I don't even know.
I like, literally don't know how to do this, which is probably how our business owners feel when I ask them to like, make KPIs or like, what are you talking about? Uh. So my team asked me to sit down here and make a YouTube video about my greatest failures. And I got three minutes into talking about my failures and just paused the whole thing because it's so uncomfortable for me at this point in my life, to go backwards and to look at the things that I've done incorrectly.
Because what I do look back, the majority of what I've done, I feel like I've done incorrectly. And still today I am disappointed with myself and I'm frustrated that things aren't where I want them to be or how I want them to be, and I'm not who I
want to be. And so it's really challenging for me, and it's actually the thing that probably makes me more emotional in life than anything is looking back at failures, because I still feel like I'm in this constant state of not doing the right thing at the right time. As I just turned 31 this year, I really recognized that this is the thing that holds me back, and it's so challenging for me to talk about things that I think make people relatable, which is their failures and
their experiences and lessons. Not from this place of, oh, I figure this out, but from a place of I'm going through this today as I think about the people that I relate most to and the conversations that I want to be a part of, and the people that I look to for mentorship, the things that are the hard parts of their life, are always the things that
I relate most to. When I was 24 years old, where Brandon put me in this seat in our business that I wasn't ready for, and I honestly should have told him no, that I shouldn't do this because I didn't have the experience. No one's taking 24 year old Natalie blonde Natalie, seriously in charge of a company with 50 people. And yet I just said yes. And part of me even feels weird about that, because there's like, this privilege that comes with that. Like, oh, my then
boyfriend put me in charge of this company. Like, I am so self-aware of who I am and how I'm perceived by people that I recognize that talking about this is seems like it could be privilege, and it's just the reality of what my life was like. I was 24, I was dating and soon to be engaged to an older man who had a lot of money, and it was everything that I didn't want to be known for in life. I had a full ride academic scholarship to college. I got straight A's like I was going to be
somebody without somebody beside me. And then I decide to date Brandon. I decided to fall in love with what I believe is my soulmate. I believe in soul mates, and he put me in this position that I thought I could do and I thought I could take on, but didn't actually have like true certainty that I knew what I was doing. I don't think anybody who takes over a business has true certainty and hindsight being 2020, I should have said no, but I didn't and I
said yes. And I was this 24 year old who had all of these direct reports of people who were older than me, who did not take me seriously. And I knew it, and they knew it. And I just continued to put myself in this position that was so confidence shattering. I would go home at night and I would cry about the things that people said in surveys and feedback, and I just found myself, like stuck in the situation where he needed me in this role because there was nobody else he trusted. It was all I
could do. Like, my mission for this whole year was just to figure out how to make this business stabilize, and how to make this business not lose money, and how to prove to my husband, then boyfriend that I can do this. And instead of fixing it, and instead of things getting better, it got worse and it got worse, and it got worse, and there was more bad news.
And this like cycle really perpetuated to the point where I had to make the proposal to him in a group of partners that we needed to shut this business down, and it crushed me because everything that everybody thought about me, everything that people were saying about me and my own internal doubts about my abilities and my skill sets, was just validated in the fact that I couldn't figure out how to make this technology platform work. I honestly was
just a shell of myself. I can't even take myself back to that place, to be honest with you. Like, because if I did, I would just be in pieces on the floor because it was so soul crushing for me. And so, um, just challenging. Uh, I it's hard to put into words because I stopped believing in myself. I stopped believing that I could do anything. I'm not the right person. Somebody else gets to do this. I can't like girl boss and figure this out. And, um.
Luckily.
Luckily, I was spending time on YouTube and literally found Grant Cardone on a suggested video on the right side of my screen on YouTube. And listening to his YouTube videos is what, like, reinvigorated me to be okay with the fact that I had failed and be okay with the fact that I was 24 years old. And of course, I was going to make mistakes. And who am I to think that I could just figure this out, like all of these things that I had wound myself into
being so doubtful and secure about? I watched these videos that helped me overcome all of them, and I think that's the power of social media. I think that's the power of being able to create content like this, and to communicate with other people is to be able to speak life into people's fears and ideally, live a life where you can be an example to them and have them see a different picture for themselves than they thought
was possible. And if he wouldn't have created the videos that he created, I would not be who I am today. I would honestly be following my husband around the world, letting him do the big deals and him negotiate all of the contracts and him be the business person. While I just gave up on myself because of a set
of experiences that I had so early in life. I'm so grateful for content platforms that give these other pictures, but I think it's easy to even look at me today with the team that we have and the business that we've built over the last five years, and to think, oh, it must have been so easy for her this whole time, and she never had to overcome these challenging moments when, just five years ago, it's hard for me to admit who I was back then, because it's not the person
that I am today. And I almost gave up and I'm I was almost the opposite, the exact opposite of everything that I talk about. And the fact that I was there at one point is really difficult for me to admit, because I want it to seem so easy and like I've always had my shit together, even though
the reality is, of course, that's not true. But if you're going through something that's similar, my strongest piece of advice is just to keep going through it and to believe that you can have this life that you want to have. Because if you stop believing that you can have this life, you're going to stop putting energy into figuring it out and it's possible for you. You are capable of doing it even if you failed 100 times over.
If the one time that you're successful is the 101st, it's worth not giving up on yourself because it's available to you. I hope that if you're listening to this and you're going through the dark side of entrepreneurship, you have confidence in knowingness that you are not alone.