Episode #641 - The Power Of Positive Thinking with Tanya Dalton, Founder & CEO at Inkwell Press

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm talking with Tanya Dalton from Ashvolt, North Carolina. Hello, Tanya.

Hi, how are you?

And we go, Tanya or Tanya?

Tanya.

Tanya. Okay. And so how long you've been in Asheville? For about 10 years now. 1012.

Little over 10 years. I've been here since 2012.

And came out of Dallas.

Yes, right. Lived in Dallas for a long time.

And it's nice to switch things up, isn't it? I mean to every now and then you need, you know, it's nice to have another place to go and meet new friends and get in a new, new climate. Even if it's a, you know, second a vacation home or something like that, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I think, I think change is so good for us. Right? It's getting out of your comfort zone. And I made the choice to live in Asheville. I have, you know, as an entrepreneur, I have all kinds of freedoms. One of those freedoms outside of time freedom and financial freedom is location freedom. I can do my job wherever I want, so why not live where I want to live?

You know, why torture yourself? You're only going to live once. You know, that's, that's, that's what I came to the conclusion about resorts. Like I don't want to go to resorts, I want to live in resorts. I want to walk out my front door and I want to be in a resort. And so the, that's why I'm in Palm beach and Aspen, you know, half and half, you know, I, I go back and forth, so good way to go. You know, it's just a matter of what, what you like in life. And that's the, the free. You pay a price to be an entrepreneur, but there are incredible rewards, so why not exercise them? And you should because it puts you in a better frame of mind. So when you're doing your business, you're at your best?

Yes, absolutely.

No matter what business you choose, it's going to be a challenge and you're not going to be great, you know, piddling, given a half hearted effort. So you, you know, part of it is, I think, Tanya, getting yourself in a situation all the way around that you can consistently perform at a peak level, you know, peak motivation, health insurance, energy. You, because you're wanting to do it, but you got to do that for yourself when you're an entrepreneur. Have you learned lessons on that?

Oh, without question. Without question. I think. I think everything is a choice. I like to say that really how you wake up, how you move through the world is 100% a choice. I can choose to either say, oh, I have to go to work, I have to do these things, or I get to go to work. I am lucky enough to get to do these things. And it's the same thing with where I live or what I eat or what I do throughout the day. All of it is a choice. And you do have to really motivate yourself, especially if you're an entrepreneur, because you don't have somebody standing over you saying, hey, you got to make sure you do these things right. So. So honestly, having that mindset of shifting the way that you think and really seeing that we do have so many opportunities, whether you're an entrepreneur or not, we all have thousands of choices throughout the day. It's just actively choosing to see the choices. That's the first step, right?

Yeah. Having your antenna up. Because the default situation is to not have your antenna up, and you just notice the bad things that happen. But what's the downside of that is that's eating up time where you could be noticing the positives that are coming your way. And all of us have. Have those good circumstances come along with. With the bad. But without question.

Without question. I mean, that's. That's frequency illusion right there, right? Have you ever. Have you ever been in a situation where, let's say that you want to get. Let's say you want to buy a BMW.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden you look around and there's BMWs everywhere. BMWs left and right in front of you and behind you at the stoplight. They're everywhere. And the thing is, is honestly, it's not that there's all of a sudden all these BMWs on the street. It's that your brain has started filtering for it. And that's what. That's what our brain does. We have this reticular activating system in our brain, and it filters information because otherwise we would be bombarded with way too much information throughout the day. So we tell our brain what's important to us, whether it's positive thoughts or BMWs or opportunities or whatever it is, and our brain says, okay, this is what's important. I'm going to start filtering. I'm going to start making sure that you start to see these things more often. So all of a sudden, when your brain hears that, hey, you're interested in a BMW. I'm going to show you all the BMWs. Right? And it's the same thing with positivity. It's the same thing with choices. It's the same thing with opportunities. We, we tell our brain what to filter for and our brain will do it for us. So this is why that whole concept, that idea of positive thinking, why it works, why the concept of manifesting works, because your brain is filtering for what it is you're wanting to bring to the forefront.

Talk to me about launching your business. You know, one thing grabbed my attention in the bullet points about your background. You launched your business on a shoestring budget and within 18 months you had a seven figure business. So talk about that. Yeah, well, you make that happen.

Talk about choices. Well, my very first business, I started with $50 and zero business experience. And you know, honestly, it was again, choosing how I wanted to see myself. I could either see myself as, you know, somebody who didn't know what she was doing and was fumbling and bumbling around making mistakes left and right, or I could choose to see myself as I wanted to be. I could choose to see myself as a woman who was ready to truly step into entrepreneurship. And again, this comes down to that whole idea and that concept of how do I want to think about myself? How do I want to identify who I am, not just to myself, but to other people as well. I think it's really important. I think mindset is your secret weapon when it comes to stepping into greatness, because your mindset dictates everything. Right?

Right.

And so that's the thing. For me, it was really looking at all the things I needed to do and thinking about, okay, what are my strengths, what are my strong points? Maybe I didn't have a background with an MBA or any sort of specialized training, but I had certain gifts, certain things I was really good at, one of which is operations. I'm really good at understanding productivity. And so I knew that with all the things you have to do, especially as an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel like you have to wear all the hats and you have to wear them all at the same time. And what if you don't even look good in hats? Right? But you're switching hats throughout the day, Finance hat, operations hat, customer service, doing all the different things. So for me, one of the things I started doing was really making a decision about where do I want to focus today. So I started theming out my day. So Mondays was for marketing, Tuesdays was for product Development Wednesdays was for inventorying and stocking and doing those types of things. And that allowed me to choose where I was going to focus, to go deeper. In those days, it's really easy to go shallow because there's so many different areas to lean into. Or I could choose to say, okay, Mondays for marketing. I'm going to go deep into marketing, and I'm going to give that the majority of my time. And that's not to say I would ignore a finance issue or ignore an operations issue. I still would take care of those, but marketing would take the majority of my day. And honestly, it's this focus, choosing where you want to focus. That's what allowed me to scale to seven figures in less than 18 months. And I only had three employees, me, my husband, and one other person who was working part time. I think there's this belief that you have to have big teams or you have to have some kind of fancy, you know, letters after your name, or you have to have some kind of special something. And the truth is, it's choosing where you want to focus and then leaning into that fully, wholly and completely so you can move the needle in your business or in your life.

And so how did you make a $45,000 mistake early, early in your career?

Well, yeah, I made a lot. I made a lot of mistakes, and one of them was $45,000. That was not a fun mistake. But I tell you what, you make a $45,000 mistake, you're not going to forget it.

Yeah.

So we had your product that we were getting manufactured, and there were all kinds of issues. I had. I had partnered with the first person that. That I felt like could get me what I needed. Instead of really taking my time, diving into the contracts, understanding the relationship, I moved a little too fast into that relationship and with this person who was my liaison with my manufacturing plants. So I have a physical product, so we have manufacturing and factories we deal with. So my liaison was not really delivering in the timeline that he had promised. And it kept going on and on where we were. We were getting to the point where we needed. We needed product, and we needed it now because we had already started the marketing push. We had already started, you know, advertising and doing all of those things. And I said, we need the product. We need it now. And he said, okay, we can, we can. We can overnight the product to you. We can get it to you. It's going to be four to five thousand dollars. So I said, okay, let's. Let's do it. You you know, when you have something air freighted, FedEx doesn't tell you how much it's going to be until after it's arrived, because they don't know. So the product arrives, we start selling it, we're moving on, and a week later we get the bill. And it's not 4 to 5,000, $45,000 for the product. And it was. Yeah, I mean, at that point too, especially when you're starting off your business, you're not on a shoestring, you're barely. I mean, there's not a shoe to be had, right? Every penny, you are pinching as tightly as you can. And I was lucky because I had an Amex and I called Amex and I said, you know, here's my situation. Can you help me out? And they were like, yep, absolutely. So Amex was a great partner for us, making sure that we were able to pay this bill. But honestly, if I hadn't said yes to, okay, I'm going to pay this freight bill, we would have been dead in the water. And a lot of times you have to make the risk, you have to make the mistakes. What's great about that $45,000 mistake, if you can say that anything's great about a $45,000 mistake, is now I'm very, very careful about my partnerships. I make sure I read all the fine print. I am in charge of deadlines and timelines. So I learned a lot from that. I think. I think we often forget and we're so scared to take a risk and because of the failure, but the truth is, because of the failure, you succeed. We should all be striving for some sort of failure rate in not just our businesses, but in our lives in general. If you're not failing, you're not trying, you're not sticking your neck out, you're not stepping out of your comfort zone. You're staying where it's safe, you're staying where it's easy. And you're not going to scale and grow the way you want to. So actively seeking out and setting an expectation of, okay, we're going to have a certain number of failures, and setting that as not just something that could happen, but as an expectation, I think is a really important thing when it comes to mindset as an entrepreneur, as a business owner.

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Also, it makes it inevitable that you're a lot tougher cookie to deal with when people miss deadlines.

Oh yeah, without question.

You know, you're very understanding. You know, you make friends with everybody and it's not your job to be everybody's friend, especially people who don't, you know, could basically stab any in the back. But you don't see it like that. It's like I can put up with that. You know, it's just like, you know, business is dropping the ball in a friendship is one thing, dropping the ball in business is an attack.

That's a whole other thing. And, and yet we do that a lot of times, not just with our partnerships or with vendors, but also with our team where we justify, we make excuses, we say, okay, they're having a tough time. Right, Right. All of these things are important to understand that the people that you're working with when it comes to business are here to support you, to support the mission behind what you're doing in your business. And if they're not supporting you, what are you doing with them?

Right. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, you know, you're either positive, you, there's no such thing as neutral. You know, you're either a positive or you're negative. There's no such thing as neutral. You know, somewhere where you, there's no cushion, you know, for people to just kind of get away with things and miss deadlines and, you know, because that's, that's really the price of being a contractor on your team is that you. Someone that you can rely on pretty much 100% of the time. And that allows you to go do what you need to do and make other commitments. But then it becomes a daisy chain of dominoes falling backwards when they cause you to miss deadlines and then your goodwill is damaged. And so as you started out, what got you to the point to where you're starting businesses? Where did, where did all that thing come from?

Well, it's funny because I spent a long time calling myself an accidental entrepreneur that I just, oh, like I tripped and fell and landed in it or something like that, because it wasn't something, as I mentioned earlier, that I went to school for, that I had a degree, and I had not even taken a single business course in college. So I called myself an accidental entrepreneur because it wasn't something I had anticipated. But when I go back and I look at the breadcrumbs of my life, you know, like the little trail behind me, I see all these little moments of entrepreneurship that were in my past where I started a little purse company and I did a. I did greeting cards for a while, and I. I created websites for a little bit. But, you know, I just saw those as these little things that I did on the side, and it wasn't really who I was. I now realize all of that gathered together. All of that has gotten to me where I am, the big things, the little things, all of it together. But I really didn't know I was going to step into being a big business owner, being an entrepreneur, until I had a conversation with my husband. My husband, he worked for international companies, Fortune 500 companies, doing international marketing. And he would leave our home in Dallas, Texas, at the time, and he would buy a ticket called the around the World ticket. So literally, he would leave Dallas and he would circle the globe all the way around and come back the other side. So he'd be gone for three or four weeks at a time. And I had a conversation with him at one point where I was in Dallas and he was on the other side of the planet, and I was telling him the things that the kids were doing and what was going on in our world. And he got really, really quiet. And I said, are you okay? And he said, I'm missing everything. I'm missing all the moments. I'm missing the milestones with the kids. I'm missing all the things. And I hung up the phone with my husband that night, and I made a really big, bold choice in my bright yellow kitchen that night. I decided I was going to grow my little side hobby business that I started with 50 bucks. I decided I was going to grow that to absorb his MBA income so that he could do what he was passionate about, which was marketing, but he wouldn't have to travel. And we could really have that lifestyle freedom we wanted. And that for me, was the tripwire into really stepping into entrepreneurship, because to me, it was very different. All of a sudden, I had what I now call a cathedral, a landmark, this big, beautiful, bright future that I'm looking forward to, far off into the future that I know what it Is I want now, how do I get there? So this idea, this concept of running a big company was brand new to me, and here I am.

How old were you at this time? Well, I'm sorry, How old were you at this moment? When that phone call.

How old was I? Well, that was in 2008, so I'd have to do the math because I can't even remember how old I am today.

Yeah, you were 2008. That many years younger. And so how many kids? How many kids and all did you have? And how long have you been married to get to this point?

Yeah, so I got married in 2000. My husband and I have been married 23 years at this point. So at that point, we've been married eight years. And we had two kids who were small at the time. I mean, my son Jack was five, and my daughter Kay was about, you know, one, one and a half, almost two. And so they were just small kids playing at my feet. And that's really how I started that first business was with kids playing at my feet.

Yeah.

And I worked hard on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that was the day they went to preschool. And Monday, Wednesday, Friday were lighter work days. And then, you know, as they got older and I was able to spend more time on business and growing, I was able to kind of shift that. That timeline of where I was spending my time. But even at that point, with doing that minimal amount of work, I was scaling to six figures.

That's. So how did you know to do that? You know, how did you. What was your role model? What were you copying?

I wasn't copying anyone. And I think that might have been a little bit of my secret to my success, quite frankly. There was. Especially with women. I didn't know any woman who was doing anything like I was doing. I would look at what a lot of the men were doing. My dad was not an entrepreneur. He worked for, you know, a Corporation, a Fortune 100 company for his whole career. And, you know, I. I think that was part of it was I just really went head down with what. What do I think I am good at? What are my strengths, what's in my zone of genius? And I just leaned into that even more. And in a lot of ways, that helped me, but in a lot of ways, it really held me back. You know, it's funny. How did it help a long time? Well, for a long time, I felt like I was on my own little private island. And not the fruity cocktail kind of private island. That sounds amazing. More like Tom Hanks, you know, talking to a volleyball type island where you're going a little crazy. Right, right. Where you're bouncing the ideas just off of yourself. And when I began to realize there were more people in this world of entrepreneurship and I was able to interact and connect with them more, that helped open up my eyes even more to what was possible.

So I think that really is phenomenal that you were able to do this without having at least people to bounce ideas off of and work through situations. You had to use your husband a lot. You had to bounce ideas off of him a lot.

Yes, absolutely.

And he's a marketing guy.

He's a marketing guy and he has his MBA with a marketing specialization. So. So I like to say that, you know, I got my MBA on the streets basically through osmosis of, you know, working alongside of him.

Well, how this thing about International. I, I think you've given me a clue where, you know, because you're, you know, in your biography and basically information about you International keeps coming up. You know, your book, your book has been translated into eight languages internationally. Best selling author. And so the International Advantage was actually your podcast, is that right?

Intentional Advantage.

Okay, I read that wrong then. It is time for new glasses. And I have had, I have had the exam and they are being ordered.

You just need to make the appointment.

Yeah, no, no, it's been made and the glasses are on the way. They're just not here yet. Okay, so it is the Intentional Advantage, not the International.

Yes, but there is a lot of International. You're right. My books have been translated into eight languages around the world. My book the Joy of Missing out was named a top 10 business book of the year by Fortune magazine. That's a pretty crazy thing for somebody who has zero business degree, no business courses.

Very crazy. A very crazy thing. In fact, I don't think it's legal really for that to happen. I don't think you have permission. I don't think you have a visa stamp for that.

I think that's the best part is I don't need one.

Yeah.

And that's the thing I don't need. I think so often we hide behind this idea that we don't have this or we don't have this knowledge or we don't have. It's up to you to choose what you want and then go after it. Absolutely.

How do you think that happened, that you were able to score that and was that your first book right out of the gate?

Yes, my first book, the Joy of.

Missing out and so why do you think that or what have you heard back from the world, the echo back from the world about why that book resonated so well and people connected with that so much?

Yeah, well, I think because we've. We've spent a lot of time in fomo, the fear of missing out. And so that whole contrarian idea of actively choosing to miss out and finding joy in it is. It's a very different way. It's a. It is a shifting of your mindset. Because I truly do believe it's in the things that we say no to. It's choosing where you want to focus, where you want to lean and spend your. Your time, your energy, your focus. That is where you're going to find the joy and the happiness. I truly believe that we all have joy and happiness in the cracks and crevices of our everyday life. It's just that we're so damn busy, we don't see it. We have too much going on. And so by really deciding where you want to lean and what's amazing is, you know, that book was named, as I said, a top 10 business book of the year, but it's not even necessarily about business. It's about life in general and how you want to live. I mean, how you do anything is how. How you do everything. Isn't that right? That's what people say. And so it's. It's this idea of you get to choose the little things, the big things, the in between things, and then doubling down on that, really looking at those as an investment.

Where did it dawn on you or when did it really dawn on you? The missing out was a good thing, you know, overcoming the fomo.

Yeah. Well, I had. I had this moment when my kids were little where I was stirring a pot of spaghetti. And I remember because it was four minutes that totally changed my life. Me stirring this pot of spaghetti. My husband had come come back at that point. He was still working, and I had my two small kids. I was starting my business, so I was doing a lot of things, starting to figure out how to put up a website, trying to do all these different things. And I'm stirring this pot of spaghetti and I'm worn out, I'm exhausted. My kids have run me ragged, I've run myself ragged. And I hear the garage door open up and I think, oh, John is home. Which means relief. Relief doesn't mean I get a break. It means now I can pass the kids off to him because I can do the 10,000 other things I need to do throughout the day. And my husband doesn't come in the door. A minute passes, doesn't come in. Two minutes pass, still doesn't come in. Three minutes. I'm now like at, you know, I don't know what def con level, but it's pretty high. I'm pretty angry. Four minutes pass, he still hasn't come in. And I am furious. I stomp across the kitchen, I fling open the garage door, and I look at him. He's sitting in his car and he's laughing with some bit on the radio. And I was furious. I was so mad. And I thought to myself, I would never do that. I can't believe he's out there. And then I thought, oh, I would never do that. I would never give myself four minutes to laugh with a bit on the radio. I wouldn't. I wouldn't give myself four minutes just to decompress before walking in the door. That's when I realized I was getting a lot of my value. I was seeing a lot of my worth in my doing. Trying to do everything, trying to be everything, trying to do all the things. Having a to do list that was three miles too long. And that's really when I realized productivity is not about doing more. It's doing what's most important, right? And if you are doing what's most important, it means you have to say no to some of these other things. We have to walk away from that feeling that we have to do all, be all hashtag right, do all the things and really lean into what is most important. And when we do that, that's when we moved the needle. Now, I didn't get that lesson right there. Standing in the doorway of my garage, it took me some time to unpack it and really dive into it, but I realized that's not who I wanted to be. I didn't want to be that woman at the end of the day who was worn out, exhausted, frustrated, going to bed and thinking, oh, I should have done more. Why did I get more done? Even though I was busy all day long, I wanted to figure out what was most important to me. What did I really want to say yes to? Which means if I'm gonna say yes, I gotta say no to some other things. And that's really where that started to click for me. And I began to figure that out.

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