Show Up For Your Business ~ Pamela Jean A New Life Coaching

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Tuesday Talks. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited that you have joined me today. My topic for today is showing up for your business. What does that even mean? Because I know that you go to work every day, you work on your business, but what does it really mean to show up for your business? First of all, I want to take you through a little bit of my history, just so you know where I've come from, where I've been and where I'm going with my career path. I started my first business when I was 21 years old. Seriously had no clue what I was getting into. I had no idea how much work it was going to take, how much effort it was going to take buy. But one thing I did know is that I had drive and I had passion and anything I set my mind out to do, I was going to do. So I truly went into it very fearlessly and I'm glad that I did. So I started my first studio out of my home. As I said, 21 years old. This is 2019 is actually my 30th year in business, which is really exciting for me. I can't even believe that it's been that long, but I've been self employed entrepreneur for 30 years and that's super, super exciting. Great accomplishment. I'm really proud of that. But what I want to do is backtrack just a little bit. So I had been working in bank marketing and human resources eons ago. And my project one year was to help assemble and create the annual report for the stockholders of the bank. And in doing that, I had the opportunity to work side by side with an incredible commercial photographer. His name is Chuck Peterson. He was from Sioux City, Iowa and just a great human being, a really awesome man, very talented photographer. And in my working with him, it dawned on me that oh my goodness, you could actually make a living as a photographer. That that was something that could happen. So I decided not long after that project that I was going to quit my job at the bank and I was going to start a studio. So what did I know about starting a studio? I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't know a thing. But what I did know is that I wanted it badly and I was going to do anything it took to be able to open a studio and create a business. So I enrolled in a photography school called Mape Mid America Institute for Professional Photographers. Those of you that have been in the industry for a while will have heard of Mape. It was a Fantastic week long school. Very, very awesome. Unfortunately, it's no longer open, but that's where I got my start. I took the class Intro to Lighting and my instructor for the week was Mr. Len Levy. I'm sure some of you have studied with him before, but day number one of class, we had to go around the room and tell the class your name, where you were from, how long you were in business and what you wanted to accomplish and out of the class that week. So we're going around the room and it came to me. I introduced myself, I'm a new business I just recently started. And my objective for the class is I need to learn how to properly light a portrait and how to use my lights by next week because I have my first paying client. So the entire class turned around and looked at me like, are you kidding me? You have a paying client next week, you don't even know what you're doing and you're here to learn lighting? Well, I didn't really think that that was that big of a deal. I thought everyone else was crazy for looking at me like that because I thought, well, I'm doing the right thing, I should be here learning how to light because I have a paying client next week. But what that taught me about myself is that I, I was going to make it happen no matter what. Nothing was going to stand in my way of watching my dream come to fruition. So I went through the class, I learned how to do my lights in a week and I had a very happy paying client the following week after that. But what I really want to talk about is that discipline factor. You have to be disciplined in your business, whether you are just starting out or whether you've been in business for 30 years. You, it's discipline. It requires daily routine and daily discipline. So like I said, I started out in my home and you know, in the beginning there wasn't always a lot to do. I had to make things up, I had to find things to do. But clearly I had a lot to learn about the business. So I stay. I kept very busy learning, reading, networking as much as I could so I could learn the tricks of the train. But with it being my home, I would have been tempted. There were times where, oh gosh, I'm kind of behind on laundry. It'd be really nice to have dinner ready early tonight and was tempted to start, you know, a load of laundry or picking, dropping the kids off later as opposed to earlier. But I was very disciplined in the fact that my children went to daycare Every single day for from 8:30 in the morning and I picked them up at 5 o' clock at night. Those were my work days, just as if I still worked at the bank and I left my home to go to work. I left my home, brought my kids to daycare, came back home and started working. I stayed in my office. I did not wander around to the kitchen or go see what's going on in the laundry room or go sit out on the back deck. I stayed very, very disciplined and started that path of creating and building a business. So first of all, you have to have a very, very strict and rigid daily routine. I want you to take a few minutes and think about what fills your day. Do you find that at the end of the day you just don't have enough time to get everything in that you're struggling with getting all of your tasks accomplished and then you go through a whole day and you're like, oh my goodness, my to do list is still lot on that. So what are you spending your time on? Write a list. This is a great assignment. Write a list of everything that consumes you in a day. And I want you to identify the areas of your day that are sucking your time, that are non productive times of day. For instance, start with your email. Look at your email and how much time do you spend in email? How much junk mail do you get? How many times do you click on something and then you end up down the rabbit hole and then 30 minutes later you're still checking email. Well, my biggest suggestion for you there is to go through everything that you receive and unsubscribe to anything that is nonsense that you don't need to know about. I even unsubscribe to my lab into some of my other sources because it does take time for me to go through those. If I have a need from my lab or if I have a need from a company or an organization, I will seek them out as my need arises. But eliminating the things that I don't need to click on and see, you think one click doesn't take very long, but if you're doing that 10 times a day and it takes you 10 minutes each time, that's a lot of minutes out of your day where you could actually be accomplishing something huge. The next area. I know we're all guilty of this. How much time do you spend? How much wasted time should I say do you spend on social media every day? I realize social media is a very big part in marketing our businesses, marketing ourselves, no matter what you're in the business in what your business is. Whether you're a photographer, a boutique owner, a hairstylist, you use social media to connect with your audience, to create your community, which is great and fine and awesome. But how much wasted time do you spend on social media? I have a social media marketing calendar. I follow my calendar to the letter, I work the groups that I'm in, I accomplish what I need to accomplish and then I get off social media because talk about a rabbit hole. Oh my goodness, you can be flipping through and scrolling and scrolling and all of a sudden, I mean 25 minutes have gone by and you've done nothing but looked at mindless things on your phone or on your computer, on your device. So truly eliminate the waste of time on social media and be very, very disciplined there. Getting that daily routine is extremely important. A routine is something that you do all the time, every single day. My daily routine is very, very specific. I have certain self care things I do every day. I do a lot of things for my businesses every day. You know the first thing I do every day is I am at the gym at 5:30 in the morning five days a week. I do take the weekends off to let my body rest a little, but I'm very disciplined on that. You'll notice that I post on social media that my workout is done for the day. I don't post that to be that I'm bragging or boasting that I worked out today. It's more for my own accountability and for my own discipline to make sure that I get up and do it. So if I can't post about it then if I don't do it I can't post about it. So I make sure that I get up every day and go to the gym. 5:30 to 6:30 like routine. I come home, I make my breakfast and I oddly I eat the same breakfast every single day. That's part of my healthcare plan, but it's also part of my self care. I know what it takes to get my body feeling really, really good and regenerated for the day. So I usually eat three eggs and a piece of fruit every single morning for breakfast along with my coffee. But while I'm doing that, my big personal goal this year for me was I wanted to read the Bible in the year of 2019. So every single morning I read my daily Bible verse before I do anything else. If I click on social media first, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole. So I stick with my very disciplined self care Part of things that I want to do for myself personally for this year as goals. So make sure you have that specific daily routine. You have to have that in order to ma maximize your day and maximize your time and ultimately reach all of those goals that you want to reach and eliminate the things that suck your time. Because, you know, time. Here's the thing. We all have a life. We all have a life that we've been given, but we all get to decide what we're gonna do with that life and how successful and how intentional we're going to be about living that life. I think we all have encountered people that, you know, they a life, but it's just dismal and bleak and oh my goodness, I'm so glad I'm not in their shoes. But ultimately, at the end of the day, people are where they are because of choices and decisions that they've made. There's things that happen to us that are completely out of our control. You know, you didn't ask to have cancer. You didn't ask to have a family member pass away. You didn't ask for that. But what you are in control of is how you respond to those things. I can respond positively or negatively about, you know, being diagnosed with cancer or by having something bad happen in my life. I get to choose how I respond to that. And the people that are the most successful that you're going to come across are people that make the choice to always take the high road and look on the high side of life. The glass is always half full, not half empty. Those are the people that are the most successful in your world. You can be one of those people. But it is a choice. It's a choice to be positive every single day. You choose your happiness. You choose your level of joy. You also choose your productivity within every single day. It's a choice to sit on social media and get sucked into a rabbit hole and learn nothing. But it's also a choice to choose that one thing in your business that is so hard for you that it's so difficult that you don't understand. It's comple complicated, it's confusing. It's created so much fear and anxiety in you because you just don't know how to handle it. That's a choice. Also eliminate your fear of those things and tackle the hard stuff. When you do that and make a choice to do that, I promise you, things are going to change for your life. They will absolutely change for your life. So the next thing I want to talk about, essentially there's three things to me that I feel are important in building your business. Discipline, effort and courage. So I want to talk about effort. I don't buy into excuses and reasons that just don't make sense to me, especially in today's world. Everything that you need to learn or could ever want to learn about anything is free. The Internet. I mean, if you want to learn about hashtags, just Google hashtags. If you want to learn about portrait lighting, you can learn that. If you want to learn about sales, you can learn that. If you want to learn how to basket weave, you can do that too. Anything you could ever want to learn and know is available for free. There's no excuses. You have to do the work. You have to be discipline to do that work and be prepared every single day for any and all opportunities that come your way. Now, when I started my business 50, 30 years ago, I could have sat around and waited for the phone to ring. But why would you do that? I could have sat around and worked in my jammies. I could have sat around and worked in yoga pants. But what if, what if an executive called and said, could you come by my office? I would like to talk to you about doing a corporate photo shoot for me. Yeah, I have to get ready yet. I haven't showered yet. I've got to get my clothes on. No, you have to be ready at a moment's notice for that opportunity that could come calling or come knocking or for you to be able to create that opportunity. Because opportunities just don't land on your doorstep. You have to make them happen, but you have to be prepared for them. You have to be brand ready 247 while you are working within your business. And even beyond that, you get one first impression and once you blow that, there's no do overs with first impression. So please be ready at all times to take on business and to tackle those opportunities. I mean, if you are a realtor, what if you're working from home that day, you're in your jammies and that client calls and says, hey, Susie, I'm able to meet with you at lunch in 30 minutes. I had a change in my schedule. Can you meet me at the house I want to buy in 30 minutes? What if you're not ready? What if you're not prepared, then what? You could miss the opportunity of a sale because you can bet that if you're not ready and prepared, you someone else is going to be. So you've got to be ready and prepared and be willing to put in that effort. You know, being a business owner is difficult. It's hard. There's nothing easy about it. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. It's not easy, but it's going to take going the extra mile at all times and being prepared for what you don't even know. You need to be prepared for having set and established business hours, times of day that you're going to be working on your business. That goes all the way down to from 8 to 8:30. I will check and respond to email and do social media. 8:30 to 9:00'. Clock. That's when I work on my marketing plan for the week or for the day, whatever that looks like for you. From 9 to 9:30. That's when I'm going to spend time creating clients. Because again, if you have a special and unique product line, you have to create clients for that product line. So you have to be on your A game all the time. There are no such things as having a bad day when you're a business owner. You don't get the luxury of having that. So you've got to be willing to do the work. It's so, so important. I want to switch gears just a teeny bit. I'm very goal oriented. I have goals that I set for myself over the years. I have new goals weekly, new goals monthly. You have to write your goals down. I know, everyone knows that. Write your goals down, look at them, think about them. I want you to think about this. Write your goals down every single day and write them in the pretense that they've already happened. So maybe you want to be an author and you want to be on the New York's New York Best Sellers list. New York Times best sellers list. Write that down every single day. If you have financial goals, write that goal down. I want to be debt free by August of 2019. Write your goals down every single day. And when you start writing them down with the intention, with that intention, it just changes your mindset and it changes your energy and these things will start happening for you. Goals essentially are dreams that you are wanting and hoping and working to come true for your life and for the life of your family. But what I want you to always remember is nobody will love your dreams and be as passionate about your dreams as you. Even if you have a supportive family, supportive spouse, supportive friends, no one is going to care about your dreams more than you do. So don't expect anyone to to buy into your dreams at the same level and then same intensity as you have. That's an unrealistic expectation. So when you're sharing your dreams with a loved one, someone who's one of your biggest supporters, and they don't have the reaction to your dream as you hoped that they would, it's okay. It doesn't matter. Because your dreams are your dreams. You do you. What's important to you is going to be different than what is important to them. Even though they're just as supportive and loving, they're never going to buy into your dreams as much as you do. They're never going to want that dream to come true as much as you and don't have an unrealistic expectation on the people around you. Your dreams are up to you to make come true. Your goals are up to you to make come true. It just takes a lot of discipline, courage and effort to make sure that you're on the right path to have those dreams come to fruition. If you have that negative source in your life, and trust me, we all do, and sometimes that negative source can be someone that you love. It can be a family member, it can be a spouse, it can be your children, your parents, it can be a best friend. Now, I realize you can't eliminate your family. Well, I guess you can, but you might not want to do that. But you can control how involved you allow them to be with your dreams. So if you have that negative source in your life, if you can eliminate it, delete it from your life. I promise you, if you do that, if you trim the fat and get rid of that dead weight in your life, your dreams will start manifesting in ways that you never ever thought possible. If you have that situation where it's family and loved ones or a spouse that does not see your dream as important as you do, you can't eliminate them. Right? You really can't do that. But what you can do is you can put boundaries around yourself and your dreams. You can put boundaries with how much you allow them into your dream. And it doesn't mean that that's not necessarily a bad thing. But what that is doing is it's eliminating you choose your choosing. You're making that choice of who gets to play in your dreams and who doesn't get to play in your dreams. And by setting up that boundary that keeps you focused where you need to be focused, and you're not allowing someone to come in and be a dream sucker for you. You know, dreams are like balloons. You can see a balloon just floating nice and pretty, and that's a great dream. But there's Always a jagged edge. There's a pin. There's someone who wants to crush your dreams or squash your dreams. And those people in your life, they're really miserable people because they don't want you to succeed because they couldn't succeed. They don't want you to see happy because they can't be happy. There's so many reasons why someone would crush your dreams. But here's the thing. It's not about you. It's about their own insecurities. It's about them not being happy with themselves. So if you have that dream sucker or that person in your life that just, my goodness, they're never happy. And every time I show up and try to see them, they just suck the life out of me. Well, they do that because they're not happy. It's not about you. Misery loves company. You've all heard that saying before. It's very true. Misery does love company. So just don't put yourself in that situation. If there are people that you can eliminate from your life, then eliminate them. If they're friends that just suck you dry emotionally, they just hurt your heart. They just take everything out of you. Then distance yourself from those friends because I can promise you, your vibe will completely dictate who your tribe is. If you are positive and sending out those positive vibes, you're going to be attracting people just like you. So if you need to eliminate some of those dream suckers in your life, absolutely 100% do that. If it's a family member where you can't really delete them from your life, then put boundaries around your dream and allow them in. Let them know what's going on. But don't expect them to have the same passion and fervor for your dream that you do because that's an unrealistic expectation. So I'm going to leave you with this today. Thank you so much for hopping on and joining me for the first Tuesday talks. Now, next week, I am going to tell you you're going to want your pens and notepads ready next week because I'm going to dive into the cost of doing business. Now, it doesn't matter what business you're in, whether you are a boutique owner, a hairstylist, a what, a tanning salon, whatever it is that you do, it doesn't matter. Business is business. Being an entrepreneur is being an entrepreneur. It doesn't matter what you're in the business of. And understanding how much it costs you to be in business is absolutely imperative on helping you create a good foundation for pricing for hours for understanding your cost of goods. So we have to know and understand how much it costs you to be in business. So we're going to tackle that next week. You'll definitely want to be prepared for that. Pen notebook ready. If you have any questions feel free to private message me DM me on Facebook messenger or send me an email pamelajean.a new lifegmail.com feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Any and if you have any questions on what we talked about today, I'm happy to answer those for you. I would love to connect and grow and get to know everyone here. If you have any topics that you would like me to cover, I am happy to discuss those with you as well. So thank you all again so much for joining me with Tuesday Talks and I will see you next week. Have an incredible week and don't forget to smile and be kind or be quiet.