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People think I'm super disciplined.

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Spoiler alert, I am not.

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I hit snooze.

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I skip workouts, I leave emails unread.

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Just ask Serena.

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But somehow, somehow

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I still manage to get the big stuff done.

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You know, the stuff that really matters.

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So today I thought I'd pull back the curtain.

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On how I've built a business and a life and a rhythm that works for me,

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not because I have perfect discipline.

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Not at all, and I'm almost our 50 fifties.

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Good enough, right?

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I'm a 50 fifties, good enough girl.

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Not because I have perfect discipline, Uhuh, but because I figured out

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what discipline actually looks like

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for real people like me.

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So let's get into it.

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First of all, full disclosure, I have discipline as one of my top five

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strengths, but it's not with everything.

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It's only with the things that I really actually care about.

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To be honest, I'm gonna give you some really specific examples today on how

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I'm disciplined and What it means because being disciplined is an absolute blessing

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at times and an absolute curse at times.

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And you're probably thinking, how can it be a bad thing?

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Oh, well strap in.

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Here we go.

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The first example I wanna give you is when I was a bit younger, so my

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discipline, if you've listened to any of the podcast episodes before this

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one, go back to the one where I talk about having four houses before I'm 30.

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so this is how discipline played out.

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Then I had four mortgages at 30, so four houses at 30, which sounds

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amazing, but if anyone's got mortgage, you know what that feels like.

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I worked full-time in my HR role.

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I had a side hustle 'cause I was passionate about it and

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I was studying uni full time.

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Now you might say, oh, that's pretty disciplined.

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Well, yeah, getting to those places is pretty disciplined.

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Where my discipline fell off was probably a little bit of the uni work.

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Doing the uni work I did enough to get through and that's okay because if you've

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listened to another one of my episodes where I talk about how smart I am,

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I'm street smart, not academic smart.

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I was okay with that.

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So that was one time, long time ago where discipline really.

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Came off for me.

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It was a routine, it was a rhythm, and I did enough to get by.

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Very recently, I've done something else.

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I committed about 18 months ago to doing 20,000 steps a day.

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You've all heard the story.

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I get up at 5:00 AM blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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I do 20,000 steps a day now.

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I committed to that and I am unable to let myself off the hook.

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So if you've got any way to let yourself off the hook, send me your tips.

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I wanna know, I committed to 20,000 steps a day and I thought at the time, easy.

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Done.

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Now it did get easier, not gonna lie, and I have done it for.

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18 months now.

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18 months, and there's a switch in my brain that will not let me turn it off.

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So 20,000 steps.

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It is day in, day out.

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It's nine o'clock at night.

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I'm at 19,842.

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Gotta get my 200 steps in.

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That is the craziness about having some goal in your head or something

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in your mind, so you don't actually have to make the decision ever again.

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That's where the discipline becomes a curse.

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In business.

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Imagine if you had so much discipline or stubbornness, we could probably

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call it that you've rolled out this thing and you will not let it die.

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Even though no one's signing up, no one's wanting to play in that space.

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No one wants to buy your offer.

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We've all been there.

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We have all been there.

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When I first started my business eight years ago, almost nine

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years ago, I had no idea.

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I had no cash and I had no clients.

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And I thought to myself, what does someone do that doesn't have an email list,

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that doesn't have any skin in the game?

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And who is an unknown quantity?

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What does one do?

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And I decided that one did pound the pavement.

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And so this is before COVID.

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And so I basically pulled all my LinkedIn followers.

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Together in a spreadsheet and I decided to go and pound the pavement.

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I did somewhere between three and five cups of tea or coffee a day for six weeks.

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Now one of the ways that I let myself off the hook is by

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calling things "Experiments"

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And so I experimented for six weeks to see if we could raise some funds,

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see if we could get some clients, see if we could do all the things.

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Did it pay off?

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Yes, absolutely.

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Was it the right way to do it?

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Who knows?

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It worked for us and I had some amazing conversations, and

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to this day, I still have relationships with those people

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now.

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Pounding the pavement, getting sales, doing business development sometimes.

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As business owners, we struggle with that.

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We're like, where do we go?

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We scratch our heads.

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Where do we go to find our ideal clients?

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Meanwhile, I'm like, they're kind of everywhere.

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So I just went everywhere.

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Of course, I had a stack of appointments, but then if someone canceled in the

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middle of the day, I wasn't like, oh yeah, yeah, I've got an hour off.

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No way.

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Who's next on my list?

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sometimes I make decisions and then I do not let myself off the hook.

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Sometimes I should let myself off the hook.

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I remember I rolled out an offer, so I love rolling out offers.

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So I get an offer, I roll it out, I market it.

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I see if there's anything in the system, if there's anything

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anywhere, if people will buy it.

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I do the testing, all the things, and one of my offers, it's a beautiful

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offer called A Month of Momentum.

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So this was an offer.

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It's 90 minutes with me.

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It's a standalone offer where you can just dip your toe in the water and see if

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you like the style of coaching that I do.

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I'm fairly results driven, so I quite like results.

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So in 90 minutes we can get quite a lot done.

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I put this offer out there and for a year no one took it.

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No one took my month of momentum.

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In fact, it wasn't until maybe 18 months ago, Serena and I were having a, a

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conversation, a Team McQueen meeting, and I said to Serena, I actually think

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I might take down a month of momentum.

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No one's buying it.

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It's just sitting there.

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It's not doing any harm, but it's also taking up precious space on my website.

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So why don't we just remove it?

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Within a week, I had three months of momentums built.

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Now I do not know why.

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I don't know what happened.

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I seem to have more sales calls in the diary, and therefore people either wanted

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a month of momentum or they wanted to join coaching or whatever it is, and

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maybe my energy changed around it.

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Maybe I wasn't as stubborn to just like ditch it, which I can do, I can get an

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offer and I can go, it hasn't worked.

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Spin it.

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versus giving it a little bit longer just to stew in its own juices

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and month of momentum has been a game changer for a lot of people.

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We've done a lot of good things, so I'm so thrilled that I didn't, I

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looked at it and I analyzed it and I went, okay, let's just give this

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little push and see what happens.

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I think discipline means a lot of different things to

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a lot of different people.

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For me, discipline means showing up.

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For me, disciplines means surprise and delight for my clients.

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For me, it means helping my clients get whatever the results.

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They're looking for.

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Some people come to me and they're like, I need to restructure my team.

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I've got no one else to talk about it.

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Great, let's do that.

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Because I have a HR background.

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Others come to me and go, I wanna hit half a million.

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I wanna hit a million.

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How do I do that?

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I'm here.

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How do I get there?

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Cool.

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And every level of business is also different.

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You remember when you had $0 in the bank?

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What you did.

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Do you remember what I did when I had $0 in the pound of the pavement, wrote

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a lot of content, talked to anyone and everyone showed up everywhere.

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Like they were the things that I did in my business, less time behind the computer

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because I just hate computer work.

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And then as you grow in your business and evolve in your business, so once

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you hit the a hundred mark, great.

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You good?

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And then you can hit the 200 mark and then you double the numbers.

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But.

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Each level has a specific kind of sacrifice you need to make.

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And and we have to make sacrifices to get to the next level.

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there's always trade offs.

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I've talked about this in the podcast before.

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There's always trade offs about will we do this?

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Won't we do this?

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There was a time when I thought to myself, do you know what my target market is?

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Probably not those under a hundred k. And then I went, do you know what though?

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I can really help the people under a hundred K because if I give them this

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thing, then it will push them into a hundred K, which solves whole myriad

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of problems for women in business.

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And so I decided to stick with it.

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I decided to go, Nope, I'm gonna play in that space because

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that's where I can serve.

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And I've been there and I know what it feels like and I know

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how much hard work I had to do.

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I had to be really disciplined in that space, but without discipline

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or without something holding you.

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And I have to say, it's not just about discipline for me.

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It is my why.

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I want women to create a life they love.

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I want women to make money so they have choices and freedom and all the things,

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but I could not have done all the things that I have done in almost nine

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years of business without discipline.

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Now, some people are disciplined about the things that doesn't

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move their business forward.

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For me, I'm disciplined about only the things that move my business forward,

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and sometimes that comes at a detriment.

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for instance, I love.

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Relationships.

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If you said to me, write some content or get on a call with someone, I

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would get on a call with someone.

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If you said to me, do some admin or move the needle in one of

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your programs with one of your people, I would move the needle.

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So there are some things that I have no discipline about that's admin.

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Emails, probably all the things I'm actually not good at.

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I would rather be in front of someone helping them with a solution,

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helping them with a problem than ferreting around in my admin folder.

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Let's be honest.

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What's important to you?

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Are you putting the discipline?

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The effort, the structure into place with the things that are

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important to you in your business.

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Some people would say revenue.

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Great.

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Are you doing the things to increase your revenue?

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Are you showing up in all the places?

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Are you picking up the phone?

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Are you sending out emails?

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Are you talking to people?

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Are you putting your offers out there?

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There are so many ways to focus on that.

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sibility might be important to you.

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Are you showing up on LinkedIn?

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Are you serving on LinkedIn?

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Are you going to events?

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Can people see you?

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Are you visible to your target market?

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And if that's a big rock for you, get disciplined about that.

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The thing about discipline and everyone always thinks I'm very organized and

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for some things I'm really organized for other things, I don't give a crap.

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So I work at home.

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I'm not one of these ladies that go, oh, I have to do a loaded dishes or

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the washing before I go to my office.

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No, I don't really give a crap about that.

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I go to my office, it's work hours, I go to my office and anything else can wait.

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And so I'm, I'm very blessed with that.

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I can switch off and switch on.

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Others are not so blessed and cannot do that as much.

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But what I wanna say to you and what I wanna leave you with today is discipline,

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a rhythm, A structure gives you freedom.

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It does give you freedom, and that's why I think I like discipline, because I have

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freedom, because I can have a look at my calendar, I can see how much white space

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I've got, I can see what's going to give me energy, what's gonna drain my energy.

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And by having a structure and the discipline to focus on the big rocks,

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it actually means more freedom.

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So my questions for you today, or my question for you today

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is, what are your big rocks?

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have you got the structure and the discipline around those big rocks

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to move your business forward?