Always have that big number in mind, because like I said, if you don't put it out there, then you'll never reach it. And the thing is, as you keep getting to these little milestones and achieving these, you are starting to gather all this evidence and all this proof, that, what you're doing is working David Shriner-Cahn: Welcome to Smashing the Plateau. We help consultants, coaches, entrepreneurs, and small business owners build their business after a long career as an employed professional.
We believe you should be able to do what you love and get paid what you are worth, consistently. I'm your host, David Shriner-Cahn. Today on Smashing the Plateau, I'm speaking with best selling author and co-founder of Mind Movies, Natalie Ledwell. In today's episode, you'll learn how to identify your niche and create a big vision to turn it into reality. Stay with us to hear all the details. How do you feel about your progress toward your vision?
Would you like to be part of a structured, supportive process to help you implement ideas that you know would help you move the needle toward your goals? As a member of the Smashing the Plateau Community, you'll have access to a structured process for growth. You'll also be a member of a community that is built to be a safe, caring place where inclusive, direct, active, and empowering conversations are welcome.
Inside the Smashing the Plateau Community, you'll find a range of tools and resources to support you as an entrepreneur, access to experts and answers to your burning questions. If you are committed to getting your consulting, coaching, or small business to grow on your own terms, so that you can deliver great results to your ideal clients, while supporting the lifestyle you want, and you don't want to do it alone, apply to become a member of the Smashing the Plateau Community.
Learn more at smashingtheplateau.com. Now, let's welcome Natalie Ledwell. Dame Natalie Ledwell is a bests selling author host of the podcast, Not Over, Just Different, co-host of the cable TV show, WAKE UP, and founder of Mind Movies, the usually successful and revolutionary online personal development company that has reached over 10 million people worldwide. Natalie, welcome to the show. Hey, David, how are you? David Shriner-Cahn: Great. Tell me a little bit about your audience.
My audience is actually me. I know that often when we're giving people advice about, going out and starting a business to go find your tribe. Who's your tribe? I just found that I just showed up as myself and then what attracted to me was women who are similar to me, they're in middle age, maybe coming out of a marriage or the kids have gone off to college or whatever that is, and they're looking at this next chapter of their life and going, how do I contribute? How do I make a difference?
How can I, still do something. It's not like my life is over. I still wanna be able to do something that's fulfilling. So that's normally who my, my audience is. And I normally talk a lot about personal development and mindset. In the aspect of how do I apply those principles to a business or to a new vocation or something like that. David Shriner-Cahn: Why have you chosen personal development and mindset as the primary areas to focus on?
Ah, I got into Mind Movies or started Mind Movies totally by accident. A serendipitous series of events, let's just say The Secret had just came out in 2006 and talking about the Law of Attraction, Oprah had just interviewed, a lot of the main teachers from that movie and everyone was talking about visualization. Now at the time I had four businesses. That I was running at the same time with my husband concurrently. And, yeah, it was crazy.
And a friend of ours approached us with this idea of creating a little movie, like a little slideshow, which was his version of a vision board. So it helped people to be able to visualize the life they wanted to live. Now it was a hot topic around the world. Oprah had just featured The Secret. let's go into business and set up, website and we're like, dude, first of all, we've got four businesses. I got no time for this, even though I knew it was a great idea.
And the other thing was that I knew nothing about the internet. My husband could hardly turn on a computer. And I hadn't even heard of YouTube. I know someone was trying to describe a social network to me. I go, wait a minute, you put your personal details on a website on the internet. Why would anyone do that? That's how little I knew when we got started put a little video on YouTube.
We had so much traffic coming from that, we made our first three sales and the second day we had that video up, which was very exciting. And then within a few months we had that many emails coming from people going, this is changing my life. We're like, all right, these are the businesses, whatever. We've gotta focus on this. This is it. It really ignited something in me where I'm like, no, we can really make a difference here.
And it was something I'm like, we have to figure out this internet thing. David Shriner-Cahn: yeah. And was there something specific in the content that you put up that you think was really attractive to people? It was just a really simple idea. You know the idea of, with a vision board, normally people will cut out a photo of the house they want, or the car or the vacation, so that when they look at those photos, they can imagine themselves in that house or on that vacation.
But when you had this dynamic moving little video that has affirmations, that describes what it is that you want with the photos. And then you add the music to that, that like the soundtrack to it. when we are visualizing what's most important is how we feel like we need to feel what it's like to already be there. And so the music was like the secret source. So having such a simple idea like that, I, my first career was in fitness. I started managing fitness clubs when I was 21 years.
Talk my way into this job. I had no idea what I was doing. I'm like, I reckon I could do a better job than you, but it, this is how I cut my entrepreneurial teeth. I was managing other people's businesses. So by the time I finally went into my own, I'd had all this experience, which was fantastic, but my bosses at the time would send me to the Tony Robins and the Jim Rohn and the Zig Zeigler. And so I was always a student. Personal development.
And I always felt like I had this positive career now, my first business after that was a nightclub. So I had this stark contrast of going from somewhere where I think I was doing something positive to this, oh my God. I'm creating an environment for people that to go out and drink and have a very unhealthy lifestyle. Getting back, you know, when we were receiving these emails, sparking that thing inside of me, I'm like, Ooh, I remember this feeling. This is what I used to do when I was younger.
and it felt like I was home. It felt like, no, this is exactly where I'm meant to be. Which is not what I felt when I was in that nightclub. So when it of ignited those deeper feelings for me, I'm like, okay, I need to really pay attention to this. How hard was it to say no to those four existing business? We didn't say no straight away. And, and this is it, anyone who's looking to, to go into a business, I don't, and I think you are the same, we have the same opinion here.
Don't jump in and and just cut your ties. We still, we had our, my husband's, brother come in and run a couple of the coffee franchises that we had. One of the other one was like a network marketing business. So we were still able to run that, because it was mainly online. so we still able to maintain some of those businesses, why we started to dabble into Mind Movies and looking what that looked like.
We ended up buying a program, a few months in cuz we're like, how do we do the internet marketing thing? And then we realized you could buy programs that would teach you how to do that. And so we bought one program, it was a $2,000 investment, which at the time for us was huge. And you, we've never spent $2,000 online for anything. It's what if it's a scam? we had to go through that whole process. But we implemented one idea. From that program and instantly made our money back.
We're like, okay, this is crazy. And that's when we went, okay, how do we get more of this? Like we were hooked and the man who actually created that program, his name was Frank Kern. Who's a legend in internet marketing circles. And he announced he was doing a live event in April of 2008 in San Diego. So we packed up you know we came over to the US. We attended that seminar. And one of the biggest things that happened to us at that seminar is that we were accepted into Frank's mastermind group.
And we ended up staying in the US for the next five months, working our butts off, meeting with Frank being part of that group, even our social circle where internet marketers. So even in a social setting, we were learning, we were like sponges, like gathering all the information that we could so that we could do our big launch, in September of 2008, which as is when the economic crisis hit the planet, everyone's losing their homes and their jobs.
We'd had accumulated $120,000 on credit cards, which, once we realized what was happening economically, we had a little meltdown. We're like, okay, this has gotta work. Otherwise we're toast. And in the end, we ended up doing like a $700,000 launch selling a little $97 program. And it could have gone either way, but it just happened to be the right time for this kind of a product, cuz it was simple. It was easy.
And it was helping people have hope and to feel more optimistic about their future, especially given the events of what was just happening in the world. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. So do you feel like you, like there was some serendipity, in the timing and also what kind of product you chose to offer? Yes and no. Yes, we had decided way before the economic crisis hit that this was what we were gonna do. We already planned the date we had already, had done all of that.
But what we also did, and this is what was the difference between the massive success that we had with Mind Movies and all the other businesses that we had. We had varying degrees of success with the other businesses. We made good money and, and we lost some, and we learned a lot of lessons, a lot of lessons along the way, but what made the difference with this particular business is that for me, I believe we were applying everything that we were teaching.
We had created a Mind Movies specifically about that launch. We talked about the amount of customers that we were attracting, the type of people that we were attracting, the amount of money that we were going to make, what our business looked like. we were very specific about what that looked like. And every day we were focusing on that. and low and behold, that's exactly what we created because we were very clear about where it is that we wanted to end up.
We were very strategic about surrounding ourselves with the right people and the right help and the right support. we could have friends in our life that'll, be our little cheerleaders for us, but we had a step up from that. Our email list went from 8,000 to 80,000 in a week. That's how quickly we were, gathering email, for the database and the email delivery system shut down our account, cuz they were convinced we were doing something illegal, cuz they'd never seen anything grow that quickly.
And if it wasn't for Frank being able to get on the phone with them and go look, no, these guys are legit. You know it wasn't just you know, I'm gonna help. I'm, I wanna support you, but it's I've got the specific help that you need. And believe me, everything that could go wrong, went wrong on that launch, so many things, but we had the right people around us to help us to get through all of those challenges.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. No, it sounds like the fact that you spent all of this time trying to learn what you needed to learn and have access to the people who had expertise, that would be helpful. that was really critical.
Yeah. And I think too, for me, especially like I was so far outside my comfort zone, the only thing, the only there's two programs, I knew how to use on a computer when we started that company was Word and MYOB, which was the bookkeeping, software, which is the only reason I used a computer. To create invoices and to do bookkeeping. So I'm having to learn how to write emails, set up order responders, edit videos, build websites, all these things.
And it's so far outside my comfort zone and I was 40 years old at the time. So to say that it was very stressful was an understatement, but what kept me going through that was the fact that we had enough people around us that were validating that the idea was great and that, that we could be a success that I knew exactly where I wanted to end up and I could see and taste that.
And also what was fueling me was the feedback that we were getting from our clients and from our customers just going, you've helped me. You've changed my life. You've helped me. improve my relationship. You've helped me, with my relationship with my son, I finally got the car or the house that I've been looking for, or I just, for the first time in my life, I feel really good about myself, tho that kind of feedback. And that validation was like, that's all I needed to keep going.
David Shriner-Cahn: And you said that you have been a, basically a student of personal development and how to create a positive mindset for your adult life. So you were putting all of that into play in this new business effort? Absolutely. And I think I was handed my first set of cassettes showing my age now, when I was 21 years old, Brian Tracy was the guy on the cassettes and that was like one of those, oh, my goodness. I can think differently and change the outcomes in my life. This is crazy.
But I remember having a moment before our friend approached us with this idea. four businesses working really long hours and still struggling financially. And I'm like, I don't get it. Cuz I knew how to make a plan. I knew how to think positively, I knew all of those things and I'm like, why am I, why are we still struggling? And this doesn't make any sense to me. I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything right. And then it wasn't until I, saw The Secret and went, oh, wait a minute.
because for me, my plans were always small. I'm thinking if I don't know every single step and I can't see the entire plan before I get started, or before I set this goal, then I'm only going to set something that I know I can achieve. that's, That's a foregone conclusion. For me to set something huge, like a million dollar launch, which is what we did in the end. And I'll can tell you a little bit more about that story, but a million dollar launch.
I would never have dared to set a goal like that before, until I understood the principles. no. You just need to know where you wanna end up and you just need to take that first step. Then you just need to take that second step.
And if you are in alignment, meaning that you can see yourself already there and feel what it's like to already be there and you're taking this action, then things will start to fall into place for you and things that you could never have planned for in a million years, which is what was happening for us. having, and I like Glen and I, we like 20 different businesses we had together. We knew how to run a business. I, we knew how to do a successful business, but this was the missing piece for us.
It's oh, Okay. we didn't just go from that to a successful business. We went to living in the us and all those teachers that were in The Secret. are now my friends, we've helped 10 million people around the world. Like this is as far exceeded anything I could have ever dreamed up for myself before I understood these principles.
David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. So Natalie, how important is it to think big and then work backwards to the first step versus thinking way smaller and working backwards to find the first step. Cause I know it can be very scary. You go, oh, million dollars. That's the big number.
I'm like, I dunno if I can do this and what I do know is that anything, when it comes to what we are creating in our life, how we feel and our emotions, we need to be wary of, with the law of attraction, the principle basically is like energy attracts like energy. So we wanna be the same energy or similar energy or frequency, the things that we want now, our emotions are our frequency.
Now I also know on the other hand that if you don't set that big number, you're never gonna reach it cuz you don't believe you will. So I always say put the big number out there. Now you can, like you said, reverse engineer it, break it down into smaller increments and go, okay, I'm gonna get to that million dollars. But let me focus on the first thousand or first hundred thousand or first 10,000. And then move your way up, but always have that big number in mind.
because like I said, if you don't put it out there, then you don't, you'll never reach it. And the thing is, as you keep getting to these little milestones and achieving these, you are starting to gather all this evidence and all this proof, that, what you're doing is working. you're building your belief and you're building your expectation, which are two very important ingredients when it comes to achieving anything that you want in life, once you believe and expect that it's gonna happen.
And the way that you do that is by set the big number and then keep achieving those small little milestones along the way. David Shriner-Cahn: Now, Natalie, for your audience of women over 50, particularly those that may have been doing something professionally for most of their career where they've been doing well, but not necessarily achieving that kind of big vision, but let's say they're doing well as an employee and then they decide they wanna shake things up a little bit.
either by leaving their job or in some other way, what are some of the outcomes that you've seen them achieve when they shift their mindset? So a lot of the women that I work with, the reason they wanna make a change is because maybe what they've been doing in the past has been outta responsibility. They're a wife, they're a mother. They have a family they're contributing to the household.
Maybe they didn't even have a job or maybe they're looking to get into a business now because they wanna make their contributions. because they don't have as much responsibility as they had before. And we, 50 to me is the sweet spot. We've got all this life experience. We've got all this knowhow, we've got all this knowledge. and we are still healthy. We're still energetic. We've still got all this, this, go in us, to be able to look for the, look forward into something.
So the question that a lot of women are asking that I get to work with is how do I make a contribution? Or how do I do something that's gonna fill my soul. And so when they're looking at what they're going into next, they're looking at well, what am I good at? What have I been good at? And what is it that I really enjoy doing? And then from there they go, okay. So how do I make money out of this? Or how do I engineer a business out of this? And then they start that research from there.
So anything from becoming a coach. To starting their own podcast, to running an ebook, to doing some online programs. And for some people it's just, creating some kind of, product or craft or something like that, where they can donate a certain amount of money from that, into the charities or the causes that are really close to their heart.
So really a very heart and love based businesses is what I can see is coming out of the women that I work with as well and something where they go, look, I could do this forever. I think this whole concept of retirement, this, our generation are like, Retire? Why would we do that when we love what we do? it's not like it's a, something that we've, that we have to do. It's something that we get to do and that we love to do. David Shriner-Cahn: That's so true.
And so it kinda takes a whole retirement thing off the table. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah. How many of them end up doing something in business? I would say there's probably about, I don't know, 25%, 25 to 30% of the women that I work. Is there anything about your work or about your audience that we haven't discussed that you'd like to share? Let's see. I think really, like I said, it, we can go through our whole lives.
Struggling, which a lot of us do, and a lot of what I do is not just helping people have this really optimistic and positive vision of their future, but also understand what stopped them from having that before now, and for a lot of us, we are overcoming our childhood, we're overcoming our culture. We're overcoming, the expectations that society had for us to show up in a certain way or to go into a certain career. So now it's now I get to do what I really wanna do.
So figure out what that is and why have I not stepped into that yet? Now a lot of us are overcoming limiting beliefs or programs of not being worthy, not being smart enough, not deserving success.
And I also help people to really be able to clear a lot of that old programming because consciously we go, no, I wanna create this career and I wanna have this wealth and I wanna live this lifestyle, but subconsciously our subconscious mind is going no, remember, you're never gonna amount to anything you were told that repeatedly when you were a kid. So I'm gonna do my best to throw up all the procrastination and all the negative thoughts and every excuse for you not to be able to do that.
So when we become aware of what those thoughts are, and especially they come to the service, when we set ourselves a goal of, okay, no, I wanna create a business that I feel good about. Then when we start in taking action in that direction, that's when these thoughts really come to the surface, all these feelings come to the surface. It's oh, who do I think I am? We all, all from time to time have that imposter syndrome come up.
I have the same thing, created a social emotional learning curriculum for schools. Now I left school when I was 15. and I don't have children. I'm like, so I'm like, they're way minute now. I'm like, I know you can make a lot of amazing things happen, but really this, but again, there's been too many things that have fallen into place to help me to make this become a reality that I'm like, okay, I can't walk away from this.
there's too much support that I'm getting from wherever, to be able to make this happen. Being able to overcome that is also a lot of what I, help, people do is to get, let's get past that old programming and, and as sometimes that's the reason we stay in a job or a career longer than then maybe we wanted to, because we have a lot of this self doubt, which is really connected to some, deeper, childhood experiences. And we all have it, like every single human being on the planet has it.
But once we become aware of that, And then choose to release it and go, okay not so thinking those thoughts anymore. They're not serving me. What am I choosing to replace those thoughts with? And then starting to move through forward from those four paradigms is just, it makes all the difference in the world. David Shriner-Cahn: Yeah, Natalie, congratulations on everything you've achieved and the huge impact you've made on so many lives.
If somebody wants to go deeper with anything that you've shared today, or access any resources, you have learn more about you, et cetera, where would they go? Yeah. So mindmovies.com is our main website. From there, there's a lot of free content. You can download some free Mind Movies as well. There's a whole, all the information on our programs there also, if you're a female and you're listening to this and you're, Expectable age like myself.
you can access the podcast there, which is Not Over, Just Different , but if you are listening to this and, you are interested in a social, emotional learning curriculum for your school. If your kids are still at school, personalgrowthstudies.com is, definitely the best place to, to find out some information and to connect with me through there. David Shriner-Cahn: Sounds great. Natalie, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and share your insights in your story.
My guest has been co-founder of Mind Movies, Natalie Ledwell. Thank you again, Natalie, for joining us. Thanks David. David Shriner-Cahn: When you visit the Smashing the Plateau website at smashingtheplateau.com, you'll find a summary of each episode, along with the links we mentioned on the show. On today's episode with Natalie Ledwell, we learned how to identify your niche and create a big vision to turn it into reality. How do you feel about your progress toward your vision?
Would you like to be part of a structured, supportive process to help you implement ideas that you know will help you move the needle toward your goals? As a member of the Smashing the Plateau Community you'll have access to a structured process for growth. You'll also be a member of a community that is built to be a safe, caring place where inclusive, direct, active and empowering conversations are welcome.
Inside the Smashing the Plateau Community, you'll find a range of tools and resources to support you as an entrepreneur, access to experts and answers to your burning questions. If you are committed to getting your consulting, coaching, or small business to grow on your own terms so that you can deliver great results to your ideal clients while supporting the lifestyle you want, and you don't want to do it alone, apply to become a member of the Smashing The Plateau Community.
Learn more at smashingtheplateau.com, where we have additional resources to help consultants, coaches, and entrepreneurs build their business after a long career as an employed professional. We believe you should be able to do what you love and get paid what you're worth, consistently. I'm David Shriner-Cahn. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our show. I'll see you on our next episode.