Hey, Hey, bold leaders. Welcome to another episode of The Bold Leadership Revolution Podcast and I am your host, Tara Newman. I’m excited to be here with you today. This episode is slightly different than my other episodes. For the last six weeks, I have been going to speaker training. It’s called the Speaker Salon with Tricia Brouk in New York City, and we create our talk, a Ted style talk that’s seven minutes in length and then we perform it on the stage. I will be performing it this week. And since you won’t be there to see me perform it, I wanted to share it with you here on the podcast.
I believe really strongly in the talk that I’m giving and I would love to open up a conversation and dialogue around it. The talk is called, the Strategy is You, and it kind of recaps my past lived experiences and brings it into the work I do today and kind of marries them together.
So without further ado… Oh, there’s one more thing that I want to share with you. So as we decide how we were going to perform this talk, Tricia and I decided that I was going to enter the stage, come onto the stage to the theme of Rocky, and at the end the Chumbawamba song was going to play. You know, the one that goes, I get knocked down and I get back up again? So that is how my talk starts with Rocky and it ends with Chumbawamba. There’s really good reasons why we pick these two songs. They happened to be two songs that play in my head that symbolize, for me, resiliency. So when I’m going through hard times, I tend to hear Mickey from Rocky come into my head and say, “Get up you son of a bitch because Mickey loves you.” Or the Chumbawamba song playing around, I get knocked down but I get back up again. Those tend to be my themes of resiliency and that is why those songs are playing.
So if you will, just for a moment, imagine the Rocky song is playing and then when I finish the talk, I want you in your head to also imagine the Chumbawamba song playing. And I know you all can’t stand me now because you are going to have the Chumbawamba song in your head for the next three days. But anyway, give this a visualization.
Now the talk title is the Strategy is You.
I’m a firstborn over-functioning super achiever and I believe it’s my job to disrupt the status quo. I’m bold.
In 2005, my husband and I started our first business and we were confident. We took on a multiple six-figure manufacturing startup complete with expensive equipment leases and upfront material costs.
Over the next five years, we really got after it in life in a big way. We added two beautiful children and a business plan set to make millions. We had credentials upon credentials, decades worth of manufacturing experience, my master’s degree in organizational psychology, and plenty of real-world business experience. We knew it all. The theories, strategic planning, Lean Six Sigma, and every Japanese manufacturing principle to ensure excellence. But instead of making millions like our downloaded template of a business plan predicted, we found ourselves in a street fight of our lives. You can’t fight the great recession with your fists and there is no step-by-step plan to help you navigate a national financial meltdown.
One day I was in my room. I was crawling along the floor and I wedged myself in the corner with my back up against the wall. I started rocking back and forth to seek comfort. It didn’t come. For the first time in my life, I was forced to surrender. I prayed to God, to the higher power, to the universe, to anyone who would listen to please intervene on my behalf, to show me the way, to guide me, to give me a sign. And then the bank called. They give us 30 days to pay back our line of credit. It’s $100,000 in 30 days or they were going to take our collateral. What collateral? As it turns out, my dad, our business partner, put his commercial property up as collateral when he co-signed the loan. We tried to negotiate with the bank, but they were firm, “Pay it or lose the property.”
My dad liquidated some of his assets, paid back the loan and secured his livelihood, but he was furious and I was terrified. We were no joke broke. Every morning my husband and I would get up, we would put on our deodorant and we would look at each other and we would say, “Just one swipe.” We were deep in survival mode.
While having to pay my dad back was debilitating. It freed us. We liquidated the business and took one incredibly bold action. In 2010, we did the perp walk into bankruptcy court and begged them to let us keep our home and our cars, which they did. The pressure was turned off, but the anger was turned on. I blamed everything outside of myself. Never once thinking to take personal responsibility for this failure. I blamed the economy. I blamed the client that stiffed us for $50,000. I blamed my husband. I could still remember standing in my living room screaming at him that he ruined my life and that I hated him. You see, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and at that time I had no idea how I would ever run my own business. Bankruptcy felt like a death sentence, but I’m very much alive.
I stand before you today a successful businesswoman about to celebrate my 20th wedding anniversary and the mom to two incredible teens. My dad and I go for breakfast on a regular basis and he grills me on my P&L. He’s really proud of me. He often marvels at my success and asks me how I figured it all out.
Over the last decade, I’ve come to know the strategy is you. There are two types of people in this world. Those who continue to seek solutions outside themselves and those who know the strategy is you. One is like a mouse in a cage running around, pulling all the levers, looking for its pallets, and the other is firmly grounded in truth and knowing. One will bankrupt you and one will allow you to create your own economy and ultimately make you recession-proof.
If you truly want to succeed in business, you must learn how to put your intuition at the forefront of any strategy. The strategy is you, means that you have all the answers. You know what comes next. A formula is not a strategy. Your lessons learned form the strategy. When you cultivate your courage, find your focus, execute consistently and take personal responsibility, you become the strategy and nothing can knock you down, not even a financial crisis.
You must take bold actions. Bold isn’t loud, loud is noise. Bold is quiet and unwavering. Bold isn’t big. Bold is often doing that one thing you’re unwilling to do. When you’re bold, your very existence disrupts the status quo. When you adopt the strategy is you mindset, you become a bold leader. Bold leaders widen the circle, stabilize cultures, and develop more bold leaders on this planet. The bold leaders of the world change generational and societal narratives. The create new frontiers and alternate realities. We need to bring forth more new ideas, bold ideas.
We need people willing to rip up the blueprint and seek solutions from within themselves and to help others do the same. If you’re clinging to your 10-point template, if you’re white-knuckling your ride to success, if you’re trying to figure out what next tactic to take, I want to remind you that you have all the answers. The strategy is you. I invite you to join the Bold Leadership Revolution and radically change the way you show up in the world.
We are so excited to announce that their doors are now open for our 2020 Bold Leadership Mastermind. Now, if you’re thinking it’s a little too early to start thinking about next year’s investments, let me tell you that spots are already filled, and here’s why. One, because running a serious business means getting serious about where you’re committing your dollars way ahead of time. It’s about prior proper planning. And two, it’s because there’s a new leadership paradigm emerging and it’s changing the trajectory of business.
As a matter of fact, it’s because business is changing and becoming more disruptive that leaders are being called upon to be more bold and brave than ever before. And we know something about bold leadership over here at the Bold Leadership Revolution HQ. Now, this means business owners today need to build resilience to thrive through uncertainty, empathy so they can connect deeply with others and courage to lean into their edge every single day. We’re able to train resiliency, empathy, and courage by creating the critical habits that keep you focused and accountable on your most important work. When these skills and habits are paired with a solid business strategy and operational skill, your business benefits by generating stable and consistent profitability.
Now, the funnel or marketing tactic might have gotten you to where you are, but it will not get you to where you need to go next. What my clients find from working with us is the answers don’t lie outside of them. The strategy is you. When you stop looking for the quick fix, the sexy or alluring strategy and focus on strengthening you, the leader, you set your business up for reoccurring growth year after year. You stop giving your power away to situations, circumstances, and the next guru. You have the power.
Here’s what you need to know before booking a call with me. This opportunity is for you if you’re looking to optimize three core pieces of your business, you the leader, the business operations, meaning you want to have the most effective and efficient business, and your team. Whether it’s one person or you’re about to start hiring a team, you want to make sure that when you hire a team, they are optimized for efficiency and they’re going to be hitting the ground running with you.
Now, you want to do those three things and you want to be supported by an incredibly committed group of female business owners. If that sounds like you, my calendar is now open for the two of us to sit down and talk about your business and your leadership for 2020. You’re going to want to go over to my website, TaraNewmanCoaching.com/discovery-call now to book a time to meet with me. We’ll also drop the link in the show notes of this episode.
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