The good stuff

When I started my business 18 years ago, I brought my identity as a classic eldest daughter. If there are any eldest daughters in the room, you would know exactly what I’m talking about. I was helpful. I was capable. I was quick. My God, if a client sent an email, if anyone sent an email, the speed in which I reciprocated that email. My goodness, there was smoke flying out of my fingers on the keyboard. I was really independent, and I’d been conditioned that way, like I had spent two years as a tour leader. I’d been travelling before that, overseas. I’d travelled after that,

I hadn’t asked my parents, you know, for anything. And God knows how long I wouldn’t know how to ask my parents for anything. I had this real I’ll figure it out. Attitude, and I felt really proud of that, like that was, you know, part and parcel of who I was. This is a positive thing,

but the problem with identity is that it causes you to play out a certain role, and that can take you to a certain place which is useful and valuable and helpful, but then it can’t take you any further. So it’s like you’re getting to one side of the river, and then the old identity needs to be shared in order for you to cross that river and get to the other side. And that’s what happened to me, because after two babies in quick succession, after, you know, too many years of not enough structure, not enough boundaries, not enough systems, not enough. You know, being assertive.

I was left feeling resentful. I was feeling really burnt out. I had a period of about 18 months where my business was in a bit of a holding pattern. I was still earning money. I was still marketing my business. I was doing my minimum viable marketing.

But I was, you know, unhappy. And I don’t think I realised. I definitely didn’t realise at the time how unhappy I was. It was only really upon reflection that I realised, you know, wow.

It’s only when you kind of take the glasses off and look back with the benefit of hindsight that you go, Okay, I guess that was a bit of a shitty period.

So I made a lot of changes in that period, and it started off with my identity, because it left me feeling frustrated. I was also very jealous. I wasted a lot of time being jealous. I looked at everybody on the internet that looked happier than me and more successful than me,

and rather than using that jealousy to actually do something and change something, I just dug my heels in deeper. I clung to my values and I reinforced that old identity to myself. I you know, I’d tell my business buddies. We’d, you know, we’d look at other people on the internet and laugh, and then we’d tell each other how much better we were, you know, not in so many words,

you know, but I could never do that, you know. My I have much too high integrity. My values are far too deep. I’m far too generous. I could never charge that amount. How ridiculous like, How idiotic that person must be, an absolute egotistical asshole to charge that much. How very dare she

if I could have my time back, and really this is the whole point of what I do is that I made a lot of mistakes. I made, potentially all the mistakes so that you don’t have to, so that I can speed up your timeline, and you don’t have to get stuck in the muck in the same way that I did.

And my identity now is different. So I don’t have I don’t look radically different. I don’t have a radically different haircut. I don’t have a whole bunch of tattoos. I don’t have any tattoos. My dress sense is pretty much the same. I look older, sure, but you know, your identity is not what you look like. Your identity is a lot more internal and a lot more subtle than that. So yes, I’m still helpful and I’m still capable and I’m still definitely independent.

But I also recognise when these things tip when, when the strength becomes a weakness, and I asked for a shit tonne more help now than I did back then. I wasted a lot of time thinking that people were going to judge me for asking questions, and they’d think I was stupid for asking questions. Now I recognise exactly how idiotic that is. Exactly You know, what a self defeatist attitude that is. I asked for help. I am getting better at receiving help, because these are two different things, asking and receiving. I have boundaries now to.

And most importantly, I model things for other people. This is part of what I do as a business coach and what I do as a human because words are cheap.

Anyone can say, I’m great, I’m wonderful, trust me, Words are cheap. You have to actually model it for other people. And so one of the things that makes me so very happy is when an old client reaches out through LinkedIn, or reaches out, you know, via email, and says, Hey, I thought you’d be so proud of me to know that I just got a $28,000 job. I thought you’d be proud of me to know that I just negotiated a pay rise with one of my oldest clients. I just thought I’d let you know. I thought you’d be pleased to hear that I wanted to charge five grand for a job, but I pushed myself and I charged eight, and the client said yes, without hesitating.

Love that. I love that. Yes, yes. I am very proud. I’m very proud of you. I’m very proud of you. I have the same thing in my personal life for different reasons. So friends oftentimes tell me stuff like, Hey, I thought you’d be proud to know that I booked myself a holiday by myself. I booked myself two days away without the family. Or hey, I booked myself a massage, or hey, I arranged a babysitter. And you know, I’ve gone and done something for myself like it’s so it’s so seemingly small, but it’s so radically different and difficult for a lot of us to do this thing, to prioritise ourselves, to put ourselves and our needs and our wants first. Yes, yes, I am proud of you. I’m very, very proud of you.

So I enjoy sales a lot more now. I enjoy the art of I’ve always enjoyed communicating, but I enjoy that more direct conversion, copywriting, I spent years writing useful, valuable, helpful articles and content and social media, content for myself and for my clients, on behalf of my clients, and now I really enjoy the art of sales copywriting, the art of direct Conversion copywriting, where you write something, you send it into the internet, and then people take action. They purchase. Typically, they purchase. I enjoy the game of selling. Now I don’t see it as such a tense, fraught, stressful situation as what I used to do.

Our strengths are fabulous, and ideally, we want to build our revenue streams around our strengths. We want our strengths to be front and centre in our businesses. It makes no sense, right to kind of adopt a business model or adopt a particular business where we’re doing something that you know we can do, but we’re not excellent at it. It’s not our natural strength, it’s not our natural kind of preference, our natural joy.

But there is a tipping point where too much of a strength becomes a weakness, and this is really, really important for us to recognise

when it comes to our relationship with money, our beliefs, our thoughts, our attitude, our feelings, our actions around money. These are personal, and they’re also structural and cultural.

And the culture will try and tell you that it’s all personal. They’ll try and tell you that it’s your imposter syndrome. They’ll try and tell you that it’s your confidence problem. They’ll try and tell you to just be more confident. They’ll try and tell you that, hey, if you got a haircut and new wardrobe, if you if you only hired this you know, this business coach, or this, whatever person that you know, you too, could have it all. They’ll try and tell you that it’s your fault

and your personal failing that you’re not managing to keep all of the balls in the air and look like you’re relaxed and having good time while you’re doing it. It’s not your fault. The structures in our society, the culture of our society, becomes personal. And that’s that’s how it works, right? That’s why it works. This is why propaganda actually works, because if, if the people to who, who were subject to the propaganda knew that it was propaganda, it wouldn’t work.

It works because you take the structural cultural messages and you internalise it, and that becomes your identity, and that is propaganda. That is how it works.

So some of the you know, to kind of give you a little bit more information, if you’re scratching your head right now, some of this, the structural conditioning, or the structural things that we have against us, includes the fact that we have to drop our lovely children to school and. At, you know, 9am and then we have to pick them up at three or 330 which gives us an incredibly short work working day.

You know, some of the structural, structural things are things like,

you know, that it’s a hell of a lot harder for hot, for us to access credit. It’s almost impossible as a soloist to access credit. I had to change banks in order to get a business credit card, because even though I had had my business bank with St George for a number of years and they’d seen all the incomings and all of the outgoings, they denied me a lousy $5,000 credit credit card, and I had to go to a different bank. It’s almost impossible nowadays to get a business bank loan, or it makes, you know, it’s not an easy thing to do. And the

cultural things, I mean, gosh, we don’t have enough time. There’s too many things to go into with the cultural things, but that includes this weird and enduring taboo with ambitious women and making women feel like they need to choose between being a good mother or being a working, ambitious person in the wider world, and if they are a female leader, then they’re they’re playing a very complicated dance. Either they’re taught, they’re told they’re a bully because they’re adapting the behaviours of what male leaders typically display, or it gets even more complicated, and they’ve got to do this very complicated dance of, you know, being personable, you know, but also being effective and being warm and encouraging and acceptable with these kind of traditional feminine behaviours, God, kind of trip over my words. I don’t like saying it so much.

And, you know, being a highly effective leader.

So the economy, our whole economy, depends on women’s expertise being cheap and women’s domestic labour being largely free.

Because this is the other part of the whole kit and caboodle. Is that if you are living in a heteronormative relationship with a man, then you’re going to be doing the lion’s share of the domestic labour, even when you married one of the good ones, so to speak,

like your friend, not too long ago, said to me,

Sean, bless him. He thinks he’s a feminist.

And then she went on to detail, you know, all the stuff that she did that he didn’t even think about.

So if you’ve ever apologised for pricing, for your pricing,

if you’ve ever offered a discount without being asked or the person asks for a discount or starts to negotiate or starts to kind of undermine your confidence, and you immediately capitulate. If you’ve ever felt shame about asking for or receiving money,

it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It is a result of, as I said before, the structural and cultural conditions in which we all are brought up. But if you want to change, it is your responsibility. There’s a difference between fault and responsibility, right? And my kids, you know, as children, do they say, Oh, it’s so unfair life. Life’s so unfair. And my result, my response, is always, yes, life is unfair. Life is unfair, but what are we going to do about it? Yeah, are we going to are we going to bemoan our fact and be depressed forever? Are we going to be poor and depressed forever? Or are we going to take responsibility and say, You know what? I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. This shit needs to change.

There are many things that are outside our control, and we talked to we talked quite a lot about that. When I was talking about sales in the last couple of days. There’s a lot that’s outside of our control, including other people, the delusion, the delusions that we carry that, you know, we can control other people, we can’t, but what we can control, which we talked about yesterday, is our Jedi focus. We can control our Jedi focus, and we can change our thoughts, our beliefs, our feelings. It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s like plucking weeds from a garden. It’ll be a war of attrition,

and initially, when you start going, Okay, I’m going to replace thought with another thought that belief isn’t serving me, that belief is keeping me exactly where I am. It’s keeping me stuck. So I’m going to choose a different belief. Initially, it’ll be a war of attrition. It’ll be you battling all day long to instal a new operating system.

But slowly, slowly, slowly, you’ll start to win the war of attrition. You’ll start to win, and there’ll be fewer weeds popping up. There’ll be fewer old thoughts, beliefs, feelings,

because you’ve successfully installed a new operating system, you will need to still pluck out the occasional weed, and you will still attract the occasional Energy Vampire, as I said, you can’t control other people. I think my sales process is pretty awesome right now. I think my sales pages, you know, all the details are on my sales pages, including my pricing, you know, including FAQs like every every detail I’ve attempted to preempt, but still the occasional person you know pops into my DMs and tries to do a bait and switch. Yesterday, I had somebody who had told a mutual friend, hey, I’m interested in Brooke McCarthy and hustle and heart. So my mutual friend had introduced us, and then this strange person did a bait and switch. Luckily, they did the bait and switch in on the LinkedIn DMS and not on a zoom call, because I would have been far less polite and said, Oh, I don’t actually have a business. I’m just, you know, interested, if you’re interested in what I mean, what I’m doing. I’m like,

does that work? Does that actually work? No, I would suggest it doesn’t.

So you know, you’re still going to have the occasional crappy situation or strange and unusual person, but it’s going to happen far, far, far less when you had take control and say, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. My identity has gotten me to this point, and I’m thankful for that, and I’m definitely gaining something from keeping this old identity. So I need to look at that, because it makes me feel good, right? It makes me feel good to say, oh, you know, to be a generous person, it makes me feel good to be a nice and kind person.

But I’ll tell you something for nothing. There is no way in God’s green earth I would have been able to do good money March and give all this stuff away for free. During that 18 months of burnout, I could, I didn’t have the capacity to I couldn’t even dream of doing something like this for free. I didn’t have the capacity. When you are resourced, you are able to be a shit tonne more generous. And for the last, I don’t know, eight or so years, every single year, I’m donating to charity, not just from my personal bank account, but from my business bank account. So every person who purchases, every client of hustle and heart participates in that.

This is not possible when we’re barely keeping the lights on.

So

I want to kind of leave a couple of key things that might not have been clear enough.

The first one is boundaries.

Whenever we’re doing something radical, whenever we’re making a big change, whenever we’re launching something new, whenever we’re putting ourselves out there, whenever we’re pushing ourselves and scaring ourselves and making ourselves vulnerable, we have got to have sky high boundaries, and that means unfollowing anyone on the internet Who is triggering you, because a lot of people are following people on the internet, and it’s kind of like rubber necking a car crash or picking a scab, you kind of know it’s going to traumatise you, or it’s going to leave you in a bad mood, or it’s not a good idea. It’s not a healthy thing to do, but we do it anyway. We follow the people on the internet and look at this stuff that we know are going to leave us in a bad mood. That makes no sense, right? There is nobody I follow on the internet who triggers me because I, you know, I don’t want that that’s that’s not a useful, constructive, helpful state of mind to be in.

So that includes perhaps breaking up with the communities, breaking up with the people, or not having the conversations that you know are going to lead to the same place. If you’ve got a friend who’s got a real poverty mentality, a friend who’s constantly worrying about money and moaning about money and thinking about money, and you know it’s.

You’re going to have to either cut that person off

or no longer enter into those conversations, and you can try and keep that person in your life. Please don’t waste your breath trying to convince them to change. As I said before you you know there’s only so much that you can do, you’re far better off modelling behaviour than you are trying to convince somebody with words.

But don’t get yourself into those conversations. Don’t have conversations with people who are earning $2.50

and perhaps you know a little bit humbly proud of it, doing a bit of humble bragging about

1. The other thing that we do alongside our boundaries is that we have to be ruthless with ourselves.

We have to be radically honest with ourselves and stop deluding ourselves. So watch your thoughts. This is, this is the part that you know of plucking out the weeds right? Watch your thoughts. Watch when the little voice in your head says, Who does she think she is?

How very dare she?

Watch the voice in your head when it says, She doesn’t need my money, she doesn’t need my favour, she doesn’t need my introduction. She doesn’t need another opportunity. She’s got more than enough.

Watch where you pay more for certain things, but you ask for less. You pay, you happily pay other people’s perhaps higher rates, but your rates are a lot lower.

Watch where you pay less and you negotiate hard with your suppliers and vendors, but you have higher prices, you ask for more. Watch these inconsistencies, these are the weeds that we want to pluck out.

Yeah, because a lot about confidence, and I talked a little bit about the difference between confidence and self trust.

A lot about self trust has to do with alignment. It has to do with internal integrity, where you know without the shadow of a doubt that your beliefs, your opinions, your values, your thoughts, your actions, all add up. They’re all congruent. They are in alignment, and you sleep easy at night time as a result,

you will trigger other people, and you’ve got to be okay with that. You got to be okay with that, like trying to resist, you know, trying to stop provoking people and trying to micromanage other people’s moods. This is a kind of a trauma response of people pleasing, gone into the extreme where, you know we’re going to keep we’re going to kind of damage ourselves. We’re going to hurt ourselves. We’re going to, I think there’s a saying, isn’t there? Like you set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

You’re going to trigger other people regardless of what you do. People are going to misunderstand you regardless of what you do, so you may as well do what the fuck you want.

There’s going to be unhappy people who are walking around, you know, looking to be offended and triggered. Those people are not your problem. They’re not your problem, and you certainly don’t help them by, you know, setting yourself on fire, because this resentment will build and compound, and it will build and compound in your business and in yourself.

I’ve got this, I’ve got this kind of little theory on life, I guess. And my theory is that

the natural, normal, default state of a human, as we age is to get bitter and jaded and stuck in our ways, that this is like a mind that’s gone unchallenged. It’s it just gets more and more in a groove,

and it doesn’t change, and it will get bitter and jaded, because, of course, life has a way of, you know, heaping traumas and sadnesses and you know misfortunes upon us, like that’s every Nobody escapes that right? We all have that. And so therefore, perhaps one of the meanings of life is to resist this and to not get bitter and to not get jaded and to be joyful and practice joy every single day, despite, despite, despite.

Maya Angelou said modesty is a learned Affectation.

Modesty is a learned affectation. We learn this. Babies are not modest. What is affectation? It’s pretension. We’re pretending.

This is something that we’ve been conditioned to be and in whose best interest certainly not in ours, not in ours. This is one of the key coaching questions that I use, in whose interest is it in? Whose interest is it for you to think what you think in, whose interest is it for you to believe what you believe in, whose interest is it for you to feel what you feel?

And if the honest answer is it’s not in my interest, then I believe you have a responsibility to eject that squatter from your brain and to implant plant a new, thriving thought, belief, feeling that takes you closer to where You want to go.

The good news is that this exhausting energy costs of constantly fighting against your best interests, of constantly being modest, of constantly feeling shit about charging good money, of constantly feeling shit about chasing for overdue fees, or feeling shit about, you know, whatever, about not having enough money in the bank account, about, you know, not earning enough about the business being like a dysfunctional relationship where you give, give, give, give all the time and you don’t get anything in return.

This is a massive, massive drain, and when you stop fighting against your best interests all the time. This unleashes boundless capacity and alongside your offerings ecosystem, alongside your profit plan, alongside those kind of structural changes to your business model, the way you deliver value, your pricing, etc, etc, that boundless capacity is what enables you to do amazing things. And not just to do amazing things, but to do amazing things with plenty of boundless, sweet, sweet time to sleep in, to wake up without an alarm, as I did this morning,

Hello and welcome back. Today I’m talking about Jedi focus and I want to start by taking you to Cambodia and Vietnam. When I was 22, 23, 24 and anything that could go wrong would go wrong and it would go wrong on a pretty regular basis.

It used to go wrong on such a regular basis that I would just expect that things would go wrong. I never expected that things would go smoothly and that everybody would be happy and that there would be nothing to report. There was a hotel that we used to stay in in Phnom Penh. It was absolutely beautiful. It was a big old colonial building. Stunning.

But I used to call it Faulty Towers because invariably every single time there would be half the group being given renovated beautiful wonderful rooms and half the group being given unrenovated crappy rooms. There would be people who had no running water. There would be rooms that had no towels.

There would be room allocations where we’d been given too many rooms and I was being told that I absolutely definitely had to pay for rooms I didn’t need. Every single time there would be something that went wrong. I had buses that didn’t turn up. I had drivers that were so hungover they were vomiting out the window as they were driving.

I had tour leaders, local tour leaders, or one in particular that would get on the gear. I don’t know what gear it was, but he’d go into the land of nods while I tried to distract the tourists, the passengers. There was the time that I forgot to get a visa.

Despite having done the trip a thousand times, despite having gotten myself a visa a thousand times, for some reason one day it just completely dropped out of my head until of course the night before when I was near the border of Cambodia and realised number one, I didn’t have a visa. Number two, I was going to have to leave the group to cross the border by themselves and then take the bus to Penampen by themselves, so they had to leave the bus on one side and then pick up a new bus on the other, while I went back to Ho Chi Minh City and flew to Penampen.

There were multiple days where the roads would be washed away, where bridges would collapse, where we would need to get high-speed boats that didn’t have enough safety equipment. It went wrong all the time.

Now luckily I’m from a very large family so I’m quite used to a bit of chaos. My childhood had a lot of people, there was a rolling ensemble of players and actors coming through the door. So I was kind of used to some chaos.

But the point of this is that in business, the same rules apply. And we could say it’s business or we could say it’s life or we could say it’s both, business, life. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And what’s that saying — if you want to see God laugh, just show her your plans.

So this is super important when it comes to money. It’s super important when it comes to sales and it comes to launches. That we don’t lose our momentum, we don’t lose our trajectory, we don’t change our trajectory every single time there’s turbulence. That one month of lower than anticipated sales, one quarter of lower than anticipated sales, that losing a big client and losing the regular income that came with that client, having a new competitor come on the market does not mean that every single thing is causing us to lose focus.

I’ve worked before with clients where every single time a new competitor arrived or a new development happened in the market, it was like, right, we need to review our strategy and we need another meeting. And it wasn’t like we’re going to refine our strategy, which would be smart. It’s like, oh my God, let’s all panic and let’s throw the whole thing out and let’s start over again.

As business owners, we need to have mastery of our focus. We need to have mastery of our self-trust. Because there’s going to be unknowns and pretending otherwise is silly. It’s naive. Of course there’s going to be challenges. But you’re not going to let something unexpected or something less than ideal cause you to change tact or completely push you off course.

Now, I wasn’t always a Jedi focus tonight. When I was earning a lot less money, a lot more hours a week, habitually sneaking work in, in evenings, in public holidays, overseas holidays with friends and family, I wasted so many family holidays. I wasted my focus in all kinds of stupid places. And I think back on it now and I’m like, imagine what would have been possible if I just held my focus.

And when I’m talking about held my focus, I’m not talking about not following your desires and not following your interests because when I started following my desires and my interests, business got a hell of a lot more interesting and a hell of a lot more profitable. But I’m talking about wasting time and limited energy.

Closely following my competitors, trying to anticipate what my competitors were doing, bitching about my competitors like I had any business to do that. Wasting my focus, trying to anticipate and reverse engineer other people’s businesses, other people’s business models, rather than actually just focusing on what I wanted — to stop censoring my desires, to put my desires upfront and center, and use that as the guiding star in figuring out the kind of business and business model that I wanted.

When we have Jedi focus, we’re not waiting for our circumstances to change. And we hear this in sales from prospects all the time, right? The most common thing that you perhaps might hear is, oh well, the circumstances right now, I’m just waiting to see, and this thing’s going to happen, and I’m waiting for that to finish. And then I’ll be in a better situation to make a decision.

But the difference is the Jedi doesn’t wait for circumstances to change. They are the ones changing the circumstances. We are the ones that are happening to life, not life happening to us.

And people get this wrong with clarity too. We’re waiting for clarity to strike. There’s a real romance about this. I blame the movies. I blame television. We’re waiting for the clouds to part. We’re waiting for God’s arm to descend from heaven and anoint us with clarity and tell us this is what you must do. This is the fully formed vision that life has for you, that the universe has for you. It doesn’t work like that. Because on Monday you might have absolutely immaculate clarity and on Tuesday you cannot get off the floor of the shower.

Instead, clarity comes as an inevitable byproduct of taking action. It doesn’t come through delaying a decision. And we see this in sales as well, right? The person that moves is the person that’s decided. And the person that’s decided is not the person who’s sifting through all the information, sitting meditating in a cave in the Himalayas. They’re not canvassing opinions on the internet, canvassing opinions from anybody who looks sideways at them. They make a decision, they take action, and then the clarity happens.

So to kind of reiterate or summarise what we’ve been talking about with sales — sales is the clear, direct invitation. It’s perhaps a little flirtation. It’s a bit of a vibe check. And it needs to have an introduction of tension. You need to be okay with introducing tension because that’s what a decision is, right?

And this is why so many people give away their power and kind of float from thing to thing. Because what are we doing when we make a decision? We’re cutting off options. And a lot of people have this idea that the more options, the better. In fact, the more options, the more off we are.

Anyone ever had a kind of a midlife crisis or a quarter life crisis? Because I have and it’s bloody painful. Very boring and painful about a whole bunch of not much happening. And it was that lack of decision. It was that lack of cutting off options. It was like, I want to keep my options open. I need to canvas my options. I need to look at all my options. Here are all the many and varied things that I can do, but I’m not going to make a decision because I need to keep my options open.

When we introduce a bit of tension into the sales conversation, it might be urgency, it might be FOMO. And one of the reasons why it’s useful to have deadlines with launches is for this reason. It’s easier in effect to sell something that has a deadline, because you’ve introduced some tension, you’ve introduced a little urgency, you’ve introduced some FOMO. You’ve made it clear and obvious to the person that they need to make a decision because the date is coming and the date is going to pass them by.

But many, many people kind of float along not making decisions. They’re letting decisions be made for them. They’re not embodying that main character energy. They’re instead floating through life, reacting and responding to the bigger personalities around them. And that’s true of business owners, 100%. Because we can do pretty well being the kind of person who reacts and responds. That can take us pretty far.

Especially in that first part of our business. The first 18 months of my business clients loved me. I was quick, I was responsive, I was a yes girl. I got shit done. I didn’t push back. I made shit happen. And I was reacting and responding. Absolutely. But there’s a value to that only to a point.

If you want to sell one to many though — so not so many sales conversations, maybe you’re done with sales conversations, maybe you’re like, if I never have to have a sales conversation one to one ever again, it won’t be a moment too soon — that is your prerogative. Because the only rule of business, if you remember, is exchanging value for cash. That’s the only rule. You get to make up the rest.

So if you decide you never ever want to have a one-to-one sales conversation ever again, that’s your prerogative. But in order to move from one-to-one sales to one-to-many sales, where perhaps we’re making sales on autopilot, where things are a lot less manual — I’m not saying they’re easy, certainly the shift is not straightforward — it doesn’t require you to be there doing the selling.

And by the way, this is where your brain goes: that’s okay, I’m just going to hire a unicorn, I’m just going to hire a salesperson who’s going to do it for me. In 18 years of being in business, very, very few instances have I seen this used successfully. Because if you’re a fabulous salesperson, you’re not going to be cheap. Otherwise, you’re probably not a very good salesperson, right? It’s going to be the business owner in 99.9% of cases that is responsible for the sales.

So if we are moving from one to one to one to many sales, the first thing that we’re going to need is a great sales page. A sales page is simply a page on your website. And no, you don’t need special software for it. It’s a page on your website which outlines what the thing is. So if you go to hustleandheart.com.au, you can see one at forward slash momentum, another one at forward slash audacious, and another one at forward slash ignite.

A great sales page outlines everything, anticipates any information, preempts any frequently asked questions, addresses any kind of concerns, and it needs to have the price. In most instances it’ll have the price. If it doesn’t have the price, it should at least have some indication of price because a lot of people simply will not engage if there’s no indication of price.

So this is where people have to go in order to enter their credit card details in order to give you money. In addition to that, we can run events. You could run an audio only event like this. This is what I’ve been doing quite a lot of in the last three or so years. I’ve been helping a lot of people inside my Momentum mastermind to run audio only events. You could do a traditional sales webinar, which is video, where you typically have like five or ten minutes of teaching and maybe fifty minutes of testimonials and pitching. You could sell from a physical stage. I did this — I flew myself around Australia at one point and I sold from stage.

You can also sell via social media. You could sell via YouTube, via Instagram, via TikTok. Hell, you could even sell via LinkedIn if you want to. It tends to work better if you’re selling via video in those instances rather than a link in a blog post or a link in a LinkedIn post.

So these are the main options when it comes to selling one to many. But if this is you and you are thinking, oh, I really hate selling one to one, I really don’t want to do it anymore, I’d rather stick needles in my eyes, I’m going to sell one to many — please know that this is not necessarily any easier. We tend to think the grass is greener over here because it looks easier than what I’m doing and I really don’t like what I’m doing. It’s not easier to sell one to many.

And certainly if selling one-to-one makes you highly anxious, if it makes you uncomfortable talking about money, uncomfortable getting into those sales conversations, it’s not going to become easier when you sell one-to-many. In fact, when you’re selling one-to-many, it’s more important than ever that you embody that main character energy. It’s more important than ever that you have that Jedi focus and that you’re able to keep that focus on the inevitable success that’s going to happen.

Because if you are easily distracted by the comments in a Zoom room when you’re in the middle of your pitch and somebody’s writing things and you’re getting completely thrown off track, or the doorbell rings and you’ve got a delivery, or your mother walks into the room unannounced and stands in the corner of the room while you’re pitching — or the internet is shaky that day — like all the things that can go wrong will go wrong. And if you don’t have that Jedi focus, then potentially you’re going to make things worse for yourself.

So that Jedi focus is one of the most wealthy things that we have because what we focus on increases. And as I’ve been talking about throughout Good Money March, that negativity bias that all our brains have — it’s kind of like leftover wiring that’s faulty. And what we’re trying to do is constantly resist, much like the war of attrition on weeds in the garden, we’re trying to resist that negativity bias. And how do we resist it? We resist it through our focus. We resist it through putting as much imagination into our inevitable success as we do our certain demise.

We increase our Jedi focus through practice, much like we build a muscle through using it. And if anybody’s sat down to meditate before on a bad day and it feels like all you’re doing is pulling your focus back, pulling your focus back, pulling your focus back — you know the value of that, right? Because it’s in that pulling of the focus that the focus is being strengthened.

So real wealth is resourcefulness. It is creativity. It is seeing the upsides and the possibilities in any given situation. It is being able to find or seek solutions to any given problem. And it’s no longer seeing failures as some kind of identity cloak that you walk through life wearing.

The biggest revenge, the biggest thing that you can do to counter the inevitable shitty experiences, the inevitable trauma that life will dish out, is to be happy and successful. And how do we do that? Through that Jedi focus. Through seeing ourselves as winners. Through seeing ourselves as able to handle whatever life throws our way.

I like being stretched. I’m easily bored. I want to be in rooms where I’m not the most intelligent person. If I’m in a room where I am the most intelligent person, I’m in the wrong room. I don’t want to be the big fish in the small pond. I want to be the small fish in the big pond. I want to be stretched by the people that I’m surrounded by. I like feeling that I’m a little bit out of my depth.

That feeling is something that I actively cultivate. I go looking for it. And I know that my real wealth is my deep self-trust. I have absolute, unshakable, unwavering confidence that regardless of what happens, I will be able to make money in any environment as a business owner without going back into the workforce.

So when you have that deep self-trust, you make investments in your business with the absolute knowledge and expectation that you’ll get a return on investment. And you’ll get a return on investment because you’re bringing that main character energy. You’re not reacting and waiting and waiting for situations and waiting for the big personality to boss you around. You are active. You’re an active player in your life. And you’re going to get a return on investment in any investment that you make. Even if the return on investment is, okay, now I know what I don’t want to do and now I’m going to do it differently.

There’s plenty of times where I’ve purchased something and I’m like, wow, this is so shockingly shit that I must make something that’s better. And I get my return on investment that way because I’m motivated and I’ve got that Jedi focus of, oh my God, this is shockingly shit, I need to provide a quality alternative.

So back to this idea of introducing a little bit of tension into a sales conversation. We need to create that tension. We need to create that urgency because sitting on the fence forever hurts. Sitting on a fence forever hurts.

So this is my call to action to you today. Whether or not you sign up for the Good Money Bundle — it’s $157, I can’t remember, not much — whether you put your name on an interest list, whether you sign up for the interest list for Ignite which is my visibility accelerator, whether you sign up for the interest list for Momentum, whether you decide you know what, I am going to get out that thing that I was working on and I’m going to finish it today — whatever you decide to do, I want you to actually do it and do it with your whole ass. Don’t half ass it.

And for God’s sake, don’t sit on the fence forever because this is a very painful place to sit. Like I said, two and a half years having a quarter life crisis was painful for all involved. Nothing much happened except a whole bunch of overthinking, but it was a very painful experience that I would not wish on my worst enemy. That kind of floating along through life, waiting and expecting that circumstances will miraculously change in your favour. This is not the mentality of the Jedi.

The Jedi is changing the conditions around them. They are changing the circumstances around them. They are an active player in the game.

All right, so your challenge today, should you choose to accept it — get out your Good Money March document that you’ve been using. First prompt is: what are your values as you see them right now?

The second prompt is: write out your schedule for a normal day.

Third prompt is: write out your monthly budget. Hopefully Good Money March has already inspired that or at least started the process of looking at the budget in your business. What do you spend? What do you need to keep the lights on? What is your elegant sufficiency number? What is your fuck you money number? What do you want as overflow in your slush fund?

So we’re writing out our monthly budget. And then the fourth thing I’d like you to do is look at the items in question one — your values as you see them — and ask yourself: are my values as I see them reflected in the lists from my schedule and my monthly budget? Can I see my values in my schedule, how I spend my time, and how I spend my money?

That’s the challenge for today.

Welcome to day six. Can you believe it? A good money March. I have had the most awesome weekend and I’m feeling so pumped for the week.

For many years, 18 years I’ve been in business and for a good 11 years, probably longer, email was my main vehicle for selling. So I made a commitment to my minimum viable marketing plan in January, 2010. I had a baby at the time and I was also pregnant with the second child. And I made a commitment that I was going to be publishing one piece of long form content, one blog post a month, every month, forever after. That was my commitment. And so that’s what I did.

And for years and years and years, since January 2010 up to now, I have been focusing on giving all the best things I know away for free. All of my best and most useful insights, all of my best and most hard-won expertise to give it away on the internet through my website for free.

And when I went to launch something, whether it was a face-to-face marketing course in Byron Bay or Perth or wherever, or it was an online group program, or it was a one-off hour-long masterclass, whatever it was, my primary way of selling it was through email. And I was focused on giving lots and lots of useful, valuable, relevant information away with the view that some people would come back and purchase. That’s always been my motto, my mantra, I guess.

But something happened in about 2021. I think it was pretty much the brokenness of COVID and working really, really hard, like harder than I’ve ever worked in 2020, ridiculously hard. And really starting to see that, you know, things were once again not working. That I was once again starting to feel this anger brewing, this resentment brewing, and that once again a change, a necessary change was on the cards.

It was also around this time that I started really focusing on being seen to be selling. Because for many, many years I was very comfortable with the written word and I felt almost like I was hiding. It felt safe to write blog posts. It felt safe to press send on a mass email. It even felt safe to write those mass emails, you know, at the tail end of a launch to be really clear and really direct and obviously a sales email. But it also started to feel like it was hiding a lot more.

And so I started really digging into self-belief and not just that deep, quiet self-belief that comes when you’re alone. And you feel really clear and you feel really good and you feel really stable about yourself. You feel like you’re almost in communion with yourself and you’re feeling wonderful. But more than that, that visibility piece of being seen to be selling and to not shy away from that. To get on the internet, to put my face on video, and to be seen to be selling not just by my clients or prospective clients, but also the assorted others, right?

The assorted others that oftentimes squat in our brains taking up valuable real estate without paying rent, you know, and telling us all kinds of mean things. How very dare she, look at her. Oh my goodness. She’s such a braggart. My God, look at her, obviously thinks she’s so good, she’s so special. I mean, look at her. How embarrassing for her. I’m embarrassed for her. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So on day five on Friday, we talked about sales as moving from taking, grasping, convincing, towards giving, expressing, and inviting. And away from the illusion that we are operating in, that we have some kind of control over other people, which we don’t, towards the joy of commitment, committing to selling, regardless of the outcome.

Because there’s way too many people that wait for evidence. And oftentimes, you know, I’ve had these people in my how to start a business courses, like countless people. There’s always a percentage of people that come to those how to start a business courses, how to start a side business courses, who are never going to do it. I know within five minutes, they’re never going to do it because they are waiting for proof. They want proof. They want evidence. They want more proof, more proof. Find me proof, I need more evidence, I need a guarantee. I need a guarantee before I do anything.

There are too many people that have it back to front. They think that people need to be buying their thing before they decide, okay, well, it’s good enough to sell. It’s a goer. I’m going to actually commit to selling this thing because people have purchased — great, I’ve got evidence, now I’m going to keep selling.

We’ve got it back to front. Because the first person that you need to sell your offering to is yourself. You need to sell it to yourself. And so this is what I’ve been focusing on, especially over the last probably two to three years, but there was that kind of turning point in about 2021. Selling it to myself first and foremost.

So that I have this unwavering self-belief, this unwavering belief in the value of the offering. And the offering — let’s remember, let’s not forget — the offering is oftentimes an idea. It is not an actual thing. It is not a three-dimensional thing. We’re selling services, we’re selling promises. What are we selling? We’re selling a great idea. The thing hasn’t come into fruition yet because I can’t give the service, I can’t perform the service for the client if this client hasn’t purchased the thing. If I’m talking about some group thing or even some one-to-one thing, I’m selling the idea of a thing because I haven’t actually delivered the thing yet. I’ve never delivered the thing. I have to sell it first in order for me to deliver it. The very first person you need to sell to is yourself.

And of course, the problem is confidence. It’s a big one. It’s a big one. Confidence will fluctuate day to day. This is what we tend to forget. We look at somebody confident and we think, oh, yes, they are confident. It is a fact. They are confident Monday to Friday, Monday to Sunday, 9 to 9 p.m. They are confident, it doesn’t fluctuate. But that’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit. Because you see it in yourself. You see the fluctuations in yourself.

But confidence is different from commitment. So my confidence, like every other person, will fluctuate. Of course it will fluctuate. Depending on how I’ve slept, depending on my hormones, depending on the people around me, of course my confidence is going to fluctuate. I’m a human. That’s normal.

But my commitment is unwavering. I am committed to being in business. I’m committed to being in business in the long term. Because I’m committed to being in business, I’m committed to building relationships with thousands of people. Because I’m committed to building relationships with thousands of people, I’m committed to marketing and communicating and giving away the best of what I know for free on the internet via my website. Not on endless pick-my-brain coffee dates. That’s not what I do.

So the commitment is stronger. It is the rod that goes deep into the ground where the confidence is the horizontal thing. It’s the horizontal thing that doesn’t necessarily go that deep because it’s a little bit of a performance. It’s a fluctuation. It’s a performance. It’s a dance. And it’s an aphrodisiac.

Your confidence is how you show up. It is the fact that you’re doing it anyway, even though you’d rather stay in bed. Even though the voice in your head this morning said, no, look, it’ll just be easier if I turn over and get another 40 minutes sleep. No, look, you deserve another 40 minutes sleep. Just roll over and try and go back to sleep. The confidence is the aphrodisiac that means you show up anyway and you do it knowing that you can manipulate yourself. And I use that word on purpose. You can and I believe you should manipulate yourself.

You manipulate yourself when you put on loud music that you know is going to get you in a buoyant, upbeat kind of mood. You manipulate yourself when you eat something that you know is going to taste wonderful and you do it because you want that feeling. You manipulate yourself when, for example, you set your alarm clock because you want to get up and go for a walk first thing in the morning. You manipulate yourself when you put your pen and your paper out to write first thing in the morning because that’s what you’ve decided you were going to do.

So your self-trust, your relationship with yourself is absolutely critical with sales. And what I find oftentimes is people that do anything to avoid selling, where they’re in business but they would rather stick needles in their eyes, they would rather jump through hoops, they would rather chew broken glass than to actively, clearly, directly sell to somebody else.

It’s oftentimes because they have a shaky relationship with themselves. Because when we have deep self-trust, when we know who we are, when we know who our dark or broken or shadow side is as well, we’re not kind of avoiding that bit. We’re not pretending that those parts of ourselves that are less attractive don’t actually exist.

When we have that deep self-trust, then we’re not so easily perturbed when somebody is indifferent to us, when somebody resists our charms, when we’re clearly and obviously extremely attractive, and when they’re not laughing at our jokes, even though it’s clearly and obviously that we are very funny. That deep self-trust will power you through the ebbs and flows of other people’s responses to your selling.

And it will mean that their reactions and their responses you don’t take so very deeply personally. That you recognise whatever response that person is having has to do with them and it has far, far, far less to do with you.

When we can sell, when we can make bold decisions, when we can leap without needing to wait for evidence, this is truly impressive. It’s not impressive for somebody to start a business having this huge safety net of mom and dad and multiple hundreds of thousands available should they fuck up. That’s not impressive. They’ve got the safety net. They’ve got the evidence. They’ve got a hell of a lot more ease. When we move without evidence, we’re impressing ourselves. We’re demonstrating to ourselves that we are worth it. That we’ll do it and we’ll rely on ourselves despite not having the safety net, despite not having the evidence.

Sales is commitment and the first person you need to sell is you. Way too many business owners give up far too quickly. Far too quickly. I had a coaching intensive with a client in May last year, May 14 and 15. Within three weeks, she’d secured her first client with her new way of working and her brand new price, which was a shit ton higher than her old price. Three weeks. Two weeks after that, she had her second person booked.

Far too many business owners give up far too quickly. They decide they’re going to launch something, they’re going to sell something, they’re going to have a bit of a campaign, they go on the internet, they send an email, they post a couple of times on Instagram, they post a couple of times on LinkedIn. A few days pass, nobody’s purchased, they get all in their heads about it and then they quit. And then they do the same thing again and then nobody purchases and then they quit. Or maybe they do the same thing again and one person purchases which gives them a little bit longer in the launch, but then nobody else purchases and then they quit.

So we need to commit to doing the thing and selling the thing. Not just, okay, I’m doing the thing, but I’m actively on the internet selling. And I’m following up, and I’m reaching out, and I’m following up, and I’m saying it slightly differently. And if it’s not resonating this way, it’s going to resonate that way. And I’m trying to say the same thing in slightly different words with a slightly different angle. And I’m going to try a different angle and a different angle and a different angle.

This is the part that’s creative, right? It’s the communication that we can really go nuts with, we can have a lot of fun with. And a lot of that is about giving up control as well, right? Because we think we’ve got the perfect words. We’ve been crafting the perfect words in our creation cave. We spring out of our creation cave onto the internet. We use the perfect words. Nobody responds.

And rather than going back to the drawing board and going, okay, I need a slightly different way of saying the same thing, we just keep hammering the same words, because these are the perfect words. I’ve come up with the perfect words. If these words aren’t working, I just need to keep going with the same words. If it’s not resonating and people aren’t engaging, don’t stop promoting it. Don’t stop selling it. But absolutely change up what you’re saying. Change up the words. This is the creative bit.

If somebody doesn’t understand what I’m saying when I’m training, when I’m in a group and I’m training something and somebody looks lost and confused and they’re asking questions, I don’t turn around and say, oh, well, let me just say exactly the same thing again, like you’re hard of hearing. I’m going to try a slightly different angle. I’m going to try a different analogy. I’m going to try another way of expressing the same thing until I find the key that unlocks the understanding in the other person.

So a lot about selling, and a lot about money, is our relationship with power. And remember, oftentimes we reject the idea of selling and we reject money because we’ve had shitty situations where people have tried to lord it over us either with power or with money. And because they’ve misused power and money and we’ve been the victim of that, we’ve decided it has to do with power and money rather than recognising that it has to do with that other person.

So when we can reconcile and heal our relationship with power, we’re going to reconcile and heal our relationship with money and our relationship with sales. What we’re asking for in sales is we’re asking for commitment from other people. And nobody is going to commit to us if we haven’t committed to ourselves.

Now I see this in business owners sometimes where they’re asking me, oh, but something’s wrong. What’s wrong? People aren’t buying and da-da-da-da-da. And it’s kind of clear and obvious to me that the person hasn’t really committed to their business. They’re using a Gmail address. Their website is under construction and has been under construction for two long years. They’re not actually demonstrating to other people that they’re committed to what they’re doing. And then they’re asking other people to commit to them.

Nobody’s going to commit to you if you haven’t first committed to yourself, if you haven’t first committed to your business. And this is not about the hours that you put in and look, here I am, burning the midnight oil and you know, I’m making my fingers sore with all the typing that I’m doing, I’m being very diligent and hardworking and I’m thrashing myself. This is not about that. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about being unwavering in your desires and the certainty that you will grow a sustainable business.

Because when you’re always at the kind of not-enoughness and it’s like, well, you know, I put in 20 hours today, oh my God, I’ve been working so hard, but it just doesn’t seem to be working. Why don’t people get it? People don’t seem to get it. It must be the economy. It must be the petrol prices. It must be this. It must be that. When we’re constantly in that loop, we are not committed. We are not unwavering.

We are massively fluctuating and people can feel that. They can feel that. They can feel it face to face, but you bloody better believe it, they can feel it through the internet as well. Even when it’s just text, I can get a sense of a personality through text, through an email, through website copy, through social media copy. I can get a sense of a person, including their energy.

So when we are committed, we’re committed to creating momentum. We’re not doing that stop-start energy all the time. That stop-start energy is exhausting. This is a massive energy leak. It’s exhausting for the business owner. It’s exhausting for their audience. And what tends to happen is their audience just tunes out because it’s like this person is always stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting. And when they’re starting, they’re coming in with this great big bang with this kind of dramatic flourish. Here I am, I’m back again. And then people don’t buy, the person gets exhausted, the person gets frustrated, the person gets pissed off and they stop and they disappear or they completely change direction.

By all means, evolve your business. By all means, changing your mind is totally possible. Absolutely. But there’s a difference between making a clear, open-eyed change or decision and flakiness.

So sales is an infinite game. Business is an infinite game. And because it’s an infinite game, it’s got to be fun, right? Like if we are going to be doing this for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, if sales is the life force, is the fuel in the tank of business, then we’re going to be doing it and we’re going to be doing it regularly and we’re going to be doing it for years. So it’s got to be fun. It’s got to be fun. Otherwise, what the fuck is the point? If it’s not fun, you won’t do it. If it’s not fun, you will avoid it. You will resent it. And people can see that, they can hear it, they can feel it. When you treat it as a finite game with a start and an end with winners and losers, you will quickly and easily get frustrated and burnt out.

But infinite games don’t have winners or losers. They’re simply evolutions. You have setbacks, you have momentum, you have quiet, fallow periods or periods when you’re consolidating. And it’s all good. It’s all part of the same game. You go on holidays, fine. You don’t want to be selling when you’re on holidays, understandable. But you don’t make these setbacks mean anything. If they didn’t buy now, they’re going to buy later. Don’t worry about it.

So a little bit of a maturity check — you don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step. You cannot see, it is impossible to see the whole staircase. You cannot know everything about everything. And that’s kind of like, you know, some business owners that get stuck in this perpetual loop of learning. Part of it’s admirable, yes, of course. I’m a teacher, trainer, coach. Of course it’s admirable to learn, absolutely. But it’s like it’s fuelled by anxiety. If I can just know more, if I can know everything about everything, then I’m never going to feel like an idiot. I’m never going to feel like a loser. I’m never going to feel like I’m on the back foot. I’m going to know everything about everything. It’s not possible to know everything about everything. The more we know, the more we realise we don’t know.

Don’t let that freak you out and stop you. I think this is oftentimes what’s underneath imposter syndrome — somebody is highly intelligent, they’re highly conscientious, they recognise that even though they are well qualified and very experienced and knowledgeable, there’s heaps that they don’t know, and then they let that thought take over. Of course you don’t know everything. You cannot know everything. It’s impossible.

But to move faster in business, to actually make money now, not in 10 years time, to make excellent money now, you have to be okay with that. You have to recognise that this is no big deal, to not know everything. You have to recognise that it’s totally okay for things to be not quite complete or not quite finished or not quite finalised or not quite ready yet, and you’re going to do it anyway, you’re going to sell it anyway. You know enough. You know what you need to know. And if somebody asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to — this was my biggest fear as a tour leader. I read every book I could get my hands on about Cambodian history, Cambodian culture, Cambodian religion, Vietnamese history, Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese religion. I was petrified that somebody would ask me a question that I didn’t know the answer to.

Number one, it never happened. Number two, on the odd occasion when somebody did ask me a question that I didn’t know the answer to, I could just say, oh I’m not really sure about that, but let me get back to you. I’ll find out and I’ll get back to you.

You need to advocate for your offers. You need to love your offerings fiercely, even when they’re not selling. You need to know the value of those offers inside out and back to front. And if that means rereading your testimonials, rereading your client feedback, if it means printing those out, sticking it to the wall, sticking it to the mirror, getting your client compliments tattooed on your arm, whatever you need to do — you do it. You play the music, you hype yourself up, you stand your ground, you stand tall and strong, you love your offerings fiercely even when they’re not selling, you are committed to yourself, to your clients, to your business, to your future.

If you cannot commit to that, then how do you expect anyone else to commit to you? You’re the one that has to move first. You need to move first. And you need to do this without waiting for evidence, because if you are constantly seeking the proof, seeking the guarantee, your mind will always play tricks on you and tell you, well, it’s not real, you need more, you need more evidence, you need a bigger, bolder, better, ironclad guarantee. And there is no such thing.

Your challenge today, should you choose to accept it — and really, why the fuck wouldn’t you — is to sell and more importantly to be seen to be selling. Because one of those little thoughts that trips us up is: if I don’t try that hard, I can’t fail. This one was my favourite for years. I’m embarrassed to admit how many years this was my favourite. And it wasn’t even conscious, because of course, if it had been conscious and obvious to me, then it wouldn’t have had the same power and sway. If I don’t try that hard, I can’t actually fail.

So today we’re going to sell and we’re going to be seen to be selling. And we’re going to put our whole bum into it. Not dipping our little toes in, not giving ourselves a get out of jail free card, not taking ourselves off the hook and saying, well, you know, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, I shouldn’t, I can’t, I couldn’t possibly, I have an appointment with the dentist.

We are going to be seen to be selling. Because if we don’t believe in the value of our offers, if we’re not committed to our offerings, to our business, to our clients, to our future, then why the hell would anyone want to commit to us?

Go forth and sell.

 

Hello and welcome to day five and potentially my favorite subject to teach and train on which is sales. This is the absolute engine room of every single business because if we do not have sales we do not have a business and remember there’s only one rule here — only one rule to business — and that is that we exchange value for cash.

So I’ve spoken quite a lot throughout Good Money March about the shitty experiences that I have accumulated through the early years of my business. And there’s a reason for that. Because if we want to change something, we need to get to that point of going, you know what? This ain’t good enough. This is no longer tolerable.

Right? Because we get what we tolerate. So part of making changes, part of promoting ourselves, part of giving ourselves a pay rise is to raise our standards, to stop tolerating things that are no longer tolerable.

So as I’ve spoken about before, being a tour leader in Vietnam was a really quite formative experience for me, especially when it came to sales, especially when it came to money and sales and that kind of gritty, resourceful, resilient, creative entrepreneurship. What I actually think of as entrepreneurship, because oftentimes in big cities especially we get confused and we think entrepreneurship looks like a 22-year-old white guy standing on a stage with a deck and pleading for investment. That is not what I think about when I think about entrepreneurship. I think about resilience, resourcefulness, creativity, the ability to kind of see an opportunity and seize it immediately without overthinking.

So generally speaking, this experience in Vietnam for me was very, very positive, but there was one particular instance with one particular person which kind of sticks in my head — a great example of the kind of shitty experiences that we accumulate with sales.

This woman was at the markets and she was selling wallets and I was in the market for a new wallet. And when I approached her stall, she didn’t look at all interested in making a sale. She immediately started asking me personal questions. Do you have family? Where are you from? How many siblings do you have? Lots and lots and lots of questions.

And then when I was ready to haggle, like when I’d found a wallet and I was ready to haggle, she looked really upset and she’s like, but we’re friends, we’re friends.

Now this might seem like a funny story, but I wonder whether this sounds slightly familiar to you. When somebody makes you feel like you’re taking from them because you’re friends. And really you’re like, well, not really. In the case of this woman, we’re not friends. Clearly we’re not friends. But oftentimes we have that in business. And I think it’s something that women especially get a lot of — like, you know, I’m a friend of a friend, I’m a distant acquaintance, we went to school together 30 years ago, surely you’re going to give me a good price or surely you’re going to do this for free.

And so those people that make you feel like you’re taking the food from their baby’s mouths when it comes to sales — those people I like to call energy vampires. And so if you’ve ever walked away from a sales experience feeling like you’ve been had, that there’s a con going on, that you have immediate regrets, you have buyer’s remorse — this is potentially, probably, definitely one of the reasons why you’re perhaps avoiding sales or associating sales with a con or manipulation.

Because there are lots of shitty experiences that we accumulate over a lifetime. No doubt you’ve had interactions with shitty salespeople. And you’ve walked away thinking, I do not want to do that. That is not me. I’m a nice person. I’m a kind person. Why on earth would I want to sell? And we’ve then effectively shot ourselves in the foot because we’ve decided the whole game of sales is something that we don’t want to do because we don’t want to be an asshole.

You do not need to be an asshole to sell effectively.

So this is not a win/lose, finite game. This is one of the assumptions that we tend to take on — one of those erroneous conclusions we tend to draw — that in sales, somebody wins, which is the seller, and somebody loses, which is the buyer. And so of course, as kind, nice people with high integrity and high conscientiousness, we don’t want somebody to lose.

So if you’ve had that idea before, if this is familiar to you, maybe you’ve had that experience with a salesperson where they’re guilt tripping you. They’re making you feel responsible for the fact that they can’t pay their bills. Maybe they’re playing the victim, shifting the blame to other people — being you — to avoid accountability and gain sympathy. I’ve seen this before many times. One salesperson in an antique shop jumps to mind — a woman where I bought from her because I felt bad for her. Nothing had a price tag. And I walked out of that antique shop going, wow, I seem to have spent a lot of money on things that I’m really not that excited about.

Then there’s also love bombing — overwhelming someone with affection and attention. I see this quite a lot in those feminine sales styles, the new agey, feminine power, you go girl world. There’s a lot of love bombing that goes on. And then of course there’s lying or distorting the truth, admitting facts, creating false narratives, making the person buying feel less than.

If you’re selling through disempowerment, you’re going to have disempowered clients. If you’re selling through manipulation, you’re going to have clients who have buyer’s remorse, high dissatisfaction, who do chargebacks on credit cards.

But if you’re selling through love, because you genuinely believe in the value of your work — if you’re selling through service because you know the absolute massive effect and transformation that’s possible through your work — you are almost obligated to serve people and get it in front of as many people as possible. If you’re selling through self-belief, deep self-trust, commitment and enthusiasm, then you’re going to have clients who are empowered, excited, motivated, energized, and who rise to meet your level of commitment and enthusiasm.

Because by raising your standards, by extension you’re expecting those higher standards from others. And this is how we take sales from taking and grasping and convincing to giving, expressing and inviting.

So just take a moment to reflect on whether it feels in a sales conversation like you have to convince somebody. Sometimes it might feel like you have to audition for somebody. Occasionally I’m on a sales call with somebody and they’re clearly not my person. They almost always haven’t taken the time. They don’t really know who I am. They haven’t spent any time looking at my website or downloading anything or listening to a podcast, and then they request me to pitch them. They’re like, okay, so pitch me.

I’m like, what? I’m not pitching you. This is not what we’re doing here. I’m not pitching you. I’m not on stage. I’m not auditioning for you. This is a conversation between two equal adults. Consent-led sales. It’s a sales call. I’ve made it clear on the website it’s a sales call. One of the questions I’ve asked in the form before we’ve gotten on the Zoom call is, are you prepared to invest in your business right now? Some of my forms even say, have you read the sales page? And they have to tick the box to say yes. So I’m not pitching people because my website, my marketing has done that for me.

So when we can take sales from this auditioning, convincing, grasping, taking into expressing, inviting, giving — then we’re also moving from the illusion of control into the joy of committing to selling regardless of the outcome.

A lot of business owners ask me, you know, why won’t that person buy? We had a good conversation, great rapport, they need what I’ve got, I’m sure they trust me — but why haven’t they purchased? It’s because we’re operating under the illusion of control. We’re believing we can control other people, and we can’t.

If you’ve got children, you know this is frustrating. If you’ve got parents, you know this is frustrating. If you’ve got a partner, you know this is frustrating. You cannot control other people. So therefore we need to take a certain attitude with sales — what can I control? I can control myself. I can control my activities. I can control my emotions, my thoughts, my beliefs, my attitude. I can pick up the phone or send that email or make that outreach. I cannot control the outcome because I cannot control other people.

And when we can take the attitude of I am going to commit to this regardless of the outcome, then we are streaks ahead.

So when we’re moving away from this old, manipulative dichotomy — this finite game where we have a winner, the seller, and a loser, the buyer — we’re going to move towards this is an exchange. We’re exchanging value for cash. The person who’s buying is not losing. They are gaining. They are gaining value from working with us, from working with our business. And this is an infinite game. It never ends.

And it’s personal, but it’s also not personal. Yes, your personality counts for a lot. Yes, there is someone for everyone and there is a person for every price. And if they don’t get you — if despite how obviously charming you are, they do not find you charming — well, it’s not your fault. It doesn’t mean you need to change personalities. It’s just like a key that doesn’t fit into a lock. It’s just a matter of finding another key.

It is personal, yes. But it’s also not personal because people draw conclusions about other people all the time and they’re frequently wrong. I’m really good at that. I’m somebody who makes quick snap judgments, and I’m often wrong. One of my oldest friends from high school who I’m still very good mates with — when I first met her, I did not like her at all. My first impression was not my person, way too cheerful. I was a goth at the time, in the depths of 15-year-old angst and existential crisis and depression.

So it’s not personal. And remember that energy vampires will make it feel very, very personal for all the wrong reasons. They are enmeshing your energy with their energy and they’re doing it on purpose to manipulate you and get what they want from the relationship. Resist.

The other thing we need to clarify is that there is a difference between marketing and sales. These are two distinct and different things. They work hand in glove. Marketing is a service of sales. It should be a service of sales. Sometimes it’s not, and I see that quite often in businesses where the person is diligently posting on the internet, sending emails, posting on LinkedIn — but all of their sales are coming from somewhere else entirely: referrals, word of mouth, another channel. That doesn’t really make sense. You want those two things working much more closely, hand in glove.

There are different types of marketing. We have awareness marketing — the top of funnel, educational, how-to, useful, valuable, helpful, relevant information that we put out on the internet. Then further down the funnel, we have nurture content — a little bit more familiar, where we’re trying to reach through screens and pluck the heartstrings of strangers and make people feel like they know us, they like us, they trust us, even though we’ve never met before.

Further down the funnel, we’ve got identifier content or hand raiser content. This is where you are being a lot more direct with your audience, trying to get the person to identify and say, yes, that’s me, you’re talking directly to me.

And then sales content is a very small percentage — maybe about five to ten percent. It needs to be clear, it needs to be direct, it has a call to action. And sometimes that call to action is to purchase directly, sometimes it’s to apply, sometimes it requires a sales call first.

Now I want to put a few more things on the table before I give you the challenge for today. Some really common mistakes — and I’ve been lifting the lid on other people’s businesses for 14 years now.

The most common mistake is that there’s no defined offer. They’re selling copywriting services, consulting, whatever the service is, but there’s no definition to it. It’s not packaged into an offering. It doesn’t have edges, and it makes it harder to sell because it assumes a lot on behalf of the other person.

The second is no defined process, especially for consultants, for people that do big complex projects that span multiple months. You need to have a defined process if you want to be improving your sales conversion rate.

The third is no effort in communicating value. Oh my god, I see this every day of the week. One of my friends wanted to do a leadership course. I trusted this friend, so I looked at it. It had a price tag — which I liked, because I appreciate transparent pricing — but it had a desultory number of words to communicate the value of the thing. It pushed me onto a sales call, which I diligently booked, and the salesperson pretty much repeated the exact same words and kept pointing me back to the sales page. I’m like, I’ve read the sales page. There’s no words. Every word that’s written is probably worth about $50 each because you’re expecting me to pay $6,000 and giving me no information. Your marketing needs to do that, not the salesperson.

Then there’s no transparency in pricing. There are lots and lots of people who will never inquire if there’s no price or no indication of pricing. Of course this is a personal decision, but you are excluding a big chunk of people who would never inquire if the price wasn’t clear and obvious.

And the other major, very common mistake is that when the person actually has the sales conversation — and that’s oftentimes the owner — it’s really quite clear and obvious that there are money hangups, and it doesn’t feel good to be on the receiving end of that. The person sounds defensive, sounds apologetic, sounds like they’re embarrassed to be having the conversation. There’s a shakiness. The energy doesn’t feel steady and calm and confident. It feels shaky and uncertain.

So we need that clear, direct ask, which is what sales is all about. We need it now more than ever because there is more information than there’s ever been, more complication, more options, and as a consequence more decisions than there have ever been.

Confused people don’t buy. People that feel overwhelmed by information and options don’t buy. So now more than ever it’s really important for us to be clear and direct in our calls to action online and in our sales conversations — not having meandering conversations where it’s not really clear and obvious to either party that this is in fact a sales conversation.

I want to bring back consent-led sales. Consent-led sales means it’s clear and obvious to both parties that it’s going to be a conversation about sales, that money is going to be discussed, and that there’s going to be a clear direct ask. No more bait and switch. No more let’s get on a Zoom call and all of a sudden someone’s pitching you on something you’ve never heard of and expressed no interest in.

We are equal consenting adults. We treat people with respect. We treat people the same way we expect to be treated. We raise our standards in not only how we are treating ourselves, but how we are treating other people.

One final thing before the challenge. You have to introduce tension in the sales call and be okay with that discomfort — because you’re asking somebody to make a decision.

I don’t ever want them to say yes or no to me on the phone. I’m very happy for them to go away and think about it. I want them to sleep on it. I have never put anyone on the spot and said you have to decide right now. I think that’s ridiculous, unethical and manipulative.

So yes — have the conversation, make the ask, and let them go away and think about it. Come back tomorrow, come back within a week. Give people a bit of a deadline, because otherwise it’s an energetic leak — a door left open that bangs in the wind.

This is going to create tension because most people hate making decisions and they will tell you later, or now it’s not a good time, or I love what you do — let me pay you in a compliment. You’re the one introducing tension because you’re asking for a decision. And we need to be okay with that. We need to be okay with sitting in the discomfort of silence. It’s not something people can die from. All you’re doing is making it slightly awkward, perhaps.

But you need to be okay with introducing that little bit of tension that comes with asking somebody to make a decision.

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Alright, the challenge for today. Pull out your journal, your Word document, whatever you’ve been using throughout Good Money March. We’ve got two prompts today, both of them journaling.

The first is the best sales experience you’ve ever had. Think about an experience where it was enjoyable — because an enjoyable sales experience is genuinely fabulous for both parties. There’s plenty of those experiences, but our negativity bias tends to force us to overlook them. Journal the best sales experiences. If there’s been more than one, write down more than one. It could be where you are the person selling, or you are the person buying. Write down the details. Bring it back into your memory — not just from an intellectual perspective but from an embodied perspective. What did you feel? What did you notice? What was the smell, the taste, the music, the color and movement? Write it all down.

The second prompt is to journal the best client outcomes that you’ve gotten. Because of our negativity bias, we tend to rush past the stellar client outcomes and fixate on the client who was less than happy or disengaged. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to journal the best client outcomes. And if you want to go deeper, go into detail — what was the situation or circumstance? What made that situation or circumstance ideal for the client to get the best outcome? So that we can engineer this again and again and again.

Eleven years ago I launched my first premium flagship group program, the Hustle and Huff program. It was a long time coming. I sat on my ass for two long years before I finally pulled my finger out and made it happen. I had the goal of having 20 people in that very first cohort. And goodness — I got 20 people and I was absolutely thrilled.

Then one person, I think it was week one, asked me for a refund. The reason she gave was that she’d realized she didn’t have time for the program and she’d changed her mind. As you might imagine, I felt like a balloon that had just been popped. It was clear and obvious that people don’t read, because it was clearly stated on the sales page — before you paid, not after — that there are no refunds for change of mind.

And when I went into that first group call I was feeling a bit defeated. And then I said to myself, am I going to let one person out of 20 influence me into giving those other 19 people a lesser experience? Am I actually going to let this one thing colour the whole thing? And of course the answer was no. I went in with as much joy, enthusiasm and flair as I could muster.

This is the trap of our negativity bias. We’ve got to get out of it. It’s like plucking weeds out of a garden — it needs to be done over and over and over again. Those buggers keep coming up and we pluck them out again.

So the challenge for today: focus on the best sales experiences, focus on the best client outcomes, journal them, and keep them front and center. And I dare say there’s a shit ton more of those than you initially appreciate.

Good morning and welcome to day four of good money March. Today, we are talking about pricing. So yesterday, I shared a few of my shitty money experiences, and regardless of your terms and conditions, regardless of your boundaries, your ability to hold boundaries, regardless of your business setup, you’re going to accrue a few shitty experiences. This is kind of part and parcel of being in business for yourself, but there were too many shitty experiences for me.

That was super useful and valuable, because I got mad as hell and I just wasn’t going to take it anymore. My stress was way too high. I had two kids under two. My partner was also self employed. Our mortgage repayments at the time were very, very high. Nothing in my business felt predictable or stable.

It was not unusual for me to be lying awake in the dark calculating cash flow in my head, thinking, if that person paid that invoice, and that person paid that invoice, then I have this much in the bank, and then I could do it. Just doing endless maths on a loop.

So 14 years ago, when the kids were two and one, or two and three, something like that, I started teaching and training. I started business coaching shortly after, and for the first time ever, I started putting prices on my website. I defined what my offers were, what they included, what they didn’t include, and I had the price on my website.

Overnight, my stress levels halved. I cannot tell you how dramatic this change was. I went from always billing by the hour in arrears to billing up front. I did sometimes bill a percentage of a project, so I’d quote on a project and then bill 50%, then 25%, then 25%, but it always felt stressful.

By putting the price on my website and making my pricing transparent, it had multiple effects. The most obvious one was reducing my stress, but it also reduced my time dramatically. It reduced my energy leaks.

Energy leaks are when we’re ruminating on something, letting somebody squat in our head and not pay rent. Thinking about them over and over, and it bleeds into everything else we’re doing. Before I had pricing on my website, I was spending a lot of time in countless conversations with people, sometimes over months, who wanted all the options and all the variations.

They wanted my quote to include six or eight or twelve items. They had the taste for a Porsche, but the budget for a bicycle. The whole thing, as well as being inefficient, was hugely stressful.

So today we’re talking about pricing and positioning. Pricing is one of the most important levers you can pull in your business. We are not talking about worth. Worth is not something we’re discussing. We are not talking about deserve, because deserve is irrelevant when it comes to pricing.

In my opinion, everybody deserves abundance. Clean water. A roof over their heads. Safety and security. Three great meals a day. They deserve all of that. But when we get into what is it worth and what do I deserve, we overcomplicate things. We add morality, judgement, emotion. We don’t need to do that.

We are simplifying. We are un-fucking the money. We are making it uncomplicated.

A lot of business owners use words like accessible. They say, I want to be accessible. But the way we make ourselves accessible is by actually earning excellent money. There was no way I had the capacity, imagination, or emotional fortitude to deliver something like this when I was earning far less and carrying far more stress, with fewer systems, structures, boundaries, and pricing that actually sustained me.

You are of no use to the world when you are pricing yourself at a level that makes your business unsustainable. Because someone is going to be paying for you. That can put you in a very vulnerable position.

I’ve seen this many times. One client comes to mind. She was a wealthy woman, had a business for decades, but it wasn’t earning much. One day her husband walked out, changed the locks, froze her out of the bank accounts. Completely out of left field. She did not see it coming. It put her in an extremely precarious position.

This happens more than we hear about. So be careful when we talk about accessibility, because we can be vain about it. Profit planning is maths, not vanity. And vanity shows up in different ways. Being generous. Being accessible. Being nice.

A lot of business owners would rather be nice than be paid. I’ve seen this repeatedly. Someone gets a great opportunity, like speaking on stage, and they don’t talk about what they sell. They don’t want to be seen as selling, greedy, needy, or graspy.

Another thing often overlooked is that you need to be wealthy to charge a low amount. You need to be well resourced to operate at volume. It is a different business model.

If I price something at $50, I need to sell a large volume to make a livable wage, let alone have surplus to invest in team and support. It is expensive to sell low. It makes far more sense to sell at a higher price, especially for solo business owners or small teams who do not have volume or factory-level capacity.

Revenue planning and profit planning is maths. This is what I did 18 years ago on the back of an envelope. If I have three retainer clients paying 2k a month, that’s 6k. You don’t need a degree to figure that out.

Your revenue plan is simply: what am I selling, at what price, and how many do I need to sell to reach my goal?

So here’s the challenge.

First, the more detailed one. Build a simple revenue plan. Start with your money goal. You’ve already done that. You can work it out by looking at your expenses, or just look at your credit card or bank account as a shortcut.

Add a buffer, because people tend to underestimate.

Then look at your true capacity. How many hours do you actually have? People overestimate this. We forget time for basic life things, travel, interruptions.

I suggest working on 10 months out of 12. If your goal is 100k a year, don’t divide by 12, divide by 10. That gives you a more realistic monthly target, allowing for holidays, sick days, mental health days, and school holidays.

Next is your offerings ecosystem. This is productised services. Instead of constantly scoping custom work, you define your offer clearly. Who it’s for, what outcome it delivers, the process, the price, and the terms.

This removes endless back and forth, proposals, revisions, and wasted time.

The fourth piece is marketing. Promotions, launches, campaigns, offers. This is the fuel. Many business owners get stuck creating offers, because it’s the fun part, and neglect marketing.

But without marketing, it’s like having a beautiful shop with incredible products and forgetting to invite anyone in.

Pricing itself is a mix of maths and psychology. It is not about adding margin. It is not about how long something took you to create.

Especially with services, pricing is about perceived value. A lot of people price based on their costs or by copying others. They look at someone else’s price, compare it to their own self-worth, and pick a number somewhere around that.

We all do it at some stage, but we need to move beyond it.

It is our responsibility as business owners to communicate value. People do not understand the value of what you do unless you show them.

This is not done through endless one-to-one conversations. It is done through your website, your sales pages, your marketing.

If you are having a lot of sales conversations that go nowhere, your marketing is not doing its job.

Marketing is communication.

Your website should do the heavy lifting, so that when you do have sales conversations, they are efficient and focused.

Final challenge.

Go and collect evidence of people selling something very similar to what you do at a much higher price point.

Because we tend to focus on people charging less. Those people are not your concern.

Start training your brain to see what is actually possible.

Good morning and welcome to day three. Today, we are focusing on excavating the shit and choosing a new reality, which means choosing a new identity. So 18 years in business, I have acquired a few money stories.

Let’s just say I’ve acquired a lot of shitty experiences. And one of the reasons why I work and why I love doing what I do is that I want to drastically shorten the timeline for you, because if I can save you some time and some money and some effort, and if I can help you get to the good stuff quicker, then great. There’s a purpose. Why I, you know, experience the shit that I experienced.

So just a few quick stories to illustrate. Firstly, there was a story way, way, way, way back when, in the very early months of my business. So I’m thinking it was perhaps month two. So you gotta imagine, it’s 2008 take yourself back in time. 2008 I was a baby business owner. I was having coffee with anyone who looked at me twice.

I was, you know, utilising my network as much as possible and asking people you know, do you know anyone that needs help with their marketing? Do you know anyone that needs help writing copy for their website? Do you know anyone who needs help with this new, new fandangled thing called social media, this new thing called Facebook, and I was going to events in Sydney, yeah, generally, doing the thing that you do in the first 18 months or so of business.

And I went to this networking event where a bloke spoke on stage, and then I spoke to him afterwards, and we ended up meeting, and in the course of the meeting, he was a very charismatic fellow, and I was very excited by what he was doing. One thing that you need to know about me is I’m easily excitable. I find it easy to kind of see other people’s visions and to get swept up in all the potential of that.

So in my great naive enthusiasm, I told him, yes, absolutely, I love your vision and your mission, and I want to help you, and I want to do it for free. And he said, Great, wonderful, fabulous. And he said, Oh, maybe we could start my website. I’m like, Yes, great, give me the keys, let me in. Let’s log in now. And he said, Ah, I’ll just have to call my website designer to get my login details.

So I’m speaking on the phone with this guy’s website designer, and he’s given me access to the website. And I said, this is a lovely looking website. Do you mind if I asked how much this guy paid you for it? Because I’m a new digital marketing agency owner, blahdy blah blah. And the guy said, Oh, I designed his site for free.

And I said, Oh, that’s very kind and generous of you. And he said, Yes, it is, isn’t it? And there was just something in the his voice at that moment where I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And my, you know, antenna went up, and I thought, shit. I got to get out of here. So I said goodbye to the guy and I left. And then when we had our follow up conversation, and I said to him, Look, I’m very sorry. I got a bit excited in the moment, and I just cannot do all of this marketing for you for free, the guy got really angry with me, and, you know, tried to accuse me of all kinds of things because I told him that I was working, I would work for him for free, and I had changed my mind.

This is the first of many similar stories. There was another client who owed me multiple 1000s of dollars that I needed to put on a payment plan. Now he was paying me back $500 at a time, and you know, at the rate that he was going, it was going to take him a long, long time for me to get my money back. And during that time, he took his family on an overseas holiday, and I was like, What am doing, so I needed to renegotiate and change that up there was countless stories of the clients who told me earnestly that they couldn’t afford my marketing services, but they would happily go overseas.

They would happily go on holidays. They would happily pay for branding or for photography or product development or bookkeeping. The product development particularly kills me because it’s like that. There’s no There’s no marketing to speak of, there’s no audience to speak of, there’s no community to speak of, and they’re paying, you know, 1000s in in one instance, somebody told me they spent $16,000 making a course, you know, and without marketing, it’s like, well, it’s like you’re spending all this money on inventory in your shop.

You know, who’s going to buy it? So, countless, countless stories. I had people short change me. I had people who I needed to chase and chase and chase. I had one particular client, and I remember it because it was only $300 it was like it was a relatively small amount of money. But you know, the amount of stress chasing that $300 cost me, and like staring into the darkness at 2am thinking, you know, when is this person gonna pay me? So if any of these resonate with you, please go ahead and write down your own versions. Grab a pen and pencil, start typing out a few of your own versions. And if you haven’t collected any shitty stories about money yet through your business, then I hazard a guess that perhaps you haven’t been in business for long enough, because it’s really, really, really common.

Tell me if these resonate, I can’t earn more money, I can’t service more clients. I’m already at capacity. I’m already working too hard. I’m already feeling burnt out. People aren’t buying. People don’t buy. In this economy, if I don’t try, I can’t really fail. I already tried that. It didn’t work. Only people who have low integrity scale their businesses and work with so many clients at a time, what I do is too high in integrity, with much too higher standards to ever be able to work with so many clients at the one time. I can’t provide the best possible service.

If I’m leveraging my expertise, premium paying clients will be too demanding, and they will make my life harder, and I need to prioritise my peace. There’s too much competition. I should have done this years ago. The time has passed. If any of these things resonate with you, please write it down. They they won’t all resonate with you, but if any of them do, please write it down. Today. We’re excavating the shit, and we have to excavate the shit if we are to build a new identity as a business coach. My clients pay me to make them feel uncomfortable. People don’t pay me to tell them, everything’s wonderful, everything’s great. Well done. You go. Girl, go. Girl, carry on. You’re doing well. Of course, I say that, of course I I rev them up.

But people don’t pay me to make them feel comfortable, because this is not what we’re doing here, and especially if we want something different than what we’ve already got, if we want to have a new relationship with money, if we want to get air quotes good at money. If we want to be fabulous at earning, fabulous at saving, fabulous at investing, if we want to change what we get, change our outcome, we have to change our identity.

And as I’ve said before, this is part and parcel of getting older, and it’s an goddamn privilege. It is. It’s a goddamn privilege. It’s a privilege. Not everybody gets to decide on because, you know, some people are stubborn, some people have fixed mindsets. Some people are like, No, this is just the way that it is. It can’t be changed. It doesn’t work like that. You know, this is the truth. This is the whole truth. This is truth with a capital T.

So when we’re looking and again, please don’t feel like you have to share any of this shit. This is a safe space. You are you and your pen, you and your pencil, you and your diary or your journal or your, you know, blank document. It doesn’t have to be shared with anybody. So please feel free to be open, to be honest, to be radically, radically, you know, open eyed with yourself, because we don’t change things by holding tightly and suddenly to, you know, the not whole truth. We don’t want to delude ourselves here, right? So our old identity, you know, I want to kind of talk a little bit more about that. The first one is that we need to take ownership and step into this main character energy where we are the main protagonist in our own life story.

Because if we have an identity where it’s like, well, things just happen to me. I’m like, a I’m somebody who reacts and responds. I’m not the main character. I’m the person who’s in the background. If that’s your identity, it’s going to be almost impossible for you to change anything. We’ve got to take ownership of ourselves. We’ve got to be taking responsibility for for the stuff that’s happened, right?

So if you know one or two bad eggs, if you stumble across one or two bad eggs in business, that’s not your fault. It’s totally not your fault. The other day, I had somebody who asked to barter services with me. I’m like, Dude, I haven’t done bartering for bloody 15 years now. I don’t barter. It’s not a thing I do. You know, that’s that’s not my fault. That’s just, you know, that’s the other person. But if the same shit keeps happening over and over and over and over again, if you can see a pattern going on, then it’s time to take responsibility. It’s time to say, Hey, I play a part in this. This is not just some, you know, random pattern that you know, seems to happen to me. I am actually responsible for this. I’m playing a part.

We need to see where we play a part. In order for something to change, right? We need to take responsibility, and when we take responsibility, we can make change. Now, part and parcel of this, and this one’s a little bit tricky, which is why I prefer audio to written. It’s difficult to sometimes admit of what we gain in a dysfunctional situation. We’re always gaining something from staying in a dysfunctional situation, even if it’s just familiarity. So I’ll give you a quick example to kind of illustrate this point, when I was charging too little and earning too little, and I had two children under two, and I was, you know, to be frank, I was stressed. And I was stressed not because of two children under two, you know, I don’t want to blame my children. I don’t want to blame my children. I don’t want to use my children as an excuse for not earning more.

And I certainly don’t want to be using my children, you know, as a kind of a blame game for why I feel stressed. One of the reasons I was under charging is because I wanted to be seen as nice and kind and generous. I gained from that identity. I liked being thought of as generous. And in fact, it was that very word generous that in one instance, caused me to put my prices up where I kept hearing this, this word when, when clients would talk about me, that comment to me, or they’d give me testimonials, and they’d say, generous, generous, generous, generous. And I’m like, Oh, just a second now, generous, generous. Sounds like I need to put my prices up, because I’d moved past that point of going, Yes, you know, it’s lovely to be seen as generous, and it’s nice to have an identity as generous, but I absolutely, definitely do not want to be under charging. I absolutely, definitely want to be making lovely money, fabulous money, great money, with surplus and overflow and buffer, you know, for many and varied reasons.

Now, the last point I want to make about changing your identity is that we need to recognise the cost of not changing. I can’t convince you to change. This is not my role. This is not my job, and it’s an impossibility anyway, even if I decided it was my role and responsibility, I’m not God. I cannot change somebody else. I can’t even change my partner, and we’ve been together for 2223 years. He’s a very stubborn, very stubborn man. So if I can’t change my partner and I can’t change my children, then what the hell am I, you know, assuming that I can change you, you’re the person that needs to actually believe that this is true.

You need to decide I can’t convince you of this. But as a quick reminder, in day one, I talked about anger. I talked about resentment. I talked about frustration, and I said how all these things are really useful emotions. And so they’re useful emotions because they can be alchemized into change. And if they’re not alchemized into making a change, into doing something different, into being bold, then they tend to stagnate and coagulate into depression or low self esteem. And again, this is one of the big motivators for me in why I do what I do, because I’ve seen it firsthand. I have seen utter legends in their fields who have decades of experience. Everybody in the know knows exactly who these legends are, and they say the most interesting, provocative, thoughtful, nuanced things. And when I, you know, have a one to one conversation with them, a private conversation, it’s clear and obvious to me that they have low self esteem. These are people that are at the height of their careers, who should be revealing in you know their talent and their body of work, and you know what impact they’ve had on their community at large. And yet, they have a relationship with money, they have a relationship with business, they have a relationship with sales, which is dysfunctional, and they have not changed their identity to therefore change their results.

So when we’re wading into the shit, wading into the shit, and this ain’t fun, this ain’t glamorous. This is not anybody’s idea of a good time. Please know that you’re going to trigger others and that this is kind of the price of entry. This is what you pay. This is your price of entry. I have triggered, no doubt, countless people. Most of those people don’t let me know that I’ve triggered them. But oftentimes I can, you know, I can kind of Intuit it. I can get a sense that somebody’s pulling away from me. And you know, what? What can I do about that? Nothing, really, nothing. I can’t do anything. What am I going to do? Tap them on the shoulder and say, Hey, can you? Can you tell me exactly what about me is triggering? Is causing you to pull away from me because I’m feeling blahdy blah, that would be weird. Most people won’t tell you the truth. Most people could barely articulate it to themselves.

Your Success will trigger other people, because they may not believe it’s possible, they may, you know, you’re kind of holding a mirror to them also and making them see where perhaps they’re playing it safe, where perhaps they’re not putting themselves out there. They’re kind of holding themselves back. They’re avoiding visibility. They’re avoiding bigger opportunities you will provoke and trigger other people. And you know, I want to kind of temper that with, firstly, a lot of that is not your fault, nor your responsibility to manage. You cannot micromanage other people’s responses to you that will make you miserable. It’s impossible to do, and it will make you miserable. And second, you don’t need to go out of your way to enter into those conversations. There are many people, not many people. There are some people in my life where I know to avoid certain topics because it’s going to trigger them. And they’re going to be triggered. They’re going to say something that I’m not going to enjoy hearing, and then, you know it’s it’s not going to be a fruitful relationship. You don’t need to be talking about money, you don’t need to be talking about business.

You absolutely do not need to be talking about all the changes that you’re making or thinking to make with everybody. Don’t do that. That’s a silly thing to do. All you’re doing is you’re welcoming in irrelevant opinions, uninformed opinions. You know emotion, you know you’re inviting trouble. So please be careful with you know your your board of advisors, so to speak, you don’t have to share what you’re doing, business wise, money wise with all people. By all means, share it with important people. But also know that you know you may get responses that you don’t actually find useful. The narratives you might hear are things like you don’t deserve it. You didn’t work hard enough. You know, who do you think you are? You don’t have enough experience. You don’t have enough this. You don’t have enough that.

You know, this is kind of stuff again, where you don’t need to wade into those conversations. Most of the time, most of the time, we’re sharing information. We’re sharing important stuff with people that aren’t actually qualified to hold the space for us. So whenever I’m doing something big and bold, whenever I’m in the midst of a big launch, for example, I am very, very careful as to who I share that with, and I will share it only with people in my life who, who I expect will be unashamedly supportive and cheerful, you know, cheering for me, if it’s anything other than 100% you know, you go, girl, I’m not going to share it with the person, because I don’t need to. Yeah, I’m in a place where I need to keep my attitude bulletproof, so I’m going to be careful with who I share it with. All right, so one more thing, before I talk about the challenge for today is a lot of our shit, a lot of excavating our shit in relation to money, in relation to experiences that we’ve had that have shaped and informed us, have to do with your relationship with power.

And your relationship with power will be reflected in your pricing. And oftentimes, our relationship with power and our relationship with money deeply, intimately intertwined. And it’s oftentimes because, you know, when I’m talking to clients who have a very Vex relationship with sales, where, basically they try to avoid sales at all costs. Sorry, let me start again. They try and avoid actively selling. So yes, they’re making sales, but it’s all very softly, softly. It’s all very reactive, rather than proactive, it’s all, you know, like word of mouth and responding to inquiries, rather than proactively selling. We’re going to be talking about sales for the next two days. I can’t No, not next two days. Next three days. I cannot wait. It’s going to be awesome. But oftentimes it’s because, you know, for those particular clients who really try and actively avoid proactive sales. It’s because they’ve had shitty experiences where somebody has attempted to lord it over them with money. And you know, certainly that was my story for the first few years of my business, especially when I build in arrears, when I charge by the hour and I build in arrears, it was very, you know, it wasn’t uncommon at all. It was pretty common that somebody would hold the final invoice over me and go, Well, just one more thing, one last thing, one last thing, one last thing, one last thing, quick, job. Quick, quick, quick. One last thing, you know, and it’s like just a second, dude, I have given you the brief. I have delivered the brief. I’ve delivered what is within scope. And you’re just holding this invoice. You know, it used to happen all the time. So there are many ways to think about power and the old way of doing it, the old, you know, rotten status quo is this hierarchical power, this old school hierarchical power, where it’s like you’re better than me, you’re less than me. It’s very kind of classist, better worse. We’re all kind of on some kind of ladder or hierarchy. But there are many, many, many other ways of thinking or dealing with power. There is power with, there is power between. There is power to, there is more of a kind of a flat structure, a circular structure, a regenerative structure of power. It doesn’t have to be hierarchical, because when we have money and we have power, we are resourced, and this is one of the reasons why the status quo doesn’t love this for us, because they don’t want us to be resourced, right? They want us to be obedient. They want us to be waking up, and they want us to be working hard, and they want us to be spending money on things that make us feel better, like getting our hair dyed or whatever. And they want us to be falling into bed exhausted at the end of each day, because we’re if we’re exhausted at the end of each day, then we’re not. We don’t have the energy, you know, to over overthrow the rotten industrial complex, you know, the dudes in power. All right, so I’m going to end it there. I want to talk about the challenge, your challenge. Should you choose to accept it? Please don’t passively listen to this and expect anything is going to change. The first step to making change is to decide this takes a second. The second step to making change, or to creating anything new, is to write it down. Take it out of your head. Take it out of the bloody blah blah, and put it on paper. So my challenge for you today, should you choose to accept it? What is the new money identity that you want to grow into? Give us specifics. Go into detail. Go back to your figures. How much money in the bank, how much buffer in the bank, how much in savings. How do you want to feel around money? How do you want to act around money? How do you want money to change for you, and obviously, to change things for the better? Because that idea that I just want to highlight, if your brain’s like, ah, if I have money, I will change into a greedy person. That’s not a thing, that’s not a thing. And that’s part of the kind of excavations that we’re doing through good money March. So with your new money identity that you’re writing down. Do it in present perfect tense. I am, I do, I have, I enjoy, I love, I spend on, I invest in. Give us specific specifics of genius. Don’t make it vague and general. You start with vague in general, absolutely. But take it from broad and vague and general into specifics. This is your new this is your future that you are writing into the present. Enjoy the process. Tomorrow, we’re going to be talking about pricing, everybody’s favourite topic. It is not too late to join good money March, please. If you’ve gotten value so far, I would love, love, love. If you would send people to our good money March web page. I will post it below, and I’d love to hear from you. So go ahead, use the chat, use our group. I’ll see you tomorrow.

When I was 22 years old, I left Sydney and I went to Vietnam. I went to Thailand first, then into Cambodia, then in Vietnam, and I ended up living and working in Vietnam and Cambodia for two years.

Now, even though my dad was a small business owner, and at around the same time that I left Australia, his business partnership was combusting in the worst possible way, even though I had worked in his business, I had sat alongside his bookkeeper and helped her, and I was familiar with the ebbs and the flows of money, even though I used to answer the phone to debtors who were looking to be paid, even though I knew that cash flow was central to business and that these were great early lessons, that debt is part and parcel of building a business, that risk is part and parcel of building a business, even though I had this early experience, it was really my experience in Vietnam that shaped my view, specifically my view on selling and my view on entrepreneurship, far, far more than my early experience working in my dad’s business.

Because the Vietnamese that I met were, almost to a person, incredibly industrious, incredibly resourceful, very hard working.

I would sit with a friend that I had in Hue, which is a beautiful imperial city halfway down the country, in the middle of the country, and I would sit on one of those teeny tiny plastic stools with my knees in my armpits next to her glass cabinet. So you’ve probably seen this before. If you’ve travelled in Asia, you would definitely have seen it. The glass cabinets on wheels, where inside you might have cigarettes and lollies and snacks, all kinds of different things, and you can wheel them out onto the street, and then you can wheel them back inside the house at the end of the day.

So I would sit with my friend for hours, and we would just chat and watch the crowd go by, and she’d call over whoever was selling snacks, and we’d just snack continuously.

And I watched her negotiate with people. I watched her talk about money. I watched her barter. I watched her make it fun and make it social. And I picked up lots and lots of different things in relation to specifically, in relation to talking about money as well, because in Vietnam, it’s very, very common to barter.

And this is not a stressful thing. This is not some kind of game of who can pull the wool over the other person’s eyes. When it’s done well, it’s a very social, engaging, fun, enjoyable conversation. And it quickly became clear to me that whoever was in a rush, whoever was feeling uncomfortable, whoever was kind of not enjoying the process would invariably lose.

Ideally, it wasn’t a win-lose game. In a great barter conversation, it’s a win-win. The person walks away feeling good about the price that they paid, and the seller walks away feeling good about the price that they got.

So this was really, really pivotal, like I said, to my experience, specifically in relation to selling.

And what I didn’t see in Vietnam is I didn’t see shame about selling. I didn’t see embarrassment about selling. I didn’t see any Vietnamese or hear any Vietnamese say things like, I don’t want to look greedy, I don’t want to look desperate, I don’t want to look like I have to sell. This was just not something that was even entertained. It wasn’t even remotely relevant to the people that I was hanging out with.

So yesterday, we kicked off Good Money March by talking about your thoughts, beliefs, feelings about money, and how these are not truth with a capital T, about how these things were planted and thoughts kind of solidify into beliefs and attitudes, and of course, beliefs and attitudes have a massive effect on what we do or don’t do.

Today, I’m going to talk about simplifying money. I’m going to talk about the four different quadrants, or the four areas of money. I’m going to talk about some foundational stuff. So if you’re fairly new to business, or you kind of know that your business, from a money perspective, is a bit of a red hot mess, then I think you’re going to enjoy the foundational stuff, hopefully. And then we’re going to end, of course, with a challenge.

So let’s kick off by talking about the four different aspects of money.

The one that we, of course, are focusing on in Good Money March is earning money. We’re talking about revenue. We’re talking about profit. And also we’re talking about take-home pay, because take-home pay is what you get to take out of the business and keep or retain.

The second area is saving, and this is the part that most business owners tend to get a bit fixated on. This is absolutely, definitely gendered, and it tends to be something that women are praised for. Women are rewarded and praised for being good savers, good budgeters, good money managers.

The third part of money is spending. Now this has to do with business, of course. So the things that we spend on, including perhaps our staff, perhaps our contractors or subcontractors, perhaps our software subscriptions, maybe things like website design or photography or graphic design or copywriting.

And then the fourth area of business is invest. Now, invest is very much outside of Good Money March. We’re not going to be talking about investing, but I do want to make the point that it is almost impossible to invest money if the take-home pay that you are drawing from your business is slim to none.

So the quadrant that people tend to fixate on the most is saving, and this, I would suggest, is a fool’s errand, because there’s only so much that you can cut.

Now, of course, some people have money dysfunctions in relation to spending. They really struggle to hold on to money. It makes them feel unsafe holding on to money. Or conversely, I’ve heard many, many people tell me that it makes them feel safe to spend it, because if they’re spending money, then they can tell themselves, well, I’m doing okay because I’ve got money to spend.

But saving money is something that, you know, you can only really make incremental cuts. There’s only so much you can cut. One of the big areas that people tend to overspend on is subscriptions. And it’s easy to do, right? Because we kind of go, oh, that looks exciting, and that’s a problem that I have, and all of a sudden you’ve got all these amounts that are leaving your account every month, and you’re not even really sure what they’re for most of the time.

But the area that most of us are neglecting is the earning. Because, of course, as a business owner, potentially, our earnings are limitless. Potentially, we could make a hell of a lot of money. And of course, the more money that we can make, the more easy it is for us to invest, for us to grow more quickly, because we’ve got surplus so that we can spend it on things like ads or contractors or staff.

Business coaching, of course, I have to say that as a business coach, there’s a lot more that can be done. There’s a limitlessness with the earnings that there is not with the savings.

Now, what I have noticed over 14 years of coaching business owners, and you know a little bit about what I’ve done, I’ve done a lot of one-to-one business coaching. Of course, I’ve done group business coaching. I have done facilitation, where I’m facilitating conversation. A lot of that has been around money and identity. I have done training, and I have trained under the Hustle and Heart brand, as well as on behalf of other training institutes, corporates, higher education, TAFEs, universities, all kinds of different places.

And what I have seen, the three main things that I have seen, is a struggle to receive money.

So this is that kind of embarrassment that you might feel when you charge an amount that’s appropriate to the value that you’re delivering.

Now, being unable to create a sustainable, profitable business will likely have a flow-on effect, including your dependency on others to pay your way in the world, and especially for women, this puts us in a very precarious position. Because if we do need to leave a marriage, leave a romantic relationship, it oftentimes puts us in a very, very vulnerable position, or makes it incredibly difficult to leave.

The second main money dysfunction that I see is the inability, or a struggle rather, to hold on to money.

So these are the people that spend beyond their means, that can’t really save, find it very, very difficult to save. They see money in their business bank account, and they just kind of want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And it might kind of feel fun in the moment, but ultimately the effect, as you might imagine, can be a little bit disastrous, because again, you’re stymying the growth of your business. If you can’t invest, if you don’t have surplus money to invest in growth, then it’s going to be almost impossible to hire staff, to pay for marketing, to purchase equipment or any other types of support.

Oftentimes this can kind of go hand in glove with flightiness. So the business owner that’s kind of frequently changing their mind, frequently changing direction, rebranding, renaming, changing up what they’re doing, changing up their offerings, buying businesses, selling businesses, a constant state of flux. And the flow-on effect of this, of course, is that oftentimes these people are seen as unreliable and untrustworthy because of that flightiness.

The third dysfunction that I see around money is a struggle to spend it.

Now again, this is something that women tend to be rewarded for, because this is a gendered agenda thing. So when women, when their expenses are minimal in business, they oftentimes get praised for this, and it kind of becomes a source of pride.

But this does absolutely, definitely turn into a dysfunction when the person is overly fixated on money. And I’ve had clients before where they’re checking their bank balance, their business trading account, multiple times a day. They’re checking their spreadsheets, their financial spreadsheets, multiple times a day, at a frequency that does not warrant it.

Their business, it absolutely, definitely can impede your business growth when you struggle to spend money, because there reaches a point, and I’ve seen this multiple times in multiple businesses, where it makes no sense what the business owner is doing. They’re working weekends. They’re working evenings. They are short-shifting their staff and suppliers. Their staff and suppliers are leaving because they’re being routinely underpaid. So the good people are leaving.

And the other thing that’s happening, of course, is that they’re not actually enjoying being in business because they’re seeing it all as kind of a win-lose situation. It’s always like, I’m losing. I never have enough. I never have enough. I never have enough. And it’s not a shit tonne of fun, right, when you’re constantly fixating on not-enoughness.

Underspending can really be accompanied by stubbornness, so the personality type that kind of resists change and risks becoming stale or out of touch or even obsolete.

So these are the three main money dysfunctions that I have seen over and over and over again over the years.

Now, I want to kind of add something before we get too emotional, and that is that this is just dysfunction. This is not a permanent state of affairs. We are all dysfunctional to an extent when it comes to money, because money is such a powerful influence as well as a taboo topic.

So please know that these dysfunctions are not a life sentence, but we need to be ruthlessly, radically honest with ourselves. Stop deluding ourselves. Stop telling ourselves that we are a certain way and that we are unable to change if we do actually want a different outcome. We need to appreciate that, as we talked about yesterday, that thoughts can be changed, that beliefs can be changed, that feelings can be changed, that our identity can be changed.

And this is a little bit like plucking weeds out of a garden.

I’ve got a kind of a big, unruly, rambling garden. It’s all different heights. It’s very steep. And when we first bought the house, it was a bit of a nightmare, and it took me years to get that garden under some semblance of control.

And this is what I think about when I think about changing thoughts, opinions and beliefs and feelings. It’s a little bit like plucking weeds from a garden. It becomes a little bit of a war of attrition, where you pluck the weed, it comes up again. You pluck the weed, it comes up again. You pluck the weed, it comes up again. But eventually you’ve planted enough trees, you’ve planted enough, in my case natives, where they get to a certain height. These are the healthy habits, if you’re not following. These are the new thoughts, the new beliefs, the new feelings about money.

And all of a sudden, it’s easy to keep those weeds under control. All of a sudden, there’s a tipping point where there is more new growth, there are more new plants in the right places, than there are weeds that are relentlessly popping up.

All right. So a little bit about the foundations. I want to make sure that I’ve kind of checked this off, because I don’t want this all to be burnt mindset. I want to make sure that if you are new to business, or if your finances are in a bit of disarray, that we’ve got these foundations set up.

The first one is you need a business bank account. You need a separate bank account to what you use in your day-to-day personal spending. Keep these two things separate. You can thank me later when tax time comes along. You’ve got two bank accounts. We want to keep those finances separate. Business bank account, personal bank account.

Secondly, we’ve got bookkeeping software. So some people are paying for bookkeeping. Great, wonderful. There’s no reason why you can’t have access to those books though, because even if you’re outsourcing bookkeeping, you absolutely, definitely do want to know what’s coming in, what’s going out. You want to see that flow of money in your business. You want to see how it ebbs, how it flows, how you know you can have perhaps a week that’s huge, or a month that’s huge, and then you can have a month that’s less than and not make it mean anything. This is one of the kind of things we’re going to get into a little bit later.

So bookkeeping software is the second one.

Third, profit and loss statements. Profit and loss statements are something that you want to learn how to read, and there is plenty of help on the internet. You can ask, of course, your accountant. You may ask your bookkeeper to give you some advice or some help in interpreting your profit and loss statement. But this gives you an accurate view, or a somewhat accurate view, on what’s what, and avoiding looking at this stuff does not make it any better. It does not make it miraculously improve. It has to actually be looked at and explored.

The fourth one, if you are curious about spending, and especially if your profit and loss statement is revealing something which is not much fun, you want to do a spending audit.

Now I wouldn’t be doing this all day, every day. This is something that I would periodically do, maybe once a year. Maybe once a year I would sit down, typically just before Black Friday, and I would look at my subscriptions. I would look at my spending. I’m looking at my profit and loss throughout the year anyway. I’m looking at my incomings and outgoings throughout the year anyway. But I would sit down once a year and do a bit of an audit as to what I was spending and see how it was tracking.

The fifth one, and perhaps the most important one, is money goals.

Now I’m going to touch on this a little bit. Money goals are your revenue targets. So I have various tools in various programmes and courses, short courses that I run, where we do a profit plan together. And if it’s something that you’re curious about, please ask, and I’m happy to send you a couple of links.

But having some kind of money goal is absolutely critical to business. And you can argue till you’re blue in the face with me on this, and I will retort that there is only one rule in business. Only one rule.

My clients would have heard me say this before. That rule is that we are in business to exchange value for cash.

Everything else, everything else is up to you. You don’t need a team if you don’t want a team. If you want to grow a massive team, you can do that. You don’t need a group programme if you don’t want a group programme. If all you want to do is run premium group programmes, you can do that. You don’t need to do Instagram marketing, you don’t need to do Facebook marketing, you don’t need to do email marketing, you don’t need to do SEO. You don’t need to do anything except exchange value for cash.

And this part is absolutely critical, especially if we are to make more. Because, as I said, putting your head in the sand and ignoring stuff does not make it better.

So we’re going to talk a little bit, like I said, about profit planning and money goals, and you know what you’re actually selling, and does the maths math, a little bit later on in a few more days’ time.

But your challenge today is take out your pen and pencil if you haven’t already done so. Go back and listen again to what I was just talking about. Go back and listen to the three money dysfunctions. See whether you identify more with one than the other, and write it down. Write down how it feels. Write down your common patterns. Write down your behavioural patterns you want to change. Write down the feelings that accompany this and what you’d like to change them to.

And then finally, I want you to write down a money goal on a piece of paper. You do not have to share that with anyone, including me.

What I like to do is have a money goal at all times on a piece of paper in my office, staring back at me.

I do this every single time I raise my prices. I put my new price on a piece of paper, and I look at it, and I look at it and I look at it. I put it near the desk where I could see it every day.

Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to normalise new things, right? This is exposure therapy, and this is the only way, really, that I know how to deal with money dysfunctions and a lot of fears. There’s many, many things that I’ve done in my life that I’m absolutely petrified of, terrified of. But the way that I reduce that fear, the only way that I know of, I’m not a therapist, so talk this through with your therapist, but the only way that I know of to reduce that fear for you is exposure therapy. Little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit.

That is the challenge for today.

What is the new price? What is the new target for your revenue that you’d like to earn? Write it on a piece of paper and look at it every single day.

Top of Form

 

00:01
Hello and welcome to Good Money March. This is the official kickoff. Now, just because we’re starting doesn’t mean that you cannot still invite other people to join us. I would love, love, love, love so much. If you would take two quick minutes and please send an email to a couple of people or share a social media post of mine where I’m talking about Good Money March.

00:29
I really want to get as many good eggs in business in here to talk about money because it’s become clear and obvious to me over the last 18 years of self-employment that there really isn’t a lot of safe spaces where we can discuss money openly, frankly, transparently, honestly, where we can share real figures, where we can share real stories and where we can do so without

00:58
judgment and shame and passive aggressive weirdness and conversely that kind of you know hype hype bro marketing you know just over the top kind of manipulative it’s almost like a a mass delusion um there’s really not a lot of spaces that we can talk about money so i hope that you take this as a safe space i hope that you appreciate it as a safe space

01:28
um We’re going to be covering a lot. So to give you a bit of a heads up as to what’s Today, we’re going to talk about thoughts, beliefs and feelings from childhood and how they influence your money. I’m going to be sharing um some stories of my own, course. Day two, we’re going to be talking about simplifying money. I’m going to talk about the four quadrants of money and how most people focus on the least important.

01:56
and neglect the most important. We’re gonna talk about excavating the shit and choosing a new reality. Yes, I wrote that in black and white in my plan in front of me. uh So figuring out which bits we are ready to move on past, which bits don’t no longer make any sense. Now it is a privilege. It is an absolute privilege as an adult to get to do this.

02:23
as an adult to get to reach a certain age and stage where you recognize, you know what, these thoughts, these beliefs, these feelings of mine are not permanent. They do not have to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They do not have to be my reality from here on in. And I can choose different thoughts and beliefs and opinions. Now that is an absolute privilege. There’s a lot of people that never get to this.

02:52
There’s a lot of people that you know die young. There’s a lot of people that are very fixed and closed obstinate mindsets where they just reject the whole idea that you can do this. You can do this. So that’s going to be super exciting and I really hope that you’re ready for that because if you’re not. This whole thing is a bit of a procrastinate education exercise right?

03:22
We are going to be talking about pricing. Yes, we will. We are going to be talking about positioning and communicating value, which of course goes hand in glove with pricing. We’re going to be talking about selling one to one and selling one to many via the internet. We’re going to be talking about how you spend your time. And then we’re going to finish up talking about your new money identity, which includes.

03:48
your beliefs about money, your thoughts about money, your feelings about money, and how it translates into new rituals, new habits, and new routines.

04:03
I hope you’re excited because I am definitely excited. This is the very first time that I have done anything like this online. So I have led countless conversations face to face. I’ve been flown to Melbourne to talk to a group of female barristers on this topic of money and pricing and identity and power. I have um taught and trained and led groups at vocational colleges.

04:32
at universities, at various education institutes, uh with business owners, new and experienced. And I have led many, many uh conversations about money, opened many money conversation circles. It’s always been an absolute privilege and a real eye-opener. But this is the very first time that I’ve done this online in this format. So I’m excited.

05:01
And I hope you are too. I want to start with a quick story from my childhood. So I grew up in Sydney. I grew up in a pretty kind of stock standard middle class family. um The only thing I guess that was slightly unusual about us is that there were four girls, four children. I was the eldest. This is not unusual. Eldest children.

05:29
eldest daughters run businesses. It’s a thing. ah And my mother was a consummate budgeter. She was very, very good at it because she didn’t work when I was a child. She had um four kids that she’d kind of evenly paced. So there was a bit of a spread between our ages. There was 11 years between my youngest sister and myself. And she was managing um the budget.

05:58
ah And definitely she was wearing the pads in so far as, you know, money was concerned. ah And she didn’t believe in pocket money and she was a bit of a, I think my kids call it a pantry mother or a crunchy, crunchy mum. So no junk food. She was very keen on, you know, uh whole foods, et cetera, et cetera. And no ah lollies, absolutely not outside of the Easter show, Royal Sydney Easter show.

06:27
um So I was a little bit obsessed with getting money because the corner store, which was a couple of blocks walk from my house, had a little money section, sorry, a little lolly section, and that lolly section had five cent lollies, which I was super keen on. So these are the days where we had one cent coins and two cent coins, and I would diligently find them down the back of the couch or wherever I would.

06:55
you know, collect them from the street and I would save up and I’d walk down the road and buy some lollies. And then around the same time, the popular book series, The Babysitter’s Club was all the rage and inspired by that, I started my own babysitter’s club and I had absolutely no qualms about knocking on the doors of the neighbours and just offering my services, me and my neighbour friend.

07:25
And we would do anything and everything for a couple of bucks. And I think from memory, it was about $2 an hour, maybe $2.50 an hour. Over the years, we put our prices up a little bit. It was like $4 an hour, $4.50. We were like age 11, age 12, age 13. I got my first job as delivering pamphlets at around the same age, I think 11.

07:54
very, very underpaid that job.

07:59
And it developed my dislike for small yappy dogs that tended to bite you on the ankles when I got too close. I got my first job after that at 13. I lied about my age. And so basically I was always good at making money. That was my identity as a kid. I was somebody that was good and resourceful and diligent and hardworking and great at making money. I started teaching yoga at age

08:29
18 and you know pretty quickly decided this wasn’t going to be my thing because I was in my very first class before the class had ended I was already calculating how much money I’d made I was going okay 12 times 6 equals whatever minus I think I paid $10 for the room hire. This is the 90s so things were cheap my goodness.

08:56
So that was one of my, these are a few of my money stories. And over the course of 18 years, I started my business when I was 29 and I am now 46, believe it or not. I’ve collected many, many, many more money stories and I have had to evolve those stories. I’ve gotten to certain points in my business where I am

09:25
typically mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Now I want to talk a little bit about, well, I want to talk a lot about emotions in Good Money March because you better believe that feelings and emotions have a shit ton to do with money. And there is almost always something practical or productive or useful

09:54
about all emotions, including the emotions that we would prefer not to be feeling, the emotions that we might ah label as bad emotions. And so I want to talk a little bit about that because what we can do with these, again, air quotes, bad or negative emotions, what we can do is we can alchemize them, we can transform them, we can use them. And one of the most powerful emotions

10:23
to alchemize for change is anger. So anger is sometimes frustration. And what we want to do is we want to make sure that we’re alchemizing frustration and anger before they coagulate into depression and defeat. Because depression and defeat are a lot harder to alchemize. It’s a lot easier to

10:52
to use the state of anger or to use the state of frustration and to turn it into something productive. in my case, getting to a state of frustration, getting to a state of anger has been very, very useful to make a big bold leap forward. And that might have to do with closing down certain services. It might have to do with starting new services that I’m kind of a bit scared.

11:21
or wary about starting. like, oh God, can I really do this? don’t know. Can I really? Okay. All right. I’m doing it. Okay. It’s happening. It has to do with increasing my prices with um tightening terms and conditions or changing terms and conditions, enforcing terms and conditions. Every time I feel frustration, every time I feel anger, this is a good, useful sign that something needs to change.

11:52
So.

11:55
A couple of the things in relation to business, because to give you another insight into who the hell is this person, who the hell is this voice on the other end of my WhatsApp. I did a religious studies degree fresh out of school. I wanted to know the meaning of life. didn’t like small talk. I wanted to just get straight into the heart of it. I wanted to know why am I here? What is the purpose of this? What is the point of living?

12:21
What is the point of life? What is my place in it? What is the meaning of all of it? And I tried a lot of things. I got into teaching meditation at uni. ah I taught yoga. I tried lots and lots and lots of different self-development and spiritual things. And it really wasn’t until I started my own business 18 years ago that things really accelerated.

12:50
because nothing will trigger you, nothing will provoke you like business, like being self-employed. It will trigger abandonment issues, it will trigger control issues, it will absolutely trigger money trauma, it will trigger people pleasing tendencies, it will trigger validation addiction when you kind of…

13:15
you know, really needy about, you know, needing to be validated. It will trigger fear of being rejected. It will trigger boundary setting, which kind of goes hand in glove with people pleasing, right? It will trigger your tendencies perhaps to discount, perhaps to over explain, perhaps to seek endless opinions before you do anything. And so the thing that I want to ask you,

13:45
as we kind of wrap up day one is I want to ask you, are you staying in those triggers or provocations or are you going to evolve? And this is not a difficult question. This is a question that literally takes a moment to decide. Deciding takes a moment. It does not take a lifetime. It does not take a weekend of diligent research.

14:12
Are you staying in your triggers and your provocations? Are you clinging to your money baggage or are you evolving?

14:24
Because make no mistake, being in business will force you into determining who you are and what you are like as a leader. And that absolutely goes, even if you’ve got no team, even if you’ve got no desire to have a team, you are still a leader of some description. You lead yourself and you lead your clients. So as I said earlier, I expect that

14:52
Some people will be triggered by what I have to say in Good Money March. I expect that you might be provoked, that you might wish to disagree with me, that you might want to question me. Please go ahead and do that. You are very um welcome and encouraged to question me. Yeah? But please know the difference between questioning and triggering. And also notice the difference between

15:22
our desire to kind of reject everything because we might disagree with one thing. To throw the baby out with the bathwater because it’s easier to stay put perhaps, to stay comfortable in your comfort zone of your money stories and your thoughts and your beliefs and your feelings and the actions that flow on from that than it is to actually examine your own thinking.

15:50
Like I kid you not, this is not an easy thing to do. It’s something I’ve done over and over and over and over over over again. You know, it feels like a little bit of a daredevil thing to do, right? Like, and there’s going to be some, some emotions come up. There’s, there’s oftentimes a lot of grief. There’s oftentimes a lot of like, I look back on, you know, what I tolerated and I’m, I feel sad for myself. I’m like, you know, I feel.

16:19
I feel really sad. I think, oh, that’s such a shame that you let that person make you feel like that or that you felt like that as a result of that person or that incidence. So by all means, go ahead and question everything and recognise that maybe not every single thing that I’m saying is relevant to you today. That’s totally OK. It doesn’t have to be. Yeah, we’re not here to kind of nod along and say, yes, teacher. Yes, sir. No, sir.

16:49
That’s not what we’re here to do.

16:53
So my challenge for today, and these challenges will be sometimes psychological, sometimes highly practical, oftentimes a bit of both, is the first thing I’d like you to do is I’d like you to find some kind of notebook, some kind of piece of paper. I’d prefer it to be paper than to be typed out because if you’re anything like me, you open up a document, you have excellent intentions, you write something meaningful in it, and then if it’s not kind of slapping you in the face,

17:22
It’s not printed out or it’s not right there front and centre on your desktop. You tend to overlook it. So we don’t want to do that. We want to make sure that whatever we’re doing this Money March, that we’re going to see it, we’re going to use it, we’re going to do it. And I want you to ask yourself, what are some of the key stories from childhood that relate to money that have been influential?

17:50
And it’s often the stories that you have either told people about over and over again, or it’s stories that you’ve considered often, that you’ve thought about often.

18:05
What are some of the stories from childhood?

18:09
that you have held onto and that has influenced your thoughts, feelings, beliefs about money. Now make no mistake, these will be influential. And when I’ve led money conversations in circles of people, in circles before, it’s really clear and obvious that people either follow what their parents do,

18:36
their parents, their grandparents, their family, their subculture. They follow in the same trajectory or they clearly and obviously rebel against it. Very, very, very few people actually choose a third uh path.

18:56
So this is your challenge for today.

19:00
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about simplifying money. We’re going to talk a little bit more practically, especially as it relates to business, especially as it relates to take home pay, especially as it relates to your money. The part that most people fixate on and the part that most people overlook, which is actually one of the most important elements. This is our focus for tomorrow. As I said earlier, please do go ahead and share and share.

19:30
far and wide that would be the best and most awesome thing that you could do for me and I thank you for that. you tomorrow.

 

00:00
One of the things that business owners tell me over and over again, especially as it relates to growth, is that they don’t have time, right? This is not news. And what tends to happen is this exhaustion of contemplating, okay, I really want this thing. I want to, I want to grow. want to take home more money.

00:29
I want to work with more interesting clients. I want to be doing more interesting work. And when the business owner is contemplating this or talking it through with me.

00:40
Whether it happens sooner or whether it happens later, there’s this like, this frustration, this like, tiredness, this kind of like, unfortunately, occasionally a glimpse of resignation of like, well, you know, how the hell is it possible to happen? Because I’m already stretched, I’m already at capacity. And you know, that can manifest in a bunch of different ways, maybe frustration, maybe,

01:09
Anger, maybe sadness, maybe depression. The worst, I think, is that resignation, because the resignation is like, you know, it’s a giving up, right? It’s a giving up. And the business is in maintenance mode. Now, I’m not suggesting that businesses always need to be on this upward trajectory, not by a long shot. In fact, sometimes a client comes to me and they want to deliberately

01:37
uncomplicate their business. They want to shrink their team. They want to shrink their infrastructure. They want to boost their profits while making business a hell of a lot more simple to run. So it’s not like we all have the same goal, which is like, you know, has to be relentless growth. This is what got our planet into the mess that it’s in in the first place, right? We don’t need to always

02:04
You know, be doubling our revenue every year. That’s not the point.

02:11
But for those people and perhaps this is you, I don’t know, for those people who are contemplating growth and feeling at the same time this kind of existential tiredness, this world-weariness, this kind of, you know, huge frustration of how, where how is not constructive and how is not creative and how is not like…

02:36
open-minded, how is like a cry of exhaustion, you know, but how, how will this happen? How will this happen?

02:44
For those business owners, this message is for you.

02:50
The exhausting energy cost that comes with constantly fighting against your best interests and that relates to money because that’s what we’re here for, right? That constant energy suck, that constant energy leak of fighting against your best interests. This is a massive, massive drain.

03:17
Because we oftentimes take a really simplistic view of time. think we have like a finite amount. We think we’ve got, and that’s true, we’re not gonna live forever, Sooner or later, our time will come.

03:35
But we frequently underestimate how much energy has to do with time. And you’ve probably experienced that when you’ve been in flow or when you haven’t been in flow. When you’ve been in flow and everything seems to just be singing and humming, it’s challenging, but it’s also fun. And you look back on what you’ve achieved that day and you feel this immense sense of progress and the satisfaction that comes with that.

04:06
And conversely, you probably had that experience where nothing is working. It’s like one problem begets another problem begets another problem. And the progress is infinitesimal. And you just, get to the end of the day and you’re just absolutely zonked and you don’t feel like you’ve got anything to show for it.

04:30
That is not time, right? That is energy. And so when we can rewrite our money stories, welcome, hello. This is what we’re here to do. We are here to challenge our own psychology. We are here to unlearn the parts of our socialization, the parts of our thinking, which are unhelpful and unuseful in moving us towards the business and the life.

05:00
that we want.

05:03
When we can do this, when we can successfully rewire our brains, challenge our thinking, and introduce new helpful thoughts, new helpful attitudes, new helpful beliefs, new helpful actions that will come as a consequence of those things, and we will be talking about actions, don’t you worry, this is not all blah-dee-blah-blah.

05:31
If anyone’s worked with me before, you would know that I’m very much practical and action oriented. I love a feeling of momentum. I know the preciousness of momentum. And once you’ve got some momentum, I am doing everything in my power to keep you moving.

05:49
Once we can plug these energy leaks that come from this constant arguing with ourselves, this constant overthinking, this constant internal chatter, we unleash boundless capacity. All of a sudden, and it can happen super quickly, it really is a matter of deciding.

06:15
Yeah, a decision doesn’t actually take that much time, right? A decision takes no time at all. What takes the time is the overthinking and the, you know, overwrought kind of pros and cons and arguing for this side and arguing for that side and finding another third side to argue with. That’s the exhausting bit, right? The decision itself, that takes one single moment. And once this boundless

06:43
capacity is unleashed, then we see things as they actually are. It’s kind of like we’ve been wearing a pair of glasses and all of a sudden those glasses are taken away and we can see things as they are and we can see our actual capacity and we can see all the structural systemic influences that are keeping us stuck or keeping us moving.

07:13
we can start to notice more clearly the people in our life who are actively helping us get closer towards what we want or are inadvertently hindering us. And of course, you know, this is tricky to notice sometimes because it’s not always obvious. Yeah, it’s not like they’re yelling in your ear.

07:37
But when we can take those glasses off, we start to see that things can be changed. What can we do within the set of cards that we’ve been dealt? And I’m not for a moment suggesting that we all have the same opportunities. We absolutely don’t. My kids say to me sometimes, it’s not fair. And I’m like, yes, life is unfair.

08:04
We are not all starting, you this is not a race where we’re all starting at the same spot. We’re all at different points. Some of us have more or less privilege. All of us have more or less privilege. But when those glasses are off, we can start to see things as they truly are. We can start to see what’s going on. We can start to notice the bits that are our psychology, the pieces that are systems, the pieces that are structures.

08:33
And the structure could include things like what time do you wake up in the morning and how does the alarm go off? Does a child wake you up? Are you woken by a husband or a wife? That’s a structure. And we start to see what pieces we can actually move on the chessboard. And we start to notice that there’s an infinite game happening here, that sales is an infinite game, that business is an infinite game.

09:02
that it just goes on and on and on. There’s no end in sight. And this is one of the things I think, you know, that clients often kind of have a bit of a revelation when they, when they witness, when they share this with me, of like, oh my God, doesn’t, never ends, does it? There’s always another one, another one, another one.

09:24
Because when we see business and when we see sales and we see money as a finite game, then it’s easy to get frustrated. It’s easy to get frustrated because it’s like, okay, I had a goal of 10, I got to three. I’m frustrated. I had a goal of 20, I got 18. I’m frustrated. I had a revenue target of 20,000 a month. I got 15,000 a month. I’m frustrated. It’s easy to get frustrated with a finite game.

09:52
But when we recognize that business, that sales, that money, and it’s not just sales, right? It’s like the whole kit and cabertial, which we will be getting into, I promise. This is just a little warmup, just a little warmup. When we start to recognize that it’s an infinite game with no start and no finish, we’re all starting at different points. This is not a race where we all start here and we end there, and it’s very neat and easy to understand.

10:22
We start to treat it as fun and we stop taking, you know, we stop leeching so much of the potential fun, the potential enjoyment from it and recognise it for what it is.

10:45
You know this already. You know this already. You know that when you take a graspy kind of desperate energy to money, that it’s kind of repulsive. You know in sales when you’re in a conversation with a prospective client and you’ve got that kind of desperate energy, you know that they can pick that up. You pick that up in other people, right? We are social creatures. We are intimately interconnected to each other.

11:15
We notice these things and most of the time we notice it unconsciously, but we do notice it. It doesn’t make it less real. You pick up on other people’s energy and you absolutely pick up on other people’s energy in sales conversations. So when we can take a different attitude and when we can take that infinite game, sales and relationships goes from

11:41
from taking and convincing and proving and that kind of graspy desperate kind of energy that kind of gimme gimme gimme energy into more of a real relationship. A human a humanity comes back to it which is giving expressing inviting.

12:07
So we haven’t properly started yet. If you are new to the group and you’re looking at it thinking there’s nothing going on in here, this is because of WhatsApp. It’s not because you’ve missed anything, you haven’t missed anything, I promise. We haven’t yet started. We are only just warming up, folks. It’s gonna be so, so good. I’m very excited. I would love to hear from you. Please take up space, introduce yourself.

12:36
Tell us who you are, link us up with your website. So long as it’s not porn or gambling, your links are very welcome here. And I cannot wait to kick off properly next week. Please share, ask your friends into this group. We’re gonna make good money in March and beyond because it’s not a finite game, it is an infinite game.