Day 4 of our Money-Making Challenge! What if this is actually EASY?
In this Facebook Live session Mary Schiller, author of Let’s Make Money Honey, shares a mindset‑shift that frames money‑making as a simple, creative activity rather than a daunting task. She opens by acknowledging her cold‑ridden voice and greets participants, then moves into two personal stories that illustrate her point. The first story recounts how, despite no prior sales experience, she closed roughly $250,000 in high‑ticket sales within two months by approaching calls as helpful conversations without personal pressure. The second story describes how she wrote a 100,000‑word novel in a month, debunking the myth that such a project is inherently hard. From these anecdotes she extracts a core principle: when you detach emotional stakes, treat the process as a game, and view money as an internal creative resource, the activity feels easy. Throughout the session she engages with audience members, answering questions about the perceived scarcity of money, limiting beliefs, and how to experiment with pricing. She repeatedly emphasizes that money originates from within, that perceived value is what people pay for, and that failure is merely data. The talk culminates in an invitation to keep experimenting, follow what feels fun, and to join the next day of the challenge and the upcoming Let’s Make Money Honey program.
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Hello, hello. This is Mary Schiller. And as you can tell, this cold has really done a number on my voice. So I apologize in advance that you're going to have to listen to me sort of croak through this presentation. So please do bear with me. Actually, this is quite a bit more voice than I had this morning. When I got up this morning, I really couldn't say anything at all. And so all day I was like, oh my gosh, am I even going to have a conversation Am I going to be able to talk with people later today or am I just going to be talking and nothing's coming out of my mouth? And my husband was like, well, you could set one of the cats up and she could sort of have the conversation with them. So we had a couple of laughs about that. So anyway, I will do my best to, to stay vocalizing during this talk because I'm actually really, really excited about what I'm going to share with you on this Facebook Live. Again, I'm Mary Schiller, author and coach and creator of Let's Make Money Honey. I want to welcome you. If you're watching live, give me a thumbs up or tell me who you are in the chat box so I can see who's here today. If you're watching on the replay, thank you for doing that. Hey, Joanne. Please feel free to post comments because I do come back and check afterwards. We have, I was thinking about the first 3 Facebook Lives that we've had in this group and I was realizing that we have really covered a lot of ground. Hi there, thank you. We have really covered a lot of ground. I'm not even sure that I could recap everything. Hey Peter, oh, it's nice to see you. Hi Karen, how are you? Hey Dale, yeah, well, I'm feeling better but my voice hasn't really caught up to things. I kind of sound, I don't know. Sometimes when in the old days, my voice would get like this, you know, I would pretend I was like Marlene Dietrich or somebody, but I'm a little too old for that now. But anyway, I was realizing that we have covered so much ground so far in this challenge. And you guys have been posting such amazing comments in the group and I'm going to address a few questions on this call as well. But I hope that you're starting to see that money can be experienced in a very different way. If you have been feeling stressed about it, if you've been feeling sort of boxed in by it, I hope that you're starting to see that there is a whole other world that exists related to money and all kinds of things in life. Since we're particularly talking about money. So I'd love to know if you'd like to just take a moment to write me a note in the chat if you are experiencing something new around money, just say, "Yes, I am," or, or something because even myself, I'm definitely continuing to see new things in this area and it's one reason why I'm hosting this group is because I like to learn too, I like to get new insights and ideas into money and other areas of life. So this is benefiting me as much as it is you, hopefully. So I want to thank you for being here. So for this Facebook Live, I'm going to start with— I have a couple of stories that will illustrate my main point of this conversation. And the first story has to do with selling. Now, if you are at all thinking about having your own business or if you have your own business or if you have been around the block a few times, you know that sales and selling— Oh, great, Nikki, that's great. You know that sales and selling is a humongous topic, right? It's like one of those things that's got sort of a mystique around it. And in the, in the book, Let's Make Money, Honey, I mentioned my friend who has done very, very well financially in life because of his ability to sell. And I knew when I knew him as a teenager, he was just so good at talking to people in a way that put them at ease. He could sell anything to anybody. I swear it was really funny. It was sometimes embarrassing because we would go, and me and him and a group of friends would go into a shop or something, and he would never ever pay the sticker price for anything. He would always bargain, you know, and get the price down. And we would just be like, can you just pay the sticker price? Do we have to do this every time? But he was so good at it. To him, it was fun. Oh, great, Joanne. That's cool. Oh, thanks, Doug. A few years ago when I decided to try to start my own business again on the side, I was realizing maybe I should get some help in learning how to sell. When I had worked for myself previously, all of my work came in through word-of-mouth referrals. I was a copywriter and so I just got work from other clients spreading my name around. And then for a long time I only had the same like 2 or 3 clients over and over again, so I didn't have to sell anything. I just worked for them consistently. So I had never really investigated this whole area of sales and selling, and I had never in my wildest dreams seen myself as a quote unquote salesperson. I just, the whole idea of selling just seemed a little bit abhorrent to me. I don't know if you guys can relate to that, but I hadn't really gone in that direction at all. But I thought, you know, if I'm going to start a new business, maybe it'd be helpful this time to get some training related to sales. So I took a course in selling and it didn't really help me at all. And I thought, well, gosh, you know, I guess it's true. I guess I'm just not very good at this selling thing. You know, I should just not even bother trying because I'm just It just isn't my thing. And here's the irony of this. So in 2015, when I was looking to leave my full-time job that I'd felt so stuck in forever, I was, I started working as a freelancer for this startup doing some writing stuff for them. And eventually, you know, they called and said, we'd like to offer you a full-time job. And I was like, oh, cool. And I was thinking maybe they were going to offer me something related to editing or managing the freelance team or something like that. And they said, no, we want to offer you a sales job, selling. And I remember thinking, are you nuts? Like, what are you saying? You want me to be your salesperson? And so I had a few conversations with them and they explained, you know, what they were really looking for in a salesperson was somebody who was simply personable. Who was intelligent and who could connect with people. That was what they felt was most important. And what I was selling was actually quite expensive. The cheapest package price was $10,000. And it went up, at that time it went up to like $40,000. So this was not cheap stuff we were talking about. And so I was a little intimidated by that 'cause I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. Hey Kim, good to see you. Hi Zoe. Yeah, I know, sales is just a weird, weird thing. And so I was so sick of my old job that when they offered me this full-time job, plus it was a telecommuting job, I was like, okay, I'll do it. And meanwhile, I'm like, oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into here? You know, what if I'm really bad at this or whatever? And I just kind of set all of that old thinking off to the side. And so I started working for them and for the first couple of weeks, They did some sales training with me and the other salesperson that they'd hired, and he had had some experience in sales. He was much more fluent in sort of the sales speak than I was. And so we went through this training and then we started doing these sales calls. And I was doing probably, I was doing a lot of calls. I was doing probably at least 3 to 4 calls a day. And you might think, well, hi Vivian. And you might think, well, that's not that many, but they were long. Like some of these calls would end up being like 90 minutes. Minutes long. And so it was quite the marathon days I was spending doing these sales. And so that was like in August of 2015, and I had not paid attention. Now this is how naive I am about this sort of thing. I had not paid attention at all to my quote-unquote sales figures. I didn't have like a running list of people that I had successfully sold to, if you will, who had signed on the dotted line and how many I hadn't. And I wasn't paying attention to any of that. I knew that I was signing up a fair number of people, but I wasn't keeping track of the statistics at all. So in October, so about 2 months later, we all got together. We were all in different parts of the world actually, and we all got together for a quarterly meeting in Las Vegas and we were going through the sales figures. And the then CEO of the company says, so Mary, I wanted to tell you that, you know, you had by far the highest, not just the sales gross number, but your percentage of sales per call that was made was more than twice the other guy. And I was like, what? I couldn't believe it. I honestly couldn't believe it. I was looking at the numbers. And I had, this is really interesting. So in 2 months I had sold something like a quarter million dollars of this service to people in my first 2 months of quote unquote selling. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. And I had, like I said, I had a really, isn't that nuts? I had a really high percentage of closing the sale. So I don't remember what that figure was, but you know, it was pretty high. And for something that was that expensive, like I said, it started at $10,000, I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. So the CEO at that time asked me, well, you know, you have to share with us, what are you doing on these calls? What is your secret? Because, you know, we'd like to learn something. And I looked at him and I said, well, I guess it's a couple of things. I says, one, I said, this probably isn't the right thing to say to you since you are my boss, but I just don't really care whether they sign up or not. I just want to give them all the information they need in order to make a good decision. The second thing is there's nothing really riding on this for me. There's really nothing riding on it at all. I just have these wonderful conversations with these really interesting people. I make sure that they have all the information they need, and that's it. And he looked at me kind of wide-eyed, and he was like, what do you mean there's nothing riding on this? He's like, well, you know, if you don't do well in sales, you're probably gonna get let go. Ironic, since he did let me go a few months later. But anyway, and I was like, yeah, well, I'll just do something else then. You know, I'll just do something else. And I just had this overwhelming sense of, you know, I guess this really isn't as hard as I thought it was. You know, if I don't have much sort of emotional investment in this, if I'm really being present with people and I'm simply trying to connect with them and have a good conversation and being helpful, that's all there is. That's just all there is. To it. So that was a big lesson to me. The second story I want to tell you, and I'll tell you the theme of this call, but you may be sort of getting an inkling, was back in 2012, 2011, 2012, I started writing a novel, and I'd never written a novel before. And the idea of writing a novel was like, oh my gosh, like this is like climbing Mount Everest. You know, I had been, a copywriter, and I'd done all kinds of other writing. I've written, you know, scripts for television commercials and radio and all kinds of things, but I'd never done fiction, and I had never tried to write a novel, like 90,000, 100,000 word novel. And, um, so I started working on it, and I got to probably about the two-thirds point, and I just kind of flipped out. I was like, oh, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just gonna I stopped this whole thing. Just gonna quit. And then I think it was in early 2015, I decided to pick it up again. And by, no, actually it was, I think it was, yeah, it was 2015. And I decided to pick it up again and I thought to myself, you know, this just can't be that hard. Lots of people do this, so it just can't be that hard. So I sat down, And I was working full-time at the time, but every spare minute I had, I worked on this novel and I finished it in a month. So I wrote approximately, how many thousand words was it? I think I wrote about another 40,000 words in a month and I finished it. And I was really pleased with how it turned out. And I shared it with some of my friends and family and they were really happy about it. I remember having this feeling of, gosh, that really wasn't that hard. Like, here I had sort of built up this whole thing about writing a novel, and it really wasn't that hard. And I'm now actually in the process of revising that novel because I came up with some new ideas for it that I think will make it even better. So I'd like to self-publish it next year, or maybe even find a real publisher for it if I could. That'd be really exciting. And so those are two kind of recent examples to me of this notion that what if this thing, whatever this thing is that we've looked at that seems so difficult, what if it's actually easy? And I'd love to put that question to you in terms of making money. What if making money is actually easy? Easy? What if it's not this big scary thing? What if it's as natural as breathing? What if it just is something that's simply part of life that we don't have to obsess over? Oh, you like that one, Vivian? That's cool. Exactly. So we can look at something like I did about sales and like I did about writing a novel as something that were completely out of my zone. Like I had no, no inkling whatsoever that I was capable in either of those areas. And you know, keep in mind too that by the time I tried both of them, I was in my 50s already. So, you know, I also had thinking like, Mary, if you were supposed to write fiction, you would have done it when you were in your 20s. You know, nobody starts writing fiction when they're 50-something. Are you nuts? You know, what are you doing? I had all kinds of thinking like that. And I just kept coming back to this idea of, you know, what if it's just not that hard? What if it's actually easy? Yes, Susanna, like you did about writing knitting patterns. Now again, that was something that you had sort of seen as beyond your capabilities because it wasn't something you'd ever actually tried to do before. You know, you were kind of a a seat-of-the-pants knitter designer. And once you actually sat down and tried to write the pattern down, it really wasn't that hard. And so, so that is really my point of this particular conversation we're having is what if this is actually easy? What if the whole making money thing is easy and it just looks hard to us because we've been staring at a bunch of old thinking about it for so long. And we've forgotten, we've forgotten, as we said in a previous conversation, that this creativity that we possess as human beings is available to us in everything. There is no such thing as a segmentation of human creativity. It doesn't work like that. It's available to us in anything and in everything that we want to try to do. Hi, Zoe. Doesn't making money rely on other people who are generally not predictable giving it to you? Um, well, I see where you're coming from on that question, but, um, I think there is some predictability to it. One of the things that we talked about, and I think it's important to reiterate, is that money isn't coming from out there. You know, money is like everything else coming from within us. We are always the source of it, just like we are the source of every other experience we have in this life. Everything comes from within us. And like I was saying with somebody, I believe in this group, that really making money, quote unquote, is nothing more than listening to some inspiration, creating something that someone else sees as valuable, and asking them to pay you for it. There's really no mystery to it. And if you start to look at making money from that vantage point, I think it starts to look very simple. It's like, and if, you know, I'm, I am not hesitant to say that there have been plenty of things that I have put out there that have not been purchased by anybody. I've made things, I put them out there for sale, and nobody's bought. And I remember having one of those moments a couple— when was that? Maybe a year and a half ago or so. And I really thought I put something together that people would really like and nobody was interested. And I thought to myself, well, that's fine. You know, maybe the timing wasn't right or maybe I didn't present it in a way that they understood. Doesn't mean that the idea is bad. It's just maybe not the right time. And because I've now really kind of seen for myself that there's nothing riding on any of this, that it's all about trying something, experimenting, seeing what happens, and then going from there, it just was like more data for me to use, if you will. It wasn't like, oh my gosh, I'm this horrible failure. It was like, oh yeah, well, that didn't feel so great, but, you know, I learned something from that and I'll take that with me into the next a project. And so I don't, you know, there's lots of ways if we're looking at actually making money, there's lots of ways that we can test things. You know, we can test people's interest just by asking them for a dollar for something before we ask them for $500. You know, are they willing to pay anything for this? That's a good test. So, you know, it's really just a matter of experimenting and realizing that there doesn't have to be all of this heaviness around this topic. That it can be experienced in a lighthearted and experimental, game-like way. So I don't know if that was helpful to you, Zoe. If not, let me know. Okay, cool. So what do you think about this? Do I sound crazy? I know I sound sick, but do I sound crazy when I say, you know, what if this making money thing is actually really easy? You know, maybe it's just that you haven't tried it in a way, in a different way from what you've always been doing. And so if you gave yourself the freedom to try something new, you just never know what would happen. You know, one of the things that I would really like to do in the coming year is to really get good at writing fiction. That's something that I plan to devote a lot of time to in 2018. Because I just, I found the process actually of writing that novel really exciting and fun. And I realized that, you know, there's this whole aspect of myself that I haven't even explored. And so if we're looking at it from the money-making side, there's lots and lots of ways that we can make money that we haven't even begun to explore yet. So what would happen if you gave yourself permission to just Go explore those and have fun and see what happens. Hi, Kathy. I like the way I see— oops, see money is the way I'm projecting others see money. I say this because I don't want to take money from others because I know how limited it is. Oh, well, that's an easy one because money is not limited at all. Is there a, a number that indicates how much money there is in the world? Because if there is, I'm not aware of it. Money is limitless. There is enough of it and more for everyone because again, we are the source of it. And since we're limitless, so is it. So I never worry about that. You know, people always— and talking about sales, you know, one of the things that often comes up when people are sort of dealing with sales, especially if they're I've noticed this with a lot of coaches is they're always worried about how is somebody gonna pay for this. Well, I don't worry about that because I know that everyone has the capability of paying for whatever they wanna pay for. That's really not my concern at all. So, you know, I would rather show someone that than make an assumption that they can't do it, if that makes sense, Kathy. Oh, cool. Okay. So let me know if you have any other questions about that because I think that's a really, really common thought that people have, that money is limited, money is finite, and there's only so much of it to go around. And, you know, if somebody pays me $50 for X, then they don't have that $50 to buy groceries or something. That's just all made-up thoughts. That's— there's no truth in that whatsoever. We have as much money as we need available to us at all times, no matter how much is in our bank account. That amount is irrelevant to me. It's just a number. It doesn't have any— it's no reflection on how much is actually available to me, if that makes sense. So I don't even look at the bank account number with any feelings of importance at all anymore. It seems very irrelevant. Yeah, it is life-changing, right? Kathy, Peter, I think I get that making money is easy. There are certainly instances when this has been the case. It's thinking that my ideas won't work which can stamp out my ideas virtually before I begin to explore them. So yes, and I'm glad you said that because I wanted to go to a couple of questions. Dale, in one of the discussions in the group, had been asking about, you know, there's all these thoughts that come into your mind about, oh, I can't, you know, it's not possible or whatever. And I think if you walk away from this challenge with one thing, I would love for it to be this, that you can have any thought at all. And it has no relevance to what you will do or what you can do or can't do. Those kinds of thoughts are just like, I don't know what, I don't have a good word for them today, but your thinking can't stop you is what I'm trying to say. That would be like saying, I think I wrote this in the thing, that would be like saying that the clouds can somehow stop the sky or the waves can stop the ocean. It's not possible for that to happen. So don't worry about any of those thoughts that you have. We all have them. We all have them. You know, I'm sure there isn't, you know, thinking of myself as a writer and knowing what kinds of thoughts come into my head. If I stopped to pay attention to those and gave them any importance, I would never write anything at all. I mean, that's how loud they can sometimes be. But I know that they have no power over me. They have no connection to my capabilities and my my creativity at all. So I think you can freely go in whatever direction you want, no matter what's going on in your head at any given time. So I don't know if that's helpful, Peter. Doug, people are willing to pay for perceived value. Yeah, it's really, and this is the other piece, I'm really glad you said that, Doug, because, you know, we don't always know exactly what someone is paying for. That makes sense, you know. I may think that, you know, people are paying for access to me or something, but that may not be at all what they're paying for. They're probably paying for a change that they want to see in their life, you know, or people who buy a certain perfume are paying for this notion, this value that, you know, they can be more like the celebrity who's being, who's on the poster for it or whatever. You know, people are paying for all kinds of things that we can't even begin to understand. So that's why I like to come back to what's simple and what's easy. And that seems to me to be listening to my own inspiration and creating something that at least looks like it could be valuable to someone else and then testing it to see if that's true. That's pretty much all there is to this making money thing as far as I can tell. Um, so, um, are you guys with me on that? You know, that it seems like it's this sort of big, scary thing, but in actuality, it's really pretty simple. Another question that somebody had that I really wanted to address too, I think it was Farina, said that she— and this goes back to what you were saying just now, thanks, you guys, Peter, about, you know, you'll have some ideas and then they seem to get sort of snuffed out right away. And I think Marina was saying that she'll come up with an idea. And then as soon as she sort of attaches the in order to make money piece to it, everything starts to get very heavy and kind of falls apart. And so I think there's a couple of ways we can look at that. One is kind of like I was saying earlier in my sales story, I wasn't even thinking about the fact that if I didn't do well at sales, I could lose my job. Like, I wasn't— it wasn't on my mind at all. I was really just trying to give people a good experience on the phone and trying to be helpful to them. And so the money piece was just not even in my head at all. And I think that's why I did well, frankly, because I had no thinking about that whatsoever. And I also would like to say that at that time, I was the sole breadwinner of our household, so you could say there was pressure on me to do well in that job, but it wasn't, that wasn't part of my experience on those calls at all. And so I think that's one thing is we can simply act from, from who we are as people and what we want to try to give to the world and, you know, let the money chips fall where they may. The other thing though that I've also found fun is playing with the idea of making money, like really making that a focus, you know, as part of this challenge. Like, what if I could make $200 in the next 5 days so I could go buy that purse that I want at Béaugevais? You know, how could I, how could I make that happen? Let's find out. And treating the whole thing of making money as a game as well. And that to me seems really fun and exciting. It doesn't have to have that Oh my gosh, you know, if I don't make the money for this, it's, you know, the world's going to end or all that. Like I used to see money. So I don't know, Peter, if that also addresses it, but I feel like there's kind of two stories along those lines and both can be useful, if you will. The one of just realizing that there's nothing riding on anything, you know, I mean, not to get too sort of heady about things, but You know, we already have everything. And I don't just mean physical things. We already have everything. We came into this life with everything. We will go out with everything. And what we have in terms of external things makes no difference. You know, we all have everything already, whether we have a dollar in the bank or a million dollars in the bank, we're all the same. We all have the same beautiful gifts in terms of being human. And so once we are playing from that as the baseline, it's like the rest of it just seems really fun and interesting to play with. And I find making money and that whole area to be an incredible, incredibly creative playing field. So I hope that was helpful, Peter. I'm just going to open the window here a little bit. Hang on a second. Need just a little bit of air. It's cold out. I haven't been out of this apartment in like 3 days 'cause I've been sick, so. But it's been raining here. So what other questions can I answer for you? How is this landing for you in terms of, you know, could making money actually be easy? Could it be easy? Could something that has seemed hard actually not be hard? I'm betting you can think of examples like Susanna did of things in your life that used to seem difficult to you that don't anymore. You know, I can tell you another example from my current life situation is it used to seem very, very scary to me to try to speak French to anyone. And I'm really having to get over that. So now it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to at least try to do that. Even if I stumble around, I kind of just don't care. Because again, I know there's nothing riding on it, you know, I'm, I'm just having fun trying and, and, you know, trying to improve and, and not placing so much weight on that. And I also want to go back to this idea too that, you know, we have so much creative potential that is just sort of simmering under the surface all the time and is, is just waiting for us to access it, that we can use in any way we want to, any way we want to, you know. If we want to use it to try to make a whole bunch of money next year, we can use it that way. If we want to use it to try a new hobby, we can use it over there. Susanna, sometimes I struggle with setting prices, then my client pays me more than my price so they take care of it for me. Yeah, I've had that happen myself, you know, where people have said, oh, you know, that's too cheap, I'd like to give you a little extra. It's like, okay, you know, lesson learned, right? Doug Quinn, so great when we're not attached to money results, having fun. You know, really, what else is there to life? Than connecting with people, having a good time, and, you know, just learning more about who we are in this life form. You know, I don't really see any other point to being here. I just want to keep looking in this direction and keep looking towards this incredible creative well that is available to us all the time that we can use in any way we choose. And I really hope you hear that, that you can use that creative force in any way you want to. So if you make the decision saying, I don't like my finances anymore, they don't reflect the way that I want to kind of live in this world, I'm gonna change them, you can change them. That is completely available to you. Brian, the obstacle seems to be fear of criticism or putting yourself out there. So I'm sure that a lot of people can relate to that. And I guess I would go back to what I was saying a few minutes ago, which is that there's nothing riding on it. So most of the time we have this idea that, you know, people are, you know, going to judge us harshly and therefore something terrible is going to happen as a result. Well, everything we experience comes from within us. It doesn't come from anybody out there. It doesn't come from what somebody says about me. It comes from me. And so the more that I can sort of connect to that reality, the easier it is to just put myself out there because it's like, and also, I mean, let's face it, Brian, you know, you and I are not Oprah. So, you know, if we put something out there and people don't like it, we're not going to be, you know, dragged through the tabloids or something. There is some virtue to being an unknown person. And so, you know, so I feel like we have even more room to play with things because nobody cares if something quote unquote flops or makes it big. Nobody cares. You know, it's really just about getting outside of ourselves, getting out of this me, me, me. I talk about that quite a bit in the program. Getting out of this me, me, me sort of headspace and looking out there and saying, how can I offer something to another person? How can I connect with another person? How can I do something that they think is hard that seems easy to me? How can I help them with that? And that kind of gets you over that hump of, you know, that fear of criticism thing. Oh, Kathy, I'm glad this is ringing true for you. Hi, Joanne. You're putting your art in a local consignment shop. Ah, to get a feel for what people might be willing to pay. They'll be in a local shop for about 3 weeks before the local craft sale. Yeah, I mean, all you can do is experiment, right? Until you put something out there, you can, you know, you can try to play out all of the scenarios in your mind, but it's never going to give you any real information. You have to put something out there in order to see what somebody will pay or if they will pay. And then like I said before, If they don't, it's not a slight to you. It's not a criticism. It's not a judgment. It's just data. I actually learned that lesson many years ago from a professor at the business school where I was working at a university, where he was telling these new managers, he was teaching them about how to be a good manager. And he was saying, you know, everything that happens is just data. It's just information for you to take in and learn from, and then make a different decision next time. That's all. So if I look at, let's say, a critical review on Amazon of one of my books, it's like, okay, that person really didn't see this piece of what I was writing. So maybe if I do a new version, I can expand on that so it's clearer for them. Or, you know, I can say maybe that needs to be a separate book altogether. You know, this thing that they're pointing out, maybe I should write something separate for that. And so I just really see it all as information and not as a reflection of, of my worth, you know, because we're— our worth is undefinable. It doesn't, it doesn't certainly equate to a dollar amount. And so that's a helpful thing to remember too. I think a lot of us don't. I think I used to attach my self-worth to that number in my bank account, and I no longer do that. It seems like I was saying earlier, it seems irrelevant to pretty much everything. So, so that's something helpful to remember too. So any other questions or comments? Let me take a sip of water here. Hi, Zoe. Hope this isn't so awkward, but I have a question. How could this understanding be helpful to someone who literally has nothing if they are sick, homeless on the streets with no support? I think some people are so stuck, they don't seem to be able to help themselves. Yeah, it's not an awkward question. I know, I know what you're, where you're coming from. And I think that it would be hugely helpful to someone like that because if they could, you know, and not to put too fine a point on it, I was never homeless or without any support, but, you know, I do encourage people to read my other book, most of which I wrote before I kind of had this epiphany about everything called I Am Just a Woman. You can kind of see where my head was back then. And I really saw myself as being a complete disaster. I saw my life as a disaster. I saw myself as a disaster. I, you know, really didn't see why I was here. I only saw that I wanted to live long enough for my daughter to become an adult. And after that, once she turned 18, I had this thought like, well, I guess I could just die now because there's nothing else for me to do. So that's the headspace that I was in. For a long time. And what this whole new way of seeing my life has done for me has shown me that even when I was seeing myself that way, it wasn't true. It certainly wasn't true. I still had all of these incredible creative reserves, and I had all this capability in me, and I had a beautiful life. Even though it didn't look beautiful to me at the time, I can certainly see now that it was. And so I think that it would be hugely helpful for people to, to start to see a little bit of this for themselves, that no matter what our outer circumstances might be, and no matter what our life experiences have been or the facts of our experience, we're all perfectly okay. So I don't know if that was helpful or not. Doug, do you just ignore your limiting thoughts? Well, I guess I would say that, well, I just know that any thought I have that indicates any limitation, which if you'll start to notice is most of the thoughts you have, they're just false. And so I don't really spend much time even looking at what I'm thinking. I don't really know how to explain this very well because I get asked this a lot. And it's more like I kind of know they're there. Obviously, I know that they're there, but I just don't care anymore what they say. I don't care anymore about what feeling comes with them. I don't like actively try to ignore them, I guess is what I'm trying to say. They're just simply there, but they don't really seem to have much importance. Anymore in my life. You know, that's not to say that occasionally I don't have bad days, like I talked about earlier where I was on another call where I had this day where I was completely freaking out. But the whole time I was freaking out, I knew why that was occurring. I knew that it was some weird thoughts going through my head. So I wasn't worried about feeling that way. And I just continued to, instead of being very concerned about my limiting beliefs and things like that. I just don't, I just don't even go there. I'm, my life is much more focused on this creative aspect of being human and this endless capability that we have to do things. So that's where I would love other people to be focused. So I don't know if that was helpful or not, Doug. Joanne, if they don't sell at the craft sale, I give $5. Oh, that's nice. That's cool. That's a really nice idea, Joanne. I love that. Oh, I'm so glad, Kathy. I'm glad this is helpful. Hi, Monica. I can't quite see your comment here. Oh, yeah, I think, you know, there's— I was just emailing with a friend of mine And there's somebody in her life who has struggled to kind of gain his bearings. And I feel like the more we can see people for who they really are and not for what their circumstances are, the quicker they respond. I've seen this a lot in my own work with people that because I don't see people anymore as their behaviors, or I don't see them as their thinking, or I don't see them as their life situation. None of that matters to me. I am, I feel like there are very few times in life where people have the opportunity to connect with someone who's really looking at them, who's looking past all that surface stuff. And when I advised this person I was emailing with to kind of try that, things seemed to turn around a little bit. For this person in her life, where he started to suddenly get really excited about doing something. And so to me, that is the greatest gift we can give anybody, is a listening ear that is listening to them and pays no attention to the other stuff because it's really irrelevant. It's just irrelevant. Um, so you think it'd be tricky to explain this to someone in a tough spot. So that's why I don't do that. That's a really good point, Zoe. It's why I don't do that. So I never try to tell someone, oh, you're not really in a tough spot. It just looks like you are. It's just your thinking or something. I would never do that. What I do is I connect to the natural joy that is who they actually are. We would talk about something that they like, talk about something that lights them up. And when people start to light up, then things start to change. And so that's why I feel like so, and I don't mean to disparage these other people who are trying to help people with money, but it's why I don't like them very much, those programs and things, because they seem to make it into this really heavy, big thing. And it's like, no, you know, this can be a very light, fun thing. And just like anything else in life can be. And so that's where I try to come from with everything and everybody, because that just seems like truth to me. So I hope that was helpful, Zoe. You've really— Doug says, you realize you've let your thoughts get me down or distracted. You now decide to stop it. Yeah. Have you seen that video with Bob Newhart? The Stop It one? Doug, let me know if you have. If not, I'll post it in the group. It's one of the funniest videos out there. Joanne. This has been transformative for me in your relationships, pointing towards natural joy. Yeah, I don't, I don't see any reason to talk about problems, quote unquote. I don't see any reason to, to even go in that direction or try to unearth things, or that just seems like a big fat waste of time. Like, why would I ever do that? You know, that's what I tried to do all those years. And it just kind of kept me seeing life the same way. When I saw that, oh, actually, none of that's really all that important. I can actually listen to what's inspiring to me and I can act from there. That's when things started to change for me, not because I, you know, spent more years trying to unearth, you know, all this ugliness that I was experiencing in life. Kathy, have you seen the new heart show? Yeah, that's— I'm gonna post that video in the group. It's just It's like we don't have to go in those directions is basically the point of that Bob Newhart piece. You know, we can, we can just stay with what's right in front of us and what is real and what is truthful. And, and like I said, to start this off, you know, what if everything that looks hard to us, including making money, if that looks hard to us, what if it's actually not? You know, what if it's actually really easy? What if the ease that you feel in some other area of life can be had in the money-making area? You know, one of the— that's cool, Doug. One of the areas of my life that always came very naturally to me was being a parent. I didn't really stress out about that very much at all. And it still comes very naturally to me. And I realized that that ease is available to me across the board, that there's no part of life that can't be experienced that way. And I find that a really exciting revelation because it means that a lot of the things that have looked hard to me aren't really hard. I just have thought they are. And I can realize the truth, which is that ease is available in everything. Kathy spent lots of time digging in the ugly and just this year I started to resist. I felt that life just shouldn't be this difficult. There has to be an easier and more enjoyable way to evolve. Yeah, I would agree with that for sure. And I think another piece of this for me too has realizing that it's been realizing that there's really no place for me to evolve to. You know, I don't need to improve myself. I'm, we're all fine as we are. And it seems to me that at least from my perspective, the only real priority in life is to continue to explore what we're made of and to see how much we can bring that out in all different areas of life. And money is no different from anything else. It's an area that we can explore and we can have fun with and we can get creative with and just see what happens. And you know, what's kind of cool about the money thing is that because money does some really fun things in this world, it means that really great people can do really great things when they have more money for it. So that's another reason why I do what I do is I want to see great people like you have all of the financial resources you'd like to have in order to do what you'd like to do in the world for philanthropy and all kinds of things. So it's kind of a nice bonus, if you will, for exploring the creativity of money. All right, well, I think I will wrap this up before I lose my voice anymore. Hopefully tomorrow I won't sound quite as frog in the throat, but you know, if I do, I'm sure you'll, you'll forgive me. So just take this idea home with you today. You know, what if it's actually easy? And that doesn't mean just money, but anything that comes to your mind that has seemed hard, just kind of stop and go, wait a minute, what if it's actually not hard at all? What if it's actually easy? And see what happens, what starts to shift. Yeah, go for the joy, Monica. I agree. Go for the fun. I always say follow the fun. That's kind of my, my new catchphrase. You know, follow what's fun in life because, you know, what else would you want to do? I used to have this thing on my refrigerator that was a quote from the Ben Jerry's guys, and it said, "If it's not fun, why do it?" And that's kind of how life looks to me. If it's not fun, why would I bother doing it, you know? So kind of look at it from that vantage point, and life starts to really change in some amazing ways. Oh, thanks for being here, Dale. Hi, Mimi. Thanks for coming, and please feel free to keep posting in the group. We have one more official day of our challenge, and then We have a bonus day on the 15th, which is when the registration reopens for the Let's Make Money Honey program. And I would love to have some of you guys in there with me to continue this conversation. And in the meantime, please keep posting. And it's been just such a fun experience for me to interact with you and talk about this topic. It's just been pure fun. You're very welcome, Zoe. I like doing what lights me up too, Doug. That's why I'm here talking with you guys because this definitely lights me up. So thanks so much for being here and I will talk to you again tomorrow at same time, same place. What was it? Same— what was it on Batman? Same bat station, same whatever. I forgot. Anyway, all right. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for being here, you guys. Bye-bye now.
