3 things you can do to create your dream HQ

Is it time to stop being a weenie about your workspace? Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weenie cast. 1988 was a landmark year in our history. First and foremost, I was born, which is a big deal because here you are listening to my podcast, and this wouldn't be happening if I weren't born that year. Second of all, women in the United States were finally given the right to own their own business. 1980. 1988 was when that was made legal.

People, women owned businesses the same age as me. And the third thing that was a complete game changer was the movie Working Girl with Melanie

Griffith. There isn't any room at the top for local girls like us. I'm not giving up. In the land of opportunity, they're not gonna give you no shot test. They're gonna shoot you where dreams are won and lost. Spray me down. Sorry. Well, I can't for a while Walk around my own party clinging Someone's about to get what she deserves. And here is where we start our episode of the Weenie Cast today. It's talking about Working Girl and how it's relevant to your business.

So if you haven't seen the movie, I highly encourage you to go do it. Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford. Alec Baldwin, who I know is problematic now, and Joan Cusack, who I absolutely love. You know, Debbie from the Addams Family, too. Family values. Amazing. Anyway, so if you're not familiar. So working Girls. So Melanie Griffith is this really ambitious, working class woman who's a temp. She has a very, very strong, I think, Staten Island Brooklyn accent. I don't really know the difference.

Sorry. You New York people, I hope you don't throw tomatoes at me. Although you wouldn't be able to reach me because you're probably very far away. Damn it, I missed. And so she gets a temp job for this investment firm, and she starts working for this woman. And long story short, she kind of up levels her look. She completely gives herself a makeover so that she looks like she comes from almost a higher society. And she has this idea.

She does it because she has this idea that she knows can make a ton of money. And so she starts playing this part and she changes her voice and she changes her look and she cuts her hair, which she really needed. The haircut that she starts off in the movie is not good. But the point is, is that as she makes these little upgrades to her look and she feels like she's the part she Becomes far more confident. She attracts partners to help her with this deal that take her seriously.

She gets into boardrooms to have meetings that she wouldn't have gotten into previously. I won't ruin it for you because if you haven't seen it, I think you should go and watch it this weekend. But we need to have a very serious conversation today about how you are actually keeping yourself small with your own environment. Now, like me, you might be working from home, you might have an office somewhere, you might still be working a 9 to 5, and that's all fine.

I personally am not going to be changing the fact that I work from home. I want us to talk about our environment because the environment that we surround ourselves with really does create the energy in which we show up to work every single day. And let me paint the picture of the difference here. There is the work at home freelancer who carves off like a little corner of the dining room table and squeezes laptop and the notes and their cup of coffee and their water and maybe a little snack.

And they're working there amidst the chaos of their home. Then, you know, to another, another degree is someone who has cordoned off, you know, a whole room to be their office. And these are great places to get work done. You know, whatever works for you. There's. There's nothing wrong with it if you're getting the work done.

But if you want to have bigger impact your business, if you want to grow an empire, if you want to have multiple businesses that all support each other, if you want to have a nonprofit, if you really want to be a tour de force in the world, do you need a work at home space or do you need a fucking headquarters? Because let's talk about the different energy that goes along with that.

You know, if I'm just working from home and, you know, I know my desk is just 20ft from my bed, you know, I might get out of bed, throw on a sweatshirt, go make a cup of coffee, like kind of scuff my slippers over to my little desk, sit down, literally type in my password, check my email, go check LinkedIn, see what's going on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What about that process? Sounds inspiring, right?

What about that process makes you feel like you're powerful, like you're showing up to do business? Not much. You know, this might be a personal thing and something uniquely feminine, but I don't feel like I'm that powerful when I'm not at the point in the day where I'm wearing a bra and not to say that there's anything wrong with doing some work as you're still waking up and you just want to get that one email out. But let's talk about how that kind of leaks into the rest of your day.

Now, imagine the difference. When you wake up, put on a sweatshirt, go and have some coffee, start thinking about the day ahead. Maybe you do some journaling, maybe you take your dog for a walk, you come back, you have breakfast, you shower, you get dressed as if you are going to work, because you are. And at the time that your work day starts, you walk into your workspace, you walk into your headquarters of your business, and you sit down and you get to work.

The currency of the universe is energy. And the cool thing about this is that we create energy. We can create whatever energy we want to attract more of in our life right now. How we feel about the space that we're in massively impacts how we can create that energy. So if you're in your home, workspace, or wherever you're working on your business, I want you to look around right now.

And if you were a stranger, if you were coming into the headquarters of this business, what would your first impression be? I'll be honest. If someone walked into my headquarters right now, they'd be like, wow, it looks like she had some grapes three days ago. Hey, a little science project going. Otherwise, they look around. They'd see a lot of projects in the middle of the process. Right. It would be messy, because that's who I am.

But it would seem like, oh, cool, she has a lot that she has her hands in. And even as I look at my office doing this episode, I see different ways I could upgrade my headquarters. You know, there are things on my desk that are not headquarters things. Right. They're not things like, you know, I can probably take some of my jewelry that I wear while I'm on Zoom calls, and I can put them in my jewelry box in my bedroom. They don't need to be here.

I haven't talked about this publicly before, but not too long ago, my producer Neil said to me, something's changed. Your energy's different. How you treat yourself is different. You're brighter. Something along those lines. He might have also said, wow, you're so gorgeous and so smart and all. Thanks. I'm just gonna add those things to the things he said to me, because I like compliments. So there we go. And he asked me what happened. What was the.

What was the thing that changed? And I'm sorry to say that the Thing that changed is I cut off some family members who I had spent a very long time trying to win over, trying to be good enough for, trying to be someone who got included. It's kind of a sad state of affairs when you have a family that's kind of run on like this exclusivity. I won't go into the details in this episode. I will definitely be talking about this more at length in another episode.

But I realized that I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance because here I am doing a lot of personal work on my own worth, on how I deserve to be treated in relationships, my business. And here I was accepting less than I would accept from anyone else, from some family members. And while it was a really hard, sad decision to make, I made the decision to ask them not to contact me anymore. And there was a lot of grief to it.

There is incredible amount of grief that goes along with letting go of a relationship that you'd always had really high hopes for. We all know that experience of going on a few dates with someone and you start falling for their potential. We start imagining the future we could have with this person, even though there's no evidence that they would be at all interested in that future or would have any ability to be that person in that future.

And the sad truth that I had to recognize is I was doing the same thing with these family members. And what I was finding is for as long as I let them treat me like my feelings didn't matter, I was treating me like my feelings didn't matter. And when you treat yourself like something doesn't matter, your feelings, your time, your self care, that's what you train the universe to do.

And when you treat your business like it's just this silly little thing that you do to generate some money and it lives in a corner of your home. And isn't this cute? This is where I get my little cutesy work done. That's what you train the universe to treat your business as, as well. And it doesn't take a big upgrade.

I'm not telling you to go and like, you know, rent a $5,000 a month office somewhere in the center of a city nearby and that you're going to now have to commute to work and hire a receptionist and all this stuff. No, no. I mean, maybe, maybe you're at that point. How exciting for you. But it's not necessary to upgrade the energy that you're attracting to your business. But what is necessary is that you create a space for you to do the work. That feels like your headquarters.

It feels like mission control for every business you are going to launch into the world. It feels like mission control for any nonprofits you want to create, for any consulting you want to offer. It needs to be representative, not of your home, but of your brand. I mean, this sounds like a little, like, redecoration project. This can be an incredibly triggering process.

There will be a voice at some point as you go through and upgrade your workspace, upgrade to this headquarters, who's gonna be like, who

the fuck do you think you are? God? Like, you're just putting on airs. You're like, who's gonna buy that you're this person? Who's gonna believe that this is your workspace? Who's gonna believe that you have this massive business? Especially if you're only making, what, like one or $2,000 a month right now? Maybe you just started like Tess McGill in Working Girl.

She kept herself really small with temp jobs and with her style and with how she spoke and how she carried herself and in how she believed she deserved to be treated and in the treatment she accepted. But once she started changing that, the universe changed with her. The opportunities opened up to her, partners arrived. She found the resources that she needed to make the future she wanted real.

So here are three things I want you to consider before you start changing things up in your headquarters. First and foremost, I want you to imagine that you are having a meeting with a potential business partner, and it's going to be at the headquarters of your business. And don't try to imagine this like, oh, my God, they're coming into my guest room of my house like, oh, God, like, this is going to be unprofessional. No, no, no, no, no. I want you to adjust this for imagination's sake.

Imagine this is separate from your home. They're not going to see your messy kids rooms. They're not going to see that there are dishes in the kitchen sink. Okay? This is just a standalone place. And I want you to imagine you're walking into the building to have this meeting. What's the feeling you want to experience as you walk into that building? That's the first question I want you to answer.

The second question I want you to answer is, what do you want your potential partner to experience as they walk into that building? What thoughts do you want them to have? What impression of you and your business and your empire do you want them to have? And once you've gotten really clear on what those things are, I want you to think about what are the details in that headquarter space that gives that impression, that makes you feel that way. And it might be that you journal on this.

You might go to Pinterest and start doing a board all about this, finding different visuals that help you represent this. By the way, Pinterest has rolled out a new feature, the collage board, which, oh, my God, is so much fun. I, like, want a collage my whole life. So much fun to play with. I can't recommend it more. Go and play with it.

What I like about it is that you know how, like, when you pin stuff on a board, like, you kind of want to make a collage with it so you can save it somewhere and have it visible. And you couldn't before. You, like, you'd have to print up stuff and then cut it out and then paste it all together and then have it somewhere. Like, that's a pain in the ass. But now you don't necessarily have to do that.

You can literally make the collage on Pinterest and it's automatically the same dimensions as your phone background. So you could literally create a collage and screenshot it and have it as your background, or print it up and post it somewhere and it's already done. It's really cool. Pinterest.

If you would like to sponsor this podcast, then Please contact me katiemcmanus.com Second, once you've done this soul searching, once you've really understood the energy you want this space to have and the things that will communicate to the universe that it should send that energy to you, I want you to think about your ideal headquarters and what would the logistics of that headquarters be? And when I say logistics, like, when is the cleaning schedule? What are the standards for organization?

When I worked at Equinox Fitness, there were so many rules about how tidy you had to keep your office because the offices were all visible to our clientele, right? We had glass walls and glass doors. They could basically see right in, right? And me not being the most tidy or organized person. So how it worked is we'd have, like, this desk that kind of came out from the wall that had our computer on it.

We had chairs on the other side so we could meet with potential clients and members of the gym. And then we had this cabinet, and the cabinet had drawers from the waist down, and then it had kind of shelves. And on the first shelf there was our printer. And so what I would do is anytime papers started accumulating on my desk is I would just take the whole pile of Papers, and I'd put them directly on my printer.

So there'd usually be a pile about a foot high of papers on top of the printer, which of course, like, because I knew it was there, anytime I needed to print something, I'd just go in, take this massive pile of papers off the printer, print it, all the things, put it back. Our CEO once came into our club, and because it was my day off, he decided that he was going to use my office. And he went to print, I think like a 70 page report.

And that is the story of how I had to get a new printer because it jammed up the printer so much, it broke. That is also the story of how I got written up for the first time in a job because I wasn't following the rules and caused company damage. So anyway, I want you to think about your workspace and what are the rules like that and what are the reasons for it? And especially if you share your home with other humans, like adult humans, a child humans, how do they need to learn the rules?

A home office is where you can go and be like, oh, God, I feel really guilty. This is kind of a mess. Oh God, like, I should probably do that. Oh, God, like, this isn't working. That's not working. I gotta fix this. Would you accept that from a headquarters? Is that within your company's guidelines of how things should be done? I've been doing a lot of work with my favorite self lately.

You know, the whole concept that we don't need our ideal self, like, they're not really helpful to us, but our favorite self, the person that we so enjoy spending time as each and every day. I've been spending a lot of time with her. And whenever I get stuck in my work, I kind of revert back to her. And I'm like, cool. What do. What do I want to be focusing on right now? And I can't tell you how often her first response is, tidy, tidy. Take the mugs down to the kitchen.

You have too many index cards with too many notes. Go through them, throw out the ones that you don't need to keep, organize the rest, do this, do that. 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. My favorite self actually wants me to have a nice clear space to do my work. And I can't tell you how many of my clients, now that I've started working with them on their favorite selves, are experiencing the exact same thing. We don't build in time to take care of our headquarters.

So what you're going to do in this second step is you're going to a figure out the standards for how your headquarters needs to appear. 90% of the time, we're not perfect. Right? And build in an hour, an hour into your schedule each week to make sure it reaches that standard. Schedule it block it off. No client can book in that time. Family and friends cannot invite you to do stuff in that time that becomes part of your work is to maintain your headquarters.

And finally, the third step is I want you to make three changes. They can be big, they can be small, but three changes this month and three changes next month and three changes the next month, just three. We're not trying to overwhelm you with a whole redecorating, with getting all new furniture, with painting. Whatever it is that you think you need to change, you can change in simple, small iterations.

And the reason I want you to do it in small steps like this is because I want you to see the gradual shift in energy. What changes when you maybe get a desktop monitor and you're able to see on a bigger screen. What changes when you change your background and you feel a little more confident on zoom calls? What changes when you buy something that's beautiful and artistic and sculptural and you have it on your desk and it's just there for decoration's sake because it feels aligned to your brand.

And you don't have to do this forever. It's not like for the rest of your life, every month you have to change three things about your headquarters. But do it until you feel like this is your headquarters. It's not your little rinky dinky at home workstation. The universe will take your business as seriously as you you take it. If you're not taking it seriously from a spatial perspective, the universe is paying attention to that. And the universe won't take it seriously either.

And just like our friend in Working Girl, when the universe doesn't take you seriously, it does not send you partners, it doesn't send you resources, it doesn't send you opportunities. It starts with you and the upgrades that you are completely, completely within your power to make right now. The three changes that I have made in my workspace. Number one, I changed my schedule so that I could have time to really make sure that I'm not working in a cluttered space, right?

Because clutter is kind of my. My go to. It's something that I just don't even think about. I just create mess wherever I go. It's kind of like I'm accidentally the Tasmanian devil of my own life. I just kind of like spin and chaos kind of ensues. And I don't mean to, but, you know, it happens. And what's funny is that I don't even notice it as it's happening or immediately after. But it gets to a point where all of a sudden it's so bad that I have to disrupt my day to go and take care of it.

So what I've actually done is I've built into time for me to tidy as I go, so I don't have to wait till I notice it, right? Because if we're hearkening back to a couple weeks ago, and this used to be a podcast on adhd, once you, like, have fulfilled the purpose, you don't really follow through to the rest of the task. So, like, for instance, when I go into my closet to get socks, the socks are in the drawer. I open the drawer, I find the socks, I move on.

The thought of closing the drawer doesn't even occur to me, Right. It's the same with everything that I do. And I don't have to make myself wrong for that, but I can help myself be better at tidying it up sooner. A small upgrade that I actually made this month is I got this nudge counter from Nanu Electronics. And it's not electronic at all, but it's this beautiful heavy hunk of metal, essentially, that you can click and you can count.

And what I love about this is that it's something that is so tactile for me to be able to track the very specific habits that I'm trying to stick to. As I think about my headquarters, I want to have interesting little pieces like this throughout that are utilitarian, Right. I love, like, for instance, when I'm shopping for jewelry, I love earrings that are sculptural, like a 3D personality.

And that's one of the things that I find really energizing in a space when there are really beautiful little utilitarian objects that have significance. And the upgrade that I am planning on making once I finish my research is I'm buying a new office chair. Full disclosure, this office chair, when I started my business, I actually stole it from my mom's law office. No one was using it. The lawyer was like, I don't really care. She can have it, it's fine. And it has served me really well.

But this is a really squeaky chair. There are times when I'm recording this podcast where it squeaks because I move and I have to rerecord the last portion, and that's kind of a pain in the butt. Also, it's not the most comfortable. It's not uncomfortable, but it's not the most comfortable. And I know I'll feel a lot more grounded when I'm sitting in a chair that is like, ergonomically correct for me and feels a little bit more on brand.

So three upgrades, you know, and one has to do with my time, one has to do with a piece of furniture. One is just a little knick knack. It doesn't have to be an extreme project, it doesn't have to be super expensive, but it does have to feel in alignment with your vision for your headquarters. Unplanned gold. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel.