Hey, hey there. Welcome to the Bold Money Revolution, and we are here today with Lisa Carpenter, who is a friend and a client of mine, and we are going to be diving deep into her business transformation story.
So, if you have ever thought, “Man, I just want to burn it all down,” this one is going to be for you because we did burn it down, Lisa.
Lisa:
We burned it down.
Tara:
We burned the fucker down.
Lisa:
It’s going to be that kind of podcast, is it? So, buckle up, people, because this is going to be real and raw and share all the behind the scenes deets.
Tara:
Right, which is exactly why I wanted to have Lisa with us today because she does such a great job at verbally processing and allowing people to witness her journey in a way that I think makes it very relatable for those of you who might be like Lisa, who might be ready to burn it down or at least make some big shifts and pivots.
Tara:
I think, really, there are a few takeaways here for me that I just want to tee up before we even get started in the sense that it will take as long as it will take and there is no there. So, if you’re wondering like, “When is this going to happen for me? When is it just going to pop?” we’re going to talk about that today.
Also, there is the messiness of unbecoming on your way to becoming who you are stepping in to. I think Lisa does a great job at sharing her messy bits, which I appreciate. Really, also, this whole concept around burning it down, it’s become a cliché. However, and I do not advocate for anybody on their own burning their business down. I’d like to just say don’t do this at home, friends. Lisa was guided and supported the entire time that she was making these really big decisions, but there is destruction before creation. There is death and die off and follow periods before you step into that thing that you are creating, and I think this is also a bit about that story.
Now, there is a transformational. There are maybe a few transformational times in my work with Lisa and I want to share one of them, and then we’re going to talk about what it looked like before, and then what it looked like after. One of the big pivotal moments was October 2018. Lisa was sitting on my couch, my actual couch in my home. She had come to New York. She was visiting. That is where we co-conspired and shook hands and agreed to stand shoulder to shoulder as she burned down her business.
Now, we had been working together for probably almost a year before that, six months, a year. I don’t really remember exactly. Can you help people understand where you were before 2018 and what led you to making that decision?
Lisa:
You’re asking me to take this really long story and shorten it. I think we’d actually been working together quite a long time before that. I had come into the fold. So, it’s interesting because I believe … So, I’m horrible with dates, but I believe it was in late 2017 that I rebranded, and then immediately after my rebrand, I was like, “I don’t understand my message.”
Literally, I had written the words, I had stepped into this message of full-frontal living, I understood what it meant, and then I immediately went into this place of I don’t understand my message. That then kicked off I guess until I was really on your couch, this period of I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know who I’m talking to, wanting to stay attached to my old messaging and my old way of doing business, and programs that I used to sell, and not 100% stepping into what I knew was possible for me, but I didn’t believe it. So, I think that that’s where we’d gotten to.
Tara:
Can we back this up just a hair cue because Lisa has been a business owner for a very long time.
Lisa:
Yeah, like two decades now.
Tara:
Yeah. She owned a fitness studio. So, she had a brick and mortar business, and then we met in 2015, and you were … Where were you in bringing your business online in 2015?
Lisa:
Oh, my gosh! Where was I then? I think I was still promoting my program EAT at the time.
Tara:
You were. You were promoting that for a while after as well.
Lisa:
Yeah. So, I was really speaking to trying to support women changing how they were feeding themselves. So, I was really trying to grow following that launch, the launch model. That’s really what I was trying to do, make all the money by selling to mass amounts of people, but really, all I was doing was spending mass amounts of money-
Tara:
I was going to ask you.
Lisa:
… and getting more and more and more frustrated and upset. Honestly, I was so looped into my story of struggle and survival I didn’t even realize that that was really what was anchoring a lot of my decisions. I actually didn’t know how to thrive. So, I kept myself in this, “How can I keep making it hard?”
Tara:
I think you confessed to us that you had taken almost every … In the mastermind, you confessed to everyone, you shared so beautifully that you had taken almost every person’s course.
Lisa:
Yes. First, it was Brendon Burchard. That was my first. He was my gateway drug. It’s only $2,000, which at the time was a lot of money. Then it opened up into Marie Forleo’s B-School, and I’m not knocking any of these programs, but then Marie Forleo’s B-School led to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. So, if there’s a digital course there, I have it. You name it, and I had the debt.
Tara:
To the tune of?
Lisa:
Yeah. I had the debt to prove it. Yeah. I probably racked up growing my business probably close to $80,000+ worth of debt.
Tara:
Wow!
Lisa:
It’s a lot.
Tara:
It’s a lot. So, I think by the time you landed on my doorstep, you were really exhausted from all the courses, trying to do all the things the way everybody told you to do them, and to do them perfectly, and it was costing you a lot of time, and it was costing you a lot of money, and it was costing you a lot of energy, and it was costing you a lot of sanity.
Lisa:
Yeah. My resiliency was at an all-time low. So, for most of life, I subscribed to that if you just work hard enough, you’ll get the results that you want. So, I just kept trying, working harder, and doing more things, but it never really got me to where I wanted to be. In fact, I was feeling so crushed by it all. I was in that story of like, “What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I get this? I’m a great coach. What I’m selling is valuable,” but it wasn’t working for me.
It didn’t matter how many times I tried. It was like the universe kept saying to me, “Lisa, stop it,” and I was like, “No, no. Let me just try one more time. Maybe this will be the time that gets me over the edge.”
I had to get to the place where I was willing to let it all go, and I remember the decision to … I had written my book by this time, which, again, pulled me back to the shore of doing the old things that I’ve been doing because maybe if I write a book that will save me and save my business.
Tara:
Right. All the strategies that you see promoted.
Lisa:
Right. I’m proud of the book. It’s great. It’s doing a lot of great work there out in the world, but the book, the purpose behind the book was to tie that part of my work out with a bow, release it to the world in a different way, but what I actually allowed it to do was pull me back to, “Oh, maybe I should still be doing this,” instead of writing it and then letting it be my work that floats around out there in the world.
So, I remember when I got to the place of closing down my course, deciding I was never going to launch it again, letting go of … Gosh! We sent an email out to my list saying, “I’m deleting you.” Was that bold? “I’m deleting you.” Letting everybody know how I was going to be working with people, really stepping into deciding just to do one-to-one work, and we can talk about how we got there. Then I deleted thousands of people off my list, bye, to open up space for the new to come in.
Tara:
So, I actually think the book was really a valuable part of your process because I think when it came time to … because a book doesn’t make you money, a book is a marketing tool in a lot of cases, right? So, the book is meant to drive people to a course or a membership or a small something that they buy. So, everybody who buys the book is then supposed to go and buy this course or resource. I think you were having so much dissonance around driving them to something, and I think that was really clarifying for you.
Lisa:
It was. I’d spent years of my career building up this program EAT. It was so hard for me to just let it go, and I’m sure many of your listeners might feel the same way. It’s like you’ve put so much time and energy and effort, but we have to often let things go, but we are attached to them because of the time, the energy, and the effort we’ve put behind them. So, in writing the book, it was meant to be, yeah, that way to bring people over to my community. It still didn’t really work that way for me.
Tara:
I don’t think you wanted it to work that way.
Lisa:
I didn’t, really. I mean, when I-
Tara:
Let’s be honest.
Lisa:
I really did write it as a way of putting a big red bow up on this part of my work and then releasing it. I really did write it with that intention, but I think, unconsciously, my fear just pulled me back to, “Well, now, I’ve written this. Maybe I should try again.” I didn’t get it all to work, but it was never going to work. It’s not that the course isn’t good. It’s not that it’s not solid information. It still lives in my ecosystem, but I had to let go of my attachment to the belief that that was the thing that was going to create my success. When I was no longer attached to that course, that program, those years of my work-
Tara:
The women who would buy it.
Lisa:
The women who would buy it, that being the way that I was going to reach success as I had defined it in the past. Just so your listeners are clear, my definition of success was the money in the bank.
Tara:
Million dollars.
Lisa:
Million dollars. Now, my definition of success is very, very different. I was really allowing my belief about what money meant to derive the decisions that I was making in my business.
Tara:
What happened when you let go of giving money meaning?
Lisa:
Oh, so much, so much.
Tara:
So much actual money.
Lisa:
So much actual money.
Tara:
That was really that point, so much actual money.
Lisa:
So much actual money. Let’s be clear here. As all the stuff is going on in my business, I was also doing a significant amount of work around my beliefs around money and not just my unconscious beliefs, but I was also very much taking responsibility for my behaviors. So, it’s great to shift our energy behind money, but I also had to look at how I was showing up for my money, and I love that you always say that you’re a great steward of your money, and that was something I really took onboard like, “Am I actually being a good steward of my money? Am I being respectful of my money? Is my business actually set up to receive money?”
So, here I am saying, “I want to make all this money,” but I didn’t have the capacity to receive all that money energetically or with my system. I didn’t trust myself with money, and I’m still … I mean, I’m handling a lot more money now than I ever have, and I still have to have conversations with you around, “Okay. How do I take this to the next level?”
There was a point, you’ll laugh at this, where a spreadsheet around money would literally send me screaming from the room. Now, I’m like, “Let me just check my spreadsheet.” There’s-
Tara:
Well, let’s talk about that.
Lisa:
That spreadsheet brings me so much joy now because now I can see what’s happening in my business.
Tara:
Let’s talk about what it was like being on a coaching call with you.
Lisa:
Pretty much I think every time Tara had to bite her tongue to not fire me. I was a very resistant client. Many of the women that I work with are highly resistant, too. I had so much resistance around this because there were so many stories that I was working from.
Tara:
So, you say resistance, and I appreciate that you say resistance because that is certainly what it felt like. It was very heavy having these conversations. Sometimes it was near impossible to be-
Lisa:
I was very attached to my struggle, Tara.
Tara:
I know you were. You don’t have to prove that to me. I was there. I have the trauma-
Lisa:
Right. I know. You got the trauma scars from it.
Tara:
I have the trauma scars.
Lisa:
I have literally single-handedly prepared Tara to step into even greater leadership by coaching me.
Tara:
It was my initiation.
Lisa:
Right, your initiation. I’m saying that because I think so often we don’t recognize that the thing that we don’t want is the one thing that we’re really focusing on, and I was so focused on the struggle, and I didn’t realize that being so focused on the struggle, that was keeping me in the struggle was the think part of it.
Tara:
I think, too, there was a part of you that was very … I don’t know what the word is, allured by, brainwashed by what you were seeing happening in the online space, and you were very attached to your success looking like the success of one of these web celebs or something like that. Not that you were comparing or copying or any of those things, but that was something that was really appealing to you, and you wanted it to happen that way.
Lisa:
Yeah. I was being sold the dream, and I wanted the dream because if I have the dream, then my suffering would be ended.
Tara:
Yeah, and I don’t buy into the dream.
Lisa:
Right. When I moved my business online, prior to moving my business online, which I think has been about six or seven years now that I moved my business online, I never questioned business. I just did what I did. I was very unconscious to a lot of things that were going on, had no idea about coaches or even running a business. I just did what I did and grew my business.
When I moved my business online, it was all these stories of, “Well, you just create a course, and then you do the thing, and then you’re going to make all the money.” That may be the path for some people, but that was not the path that was meant for me, but I really fought that because I wanted that to be my path. I wanted to get there as fast as I could, but, again, that just wasn’t meant to be my path.
Then it wasn’t until I was willing to just explore, “What if there’s another option? What if there’s another way that things really change for me?”
Tara:
Yeah, and I think one of the primary things that you would show up to our coaching calls with was shame.
Lisa:
Oh, all the shame. Yes.
Tara:
All the shame, and I feel like we literally sat in your shame. It was just a place for you to come to and feel shame until you were ready to not feel that shame anymore, and then you could take those steps forward. I think that that’s very common because I just want to really call attention to something that you said just so we can have a call out, that you had a business that was not online, you brought your business online, and I’m going to be cheeky about this, you got dumb, right?
You knew how to run your business. You operated from intuition. Everything was always fine. You always made money. Was it perfect? No, but things moved forward and there was momentum. Then you came online and you tried to do it this way, and you tried to do it that way, and I’ll say those tactics work. Strategies work, right? Some of those tactics really do work, but there’s also an order of operations in order for them to work. We can into that in a little bit, but you forgot who you were. You forgot that you had intuition.
For you, because you just said spreadsheets would make you cry, right? I know that you believe in data because you are a competitive athlete, and that’s okay that you believe in data there, but data in your business was hard, and you’re way more intuitive than you are data driven in your business. I think your business is a place where you like to be creative and explore and be expressed, and that’s fine, but you are stifling that part of you by trying to follow all these other plans.
Lisa:
Yeah, and because as you said, I was so deep in my own shame, shame of not being good enough, shame around my money, right? My shame around my money was what was driving so many of the decisions that I was making instead of just taking responsibility for my money and, again, not giving it so much power. Oh.
Tara:
You would get so mad at me.
Lisa:
I would get so mad at you because I would want you to just-
Tara:
Tell you what to do.
Lisa:
That part of me, right? So, this is where my victim would show up. Just save me. Just tell me what to do, Tara. Tell me what to do because I didn’t trust myself to do the right thing, and I didn’t believe that I’d … My resilience was so low at that point I didn’t trust myself anymore to make decisions in my business. So, I didn’t see a way out. I didn’t see a way out.
I was just so hard on myself for everything, but I had to come back to that place of knowing that I could trust myself and that I could do this. So, that burning down phase was a really big part of it, and then our trip to Tulum was really when I just let everything go.
Tara:
So, in October, you came to New York, and I don’t remember how you said it or what you said, but you were like, “I’m done. All I want to do is I love coaching one-on-one. All I want to do is coach people one-on-one. Can I coach people one-on-one and make great money?” and I said, “Yes. You could make your most profitable money doing what you love without a doubt.”
Lisa:
Yeah. So, then we went to work around, “Well, how do we do that?” It was literally starting from scratch, “Well, how do I do that?”
Tara:
Right. What we said was we were going to position you as this really high caliber coach-
Lisa:
… which I am.
Tara:
… which you are for a very specific kind of woman. So, you had been very also not attached to the money, but attached to the type of women who you had been working within the past, who were not the right women for you to work with anymore. That’s grief. I think that anybody who has outgrown their ideal client in the past understands that grief and that feeling like you’re disappointing people or leaving people behind or any of those things, but you are really just stepping into your highest level of leadership.
Lisa:
That’s true because when we made the decision that I was really going to purge my list, there was a huge period of grief because I had built a significant business and following working with this specific type of woman, but my growth had reached this place where I can no longer really meet them where they were at. I could no longer really meet them where they were at.
The more I stepped into my own power, so to speak, I really couldn’t be available for people who wanted to stay in a place of being a victim. When you’re working in the … I was working basically in the weight loss industry, so to speak, helping women transform their bodies with their nutrition, there are a lot of women, just like I was really attached to my suffering with money, there are a lot of women who are really attached to their suffering around their weight and weight loss.
You can’t save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved. You can’t save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved. You couldn’t save me from my own misery. You could hold space, and thank goodness that you continue to do that through some of the really tough times, but letting go of those people I felt like I was letting them down. I thought, “Who am I to just let these people go?” What I also realized is in letting them go I was giving them the opportunity to find their next coach or their next mentor.
There’s somebody else out there in the world who is ready to receive them and take them on their next leg of their journey, and I also knew that it would allow me to really step into working with the women that I wanted to work with who were truly ready to take responsibility for their physical and emotional wellbeing because it really isn’t about food or your weight. I talk about those things as just being a symptom, but it was a really big deal for me to send those emails. It was very, I mean, I even went through my hard paper files and deleted things, and throw a garbage bag full of years of work and PDFs and all the things because I needed to burn the boat, right? I needed to stay of the course of this is who I’m here to work with, this is how I want to work, this is the type of women that I’m calling in, and by doing that, that’s what I created, but we should probably talk about my sales journey.
Tara:
Right. So, that was my next thing because … So, we burnt it down.
Lisa:
Burnt it down.
Tara:
We got clarity. We made commitment. We made a decision, and then you’re like, “Tara, I need money. I need to bring in income.”
Lisa:
Because by this point, I’ve been swimming in the I don’t know what I’m doing for so long. I had killed all revenue to reach the bottom.
Tara:
I’m not sure if I had ever met a worst salesperson than Lisa Carpenter, who insisted upon breaking the cardinal rule of sales calls on every sales call. The cardinal rule on sales calls is don’t coach on the call. You coach on a call, but it just looks very different on a sales call. Lisa would just want to coach people so they would wind up in this one hour coaching session with her. They’d have their problems solved. They’d be great. It was for free. We were not enrolling any clients.
So, I was like, “She needs to hear this from somebody else.” So, I had a consultant come on and the consultant and I did a call with Lisa around holding a discovery call, a sales call. Lisa went off and step-by-step tried to implement, and it just didn’t fit. It just didn’t fit you, period.
Lisa:
I went off with this like, “I’m going to make sales my bitch. I’m going to do this.” I did a lot of sales calls.
Tara:
You did.
Lisa:
I’m really like, I said, “I’m going to do sales calls and I’m really going to learn how to do this. I’m going to master this. I’m going to be with the discomfort. I’m going to master this,” and I hated every moment of it. Nothing felt good about it.
Tara:
So did I.
Lisa:
Right, and so did you. Now, I will say that my sales has come a long way since then. I’m way more comfortable on sales calls now, but I choose, I’m going to be clear about this, I choose not to have sales calls anymore. I just don’t do them, period, end of story, because why? Well, one, I don’t like them. Two, I want to get on a call and that time and that energy I want to serve the person on the call.
So, to get on a call with me now, you have to pay to get on a call with me. It’s a coaching call. I’m going to coach you. At the end of that hour, you’re going to walk away. You will have had skin in the game because you’ve paid for the call. So, you’re actually going to honor the transformation you have on the call, which, by the way, if people aren’t paying you for your time and you’re solving their problems, you’re not actually helping them, you’re perpetuating their suffering.
Whereas when you pay for something, you value it. You take much better care of it. You’re like, “Wow! That really landed.” So, you have to pay to get on a call with me now, and they’re a coaching call. If I feel in alignment with that person and I believe that I can support them in really getting to where they want to go and I’ve been doing this work for long enough now that I know what’s involved in it, then I will invite them to continue on that journey with me and they can apply that first coaching call towards a bigger package, but I am no longer available to do any type of unpaid “sales calls”.
So, this, for me, just feels so easy and so in alignment because I can’t even describe it. It feels like a fair energetic exchange. I’m not attached to whether or not somebody carries on, whether they accept my invitation to work with me or not. I don’t extend that invitation to everybody, which also makes me feel very boss because I know like, “Oh, I don’t want to work with that person again. They got what they needed from that session. I don’t feel that resonance with them where I’m the right coach for them right now.”
So, it’s not about just get everybody on to these paid sales calls, but they’re coaching calls, to invite everybody. That’s not the way it is for me. So, that really transformed my business. I didn’t even realize that I was setting up a sales system because that’s not how I intended it. It really just started out as, “Screw this! I’m just going to do paid coaching calls, and people can work with me in a one-off and I’m unattached. I’m going to give people a way to pay me.”
Tara:
What we do a lot of, you and I, is it will take you probably six months to start seeing traction from when you burned things down and then when you went with this new way of having sales calls. It took you probably about six months to start seeing traction. Then I would get a message from you and you’d be like, “It worked. I got a new client, and this, that, and the other thing,” and I would repeat back to you reminding you that this wasn’t happenstance, that over the last six, nine, 12 months, here are all the steps that you followed that created a repeatable system and process for you to continue to use in your business.
Lisa:
Yeah. At the time, when I started this, too, because these are not like, “Get on a call with me for $150,” this hour, it’s not for everybody. It’s not for everybody. At the time, nobody was really doing this, but with your support, I had the courage to just say, “Well, I’ve got nothing to lose, and this is how I want to value my time. This is the dollar price that I’m going to put against my time. This is what I’m going to step in to.”
I had no idea if it was going to “work”. I just knew that if I was getting on a call with somebody, I knew the transformation that I could create in that hour and I knew the value that I wanted to put on it, and I was just like, “Otherwise, this is …” Yeah. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was just an intuitive, “This is the number we’re going to use.”
Tara:
Yeah. So, I think there are two key takeaways here. There’s one around your sales strategy and business model should be as unique as your fingerprint, right? You’re not the only person who I work with that has a very unique way of selling. People who are buying into this seductive idea of click to buy, that’s not actually a sales system, that’s not actually a sales process that they’re teaching you in the online space.
You can sit around and wait for people to click to buy all you want, but I don’t advise it. So, we were able to look at a very unique way that felt good to you, that helped you create and step into this sales process. Then the other thing is, what are you willing to risk? So, if it’s not working-
Lisa:
Yeah, nothing was working.
Tara:
Right? If it wasn’t working, what are you willing to risk? Why are you holding on to something that isn’t working? So, we were able to really take and make that leap and say, “Let’s test it.”
Lisa:
Yeah, and I’m so glad we did it.
Tara:
“We’re not getting results now, so what’s the worst that can happen?”
Lisa:
No. I even remember I’ve talked about this before on another colleague’s podcast around I even had a mentor say to me, “Lisa, you could be running group programs.” I said, “Yes, I could,” and I’m choosing not to because I was so done with the chasing, trying to sell group programs as a way to generate revenue, and all I wanted was to create stable revenue, so that I could make decisions in my business from an empowered place as opposed to, “What do I have to do right now to make this work?”
I wanted to put money in the bank so that I could hire my team, so that I could get the support that I needed, so I can make decisions from a place of expansion as opposed to scarcity and lack or freaking out. At the point where we had, I think it was about June of last year, I had let most of my team go. I had really scaled everything back and just said, “I need to do this on my own. I need to make the bold decisions to stop paying for X, Y, and Z.”
Tara:
Yeah. I was going to say that when you made the decision in October, you even started removing yourself from programs that you had paid for. You were supposed to be at events that you said no to. You started really pulling yourself out of all the noise, so that you can hear yourself and what you wanted and be in alignment. Oh, gosh! Remember those conversations around alignment?
Lisa:
Oh, my God! I’m like, “What does that even mean?” I always felt like I was in alignment, but now I understand. I was so in soup of listening to everybody else, and the thing is I would listen to everybody else and these are people that I respected, and I still respect them, that’s their path, but every time I listen to them and disconnected from my own intuition, it sent me back into my shame of, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do it this way?”
The more I was in shame, the more I would struggle. The more I would struggle, the more I would perpetuate more of what I didn’t want to have happen. It was really hard to leave groups in places because there was that part that I had to overcome that felt like I was giving up, but I wasn’t giving up. It was about I had to be able to hear my own voice.
So, the end of 2019 and going into 2020, so mid 2019 into 2020 was really about me putting blinders on and saying, “This is the only thing I’m doing. This is the only thing I’m focusing on,” and that was so not easy for me.
Tara:
So, before we get there, we then went on a retreat.
Lisa:
Yes.
Tara:
I promise everybody listening to this who wants to go on retreat, I am taking you all on retreat, I promise. As soon as we can travel again, Tara is going to be hosting all the retreats because that’s what COVID has taught me that I miss leading and hosting retreats, but the taxi ride down Tulum beach road to the retreat.
Lisa:
You really want me to cry, right? I remember you saying to me, “Lisa,” because I was just in such disbelief and awe. We had had the pleasure of spending a couple of days together before the retreat started. So, we’re driving there together and you looked at me and you’re like, “I didn’t give this to you, Lisa. I didn’t give this to you.”
Tara:
Yeah. You were deflecting what was happening, which is common. I’ve had a client say to me once. She called me and she was like all about her wins. Then she’s like, “You know what? It just happened like magic.”
I’m like, “No. It’s not magic. You actually have taken actions that have led to this point.” I love magic. I want to believe in magic, too, right? I also don’t want to bypass the things that I actually had control over, and took action on that brought these things to me. It was like you were having this moment where you were having a hard time receiving what you created.
Lisa:
Yeah. To recognize that I had made the investment in the mastermind, I had created that experience for myself. So, you had curated the experience. You did all the bookings. You made everything, but I had made the decision to step into that container and I completely wanted to defer that.
Tara:
I was holding your hand. We were holding hands, and I said, “You created this, Lisa. You created this. You chose this.”
Lisa:
Yeah. It still takes my breath away because last year, in that mastermind, oh, most days, it was so hard for me to show up in that container because I felt like everybody was crushing it and I was getting crushed. I was like, “What am I doing in this room with these women? Literally, my life is on fire. My business is on fire. What am I doing here?”
That was really profound. There was still resistance there. I remember you’re like, “We’re going to do visioning today.” I was like, “FU and your visioning. I’m going to be-“
Tara:
Oh, well, we were in Tulum.
Lisa:
Yes.
Tara:
Did you partner with Stacey on that?
Lisa:
Oh, yes, yes.
Tara:
I don’t think she’s forgiven me yet.
Lisa:
Poor Stacey. I was like, “I’m not doing visioning,” because, again, my resiliency was I was just so … I don’t want to dream. Just tell me what the next step is. That’s all I could see. I couldn’t even see the bigger dream, but that trip in Tulum, I spent a lot of time in the water. I spent a lot of time-
Tara:
You had your coaching session with me in the water.
Lisa:
We did. We went in the water to coach. I remember standing there one morning phasing out, and just I had my hands in the air, and I was just like … I know this sounds like I come to Jesus moment, but I really had that moment of, “I’m done. Take it all. When I leave here, I’m leaving everything, every misstep, every … It doesn’t matter what I did in the past. None of it matters. I am starting with a clean slate. My business is brand new. What do you want, Lisa? What do you need to clean up? What do you want to step in to? Stop with the bullshit around. You don’t know how to dream. Stop with you’re not capable. Look at where you are. Look at the experience that you’re giving yourself. You can have whatever you want, but you have to let go of the …”
This is the conversation with myself was I had to let go of the attachment that I’d had to everything in the past. I had to really make the decision that I was going to go home and I was going to be committed to building a thriving practice even though I didn’t know what that look like, even though I wasn’t sure how it was going to unfold or when it was going to happen.
One of the biggest things that shifted for me in Tulum is we decided to set a goal for me that had nothing to do with making money or getting clients. We’ve decided to focus on setting up quarter goals that were simply process-oriented. At that time, it was how can I change my onboarding process for new clients so it would feel really luxurious and expensive. So, I came home and set to work on that and just focused on those one-to-one, those single session coaching calls, and doing my podcast, and that was it.
Tara:
You also set another goal.
Lisa:
Are we talking about my relationship?
Tara:
No. Actually, I was talking about your goal to get on stage.
Lisa:
Oh, yes, that goal, that goal that’s still hanging out there in the breeze.
Tara:
You said … Do you remember how this went in the mastermind circle? This has nothing to do with business or something like that.
Lisa:
Oh, my God! Yes, yes. I’ve done this before. It’s not going to be that big of a deal, and I completely got my ass handed to me. So, in Tulum is where my fitness coach, her studio is, and when we had gone down to Tulum, I wasn’t working with her at the time, but I booked a single session to go in and learn from her, and pretty much got my ass handed to me and decided, “Okay. I’m going to start working with her.”
That was in. So, I made the decision that I was going to do that. When she opened up registration for her program, that’s when I jumped in. That was so powerful for me because there’s that saying, “How you do one thing is how you do all things,” and I’ve always been physically active in training and all that kind of stuff, but to go back to the dedication and the systematized way you approach training when you’re going to compete was so beneficial for allowing me to see what I wasn’t doing in my business because in the gym, I have to look at the data. I have to follow the plan. It literally is a chop wood carry water. It’s very, very boring. Go in, do your workout, try and progress every week when you do this specific workout, and things will change, but you can’t touch it, you can’t feel it. Then I’d look at my business and think-
Tara:
Business is the same way.
Lisa:
I’m not doing any of that in my business. I’m not tracking any metrics. So, I’d stomp my feet that nothing was growing. Yet, I wasn’t watching any data to see if anything was changing. I wasn’t tracking any numbers. I wasn’t-
Tara:
It wasn’t just because I feel like I need to defend my coaching. It was not for lack of me trying to get to focus on data.
Lisa:
It wasn’t. I had so much resistance around it because in my business, I made it mean something. Again, I was so attached to that story of I’m not good enough and I’m getting it wrong. The difference is when I go in the gym, I’ve never felt like I’m getting it wrong in the gym. The gym is the one place where I feel like, “Get the hell out of my way. I got this. Anything is possible.”
You can’t put limitations on me in the gym, which is amazing, but in my business, I worked from a tremendous amount of limitations because I didn’t believe in myself from years of getting my ass handed to me at my own hand.
Tara:
So, I think one of the … because I remember when you’re saying, “This isn’t going to have an impact on my business,” and all the women in the mastermind being like, “Are you crazy, Lisa? This is going to have the biggest, most dramatic impact on your business,” or however they phrased it.
Would you say that you were able to then transfer the confidence from being in the gym more and having not to focus on and seeing those results of being comfortable there to your business, and did that give you more confidence in your business then?
Lisa:
It helped shift my attention away from my business being everything and for so many years because I was trying to make so much happen. My business was everything. So, it gave me something to look at outside of my business. It allowed me to really look at, “Well, I don’t make the data …” Sorry, the garbage recycle truck is outside. “I don’t make the data in the gym mean anything, whether it’s the weight on the scale, the number on the measuring tape, how much I’m lifting. It’s simply just record the data and track your progress.”
I needed to transfer that over into my business. So, being back in the gym and watching how I was tracking data and being very, very neutral about it, and then I looked at my business and thought, “Well, no data in my business is neutral. It all means something, which is why I’m not tracking it. So, I’m just going to not track it to avoid it, so I’m not triggered, but I needed to see it in order to see that I was progressing.”
Tara:
I actually want to say that I agree with that. So, if you are very confronted by your information in your business and you can’t go look at your bank account or your podcast downloads or your email metrics or whatever without having some confronting feeling attached to it, I would step away from it for a while, and then work on what you’re making those things mean, so you can step back into looking at those things with no attachment and no confrontation.
Lisa:
Yeah. So, instead of being all up in my money stuff, I just started tracking. How I tracked it in the beginning was I’m just going to track the revenue booked because that made me feel awesome, not banked, but booked. So, I started tracking the revenue booked, which was really cool for me because they were much larger numbers.
I started tracking how many new followers I had on Instagram, but I didn’t make it mean anything. If it was five, I was like, “I got five new people,” and I’d be excited about it because guess what? In the gym-
Tara:
Oh, my gosh! We had to have a lot of conversations around one is better than none, and then you’re like, “Nobody reaches. Nobody engages. Nobody’s reaching out to me.” I’m like, “They are, Lisa. You’re just not receiving it.”
Lisa:
Well, and that was a big part of it, right? Getting me my journal and actually looking at, “Are you keeping track of these things? You’re whining about that this isn’t happening, but am I actually going out and looking for proof?”
So, I start to look for proof that people were engaging with me. I started looking for proof that people cared about what I had to say. I started looking for proof of all the things I wanted because I was so committed to looking for the evidence that nothing was happening because, again, really attached to the whole struggle.
So, neutralizing my data, carrying that thought over from the gym and my food and all of that stuff being neutral, and realizing that I needed to make it completely neutral in my business was really powerful because then I got to see like, “Oh, my God! Things are happening.” Even if I wanted to go back into that old story of nothing’s happening, I could look at the data and say, “Lisa, pull your head out of your ass. Stop perpetuating this story that’s not true.”
That is so much a part of this work is you have to be so committed to flipping your stories and really looking for what you do want as opposed to what you don’t want. I was so attached to what I didn’t want.
Tara:
Yeah. Even last year at the retreat in December, I remember you being in your room for a while. You couldn’t even come down and be with everybody. I think I put your hot seat on the last day because I just knew you needed space. It’s a big year.
Lisa:
I couldn’t even … The pause to reflect on what I had accomplished in basically from let’s say May of 2019 to, when did we meet? November? December of 2020.
Tara:
December.
Lisa:
It was so profound for me. I couldn’t even-
Tara:
Seven months.
Lisa:
I couldn’t even speak about it because people would say all the time that things can happen really quickly, and I never believed them. When I had to sit back and really allow myself to see what I had done in a short amount of time, it was so overwhelming because I basically had taken my business from no revenue to multiple six figures, a full client load. I had gone back and launched a small group program with … I can’t even begin to say how much ease because I didn’t know the way other people launch.
Tara:
So, this is how fast. So, in October 2018, you said we’re just cutting it down to one-on-one right now, and we knew there might be other ways to work with you in the future, but this was more of a forcing focus. We needed to force your focus because you’re chasing multiple rabbits a lot of the time. It just wasn’t a great use of your energy or your attention or your effort.
So, we cut it down to one-on-one in October 2018. Then by the summer of 2019, so not even a full year later, you were really booked with your one-on-ones and you decided that you had the time and the energy and the focus to put in to launching a small group program.
Lisa:
Yeah, and it went smashingly well.
Tara:
So, flash forward now to this year, you have piles of money. You had piles of money in the bank. You were really letting it build up. That was important to you because you needed to know what it felt like to hold on to money as somebody who had been a debtor in the past and really working on those money behaviors. We needed a little hoarding to happen. We also needed to build you up a little cushion, and then you decided to go and buy your dream car.
Lisa:
I did, a car that I’d been holding arm’s length. Again, you’ve probably heard me talk about this car for years. I decided to go buy my car, and I paid for it in full, in cash.
Tara:
In cash, right.
Lisa:
The money was back in my bank account by the end of the week.
Tara:
Then you were thinking about buying a house, but I thought you made a great … You had reasons why you wound up not buying it, but you could have.
Lisa:
Could have bought it, yup.
Tara:
Could have bought it. Then you had a really big launch.
Lisa:
Yeah. This was my biggest launch ever. I don’t do traditional launch models because-
Tara:
Because we don’t. That’s not what we do here.
Lisa:
We don’t, what we do here. I’m 100% committed to ease. It’s not that I’m against doing hard things. I do hard things, but understand hard things for me are staying focused. This past year of growing my business and saying like, “These are the five things that I’m going to do every single day, chop wood, carry water,” like you say building a business is really boring. It’s doing the ordinary things extraordinarily well. That’s hard for me, over and over. That’s the hard thing.
What I’m not available for is making things feel hard when they don’t need to be. So, this launch that I did, we grow a wait list, and then we launched to the wait list, and that was it. I used emails that I used from the year previous when I first had launched this program just to see, “Oh, I wonder if people would do this program with me.” It was the first time I’d ever run it live. Yeah. We reused emails. We just tweaked them a little bit, and my team ran with it, and, yeah. It was a big launch for me. It was a really big launch for me.
Tara:
So, we’ve gone from burning it all down to stripping it all back, overspending, exhaustion, overwhelm, resistance. I know that, listen, there’s lots of emotions that we’re all having right now, just things that are happening in the world, and things that are happening around us, but on average about your business, how are you feeling about it now?
Lisa:
2020 has really been … My fiscal years run a little bit differently, but this year in business I’m going to blow last year out of the water. My husband is sitting back with his jaw on the floor because he said he always believed in me, but now, he’s really like, “Wow! I can’t believe what you’ve created.” When COVID hit, that was another powerful moment for me because he’s in real estate. There’s no real estate when everybody is in lockdown. He had been, for so many years, he was really the primary breadwinner, and I was just trying to keep my head above water.
So, to be in a position when COVID hit knowing that I could financially support my family, it was both an awesome feeling and a very weird feeling that my business was at that place. It’s continued. My business has just continued to grow just by doing the same things over and over again. It’s not fancy. I don’t run a fancy business. My business is very simple. I don’t have a gazillion Instagram followers. I’m never on Facebook. I have my podcast, and that’s it. You don’t need thousands and thousands of followers to build a significant business.
When I was questioned about running group programs, what I went back to is I don’t need to make a million dollars. I’m all for making millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, but for me in the beginning it was, “How can I set my business up so that I can be present for the things I want to be present to, so that I cannot feel burnt out, so that I can have my time freedom?” which I know a lot of you might think, “Well, how can you have time freedom with one-to-one clients?” It’s really easy because one-to-one clients are easy to move around if you need to. The women I work with are phenomenal.
Tara:
A one-on-one business, you can scale it, and it could be leveraged through process and systems. Trust me.
Lisa:
Yeah. It was the best way for me to grow my business. Now, I’m able to make choices about, “Okay. Well, how do we scale and grow my business now where I don’t have to be the one doing it?” Because the other thing that I’ve really learned about myself is, and this is recent revelations just around we’ve had my kids go through their psych ed for learning. So, I’ve learned more about my learning style through my little guy and then I just recently did my Kolbe as well. I really sat back because to see what I’ve built now knowing the things about myself that I never knew before is really profound because I’m not systems and process-oriented. It’s not the way my brain works.
I struggle with follow through. It’s not the way my brain works. I jump in and then I’m like, “Oh, shit! Is there water in the pool?” That’s me. That’s how I roll. So, trying to follow everybody’s model about success, literally, that was working to every weakness I had, every weakness.
So, here I am trying to support my youngest son now with his learning disabilities and his giftedness, and realizing the same thing. Public school is set up to work with his biggest weaknesses and not his biggest strengths. My whole life, I’ve been trying to fit into this mold that wasn’t designed for me, and the only way for me to create success, and the only way for me to create success moving forward is to make sure that I know who I am, and I’m playing to my strengths and I’m getting support in the areas where I’m not strong, and no longer making that wrong or believing that there’s something wrong with me or that I’m not good enough or I’m not smart enough or not smart enough with money or any of that stuff.
It’s what are the systems that I need, who do I need to put in place to support me. This even came back to I hired a new bookkeeper in 2019 to help me sort out stuff. There’s so many different nuances to growing a business. I think the hardest thing is realizing that nobody has the answer for what’s going to work for you. You have to have the courage to find your way. You have to have the courage to invest the time and the money and getting to know yourself better, so that you can make better decisions based on knowing who you really are, and not doing it based on who you think you should be or what system you think you should follow.
Tara:
The one thing that I think worked so in your favor, you’re just so committed to figuring it out. You were committed to finding something that worked for you so you could go and live your mission, really, that desire that you have to help the people that you want to help, doing the work that you want to do, your most important work in the world. I remember there was even a time where funds were tight and you weren’t sure you could pay me, and you were like, “Hey, could we just move my payment? Would you be open to moving my payment?” You were paying me at the beginning of the month or something like that.
You were like, “Would you be open to moving my payment to the end of the month?” so you essentially have had maybe two months or whatever, right? You’re like, “I’m doing the work, I’m showing up. It’s going to happen. I just need some grace and space,” right? You were not going to quit. You were just going to find what worked for you and keep moving forward.
Lisa:
Somebody once said to me when I was in corporate that I was the most tenacious person they had ever met. I remember I went and looked up that word because I’m like, “I don’t even know what that means,” but I hoped that that was a compliment. That tenacity has really carried me far. It really has.
I’ve never given up on myself. I’ve always known that I was destined to do big things in this world, but you know what? It’s that knowing you’re destined to do big things and then really knowing what that means.
Tara:
… and now allowing it to happen. So, I loved what you were saying about the millions of dollars. I remember you telling me like, “I’m going to make million dollars.” I remember I was having this conversation around your ambition, and the one thing that I can say is probably true among a lot of my clients at the mastermind level is that these are women who are here to generate millions of dollars of revenue to build millions of dollars of net worth over a lifetime.
Lisa:
Well, not right there.
Tara:
Not overnight, over a lifetime. They’re just going to stay in it. They’re going to be consistent. They’re going to be focused. That’s really the value of the mastermind is keeping people in it while they have this goal and they build.
Lisa:
Yeah. That’s what I wanted to say. It’s not that I’m not … I know I’ll make millions, but I had to stop and think, “Well, Lisa, even if you made $200,000, how would that change your life?” What if I stop chasing a million this year and I just started saying, “You know what? Wouldn’t it be cool to make $200,000 this year,” and see because even if I didn’t hit that goal, I would still going to be a lot further along.
Tara:
That was just the first benchmark.
Lisa:
Yeah, but it was letting go of like, “I don’t need all of this. What if this is enough and this will actually provide me with the space that I need in my business?” Now, that ended up being a huge benchmark for me. I surpassed that, which, again, has now allowed me to step into, “Okay. Well, what does scaling from here look like? What does it look like to step into a half million dollars?”
Then you’ve really taught me that build smaller bridges. A 20% increase every year is still 20% increase, which is amazing. I think online, we’re sold this dream of you can go from zero to a million overnight. Like I said, some people maybe they can, but at what cost? At what cost?
Tara:
Yeah. I think that probably one of the biggest things we did in October of 2018 when we made that commitment was we lowered the pressure and the expectations that you were putting on yourself.
Lisa:
Yeah. Yeah. That is very true because, again, I had this belief that if I wasn’t hitting that benchmark, there was something wrong with me instead of saying, “What does it look like to build a sustainable business?” I’m not here to be an overnight success. I’m here to be a success, period.
Tara:
Yeah, period.
Lisa:
That means that I’m able to impact the people that I want to impact. Now by growing a very thriving one-to-one practice, it now provides the revenue to get the support behind me to lean in to some of these group programs, which will then allow me to reach more people, but it’s so important for me that the revenue is there to fund that and not the other way around. Trying to do it the other way around was just creating more stress, more anxiety, putting me deeper in my money stories, more shame, and maybe that works for some people, but it didn’t work for me, and I’m not prepared to run my business from that place anymore.
So, I make very calculated … I don’t even want to call them risks anymore because I really trust myself to make investments in my business. I just make one at a time and I really think about what is the next thing that I need to invest in that is going to have the most significant impact in moving the needle forward based on where I need support. So, where am I lacking? What am I not good at? What am I no longer going to tell myself I should be able to do this? Can I invest in that person?
Lisa:
Quite often, learning from you, it’s a test and trial. Does this work? I don’t have to invest in it for the year. I can invest in it for two months and see. Does this work? Then move forward from there.
Tara:
Right. We’ve been chatting for quite a while. I want to thank you for coming by, coming by like you’re in my home again.
Lisa:
Don’t tease me.
Tara:
I know. I know.
Lisa:
I miss the couch so much.
Tara:
Soon. What would you … Is there a piece of advice from your journey that you want to share or really want to highlight or is there an actionable step that you want people to take from this conversation? What’s something you want to leave people with?
Lisa:
I had a conversation with a woman once, again, when I was working on my money, and she said, “If you cut out working with Tara, you would be more profitable, Lisa.” I remember I said to her, “That’s a non-negotiable for me because I’m actually not investing in Tara. I’m investing in myself.”
Something very powerful happens when we put our money on the line and we say that, “This is for me.” Giving myself the space of working with you, surrounding myself with other phenomenal women doing phenomenal things has been transformational for me. So, last year, it sometimes felt downright painful, and this year, to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the other women in the mastermind and seeing the stuff they’re doing right now, and knowing that I’m doing it alongside of them in a year that is a complete gong show of a year, to see what we’re all capable of and what we’re able to step in to from here is powerful.
So, I am a big believer in having a coach, and a paid coach because something happens when you put skin in the game. You show up for yourself differently. I mean, this is why I do paid coaching calls. It puts skin in the game. Again, it’s not an investment in Tara. This is me investing in me. This is saying I’m going to put this money out and it’s going to come back to me tenfold because energetically, it’s going to change how I show up in the world.
That alone, so many women want to do things on their own, right? We’ve got this like, “We’re going to prove it.” It’s such a waste of time. That whole … What is it? If you want to go fast, go alone, and if you want to go far-
Tara:
Go together, yeah.
Lisa:
… go together.
Tara:
A proverb.
Lisa:
That is such a game-changer for me. So. I will always have a coach or a mastermind in some capacity because I know that if I get into the weeds of my own stuff, that the people that are surrounding me will not allow me to stay there. They just won’t. So, we came into each other’s lives during the … What was it? What was that platform called?
Tara:
Periscope.
Lisa:
Periscope. I’m so grateful everyday because your brain works in a way that my brain doesn’t.
Tara:
Yeah, it does.
Lisa:
You never gave up on me.
Tara:
Never.
Lisa:
You never gave up on me, and there were many times where I’ve given up on myself. I just, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you for always being on my side even when I didn’t like you sometimes because you wouldn’t just tell me what to do and fix it all, but the power … When we did that retreat, and the guy came out and played his music and stuff and we lied there, when we did that meditation-
Tara:
The sound healing?
Lisa:
Yeah, right? We were supposed to meet our future self, and my future self was like, “You’re here, Lisa. You are me now.” To be in that place, to step into 2020 feeling completely prepared in my business and completely unprepared at the same time to navigate what this year has been has just been profound. So, in whatever capacity people want to work with you, they should be working with you.
Tara:
Thank you.
Lisa:
I’m so stepping out of the client role, but as a friend, watching you step in to what you’re really meant to do here and how you’re really meant to lead is also so takes my breath away because I’ve watched your journey.
Tara:
I’m holding back tears right now, but thank you, and I appreciate you, and I’m going to receive that joyfully.
Lisa:
The world needs more leaders like you, and the world needs more leaders like me and women, in particular.
Tara:
The world needs more women leaders who have financial backing. We need more money in the hands of more women.
Lisa:
Yeah, and that really means working through the stuff that’s going on in your head because if I had stayed in my shame stories, that’s where I’d still be sitting. So, women owe it to themselves to get past their garbage and their bullshit, so that they can have the impact that they want to have in the world. The world really does need us to show up now more than ever before.
Tara:
Yeah. I mean, I think … So, I’ll end it here and say I think what Lisa has shared during this podcast interview is share a transformational business journey, but what she has really shared is a healing journey, and how she showed up and used her business as a vehicle for change, growth, transformation, and personal healing by showing up for her most important work, and that is really what I wish for all women is that they show up for their healing and they show up for their most important work.
Lisa:
Yeah. Have the courage to do it your way because there’s no wrong way, and there’s no right way. Chop wood carry water everyday.
Tara:
Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa:
Thank you.
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