Elisa Schmitz Recap: How to See Possibilities Instead of Problems

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Well, I want to take a moment to just share some reflections on our last guest, the incredible Elisa A. Schmitz. She's an award winning Latina entrepreneur and journalist. She's the founder and CEO of 30seconds.com with millions of unique users every single month. And here, one thing I want to share with you. She's also the founder of I Parenting, a best of the web digital media company that was acquired by by the Walt Disney Company. What we talked about in our interview was her latest book, Become the Fire. It's how to transform life's chaos into business and personal success. And you face chaos somewhere in your life. It could be a little micro chaos somewhere, it could be a major disaster. Look, at the end of the day, we've all got friction and challenges. Although it manifests in unique and personal ways, things like racism, ageism, sexism, abuse, illness, disease, disability, divorce, disconnection, inequity, injustice and more. Like everyone deals with something along the way. But what Elisa said was that women who are outsiders experience it more intensely. And so, look, I wanted to share a few key takeaways with you and I hope that it really serves you somewhere in your life. Before I do that, I just want to remind you that if you're listening to this live and it's been released today, or within a week or so of it going live, we have opened the doors to HPL 2023. The High Performance Leadership Program sells out every single year very quickly. So if you'd like to come and join us, it's in Christchurch, New Zealand. Go along to our website, jjlochlan.com forward/hpl 2023 and the HPL is in uppercase caps. So if you want to know more about that, we've got incredible guests. In fact, yet again we've got our former Prime Minister, Sir John Key coming along. We've got the amazing Amy Carter, who's the CEO of the Christchurch foundation, and the inimitable Matt Brown. It's going to be Phenomenal. So we'd love to see you there. But as I say, tickets are limited to 80. We only let 80 people through the door. It's an INT over two and a half days, and we've already sold several of those since opening the doors today. So looking forward to connecting with some of you live. But let's get back to Lisa Schmitz. So here's one key takeaway. We all face chaos in life. We need to realize that the fire that life throws at us does not need to be a bad thing. Maybe we can try to view the fire as a positive thing, a positive movement for change. And look, isn't that quite interesting? That's her. Take this fire that we feel actually the fire is a good thing. And it's interesting to look at it like that when you consider, let's say, a forest. When a fire rips through a forest in a natural way, often it creates new birth, new things. It.

Takes little parts of the forest, burns them to intensity, and some of those things take that intense heat so that they can actually spread their seed and then regrow. So fire, in a lot of ways can really be the provoker and the promoter of change. So you know what's going on in your life right now that you could reframe as fire, but it's actually a positive thing. Elisa said we need to face life's challenges, thinking, what can I learn? And take away from this experience? I've had a few times in my life where, you know, the proverbial hit the fan, things weren't going so well. Maybe a natural disaster, maybe a relationship disaster. And often it's easy. I find it easy to revert to, why me? And this is crap. And you know what, you know, how do I get out of this? But when I've approached it with, hey, this isn't fun. This is awful in some respects. But what can I learn right now? What is the universe trying to teach me right now? And with that kind of approach, often it helps me just detach from the chaos and learn from these really intense moments. So next time that happens to you, and maybe you're in it right now, maybe there's something right now that really is troubling you, stressing you out, worrying you, sitting on your mind. Well, perhaps ask yourself the question, what can I learn or take away from this experience?

Elisa has created a few businesses using the idea of making life better. She tries to tie all of her decisions and creations into this value of hers to make life better for herself and those around her, and I just love that about her. She said, when you get to a certain place in your life, you want to share your experience, share your experience to help other people. And when you look at, say, the core human needs, one of those six core human needs is contribution. We need to meet our need to give back, to help, to add value to others. That's something we want to do. We want to feel that we can learn and grow. But then give that. And here's something I want you to write down. You cannot give what you do not have.

And what I mean by that is if you are just going from pillar to post and just filling in your day and getting up and going with it, well, you're not going to be gathering ideas and experience and lessons and failures. You need to be taking risks if you want to be able to give something of value to others. You need to fall on your face and learn how to get up. You need to have that business fail. You need to have those moments of adversity and figure out how to get through it, how to get past it, how to learn from it. But please never think that you can read and then be able to give everyone the wisdom. Reading is one thing, it's a starting point. But nothing beats in the field experience. You got to get out there and sweat and bleed in war if you want to train the next soldier. No different. As a parent, you can read every parenting book you want. But if you want to pass on lessons to your kids, you've got to just parent.

So where in your life do you need to get into the field? Stop thinking about it and stop doing it. Start doing it? Is it with your health? Do you need to get out there and actually go to the gym or do those yoga sessions every day or do that stretching before you go to bed or do you want to just read about it? Please never forget, you cannot give what you do not have such a key lesson to take away. Now, folks, just a wee reminder. I've made the decision to not have any ads on the show for the foreseeable future. I want to really increase your experience and really allow you to take in everything without having to listen to ads at this point in time. But in return, I've got a favor to ask. Could you please share this episode with three friends, copy the link and share it with them. It helps me to grow. The more people that listen to the show, the more I continue to chart. And recently we charted in the top 10 in Canada and New Zealand and Australia, top 40 in Great Britain that only happens because of you. So if you want me to continue to bring in great guests, even better guests, I need your help. I need your help to spread the show and get it into the ears of more great humans like you. So please, if you'd like to continue listening ad free, please take a moment today and send this to three people and say you've got to listen to lead on purpose. And as you know, I bring in a really wide variety of people, experts, leaders. It's just an incredible diverse range of people. So this show is for everyone who wants to grow and who wants to be better. But for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.