10 Unexpected Lessons I Learned This Summer

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I'm doing a commentary on an email and post I sent out last week that got a lot of response. It's called "10 Unexpected Things I Learned This Summer." So I thought I would go deeper on these 10 things because of all the questions that I got. So if you're not on my email list, you should go to emailsbyjulie.com and get on my email list. I send out all kinds of really good stuff, and I promise not to spam you. So, okay. Number 1, bad webinars reveal more than good ones. No one likes a bad webinar. I've done some myself this summer, and yet it does so much more to teach you what not to do. And when you have a good webinar, you sort of, you don't get the benefit of understanding why it worked. Now, of course, you can deconstruct it. You know, if you do a great webinar and it converts really well, you can stick the transcript, the chat log, the slides into ChatGPT, say, hey, this had 5, 10% conversion, what have you. And then you can ask it like, why did it do so well? And it'll say things like, oh, you had good sales psychology, or the offer was good, you know, you did a good job activating buyer mentality, blah, blah, blah. But when you have a bad webinar, it's— it forces you to get in the mind of your client differently. When you have a good webinar, you end up focusing on all the things you did right, and you're looking at it from that perspective. It's not bad, but when you have a bad webinar, or if you have multiple bad webinars, now what you have to do is really deep dive into the psychology of the person who's watching, and that fundamentally makes you a better marketer. So I've had folks who, you know, got the choreography right, got the offer right, it's validated, they have the ads right, the conversion rate, everything, all the metrics look good, but it wasn't converting. And so I started to watch their webinar looking for little hints and clues that they were not activating buyer mentality. They were not shifting true belief. They were not hooking the, the viewer in with something that was extremely painful. And I said, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm watching this and I'm thinking to myself XYZ. And so as annoying as it is when webinars don't convert, you actually end up learning so much more. And I think this is why, you know, back in the day Russell Brunson, who was one of my first teachers in internet marketing, he said, you know, do a webinar every week until you hit a million dollars. And I remember at the time that he gave me that advice, on-demand webinars were becoming really popular, and I thought, well, man, why not just do an on-demand webinar so I don't have to do it live? But I'm eating crow a little bit because he was 100% right that the things that you learn by repeating a presentation over and over are invaluable if you are trying to get in the mind of your customer. So number 2 was, "Your kids have no idea how much you carry, and that's the point." I think summertime brings this up for a lot of us. We are trying to juggle summer schedules. We're trying to, you know, still be a human, be a business owner, a spouse, and there's a lot of logistics and dynamics because the routines are all off. And it's really easy to get in your head, and it's also really easy to want validation from your kids, like, I'm working so hard and I'm trying so hard and blah, blah, blah, except that the whole point of being a good parent is to not put that emotional burden on your kids. And this is something that I'm learning because I tend to doubt myself. I tend to have mother's guilt and things like that, and I need to work on my own certainty and my own strength rather than putting that on them. So that was not one that people responded to, but I'm, I'm just going through all 10. Number 3 was delusion is nearly impossible to reason with, and we're about to see a lot more of it. I actually did an entire podcast episode last week, maybe, or the week before, about AI and AI-induced psychosis, which could be a very real and dangerous thing that we are going to face as a society. And I, I think while we're all like super busy worrying about, you know, extinction and jobs and all this kind of stuff, what we're not realizing is that this incredibly powerful tool built with like addiction-level attachment, which I'm not gonna lie, I'm 100% addicted to, has the, the power to really send someone into a delusion, especially if they're already in crisis, in trauma, or mentally fragile. And I think this is a much bigger problem than even some of the bigger problems that everyone is worrying about. Number 4 was the line between compulsion and clarity is much smaller than I thought. I lived probably my entire life with undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I think I didn't think I had it because I didn't, you know, have a lot of the, the symptoms that you tend to associate with OCD. But compulsion and clarity, like, that line is super thin because what I used to think was clarity, like I'm clear about what I'm doing in my work, actually was compulsion. Compulsion to hustle more than your body can take, overthink, do beyond your normal capacity, like get burned out, all of that sort of stuff. Because I was— I felt like I had to in order to escape the fear of lack or the fear of not having enough money or whatever it was I was running from. And so now that I'm learning that that's actually a compulsion more than it is true clarity— clarity, being really clear on what you're doing and why you're doing it, is actually quite slow. And quiet and measured, and it's not super flashy. And I'm like, my brain is like, "Are we okay? Is everything okay here?" You know? So that is something that I have been learning, especially this summer as life has slowed way, way down. Number 5, I've talked about in an earlier podcast episode. It's called "Your Business Will Only Grow to the Level of Your Nervous System." And what I'm noticing is that when you ask people to try to stick to one thing over and over over, even when, you know, maybe it doesn't pan out exactly as you want, this is where you start to see just how unregulated you might be. And so if you have struggled to stick to one thing, yes, it's possible you didn't have the right thing or you didn't have the right coach. But if you have the right coach and you're pretty sure you have the right offer, if you are unable to stick to one thing, it's usually having to do with some dysregulation happening in your nervous system. Okay, number 6. This is the one that I got the most responses to. It was, my executive function is too strong. And most people, when they hear about executive function, they hear it in the context of like neurodivergence or ADHD. And people say, well, I struggle with executive function. So this is basically your prefrontal cortex, and it's how you, you know, decision-making and planning and organization, all of those skills that you see, you know, when you think about someone who's, you know, a productive member of society or a productive student in school. That's like the executive function at play, and it's just one part of our brain. Now, there are people who struggle with executive function, and they can be scattered and procrastinate and be late all the time, and, you know, they struggle like wishing they had better. But then there are people whose executive function works so well that it actually causes problems because other parts of the brain remain undeveloped and other types of regulation. So for me, this is my problem. I have an unregulated nervous system and high anxiety, and I've had it for a long time. And so I use my executive function, my logic, my, my planning, my problem solving, I use it to regulate anxiety. The issue is that if the anxiety gets to be too much, I have no other options. And so my executive function will crash, and then I will panic. And there's no better way to see this than, uh, like if I'm on an airplane and I'm scared, right? Because the stress signals are going up, up, up, up, up, and my executive function is trying very, very hard to rationalize and scan the environment and problem solve. And it, it can't keep up with the anxiety that's, that's going up because, and because I have no understanding of how to calm my nervous system any other way, when my executive function collapses, I am left with panic. And so I'm working on developing other ways to calm anxiety that have nothing to do with thinking, which is extremely foreign to me, but that is what I've been working on. Okay, number 7: It's going too fast to follow the crowd. You need a different way to carve your path. I'm hearing this over and over, and I'm experiencing it myself, which is I can't keep up. The AI revolution is making Everything go at lightning speed. It is impossible to keep track of. And so if you were the kind of person who sort of followed the trends and like, okay, here's the tactic of the quarter, you know, we— okay, let's try high ticket without sales calls, you know, or let's try this new tool or what have you. Well, that's not going to work anymore because instead of like one new trend a quarter, it's now like 15 new trends and 15 new tools a day. So how are you going to carve your path? And that's what I've been asking myself. Number 8 was a spiritual faith-based unexpected lesson. It is: if a spiritual teacher or guru bypasses repentance, it's dangerous, no matter how inspiring it sounds. Now, this is my personal worldview, so I understand that lots of people listening to me don't have this worldview, and that's fine. But for me, coming back into my faith has meant daily reading of my Bible, and I've also been completely out of the podcast, book seen in the Christian world for the last 12 years. So now I'm back, and when I look at what's out there compared to what I'm reading in scripture, I am finding myself absolutely flabbergasted at how much New Age, Gnosticism, heresy, outright heresy is plaguing many, many Christian— supposedly Christian— influencers right now. So that was just kind of like an unexpected oh my, and it has driven me to read my Bible, and I'm reading it almost an hour a day now to stay grounded. Okay, number 9: no matter how many times I say summer is hard, I forget how hard. And every year I warn all my clients, I say, hey, summer's coming, July and August, they're really bad, and sometimes June too. And despite all of my warnings By the end of the summer, me and all of our clients, my clients are just like, oh my gosh, this is brutal. And I just want to remind everyone that quarter 4 is coming and it always rebounds. And then number 10 was writing a book is the hardest thing I have ever done, but it's also weirdly not that hard. And I spent so much time worrying about how hard it was. Once I finally got over the hump. Now I feel like I've broken this barrier that I'm not intimidated about writing a book at all anymore. And this thing that has been hanging over my head for 3, 4, 5 years, now I'm like, okay, I'm ready to write another book. I promised myself I would not start another book until this one is out the door, but I feel like a monkey has finally left my back, that I have conquered this very difficult thing that I've never been able to do. And so that is a real unexpected you know, proud thing. So those were my 10 unexpected things. If any one of those resonates with you, let me know. DM me on Instagram, email me. Make sure to join my email list, emailsbyjulie.com. And I hope you have a great week. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.