EP 86 | Lessons I Learned in February

areas of opportunity. So in my preparation for the podcast, it actually really helps me set up the next month. But also one thing that one like main driving reason that I started this podcast is to take you behind the scenes of the mindset shifts that have to happen in order to move our business from where it's at today to generating billions of dollars. And that's the target. That's where we're going. This thing is going to get

massive and it's going to happen quickly. And I want to take you behind the scenes of just all of the nitty gritty things that are pivots and shifts and points in my life where I'm learning new things and I'm executing on new things. So let's just dive in to February, what I learned this month. Okay, this is a fun one. There are no shortcuts. There just aren't there? Flat out are not shortcuts. If you want something in life, you're going to have to work for it. And I've

I've known this before. I've learned this. I'm not a shortcut person. But the specific situation that arose where I've relearned this lesson is in writing my new book and the book's titled Start The Work. It's going to come out later this year. It's a big milestone for me to be able to add a second book to my, you know, line up in my vision. There's four books, and in order to write four books, I have to

finish the second one. But I wasn't necessarily planning on writing this book until I talked with a guy that I've been working with for public relations back in November, and I wanted to make this very conscious pivot from not just being the people expert, but also moving into scaling and growing businesses. And I have this knowledge and expertise. However, I have so niched down to hiring and retaining firing and I'll always talk about those things. But I don't

just need to be known as that person. It can be broader and I'm ditching work woman so I don't just need to be the people person who's talking to women. I can talk to business owners and talk about scaling and growing their business and operations. So he told me that they offer these services where you sit down for six calls and talk to somebody about the chapters in your book and they will write the chapters. And the six calls was supposed to yield about, I think, ten chapters.

And I knew that it needed to be a 20 chapter book. So they were going to take writing half of it. I was going to take the other half, and I've been working on the other half of the book and I haven't paid too much attention to the the chapters that they were writing, because the first few pages that I read initially I loved, I was like, Wow, this is awesome. I can't believe he nailed my voice in this way. And that's because he was telling stories.

When it came to the nitty gritty and the description of these concepts and the execution of these concepts. As I was reading them, I recognized that it's actually not how I would explain the thing. And of course, how could it be? I explained things in a very particular way. I am meticulous in how I've structured our organization, the processes we've put in place, the thought process I use that really is the underpinnings of our operations, our systems,

our processes. And so this book is very systems process operations heavy. So how could I assume that somebody would just be able to capture that? Well, I did make that assumption, and the writing that he did was great. It just didn't sound like me. And one thing that I was so proud about as it relates to my book, Teamwork is it is me through and through. I had

no help writing it. I busted it out in a two week time frame and it was just Natalie and I really take a lot of pride, even today in teamwork and recommending it to people, because I know how it can help and because somebody else helped me with this book, I felt kind of dismissed, attached, disassociated with what I've written. And then I started questioning like, who

would I give this book to? So this all happened within the last 48 hours where I started to read for the final review, the book from start to finish. It was like, Oh my gosh, this is not what I want it to be. And I had this moment of like pure panic because I'm up against a deadline. My world has never been crazier than it is right now. I'm the president of two organizations and. It's just like life.

My business life is is nuts right now. My my work responsibilities are at a level that I don't know that they've ever been. And so to add on top of this, the overwhelm of thinking I was going to be able to just read through this book, knock it out in a 48 knock, knock out the edits. I spent a lot of time writing the other chapters, but knock out all of the edits within, you know, a

two day time frame. And I sit down on a Saturday morning and an hour in, I'm not even, you know, six paragraphs through the book because there's so many changes and tweaks and contextually things are not right. And so point being, there are no shortcuts. If you want to do something correctly, you have to put the energy into the thing. Now you have to be so specific in particular about what actually requires your energy and requires your effort.

It's funny, a lot of the book is about how you actually delegate things and how you duplicate yourself, but. Writing a book is just not one of those things for me. I. I want my voice to be authentic through the book writing process. I want it to be me through and through. In order to do that, I just can't take a shortcut. And there are things in your life that you can't take shortcuts around. You are the person for the things that you don't need to

be the person on. Please stop doing those things. Get rid of those things. I'm not here to tell you. You have to take on the weight of the world. And there are no shortcuts for anything because there's a lot of things that you can shortcut through duplicating yourself. But the things that you know that you have to do, you just have to freaking do them. And there's no there's no shortcuts. Okay? The next thing, this is a little fun. So we had growth con in the month

of February. Growth Con is our big event here in ten X world where we bring in all these speakers and it's this flagship event. It happens once a year. There's thousands and thousands of people in person. There's tens of thousands of people online watching this event. And for the event, I got my hair and makeup done every single morning at the crack of dawn. And I was shocked in the way that I looked from these hair and makeup. Duo like they did such a great job.

My face has never looked like that before and I have done my makeup the same way since I was in middle school. I use practically all the same products because I've always thought that I can't do my makeup. And it dawned on me on the final day of hair and makeup, I was like, Wait a second, I can learn how to do this. I've just sat here for five days and experienced you putting this makeup on my face and doing my hair. Why can't I learn

what you're doing? Because it's happening right in front of me. And so since then, I've had my makeup done. I had another speaking engagement. So I had to get my hair and makeup done. And I just started asking the person questions for how you put concealer on, how you put foundation on how you put bronzer on. And it might sound a little silly and a little ridiculous because I recognize that it is a little silly and a

little ridiculous. But the learning lesson from this is you can fricking learn anything you can learn anything you've ever wanted to learn. There is no rules. There is no like, Oh, I'm not good enough or smart enough or Oh, I'm not artistic or Oh, I don't know math. You can fricking learn it. And when you have that mentality, it's

amazing how more fulfilled your life becomes. Like, I've had a lot of fun over the last week and a half buying makeup, watching like, I don't know, 30 minutes of tutorials trying it out and like, Wow, I really like the way that looks. And there's there's a lot of joy that comes through taking something that you don't know how to do and actually learning how to do it, especially if you want to learn how to do the

damn thing. I want to learn how to put concealer under my eyes to where it doesn't crack and look funny, and there's nothing wrong with that. So first off, you can learn anything. Second of all, you don't actually have to feel bad about it because it's your life and whatever you're interested in, be interested in that thing. Learn that thing. Don't hold yourself back on this hair and

makeup thing. I shared this at the mastermind that we did for Growth Con, and I keep thinking about it and I want to share it with you as well. So speaking of makeup, about three years ago, I had my makeup done, and I, I, I wanted a handful of tips on how to do something different. I think it was how to apply concealer. Obviously, I didn't listen because three years later, I'm still struggling to figure that out. But I asked a question and then I went on

to explain. What I currently did with concealer, and this makeup artist literally stopped me in the middle of having a conversation. And she was like. I don't need to know how you do your makeup currently in order to teach you how you should do it. And for me, that was just like. Wow, she's so right. This happens with us, with business owners all the time. You don't have to tell me that jacked up way that you lead meetings or how you've structured your services or how

you lead one on ones. For me to teach you and help you do those things better, I don't need to know what you're currently doing. I just need to give you the framework for what actually works. And this makeup thing really helped me. Just like come at this from a different angle. I loved it. I thought I would share it back to things that I've learned. So this is a gut punch for me. If you say something is important, then you make time for that thing.

If you say it's important, you make time for it. But how many times do we say something's important but we don't actually make time for it? Does that mean it's actually important to us? Well, no, it doesn't. And so this particularly the thing that I'm saying is important to me, which is the promotion of our business, the creation of podcast content, YouTube content, TikTok content, all the things surrounding getting known. I say it's important, and yet

I haven't been making time for it. I haven't been making time for it for a whole variety of reasons, all the excuses, all of the other priorities. But wait a second. If it's important, you make time for it. And so I've really started to feel like I'm already

a big driver into my calendar. But I am ruthless right now about blocking off anywhere between an hour to 90 minutes every single morning to just knock out content, whether that's TikTok videos, doing what I'm doing right now, recording podcasts, doing videos, whatever the content is going live. I'm making the time to do it because I know it's important and I see the results of it when I do it. But it's the lack of consistency that causes it to struggle. And so if you say it's important,

you will make time for it. And if you're not making time for it, how important is it, really? Next up. This goes back to this whole book fiasco around not taking shortcuts. When I was in my hour of making edits, I kid you not. I went through five minutes of pure panic. As I mentioned, I have a lot of things going on right now that are important to me. I do not have time in my head. Let's just. I'm going to correct myself right now. In my head.

I couldn't think with the time that I needed. To finish this book in addition to what I'm already doing because I just couldn't find the time. I was like, When am I going to get this done? I plan to have this knocked out over the course of this weekend. How? Like I just went into full blown panic and then I went into, Well, why do I need to write a book? I don't need a second book. My first book was great. What's the purpose of writing this? I'm just going to forget about it. I don't need to

do this. It's not something that like, is important to me. I started to talk myself out of the freaking target and I just like I didn't have a path for like, how do I expedite this? How do I who do I call? All of these things were going through my head. And then this, like, anxiousness is like, no, I'm just not going to write the book. That's what I've decided. I'm not going to write the book. And that lasted for my pity party for about five minutes until she

was like, Wait a second, I don't freaking quit. I do not quit. I will not quit. This book is going to get done if I have to move something around in order to make this happen. This is a priority to me. I'm not going to quit on this. I'm just going to do the freaking work. So I had to unwind myself from the overwhelm that I felt in that moment. And I think that that's a really

real part of the creative process. I think it's a really real part of leading something, of being responsible for something, and especially when it's not going well, like it's okay to respond like that. So this is what I did. I. Stopped typing. I exited all of the tabs. I went, talked to Brandon. Brandon and I connected for like ten minutes and he validated everything I was saying. He's like, You're right. This is not the quality. This is not like, this is not what you want it to be and

you're going to figure it out. That's what he always says. You're going to figure it out. Like, yes, I know. I'm going to figure it out, but can somebody figure it out for me? That's not what I said, but that's what I was thinking. So I left the conversation with Brandon, went to do a workout, got back on my computer around, I don't know, 1130, and didn't stop writing until 9:00 PM. And you know what? At 9:00

I felt so much freaking better. Brandon always says this line and I haven't figured out where it comes from, but it's this thing that I think about whenever I'm about to do hard things. It's thinking about how do you eat a whale? That's literally the question I asked myself How do you eat a whale? And then the answer is one bite at a time. Now, I don't know who's eating whales. That sounds horrible, but there's this visual of there's this massive task in front of you.

This whale is ginormous. I mean, can you imagine eating a whale? It's a little morbid, but it has nothing to do with actually eating a whale and everything to do with just the consistency and the discipline and the process of one step at a time, one bite at a time. You just keep moving through it and then eventually it's finished and you've done it and you're proud of yourself. And so my battle cry with this is you just can't quit. You just have to keep going.

Whatever it takes, whatever you need to do to snap yourself out of it, whatever motivation you need to lean into, whatever negativity that people have said about you that really fires you up and makes you be like, Oh, I'm going to fricking demolish them. Whatever it takes. You that so that you just don't quit because you can't quit.

You're not a quitter. All right, I'm gonna wrap this up by saying I'm pumped for the call that is about to kick off because February is officially the best month in Cartoon adventures history that feels so stinkin good. Best revenue month, best profitability month in the history of our organization happened in the shortest month of the year. And we're just getting started. How crazy. Best freaking month of the year in February in the shortest month. Anyway,

I'm pumped about it. Can't wait to celebrate with our team. Can't wait to keep pushing. I hope that you find encouragement. I hope you find enlightenment. I hope you find some nugget that you're able to take into your life and uses a lesson that you're learning throughout the course of March and or whatever future month. You're you're listening to this podcast in appreciate you don't forget to subscribe. It would mean the world to me if you left a review.

The reviews are amazing They they just give me so much encouragement. I really appreciate the 15 seconds of, Hey, this was a great podcast. Thank you for creating this content. I read every single one of them, so really appreciate that.

And if you know somebody who is thinking of quitting on something or is taking shortcuts, or maybe they're stuck because they don't think that they can learn this next thing that's going to take them to the next level that they want to get to share this podcast with them, Share the love, help them be set up for success, help them get the encouragement they need. And I cannot wait to talk to you on the next episode.