Welcome to the Ambitious Introvert Podcast, created especially for introverts, empaths, and highly sensitive entrepreneurs to help you build, grow, and scale a successful, sustainable business. I'm your host, Emma Louise Parks business and mindset coach for ambitious introverts. After 17 years working as an air traffic controller, the ultimate fast-paced high stimulus -friendly role. My mission now is to show introverts that they too can create big results and success because of who they are, not in spite of it. I focus on introvert friendly business and marketing strategy to help you switch overwhelm for clarity, confidence, and clients.
Hello, welcome to the Ambitious Introvert podcast. I'm Emma Louise, and we are continuing the solo mini-series ‘How I think about…..’ so if you haven't tuned into the last few episodes, this is a special series where I'm literally just stream of consciousness empty in my brain about how I think about certain things that are important to us in our business.
And the reason for doing this is, I see so much educational content out there, people going like five ways to do this, or three tips for this, which is really, really useful. But we don't often see the thought process behind things, and it's changing our thought process and changing the way we approach things.
In our mind that actually creates the results and changes how we operate in our life and in our business. So, you know, the whole point of coaching is that a coach facilitates that change, where people have those breakthroughs, they have those realizations, or they notice those patterns of thought that are keeping them stuck in a place they don't want to be.
So, Really, this is just me sharing, yeah, my insights, how I think about things, how I have thought about things, and how that has changed in the hope that either you hear the way I think about something and it really resonates and you're like, that's great. I'm gonna use that and take that from now on. Or maybe you hear me talking about things and you go, no.
Like totally don't agree with that. Not the way I look at it at all, which makes. Even firmer in your own belief and your own thoughts and your own truth, which is also great. So I think it's such an important thing to. To see other people's perspectives and to be open to hearing different ways of thinking about things, whether you take them on or not.
So as ever, take what you need, leave what you don't, and know that if something resonates, it's probably worth exploring that a bit further in your own thought processes. And if it doesn't resonate, A really good marker that you're solid in your own thoughts around that subject. So today I'm gonna talk about how I think about investments and specifically about making investments in my business and myself.
So not so much about buying property or you know, starting a trust fund or any of that, but much more about the investments that we make in the business space. So, How I used to think about investments. I can tell you I've always been pretty good at investing in myself. So it's never really, I never questioned doing things like hiring a personal trainer or like.
Continued education even if it wasn't for the reason of a business, because I've always felt that there's a really good R ROI on those kind of investments. I've always liked to prioritize things like my health, so I think I came to the online business space probably a bit more open to investing because of that.
However, I definitely started off doing it from a place of lack and fear. So while I could absolutely see the benefit of, you know, learning this skill or understanding how to do something in my business, I definitely came from a very impatient place when I first started, and the reason I say lack and fear is because, I would think that I needed that thing.
Like that is the thing that's gonna blow my business up and I need it. And if I don't invest in it, then everything's gonna fall apart and I'm never gonna make any money. And part of that, I think, is the era that I came into the online space of late 2018. 2019, and it was still very bro markety and very manipulative, persuasive sales pages, countdown timers, you know, prices are going up next round.
All of that, which we do still see in the online space. Me, not as much because I'm very, very careful now about whose content I consume. But I'm sure it's still out there. But I definitely, as a sensitive empath, I think really brought into those fears a lot more than maybe other people, and felt very ungrounded and very, you know, called to action literally.
So I would put everything on that thing, like, I'm gonna buy this course and it's gonna change everything, so I need it and I have to make it work, and I have to find the money for it. . It was a very shortsighted way of investing, but you know, I'm not making myself wrong for that. That was all that I knew.
But then what happened is if it didn't do what I expected it to, which most of the time it didn't, I would feel guilty and blame myself, like I'd somehow done it wrong. . Now, sometimes this was accurate because there were definitely times that I invested in something and then I didn't fully show up for it.
I didn't do all the work, or I checked out emotionally or you know, something happened. I remember I had to have surgery around my spine at one point, and I was in a program and I had to miss quite a lot of the calls and I was on drugs and you know, I just wasn't there to make the most. Like completely.
That was, that was on me, but sometimes it wasn't my fault. Sometimes the program didn't deliver or the course didn't deliver what it had said it would. So I had to really get out of thinking about it being my fault and blaming myself and start to realize that, oh, I went to this with the right intentions maybe, but it didn't deliver.
So where this began to change for. Was back in 2020. This is how, I didn't realize that at the time, but I started to change how I think about investing in a much more positive way. So it probably just over a year into my business journey at this point, and I. It changed because I started to work with Lacey Sys as my one-on-one coach.
Now, I'd found Lacey, I'd found her Facebook group, randomly joined it, really loved it. Binged all her content, listened to all of her podcasts, signed up for the newsletter. All the stuff. Decided that she was the coach that I wanted to work with and got on her wait list, which was seven or eight months long at that point.
So I had waited so long to work with her. I felt really confident that working with her would help my business, but it, this is slightly different. I didn't feel like this is the thing that I need and it has to work and, and this kind of pressure, it felt much more like calm knowing. It felt much more like.
I like her. I've binged everything. I've been following her for so long. I still get a good feeling. I feel like she's gonna help me. I feel like she's gonna, you know, understand me, hold space for me, all of that stuff. So I kind of went, you know, this is the thing that's gonna blow up my business. But in a really empowered way, not in a, if I don't do it, everything's gonna fail.
I went into it with confidence and trust, I would say, rather than lack and fear, which is odd because it's the same belief, but the energy behind it was totally different. So of course, because I had that attitude , it totally did blow up my business and change everything for me because first off, I expected it to.
So, you know, when we talk about mindset, if you go back to the first episode of this, With mindset, how I think about it. Think if, if I've decided. That this is gonna work and it's gonna blow up my business from an empowered place, then of course it's gonna, and secondly, I fully showed up. I fully showed up because I hundred percent believed in the support.
So I was committed. I showed up to every call, I did all the homework. I, you know, did everything I. I was completely coachable. I did all things. So not only did I believe that it would work and expect it to, but I played my part as well, energetically, so that I didn't realize at the time, but was a huge turning point for me in how I think about investments, because that was the first time that I felt empowered by it.
And then I. Oh, okay. Yes. Now that I've gone into it like this and I've made a good decision, I started to trust myself again. Started to trust that I was good at choosing, you know, where to invest my money in the business. And it, you know, really made a big difference, huge difference, and was really great support for me.
So now I think of investment. As I kind of think of buckets of investments within my business, because there are so many different things, I definitely used to look at it more like I'll hire a business coach and they will solve everything for me, which. He's not, not great, very toxic, but that's how I felt.
And I really bought into the marketing claims of, you know, this one person can change everything in your business. And interestingly now I'm just reflecting. When I worked with Lacey, I also worked with some other people and did other investments. alongside it because I had stopped putting that kind of pedestal of this one person can do everything, and I started to realize like, oh, I need some support with my finances, so I'm gonna work with an accountant or C F O over there.
Or, oh, actually I could do with some help with my copy, so I'm gonna take this course here. I didn't expect that one, one investment to do everything, which was very, very liberating. So now, like I say, I think of them more in kind of buckets. So first type of investment I think of is learning a skill. So if there's a skill that I don't have that I want to use in my business, , that is a great investment for me.
So a recent one is the backend of 2022. I joined a mastermind, which was all about messaging and content, really in depth about messaging and content for three months. That is a skill that I wanted to cultivate. I wanted to understand, learn more about, apply my own business, be able to support my clients with so, That investment was a no-brainer for me because I knew exactly what I would get out of it.
I would get this skill to be able to use for as long as I'm in business, which is great. Another thing that could be learned in the skill was back in 2020, I did my E F T practitioner course, which has been wonderful and I use E F T a lot with clients. So that was a skill that was an investment, but it was a skill that I've now got.
Helps my business and helps my clients. So investments of learning something that I'm gonna actually. Now the next bucket slightly different is something like, I'm gonna call it implementation, but I'm not sure that's necessarily the right, the right term. But one of the things I did was outsource my Pinterest.
I didn't. Learn how to do Pinterest. And I think this is a big factor in how I think about investments now because am I gonna sit there and spend an hour or two a week creating pins and linking them and doing all that? No, that, that's not a task that's gonna be, well, it's definitely not gonna be income generating for me when I could be, you know, selling an extra coaching.
And my current rates. So it made no sense for me to learn Pinterest, so I paid someone to implement it. I paid an expert to do Pinterest for me. And another way of looking at implementation could be hiring an assistant to do things. It could be like me hiring my podcast editor because I don't do the editor myself.
So anything that I don't do, I'm making an investment in someone else implementing it for. Because it's gonna have a positive effect on my business. So an assistant, making sure the invoices are paid, or an assistant, you know, scheduling your newsletter is gonna have a positive effect on your business.
Someone editing the podcast so that you've got consistent marketing going out. All of that is great kind of implementation type investments. So that's how I think about the second bucket. The third way I think about investments are investments that grow my network because so much of my business has actually come from either my existing network or people that I've connected with, not expecting them to become a client or anything like that.
Just very innocently connected in other ways. and we've built relationships and collaborations and referrals and all of that good stuff. So one of the things that I joined that I'll link in the show notes is called The Advanced Network, and it's a membership for female entrepreneurs where you get to attend networking calls every two weeks I think it is.
There are all kinds of different trainings. There's a private group, there's the opportunity to connect with people, have virtual. That was something I joined that was really great for expanded my network. I've joined masterminds and group programs where I've, you know, met really great people and expanded it that way.
And especially this is great for, you know, finding podcast guests or finding people to collaborate with and all of that good stuff. So, I. Definitely worth investing for me to grow my network as well because of the effect that it has long term on my business. Another type of investment I think about is my own personal growth, so this is less about the business, although whenever I do invest in these things, it always has a positive impact on my business.
But when I make the investment, these are from my own personal. And I'm not expecting a business r o I on them. However, it's been proven time and time again that I always get that. I always get that r o roi. So there's an episode a few years ago about an AS If trip that I did, which I will link that in the show notes too, because that's another great example of how I invested in my own personal growth and it.
A big repercussion in my business. So things that I would class as personal growth, things like energy work. So whether it's emotion code or I'm working with my energy coach. Then things like human design readings or you know, I've got a couple of books about Jean keys, which if you read my news, Latino, that I read and dip into those quite a lot.
I do the pathway from to be magnetic, which is. Manifestation work, which is based on neural building, new neural pathways and overwriting in a child and shadow work. So those type of things are not directly related to business, but by looking after myself and making that investment in myself and my growth and my energy, they always have a really positive.
And the last one is something that there's a big, there's a big caveat for this one. It's being in the energy of someone. Now, this can be really, really toxic in the online space because we see a lot of people charging. Okay, multi, multi five figures to join a group so you can be in the energy of someone and it will expand and uplevel you and all of these vague terms.
So what I would say about this is only if you are at stage where all of those other things are fulfilled, that this could actually be helpful and useful, and a worthy investment. On its own, it's overrated if you pay to beat in someone's energy so that you can get on a call with someone that's like a bit of a celebrity coach or influencer, and then you sit on the call and they're talking about, you know, whatever, and people are like, oh, I just love being in their energy.
It's so expansive. That's great. But then what happens when you come away? Do you have anything actionable and tangible to do? Has it actually had a massive impact on you? Maybe it has. Maybe you feel so expanded and upleveled and just so energized and inspired by that person that you do take action and you do things in a different way, and you have a really positive.
That is great, but generally you won't get the results, I don't think, unless you have the solid strategy and the other support in place. So there is really great value in being able to have elevated conversations. There's a really, really high value in learning different perspectives and having your thought process challenged, which is exactly why I've created this series.
But I think paying a lot of money to be in someone's energy in and of itself is. Necessarily the best investment to make unless you are at a particularly high level of business. Again, not right or wrong, just my thoughts about it based on my own experience, experience of clients and things I've seen over and over again.
But I was, I would always put learning the skill. Implementation, grow my network and my own personal growth and you know, getting strategy and all of that above simply being around someone that's a bit further along than me. So I also now think about investments as more long term. So previously I definitely used to think that if I didn't make the money back during that container, that it was a waste or I'd somehow failed and wasted the money.
I do now realize after this time that good investments can take a little bit of time to recoup, but then they can often keep providing an R ROI for years and years and years to come. So crude figures off the top of my head shouldn't do this cause I'm not very good with maths. So let's keep it simple.
Let's say someone. Worked with me one-on-one and it cost them $10,000. And in that time we mapped out, let's say it was six months, and in that time, we mapped out a way that they can add an additional $10,000 a year to their revenue without doing anything any different. It's really aligned with them. It feels really great.
So you could argue that they pay me $10,000 and in the six months that we work together, they maybe get 5,000 of that back. So it's cost them $5,000. But in the six months after we work together, If they follow, you know, and implement everything that we've mapped out, they could get the other 5,000 back.
So it might take a year, it might take twice as long as the container for them to see that return on investment. But what if they get that extra $10,000 a year now for the next five years? Or the next 10 years or what if they raise their prices and the following year is $12,000 and then it's $14,000.
So when we start to look at it like that, some investments may take a little bit longer to actually get back the initial outlay, but they will keep providing over and over and over for years to come. So I'm definitely more long-term now and not expecting, you know, something to come straight back the following.
Which leads me, actually to probably, probably the last point in how I think about things is the energetics of investing. Another very toxic message, a lot of gas lighting that's used in marketing is if you don't invest, no one will invest in you, which is a very, you know, un nuanced, simplistic, crude way of putting it.
But people use this to say, Well, if you are not gonna hire a coach, no one's gonna hire you. And it's very fear-based gaslight to marketing, but there is something behind it. This message has just been manipulated slightly to create that FOMO effect, but there is a positive, energetic, and that is when you're investing from a really grounded, secure, and confident place.
Like I was with Lacey, as I said earlier, when you're investing from that place, you're basically showing that you are grounded, secure, and confident with money in general. So from a money mindset, energetic, of course, you're way more likely to receive money back if that's the belief you have and that's the energy that you are in.
So it's. Oh, I'm gonna invest 20,000 pounds because it means that I'll automatically get 20,000 pounds back because that's how the energetic works it. It doesn't work like that. It's much more nuanced than that. But essentially it's about the intention and the energy behind that decision to invest that if it's from that safe, secure, solid, grounded place and you feel empowered about it, rather than making it from fear or.
It will come back. You think then that's the right intention energy behind the decision to invest, and that is the one that does bring the money back to you. So actually the last thing I'll say is, and this one might feel raw. If you've been in this situation, I have been in this situation a few times, so if this is something that you felt recently, apologies if this does feel a bit E, but these are my thoughts.
You always get something from a bad investment, even if you don't see it right away. So it could be that. You learn you need to trust yourself more because there was a niggle as you were signing up, but you powered on and thought your way ahead and, and decided to do it anyway. It could be that you joined a program and the way it was delivered was so awful.
That, you know, never to put anything out like that to your people and you wouldn't waste your time and energy in creating something like that. Or it could be a program where the coaching is poor, but you make some really great friends. I have done that a couple of times and I had a discussion with someone recently about the same thing.
They met people. Program, which was an awful program. And one of them, they ended up hiring on their team and one of them became their client and is one of their highest paying clients. Like they didn't go into it for that. They definitely didn't get what they went into it for, but they caught something completely different.
And it could be that, you know, there's a really hyped up program that's promising to be the be all and end all, and it's gonna do, you know, X one Z for your business. and you go into it and you're like, this is really basic. I know all of this. I've done this a few times, and it feels like such a waste. But what it actually shows you is that you can stop looking for answers externally and you can start taking action.
Because if you keep consuming things and going, I already know this , I already know this, you probably don't need to consume that anymore. You can actually take the action. So I think in a imposter sometimes wants to keep us learning, especially me as a one three in human. Wants us to believe that we don't know enough before we can do it.
So if you do get into a program and you're disappointed cuz it's too basic and you already know the things, then question why you're signing up. It's maybe time to actually just. just do things. Just take the action. So I do think that you always get something from an investment, even if it's not what you expected to get when you signed up.
They say, you know, you either get the result or you get the lesson. And I do think that's very, very true, even if you may not feel it the time. Sometimes with some time and hindsight looking back, you'll see there was always something from it. Got something or learnt something about yourself. So that was longer than I expected.
I didn't think I'd have as much to talk about with this one, but it turns out that I did. So that is me emptying my brain about how I think about investments. In my business. I hope there was something that was useful in there, whether it was to make you realize that's a thought that you'd like to adopt, whether it's to make you realize that you're really confident in your own opinions about how you invest, whether it's just a different perspective.
I really hope that that was useful. And are we. Back next week with another in this How I Think about the series. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ambitious Introvert podcast With me, Emma Louise Parks, if you enjoy this show, please, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review on iTunes. As a thank you, one liquor reviewer, each month will win a 60 minute one-on-one coaching session with me where you'll get the clarity and confidence to attract your ideal clients.
And if you know someone who. Benefit from listening to the show, then please do share and help me reach as many fellow ambitious introverts as possible.