TITLE: Positive Mindset Tips

Hello. Hello. It's Samantha with a new highlight reel showcasing past episodes on a specific topic. This time it's mindset.  If there is anyone who's done a 180 degree turn on mindset, from thinking it was total nonsense to thinking it's everything, that's me. 20 years ago, freshly self-employed, I did a marketing training, and it had a module on mindset in which it was surfacing your limiting beliefs. And at the time I was like, I don't have any limiting beliefs. I don't even know why we're doing this. And truthfully, I had come out of sales and marketing at the Coca-Cola Company, so I knew a thing or two about getting things done in that area. But nevertheless, when you're working for yourself, you discover all kinds of things that are hard for you.

So I did end up having some limiting beliefs and I found it a helpful exercise.  And over the years, two things really made it clear to me the role mindset plays. First, I started working with solo entrepreneurs, not companies (more on that in a bit).  And second, my business started to grow. And as it did, I started hitting all of the upper limits that Gay Hendricks talks about in the Big Leap. Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” and I think that's an accurate ratio for skills and talents, to mindset. Because, in my experience, mindset is actually the greatest determiner of success, far more than what skills or talents you actually have. Mindset encompasses things like personal leadership and self-management, and your ability to get things done, resilience, belief in yourself, positivity, all kinds of things. 

In preparing for today's show, I went through dozens of past episodes, out of the 200 total, that are dedicated purely to mindset – dozens. So it was hard for me to select just a few of them. These are the seven that I felt were the most essential listening on this topic.

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We're going to cover self-sabotage; then one of my favorite very unconventional productivity tips. We'll talk about how to receive what you want, just one of the 10 tips for keeping yourself happy, a little bit about hermit archetype, and then, even though we talked last time about money, I saved this episode about money, mistakes, and shame to share with you this time. And then two of the revelations that came up in my 200th episode of all of the things that I wish I had known when I first started. Of course, you'll find links to all these episodes in the show notes. So if the snippets that you hear today whet your appetite to hear more, just tap the links to head back and hear the full shows. 

Today we're starting with self-sabotage. The episode was actually called Overcoming Self-Sabotage. Around '09, I transitioned from working with small businesses to working with solo entrepreneurs, and one of the first things I noticed was how difficult it was sometimes for them to get things done. And the question that we would always end up asking was, Why is it that I get to the end of the day and the one thing I said I wanted to have happen didn't get done? And then there was a related question always which was like, And why does this keep happening?  Why do I keep doing this to myself?  

So back then, I started to have my clients work with Christopher Carrick, who had worked with me when I was struggling with the same issues, fighting with myself to get the one priority done. Christopher is a spiritual director and also my husband. He had been behind the scenes with me for years figuring this stuff out and applying concepts he learned in training with Carolyn Mace and her collaborator on a book called Soul Contracts, the late Jim Curtin, who was our spiritual director. 

Christopher has worked with his own clients on self-sabotage, mainly with artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives.  Drawing from that experience and his study with Jim Curtin on archetypes, he brings such valuable insight to my clients and to this episode. In this segment, Christopher explains the saboteur archetype, which personifies self-sabotage as an aspect of ourselves, and he offers us guidance on how to address it. 

Episode 16 Overcoming Self Sabotage

Everybody has the saboteur, but not everybody’s saboteur is tormenting them. Not every person is self-sabotaging, a lot of people are. People who aren't self-sabotaging have a good relationship with their saboteur. The saboteur is neutral. That's the first key thing is that we are certain that it's out to get us, that it's this negative evil force which just loves to screw with us. It is a neutral part of us, which is collecting information on our behalf. So the problem is when it comes at us, it has all this information to give us, but it doesn't tell us, it shows us, it induces the experience and it doesn't feel good. So we immediately say, Hey, you're not my friend. A friend wouldn't treat me that way. It attacked me. It must be my enemy. 

All it did was give you information. It says, this is how you do this. I'm going to show you. Feel that? But we don't perceive it that way.

We perceive it as you ruined my speech. 

We pursue it as I ruined my speech, but I have no idea how. 

My speech got ruined. 

Sometimes our saboteur is to blame outside too. And that's when you were, when you were talking about hiring the wrong people. That's where that goes, but let's just stay on this for now. So when the saboteur comes at us, we dictate the relationship unbeknownst to us. We say, oh, we're enemies. Saboteur is neutral. So when you say You're my enemy saboteur, it goes Oh, okay. It's like that's the game we're playing. Fine. It doesn't care. It's not invested. It's there to serve you. And if you say, serve me by being my enemy, it says fine. So we have an adversarial relationship to it. What we want to do is make it an ally. So think of it this way: The negative version is the saboteur is actually me so it knows every part of me and it knows exactly how to defeat me, so I can't win.

The converse of that is what if I wanted to know the answers to what's in my way? Oh, I would ask somebody who really knows me very well. Well, you know who that is. That's the saboteur. So when you collect this information, when it's coming at you and you listen to it and you learn about it, and you start to get, oh, this is what it does to get me down. Then you can say thank you. Then you have a chance to say, you are educating me. So, and here's the really big part of it, is that the saboteur doesn't come out for no reason. We think it comes out to mess up our life. But what it really does is it, it comes out to tell us you are in the presence of possibility.

Now, if you have a negative relationship to the saboteur, it will convert the possibility to not possible. So again, when they, when those people are saying, that won't work for me, I'm in my comfort zone, it's not possible. So what you're really saying is, Hey, here's a possibility. And they're going, ah change, which I can't perceive, saboteur comes in and says, I don't think that'll work. Whew. Now I'm safe.

'cause I almost had to venture outta my comfort zone.I almost had to experience something. 

And I don't have to be the bad guy. Because I already know that doesn't work. So that's not me being negative.

I can abdicate responsibility for. 

Absolutely. 

You know, I'm really big on this, of claiming your power in your business and taking responsibility. I'm like, listen, if something goes wrong, take responsibility for it. My policy is always no blame, no shame, for anybody who works for me, for any of my clients and for myself. No blame, no shame. Why? Because that doesn't help anybody. I want you to take responsibility for it. And when you take responsibility for it, you are able to then take new actions and empower yourself to take new actions. 

So what I really like about this is a lot of clients come to me and what they're looking for is basically for me to name that. It’s for me to say, here's what's in your way. Like, you have this huge opportunity, like you're about to really break through and be a star in your niche, or you're about to really break through and be able to cross the million dollar mark or the $250,000 mark. Whatever is that that next thing or, wow, your book is going to come out and then you're going to be like a sought-after speaker. The reason that isn't happening for them though is, and that's, I think, where the saboteur piece comes in, I can say to them, well, you're doing, you're taking these actions and that's preventing that from happening for you. And so a lot of times I think we can't identify our own self-sabotaging behaviors and so when I can say to them, well, listen, every time you've gotten a chance to go make a speech, you've kind of blown it because you haven't really done the preparation that needed to be done. Like, what if we did things this way? And I can also help them kind of break that down into steps so that it isn't like one to a hundred, it's like a gentler slope. So maybe there's less self-sabotaging between those steps. 

Sure, sure. You can always just take the next step. You don't have to, you don't have to consume the whole thing. It's actually a lot easier to do it in manageable bites. So saboteur is telling you first, notice what you do to get in your own way. Notice the thoughts and the habits, and the energy states and the agreements you have, I'm allowed to not work if… because then you will do those things. And again, when like say overwhelm or lack of clarity come, it's not because you said, Hmm, I think I'll do this. It's because you say, I'm going to look over here and just let this program run. 

So I only notice it maybe once it's running. So once I can say, oh, I'm doing that thing where I fill the space so I don't have time to prepare. And I know what it feels like to do that. I know what the thoughts in my head are when I do that, I know what the energy state is. I can recognize it. Then I can wake up in the moment and say, Hmm, thanks, saboteur. What you have alerted me to is that actually this is a big deal. This speech is important. I feel the presence of possibility. One of the things I tell people is we don't sabotage our dreams, really? Because dreams can stay unattainable. They're really big. They're really over there. The saboteur comes in to saboteur our potential reality. And the potential realities build toward the dream. 

Transforming your relationship to that part of yourself is life changing and the awareness of it alone is, I can't even say how monumental. It's just been vital in my work and what I've seen in my clients too. So I definitely encourage you to listen to that whole show. Actually, that one I send to my clients when they sign on with me. Next up, I did a whole episode called Productivity Tips pretty early on (Episode 35), so it's in season three. 

A long time ago, I never realized that I was going to end up being in the business of adult learning, habit building, and behavior change. As coaches and consultants, so much of what we're doing with our clients is helping them to change their behaviors, create new habits. So I started to become a student in this area. And one of the things that can make the biggest difference in productivity is not just about getting more things done, you have to really find the joy in it. I'm not about forcing ourselves to do things, so a thing I took away from so many books about habit change from BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits to Charles Duhigg, the Power of Habits, to James Clear Atomic Habits, is the idea of celebration is underrated as a way to transform everything in your business. 

Episode 35: Productivity Tips

The first thing I want to say is that what I've noticed about using celebration in my business and with my clients is that it's this wonderful positive affirmation, positive confirmation of things that we're doing that are making a difference, and that causes us to be able to more quickly shift our attitude when things are hard, build new habits, do new things, venture outside of our comfort zone, and in general really see the kind of results that we want to have in our business. The reason why is because we're constantly affirming, yes, this is the kind of thing I want to have happening. This is the kind of thing I want to see more of in my business.

So I very much encourage you to celebrate more, and here is exactly how you can do it. So years ago I had heard this really interesting story from a woman who was teaching like money, consciousness and awareness. And she said, I always pick up pennies. Why? Because a penny is the smallest part of a million dollars. And I loved that. And I too now pick up pennies and nickels and dimes, like whatever. It's worth it to me to bend over. I'm like, that's the smallest part of a million dollars. 

So what's good about this in terms of celebration? Well, a lot of people feel like, well, you know, to celebrate I really need kind of like, you know, an accomplishment or like a success or a win before they can do that. And I'm like, no way. You can celebrate absolutely everything, like anytime you do a hard thing, anytime you push yourself outside your comfort zone. 

So here's a funny example. I was working with some clients, super successful business, several hundred thousand dollars, wanting to grow to a million. I did a VIP day with him. We wrote together an article because this had been a kind of a sticking area for them. And I said, and now we're going to go and post it on LinkedIn. Ooh, ah, terrible people. Now I gotta redo it. Now I got… No, no, no, no, no. We're going to take what we have, which is going to work perfectly for you, and go and post it on your LinkedIn. I'll wait. So then I already kind of made peace with the fact that we're about to do this. Took a little kind of time and effort and whatever, and then post, you know, hit the publish button. And then we all stood there. And guess what I did? We celebrated the heck out of that. It was a big and hard and difficult thing. We did happy dancing. We were cheering each other big, kind of silly over the top celebration. 

Why did we do that? Well, if you publish on LinkedIn every day, I'm sure you're like, what? They did it, this was a hard thing for them. It was new. It was outside their comfort zones. It was a risk. It felt vulnerable. So I wanted to award that, reward, acknowledge that, with a commensurate level of emotional acknowledgement and celebration. So by celebrating that all of us together, again in a kind of a silly over the top way, we marked like, wow, we just did a hard thing. Thank you for acknowledging that. We sent a message to our unconscious, like, that's a thing that I want to do. I want to be the kind of person who does that. I want to do more of that. I believe we send a message to the universe that says, Hey, this is what I just did and this is a really big deal and I want to see more of that in my life. So, doing even teeny things that are very difficult for you and celebrating the heck outta them. When you do that, that's an amazing way to begin behavior change. 

So the second time you do a LinkedIn post, well, you're a little less hesitant to do it. You do it and you're like, yeah. So it's not maybe the exaggerated celebration the second time, but still okay, good. And then after a while you're like, ah, man, I post on LinkedIn every day. It's no big deal. 

So there you go. And a habit has been formed. Something that you want to have happen. You've managed to affect change in your life in kind of a not very difficult way, right? That kind of went smoothly. Now I want you to think about the applications of that, not just for yourself, but also for your clients. 

I am all about celebration. But people around us can't always celebrate with us because sometimes you've closed a $180,000 deal and you can't tell your friends that because their annual salary might be $180,000, or it just seems crazy, or your parents didn't even earn that. Other people might judge your celebration or they're envious or whatever. They just can't receive it. So I always say, if you want to celebrate with someone, then reach out to me and I will celebrate your news with you. A close friend of mine surprise inherited a million dollars and couldn't tell anyone. So we happy danced together. 

And speaking of receiving, this next episode I'm featuring is called How to Receive What You Want. This is another one that I send to my clients, but also to my friends. I've heard from so many friends who are not entrepreneurs how helpful it was for them to think about receiving what we want and some of the keys to doing that. Here's why it's so valuable to ask for and accept help. It's a counterintuitive way for us to get what we want.

Episode 90: How to Receive What You Want

A lot of times it can come into ego that others are taking care of you and you feel very well that you can do this yourself. So that's one of the ways that I see people sabotage, especially with team or with bringing in other people, is getting stuck in ego and feeling like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to do it better than everyone else. No one can do it as well as I can, and all those kinds of beliefs 

Also, it is important to allow yourself to enlist support, to ask for help. So help and support can look like so many different things. It can be asking a coach or a mentor a question or a colleague. It can be saying, do you mind endorsing me for something on LinkedIn? It can be Hey, my book has just come out. Would you mind buying the Kindle version of it? So there are small ways that you can ask for support, and then you can say I'm having a really hard time lately, would you have time to talk with me on the phone, or can we get together? Really bringing in help as you need it there for you personally and not just for the business. 

And then I think so often when someone is really feeling overwhelmed, what I believe they've done is forgotten about universal support. You know, you can ask the universe to help you. You can pray and ask God to bring you some assistance in a difficult situation. And I think it can help you if you believe that way, to bring that part of you into your business so that you can, I will say, delegate things to the universe. I'm like, here's the stuff that's hard. This is feeling really hard, and I will delegate things to the universe. Like it would be really nice if you might show me where I can find some clients, or you might show me who can help me on this project, or, you know, whatever help you need. And really trusting that that help is available. For some people that might sound woo woo. For some people it may be just like, well, that's not my belief system. I just don't believe those things are possible. What I will tell you is I have been in situations where I've asked for that kind of universal support, and then people show up for me. All around me, whether that's clients, I've said I really want to bring two more clients to my business, and then those people have shown up or whether I have asked for resources of who can support me, and then that shows up. 

And the reason that is so valuable is, you are bringing that into your conscious awareness. So whether a deity helped with that, and that's not your belief or whether there's these cosmic energies that helped with that. When you say, I want to bring some support in to help me with this because it's hard, what happens is you start to look for that support and then things show up for you.

Now, maybe those things we're going to show up for you earlier, but you could easily not notice when those things would happen. So I'm going to try to explain how prayer and manifestation works 'cause I honestly have no idea how they work, I just know that when I allow myself to invite the universe to support me, or I say, oh man, this is a hard time, I'm really going to need some help on this, I notice that things get easier for me and resources show up. I can hear that there are those who are going to say, well, it doesn't work that way for me. 

So what I do is invite you to just begin on a small level, just to ask people for support. Can you find one person that you can ask in a small way to help you and expect them to say yes? Expect it. I hope you're not disappointed in that. And I hope that if you are turned down, that you keep asking because there are going to be people out there who want to support you. So, you know, send someone an email and say, can you help me with this? Pick up the phone, send a text, ask a friend, ask a partner, ask a spouse, Hey, I really need some help on this. Can you maybe do this part for me? And let's allow ourselves to be surprised, pleasantly surprised by how that goes. In general, the more you're willing to receive that kind of support, the more you are able to sincerely give that kind of support to others because your cup fills up when you receive from others and you have more to give when you are generous.

We tend to think of caretakers as those people who are constantly doing the giving and giving and then they deplete themselves. And we will categorize people in two camps. Those are people who give a lot, and then those are people who take a lot. There's a wonderful middle ground called people who give and people who receive. And if you have a healthy balance of that, then it's going to be good for you as a person and it's also going to be good for you and your business.

Your clients will love that you are the one who celebrates with them. I can't believe how unusual it still is in work culture to celebrate wins.

This next episode began as a listicle, you know, like a 10 tips kind of thing. I wrote it at the same time as the clients who were doing that celebration about posting on LinkedIn. They were writing their articles, and I wrote this one as I was waiting for them. It's from the season The Brand Called You, and this episode was 10 tips for Keeping the Talent You Happy. Here's the first tip.

Episode 97: The Brand Called You

The theme for this season is you are the brand; the brand called you. And what that means is that, as the principle of your consulting business, really everything emanates from you and revolves around you. And you can do many things to build up a business in which you do almost none of the actual work so that you're just the genius behind the things that happen, or you can have the whole thing center around you. Really, whatever you choose can work for you. 

But the important thing is that you know that you are the brand. It's the brand called you. So that means your identity is the business identity. And a lot of times what people are buying is you. They believe in you. They want to model you. They want the life you have. They want the values you represent. Everything that you come to them with, that's the thing they want for themselves. So it's incredibly important that you nurture yourself as the center of the brand. 

And I had 10 things here that I wanted to talk to you about, 10 quick tips about you being the brand. It's like if you were the talent in the business, right? If you were, let's say the diva in the opera or Beyonce, you know, she gets what she wants. We all know if there's no Beyonce, there's no nothing for anybody else. And so how do we treat that diva or that star? Well, you know, we've always kind of talked about it, like, oh, they're high maintenance and like it's they have unreasonable demands, but really your demands to be your best, you are not unreasonable. They're like the requirement for you to be successful. 

So I not only want to give you permission to make big demands of yourself, I actually want to require you to do this for the talent in your business. And when I'm talking about the talent in the business, I mean you. So what do you need to do? Here's 10 things that I want you to think about as you are nurturing, becoming, expanding, being the brand and growing your business, right? This is the very heart and the center of it.

So the first thing is give her what she wants. She ain't happy, nobody's happy. So what do you need? What do you want to have in your business? To me, the most important thing here is that you center the business around your joy and genius zone. If you don't want to work with a lot of clients, don't work with a lot of clients, don't build a business where you're going to have a thousand people to serve.

If you want to have a high intimacy business, then build that business. If you don't want to work with anybody one-on-one, or anybody personally, you can build that business. Listen, there are a million different business models within consulting even, not counting all the ones that go beyond that. So you can build the business that really suits you and makes you happy. And why wouldn't you? Right? If we wanted to be miserable, we'd all go back to corporate. So you can build the business that you want and you only have to be clear on what that is. So get clear on what you want and begin building it.

You can have what you want, I say that constantly to my clients. Believing that is where a mindset comes in. And if you're like, how? Well reach out to me 'cause my job is to make it happen. I cover nine other tips about how to keep yourself happy in that one. Because doing so, keeping yourself happy, keeps you and the business doing its best. And it's not self-serving. It's in the highest good of all concerned for you to keep yourself at your best. And it's a fun episode. So be sure to click through and listen to that one.

Next up, another archetype. The cool thing about archetypes is that they are universal energies, and even if they're not familiar to you, you contain these aspects within yourself. So we talked earlier about the saboteur, which is kind of this way to personify the energy and behavior of self sabotage within ourselves.

And in this next one we're talking about the hermit archetype. What's funny is kinda like with the saboteur, whenever I bring this up to my clients, they're also like, oh, I totally have hermit archetype. If it's not clear to you what exactly it means many of my clients and I need a lot of alone time, a lot of downtime to recharge. And it's not just because they're introverts, because I'm not. You don't have to be an introvert to have hermit archetype. Hermit archetype means you need to have intentional time alone, and it can even mean in stillness, silence, or in darkness.

Christopher, my husband, helped me to realize that I had hermit archetype, so he doesn't have an issue with it, but I've worked with couples very often where someone will need to say to their partner, I need to hermit, not because I need to be away from you. But because I need to be with myself, I need to be alone with myself.

So if you're surprised to hear me talking about this on a business podcast, just remember that a business is made up of people. You are the person, and this is another way to keep you healthy, mentally healthy, and at your best. Let's hear Christopher, explain more about it.

Episode 123: The Hermit Archetype for Consultants

Well, the part of you that lights the darkness of your interior space, you spend a ton of time, especially as an entrepreneur, paying attention to the outer world and your external experience and your deliverables and, what you're trying to create. And this is the archetype that balances that out, that says you also have to spend time in self-reflection. And so when those things in the internal space don't get honored, they start to bleed out into the exterior. So a lot of the times it'll show up as problems in your outer world. So it's like if you attend to your internal space, you'll have less problems in your external space, and you'll also find answers to results that you're looking for in the external world. So, for instance, emotional wellbeing is one, it's just spending that time saying, how do I feel? You know, if I'm engaged and I'm busy, I don't necessarily take the time to recognize, I'm not able to notice a lot of what's going on.

So knowing how you are doing requires taking time out to check. Also discovering a sense of peace, getting away from the busyness. All that busyness needs to be balanced by not being busy. It gives you a chance to reflect and plan your day or reflect on how your day went.

So to feel more organized. Otherwise, people will describe the sense of like, what's next? And I have to keep things in my head and I'm not sure. And so it produces a lot of anxiety about did I get everything done? Am I on top of everything there is to do? So you're able to check in and create some structure for your internal world, which helps a lot with going forward. 

Creativity, a lot of times we have to go in there and evoke that part of us that's way deep in there to have access to it for when we're going to need it  in the work environment. Inner strength is another one too. Spending time with yourself to locate that part that has resolved, that has knowing. A lot of times when you hear that part of you that says, look, this is your truth. It just is. It allows you to go, okay, then I will act in accordance with that. 

A really easy one is wisdom. We're all busy being smart, but giving yourself the space and the time to let that part of you come up, you gain access to answers you wouldn't ordinarily be able, they wouldn't just come to the surface otherwise. 

Spiritually, I think it really, again, it takes focus and discipline, but being willing to sit with the stillness in the silence and drop in allows you to access a deeper voice, whether you want to call it your soul or your higher self. And that's not going to give you the same answers as your ego. So a lot of times what I'll tell people about that deeper voice is one of the symptoms is it doesn't always agree with or like the things that you want it to. So if you want to know a deep truth, that's the best way to get to it. In the same way that if you want to get to a really sophisticated, rich answer for a client, it can take letting yourself sink down into the part of you that has access to that information.

My clients and I have benefited so much from honoring the hermit within ourselves and allowing ourselves to access the inner wisdom that has led to incredible breakthroughs. Taking time to hermit, I've made amazing decisions and shifts; big decisions like letting go of clients or programs and deciding to make new investments. You can find the link to that complete episode in the show notes. 

The next one is about money, and I didn't include it in the money compilation because I felt like it's a little bit more in this way about mindset. The episode was called Money Mistakes and Shame. If you listen to Brene Brown at all, who describes herself as a shame researcher, you'll know that shame is not useful for anything. It's actually corrosive, and when we shame ourselves for something we do, we don't benefit from that. In this episode, I shared some of my money mistakes and the shame that I felt about them before I went on to get help with them and why I think it's absolutely critical for you to do so as well.

Episode 157: Money Mistakes and Shame

This is the I'm not good with money. I can't charge high prices. Whenever I try to sell those high prices, nobody will buy. This is because there is this general shame around money and sense of our own value. And I just find that when you get into that kind of shame spiral, those poor decisions that you made, that you feel ashamed of, cause you to make more poor decisions and the whole thing just continues.

So I'm an action taker and I want us to really, you know, what's the first thing that you can do? Be gentle with yourself. Be gentle with yourself. What are the things that you learned from the money mistakes that you made? There's information for that in you if you can spread the curtains of shame and really take away the charge of that and say, okay, okay, what was the lesson in that? And like I said, the tax guy didn't shame me. The tax guy was like, okay, well here's what you need to do. 

So what did I learn from my whole tax experience? I needed to have support. It was an activity I don't know how to do, and so I needed to have support from people to help me doing it. Both the bookkeeping of it and the keeping up with the expenses. By the way, I have a team for this now who keep up with the expenses. I needed help with the tax process, that whole thing. And guess what? I needed to put away money on an ongoing basis so that I wouldn't have a tax surprise once a year. So those are great lessons for me. Oh, what's the fourth lesson I learned? A lot of people had this problem. It wasn't just me and carrying around shame about it didn't help me to get it done, did it? No, it just sucked my energy away. 

I have four actionable takeaways that I can use so that I don't get in that situation again. It reminds me, I had a guy, my financial mentor, when I was at the Coca-Cola Company. My financial mentor told me that when he and his wife were young marrieds, they got into a lot of debt in their first home. They put the keys to the house in an envelope and mailed it back to the bank, and left the house and just moved out of it. I don't think you can do that nowadays, I don't think that's a foreclosure or anti foreclosure strategy. You can't just give the house back to the bank in that way. Maybe you can, I don't know. But he didn't have a lot of shame around that. He was like, well, we were young, we got into a big mess and we did this, and stepped away from it with a clean slate. 

That's not advice. What I'm saying is that's a guy who got over it and moved on, and by the way, went on to be very successful and retired very wealthy.

Rather than comparing ourselves and feeling like we're less than others, let's look at how a few really good examples of people managing money mistakes and not even getting into a money shame spiral. So that's the first thing. Let's look at the lessons we can take away from, the things that we've done in the past, and for goodness sake, implement the lessons. It's like, okay,I don't need to learn that twice. Some things we need to learn over and over again. Let's not make those things the ones that we do. 

Practice self-compassion, and forgive yourself for that. Be gentle with yourself around this topic, and then create ways that you can learn more and become more financially literate. You can become better at the tax stuff or whatever is your issue in ways that are at least a little bit joyful for you. So the way that I feel joyful about the tax stuff is I love my bookkeeping company and I love my tax person and I need to feel like I can take this stuff and be like, I don't super understand it, can you guys help me with this? And they're like, sure, no problem. And they take it away from me. So that's a delegation plus a little bit of education. 

It's easy to look at the stupid things we've done with money, and it's easy to look at those stupid mistakes we've made in other areas of our lives. But for some reason, we really want to torment ourselves about the money stuff and to paraphrase memes about Buddhism, the burden is heavy, so let that shit go. 

Our final two clips are from my 200th episode in which I celebrated by sharing 21 things I wish I had known when I started, including this weird thing. I wish I had known this weird thing when I first started my business. Instead, I had to learn it many, many times over the years, and it's something that I share now with my clients.

I've always said that my business is about earth rules and magical thinking. Earth rules are things that work here on earth, like plans and strategies, tools, goals, money. While magical thinking is things that work, but we don't always know why. Like meditation and prayer and intentions, affirmations, positivity, and the quality of your energy. So I learned a lot over the years about the quality of our energy and the role that energy plays in things like your marketing results.

Episode 200: What I Wish I Knew When Starting My Consulting Business

Here's a weird thing: the actual marketing that you're doing isn't necessarily the way the clients come to you. They come to you through your energy. What do I mean by that? Well, I wish I knew that I could be doing all the right things in the marketing, but if my energy wasn't right, like if I was exhausted and worn out, burned out, then no clients would come to me. 

Why? Because the universe is benevolent and the universe was paying attention to the messages that I was sending and the messages were virtual closed sign. No more clients right now. I'm overwhelmed. I'm busy. I'm tired, I'm exhausted. So you have to get your energy right in order for your marketing to work. 

Clients are attracted to you because of your energy. It doesn't mean you can stop marketing. I mean, a client can't just like walk up to your door and knock on it and be like, Hey, I got your energetic signal. They still have to see the marketing, but the energy that you're sending out through your marketing is what's going to bring the clients to you. 

And just for a little symmetry, I'm going to bring it back home to this one about self-sabotage. 

Self-leadership, self-management, self-sabotage when you are self-employed, it's all about yourself. We are all amazing at getting the work done for the client. Like we always meet client deadlines, but when you have to work on your own stuff, you have to learn how to work on your own stuff, and so you're going to meet your own self-sabotage. You're going to meet your own rebellious inner self. We have to learn how to get work done. I started by finally, after years of suffering, recruiting accountability partners, and then I would have accountability buddies and we would co-work or parallel work or whatever it took for the work on my business to get done.

And as I shared before, I also enlisted the help of my team members and Christopher, and gradually, very gradually I began to be able to get my own work done all by myself because I built positive habits and positive associations, and now I absolutely love to work on my business. And my clients, many of whom would struggle to spend time getting anything done for themselves.

And my clients, many of whom would struggle to spend time doing things like writing an article or working on their signature system, or reviewing a module and a brand training that I'd shared with them, it was really hard for them to do anything that wasn't done for their clients. They're also building or have built those habits, so they're able to work on their own stuff and enjoy it. Mindset is disproportionately vital to the building of your consulting business, and these seven episodes have even deeper lessons for you. So I hope you'll feel free to click through and listen to the complete episodes and always believe in yourself and your ability to achieve what you want.

And if you ever need help with that, reach out. You can find me at samanthahartley.com/super. I would love to support you as you grow your business. With that, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consultancy.