I'm going to ask you a question.

Why can't I be successful?

Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach, and welcome to the OUI cast.

There's this great tool that you can use for creating content, and it's called answerthepublic.com you can pay for a membership and you can do as many searches as you want, or you can use their free membership.

It's fine.

You just are limited to how many searches you can do.

But basically what you can do is you can put in keywords like business coach or social media or HR consultant, anything that has to do with what you do for your clients, and it'll come up with the most commonly asked questions on Google and how they're phrased and what are the questions that are asked, and you can actually take those questions and use them as content.

And this is actually not even the point of this episode, but I shared this with you because I want to talk about this, because I was using this tool to frame up some of the ways that we look at success as a concept in the wrong way.

I was using this tool to see what kinds of questions get asked about how to be successful.

So I put in the search criteria, be successful.

And some of the questions that came out that have a very, very high score for being asked are, can I be successful in life?

Can you be successful without college?

How to be successful in life, how to be successful in business, how to be successful in college, how to be successful in school?

When will I be successful in life?

When will I be successful in general?

Oh, this one I love.

When will I be successful?

Astrology.

I don't know if that means that they're, like, wanting to be an astrologer or if they're, like, wondering if, like, there's something in their stars that are going to mean success coming up.

And along that vein, which zodiac signs will be successful?

Why are businesses successful?

Why can't I be successful?

And I think we've all asked this question before.

Why can't I be successful?

And it's usually after a failure.

It's usually after something didn't work out, or maybe we were even just too chicken to try.

And I think we're asking the wrong questions when we're asking about success.

Because to ask how to be successful, you have to first understand what the definition of success is.

And that's different from person to person.

And a lot of people have never actually thought about what their own definition of success is.

We just Kind of take at face value that being successful, quote, unquote, is about how much money you have or how big your house is or how fancy a car you drive.

We connect being successful with, you know, what university did you go to?

Was it an Ivy League?

Do you have an advanced degree in business?

We talk about how successful people are by how much money they make and maybe what kinds of clients they have and how good their branding is and all that jazz.

In relationships, we even assign success.

People who are married are deemed successful in their relationships, when I know a lot of married people who would not necessarily agree with that.

We assign success in so many areas of our life.

But is it your definition of success or is it this kind of, like, amorphous society definition that it looks a very particular way?

My definition of success recently changed.

And this has actually been almost like the North Pole shifted in the world for me.

And it happened when I realized that I no longer wanted to follow my ideal self.

I no longer wanted to turn to this idealized version of Katie in my mind to see, okay, well, what's the next rung up for success?

Like, what's the next win I should be going for?

It shifted when I started looking at my favorite self.

What is my favorite self?

Who is she?

What does she like?

What does she enjoy being?

What does she enjoy doing, and how does she see success?

I want to go into that deeper in a moment.

But first and foremost, we need to bust a myth about success.

Oftentimes people think of success and they associate it with how much money you make, and it becomes this.

Either or.

You can either be successful and wealthy, or you can do good in the world.

It's almost like we've all internalized this whole model, you know, created by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, where if you wanted to become a nun or a priest or a monk, you know, to enter the church, you had to give up all of your worldly possessions.

You had to release any claim, you had to property.

You had to donate all of your clothes, all of the things that you hold dear.

We've taken that model and we're like, yeah, absolutely, that's how we should do it if we want to really be a good person in the world.

We want to make a difference.

We want to help others.

We also have to be poor, completely discounting the fact that the Catholic Church is like, what, a trillion dollar institution?

Like, in real estate, in money, in artifacts that they own.

I mean, the paintings that are in the Vatican Museum alone create a massive fortune.

So if you were to give up all your possessions back in the day and go and essentially work for the Catholic Church, you'd have your housing covered, you'd have food covered.

You'd basically have all of the needs that you have as a human being covered in the here and now.

If you want to be a helper and you have this paradigm that you can either be a good person and donate your time and have a real impact on others and make a difference, we have this belief that you have to do so while poor, you know, forgetting that we don't have this institution taking care of us.

And also, that's not true.

Absolutely not true.

You do not need to be poor.

You do not need to struggle.

Can you spare some change if you want to make a difference in this world?

It's not an either or.

It can be both.

And actually, when you make it both, things get so much easier.

Few of the things that I've really explored with this whole model of the favorite self is like, what does my favorite self love doing?

And what does she want more time to do?

And a few of the things that came up is running my nonprofit, the Gay Birthday Club, which is about to launch.

I'm really excited for it and getting involved politically.

Not running for office, don't worry, I'm not.

I don't think I could handle that.

But supporting others who are.

Who are running for office, volunteering, helping them strategize, doing marketing for them.

And let me tell you, when I first had the idea of my nonprofit, I played small.

I talked to a bunch of people.

I felt out the idea.

I bought some books on Amazon on how to start a nonprofit.

I then felt really guilty that I had these books, books lying around my house and I wasn't reading them.

And I started doing some research online.

I got really overwhelmed until I finally said, no, no, no, no.

Like, this is not working.

If I want to make this happen, I have to make this happen.

And I'm not making this happen by trying to figure it out on my own.

So I did what I do best.

I threw some money at the problem.

I asked my incredible lawyer, David Freyman, to find an attorney that he could refer me to because it's not his specialty, to help me set up a nonprofit.

By the way, there are very few lawyers who do this.

It took him months to find someone.

And not.

Not because he wasn't doing it, because literally there are so few attorneys who do this.

So if you're an attorney and you want to do something that there's need for, you know, you might think about that niche, but money made it easier to get started, right?

Because attorneys cost money, and especially for a nonprofit that's not designed to make money.

And I will be able to pay myself back for what I've invested so far.

It's not, it's probably not going to happen anytime soon, but I'm, I'm years ahead of where I would be if I were trying to figure it out on my own.

And actually, like, let's talk about this.

My favorite self wants to make a difference.

She wants to make sure that everyone knows that they are loved and celebrated, especially on their birthdays.

And she's so excited for this idea of the gay Birthday club, where folks in the LGBTQ community can sign up to get a phone call on their birthday singing them Happy birthday, Happy birthday to you.

And I could have absolutely spent another six months to a year trying to figure it out on my own, second guessing myself, trying stuff, getting it wrong, filling out forms, having them sent back.

And here's what would have happened.

Most likely, I would have given up.

In business, you'll hear this phrase kicked around a lot, because it's true.

Time kills deals.

If you're in a sales process with someone and too much time goes by, the chance that they are going to say yes and sign on the dotted line and pay, the money goes down dramatically.

And just like time kills deals, time also kills ideas.

You may have an incredible idea for some kind of good initiative that you want to put out in the world, but if too much time goes by from having the idea to actually making it real, you're going to lose interest, you're going to lose the energy in it.

You're not like the goose is going to get juiced and there's not going to be any left.

Love that saying.

Again, my Canadian listeners, if you know if that's a Canadian saying or just that one person who shows up to my Brave Biz lab calls who says it from time to time, I want to know.

It's easier to have a massive impact on the world and to help people and to really make a difference when you have money, when you make lots of money.

When I did some reflection with my favorite self on what I really want my business to be, this podcast to be, and the rest of my life to be, everything revolved around being the help that others need.

And here's the beauty of it.

You can have a business that helps other people that makes you lots of money.

You could then use some of that money to start a nonprofit that helps lots of people and has an impact and hopefully at some point become something that exists separate from you so you don't have to put too much time and effort into it long term unless.

Unless you really want to.

When you make more money, you also have more freedom and flexibility to go and do other passion projects, like, for instance, getting involved in your community, maybe running for school board, or helping certain elected officials get elected in the first place.

Because you believe in what they stand for, you can donate to causes that matter to you.

Hell, I mean, if your idea of success is you want to go to Costa Rica for two months out of the year and go surfing, guess what makes that a lot easier?

Having a business that is successful in making lots of money.

So all those people who are Googling, how do I be successful in my business?

How do I be successful in my life?

The answers they're getting are not useful.

Right?

Because how does Google know what your definition of success is?

It doesn't.

It has no way of knowing that at the point that artificial intelligence gets to the stage where it can read your mind and understand what you mean.

I mean, I think we have some bigger things to worry about.

But when we ask questions like that, when we ask for guidance without understanding what we're trying to get to, we're actually keeping ourselves small.

Right.

It's kind of like imagine you live in Boston and you want to drive to California and you go up to someone and you say, hi, can you give me directions?

I'd like to go somewhere.

They may think that you want to go to New York.

They'll give you directions to New York, you'll get to New York and you'll go up to someone else and say, hi, can you give me directions?

And they'll give you directions to their favorite bagel shop.

Because it's New York.

Why the fuck would you want to go anywhere else?

This is the greatest city in the world.

That's how New Yorkers think.

They're not wrong.

Also, who doesn't love a good bagel?

But when you explicitly understand, I want to go to California, I need to start asking about going to California.

You start asking and some people won't know.

Some people didn't pay attention in geography class.

They didn't have a geography teacher who was as strict as Mrs.

Barker was.

Bingo.

It's funny, I still see her power walking sometimes in my hometown.

She wasn't one of the most traumatizing teachers, but she wasn't not one of the traumatizing teachers that I had.

I think one of the main reasons why we don't get specific about how we want to be successful is because we're secretly ashamed of what our definition of success is.

And.

And a lot of this goes into what have we been taught to believe about money.

We've been given so many different examples of how people who have lots of monies are actually the villains.

I mean, let's talk about Cruella Deville for a second.

She's massively successful.

She is a fashion icon.

And while I'm sure she could have afforded to buy 101 purebred Dalmatians if she wanted, she instead opted to pay two gangsters to go and steal them and hide them out in a house that I abandoned, house that I'm sure she owns.

And she's a terrible driver.

She can afford the insurance costs for her terrible driving and for repairing her own car all the time.

And I imagine there's also some paying off of the police, because really, I mean, with the amount of accidents that she for sure has, there's no way her insurance would actually keep her insured if the police were actually telling them that she was getting driving points.

For a real life example, Elon Musk.

If we're looking for a real life villain, you don't really have to look much further than him.

He screwed over most of his employees and every single business he has ever owned.

He's claimed that he founded businesses that he actually did not found.

He just bought them after they'd already been started.

And he's dug a lot of them into the ground, claiming that he's trying to do better for the world.

But there's been scant evidence that that's true.

Just leave it there.

When we have these models of people who are really wealthy who are doing terrible things, who are just terrible people, we start associating.

Oh, my God.

If you have money, you must be terrible, right?

And so our subconscious learns this from a very, very young age.

And we start associating.

Okay, well, you know, I don't want to be like that.

So what are the attributes of someone who is truly evil?

Oh, well, they all seem to have a lot of money.

Cool.

So I won't do that.

I also, you know, won't do this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing.

And our moral guidance system kind of gets confused, right?

We start associating stuff with evil that isn't necessarily evil.

It's just kind of a coincidence that this evil person also happens to be wealthy, you know, in my very first sales job, I had to learn how to ask for a lot of money, right?

More money than I had ever asked for in my life because I'd never worked in sales before.

And I'll never forget my now best friend, then just plain old coworker, Jessica Nobriga.

We were talking about money and like, our beliefs around it.

And she said, you know, money at its heart just makes you more of who you are.

And I love that because, you know, if you're a truly good person, money just makes you a better person.

It makes you better able to do things that makes a real difference in the world.

So as you're thinking about your definition of success, if there's any ickiness around money, a, that's a sign that you need to do some really serious money work.

And I hope you have fun with that.

And if you need any guidance, that's one of the things that I work on with my clients.

You also have to start finding better models for people who have lots of money, who are doing good things.

And yes, I am talking about Taylor Swift.

I've lost count of how much money she has donated to different food banks, every, in every location she's done, her ERAS tour, the amount of money she's given to hurricane victims, and just the general good work that she does and how kind she is in her work and in her interactions with her fans.

Because once you start unpacking what your beliefs are around money and your fears about what having lots of money will mean about you, and you start shifting the narrative that having more money will allow you to be a better, more influential person who makes a bigger difference in the world, the shame around your own definition of success starts dissipating.

Right?

Imagine, and maybe you don't have to imagine.

Maybe this is absolutely true for you.

You have a definition of success that says you need to make lots of money, you need to have a big house, you need to have all these things, and you secretly think, well, that would make me a terrible person.

Are you actually going to go for it?

Probably not, because it's going to be completely incongruent with who you see yourself as.

You're not going to feel aligned to it because that's not who you are.

But when you shift it to say, okay, yeah, I want lots of money and I want a big house so that I can host really amazing fundraising parties for the causes that I care about.

And with the money that I have, I want to be able to donate to these causes.

I want to be able to start my own nonprofit.

I want to be able to do this and this and this and this and really make a difference in the world.

And that feels in alignment with who you are at your core.

Now, that's a definition of success that you will be fearless in going after.

But babes, it's not an either or.

You don't have to set sacrifice having what you want to be who you want.

You can have them both.

And actually, when you give yourself permission to go after them both, they both become a ton easier to get to.

And if you're not sure what your definition of success is, if you've just taken the definition as it's been given to you from the world around you, and this is kind of your first foray into even questioning if that's right for you, here's a great journal question to ask yourself, and it is a little morbid.

I want you to write your own eulogy.

I want you to imagine that you are dead as a doornail maybe, and hopefully this is in the future.

It's not right now.

So I want you to imagine we are in the future.

You've lived a long life.

You've done all the things that you wanted to do.

You've had the impact that you wanted to have.

You've had really, really incredible relationships.

And then you died.

You're dead.

And everyone who's ever known you is showing up at the funeral and someone stands up and gives a eulogy.

What are they saying about you?

What are the key moments that they remember that they want to bring up in this final conversation about you?

What's the impact they want to acknowledge?

Or what are the quirky, fun loving bits that you want them to highlight?

It may not make sense right away, but buried in there is your definition of success.

And once you have that answer of what you want people to say about you after you're dead, you can reverse engineer it into what your definition for success is, which then you can reverse engineer that into what you need to be doing right now to make sure that that eulogy gets read.

And please, for the love of dog, stop asking Google for life advice.

I'm having so much more fun.

I'm feeling like more energy in this.