the things that I chose to do was I chose to take the term I don't have the time out of my vocabulary. I no longer say I don't have the time. If somebody asks me to do something, I don't say, I don't have time for that. I now say, that's not a priority for me right now. Or I'm choosing not to do that because otherwise we're a victim of time. Right? Time is like this overbearing thing that's. That's not giving us enough of it. There's no scarcity or abundance when it comes to time. Time is simply time. You, me, Beyonce, we have the same amount of hours in the day, same amount, 168 hours in the week. It's how we choose to spend them. And really, the way that you're spending your time is how you're prioritizing. What are you prioritizing and gifting your time right now? And what are you not gifting your time to? So taking back that ownership through the words we're choosing and the words we're using is incredibly powerful.

I think you're speaking to my soul. I literally just got off the phone with someone and I was like, if someone else tries to schedule another meeting, I feel like I've been in meeting, meeting, meeting every hour of the day, and now you're calling me on the carpet because I have.

Oh, I am. Yeah.

I've been being a victim. This is exactly what you said. This is me. Okay. Help, please help me. Me being a victim of my time. How else? Like, what are other ways I can rethink about how I'm looking at my schedule and my use of time to create more space in my week? Do you have other strategies around that?

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think it's so important that we take care of ourselves. And I think so often we live in this culture where there's a real push for hustle, that if we're not moving, especially as business owners, if you're not hustling, then you're dying. If you're not constantly growing, if your growth isn't, like, astronomical year over year, then you're dying. And that's not true. It's okay to, like, say, I don't want to be Amazon. It's okay to want to grow for a little bit and take a little bit of a pause. It's okay to take pauses and breaks in your day and the joy of missing out. There's a quote that I talk about where I talk about, you know, we think of rest as being a reward for great work, but rest is a requirement for great work to happen. We want to make sure that we're including intentional pauses in. Into our day, into our years, into our weeks on a regular basis. Because when we give ourselves that time to inhale, then we can exhale, then we can move forward. Right? But we can't do that if we're constantly pushing and exhaling. But there is. It's a hustle. Rinse and repeat. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Go, go, go. And it's really. When we give ourselves that space, it's no different than how I spoke about the book. Having that space to allow the book to really grow into what it was made the book so much better. And when we incorporate that into our days, it makes you so much better. I want you to think about who you are when you have hustled and been busy. Back to back meetings, rushing here, rushing there, checking a thousand things off your list. Who are you? Are you the person you want to be? Or are you a little bit snappy, a little more impatient with your friends and your kids and your family members? Are you ending your days feeling fulfilled? Because I think what happens is we rush around chasing busy. We check a thousand things off our to do list, we fall into bed at night and then we go, oh, why didn't I get more done? I should have done this and that and the other. And we feel unfulfilled. What would happen if we chose to do the things that mattered most to us, if we gave ourselves space so that we could actually do the things that matter, that align with something bigger than today, aligning with our purpose? If we did fewer of those things, we would see astronomical growth in our businesses. And I'm telling you this as a business owner myself, when we do fewer, we actually make more money. We have a happier team. We have a happier team at home with our family because we're not snapping their heads off. But then we go to bed at night and we feel, wow, today was amazing. Today was awesome. I mean, this is a question for your listeners. When is the last time you went to bed at night and said to yourself, wow, I did amazing today. Today felt incredible. Because if it hasn't been, you know, regularly happening to you, it's far too long. We need to really structure our day so they work for us. Those intentional pauses where we stop and we can question and we can zoom out and become the chief visionary officer for our company instead of being one of the boot soldiers on the ground. Right when we zoom out, that is really where we understand, oh, this is where I want to go. This is how I want my company to shift. This is how I want my company to grow. And then we can get everybody on our team all on board so we're moving in that same forward direction. That's when you get powerful with your business. That's when your business can make an impact.

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Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I take a nap almost every afternoon and I'll tell you right now, I run a seven figure business and I nap every afternoon. I call it a 26er. Cause NASA has found that 26 minutes is the perfect time for a nap. It's before you get too deep into the deep sleep mode, just enough to relax you. And it makes a huge difference. It makes me a happier human, which means I'm a happier boss and I'm a happier mom and I'm a happier wife and happier friend. And that impacts me in such a positive way. So I think maybe if you started looking at that as this is a gift I'm giving other people. Yes, it's a gift for me, but it's also a gift for everybody else around me. That's when it's like, okay, because you don't need permission to take a nap. You're the boss. Go take a nap.

I completely agree with you. I find that same thing and I'm like, I'm 20 minutes, like right in there. I'm gonna, I'm gonna bump it to 26 after this conversation. But there's a part of me like, as a child, like my dad was a farmer and a rancher and if he came in the house, if I was taking a nap, it would have been like bark city, right? He would have just lost it. So I love that we're changing that mindset and we're giving ourselves permission to rest, which is investing in ourselves. There's something else that you mentioned a lot in this book and it's about. There's really fascinating research about why people have a hard time investing in their future selves. Can you explain more of that?

Oh my gosh, yes, I would love to. Because I think when I started to understand this, for me it was like, oh, I mean, it was like a light bulb for me. So I want to share a study. I'll nerd out just really quickly with this study. But to me, when I found out about it, it was like it changed everything with how I felt about how I'd done with my goals in the past. So there's this amazing study where they used an FMRI machine, which is how they map out different areas of your brain. And they would have participants of the study talk about themselves today. So certain areas of the brain would start lighting up and pinging and then they would say, okay, talk about yourself in the future. Now, the future could be three weeks from now, could be three years from now, could be three hours from now. But when people spoke about themselves in the future, a different part of the brain would light up. Now here's what I think is the most fascinating part. They would have those same participants then talk about Natalie Portman and Matt Damon. And when they did that, those same areas of their brain would light up when they spoke about themselves in the future. Which means that you, your brain thinks of yourself in the future as a totally different person, as a stranger. So, yeah, it's a person who looks like you and talks like you and has the same name as you, but to your brain, it's not you. Your brain is wired to survive the day. We need to make sure we escape those saber toothed tigers and don't eat the poison berries we're gathering. And so it's really focused in on today. So this explains why we eat the cookie instead of the carrot or we buy the expensive shoes instead of investing in the 401k. Because the person in the future who has to deal with that message, well, it's not you. So we don't need to worry about that. And that's what your brain does. It goes for the short term. Win. And when I understood that, it was like, oh, this is why we struggle with our goals. Because they're not connected in our brain. We're not seeing that that person crossing the finish line is actually me. When we make that connection, that's when we start to see, oh, okay, what I'm doing today matters, right? What I'm doing today makes a difference.

Man, that I. That is so smart. I just have to pause for a second and think about that.

Wow.

I've been working with a self love coach this year and something that she's helped me to do is to connect your highest vision of yourself, right? Like this perfect future vision of yourself. And you're almost like meditating on or visualizing that perfect vision of yourself communicating with your hurt self or with your current self or just like marrying these two together. So what you're saying to me makes so much sense. And the more we could spend spend time really building a relationship with that future self, the More we're going to choose to take care of her on a daily basis is what you're saying. Right. Are there other ways we could go about that?

So first of all, really understanding and recognizing that is the first step. Like, oh, okay. And then any failures you've had with goal setting, let's just throw those out the window. All right? Those happened. We're moving forward. What matters is how we move forward from today. Right? So there's lots of ways you can really connect what you want in the future with yourself today. So what's amazing is there's lots of age progression apps. I mean, you can even find them in things like Snapchat. Right. And all these different kinds of add ons where you can actually age progress yourself in the future. So if you're wanting to save for retirement, having a picture of yourself in the future, you're more likely to save for retirement. You're more likely to save more money too, for retirement. Or having a picture of somebody crossing the finish line of, let's say you want to run a marathon, superimposing a picture of your, you're like putting your face on top of somebody else's crossing the finish line. Your brain will start to make that connection. So what we can do is just regularly make these connection points with who we are in the future and what we want with who we are today. And this really goes into that whole idea of looking forward into the future and really taking time. Like I love how you talked about like visualizing and meditating on it. That can make a huge difference. Because then our brain, our brain doesn't know the difference between visualization and reality. Like if you do, like who is it? Lindsey Vaughn? When she visualizes herself skiing down the slope, the muscles in her body are triggering and sparking up because your body actually thinks you're doing that. So that's a great way to make that connection as well. So it really is taking where you want to go in the future, what I call your cathedral, and then working backwards to seeing how your actions for today can get you there to that big cathedral. Because I call it cathedral thinking.

Cathedral thinking. I love that. And I just think about like how many of those things could easily go on our vision boards. That's perfect. Let's talk about goals specifically, because that's the premise, right? You talk about smart goals not working and you have a different system called impact. Can you walk us through the impact goal framework?

Yes, absolutely. Well, here's what I'll say. Smart goals are smart. They've been around since the 1980s. So it's not that they are terrible or anything like that. I've taught smart goals for years, but they've been around since the 1980s. They need a little bit of an update. So I like to say I've taken smart goals and I've just updated them for the new millennium. It's been a good 40 years since those came about. So what I love about smart goals is I love how each letter of smart stands for something. So it's really easy, right? Doesn't require any major tools or any like, taxing thinking. It's really simple to do. So I piggybacked the impact goal system off of that whole idea. So I call it the impact goal system. So the each letter, just like in smart, stands for a different thing. So I is inspirational, right? M is measurable, P is purpose driven, A is adaptable, C is challenging, and T is timed. So you can see there's a little bit of overlap. So we want to start with, first of all, inspirational. We want our goals to inspire us. We want to make sure there are goals. I think a lot of times what happens is we look around, we look left, we look right, we peer over the fence and we see that green grass over there and we're like, ooh, that's what I need to be doing. This business is doing this. So I should be doing the same thing. Well, that's that business person's goals, right? And it's not maybe necessarily your goals. So we want to create goals that are inspirational and get us excited. We also want to make sure that when we're writing out our goals, that we're writing them in ways that are positive. So not that you want to quit smoking, but you want to identify as a non smoker, right? So we want to focus in on what we want, not on what we don't want. Just like when you're ordering food from your waiter, you don't tell them all the things you don't want. You tell them what you do. So that's the first one. I is inspirational, immeasurable. We want to make sure that we're measuring our goals because we like to have a little breadcrumb behind us so we can see where we've gone, right? So really making sure that we are having goals that we can measure so we can see our progress. Sometimes you have to stop and see how far you've come in order to see how far you go. And measuring allows us to do that. Now, with measuring, though, what happens a Lot of times is we really like to zoom in on those numbers, like how much weight we want to lose, how many pounds we want to lose, or how much money we want to make. What if we instead chose to do measurable goals that were built off of habits? Because if we're looking long term, it's not about losing the ten pounds. It's about establishing healthy eating habits or working out. Right? So we can measure those things through how often we're doing them, going to work out three times a week, or making sure we're making healthy lunches four days a week, or doing things like that. So that's a way of making things measurable. So inspirational. Measurable and then purpose driven. Here's the truth. The book is like 200 pages. It's all about purpose. So how could I not say that Your goals need to be purpose driven. They need to be tied to something bigger than today. So really tied to something that has meaning. And I think this is true, especially with our businesses. I think so often we think of our businesses as we sell a product, and that is. That's the features of your product. I want you to think of it in terms of your benefits. How do your clients and your customers benefit? What do you bring into their world that is positive for them? That is the purpose behind your business? For example, I don't teach people how to plan. I help women step confidently into intentional leadership. That's what I do. I redefine productivity so you can see how it's bigger than. Well, I make planners and I sell them right? So really elevating what you're doing, really seeing how it ties in with that bigger picture. So that's our P. Then we have the A, which is adaptable, and we have C challenging. So those go together really well. We want our goals to be challenging and that we want them to push us. We got to get out of our comfort zone, because nothing good happens in our comfort zone. That's where the sweatpants and Netflix lives, right? We want to push ourselves just a little bit. We want it to be challenging because that's where we're happiest, when we're actually being challenged. But we want to back that up a little bit. We want it to also be adaptable. We want to make sure that we're not setting goals that are so rigid that when we fall off the wagon or we get off track, that we go, oh, I failed. I'm the worst, and that's it. And we just, you know, never go back to them. We really Want to make sure that we are setting goals that feel like they have some flexibility built into them because life, life happens and life demands flexibility. All kinds of things can happen in our lives. A pandemic might happen, right? Our kids get sick, we fall and hurt ourselves. You know, a new opportunity appears. So having adaptability is really important while still being challenging. So one of the ways I like to do that is for my own business. We set MTO goals. So minimum, target and outrageous goals. So anytime that we are, let's say we have a launch coming up of a product, we'll have a target of how many products we're hoping to sell. Okay, so that's our T. So we'll back that down and say, okay, what's the M? What's the minimum? If we sell this number of products, what would be considered a win? Because what happens is when we don't hit that target, we immediately fail. But really, there's probably a number right underneath that, right? That's like, if we at least sold this many, we're going to feel really good. That'll be cause to celebrate. So we have our M, our minimum. We have our target, which is what we're really shooting for. And then we have the O, which is our outrageous goal, which pushes us right, to really go far. Now with your outrageous goal, that is a goal where you're like, we are taking the whole team out to dinner, we're going on vacation. I mean, we're doing something big, right? We're going to really celebrate this. So that's a way to make sure that you don't feel like you're constantly failing. And it allows some of that flexibility for whatever comes your way. And then the last letter is T timed. We always want to have a deadline. We want to have a deadline for our goals because if we don't, they will just keep going on and on and on forever. So inspirational, right? Measurable, purpose driven, adaptable, challenging, and timed. That's the impact framework. So that really helps you frame out what your goals are going to be.

I love that and I hope everyone has MTO written down as well. Minimum, target and outrageous. I love that. I love that framework of laying that out. As I'm thinking about this framework, I'm thinking about one of the reasons a lot of people may not put a goal on their list is fear, right? You think of the fear of, what if this doesn't happen to me? Or what if I try and I fail? Or all these things that are these root causes of fear. But we're also taught to believe that fear is really the enemy. You have a whole dialogue in the book about the word fear and becoming fearless and how we use that word. Can you talk to me about that?

Yes. So fear is a really good thing. Fear is great in that fear keeps us from stepping out in the busy intersection when the cars are zooming by. It keeps us from doing dangerous things. So it's not that we want to get rid of all of our fear. And I think that so often we do think of fear as being this enemy, as this. This thing we have to overcome, that we have to fight through and get past when I can tell you that when I started my first business with $50, fear was my ally. Fear was absolutely my ally. I allowed fear to just circle me like a hungry shark, knowing that if I failed, this was going to happen. That was the motivator I needed to say, you know what? Who am I? Oh, I'm the girl who's not going to let the shark eat me. Right? Because that's what happens is we let imposter syndrome set in. Who am I to set a goal like this? Or what am I thinking? I'm just this person. I'm just a. You know, I mean, for me, when I started my first business with $50, I had zero business experience. Zero. And I've grown that into a multimillion dollar company. Right. But it was very easy to let that kind of talk, you know, hold me back. To. To say, there's no way I can do this. I've never taken a business course in college or any of those things. But we can push against fear and let that be the motivator. You know, I think we think that we're supposed to be fearless. And it's not about being fearless. It's about being brave. It's about seeing the fear is there and stepping forward anyways. Right. Just like a soldier does in battle. They're not fearless. They go in anyways because they know it's going to make a difference. And we have a whole blueprint that we walk through in the book about really breaking down your fears. Because I can promise you this, most of your fears are not real survival fears. Most of them are perception fears. Most of them are how we're going to be perceived, that we're going to be a disappointment, that people are going to laugh at us, or that we're going to be, you know, deemed a failure, that. That other people are going to think, well, who did she think she was right. We can't control any of those things. So some of those things we have to let go. We have to focus in on what we can control. Our own emotions, our own thoughts, our own feelings. Right. The things that we can control in our world. So the blueprint is fabulous because it takes those big fears that we have and then it's like, all right, let's figure out what the really what the fear is here. And then once we understand that, we can move that aside and we can step into being brave.

I love that. It's basically, I think about. My husband always encourages me, ask why three times. Ask why three times, whatever it is. And when I hear you say that and I think about, yeah, most of those fears that we face or that I see boutique owners face in this industry is those common misconceptions that people's perceptions of me, the idea of being a failure. But it's really not about putting food on the table.

Right.

We're resourceful. There's a difference in having resources and being resourceful. We have the ability to figure it out. But when we ask why three times and drill down to the root of what's really happening, there's always a solution we can come up with. And I feel like if we can just address that from the outset, then it's not such a scary perceived fear. I love that you've broken that down.

I think that's the thing is, you know, there's always a choice out there. It may not be your favorite choice, it may not be the first choice, but there's still a choice out there. You know, when you're a business owner, there, there is risk that's involved. There's always that question of, oh, gosh, what if this doesn't work out? Well, if your fear is that my family is going to end up homeless on the street, is that really true? I mean, you could move in with your parents. Not ideal. And yet also not really the worst case scenario. Right. If you're worried about getting food on the table, there's other ways that we can make sure that that's happening. You're not going to be homeless and on the street just because one product flopped, you're going to have product flops. Trust me, you're going to have floppers. Because it just. If we're not sticking our neck out there from time to time, we're not testing the boundaries and we're not innovating and we're just following along what everybody else is doing. So it is really about being brave, putting your neck out there, knowing that there's a chance that you're going to fail. But every time that we fail, we learn. And I know that seems trite, but it's so true. Every time that we go out there and we try something new, we add more to our backpack. We just keep adding to our backpack. You know, my first company I closed down in 2013, 2014. And I could have looked at that and said, well, it's a failure because I decided to close it down. But it wasn't because I had all that knowledge that I had acquired all those things I had figured out and learned along the way. So that when I opened up Inkwell Press, we scaled to seven figures in less than 18 months because I had that knowledge. So don't discount what you've learned.

Yeah, man. What an opportunity to take something that could have been a horrible experience for somebody, right? That was a show stopping experience, a worst memory, and making that your greatest opportunity or asset. I have this in the middle of my vision board, I have a post it note that the CEO once told me after I told him about the boutique hub, he looked at me and he said, oh, good luck with your little project. And I thought, thanks for patting me on my head.

Thank you.

Yeah, little girl. So to me, like that fuels what I do every day. It is the experience of that memory fueling me forward. And it sounds like for you too, you're encouraging all of us to take those fears or those experiences and use them as a springboard for what's going to happen next. Correct?

Yes, absolutely. I think that we think of failure as being this end of the road. Right. It's a dead end. When really failure is a springboard. Failure is an opportunity for not just for us to learn, but to propel us forward. You know, really, it's when we fail, it's when we have things that we don't like that we can push against and really move into what we want. And I can share a perfect example in my own business where I had a time where we had a whole warehouse full of damaged products. Long story short, every product that came, thousands and thousands, the warehouse was chock a block full. Every product was damaged. I had to spend the next three months working seven days a week, like 12 hour days, easily. The kids would get off the bus and go straight to the warehouse. They would come, you know, after school every day. They would be there on weekends. We would eat dinner at the warehouse. It was awful. Three months later, survived it. Gloriously survived it. And yet I took that time to ask Myself, how did I feel? And I'll tell you, I felt like the world's worst mom. I felt terrible. I was like, oh, this is not how I want to parent. This is not who I want to be. What have I done? And it would be so easy just to let that be the end of the road. Like, oh, that was a huge failure. But instead I chose to say, okay, if I don't want that, what do I want? I used that season in my life to make that decision that I was now setting a boundary that I now leave work. Now, this is several years later and I'm still doing this. I leave work every day at 3 o' clock to come home and put my mom hat on. And I only work four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I don't work on Fridays, and that's now my boundary. And I wouldn't have gotten to that point. I would have probably been too scared to set that boundary of I'm leaving work every day at three and not working on Fridays. I would have been too afraid to. But I didn't want to go back to what I didn't like. I didn't like feeling like the world's worst mom. So you can see failure, things that are bad, we can push against those and get to that life we really want.

Oh, you are speaking to me. You are speaking to my heart right now. I appreciate that so much, Tanya. If people listening don't have a page full of notes right now, they need to, like, rewind and listen to all this again. I am so thrilled to have had you on the show today. I do have one final question for you, and this is always, you know, the purpose behind this podcast, really, and what we do. And I know that we're very aligned in this topic and that is that we're all put on this earth to do so much more than sell a product, right? If we're doing more than selling planners and selling books and selling education. But we're here to live a purpose. And so I would love to know if you fast forward, you know, 20 years from now and you've sold the business and you've written even more books and you're sitting there with now your grandbabies on the front porch and you're talking about the life that you lived and the things you did and the things you created, what are the things you want those grandbabies to know about your life and for them to remember the most about who you are and how you lived?

Honestly, I want to be remembered as Someone who lived to my priorities. That I don't just talk about this, that I live the way that I talk, that I always put family first. I always put family first for myself and for my team. Family is one of our core values. So that is ultimately what I would hope that my grandkids. Oh my gosh, crazy. That my grandkids would say about me and that truly I prioritized what was most important in my life and that my priorities knew that they were priorities. I think that's the biggest thing of all.

That's beautiful. Tanya. Thank you so much. You are such a light. Thank you for inspiring us today and inspiring so many through your books. We will link everything up in the show notes. The book actually launches today that this podcast goes live so you guys can get it wherever books are sold. Any other last parting thoughts on where everyone can follow you up today?

Yes. So best place to find me is@tanya dalton.com you can find links to my podcast, the Intentional Advantage there, as well as links to both of my books, the Joy of Missing out and the newest one out Today on Purpose, the Busy Woman's Guide to an Extraordinary Life of Meaning and Success. What I would love to leave you with today though, is this. If you heard one little tiny nugget today that resonated with you, take action. Take a small step. Doesn't have to be a giant leap, but just do something small today, whether that's blocking out time on your calendar so that you can breathe and give yourself space. Maybe it's scheduling in a nap. Maybe it's using the MTO method. Maybe it's, you know, anything that we talked about here. I would love for you just to take one small step forward because each and every step counts and it matters and it builds momentum.

I love that. Tanya, thank you so much. I appreciate you and we will see you again soon. Thanks for being here today.

Thank you. Absolutely.

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