Podcasts about usually i'm

Today I'm talking about what I do when I start to lose it! I'm mostly enjoying this time we have during the quarantine, but there are some times when I am not fine. These are some of the tools that I've developed over the years that I am getting lots of practice on during this crazy time. Key Points from this Episode: I used to think that if I was in a funk, that I was there to stay. It's not true! I've found ways to help myself reset and have a great rest of the day! This works for me 98% of the time - take a nap or go to bed early! Usually I'm just tired. I refer to my quarterly review where I wrote down projects and things I want to get done. I find a way to make even baby steps progress on a project. Feeling productive helps built positivity. I find a way (if possible) to get some space. If my husband can watch the kids for me, I go for a half hour walk by myself. I listened to a podcast, called a friend, and called my mom on the walk. Listen to an audiobook to give some perspective to your life. Get outside of your own circumstances to think about something bigger than yourself. Phone a friend! Just talking to somebody else feels so nice to reconnect, even if it's just over the phone. Journaling paired with scripture study and really connecting with God is huge to maintaining my mental state. It helps us in the moment, but it helps rewire your brain to look for positives in your life! I'm finding more good the more consistent I am with my journaling. Recognize that some things are nobody's fault. Nobody around you deserves the anger and wrath you might feel. It might help you to let it go instead. Sit down for 5 minutes when you need to! Exercise! Even if it's just a little bit. Resources Becoming by Michelle Obama Thriving in Motherhood Journal Generation Mindful

The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-431 – Liz Warner – Running Adventures  (Audio: link) audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4431.mp3] Link MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - Hello and welcome to episode 4-431 of the RunRunLive Podcast.    I know, I know, I’m a few days late…  I’m going to be honest with you.  I just wasn’t motivated to produce this past weekend.  Just wasn’t.  My strategy is to spread out the production tasks throughout the week so when I get to the microphone it’s only a couple hours of work.  When I don’t do that it takes a good chunk of a day to pull it together.  I just didn’t have the energy.  Wasn’t motivated.  Hey, I’m just a average guy like the rest of ‘em and sometimes I run out of mental energy.  Truthfully when that happens the product quality starts to suffer.  I’m guessing there’s only a few of you die-hards who even noticed I missed my publishing window! You’re waiting until your weekend run to listen anyhow, right? So, I have recharged the batteries, grabbed the loose threads, gathered up the sundry pieces of episode 4-431, swept them into a slightly greasy bin, and will present them here for you today!  Today we have a good show for you.  I’ve got an interview with Liz who is finishing up her  ‘run 30 marathons before her 30th birthday’ project.  I was really impressed by her sense of adventure and hopefulness.  It’s a refreshing attitude.  It’s empowering.  I enjoyed talking to her.  And indeed, she is running to empower women in many places around the world that would seem sketchy and dangerous to most people, let alone a young woman.  I’m glad to have been able to talk with her. In section one I’ll talk a bit about how to mix in some hard effort sessions into your stale old training.  I’ve been doing this and enjoying it. In section two I have a piece on consumer buying trends that I’ve been thinking about.  I left the old man and the Amazon out in the Apocalypse for now.  I have been doing some writing but haven’t gotten back to that.  If you’re new, I’m talking about an apocalyptic story series I’ve been doing for the past three episodes.  I’ve got some ideas, but I have to find the time.  I think it would make a great serial podcast.  I would be the narrator and we’d assemble voice actors for the parts of the story.  If you’re interested in any of that reach out to me and we’ll have some fun. And if you’re new, this is the RunRunLive podcast.  I’m up to 431 official episodes across 12 years and 4 iterations.  60ish marathons, ultramarathons, mountain bike ultras, Triathlons, a Spartan beast and sundry other fun stuff. We talk to interesting people about endurance sports. We try to have some helpful tips for our endurance athlete friends and we muse on different things that might be interesting to think about while you’re out in the woods with your dog on a long run. It is still the apocalypse here where I live in New England.  My family is safe and I’m still safe.  I haven’t traveled since March and I’m getting a bit of cabin fever.  It’s a bit like Groundhog Day. I’m still training, even though all the races have been canceled.  Well, I should say all the physical races have been canceled.  Humans being humans we are creating a basket full of virtual races to run.  I have signed up for a couple.  Currently I’m running the that of Barkley Marathon fame is putting on.  And I’ll link to all this stuff in the show notes.  He has 18,000+ people signed up from around the world.  That’s over a million bucks in race fees.  My ultra-running friends wouldn’t stop pestering me – so I singed up. It’s all those anarchic ultra-runners. The first day someone ran 84 miles.  We’re 13 days in and someone already finished the 1,000K.   I’m not doing anything special to try to keep up.  I’m not sure I have the mileage right now to make 1,000 Kilos by the end of August.  I’m actually pretty sure I don’t.  I am logging my  1.2 mile morning walks with Ollie the Collie, because according to the rules it counts.  I signed up for another one  which again, I’m probably not going to bust out a 5K alone for fun, but I want to support people in need.  Jerod Ward and Mollie Huddle are running that one. You, my friends, if you’re able, should sign up for some sort of virtual event.  Even if you don’t want to do the event.  Sign up and lend your weight to the sense of community around the race and your shekels to the charity involved.  It’s an easy way to stay involved and contribute. I’m not big on virtual races.  I’ve spent so much of the last 20 years training alone.  I don’t care about t-shirts and medals.  When I race, I care about how I feel and how I compete.  I don’t get that same juice from running by myself.  For me, that’s called ‘Wednesday’.   Close your eyes and join me.  It is a cold morning with the chill of a mist in the air.  The sun is just starting to creep up over a still cold lake nestled in the shoulder of a mountain.  You feel the thrill of the crowded starting line.  Nervous, fit, humans shuffle dust in the dirt road.  Murmurs and stifled laughs fill the background and there is an electric sense of energy.  Like the opening of mass at a great cathedral a hush comes over the throng.  A runner steps forward.  She launches into the national anthem.  Starting out low and haunting like the bugles before a pitched battle and cresting high and brave like a waving flag of freedom.  A large, gathering voice lashed across a sea of energy.  You don your hat, wipe a tear from your eye, and wait for the gun and the surge.  And then, you see, you are out there… On with the show.     About Zero ZERO — The End of Prostate Cancer is the leading national nonprofit with the mission to end prostate cancer. ZERO advances research, improves the lives of men and families, and inspires action. Link to my ZERO page: (for Donations) … I’ll remind you that the RunRunLive podcast is ad free and listener supported.  What does that mean? It means you don’t have to listen to me trying to sound sincere about Stamps.com or Audible.. (although, fyi, my MarathonBQ book is on audible) We do have a membership option where you can become a member and as a special thank you, you will get access to member’s only audio. There are book reviews, odd philosophical thoughts, zombie stories and I curate old episodes for you to listen to.  I recently added that guy who cut off is foot so he could keep training and my first call with Geoff Galloway.   “Curated” means I add some introductory comments and edit them up a bit.  So anyhow – become a member so I can keep paying my bills.   … The RunRunLive podcast is Ad Free and listener supported.  We do this by offering a membership option where members get Access to Exclusive Members Only audio and articles. Member only race reports, essays and other bits just for you! Links are in the show notes and at RunRunLive.com … Section one – Some high Intensity - Voices of reason – the conversation Liz Warner Run to Reach - Tackling 30 of the world’s toughest marathons for women’s organizations around the globe Runner and philanthropist Liz Warner is taking on 30 of the world’s most challenging marathons, reaching 30 different countries before turning 30 in June 2020. Covering 786 miles, Liz is set to raise $100,000 for women-focused organizations in the final 20 countries, as well as to highlight on a global scale the efforts of each incredible organization and the strong communities, natural beauty and rich culture that each country holds. In It For The Long Run  Marathoner Liz Warner launched Run to Reach in early 2019, marking the beginning of a whirlwind 18-month international fundraising initiative that will see her face 30 marathons across the globe and partner with 20 local NGOs. Each one empowers women in its community to become independent, take control of their futures and fight in the face of vulnerability and discrimination. As the year’s end approaches, Liz is over two thirds into her challenge, with races taking her up active volcanoes in Guatemala, through refugee camps in Western Sahara, and across glacial lakes in Mongolia. For the last series of races, Liz will venture to far-reaching and diverse destinations, like the central highlands of Afghanistan, into the depths of small villages in Somaliland and through the rolling foothills of Mt. Everest. With every inspirational story encountered, Liz has pushed the Run to Reach mission to go even deeper. Through this project, Liz hopes to tell a story of each nation that brings to light a positive narrative in the face of challenging situations and stigmas. Race after race, it has only become clearer that the heart of each country’s promise of prosperity and equality comes from the empowerment and enablement of its women. Now with a clear focus for the last of the Run to Reach marathons, Liz hopes to drive relentlessly the success of each organization she engages with. “I’ve participated in numerous marathons and fully believe in the potential of the running community to make an incredible impact on the planet. I am firmly convinced that our collective impact, linked together, can be exponentially more powerful and change the world we live in today. Through Run to Reach, the organizations I have chosen to work with are strong examples of empowering global women communities.” Whether it’s transforming education facilities in local towns and villages or providing women with the resources they need to become leaders of change, I want Run to Reach to enforce change across the world. Section two – Consumer Trends  –   Outro Well, my friends, you have run through the deserts, oceans and jungles of this mad world to the end of the RunRunLive Podcast Episode 4-431.    Good to spend time with you. Well, my friends, you have run through the deserts, oceans and jungles of this mad world to the end of the RunRunLive Podcast Episode 4-431. Good to spend time with you. I'm glad I delayed this episode for a week.  It gave me a chance to read through the pieces and edit them.  Usually I'm a write straight through and don't worry about editing guy. The funny thing is, whether you believe it or not, I care deeply about doing a good job.  Not just here in the podcast, but in everything I do.  It causes dissonance in me to have to rush through and do things in a slipshod way. And that's not the way I want to tell my story. Research has connected the dots between why affirmation works in some cases and not in others.  It has to do with whether or not you actually believe the affirmation. What does this mean? It means the story you tell about yourself is important. It also means the way you tell it is very important.  And it means you must believe that story. You can repeat whatever positive mantra you want over and over while gazing at yourself in the mirror, but it won’t improve your performance or your life unless you believe it.  You can’t trick yourself into believing. Affirmation, whether internal or external works when it is grounded in what we believe to be our true selves. We all know what our strengths are.  Those are the bedrock of our beliefs. When you can understand and articulate what your strengths are it gives you an anchor.  Rooted to this anchor you can clear your way through the noise of inputs and outputs and set a path that is true to you. Take a moment of quiet today and write down what you are proud of, what you are good at, and what you are passionate about. Then use that statement of strength to tell your story.  Not just to yourself, but to everyone else. Thanks for listening. Chris, And - I’ll see you out there. (Outro bumper) To take you out is Track number 10 from Brian Sheff The Rock Opera by - Called "Searching for so Long" Enjoy   MarathonBQ – How to Qualify for the Boston Marathon in 14 Weeks - Rachel -> Coach Jeff ->  

Helping Yourself With Bob Burg Josh: So we've got Bob Burg here today, and he's an absolute legend in his field. He's changed the way that I do business, he's changed my life. He was one of the first self-help books that I read. And ultimately it's something that I always talk to, a massive influencer for me. And I talk to all my clients and make sure that they go and read, number one The Go-Giver. They need to jump into that, that changes the way you do business. So Bob, tell me a bit about The Go-Giver. Get more tips from Bob Burg at dorksdelivered.com.au  Watch this episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GS2jTHebvHA Bob Burg: Well it's a business parable. So it's a fictional story based on all tried and proven principles. And there's a lot of stories within the story that actually happen. But the actual work is a work of fiction. It's co-authored by John David Mann who's a fantastic storyteller and writer. I'm much more of a how-to guy. And it's a story of a guy named Joe who's a young up-and-coming, ambitious, aggressive salesperson. He's a good guy and he has good intent, but he's very frustrated because he hasn't reached the kind of success he believes he should have by this point. But he really comes to learn that the big problem, his focus is really on himself when it comes right down to it as opposed to others. And what he learns through the story, is that when you can shift your focus off of yourself and onto others. Being focused on creating or what we call getting exceptional value to everyone you meet, you realise that not only is that a more pleasant way of conducting business, it's actually the most financially profitable way as well. Josh: I have to say I completely agree. Having read your book, it would have been now, I couldn't even say how many years ago. It was many, many years ago I read. I started off with The Go-Giver and I thought, this is amazing. Jumped onto The Go-Giver Leader, jumped onto Sell me More, and then Endless Referrals, and The Success Formula. I nearly have the library. Bob Burg: Wow, thank you. That's a great compliment. Josh: I can say your teachings are amazing. And the way that that was done in The Go-Giver was a very light, easy read in my opinion. It related to lots of people and it wasn't something that you... You pick it up and you just wanted to read, you didn't want to put it down. It wasn't something that was hard to read. Bob Burg: And that goes to John, that's his writing skills. Josh: It helped. And especially in my naivety when I was first starting out in business, being able to read something like that and go, okay this sounds good. And knowing that there is good ways and great ways to do business, as opposed to the ruthless cutthroat methods that seem to be fictionalised in movies. Bob Burg: Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons there was appeal for the book, for the message. Because most human beings, they want to feel like they're making a positive difference in people's lives. And so I think what the book said is basically, yeah you can do business that way. Not only is it can you focus on bringing value to others, and not only is it going to have you feel good about yourself, not only are you going to make money doing that, but that's actually the more effective way of doing it than focusing on yourself. Because you think about this, and I often will say this in a joking manner when I speak at a sales conference. One of the first things I'll say is, "Nobody's going to buy from you because you have a quota to me." Josh: Yeah, exactly. Bob Burg: Right? They're not going to buy from you, right and we all laugh because we all know that's true. No one's going to buy from us because we need the sale, right? They're not going to buy from you because you need the money. And they're not even going to buy from you because you're a nice person. They're going to buy from you because they believe that they will be better off by doing so than by not doing so. And that's perfect, it's the only reason why anyone should buy from you, or from me, or from anyone else. And the neat thing about that is what it does is it makes it so that sales person or entrepreneur who can place their focus on that other person, placing that other person's interest first, doing what's in the best interest of that other person and being able to communicate that. That's the person who's going to be more successful both in the short-term and the longer sustainable term. Josh: Well I can say, the proof is in the pudding and I've made my business on the pudding that you gave me. Bob Burg: Oh, okay. Josh: So yeah, it worked out really well. And as you said, it should be straight-forward but it just doesn't seem to come by nature. And I know, I myself I'm very technical. My background's technical, my skill set's technical and I was the technician that decided I've got something better to give to the world. And excuse the French, but scared shitless when it came to trying to sell or talk to people about it. And your books described it perfectly, don't sell. Just show people what you've got to offer- Bob Burg: Well, here's what it is. It's not that you're not selling, but we define selling differently right? Josh: Yeah, exactly. Bob Burg: Because when you think about it a lot of people say, well what's selling? Selling is trying to convince someone to buy something they don't want or need. Well that's not selling, that's called being a thief. So what is selling? Well selling, by definition selling is simply discovering what that other person does want, does need, does desire and helping them to get it. The Old English root of the word sell was sellan, which literally meant to give. So, when you're selling you're literally giving. No, someone might say, well wait a second isn't that semantics? And I say, well I don't think so and here's why. Let's say you have a prospective customer in front of you and they want to know why. Why they should do business with you, why you're the solution to their problem, why that... Well, so you're in a sales situation, you are selling. So my question would be, when you're selling what are you giving? I suggest you're giving that person time, attention, counsel, education, empathy and ultimately extreme value. So when we look at selling that way, now we see that it's really something good that we're doing. Josh: You're helping everyone ultimately, unless you're being a thief as you said. Bob Burg: Oh yeah, sure. And that's not selling, that's being a thief. Josh: That's right. As long as you've got a good product, a good mindset, and you believe in what you're doing, and what you're selling, and what your message is I find that your customers become your best salespeople. Bob Burg: Oh, absolutely. They become your personal walking ambassadors. Josh: Correct, yeah. And it's an amazing concept, so anyone that hasn't read The Go-Giver definitely needs to jump into it. It's a must-read, it needs to sit on there on the shelf as one of the first books that you read next to E-Myth and other classics. And in fact when I first met my partner Sarah, she'd started a first business as the first set of... Backstory, met her on Tinder. I would have rather met her in a nicer way, but we live in the age that we live in. So, met her on Tinder, and the first time we caught up together she had her folder there and I caught up with her. She didn't know if it was a business meeting or a date. And I was talking to her about different ways that she could better her business. And if I don't say so myself, quite the gentleman opening the door and so on and so forth for her. And I said one of the first things you need to do is read The Go-Getter, and this copy that I've actually got here now that we've been together for a while is signed by me saying, To all your success, Love Josh. Bob Burg: That's great. Josh: So this is actually the book that I had for myself and I gifted to her. And it's come straight back, although that sounds a bit corny it's exactly the message that you're giving, you give, and it comes back to you. And it comes back to you in... I gave her a book and I got a life partner. How good's that? So it comes back to you significantly more than what you give out. Bob Burg: Well that's awesome. And I never thought of my book going along on a Tinder date, or business opportunity or what have you but I'm glad it did. Josh: So here you are. You're obviously an invite to the wedding. Bob Burg: Definitely, exactly. Josh: Yeah, just a little thank you on that one. And the opportunities don't stop when you turn off your sales cap. It's always on if you're passionate about it good things always come your way. Bob Burg: Yep. Josh: So tell me about what happens after the book, when someone's read the book what's the next steps they can do to find out how to better themselves and adventure onwards past he one-way literature. Bob Burg: Well application is always really key. And that's why in the story itself Pindar, the main mentor told Joe there was really only one condition for his mentorship. And that is that he applied those laws. Every day, that every time he learned a new law he would apply the law that day. It didn't have to be done perfectly and it wasn't a matter of figuring out exactly why or why it wouldn't work or what have you. Just do the thing, right? Just take action on it. And so we find the feedback that we received from a lot of people, bless you, a lot of people do that. A lot of people will take one law and say, okay how do I apply this? How do I do this? And then they'll work on that. I always think that's a great way to start. So you ask yourself, how do I bring value to another human being? And when you think about it we have to really understand what value is, what it means. A lot of times I think people maybe confuse price and value, and those are actually two different terms. For example the law of value says your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. But you think about it, that sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy. Give more in value than I take in payment, aren't I going to go out of business? And so we simply have to understand the difference between price and value. So what we know is that price is a dollar amount, it's a dollar figure, it's finite. It simply is wat it is, it's the price. Value on the other hand is the relative worth or desirability of a thing, of something to the end user or beholder. In other words, what is it about this thing, this product, this service, this concept, this idea that bring with it so much worth or value to another human being that they will willingly exchange their money for this. And be glad, be ecstatic that they did while you make a very healthy profit. And so when you automate for example somebody's business, and do this in a way that... What's the value you're providing? You're saving them time, you're saving them energy, you're saving them from making needless mistakes, you're making it so that they're going to make more money in their business. So I guarantee you that whatever it is you charge that person, they're getting much more in value than what they're paying. But you're making a very healthy profit because obviously with your cost of goods sold, and rent and everything else you're selling the service for much, much more than what you're having to pay to support it. And that's why in a market-based economy with every sale there should be two profits. The buyer profits and the seller profits because each of them come away better off afterwards than they were beforehand. So, that's the law of value. It's not a matter of, some people might think The Go-Giver, does that mean you're giving away your products or services? No. Does it mean you're not making a profit? Of course not. As a Go-Giver you're going to make a much higher profit because your focus is going to be on the value, the experience, everything you proved that other person, right? Not low-price, when you sell them low-price you're a commodity. When you sell on high-value you're a resource. Josh: Well that's it. Too many people, there's a podcast we did a few weeks ago on apples versus oranges, how could they possible be the same price? When people are comparing apples with apples, and as soon as you are comparing apples with apples you commoditize your business, and then the only thing you can fight on is price. And that's where you need to be able to bring that value, bring that change. So you've got value, price and cost. Bob Burg: Yeah. And here's the thing. So when you look at the price, and I think the cost is pretty self-explanatory. The price is self-explanatory, right? But when we talk about value, that can be both concrete in terms of when someone saves a certain amount of money, when you help someone make a certain amount that's fine. But there's so much more to the experience itself even, that's conceptual in nature. But here's what we've got to really understand, that value is always in the eyes of the beholder. Josh: Yes. Bob Burg: So what that other person feels is valuable about your product, or service, or doing business with you or what have you. Not what you think is of value, or what you think they should think is of value. It's about what they do. So if we're going to say to somebody, okay so how do you practise the law of value, right? Well the first thing you do is ask questions, and make sure you discover what other people find to be of value and then you go from there. Because it's not a matter of just doing things that you think are of value to others, that's fine. But what you feel is of value may not be what they feel is. Josh: Right. And then there's this disparity between your service offerings not being seen as valuable. Bob Burg: Stand-by, right? Josh: Yeah. So it's a very valuable lesson. And I know that you're big on authority building and influence, and I think that is something that could bring out a lot of value to people. Something that can show people your worth in mass without having to necessarily having to spend time as a commodity. You're able to put a resource in front of people or it's able to come about in front of them where they can see the things that can benefit their business and benefit their life. How would you go about starting off becoming an influencer? Bob Burg: So I think it's always a good thing, I'm always a big believer in defining terms so that we're all facing the same direction. So when you think about what influence even is, on a very basic level influence can be defined as simply the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. So by definitely that's [inaudible 00:24:47]. Now that's the definitely, but I don't believe that's the essence of influence. The essence of influence is pull. Pull as opposed to push, as in the saying how far can you push a rook? And the answer's not very, at least not very fast or very effectively. Which is why great influencers don't push, right? You never hear people saying, wow that Tom or that Nancy, she is so influential. She has a lot of push with people. No, she's influential she has a lot of pull with people. That's what influence is. It's pull, it's an attraction. Great influencers first attract people to themselves, and only then to their idea. So how do we do that? So the law of influence says, in the book the law of influence says your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first. Well what does that mean? We're not talking about being self-sacrificial, or being a martyr, or being a doormat. But no, here's what we mean. Like this person who utilises pull in order to influence. That person's always asking themselves questions such as, how does what I am asking this other person do, how does it align with their goals, their wants, their needs, their desires? How does what I want this other person to do, how does it align with their values? How am I making their life better? What is a problem of theirs I am helping them to solve. And see Josh, when we ask ourselves these questions thoughtfully, intelligently, genuinely, authentically, not as a way to manipulate another human being into doing our will, but as a way of building everyone in the process. Now we've come a lot closer to earning that person's commitment as opposed to trying to depend on some type of compliance which is push, right? That's pushing ourselves or pushing our will and so forth. Josh: So say you're a small business, you've just started out and you've got just yourself. You've just read The Go-Giver and you're thinking about how can you change your methodology from being a push. I'm sure you've seen some of the pyramid schemes that are out there that have generally more push than pull from a sales perspective and they're trying to get you to on sale certain products without mentioning brands and bits and pieces. There's lots of them out there and that's always a very push, and their sales training has all been very push. How would you change someone from a push mentality into a pull mentality? And how would you change around their processes to allow for that to come to fruition and be noticed by, either their existing customers that have come about probably through getting sick of saying no, and they've finally said yes. Or how would you then change the mentality of their customer base or do you think it would be a bit more of a situation where you'd refresh the customer base? Or I guess how would you change your mindset from the 1980s this is how I'm going to be pushing something onto someone, to the 2020s soon to be. How would you change their process? Bob Burg: So I would say regardless of the field, if it's sales there are certain people who do it through push, and the good ones, the sustainably successful ones do it through pull. The ones who do it through push, and have been successful, and have been successful for a long time. They have to continue repeating the process over, and over, and over again with new people all the time. It's exhausting, it's very, very dificult. You can do it but it's very dificult to build a sustainable business that way. The ones who do it through pull regardless of the business, regardless of the industry. These are the people who typically are able to really develop a wonderful referral base, and as you were mentioning earlier people who are out there singing your praises, right? What we call personal walking ambassadors. So I think it beginning with the initial conversation. And let's say you meet someone somewhere and you're at a business social function. And you just say hello, and you say your name, and they say their name. And you ask them what they do and they tell you what they do. And they're going to probably give you some elevator speech, right? I send high-end copying machines to business that need to blah, blah, blah, right? And so forth because that's what most people have been taught to do. So you want to listen respectfully when they do it, but then when they ask you what you do which they'll probably do. My suggestion is to rather than do some elevator speech, because remember right now when this person first meets you they really don't care about you, and don't care about what you do. They care about themselves. So my feeling is just say the name, say whatever your company is, whatever you do. I'm an accountant with so-and-so or whatever. But then you're going to go right back to asking that person questions about themselves and about their business. So I have questions I call feel good questions. And those are questions that are not salesy, they're not prospecty, they're not intrusive, they're not invasive. They just make this person feel genuinely good about themselves, about the situation, and about you. And remember when you're focusing on them you're taking the pressure off yourself. You don't have to be that person who has that clever pushy line and so forth. So the first feel good question that you could ask is simply, how did you get your start or how did you get started in the copying machine business? Or selling copying machines or what have you. Or you may say, how did you get your start in the office products profession? For a little bit more elegant. Whatever it is that person does, asking them how they got their start is a fantastic way to immediately communicate value to them. Because again, value is much more than just money. It's making the person feel important, feel good about themselves. And how many people ever ask this person how they got started in their business. I guarantee no one, their own family probably doesn't ask that person. And here's you who they just met, and you're asking them basically to tell you their story, and they're going to appreciate that. I would follow that up probably with another fielded question such as, what do you enjoy most about what you do? You'll probably segue into it by saying, wow you must have had some fascination experiences. What do you enjoy most about your work? Or what do you enjoy most about what you do? Again, it's a feel good question. There's no pressure attached to it. Now when you've begun to develop a little bit of a rapport with that person, I would then suggest asking what I call the one key question that will set you apart from practically everyone else that person has ever met, and that question sound something like this. Gary, how can I know if someone I'm speaking with is a good prospective customer for you? And think about what you've done when asking that question, right? Unlike other people who are just again trying to sell their product or service right away, what have you. You have actually said to this person, not in so many words, but what you've communicated is I want to help you. I want to add value to your life. I want to make your life better. Josh: You give something to them, yeah. Bob Burg: Yeah. And they're going to really appreciate that. Now, at the end of the conversation you've got their business card, you can follow up with a personalised hand-written note which is so much better than a text or an email. Even though those are always good, but after you first meet someone there's nothing like a personalised note or card to send hand-written just saying it was great meeting you. If I can ever refer business your way I certainly will. And you've not established a connection, you've now established a relationship with this person that you can then begin to build on however you do it. Whether it's by, then you connect with that person on social media. Whenever you can refer that person to someone else, or if you know that person has an interest in antiques and you find an article on antiques. And you print it out and you send it to them and say, hey I came across this and I remember you love antiques, thought you might find... All these things you're doing, you're just creating that relationship with that person. And this does not have to take a long time, it doesn't. And what happens is when you do this consistently, okay. And you do this over time with new people on an every day basis you start developing so many people within your new sphere of influence that you've always got someone who's at that point where it's ready for you to approach them about either doing business with them directly and/or referrals. Josh: What you're saying there you need to make sure that you are genuinely listening to people. You're not just hearing them, you need to be, lack of a better word, involved emotionally in what they're saying, and listening to what they're saying, and actually action from that information. You don't want to be just hearing them and then, oh yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. You like remote control racing. That's cool. Okay, moving on. You need to be ready and engaged to build that relationship if that's what's important. And ultimately in business it is the currency that is the most important, building relationships. All ships rise in high tide, especially relationships. Bob Burg: Yep, sure. Yeah. As we say, and several of the mentors told Joe in the story, the golden rule of business, of sales, of networking what have you is simply that all things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to those people they know, like and trust. There's no faster, more powerful or more effective way to elicit these feelings towards you from others than by, and again as you said genuinely, right? Genuinely and authentically, and moving from that I focus, or me focus to that other focus where you're really looking to, as Sam one of the mentors advised Joe, make your win all about that other person's win. Josh: Yeah, 100%. It is all about the other person, and it should always be about the other person. And when people say... All the things that salesmen say. I'm not closing enough, it's all a numbers game. All this other stuff, there's always someone out there as you said that's ready to build a relationship, ready to be heard, and ready to have their story heard. And building those relationships when the time comes will come. If you're being a pushy person it's all about the numbers, and you're trying to change your three percent conversion to a five percent, or a five percent to a 10 percent when you're calling up. It's a yuckier game with a lot more negativity. It's a game that you have a lot of friction towards building the relationships, as opposed to genuinely building relationships. Bob Burg: Oh yeah, it always comes back to how you do it. If you're doing it with the, how do I serve this person? You're going to have a lot more success than if you were saying I'm going to talk at this person and try to get them to buy. Again, it's not that doing it the Go-Giver way is self-sacrificial. No. It's more practical doing it that way. Because again, are they more likely or less likely to buy from you when they can tell that you're focused on them as opposed to being focused on getting their money. Josh: And I've got to say that the solutions that you're putting in place, you've been listening to them. You understand their problems, you understand their stresses, you understand their pain points. You're able to then focus on that and make sure that you're removing those problems, not just explaining that moving to this solution is better for your business. You're hearing their problems and saying, well maybe this isn't better for your business. Bob Burg: Right. Josh: And that's fine as well. Bob Burg: Absolutely, when that happens that happens. Josh: If you've still got a perfect person there that you've been talking to, building a relationship with. They know the solutions that they offer, they know the things that it does, the things that it doesn't, the bells and whistles. And that then allows for them to then refer other businesses on when they see that there is a better fit for you, and they hear other people's problems. Bob Burg: That's right. Josh: And that's where you have your compounding effect of growth and it's really a beaut feeling. So I've been very excited. As I said, The Go-Getter changed my life. Changed the direction, and not just from a personal relationship perspective that I brought up earlier, much before that. So yeah, again thank you for that one. Bob Burg: My pleasure. Josh: I've read different books. There's one, I hope I'm not quoting the wrong name here. If I am I'll correct it with the title. I think it's called Sapiens, and it talks about how many relationships a single person can have in their life and build out from that. And they talk around the magic number of... That's weird. Bob Burg: That's Sapiens. Josh: That's the one. Bob Burg: Yeah. And he talked about the tribes back in the hunter-gatherer days were typically about 150. And that's the number, David Burkus writes about that too in his book. And yeah, I'm just trying to think of the person... Durham's or Dunham's, I can't think of what law it is. But it's that he's the person that came up and he documented that 150 per person. Josh: For anyone that's watching this, that wasn't staged there. You've got hundreds of books behind you, what are the chances the one on your desk- Bob Burg: Well the funny thing is, a good friend of mine had referred Sapiens to me about two years ago. And I always have so many books on the list to read, finally I was speaking in I think Colorado maybe a couple of weeks ago and I got that at the book store, I saw it at the book store. And I was looking for it, I was hoping to pick it up. And I started reading it and I really haven't been able to put it down. I'm about three quarters of the way through now, it's fascinating Josh: It's a fantastic book. With building relationships, and obviously all different businesses have... I guess you brought home exactly what I was bringing up in the book. And that's the rule of 150, maybe 200 people. And if you are in the business of selling items that... If you're in a business where you need to sell more items and not say a B2B business and profession industry like myself. If I have 50-70 businesses that I'm working with I'm happy as Larry, and I can comfortable have those 70 relationships. But if you're selling something that is a lower priced item you need to have a significantly higher ratio. Maybe it's 500 to 1 or something like that, and you still want to have those relationships built. And you want to have the authenticity with the relationships, but knowing that you can't necessarily have the closeness, and as they talk about the different circles of relationships that you have. You have your close intimate relationships and then it goes out from there. How do you make sure, how do you keep the authenticity? Would you suggest people using different databasing programmes to write down notes on people. To make sure if you don't talk to them for two years and then they come back to you and they said, Larry I really loved the talk that we had at the business conferencing meeting from two years ago that you can barely remember because there was too many beers flying around. And what would be the best method to make sure you are bing authentic. Would you say, Larry I'm glad we had a good chat but don't remember, what'd you say? As soon as you get home, as soon as you get back to the office write down what you remember about Larry and make sure that you can have a refresh? Bob Burg: Well I think the key with technology is to always use it to help with your authenticity, you know what I'm saying? So in other words it shouldn't be that it's about the technology, it's not. It's about the human relationship when you can utilise technology to do that. So I do want to write down what I talked about with someone and review it every so often because I do want to know, okay? But if something comes up where I happen to see that person or what have and they bring that up, and it's really not something that I do remember. No, again it depends on the contexts. Usually I'm going to say, you know what my gosh. I love you, love talking with you but I don't remember exactly what we talked about in that conversation. If you have that kind of relationship you can do that. But if it's going to hurt that person's feelings because that person maybe whatever. Well no, I'd probably just say, always love talking to you and that was great. Again, sometimes I think we go too overboard with being literal in some ways. You always want to be honest, but you also always want to be kind and tactful as well. So when technology can help you to authentically keep in touch with another person, absolutely. Totally we utilise that. Josh: Cool. That's perfect. So that's something that I know that myself, I write down as many things as I can remember about as many conversations that I had with people. And that could be whether or not they liked Chivas Regal or a dog named whatever the dogs name is. Bob Burg: Well then that's good. Because if they like Chivas Regal, and that might be something you mights end them sometimes on a special occasion. If their dog's name is Checkers and you want to be able to remember that their dog's name is Checkers when you speak. If you can remember it just because you remember it, that's great. I love animals so I tend to remember people's pets names. But that's not everybody, and there's other things about people I don't remember. And in that case you need that reminder. So no, I think all of that is great when it helps to further a relationship and it's authentic and genuine, of course. Utilise the technology. Josh: As I said, I think technology is perfect to be able to help people out. But as you said, do not overcome the personal touch. Don't use technology to be personal, use technology to get rid of the repetition. But use yourself and your power that you have, your voice that you use to build those personal relationships. Bob Burg: Exactly. Josh: And that's what it's about. The cavemen had different tools that they used to achieve their objectives. And the time has changed, the chairs we sit in are different, the offices have air con in them, but we use a different set of tools to achieve the same objectives which is awesome. Bob Burg: They're just tools, exactly. Josh: Well we're getting very close to the end here. I wanted to ask, is there any speaking events or things that you do either around the states, or within Australia or down under that are coming up anytime soon? Bob Burg: Typically at this point I travel a lot less than I used to. At 61, I just don't want to be travelling all over the place, so I limit my out of state engagements to about 20 a year now. And I try to now keep it within the states. And those are my corporate programmes that I do, but we also have public seminars that we do usually in Orlando because it's easier for people from Australia, and Singapore, and South Africa, and London and so forth to get there. And so we hold them in Orlando, which is really only a couple of hours drive for me up the road. But Orlando because it's Disney World it's easier for people to get into. So our next one is actually in late January, it's called Endless Referrals: The Go-Giver Way. We limit those to about 50 people, so it's over two days and it's very hands on. So those are the ones that will be the public ones that we'll be doing from now on. And I have so many great mates in Australia, and if I could beam myself there I would do that in a minute. But the long flight, I just don't travel well anymore, so. Josh: Well I've [crosstalk 00:46:15]. Bob Burg: I stay pretty close to home. Josh: It took me two weeks to get over the jet lag when I last entered The States. I know this is pretty bad, but give me your favourite Aussie accent. Your best Aussie accent. Bob Burg: Oh, let's see. Hey mate, lovely to see you. Love all my mates down there, and we'll have a good time no worries, no worries. Josh: That sound pretty good. I don't mind that, that's good. Bob Burg: We love Australians, we love our Aussie mates so it's always a neat thing, and it's always a joy to connect with any of my friends from the beautiful land down under. Josh: Well I had the opportunity to head over for three months last year so I was travelling all around the place. And I'd have to say it's like you're travelling to different countries with each state that you go to. Bob Burg: Oh, it's amazing I know. Josh: Where Australia is in my opinion more so not as diverse. You have parts that are definitely greener and parts that are more tropical, but overall the accent doesn't vary a whole bunch. The people mentality, that doesn't change a whole bunch. Except for obviously things such as you go into the middle of the city in New York, and you go to Sydney and there's the hustle and bustle. People aren't as friendly, but that's just the nature of the beast. And for anyone who does want to head to any of your opportunities that you've got either in-person or any of the content that you have, you've got the Go-Giver movement, is that right? Bob Burg: Yeah. General website is Burg B-U-R-G.com. The two day workshop is Endlessreferrals.com, and we also have Thegogiver.com. So we've got content all over the place there. Josh: We'll chuck some links down below, all the appropriate places depending on where this gets seen. You can jump across there and have a bit of a look. And I'd like to thank you for coming along and talking with me. And we've got this beautiful summer day in paradise here, that's why I thought I'd head outside. Is there anything else that you'd like to cover off on before we jump? Bob Burg: No, this has been a lot of fun, very enjoyable. And I wish everybody who is watching and listening, I just wish you a fantastic 2020, may it be your best year yet. Josh: Thank you very much Bob, and I appreciate you coming along. Bob Burg: Thank you.

PHP Internals News: Episode 46: str_contains() London, UK Thursday, March 26th 2020, 09:09 GMT In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Philipp Tanlak (GitHub, Xing) about his str_contains() RFC. The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript Derick Rethans 0:16 Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 46. Today I'm talking with Phillipp Tanlak, about an RFC that he's made titled str_contains. Phillipp, would you please introduce yourself. Philipp Tanlak 0:35 Hey, Derick. My name is Philipp. I'm 25 years old and I live in Germany. I work for an IT service company, which does mainly development and maintenance of IT projects. We specialise in the maintenance of e-commerce website and create enterprise applications. Derick Rethans 0:52 How long have you been using PHP for? Philipp Tanlak 0:54 I've been using PHP for quite a long time now that might be six years I guess. Derick Rethans 0:58 What brought to you creating an RFC? Philipp Tanlak 1:02 The main reason I've created this RFC was out of necessity and interest, mainly to scratch my own itch. Derick Rethans 1:08 That is how most things make it into PHP in the end isn't it? Philipp Tanlak 1:11 Yeah, I guess. Derick Rethans 1:12 The RFC is titled str_contains, that tells me something that is about strings and containing things. How do we currently find a string in a string? Philipp Tanlak 1:22 The current approach to find the string in a string is to use the strpos() function or the strstr() function. But on Reddit, I found someone also use preg_match which I find kind of interesting. Derick Rethans 1:35 There are multiple amount of different methods in use, what are the general problems with these approaches that people have made? Philipp Tanlak 1:41 So the current approach which I find is not very intuitive, and mainly because of the return values of these functions. For example, the strpos() returns either the position where the string is found, or a false value if the string is not found, but there has to be a check with a !== operation, and the strstr() function just returns a string. So you have to convert that to a boolean to check if the string is found or not. Derick Rethans 2:11 Because with strpos(), if you wouldn't use the === or !== operator. Of course, if it would find it at the first position of the string, it'd be zero position, and it would return false, even though it's sfound it. Philipp Tanlak 2:26 Yeah. Derick Rethans 2:27 So there's a few different problems with these things. Also, I don't think it's particularly vary intuitive to do because you sort of need to come up with like a whole construct to see whether it's part of a string. Philipp Tanlak 2:37 Correct. I don't think it's intuitive for a beginner. So if someone is learning PHP for the first time, then he has to search through the documentation, what are the exact return values for these functions, and has to remember that so I thought, string or str_contains() might be a better fit for that to just return a true or false value. Derick Rethans 2:58 We've mentioned str_contains() a few times now, I guess the RFC is producing to add this function. How would this function differ from what PHP already has? Philipp Tanlak 3:07 So this function does not differ in a lot of ways. It's basically the same implementation of the strpos() function. But instead of returning the position of the found string, it just simply returns it as a boolean value. So either true or false. Derick Rethans 3:23 I can imagine some people will say, well, you can just do this in your own wrapper function, right? Because pretty much what it deos is converting the results from strpos() to a boolean. But you must have a good reason of why to want to add an extra function here. Philipp Tanlak 3:38 The reason for this function, and maybe someone might disagree is, mainly a user experience for the developer. So this is just out of necessity which I found, and I've been using this function quite a lot. So I thought this might be a valid add to the PHP language. So I tried to implement it and it got some great reviews. So I thought that wasn't a very bad idea I had. Derick Rethans 4:04 Is the RFC suggesting just out a single function: str_contains(). Philipp Tanlak 4:09 Yes, the RFC is currently adding just a single function, which is the str_contains(). When I first submitted the discussion about this RFC, there were quite a few people asking why is there no case insensitivity or multibyte versions for these, and I did not think of those at first. But in the discussion, it became clear that the multibyte version did not seem to be very necessary because the comparison is going to be byte by byte. Unlike strpos(), the position of the found string is not relevant. So it doesn't matter if there is any difference in encoding. Derick Rethans 4:47 I remember in last year, there was another RFC related to strings functions they were the string_starts_with() and a string_ends_with(). Those are two functions and there were also variants for both case insensitivity, ss well as multibyte. Which made eight different functions to be added to pretty much do a single thing. That RFC failed, potentially because there are so many things being added. Philipp Tanlak 5:11 Yeah, that was also the main reason, I think the case insensitivity of this function, or the variant of it was not so relevant. So I did not include it into the RFC just because of this case you mentioned. So instead of polluting the global space with more functions, someone suggested to just advance PHP incrementally and add in case sensitivity for this function just if it is necessary. Derick Rethans 5:37 This is a common recurring subject. Most of the people I spoke with in the last few episodes are all adding things to PHP bit by bit instead of coming up with big RFCs which I think is a good way of going forwards. When reading the RFC, I had a quick look at which argument the function would accept. PHP of course this weakly typed strings in most of time. Is this str_contains() function handling distinct different from what strpos() does for function arguments. Philipp Tanlak 6:10 So the str_contains() function uses the same internal function, which is php_memnstr(), if I recall correctly. It tries to interpret it as a string. And if it's not a string, it either throws a warning or notice, but I've just run some checks and it seems like in the next PHP version, non string values which are passed into the string functions will be interpreted as a string, and if that is not the case, it will throw an error or usually return false. Derick Rethans 6:43 So it doesn't do any special magic, and just relies on the PHP tends to do for parsing arguments and weak and strict typing. Philipp Tanlak 6:51 Yes, that's correct. Derick Rethans 6:53 Most RFCs they come with a patch, as does yours. How did you find it getting started with writing things for PHP instead of using PHP. Philipp Tanlak 7:02 So basically, I've looked at the PHP source code in the past, just to see how things are implemented. And I had some basic background in C. So I thought that this was not very hard for me. Most of the functions or things I had to do to include this patch, were already there. So basically, I just copied the strpos() function and remove the, when the string is found, use the position to calculate a new string and just remove that code and return the boolean value from the found position. Derick Rethans 7:35 Because it is not a very different function from strpos(), it's just pretty much a different return type. It's a lot easier to do. Philipp Tanlak 7:44 Yeah. Derick Rethans 7:45 When looking at feedback, what were the main criticisms of this? Philipp Tanlak 7:48 The main criticism of this was basically just the variants of these functions. So mainly the multibyte variant or the in case sensitivity. Other than that, the response was very, very nice and, and also very rewarding for me. So I thought I did a good job on this. And many people wanted to have this function in PHP, but either did not have the time to implement it or it was too easy. I'm not sure how that went. But I think the response from the devs and the overall PHP community was very nice. Derick Rethans 8:23 The RFC is already in voting, so I'm I'm a bit late to talk about them. Usually I'm and things are still in discussion. And at the moment, it looks like it is passing because the votes are 43 to 6 with another weeks ago, then. Philipp Tanlak 8:37 Yeah. Derick Rethans 8:37 Do you think this will be your last RFC? Or do you have something else in mind? Philipp Tanlak 8:41 At the time of this recording I don't have anything else in mind, but maybe if I find something. Since I'm working with PHP on a daily basis, which I think is worth adding to PHP I might create a new RFC. Derick Rethans 8:54 That's how I started and see what happens now. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today Phillipp, I hope you enjoyed this. Philipp Tanlak 9:01 Yeah, thanks for having me Derick. Derick Rethans 9:05 Thanks for listening to this instalment of PHP internals news, the weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. I maintain a Patreon account for supporters of this podcast, as well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next week. Show Notes RFC: str_contains() Credits Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

"Usually I'm just like, 'You're boring and I hate you.'" TV/Film actor and Professional Gay Trey Gerrald (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, THE QUEENS PROJECT, YOU'RE THE WORST)stops by the Breakdown to discuss with Matt the legacy, the history and the complete illegality of the world of Broadway Bootlegs. Plus the two discuss some Broadway gossip and make plenty of sexually crude jokes. SORRY ABOUT IT!

Usually I'm really prepared every time I hop on the microphone, but this week I have... nothing.I felt I didn't have anything insightful wrapped with a neat bow to share this time around. But then I realised, that's actually okay, that's life, sometimes we're in the middle of feeling, and learning, and we don't have the answers yet, but it doesn't mean what we're experiencing right now, as we wade through the thick of it, isn't valuable within itself.Anxiety has followed me around relentlessly lately. So I thought I'd give an insight into what that's been like. I also discuss my son beginning kinder and how it's only week one and I've experienced a parenting fail, and I chat about something really exciting I'm launching on Monday.If you'd like to connect with me, you can do so @elizabethanile See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Usually I'm not into those gimmicky days. World Donut Day? Pass. But today is World Kindness Day and I feel like I want to camp down here for a moment. Intially I thought kindness is something there needs to be more of in our society, and that's true. But I think there's a bigger challenge here that I wanted to share with you.

Usually I'm the guy that tells my students to go for it and take risks and action. Today, I was blown away by an email I received. I entered my three-year-old Elixir Project book in a contest for young adult authors. And I Won! It goes to prove that sometimes you have to do the things that you tell others to do.  To check out Elixir Project, get your free book at https://elixirprojectbook.com/

EP017 - Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever http://www.vehicle2.getspiffy.com Episode 17 is an interview with Nathan Hecht and Patrick McKeever, Founder/CEO and VP of Sales & Business Development at Rodo, respectively; recorded live at the Automotive Intelligence Summit in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, July 24th, 2019. Scot and his guests discuss a variety of topics, including: The founding of Rodo as “the cheapest and easiest way to lease a car on the planet” How the Rodo app connects customers with the vehicle and lease price they want The challenges of Rodo expanding their dealership network and customer base How the current digital shift impacts car dealerships and who will survive the impending drop in new car sales Subscription services as a fusion of leasing and carsharing, and their potential for growth moving forward If you enjoyed this episode, please write us a review on iTunes! The four pillars of Vehicle 2.0 are electrification, connectivity, autonomy, and changing ownership models. In the Vehicle 2.0 Podcast, we will look at the future of the auto industry through guest expert interviews, deep dives into specific topics, news coverage, and hot takes with instant analysis on what the latest breaking news means for today and in time to come. This episode was produced and sound engineered by Jackson Balling, and hosted by Scot Wingo.   Transcript: Scot:    Welcome to the Vehicle 2.0 podcast. We are at the 2019 automotive intelligence summit here in Sunny Raleigh, North Carolina. It was rainy yesterday. So you guys are getting to experience the, the real Raleigh. It's July 24th. And we're really excited to have on the show. A couple of folks from Honcker. They're from Manhattan, so excited to have folks from the big city down here and in Mayberry of North Carolina. So we have Nathan Hecht. He is the founder and CEO. Welcome. Nathan:    Thank you. Thanks for having me. Scot:    And he brought along his partner in crime, Pat McKeever, who is VP of Sales and BD. Patrick:    That's well said, Scott. That's correct. Thank you. Scot:    Also in our pre discussion in charge of keeping Nathan out of trouble. So it's good to have a,. Patrick:    That's my main job actually. Scot:    You go with, come with security. Nathan:    He's not kidding. Scot:    Uh so Nathan, tell us about you know, the founding, I'm a fellow entrepreneur, so I'd love to hear the founding story and all the background on yourself and how you got into this. Nathan:    Sure. Thank you. So the founding of the company is actually real interesting. It was actually from a personal experience in trying to lease a car in New York. I went into a local car dealership and basically went through the runaround of trying to choose and price of vehicle for a monthly lease. It took about five hours to ultimately realize that I don't, I don't even think I'm going to take this car after, after this whole experience and during, during the five or six hours that I was in the dealership I was searching for a way to do the same thing online and quickly realized that there was no way to do a new vehicle transaction on the Internet. And in my case specifically at least. So at the end of that day did a little more research and I I committed to trying to do this and that's how the company started and as they say, the rest is history. Cool. How long ago was that? That was about two and a half years ago. Half years ago. Cool. Scot:    Awesome. And then Pat, how do you intersect into the story? Patrick:    Oh I had met Nathan from a previous my previous place of work where we played in the, in the automotive data dms data space and actually had approached Nathan had learned about the company in today. If you have a need for dms data, we can help you. He said, no thanks. But we kept in touch and at that point kind of kept an eye on him and he was starting to get some, some traction, a real traction and I immediately saw sort of the need or the hole if you will. Patrick:    There had been other services out there that could present a savings to the consumer, but at the end of the day, and I'm a huge leasing fan, both of my cars are currently leased and have been leased for the last 10, 12 plus years. I saw kind of the fit immediately. So we met in Brooklyn about a year and a half ago and I think I made an offer at that first meeting. I'll pretty much maybe the next day. I think it was the next day. We, we had a really good sort of connection where similar but very different at the same time. And we work well together. So it's been a, it's been a blast. It's all, it's been about a year and a half. It feels like 10 years, but but it's been an awesome ride so far. Scot:    Awesome. So I, I also have a lot of co-founders and partners. Usually I'm described as the arsonist and they're the firefighters that kind of what you guys have going on here, probably like the fires you get to put them out. Patrick:    That's pretty well said. Yeah. Yeah. Scot:    So Nathan, you had the idea you wanted to solve this. So give us kind of some highlights. Over the last two years, Nathan:    I knew nothing about car leasing, car financing almost zero about the overall industry. I actually was an investor in a, in a solar panel integration business right around 2008. After I sold my previous company and one of the companies that we did this solar panel array for was a very large Mercedes Benz, Mercedes Benz dealership in Queens. And the owner Michael Cohen was just a really friendly guy and as I started to think about this business, I said, who do I know in auto? And I knew nobody. And I said, okay, well I'll reach out to this Guy Michael Cohen. I went to one of the operators of that business that I was in investor and I said, can you make this introduction? He said, sure. I met Michael and I told him about what we were doing and I'll never forget it. Nathan:    I think this is the first time I'm actually saying this publicly. We were sitting around his board table and he goes, you sure you want to do this? And I was like, no. He goes, I'm warning you. This is really, really hard. And I don't, I don't even know if anybody can solve it. And by that he meant providing an accurate monthly lease payment for a consumer in real time on an app and then actually giving the consumer the Amazon experience of completing the transaction. And that just fired me up and I was like, Yup, I'm going to do this. I had already spoken to my team that was working on me with something else and I said, we're going to sort of pivot into this. And again, most of the team were actually based in Israel engineers, developers and so on. Nathan:    And they were like, Carly seeing what there is no car leasing there. They had no idea what I was talking about. And we just dove into the deep end of the pool from day one and started to figure it out. And Michael made some introductions and very quickly learned how this works. We understood, but we, we started to focus on, on the, on the technology side of it and we then focused on the brick and mortar side of it and then the consumer side of it and so on and so forth. And slowly over time things started to come together. And finally we needed to sign up a few dealers because we're a marketplace. And I was like, okay, so this is like an entirely new beast. How am I going to do this? I'd never come in, you know, face to face with a, with trying to sell something to a, to an owner, principal at a dealership. Nathan:    And myself and my creative director said, you know what, let's do this. We took screenshots of the app, we put them onto a big whiteboard type of placard and we printed them. And I walked into these car dealerships in Brooklyn, New York, a a fine Jewish kid with the Omnicon has had into these car dealerships. And I said, can I speak to the owner please holding up this big placard of screenshots of an app? And they was like, you need a car, can I help you with a Honda? And I was like, no, no, no. I want to show them something. And believe it or not. Some first general managers came out and they looked at it for a mint and they said, what are you selling? And then I eventually got to own our principals. They looked at it, they immediately saw the value prop and what we were doing and how different it was. It was available on the Internet at the time. And some of the largest regional dealer groups in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut signed up very, very quickly once they saw the value prop. And then we slowly grew from there to where we are today over a thousand dealerships and approximately 15 markets and hundreds of thousands of consumers using the app. And it's still really, really early days. So there's a, there's a long road ahead. Scot:    Awesome. So so I'm gonna ask a bunch of Newbie questions to make sure I understand. So you guys go into the dealers are you competing with their alternative leasing thing or are you partnering with that? We're part, we're completely partnering with them. So, if I'm a Mercedes and I have a Daimler finance thing that's doing the lease, you guys partner with those guys to make it easier for the consumer. You're not, you're not competing with example.  Nathan:    So we’re a marketplace where there’s the dealership on one side offering their vehicles and their consumers on the other and our technology right in the middle that sort of makes this an incredibly fast, seamless lease transaction without ever talking to a dealer without ever walking into the dealer. So we're really the first company to take what is normally such an arduous brick and mortar process and, and turn it into a seamless online experience. Scot:    Do I have to be kind of like outside of the dealership to do this or can I be in the dealer using the app? Nathan:    You can be anywhere is when, as long as you've got Internet you know, and you can download the app or go to the website. You can be anywhere you want. Scot:    So I go to the dealer and I say, I want that car. And then they say how do you want to finance it? And then if I choose lease, then I have to download your app. Nathan:    No very different. So we're like imagine you wanted to buy an airline ticket and you went to Expedia. So you'd see basically an aggregation of all of the airlines and flights. If you were flying from let's say JFK to Raleigh and you'd see a list of flights and prices next to it, it's essentially a marketplace for airlines and for hotels and what have you. So we do the same thing. You don't need to go into the dealership, you download the app or go to our website, you type in the vehicle that you're looking for or the vehicle type. And you will see actual vehicles from dealers near you with pre-calculated monthly payments that are probably unbeatable as far as price goes. Scot:    I gather enough information about me that you're using that as an input into the underlying credit scores and all that kind of jazz. Exactly. So when you register, Nathan:    We gather some personal information on you. And then behind the scenes were taking all of the necessary industry data about the vehicle from the dealership. You know, from the manufacturer, so you know, you know, rebates and incentives that may reduce your monthly payments and reduce the selling price of the vehicle or what have you. And in real time in the background, we're calculating all of that to show you a monthly payment with an actual due at signing and you shop the way you would shop on a regular ecommerce site. You choose what you like, you put it into your cart, you place the order, you upload your driver's license and answer some credit questions. The dealer then gets that transaction, that order, and they process the order for you and deliver the vehicle to you the next day. Patrick:    Oh, so I don't have to sit there for 12 hours telling them a million times. I don't need this. Scot:    Exactly. Exactly. Patrick:    Wow. That's awesome. So you've kind of taken that Carvana level experience, applied it to leasing. Okay. I got it. I didn't, I didn't realize this direct to consumer on the front end. That makes a lot more sense now. Yeah. Cool. And then the so, so padded, it sounds like dealers are gobbling this up. Is it, you're just essentially an order takers? Am I understanding that? Scot:    I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it order just yet. We've got a, it's my favorite thing to say. It's got a lot. Hilary entailed interests, great dealer in that interest. Patrick:    We've got, we have built a good sales team that is, is literally boots on the ground knocking on doors, you know, very similar to what Nate did in the very early days. But yet to your point, we've got five of the 10 largest national auto auto dealer groups on the platform today, including Lithia and Asbury. So there the dealers are seeing the value pretty quickly when we, you know, have 10 minutes to sit with a dealer, principal and owner GM. Because really for, for them it's a similar experience to a consumer where by the time we pull a dealership into the fold or alert them on a, on an order, it's a VIN-specific structured lease with a driver's license and a credit app. So it's essentially here, Mr Julia, here's a silver platter, confirm inventory, get the credit approved and we're off and running. So it's a really pretty hyper efficient process for both consumer and dealer. Yeah. Awesome. So I looked at crunchbase. Looks like you've raised according to crunchbase, they're not always right at about $30 million. Yup. Tell us a little bit about the, had you raised venture capital before? Is this your first venture back to business? Nathan:    I had raised early stage venture capital in the past in two previous startups that I founded. And in this specific instance we've raised just under $30 million to date in a friends and family seed round and then a series a and Patrick:    Do series a series a in North Carolina was like $1 million. Scot:    Okay. It's a bay area. Susan. Nathan:    We did a, our series a was 23 million. And actually it was interesting because we had a lot of interests a lot of inbound interest. And then one company took the entire series a IAC, which is the a, which is a, a media and, and a technology conglomerate out of New York City. We're very lucky to have them as investors. At this early stage, they just invested a big chunk. And Toro I saw that. Yes, they just invested about a quarter of $1 billion in Touro. Scot:    Nice. Good. You can get get series being wind up. The so it seems like you're at the sweet spot, so you're kind of like, you're in this, you're you're, you know exactly what investors are looking for. So you're, you know, don't have a lot of employees or marketplace. You're a Fintech, you kinda check and then you're in the auto category. So you're, you check a lot of boxes there. Congratulations on figuring that out. Nathan:    Thank you. I, I can't take all the credit for that. And I also would say investors will never tell you you're exactly what they're looking for. We were lucky enough that, that things sort of clicked for the, for the right investor group at the time that we were looking for capital. Scot:    Cool. So, so I get the supply side and the dealers are there. Do they help you bring consumers into the app or do you have to promote the app yourself? Nathan:    We have to promote the app ourselves. And that's not an easy task. As you know, customer acquisition is is difficult, especially when they're bombarded with, with so many ads and so many people, so many companies trying to get their attention at the same time. So we're out there, you know, grinding every day for recognition. Scot:    So you're doing the traditional Google and all those kinds of aspects. Yep. But I'm an internet marketer at heart and so while you may have a high CAC LTV of Elisa's, like pretty substantial, which was helps on the front end of that, right? Nathan:    Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly correct. There is a very large LTV, even if, whether it's one lease or the lifetime value of that consumer, if they start leasing in their mid twenties and they listen to their seventies yes. While the CAC is hefty right up front, there's some fantastic payback over the long term. Scot:    Awesome. Cool. So I think that's super helpful to kind of frame the rest of the discussion of kind of going up to 30,000 feet and you're, you're in the thick of it. In the vehicle 2.0 podcast, we talk about connected car changing ownership, Evie Nav. I'm going to spend the bulk of our time on changing ownership cause you guys are Kinda like, you know, sitting right there and in the sweet spot of that. Do you the big trend right in your space is this subscription kind of model. It seems like that would be a natural kind of element for, you know, so you have some people looking at subscriptions, kind of almost like a rental model and then others kind of extending a lease and kind of providing some flexibility inside of Elise w you have any kind of point of view of where we're going to go as far as ownership. Nathan:    I think subscription as a category is a very interesting category. And there's a ton of opportunity there and there are some significant players already that are getting customers and traction and funding and so on. But the economics behind that are still a bit foggy, if you will. A lot of it is around used car vehicles. A lot of this credit, credit risk there. There's inventory risk. You know, there's, there's a, there's a tech risk there is how do we value the residual value of a vehicle if a consumer uses it for a month and then returns it and then I need to release it or resell it and so on and so forth. So it's an interesting category. It has a future, no doubt. But I, I would, I would compare it to, you know, web 1.0 mid nineties when sort of e-commerce was just trying to find traction. Nathan:    Travel was fine trying to find traction. There were a lot of companies that fell out and failed in trying to, you know, figure this stuff out until ultimately it was figured out and you have the you know, those that have succeeded. So that's possible that, that will happen here as well. But it's certainly a category that we keep a close eye on. And in what we're doing in particular we're thinking about these things as well and we're trying to make the, the, we look at ourselves as sort of an ecosystem for if you're going to have a car in your driveway, where did you get it? How did you insure it? How are you how are you servicing it? What are you doing with it when you're not using it? You know, can you capitalize on that? Can you make money on it? How are you paying for it and so on and so forth. So what be it, subscription or modernizing the transaction slash ownership you know, s [inaudible] and everything else that goes around it. It's really interesting and it just needs, it needs hard work, execution capital and time to prove it. Scot:    Does two goods, consumer to kind of download your app and they're active in there. You know, you don't want them to just kind of come back four years after the lease is over. So. Exactly. So I can imagine you guys have a lot of ideas around how to extend that. Precisely. Yep. Interesting. So, so pat, you're out there calling on dealerships. Are they, are they so distracted by these changes going on that they don't have time to think about something tactical like, hey, how do I make leases better? Or, or is this really, they're so transactional driven that you can get their attention? Patrick:    Yeah, it's a bit of both. So they're certainly transactional, right? Where they're still, depending on the audience, also still a bit shortsighted where they're worried about today, this week, what does my month look like? I gotta I gotta move units. Which is good. They're also, they're also aware of what's going on in the space, but I think a lot of them just are a bit I don't want to say confused, but there's so much, they hear so much and they have so much stuff thrown at them that they don't, many cases they just don't know what to do and what, how to do it and how to change the process in the store. This, some of the stores that we're working with, they're really super successful with us. It honestly just comes back down to the people in the store, right? So there's a great store outside of Philadelphia that we use sort of as our poster child. There's two people in this store that take honker orders all day having, I mean every day long and they're moving 20 plus units a month through us. And that's been consistent for the last year and a half. It's at Chrysler Dodge jeep store and it really comes down to their process and the Scot:    And they, they, they were very progressive and came on board very early on. So I think some dealers are still sort of catching up. Some are ahead of the curve. It really comes down to the ownership. And how kind of plugged in, they are really cool. One thing that we've seen in the ecommerce world as a marketplace, we'll come out and do some really innovative stuff and then the rest of the world it'll, it'll kinda raise the bar and then the rest of the world has to kind of react. Yet if you guys felt that where the traditional dealer is now feeling, you know, because you've created this seamless experience I kinda liken it to the Starbucks app. Like would you use the Starbucks app and then you forget to use it and you're in line buying two people and you're like sticking a needle in your eye. You're like, well, I forgot the Starbucks app. So then I imagine you're going to cause the whole leasing thing to get easier at dealers over time. Are you starting to feel that happening? Nathan:    Absolutely. I, I'd say from the consumer side for sure. I think it's it's fair to say that once a consumer has leased the car through our app, they will never do it the old way. So that's for certain, once they experienced this, this this digital experience on the dealership side as well. I think to Pat's point, the dealers that are embracing this and putting resources behind that and realize that this is the future, just love it. You know, and they, they, they rave about knockout deals in, in, in a few minutes and, and, and so on. And so forth. So yes, but again, to be clear, it's still very early and there's a lot that we have to prove and still a lot of adoption necessary. Scot:    Cool. I know you guys are busy out there conquering the world. So final question. If folks really want to learn more, obviously they can download the app and look at some leases that, that seems to be like an obvious one. But then maybe online. Do you guys, other than the honker website, do you guys publish any thought leadership or active on Linkedin or Twitter, any of that kind of stuff? Nathan:    Very active on linkedin and Twitter. And other social media platforms. The Honcker.com is now Sim similar to the app. You can do a transaction, you don't need to download the app if you don't want to. Most of our customers prefer to, to transact through the app. And yes, there is some thought leadership. There is a blog where we're posting stuff too on okr.com/blog. So there's a, there's a lot out there and we encourage engagement. Feedback and other communication. We've learned more from, from listening and being attentive to our customer base and our dealer base and the broader industry than we could ever have possibly figured out on our own. So we encourage our consumers, whether they've done a transaction or not, or just browsing or otherwise have thoughts to reach out and, you know, tell us what you think. Scot:    Awesome. Nathan, Pat, thanks for joining us. Nathan:    Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Jocelyne Leach calls herself a mystical midlife rebel. She's a personal and spiritual empowerment coach, mentor, and intuitive for women who want a joyful, vibrant second half of life. We’re talking about second acts and the opportunities present for us at middle age to finally do something meaningful with our lives. GUEST LINKS - JOCELYNE LEACH jocelynekelseyleach.com HOST LINKS - SLADE ROBERSON Slade's Books & Courses Get an intuitive reading with Slade Automatic Intuition FACEBOOK GROUP Shift Your Spirits Community BECOME A PATRON https://www.patreon.com/shiftyourspirits Edit your pledge on Patreon TRANSCRIPT Jocelyne: Okay, well it was about 10 years ago. Probably everyone can remember 10 years ago when the shit hit the fan in the financial markets and it just felt like the whole world collapsing. The news was just terrible. Every day was very depressing. At the time, my husband and I were... We had two businesses that were quite vulnerable to fluctuating markets, and one was a pub and restaurant. One was a property development business. And so, when the markets take a dive, people stop eating out and property takes a dive. The whole thing just imploded. So my husband was extremely stressed. He got taken to hospital seriously ill with three perforated ulcers. At the time, I was uncharacteristically stressed and unhappy and suffering as well. Usually I'm quite a grounded person. So for me to feel all these kind of... the emotional wrangling of all this going on. It made me think, I've gotta get to the doctor and get some medication to help me through this. And I thought, No, that's not the route I want to go. I need to sort this out myself. So I started two things. One thing you might not know about me is I'm also a yoga teacher. So I really dug back into my yoga practice that had got a little bit kind of wishy washy. I dug back into that and took up a more powerful type of yoga. That helped a great deal. It really gave me something to focus on that took the thoughts out of my head because it was the thoughts that were just driving me crazy. And then, at that time, about 10 years ago, the internet was really starting to take off. And so, the wonderful thing of search engines were I could just keep finding different people on the internet who would give me words of wisdom that started me moving forward and kind of climbing out of my big black hole. It's things like finding Byron Katie and reading her books and beginning to kind of control my mindshit, basically. And that was how I started to kind of turn my ship around, basically. And I think at the same time, I was also having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I was kind of late-40s and just wondering what my life had all been about, because I had always been involved with the family business in one form or another. And I've never really pushed out on my own and done anything that I felt was my particular career, so to speak. So it just started that journey. And yoga, really, was the catalyst that got me into more and more kind of spiritual and metaphysical stuff. When I first started yoga, it was just a physical practice. I wasn't into any mumbo jumbo at all. It was kind of a physical practice so I wasn't interested in anything like chanting or meditation or anything like that. But when the need arose, I needed to get into that place of being calmer and finding tools for my mind. So that's really how it all evolved. Slade: That's interesting. I did not know that you were a yoga teacher. I have a pretty special place in my heart as well for yoga. I sort of feel like it was the thing that allowed me to... It's funny, I... Like what you just said. It started as a physical practice for you and then the mumbo jumbo came later. I started out with the mumbo jumbo, and when I went looking for something to physically heal me, I had had a surgery which cut into my core muscles and I was a smoker for 20 years. So at that time, I was recovering from surgery and smoking, and I thought, Ugh, this is disgusting, to be doing these two things at the same time. So I started to think, What is the representation of the breath in healing form? What is a replacement behaviour for smoking? And I really quickly landed on yoga, as being the kind of intersection of all that stuff. And I thought, Yay! I went to yoga as this mystic already! And it was funny because I really quickly was drawn into more of power yoga and as I built up that core strength and became more and more physically strong, and of course I did quit smoking and did yoga instead of smoking, I became extremely physically empowered and alive in my own body in a way that I'd never experienced. Jocelyne: Yeah. Yeah. Slade: Never experienced. We're talking, like, I was 41 when that happened, so... It ultimately led me to all the fitness that I do now, because I was like, Ah, I do the mumbo jumbo stuff in my day job. I want to lift weights and be a crossfit cult member, so I went that route. One of the things that I have noticed is, a lot of people who are yoga instructors may go into it as a physical practice, as a job, and somewhere along the way, they start to discover that they can read energy, that they are intuitive, then they start to pick up a lot of stuff especially if they're touching clients sometimes. Did any of that happen to you? Jocelyne: Yeah. Exactly how it happened. Like I said, I was more into the physical side of it, but I began to notice that, and I think I've always had this attribute, of being able to read people's energy. And I think it goes right back to childhood. I don't know why, but that was just always how I felt that I could understand people. I could look at them and I could kind of guess what was going on. And I began to notice that when people are in my class, I could figure out what was going on for them. And I began to notice that people were quite interested, in fact, they really demanded that I would make the classes in a way that they could tap into their own energy. It was the beginning of class where I used to, when it was quite a physical practice for me, I didn't really have a run in into class. We'd do maybe a couple of breaths just to show willing. And then I'd go straight into the physical practice. And then I began to see that people more and more wanted me to take them into more of a breathing sequence and to decompress them from their day. So the start of my class where we just do a couple minutes of breathing began to be 10 or 15 minutes of breathing. At first I thought, Oh, I don't know if I should be doing this. I don't think people will like it. But more and more, I found that was part of the reason they were coming. And so it went from there. And then I began to really see the difference that it was making to people and I began to put my foot into the other aspects. The more ethereal aspects of yoga. And it was quite a journey. Learning the history of yoga and realizing there are things that, what you might call the new age community had adopted, like working with chakras and visualizations and stuff like that. They were all things that had been part of yoga practice for thousands of years. And that's what led me into studying other things like astrology and hand reading and the akashic records. Because all of those also belong to vedic studies. So it's quite fascinating how that all unfolded for me. Slade: Do you still, I'm just curious if you still work with astrology at all. Jocelyne: Yeah, I do. Some of the most powerful readings I've ever had in astrology have been vedic astrology readings. I haven't been studying vedic astrology. But I have been studying western astrology and when I work with people now, I just always take their birth dates so I at least know what sign they are. Because that gives me a lot of information. Because a lot of my work is about energy, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, what have you. And things like astrology help you cut through a lot of chit chat. It gets you to the heart of the matter more quickly. Slade: Yeah. The reason I ask about that is because astrology is emerging as a theme in all my interviews right now. There are at least three people on this season who are specifically astrologers. But then when you mentioned that, I felt like I needed to ask, because this is a theme and I have been sort of reinvigorated around using that in my practice. I actually used to use, like, someone's natal chart was almost like a meditation or a gateway image for me to do readings, so I come from having done astrological charts for extra money when I was a teenager, when I was in college, for my parents' friends and some people in my family. Stuff like that. And so, I've always asked for that information for a client because if I know their sun, moon and rising sign, I can talk for an hour about what that tells me about them, you know? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: At that point, all the intuitive stuff comes in as well. I used to think, maybe I'm just kind of using this as a crutch. Maybe I'm just sort of using that as my way to log in, as we say. But then with all of you that I'm having these conversations with, I had sort of just backed away from including that on my intake forms. Now I'm rethinking, Oh wait a minute, I feel like my Guides and the Universe is all telling me, No, no. There's more to do with that. Keep that in place. It's a very useful vocabulary. Jocelyne: I think so. It goes along with another thing I do, which is to do with yoga. Which is ayurvedic medicine, which is kind of the Indian version of traditional chinese medicine. I do a, not with every client, but with some of my clients, I'll give them a kind of questionnaire thing that they complete, which also gives me their dosha, which is a physical representation of energy, so it goes into elemental energy like in astrology. For example, if I use me as an example, I'm a Gemini so I've got a lot of mental air energy. But physically, I've got a lot of earth energy. So it gives me a great understanding of someone if I know what their physical energy type is along with their mental energy type. So if I'm helping someone in more of a wellness way, which was my previous iteration in coaching. I was a lot more focused on wellness and health because that kind of went with the yoga. And then I started building the more mystical and intuitive skills now, so I'm veering more in that direction. It gave me a really good picture of that person quite quickly and I'm all for something that kind of cuts through stuff and you can get to the heart of the matter much more quickly. The same goes with the hand analysis. I learned how to do hand analysis and the energy shows up in the lines and the fingerprints in the hands as well. So all those things kind of tie in. Slade: Wow, so if you have a client there in person with you, do you usually read their hand as well? Jocelyne: I do do in person hand reading things. They're usually mini sessions. I'm lucky enough to teach my yoga classes, the majority of them, at a local spa that opened a few years ago. I offer a kind of 45-minute mini session. So I do that in person. But if I'm seeing someone long distance, then I like to send them a kit so they can print their hand prints for me. They send them back and I look at the printed version of their handprints. And in honesty, I prefer doing that. Because number one, it gives me a bit more time to just kind of mull over what I'm seeing. And secondly, with ink print, you get more fine detail. And quite often, I'm a bit distracted if I've got a person physically in that space, all expectant-like. I get stage fright a bit. I quite like to be kind of tucked up in my office, and just kind of mulling and ruminating over the information I've got so that I can present it in a more cogent way. Slade: I didn't know that you could do that! That you could do prints with ink and send them to someone and that they can... I've never thought of that before! Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: That's fascinating. Jocelyne: Yes, it is. It's much, much more fun. Slade: Well, it also allows you the time to create a more meaningful volume of information. Because I think there's a tendency, you know, like, it's weird to just let a stranger hold your hand for most people for a long amount of time. I can see where there would be some kind of, a little bit of almost like a social space pressure to not sit there and manhandle them for 15 or 20 minutes. So to be able to have that kind of intellectual distance and to study the information kind of outside of that whole issue of touching or being in someone's personal space. I find it easier to read for people that I cannot see, that I'm not physically in the same room with. I often describe it as being like, when you are listening to music and you want to concentrate, you close your eyes. It's like getting rid of a lot of the senses that you don't need in that moment, so that you can sort of put all your focus on that intuitive channel, essentially. Jocelyne: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. I don't appreciate the distraction because I'm easily distracted anyway, so if I see an expression or something that... It can put me into my headspace, and I don't really want to be there. I want to be more into my intuitive space. The other thing I find especially with hand analysis, if I'm there with the person, and it's kind of, Cross my palm with silver, dearie, that kind of vibe, where if I'm at more a distance, it seems more, whatever the word is... Slade: Elevated? Jocelyne: Yeah. The opposite of being at the end of the pier, or in a fairground. Slade: Right. It's more elevated. Jocelyne: Doing tricks. Slade: More highbrow. Jocelyne: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I come from a family where this is the kind of stuff that is not believed in. All my family think I'm a proper weirdo. And they're the kind of people where if you can see it, then you believe it. And I'm more, you see, actually, what you believe, and more in that intuitive space. They all look at me kind of a bit cock-eyed, as if a bit, Uh oh, What's she up to now? Slade: Well, every family needs one. Jocelyne: Well that's what I think. I'm letting my weird flag fly now and I don't mind. Slade: So talk to me a little bit about how your practices evolved. I imagine some of your yoga students become people who want personal sessions from you. Or that you kind of evolve the practice into doing more of the intuitive work and the coaching. Looking at your website, there's a focus around living a vibrant second half of life. Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: You talked about the fact that your story, at one point sort of going through a midlife crisis. So talk to me about what this second half of life is about. Jocelyne: I think for women particularly, it's a kind of a point in life where women at a certain age, I don't want them to throw in the towel. I don't want them to think, Well I've got to a certain age, and I've got to start smalling things down now and contracting, kind of metaphorically speaking. What tends to happen is life kinda gets you when you're at mid-life. The thing that started me on my journey might not be typical for everyone, but it does and it can involve a certain amount of loss. It can be loss of your partner through divorce or through death, or loss of your health or jobs, or your kids moving out of your home, all sorts of things like that. I see it with my friends and my clients. There are great pressures on women at this age. There's barely a woman I've come across that doesn't have something of this kind of challenge going on for them. For most women, it's kind of unexpected, or it's more challenging than they thought it would be at this time of life. It's an accumulation of everything that's kind of topped off by the cherry on the top, which is having the menopause. So it challenges them from every part of their being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. You name it. It feels like you're powerless and you're a bit stuck. And it's all downhill from here on. I don't think that should be necessary. Not in this day and age and also, 50 isn't how 50 was when my grandmother was 50. And I think if people, well women especially, if they feel empowered again, that's how their second half becomes magical and meaningful. And they can live joyfully and have a vibrant second half of life. So that's what my job I feel is. To guide them and coach them at this time. To see the other side of this kind of void. And have a clear and inspired plan for a much more empowered, brighter future. Slade: What kinds of things do you see these women going on to do, like what kind of breakthroughs do they arrive at? Do they start businesses? Create new projects? What kind of result, really, happens when they become more empowered? Jocelyne: Yeah, I have had clients and friends who have the catalyst for them having to do something in their life, is maybe the loss of their marriage. So they've had to really think, Well, you know, I've been a homemaker for 25 years. I've got to do something now. And they'll start a business. I have several friends that have started businesses at a time in life where you think, Wow, that's a bit plucky. But they haven't had the choice because they've been thrown into that situation. Or, you know, if a partner had become seriously ill, or they've become debilitated in some way, women have to step up maybe and start being more of a breadwinner. So that's definitely something that I've noticed in women of this age and sometimes it's just they're ready for a kind of an awakening themselves. They're ready to find more about the spiritual side of life, or about aspects of life they haven't had time to pursue before if they were busy doing other things. You know, the kids leave home, you might have downsized, you might have downsized work-wise. Something else is calling and it's kind of like a clarion call to remember that you probably got more years behind you than you have ahead of you, so what are you going to do with those valuable years that you've got left? Slade: And they're open in a new way, right? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: The good news is... Because I attract this type of client as well. Women who are finally at a point where their energy is not being required by everyone else at quite the same amount. So what they're finding is they're sort of welling up with all this self-awareness and this creativity, and these sort of blank slates, and this sort of open space. Now, some people probably panic and dig in and freak out about all that, and wanting it to stay the same, so to speak. But the clients that I attract in my practice are like, Okay, well wait a minute, I've got all this time and all this energy and I'm not done yet, so what am I going to do now? It's really exciting to me because I feel like it's almost a second act, on the kind of energy that you see with college students, you know? Jocelyne: Yeah. Slade: I was a student adviser at a university before I started doing this work, and I see a real connection between the mindset of someone who is 19 years old and trying to choose a major for their study and then women who are in midlife who are coming to me wanting to discuss reconnecting to their creativity, starting a passion project of their own, doing something that they've always wanted to do. Do you see that kind of energy that I'm talking about? Joceyne: Absolutely. I think it's that kind of Saturn return effect and the need, I see, for people not to stop being creative, you know? Keep being creative. No matter how modest your dreams are, you need a new dream. You need to redesign your garden or redecorate the house or whatever it is. But you've got to keep having something to get up for in the morning. Otherwise you just kind of wither and die. So for some people, it would be modest dreams. For some people, it's like, yeah! I'm gonna open an animal sanctuary. I've got the time, I've got the space. I can do that now. They might want to travel. They might want to really do charity work or something that is meaningful for them, that they haven't had a chance to do before. Or just reinvent themselves in some other way that is meaningful to them. So that they really do get a chance to do what they might not have done when they were younger. Slade: Women in midlife too, have decades of practice doing multiple things at once. They're multi-taskers just by requirement. Almost everyone who's a mom. I joke with the moderators of my Shift Your Spirits community, which you are one of our moderators, I jokingly said to you guys, I pick ladybosses and moms. Because you guys are used to kind of doing a whole lot of everything, and dealing with everyone's stuff, you know, to put it nicely. And you have a lot of practice at getting on with shit. You know what I mean? Jocelyne: Yes I do. Slade: I really like this type of client because they're not coming in with a lot of hand wringing. They come in with a lot of energy and are looking for some place to spend it. They want to be encouraged and enabled to pour themselves into something and to be encouraged. Bring it on! I love to brainstorm. And I love it when people bring me their animal sanctuary passion projects and they need some support and encouragement to make that happen. What do you hope personally to contribute to this greater world of coaching and empowerment. What's your message you'd like to leave out there? Jocelyne: I think my main message is, what happened for me 10 years ago is that I really found out about myself. I dug down deep enough so that I could understand myself better. And I think that's the key, is to really know and understand yourself fully. Because then you can tackle the things that are your life lessons, that are your repeating patterns, the things that have kind of kept tripping you up. That thing about, you always go out with the same guy, or you always keep doing the same things and you have the same triggers. If people could just experience what it is to know themselves better, then it's a very empowering feeling to suddenly think, Okay, actually If I scroll back a bit, when I first had my hand analysis reading done for myself before I trained to do it, I had several coaching sessions where the lady did the technique that I described to you earlier, and everything she said to me wasn't a huge surprise. It was all stuff that I kind of knew about myself already. But it gave me kind of confirmation about who I really was. So then when I knew who I really was, it was like, Well, there's no good in me worrying about the fact that I'm no good at maths. Why don't I just keep pursuing the things that are my gifts and turn my gifts into spectacular gifts. You know, something I can really do something with. Rather than just be sad there wondering, lacking confidence and being triggered by all the things that triggered me in the past. I think a lot of us are the kind of stuck when we were triggered as a 10 year old or 14 year old. And I think, as a society, if a 10 year old or 14 year old died, it's a tragedy. The whole wider community feels that loss. But how many people go to their grave still being triggered as they were when they were a 10 year old or a 14 year old? I think that's a tragedy. I think how awful, that you're really dying as a 10 year old. Slade: Mmm... I had a client just recently that I did a reading with who expressed that she had wanted to be a writer when she was much younger, and that when she was 14 years old, her mother just really shut her down around that whole connection to herself. And, you know, it died, like you said, a spiritual death. So here she was, at this stage in life that we're talking about, looking to reconnect to that. I hope she hears this episode and what you just said. Because I really feel that it spoke to the reading that we did. I think she's a fan of the show, so she's probably nodding along right now. And it affirms the message that I brought through for her as well. I want to mention and not forget, because I love this title so much, if everyone goes to your website, they can get a free download. The title is "7 ways to instantly get calm in the middle of a shitstorm!" Jocelyne: Yes. Slade: Tell us about that. Jocelyne: Yeah, I'm a little irreverent. I think if you join up to my list, you might need to know that. That's a 7 day email series. Each day someone is sent a tip about a different way to kind of get a grip on whatever is triggering you, basically. One particular day, there might be a visualization and a breathing technique to calm. There might be some physical things to do, like jumping jacks or something like that, to get out of your head and into your body. It might be a recipe with essential oils, something like that. It could be dietary tips or something a bit more practical. So it's just 7 days of different things that could help you feel as if you've got a grip. Slade: It sounds like a lot of people would be interested in checking that out. Jocelyne, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Tell us where we can go to find you online. Jocelyne: My website, it's a little long-winded, but it's http://www.jocelynekelseyleach.com/ I think you'll put that in the notes or... Slade: Yes, yes. Awesome. Wonderful. That was great, Jocelyne. Thank you for coming on the show! Jocelyne: That's my pleasure. Cheery bye for now!

Hi. Hello. Hmm. All right, welcome to the show. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I feel like it is going to be a fabulous show. Is it dark? What's happening? No? Yes? Not sure. Okay, let's get comfortable. Megan Underwood what's up? There's a name I feel like I haven't seen for a while. Comfortable as fuck. Am I in the dark? How's the lighting? It feels like it looks super dark on my phone screen. I'm obsessed with lighting you guys, obsessed. Hey, Carly. Obsessed! I've just had the more hilarious afternoon ever. You can't even imagine the hilariousness of the afternoon. Okay, looks okay on my screen. Going to sit up straight. Thank you Emily, back at you. Queen to queen, hey Emma, hey Marie. Say hello if you're there people. Hmm, okay, okay, tell me there if you are there. If you're not there, I suppose you can't tell me to- Why, why? I just made this face to Kelly. Thank you, I was doing filming all afternoon. Matt was over, my videographer Matt and Kelly was here as well. We were doing the most ridiculous shit. We were doing skits. So impressed with myself. And, I was going to say something important just then and now I forgot what it was already. Why does the phone show a certain visual? And then when you look at it on the computer I can see other bits of me, and then I feel exposed. Because I'm like, like I don't have enough clothes on on the bottom half of me. That's for sure. If I sit with my legs open, it's going to be unfortunate for everybody. Or well it depends on your perspective I suppose. But anyway, I thought that I was perfectly only showing from there up, because that's what I can see on my phone. Now I feel obliged to hide behind my laptop just in case. But I'm just going to perch here and you know, somewhat, careless Marilyn Monroe-esque fashion, like I'm just casually laying here when actually I'm holding everything perfectly together. Am I going to learn something? Why would I learn something? I don't understand. I'm teaching all the time. So your soul always knows. I just did the best skit on your soul always knows. I'm so impressed with my own hilarity right now. So Kelly, one of my best friends, and Matt, who's my amazing videographer, they've been listening to me go on and on and on for a very long time about how funny that I think that I am and that I want to do skits. I want to do little funny videos that you guys will share all over the internet and they'll go viral. Okay, I'm super happy with my hair today as well. That's what's happening. There it is, all of it. It looks even better now that it's shook out, feel my head spinning a little bit. We just filmed four skits, and one them, and I wrote the scripts myself. I mean there was really no script, but there was a concept. We went all in. For one of the skits that Matt and I were filming before Kelly came around, we had me doing a scene typing at the computer, a scene cutting an apple, a scene with me in bed meditating with an eye mask on. A scene on the couch where I was eating honey-soy chips and honeycomb Maltesers, and drinking straight out of a bottle of wine, all at the same time, because it was showing like the stages of grief. Like an emotional meltdown to do with, well you have to wait and see. Right, it's funny as fuck though, or at least I think that it is. We did that, and then Kelly came around and we did a little thing that was based somewhat on truth that we think is funny that we always do. And then I did a your soul always knows script, and I'm so impressed with my own self about this. I messaged, I had Kelly go upstairs and call me and be like a pretend client on the phone, on the speakerphone, and then I'd send her a bunch of questions to ask. No matter what question she would ask, I would sit there looking like a wise, profound person, because I am. I would say, so the questions I gave her were, "I'm not sure whether I should launch my low-end programme next to my high-level mastermind, what do you think?" Then it was a question about a man, then a question about a diet, then a question about being stuck, and then, "Should I cut my hair?" And whatever. No matter what the answer was I was like, "Hmm, let me just tune in on that. Wait, I think you should check in with what your soul says, because your soul always knows." Then she would be like, "Wow, you're so wise Kat. You're just so connected." And I was like, "I know. I've been doing this work for a long time." I'm so impressed with how well I held it together while filming these skits. I did burst out laughing a few times, but we had the best time ever. I just had two hours of hilariousness. I was like, "How is this even work?" And I don't know if it technically is. But I don't know if anything technically is. And then what was hilarious beyond hilarious, after that, is as they were leaving and I was going down to the basement to swipe them out of the car park, Kelly's saying something about whatever situation in her life, and I was like, "Well your soul knows the answer Kelly." Then I was just laughing even more. But I'm like, "But it's true. This is funny because this is real." Things are funny because they're real. So I'm feeling kind of pumped, kind of high-vibe. And I'm kind of impressed with myself as well because I've been saying for at least a year, and lots of people have heard me say this, especially my close people in my life have heard me go on and on about I want to be doing these little videos, with an attempt for my videos to go viral. I want to do the funny ones because I think I'm funny. And I want to do the inspiration and entertaining ones about, "Christine's not learned anything, who promised you that you were going to learn anything. Not me, but your soul always knows exactly what you need to learn. So go and learn elsewhere if you're not learning it here. It's fine, I'm completely fine with it either way, but I can't promise anything. I definitely can't promise learning." You know what, fuck it, I promise soul shifts and deep frickin transformation, and hilarity, and sometimes shenanigans. And by the way, by the way, whatever comes out will be exactly what you need. Okay, she doesn't give a fuck. She's like, "Bye," she's just like, "I'm leaving." She doesn't know what she's missing out on. You can all send her a message and tell her if you like. I feel like this could be a good device for fixing up your hair so that you don't have to use your hand while you're holding your laptop in the other hand. It does hurt a tiny bit. Ohh, it actually brushes the hair a little bit you guys. I don't know that it was entirely designed for that. Okay, now there's hair sticking out of it and it's a bit wonky. If you look at it closely this [scept 00:07:11] has had a bit of a rough time of it. It's cause sometimes I get overexcited and I whack it on things. Not on people, don't worry, but if they were here in the room potentially someone would get a good whack with the sceptre. Tracy's already learned seven things. Okay, so we have several things we need to discuss as a community you guys. I shall sit here in my throne and discuss them with you and for you. One of them is we need to decide what my new name is. I feel that it should be put to a vote. Do you think I should have a competition to choose my new name? I'm going to drop my surname, I'm going to drop my old surname which is still legally my current surname. And I'm not going back to the previous name before that because that was my first husband's name. And I'm not going back, even though it was a good name for internet marketing, was a great fitness name, which is what it was back in the day. And I'm not going back to my birth name, because it feels weird and it's like from a 100,000 years ago. I'm going to make up a new name. I'm going to keep Katrina Ruth as it is, Ruth is my middle name. I guess the only question is, what does my soul know that my new surname is meant to be. But I think that it should start with R, so then it will be Katrina Ruth something starting with R, because it sounds like nice for alliteration purposes for fame. I think it would be a good famous person name to have a surname starting with R. If it wasn't for Ruby Rose, I would probably go with Katrina Ruth Rose, because Rose is a family name and it's also my daughter's middle name that I gave her. So I think Katrina Ruth Rose sounds really nice. It's not fucking going to be Ruthless, but thank you. Katrina Ruth Rose sounds nice, it's sounds kind of like a famous person's name, but I think that we can do better as a community. If you have any thoughts on that, there's a post about it in the daily ass-kickery, you can contribute. If I chose a name that you gave me, I would definitely have to give you something super cool as a prize for that. I can't just go walking around with a name that somebody else came up with without honouring it. All right, moving along. What do you want to talk about? Why do you even need a surname? I want one. I want it to be Katrina Ruth something. Katrina Ruth Rules. No, I don't want it, no I want a new surname. I don't want to change my legal, because you got to have a legal surname. I don't want to change it to Ruth, because Ruth is my middle name and I like it like that, Katrina Ruth. My mum used to call me Katrina Ruth, not when I was in trouble either, just like sounds nice inside my head. Fuck a duck, I dropped the sceptre. We'll switch, we'll switch to this. Have a friend who legally has no surname. Is that right? Okay I didn't know about that. All right, so anyhow, okay this could be a good scratching device down your back if you wanted it to be. Props are everywhere here. Oh my God there's two of these things. You're supposed to have a duel. There's a fucking cape on the floor over there, but it looks stupid as fuck. Madonna's real name's not Madonna though, it's whatever it is. Have a friend who, okay, anyway. The whole point of the whole point is, you can laugh about it all you like, actually my clients always make fun of me and say that no matter what they ask me I say, "Well just tune in and what would alignment look like. Or what does your soul actually say about this, or what does your soul know." And I'm like, "Well, but it's true." That's why I did the skit, because I was sort of playing into that. Obviously I do say a few more things than that one when I'm talking to my clients. And sometimes I don't even use the word soul, it has been known to happen on the odd occasion. But the reality is, you have this blueprint inside of you for, I'm going to put that down because I'm going to be serious now. I don't want anyone over here to think I'm being funny when I'm being serious. Let's pause for effect. I've been drinking wine straight from the bottle during the day, for the purposes of my filming, so I'm feeling slightly buzzed. I think I only had that much, but I don't drink during the day. And I don't know if this is just me or is this normal, but whenever I do drink anything during the day, on the odd occasion, I can have the tiniest bit, like three sips which is roughly as much as I had, and I feel like I had two glasses of wine. And then when you are literally putting wine into your mouth with chips and Maltesers at the same time, it's just a whole unusual situation happening up in there. Okay, we're going to get serious. I'm not changing my surname to Reagan, that's my friend's name, her actual name. It's not going to be Rice either, it sounds like a man's name, like a man. I don't want to be a man. Okay, I'm going to be serious and professional as fuck. I'm going to talk about soul blueprints, maybe, we'll see if it comes out. Let me just tune in on that for a moment and see what does in fact come out. Okay, I've got it, I've got it. It may or may not be anything to do with your soul at all, but it will be precisely what it's supposed to be. By the way, by the way, Wren, Ruth, Katrina Ruth Aura. Somebody suggested Chai before. I was like, I didn't understand why, but it's definitely not going to be Chia, because I'm allergic to chai tea. Okay, Katrina Ruth Riley, oh my goodness. It's got to be a new and unusual word you guys. A word nobody else knows or is using. Oh my god, I'm just seeing that my team has posted onto my page. Okay, [Mim 00:12:33], that Amanda France's Vegemite video that's on my page has a spelling mistake in it. Veget-mite it says, but Mim, do you want to drop the inner circle link. By the way, not a link, that's not a link at all. Description, comment, whatever it is. The inner circle is open, it is open. You can message me if you would like to know about mentoring with me at the absolutely highest level in my one-on-one, badass, hard as fuck, inner circle mastermind. It is indeed open. Message me on my personal page is better. Ongoing one-on-one mentoring, unlimited access to me, plus access to the hottest and most badass mastermind on the internet. On, just like, on, I think my voice just broke. Am I a 13 year old boy? For different creators and different entrepreneurs who just want more, and are willing to do what it takes in order to create it, obviously. Okay Jillian says, "To those who are even remotely considering joining the inner circle, just pull out your credit card and pay now." You can't actually technically do that, I'm sorry, you got to message me and we'll talk about whether it's aligned for you or not. And then I suppose you could pay. You know what I'm going to do? Here's what I'm going to do, here's what my soul is telling me to do, I'm going to start posting frickin case studies and testimonials of my clients every day. Give me an amen if you would like to see that because I don't normally do it and I've started to now do it, I'm going to just relentlessly, ruthlessly flaunt that shit all over the internet and inspire you with the badassery of the women that I know and that I get to mentor, but also I'm friends with and connected with. I'm starting my new show Conversations with Badasses. I've had that name for ages, and I've even got a backdrop made that goes behind her on my stands for the Conversation with Badasses show, but it's got red hair on it, so I have to change it now anyway. I'm going to be doing joint livestreams with the most badass people I know, and that will be the show. You'll get to meet lots of people from the inner circle and lots of my cool badass friends and other people that I know. It's going to be conversations with badasses. But part of it will be that I'll be talking a lot about results from the inner circle because I don't normally do that, and I get amazing results so I'm going to talk about it. And I'm going to promote, promote, promote, and find the exact perfect people who are meant to join us. Here's what else, here is what else, earlier today, I finally pulled my fucking finger out, ohh Raven, that's an interesting one. Raven, Katrina Ruth Raven. I'm going to think about that. Haven, what about Katrina Ruth Haven. Hmm, the perfect name is going to come to me, and so it is, it's done. You know I just said that I indeed pulled my finger out. Is that an Australian expression, or does everybody understand that expression? I don't know if everyone knows what I mean. I pulled my finger out means, sounds kind of dirty, but what it means is that I just finally took fucking action on something that I'd been holding myself back from and denying myself stepping into soul alignment around, which specifically was what I just said earlier, the videos, the skits, the little comedy things that I've been wanting to do for ages. It was such a good feeling. Firstly, I mean what else would you want to be doing? Okay, you did think it was dirty. It Aussie only. We have some weird expression in Australia I think, but whatever. Everybody does in their own way. What else would you want to be doing on a Friday, it's not Friday, but you could do it on a Friday, on a Wednesday afternoon except for filming hilarious stuff and just being creative and kind of acting. I guess I was acting, and I fancy myself somewhat of an actor. I'm quite certain I should end up in the movies at some point in time. And I'm going to play myself, so I need a good fucking name for that as we've just been discussing. That was fun, it was really fun. I had so much fun it was crazy. We were just in hysterics. Matt was just shaking his head, he couldn't even believe the ridiculousness of the entire situation most of the time. That's cool, but really where it's critical actually to receiving, and to abundance, and to stepping into whatever the next level is that's inside of you that you know you're meant to live into is, when you're flaking out and resisting and avoiding stuff that your soul is telling you to do that you know you should do and must do, then you dial down receiving. This is what I want to talk about. You can take the statement your soul always knows, and you can do whatever you want with that statement right. Your soul always knows what you should fucking eat for dinner. Hello Lily [Babcock 00:17:16]. Lily you know you posted last night, I'm pointing directly at you with my massive, it's actually not that big but when you point it like that it looks huge. I don't even know what this is. Is it a pitchfork? I don't need a pitchfork, let me get my sceptre back. Oh, it's way over there. Wait. Okay, all right, here I am. Why do I have to sit up? I don't like sitting like a normal person. Now I've got sequins in my bottom though. Just like kind of chewing away at it. Trident. All right, what was I saying? I'm going to tune in on that. Fuck, what was I saying? Lily, you posted last night about your hair like a mermaid, but I wore my hair mermaid style last night for a podcast, and I specifically had that thought because I had it on a side ponytail and it was very mermaidy. The reason was all the sweat from the hot yoga, and I hadn't washed it yet. Now it's cleansed and it's beautified. But last night it wasn't washed, and so I did the only reasonable thing that a person can do, which is put it in a [plut 00:18:26] for two hours before the podcast interview, and then it looked mermaidy. Then afterwards you posted that your hair was mermaidy too. I was like- Oh my god, there's seriously sequins in my ass. Okay, it's the life is now, press play cushion. If you haven't seen it, your mind will be blown. I feel like everyone's seen it, but some people probably haven't seen it. It's going to mirror language, but you're going to get the idea. Ah, ahh, amazing isn't it. It says, "Life is now. Press play," in the cushion you guys, in the cushion. I've performed this trick many times before, but there's probably new people here who haven't had the joy and the pleasure and the honour. It would be selfish and rude of me not to show it to them. Again, that was all biting my ass just then. I was sitting right on the sequins. Okay, so that's about Lily and the mermaid hair. Then the other thing was and is, your soul does always know what you should do about anything. Your soul knows whether you say yes when somebody says, "Do you want to be on my podcast?" I just go with what my soul says. You can ask me anything anytime, and sometimes I'm going to say no to you for sure. I say no to lots of people. And then you might be brave enough to ask me again another time, people do that on rare occasions, most people are not, and then maybe that day I'm vibing with it, maybe my soul says yes. That's roughly how I end up on Lily's podcast. Because typically I say no to everything, it's just a blanket rule of thumb. Everything that's not me creating my own content, but now, right now, I'm actually in a vibe of saying yes to a lot of things. So now would be a good time to ask me things. Just so you know, I feel the openness. I feel that I am open to yes to things. I feel that that can often be a good state. And in theory it sounds like it would be a good overall general state to be in, but actually the answer is, what does your soul know? I know for me there was a period of, it's time to say no to everybody and go deeper into my own content creation, and so then that's what I was doing. I was just like, blanket hard no to everybody, except obviously if it was like James out to try something, I'm sorry, but that's just what's up. That's just the truth of the matter. Okay, now your soul knows the answer to everything. What are you going to do after this? Should you even be here right now? Tune in. Does my soul say yes I should listen to Kat? She's going to drop some gold, or she going to shift and transform my emotional state in some way. And so that is a good to learn use of my time. Well one lady already left early, her soul did not care for me at all. After you get off this livestream, you go, what does my soul say that I should do, right? What is my next thing? Am I going to create content? Am I going to take a nap? Am I going to go to bed? Okay, of course you didn't, because people in my community are sneaky and badass, and supernatural as fuck. She says, "I telepathically asked you." Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. That would probably be the smartest way to things by the way. For all the people who I love and adore in my life, I send them messages from my soul all the time by the way. I'm not sure if they always get them. It probably depends on whether they're tuning in or listening, but I legitimately do. This morning only, I was sending soul messages to somebody. I don't know if they got them or not, I didn't ask. I mean I could ask right now in my soul, but I don't really mind. It goes through an energetic kind of frequency anyhow, but sometimes they will then reply in a physical sense. Sometimes somebody will reply on a Facebook message when you sent them a soul message. That's pretty cool right? Your soul does already knows how to do it. They did get it. Emily says they did get it. Did you tune in on that? Cool. I reckon right, I reckon they did get it. That's what I'm feeling as I tune in on it. I just love how fucking supernatural the world is, don't you? I wrote about this quite a bit in my blog today, just like the real gifts that we were giving and that we were born with. She did tune in on it. Thank you. I just wrote about the gifts that we were born with, and what's actually natural and real for us is as humans, how so many people think that it's kind of scary or bad to kind of access supernatural powers, and I guess to access the magic within, and to dive into the spiritual world and create from that place. If you didn't read today's blog post, you can go read that. I'm not sure if that's here on my Facebook business page yet or not, but it's definitely over here on my personal Katrina Ruth page. It's got a hot as fuck photo of me with my amazing client Amanda Frances, and she is an incredible client and super soul sister friend. It's just a hot photo, that's why I put it up. It's from a month or two ago. The title is, don't get scared of how much magic you are capable of, grow harder and deeper, run faster, and do more. I think I'll give you a link to it right now so that you can check it out after this. Yes Facebook, I will add Malibu, California as the location since that's where it was. All right, so I wrote about this, and I think that we could talk about it. I think that it's powerful and I think that's really relevant and true, and that we're just limiting ourselves so much when we play only in the human realm. Okay, no, correct, edit, rewind, the human realm includes the spiritual realm and the supernatural realm, right? Right, thank you for clarifying that for me. Send me some cat emojis or a love hearts if you agree with me. People can feel like, "Oh is that bad to operate in that sense in terms of I'm just creating shit inside of myself." I can sit in this chair like I just did, and I can sit in my throne, in my studio at home, and just tune in. Thank you for the cat emojis and the love hearts. I can tune in on whether somebody received a soul message from me, and then Emily who's here on live tunes in for me as well. She's not here, she doesn't know what person it was, she doesn't know anything at all. But she just tuned in energetically and she knows everything. Just like I know everything when I allow myself to, and so do you. Your soul knows. Your higher self knows every aspect of who you are inside and out. You already have the answers to everything, like fucking everything. Do you realise that? And all you've got to do is be willing to listen, right? I did this little skit earlier, I was like, it was funny. No matter what the question was that asked, I was like, "Hmm, tune in to what your soul says." And I was having the funniest time ever doing the skit. But it's also like, well honestly, honestly, how I've created all of the results in my life. Business results, money results, fitness stuff, health stuff, lifestyle, travel. Even like where should I go next? Or if ever I'm not on tour, should I book, for example recently we were finding a location for my July retreat for the inner circle. By the way inner circle's open, read the pinch comment after this if you're wanting to mentor with my on the higher one-on-one level. You would be potentially then coming along to hang with me in July for our next retreat. We do three. When we were looking for different venues for the retreat, even something like that, my assistant sends me through the details, and I'm just like, "Okay, let me just tune in for real, this one or this one?" And I'm like, "Hmm, I feel this." For sure I'll look at the website and I'll look at what's offered, and I'll look at pricing, I look at all that stuff right, like with anything. But it's not how I make my decision. I always trust my soul. I always trust my inner guidance. I always trust what's coming through me. Your soul always knows. I just feel like I've let my life become so easy, and wouldn't you love to let your life become so easy by just responding to what's inside of you. Now earlier today I had a conversation with a new client, somebody who I know already through Facebook, but she's just stepped into Rich Hut Empire, which is kind of like the before step in a lot of cases for the inner circle, or it's not always the before step, sometimes people go straight in. But anyhow, it's my six week one-on-one which oversold and closed out the other day, and she was talking a lot about getting caught in fear, and getting caught in reactivity, and even by the time we got ten minutes into the phone call I was like, "Okay, I'm feeling that so far everything that's come through in this conversation is that fear is guiding and directing you a lot of the time, right? Firstly, that's clouding your ability to obviously connect to soul and create from faith and create from flow. But also, isn't it tiring," I said to her. She was like, "Well yeah." And I know that's it's tiring because I used to live that way. It's fucking exhausting right. The thing is, you don't have to live that way. It's actually a choice that you can make right now. It's a choice that you have available to you right now in this moment to just decide, I'm going to choose faith over fear. I'm going to choose to access the guidance inside of me. I'm going to choose to access the superpowers that I was giving. Hello. You can come in. Alyssa just got home from school. Ohh. For you, mother's day, where do I put it? That's fine, I'll take it. Okay, go get changed because we're going to go on a girl's day. Okay. We're going to go on a girl's outing after this. Yay. Yay. So, okay, what is this, school notice. Oh shit, don't do that. I'm just literally holding a nearly, an open bottle of water over the laptop. Okay, totally lost my train of thought when I saw her walk into the room. I'm sure you saw that. You can literally choose right now in this moment to let faith rule you rather than fear. That is a choice that you have available no matter what's going on. Especially when shit is going on when you feel stark, or you feel it's too scary, or there's too much riding on it, or you can't afford to or something like that. This is the leap of faith that it's time to make. This is the leap of faith that it's time to make. It is time to say, what does my soul have to say about this? What would I be doing if I were acting from faith? What would I be doing if I was coming from what's inside of me. Why aren't they post a bed in my room? Why are you talking so weird? Why? I don't know. Go get changed honey. No, no, no, this is the time to go get change. Who put it in? I don't know. I have no idea. I wasn't even in your room. Probably Diane. Usually I'm like, come on the live, but I know if that happens we won't go and do our girl's day thing. We'll just get talking about. I'll probably wrap up in a minute now anyhow. That's really the whole thing right, I could, if I wasn't going to go on little adventure with my daughter, I'd go on and on about this for probably another 20, 30 minutes, like beyond what I've already said. But it would come back to the same core underlying message. This is the thing, you can go on and on about it for 20 or 30 minutes, or 20 or 30 years, nothing is going to change except for the fact that you have the power of choice right now to come from soul. You can sit here right now in this moment and say, "I'm going to commit to operating from faith, not from fear." You can sit here right now in this moment and say, "I'm going to start to fucking listen to what's inside of me, right." It's true in your business. It's true with what programmes you should launch or put out there. It's true with how you interact in your personal relationships. Who should you be giving your time and energy to? Where is a good investment and use of that? Rather than being like, "Oh, what do you think about this? And I'm scared of that. And here's the pros and cons." And you analysing it with your friends or your partner, or your frickin dog, or even your mentor or whatever. Let's go into soul guidance. Let's go into being directed by faith. Let's go into being directed from what's inside. Even with me right, from my inner circle, my highest level one-on-one mentoring, it's a reasonable investment to work with me at that level as I'm sure you can imagine. If you message me about it, I'll send you a full overview of what it is and what we do, and how it works. Obviously we'll go through cost details as well. But I'm not going to sit there and tell you some kind of, "Well here's the secret strategy that nobody gets to know until they come into my inner circle, right." I think I said your inner self, or I might've said your inner guidance, or intuition state, something along those lines. When I mentor my highest level clients, my role is not to provide some kind of step-by-step plan that was a secret before working with me at that level. My role is to connect with you on a soul level and to help you access more deeply what's inside of you. This is something that you can already do obviously yourself. Whether or not you decide to work with a mentor, whether it's me or not me, either way, you still have that ability yourself. Obviously it's powerful to have other people who are the alliance people for us to come in and support in that, and maybe help you to see things that you don't see, and kind of remind you of where you need to kick your ass or hold yourself to a level of accountability based on being that soul based version of you rather than a fear driven version of you. Either way and regardless, it is absolutely something that you have access to right now. Guess the big thing that I just wanted to come on today and do was to remind you of that. Remind you that you've got access to everything you need inside of you. You don't need to be out there on the internet, fucking Googling and trying to figure how to get somewhere. You also don't need to be looking for the perfect strategy or plan. The strategy, the plan, the blueprint is the one you are born with. That's what's up. That is what I want to remind you of today and that's really all. I could go on and on, but I've got a very important date with a very beautiful child of my own. So I'm going to go and do that. I'd urge you to dive inside of yourself, through your journaling, or through your months at work, maybe take a walk. Whatever you need to do or desire to do, and just ask, "What is my soul directing me to do today?" Honestly, I use this question any time I feel unsure about anything. Literally down to what I'm going to order off a menu. It's not like, like it's kind of an unconscious thing, or it just sort of happens in that moment, but I know that I always know what I need and what's right for each moment in my life. Whether it's something kind of little like that, or it's something that seems like a really big deal. Either way, I just allow myself to be intuitively guided. That is a big part of why my life has gone into such flow and ease, as well as receiving in epic and abundant way financially and through my business, and with all my soul mates and client, and people and so on and so forth. If that's something you want to know more about, and you feel that I might be the person to support or mentor you around that, message me about my inner circle, I'll get you the full overview and all the details. And do not forget, life is now, press play. Life is now, press play.

A bit of an experimental episode this week when I asked on the UTC Facebook page "Any pirates in SLO?" and Randy Moore and Brandon Harrison of the Northstar Penguins leapt to the challenge. :) And "Penguins" is not a typo.  They'll tell you the story. Usually I'm better prepared for an interview but went in cold on this one.  Turns out Brandon and Randy are great guys and we had a great talk sitting on the patio outside the Lexington Inn in SLO. And a guest co-host this week!  Comedian Laura Hayden sits in to learn about pirate festivals and now she wants to go to them.  Check out this video to see Laura in her natural comedic habitat. Under The Crossbones is a podcast all about pirate culture.  Your host Phil Johnson (comedian, musician, and pirate geek) interviews the most interesting people in the pirate subculture: Actors, Authors, Historians, Musicians, Artists, Festival Founders, Clothing and Prop Designers, Treasure Hunters, Archaeologists, and more. Be sure to also visit the MacKay Pirate Family's crowdfunding page to help them beat that nastiest enemy of all, cancer.  http://www.underthecrossbones.com/mackay Today's show is sponsored by: 30 Day Guitar Challenge - Learn 3 songs in 30 days with just 10 minutes of playing time per day!  Free to participate.  http://www.underthecrossbones.com/guitar TeePublic - This is a great company that works with independent tshirt artists to get their work out to the world and pay them fairly for it.  I've personally curated a selection of 100 really cool pirate tshirts that you'll love.  You'll get a super cool shirt AND support both the artist and Under The Crossbones!  Check out the selection at: http://www.underthecrossbones.com/shirt Pirate Radio of the Treasure Coast - The best in pirate talk and music! Get to listenin'!  http://www.PirateRadioOfTheTreasureCoast.com For videos, pictures, album links and more, be sure to click through to the full show notes.  http://www.UnderTheCrossbones.com/131   Important Websites:   Laura Hayden - http://www.LauraHayden.com   MacKay Pirate Family Crowdfunding to beat cancer - http://www.underthecrossbones.com/mackay  Find out more about my comedy, music, and tour dates at http://www.PhilJohnsonComedy.com Additional Show Notes: http://www.UnderTheCrossbones.com/131         Support the show!: http://www.UnderTheCrossbones.com/support    Subscribe to Under The Crossbones on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/under-crossbones-pirate-podcast/id1039621331?mt=2 Visit http://www.UnderTheCrossbones.com for all the episodes.     

On this episode, Wilco we’ll talk about the most important success factor in your business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:38: Have you ever bought a tool or a software or something like that and ended up never using it? 01:32: UpViral, Viral referral marketing platform. 01:44: What Dropbox did was if someone signed up to Dropbox they get everyone of their members to own their own unique invite link. 03:18: Brad Costanzo, added 3,000 subscribers within a couple of weeks using UpViral 04:06: Facebook community where people can actually discuss and brainstorm about how they are viral hacking their business. 04:38: 10,000 emails subscribers for three weeks using UpViral 06:15: What my point here is that usually it's not about the tools that we have. 08:03: The point is if you are selling a product to your customers and it doesn't really matter what it is, often it's not just about your actual product. 08:35: Do everything in your power to make sure that they are going to see all the value that you have in it. 09:26: Like showing case studies from others to first of all learn from so they can learn what others are doing. 09:28: Start seeing results from others so they believe it actually works. 10:14: If you sell something make sure, absolutely sure, that you do everything within your power to make your customers believe and know it actually works for them. Transcription: Hey, hey, it's Wilco de Kreij here back with you again. Today we're going to talk about something that I was really fascinated by over the last couple of days. Before I dive into today's episode, let me ask you a quick, quick question. Have you ever bought a tool or a software or something like that and ended up never using it? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. At least I hope I am. I think all of you can relate to that where you sometimes buy a piece of software, but for one reason or another you don't really use it, even though at the moment you purchased it, at the moment you actually entered your credit card details, you were sure this was going to help you solve problems, or this was going to help you get more results, or whatever your motivation was. You had some reason to buy it but you ended up never really using it. I probably got tons of tools that I've bought just for the sake of maybe I could use it and I end up never using it. I think a lot of people can relate to that. That's related to what I want to talk about today because as you probably know, if you're listening to my podcast, I am the founder of UpViral and UpViral is a viral referral marketing platform. We've been building it for years and it allows you to basically use the exact same model as what Dropbox did. What Dropbox did was if someone signed up to Dropbox they get everyone of their members to own their own unique invite link. All these people could literally invite their friends over with their own unique link and they would automatically keep track of who was signed up. They could literally say like, "Hey, every single time one of your friends signs up you will get extra storage into Dropbox." Dropbox is like a cloud based backup space, in case you're not familiar with that. That used them to grow tremendously. I'm 100% sure that if you know Dropbox you probably know about it because one of your friends sent it over to you. That's how powerful it is. That exact same model, that's what you can do with UpViral as well. You can do it in tons of different ways. You can run giveaways, for example you can say, "Hey, if," for example, "you get five of your friends to subscribe as well, then using your own UpViral link then they will get something of value." You can get for example a discount coupon or some other piece of value, a video, something that you're sending them, whatever it is. You can also use it to run contests. Anyway, this tool, this podcast is not here. I'm not here to pitch UpViral or anything like that. I just wanted to give you a rundown so the rest of this episode is going to make more sense. We've been doing that for a long time for a couple of years now. Officially we've been on the market for like one and a half years or so. Obviously, we've been building it before that time as well. We have thousands of people who are customers. What's funny is that last week, I think it was last week, we published a new blog post in which we interviewed one of our customers. His name is [Brad Costanzo . He launched a brand new coffee brand together with his wife and he used UpViral as a test to see how it all went. Within a couple of weeks he added 3,000 subscribers, email subscribers to his new brand new startup using an UpViral contest which is pretty awesome even though it's still a fairly small campaign. We interviewed him. We asked him a bunch of questions how he did it to send it over to our customers so they can learn from that as well. We published that on our blog. Coincidentally, we sent it out to all of our customers and just a few days later someone else in our Facebook group, we have a Facebook community where people can actually discuss and brainstorm about how they are viral hacking their business. I say viral hacking because that's how I summarize this process. Viral hacking means that you have this type of referral platform somewhere inside your business where people, if they sign up, you give them their own unique invite link so they will actually start promoting your business for you on your behalf. Someone who's also viral hacking, who's also using UpViral, he boasted in the Facebook group that he's been using UpViral for three weeks now and on his very first campaign he got well over 10,000 emails subscribers. I mean that's crazy. He started out with a Facebook fan page with 250 fans which let's be honest isn't that much. He boasted his results in the group. He said like, "Oh yeah, I've been using it first time ever about three weeks time and I've just collected well over 10,000 email subscribers." What's funny is that initially we sent out that case study to our customers by using an email. Then quite a few of our customers, that are inside that Facebook community, so they saw someone else also talk about what results they were having. Over the last couple of days, basically on our support desk we measure what kind of results we're getting or what kind of questions we're getting, how many, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last couple of days we see an immense spike in users who already had UpViral but they weren't necessarily doing it. They weren't necessarily using it. All of a sudden like, "Oh yeah, I want to start a new viral campaign as well," and they got all these questions to strategic or how should I do it best or things like that which is funny. All these people already had access to UpViral. They bought it at some point. They kept it and they didn't really take action, enough action. All of a sudden they see two case studies in a single week where other people are getting really great results using UpViral. All of a sudden they all start using UpViral. What my point here is that usually it's not about the tools that we have. I mean inside all of your businesses you have all kinds of tools that you're using, right? If I look at myself, obviously I use Facebook ads, I use Slack for communication, I use for my emails, I use UpViral for growth. I use all these things but usually it's not about what tools you have but it's about believing that these tools work. If you see other people are having results, if you see other people are saying like, "Yeah, this tool is awesome. I got this, this and this done with it," that's when you in your mind believe that that tool is actually what you need to use. My point here being is that we have all these things in our businesses. We gather information. We buy courses. We get coaching. We buy tools that we think could help us but all of these things don't really matter as long as we don't really believe it's going to work. If you buy a certain course that's going to help you using Facebook ads but if you don't really believe in Facebook ads, or you don't believe that Facebook ads course is actually showing you the right things, then it doesn't matter. You can look at it but if you don't believe it that those things are actually true or actually working really well, then you're not going to take action, right? It's the same thing with tools. If you don't really think or believe it's going to get you results then it's not going to work. My point here is not just saying like, "Oh yeah, we got some amazing cases that UpViral works," which by the way it does. We have people who've gathered hundreds of thousands of subscribers using UpViral which is I think pretty awesome. I'm happy with that but that's not the point here. The point is if you are selling a product to your customers and it doesn't really matter what it is, often it's not just about your actual product. It could be a piece of software for example. It could also be coaching or anything else. It's not just about the actual product. It's not just about the features that you have, but what might be even more important, is that you need to onboard your customers into believing that whatever you're selling works. Not just through the point on your sales page where you say, "Yeah, this is awesome and it works." Then they click the buy button and that's it. It only starts there. It only starts there. After that point don't just give them the product and that's it but actually do everything in your power to make sure that they are going to see all the value that you have in it. You don't do that just by saying like, "Oh yeah, we have this feature and we have this feature and you can do this with it and you can do that with it," but actually show other people who are having results using the product that you have. I think that's just super important. I mean for me as a super entrepreneur who's running multiple companies as service companies, that way of thinking is incredibly important. Usually I'm so focused on building new features because it's often easier to think that that's what's going to get our customers more and even more results. What I realize now is, especially this week, that it's not just about extra features but it's also about the education and just giving people the belief, the trust that it actually works, like showing case studies from others to first of all learn from so they can learn what others are doing. Secondly, start seeing results from others so they believe it actually works because only if they believe something works, they're going to go through the pain of implementing it, because no matter what you are selling, for example if it's a course, there is always a bit of quote, unquote, pain. They always need to spend time going through it and the only way they're actually going to do that is if they actually, actually believe that it's going to get them the results they want. That's pretty much it. What I just wanted to give you the quick punchline if you sell something make sure, absolutely sure, that you do everything within your power to make your customers believe and know it actually works for them, not just to the point of getting them to actually purchase your product, but especially after that. Send them even more. Send them case studies. Send them everything they need because once, even if it's just a one time purchase, the more they will start believing in that your product or you as a person or your brand or your business is the ultimate thing that they want and the ultimate thing that is going to get them results, the more, first of all, they're going to use it, but secondly the more they're going to talk about it with their friends. Like, "Ah, this is awesome and it works and it's amazing." That's what we are seeing right now. People are talking more and more about UpViral because, first of all, they're getting more results and also because they see other people who are getting results. I just want to share that real quick. I hope it's going to make sense to you all and I want to wish you all an awesome day. Bye, bye.  

Welcome to episode 322 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris. It's once again that time, real talk time. I want to talk about membership sites today because we passed our year anniversary of Hit the Mic Backstage a few months ago and I have spent probably almost the entirety of the second half and for sure the bulk so far of the fourth quarter this year all in on making my community better in every way I can, upgrading things, like the sales page, like the checkout system, the onboarding sequence, all of that stuff because of these lessons that I have learned. The three things I want to talk about today, the three lessons that I want to talk about today are the things that I feel I don't get enough conversation, enough highlighting. I think we talk a lot about tech and plugins and content even, but I don't know that we talk enough about these things, certainly before you launch. These are things that I don't think I really digested before I started and so I want to talk about them with you today and I would love to hear your thoughts. Of course if you're a member already, good for you. Don't tell the others, but you're my favorite. You can come over to the private community and talk to me about this there. If you're not a member yet, dude what's your deal? Head over to the Facebook page or even better, join the membership and come talk to us in the private community. That's going to be the best way to do it. All right? Let's jump in. Lesson number one, and this is just a good business lesson in general, even if you don't have a membership site or want to have a membership site. It's not for everyone. Nothing that you do in your business will be something that's a fit for every single person. If you launched a membership site and you're just not feeling it, that's okay. Just because this is the thing that a ton of people really love right now, I know that I launched in August of 2015 and by October I think I knew of like 9 billion people who were launching membership sites. It's been the thing of 2016 because everybody wants the ever-so-mythical recurring passive revenue, which by the way a membership site is not passive. It is recurring if you can keep members. It's not entirely passive. It is certainly more passive than a one-on-one is, but it's not as passive as say me selling on online program like I did with the Rock Star Guides. It's not for everyone. I happen to really love delivering value this way. I happen to really love connecting with my members. I really like being of service to the people I get to be of service with through Hit the Mic Backstage, but it's not for every business model. It doesn't make sense for everyone. It doesn't feel right for everyone, and guess what, guys? That's totally okay. If this is not for you, and you're like, "Well, everyone is doing it, and should I do it? Recurring revenue, rah, rah, rah. That would be great," but it just doesn't feel right, then don't do it, because you will never build the kick-ass program which you want to build if it's not aligned with you and how you best serve your audience. Don't force yourself into doing this. Okay? Promise? Look, I'm just going to assume you said promise, okay? Thank you. Number two, sort of in that same vein, it is impossible to make everyone happy. The upside to that is through knowing who your ideal members are or your ideal clients, you don't have to make everybody happy. You just have to make them happy. Caveat to that though, you'll still not make all of them happy all of the time. You'll book calls the wrong time, you'll have the wrong kind of community aspect. They'll want a Facebook group and you'll have a private forum. You'll have a Facebook group and they'll want a private forum. You'll do trainings twice a month and they want trainings once a week. There's always going to be something that somebody wants that's not there and that either you're not going to do or you haven't done yet. That's okay. This is your membership site. You get to decide. Sometimes you'll make decisions that are not overly popular. That's okay, too. Personally, I've been going through this with moving from the Facebook group to the private forum. There have been a couple of people who really wanted me to keep the Facebook group, but here's the deal. I know stuff. I know what I want my community to look and feel like, I know the experience I want my members to have, and I also know that I can't control that in Facebook. Facebook is already testing rollings ads to groups, meaning I could be having a fantastic conversation in my membership community about how I can best serve them with something and they could be seeing ads for some other membership site exactly like mine at the same time. Not exactly the experience we want to have. On the flip side, Facebook has also stopped delivering the group stuff just willy nilly. It's going through the same algorithm that paid stuff is going through now, so again, it's not necessarily getting into the news feed any better. I know that that's happening and I know that that's not what I want for a premium environment, meaning people pay to be a part of this membership site. One thing I should mention because I'm big on terms and conditions and you guys knowing, you cannot just sell a Facebook group. You can have a training library and a bonus as a Facebook group, but you cannot be making money on just having a Facebook group. It's against the terms and conditions so pay attention to that. Another reason not to worry about Facebook groups. I'm not saying Facebook groups are bad; I'm not saying they're not a fit, I'm just saying that there's a reason I made that change and I know that reason, so even through there is some pushback to having moved to a private community, I know it's long term what's best for my membership as a whole. I have, full transparency guys, I have lost members over moving. Only one or two, but I can't be everything to everyone. I have to do what's best for the whole and I have to do what's best for my business, so I made the move and I wish them the best, and I hope they come back, that'd be great, but if they find what they need someplace else that serves them in the way that way that they want to be served, then fantastic for them. Remember, you cannot make everyone happy all of the time. There will be times when you get pushback and there will be times when you have to trust your instincts. You have to trust your training and you have to trust that you're doing what's best for your business and for the membership as a whole. That's just the way it is. All right? The number three thing I want to wrap this episode up with, is that, and I kind of alluded to this earlier, this is not passive income. Yes, it's more passive in a sense that I'm working one to many and not one-to-one, I'm not trading hours for dollars, so my income is not capped in that way, but it's not passive. I don't just sit back and enjoy those PayPal ca-chings. I do enjoy the PayPal ca-chings, but I'm not sitting back usually. Usually I'm spending time making the community better whether it's upgrading the sales page or changing the checkout system or rewriting the onboard sequence or running ads or working on the marketing funnel that gets more members in or hell, even creating this podcast because it's a part of what grows the membership is people who listen to the show and want to upgrade the experience they have with the show to an even more direct line to me. And guess what guys? [inaudible 00:09:18]. Also, answering questions in the private community. Building trainings for the private community. Testing things so that I can teach it to the private community. One example is I have laid out in Q1 of 2017 what we're going to be learning in the community, and guess what, guys? All of that stuff, I'm testing those theories now on my stuff with some client stuff so that I can present that information to members during those trainings in January, February, and March of 2017. Yeah, that takes time. That's all I do anymore is work on this membership site. We do have a couple of one-on-one clients, we do have a couple of management clients, but that's not where I spend the bulk of my time. One-on-one is with me, but management is happening through some me, but mostly Charles and the team. I just oversee strategy now. Really, really, really, really paying attention to what it's going to take to keep it running. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see other membership people running memberships making is that they didn't realize how much work it was going to be all of the time. To be honest it's not a ton of work, it's leveraged work from the perspective of I'm not capping my income. I can work one to 100,000 if I wanted to, but it is a project that doesn't end. It's not "I built the course and now it's out there," so pay attention to that. Be ready for that. Just to recap, real quick, the three things I want you to know: It's not for everyone and that's okay. You can't make everyone happy all of the time and that's okay too. Real talk though, it is an ongoing project. It is never ending for as long as you have members to serve, you will be making improvements and changes and tweaks and making content and all of that for them, and that's cool, but know that because that might really feed into the first one. It might not be for you, and that's okay. All right? That's it. I would love to see you come join us at Hit the Mic Backstage. If you have more questions about running membership sites, I get really, really transparent in there. We talk about all of the tools I use. I answer questions all the time, so if you want to get some support in building your membership site, that's a great resource to get started with. More importantly, though, it will help you market you membership site. Getting clear on your social media so that you can actually sell people into it. That's going to be important. One other thing, if you really, really want to go all in on building a membership site, I actually would suggest another membership site as well, it's called Member Site Academy. I am a member; I am affiliate. I will include a link in the show notes page for this episode, but the membership guys are fantastic. If nothing else check out their podcast, but the Member Site Academy, their premium membership is killer. It's absolutely amazing, so check it out if you are all in. It actually pairs very well with Hit the Mic Backstage because you can learn all the membership site stuff there and then we, of course, dive deep on the social media side of things and backstage so you're really building your audience and marketing to them and getting members in the door.  Check out those resources and I will see you guys on Friday.   Resources Join us inside Hit the Mic Backstage Member Site Academy Connect with Me Connect with me on Facebook Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

In this episode, Milky tries to pitch the brand-new comic "The Adventures of Superpig." Maria reminisces on how her parents tried to substitute every major holiday figure with Jesus, while Milky explains how Jesus didn't believe in himself. Subscribe to us on iTunes HERE Pouch here. Usually I'm the straight man and/or foil to outrageous personalities like Jon or Eugene, but this time with Maria guesting, I had step it up and get ridiculous. Though I didn't quite reach quite caliber, Milky made sure to compensate for that lost absurd humor. As a result, it was fun playing the idiot to counterbalance Maria for a change. Check out our last DVD Load-Down, featuring El Movie Master. Please go Like the 76th Street Network Facebook page. Please check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Email, and leave a review on iTunes. Subscribe to us on YouTube. Intro/Outro: Jesus is a Friend of Mine - Sonseed. Sponsors and Friends Homo sayswhatticus by Lance Manion Artistic Awakenings Captain Cock Get a Load of This Dumbass Gets His Ass Stuck in High Chair Dude Fucks with Religious Folks by Trying to Sell His Spot in Heaven Superpig aka Chuck Norris Pig Florida Man is Stabbed because He Farted in His Girlfriend's Face Shit We Mentioned For more details on the topics discussed in this episode, visit the official Dropping Loads Blog.