Welcome back to Building Billions. This is what I learned in April. I love doing these. It gives me a moment to, like, look back and really think about the lessons that I learned. And I did a cool thing this month. I wrote down the lessons as I was learning them in the past of like spent a little time going back through my meetings and my days and just things that made pivots for me. But this time I'm like, I'm writing this down as it's happening. So I got some good ones. April was a big, huge,
massive month for me. I turned 30 years old in April and with that came a lot of reflection, a lot of planning, a lot of reassessing. And so let's just dive into this first lesson of April. This is not in chronological order. This is also not an order of importance. This is just what I wanted to start with. Motivation is your responsibility. Nobody is responsible for your motivation or for your lack of motivation. I was on a call with a business owner a few days ago, like
at the tail end of April. A lot of epiphanies happen at the tail end of April, and the business owner was essentially telling me that it was my fault that another business owner wasn't motivated due to their comp plan. And I paused and I listened and it's like, wait a second. That person's motivation is not my responsibility. That person should be motivated for whatever reasons, drive them. And there could be a plethora of reasons when your business owner,
when you're trying to achieve something. You you take what you have and you use it to motivate you. If you're frustrated, if you're insecure, if you're feeling self-doubt, if you want to help a billion people and impact the world, whatever it is that is important to you, you can use that to create motivation. But it is not your responsibility to create motivation for someone else. That has to be an individualized choice. Sure. Can you be a great example?
Of course you can. But you can't motivate them. And any structure, any creation that you might have that inspires them. Fantastic. You're doing your part for the world. I know that I oftentimes whenever I want to act in a way that I know would not be inspirational and would be petty and would be just like the not good decision, but the decision that I feel like making, I think to myself, man, what if 20 year old Natalie was
watching me? Like, would she be inspired by this? Or would she think like, you, why are you acting like this? And that in of itself is motivation for me to change my behavior. So I use 20 year old Natalie. Or if my employees saw me make this decision or if I was on Instagram live making this decision, how would I make the decision? And it always grounds me and centers me to say, okay, I'm going to I'm
going to make it in this direction. So if you feel like there are people, maybe it's your sales team, maybe it's a business partner, maybe it's your significant other and you are bearing the weight of their motivation that is not on you, that is on them. And you can help them find those things. You can do what what it might take to to guide them along the path to be a source of inspiration. But ultimately, it is not on you to motivate anybody but yourself. Number two.
The week of my birthday. I won't talk about this too much right now. Might be fun to share in the future. Accrued some content during it so that I could share the future. But the week of my birthday from a business standpoint was really a shit show. There was just a lot of different moving parts, a lot of bad news. And one of the mornings I remember I said, I don't cry, especially like in public. One of the mornings I think it was the morning of
Noah's morning, my birthday morning before my birthday. It was some really bad news. I started bawling just like it was just a shit week and we were flying up to New York for the Vogue event and meeting Sarah Jessica Parker and Gigi Hadid, which, if you haven't checked out that episode, you totally should. But I was on the flight and just like, irritated. Like, why does this shit have to happen on this milestone that has been really important to me. And I. I don't get in
bad moods very often. I really don't. But in that moment, I could feel like I was getting myself in a bad mood. I was very negative. And then it dawned on me. I was like, Wait a second, this is a moment versus my life. A moment versus my life When I assess the moment. The moment fucking sucks, the moment shitty, the moment there's uncertainty and there's doubt and there's frustration and there's anger. The moment is filled with all of these emotions. But. Where's that hit? Like, let's
take a step back and assess the life. I'm so proud of the work that I've put in to build the life that I have with Brandon, with our businesses, with our partners, with our team. Like, I'm I can't even believe the life that I have today. Funny enough, I'm back in New York. I have a really cool event that I'm here for and I remember so vividly it was 2017 and we were here in New York with some previous business partners and it was for a meeting,
but I wasn't really involved in the meeting. I wasn't invited to the meeting. I wasn't a participant. Like I didn't actively work in that business at that time, and I just felt shitty about myself. I remember being in my hotel room the majority of the time because I didn't have any appointments there. There's so many big things and exciting events and stuff going on in New York
City and I. So clearly. Remember telling Brandon, I want to build a life where we have things to do here that are meaningful and are important and where we're needed. And I it was a turning point moment for me. And so now to be here, I have an interview and just like I probably got to leave actually in like the next ten minutes, I have an interview today. A dream friggin bucket list item of my life with Chanel.
There's an event tonight and a couple of meetings throughout the day here, and I'm just I took a shower this morning and I was like, Holy shit, this is my life. This is a life that I dreamed of. This is the life that I've always wanted. This is and it's it's going to get even better because there's now new levels to this life that I want. But. In the moment when I was so frustrated a few weeks ago to change the mood, I just really had to remind myself, Natalie, you love your life. This moment
is going to pass. You're going to be able to tell the story in three years from now or five years from now about all of the change. Because right now I'm in a season where it just doesn't feel like there's progress. It just feels hard and it feels tough and it just it feels kind of icky. And I know that it's going to pop to another level, but the pop hasn't happened, and it's probably going to be a deferred pop. It's probably going to pop in like a year and a half like this. It's it's
going to take time. It's not an overnight thing. But recognizing, man, when you're having a moment that feels shitty. Maybe your life doesn't feel great right now and maybe you need that moment to reset. My life did not feel great when I was in the hotel room almost seven years ago. Really low on myself. So then you have to take the steps in order to make the changes, to create
the life that you want. But if you can separate the life and the moment, it's not a resting on your laurels thing, it's not like, Oh, I'm just going to be happy. However, sometimes it's just the moment sucks and it's okay at the moment sucks and it's okay that it's hard. Okay. Can you handle hard? Totally. I can handle hard. I know you can handle hard. So compartmentalize. It's the moment versus this is the life you're building.
And as long as you're proud of the life that you're building, who you're spending your time with, where you're going, where your energy is spent, you good? You good. This next one came from the one, the only Alana Cardon. I was talking with her about a handful of things that are going on and really seeking advice in communication.
And she said to me, one of the greatest things that she's learned to do that's really transformed her communication is not handling the situation or the problems that somebody's saying or like the tax that you feel like you have to be then like defensive of because of the very particular situation. Instead of handling something in that way, you handle the origination. So in any communication cycle, that's difficult. Somebody might be complaining that, you know, Oh, you didn't
hold my hand. And it's been the third time this week that you weren't interested in holding my hand. Why are you not holding my hand? You. You don't love me anymore. Is it about the hand? Of course not. It's not about the hand, the origination. The person doesn't feel loved. So don't even talk about the hand. Just say I'm sorry that you're feeling not loved. I didn't
realize that. My reaction. My. Lapse of judgment and holding your hand was going to hand or was going to create this feeling because that sounds like a really shitty feeling, you know, I love you. And granted, Elaine was not giving me marriage advice. It wasn't about Brandon or holding hands, and it was about something business related. But handling the origination, somebody doesn't feel seen, somebody doesn't feel appreciated, someone is
just frustrated. Most people and oftentimes you'll handle the very specific situation, but that's not the right thing to do. And so I've applied this over the last few weeks, and she and I talked about this, and it's really been masterful. You don't have to agree with everything that somebody says. You don't have to be right. You just have to handle and really look at what is the origination. If you can go to the root and go to the origination man, it's like it's a game changer. This
is really helped me in communication. And I would suggest if you were having difficulty in relationships and communication right now, look at and try to uncover like what is the origination on the other person's side of the issue and maybe what is the origination on your own side. You're talking about the fact that the person isn't holding your hand,
but is it actually that you don't feel loved? How could you communicate that that's the origination instead of you never hold my hand and having it be some sort of explosion. Okay. My final April epiphany and I got to get rolling here because this interview, it's going to happen. And ideally it happens with me, not without me. So, uh, the last other than so many things, but for the purposes of this podcast, I was driving with my brother from Orlando to Miami just three days ago. We were
on the cusp. It might even technically be a lesson in May, but I'm gonna give it to April. I think it goes on May 1st. And we were talking about our muscle building goals. Both of us work out in the gym five days a week, 5 to 6 days a week, lifting weights to gain muscle. We. Eat a ridiculous amount of protein. And these changes have been like slow over the last, I would say, year. But we've really gotten more intense and more serious about it in the last six months. And so we're kind of
buddies on this. We hold each other accountable. We go to the gym together, we talk about what food we're eating and what's helping us, what's not helping us, etcetera. And so I asked him this question. I said, how long do you think it's going to take you to get to your ideal body? And his response blew my freaking mind. He said, If I'm consistent with what I'm doing right now, I think it's going to take me five years. And like, I gasped. It's like, what, five years?
Why do you think it's going to take you five years? And he proceeded to explain, you know, the science behind it and looking at other people's results and what their trajectory has been. And in order to build the amount of muscle, it's not something that happens in six months. It happens over years of being really consistent doing the work that he's doing. And all of a sudden, as soon as he said five years, it blew this thing
for me. That I've held on to since I was ten years old that I've believed in, which is if I just go on some crash diet, I can have whatever body I want in 30 days. Like it's always a 30 day target. And the reality is I've never successfully gotten to where I've wanted in 30 days. But still, in my mind, it's a 30 day thing. And what he said, five years, it actually just like settled me into, okay,
I could be consistent with this for five years. Like it just like a mindset shift from months to years. And now what? I'm making choices. Granted, it's been five days, but like, stick with me on this. It just doesn't feel like I'm depriving myself for a short period of
time to get some short term goal. It it's changed my mindset to a lifestyle, and I couldn't have thought with five years, six months ago, a year ago, because it sounds daunting and it feels really hard and like you want a quick fix and a solution, so then you get some wins. But now I'm at a place where this behavior has been consistent enough, and so I can look at five years and say, okay, when I'm 35 years old, I can see that it the result is going to be this. And it just like in everything.
What if you knew was going to take five years? What would you be willing to put the work in? I apply that so much to business, to public speaking, to operating our organizations, to leading teams. Like it's not something that just happens. You can't just show up every day for a week and expect that your business is going to grow like it is. Consistency over a long period of time with your clients, with your team members,
growing social platforms, that creates the growth. But I'd never applied that principle to another area of my life and now that I've applied it, I'm like, Wow, this is it's actually inspiring to know that it's five years because then you're not upset that it hasn't happened right now, but you're still putting the work in right now. So if any of you are frustrated that you're putting the work in right now and it's not leading to where
you want, it's okay. It will eventually. If you don't give up, it will eventually get you to where you want to go. You just can't give up. And I think about this with the team that I'm leading right now. There's some new team members, there's some new dynamics, there's new things going on that I don't operate the same way that I used to, and they don't know. How I run things. Yet they're just getting used to me as well. The whole. Whole division's whole department's whole companies.
And what I know is I'm in this for the long haul. It's not some short thing. And when the long haul happens and they see the consistency of the daily team meetings and the personal professional financial goal conversations and the one on ones and the metrics and how we on board, like when all those pieces that we go through are tied together and I'm consistent with it,
I know we'll win. I have full confidence that we will win because we will continue to attract the right people who are interested in the long run of changing their lives. It's not like somebody comes into our environment and gets ten Xed overnight and within two weeks their whole lives changed and it was just such a magical experience. It takes time to build the confidence and the consistency
is actually what creates the confidence. And speaking of, you know, one on one onboarding, all of that fun stuff, I know I have a People Essentials workshop coming up here in June. It's it's our most popular course. It sells out the fastest. Last time we had standing room only and actually had to move venues because the event was so oversold. So if you are trying to figure out this whole team thing, this team engagement thing, how you
build a sustainable culture and a business that. The team runs when the organization runs with a high performing team when you're not even there. Highly recommend you check out
People essentials. You can go to coronavirus.com/people to get your tickets and sign up and I do it real fast because it's not going to be available for too long with that appreciate you making a fantastic may or whatever month it is that you are listening to this and looking forward to hanging with you next time on Building Billions. Don't forget to share this episode. If this helped you in any way, it would mean the world to me.
If you share this so that the show can grow and so that other people can be impacted and learn these lessons from what we're learning as we're building this billion dollar business.