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In today’s episode, we help Priscilla overcome five fears that hold entrepreneurs back.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jocelyn Sams: Hey y’all, today we help Priscilla overcome five fears that hold entrepreneurs back.
Shane Sams: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We’re a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let’s get started.
Shane Sams: What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to welcome another member of the Flip Your Life Community onto the show so that we can help them take their life and their business to the next level. Really excited to introduce Priscilla Yocum to y’all. Priscilla, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.
Priscilla Y.: Thanks you guys. This is so surreal.
Jocelyn Sams: Yes, it is great to have you here and we always get kind of tickled when people say things like that because we’re just a couple of normal people from the great state of Kentucky.
Shane Sams: Sitting around in our pajamas talking to you today, so it’s okay.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, we are. I have not even brushed my hair today, I’ll just be honest so.
Shane Sams: And that is why we podcast instead of doing videos.
Jocelyn Sams: We are very happy to have you though. We’re happy to have you as part of our community. And we want you to tell everyone a little bit, about you and your background.
Priscilla Y.: Well, thanks so much you guys. I mean, I listen to you. I’ve been listening to you guys for almost two years now so that’s the surreal part for me but in my everyday life, I am a professional organizer, so I started my own service business in 2010 and I absolutely love what I do. I help families organize their spaces for functionality and to better their routines. And I’ve loved to doing it. But since I started my business, I added two children to my family and-
Shane Sams: Which can disorganize things very quickly.
Priscilla Y.: Oh, yeah. It’s made me a better organizer for sure because they bring a whole new world challenges and that’s what I help, are families. So I’m kind of in the thick of it with them. And so I identify with a lot of their problems but one thing that I’ve found in my business that’s made it more difficult in recent years is that I don’t want to prioritize my service business over my children. And that’s really hard when you’re a one woman show not to do. And so when I started listening to you guys, I didn’t really connect the dots that I could at all transition my business online, but the more I started thinking about it, the more I started feeling like it was a possibility. And so in about the last year or so I’ve kind of been thinking about how I can scale my business better by adding this online element to the knowledge that I have and I felt like you guys are the perfect place to help me do that. And so that’s kinda how I got here.
Shane Sams: That’s awesome. So as a personal organizer in your service based business, I would assume that you literally go into people’s houses, look around, create a game plan, and then do you help them actually do any of the physical organizing or is it up to them? What does that look like? Because it’s definitely a time for dollars business. Correct?
Priscilla Y.: Yes, exactly. Time for dollars. I don’t work then I don’t make money and if I don’t work outside of the home, I don’t make money. So I physically go into my client’s home and I assess the situation and then I come up with a game plan. I’ve been really lucky that my business is 100% referrals. So usually if I’ve gotten that far, I’m for sure doing the project. And then what we do is we schedule as many days as needed for the project. There have been some projects where I can get them done in a four hour period and then there are some that take 40 hours.
Shane Sams: So do you ever walk into a hoarder, have you ever been in a house and you’re like, oh, no and you walk in, it’s like, yeah, I’m a little disorganized, but then you walk in and there’s 17 boxes of stuff in the living room. There’s a room with all laundry, but there’s a bed under it somewhere. Have you ever hit that before?
Priscilla Y.: Well, luckily my business is referrals, so you get a lot of like business, so, no, the answer to that is no, I don’t get a lot of that. I-
Shane Sams: Dang, I was hoping for a good story there.
Priscilla Y.: I have had one or two situations like that and I don’t feel equipped to handle those projects, so I’ve turned those down. But what I do get a lot of are moms who are so tough on themselves, they call themselves hoarders and I walk into their house and I’m like, “Why am I here? Like, what is the problem in this house?” So when they start opening drawers and cabinets? And I like, oh, right, okay, this is what-
Shane Sams: Now I see.
Jocelyn Sams: That’s kinda like my house. I always like people who do this job because I feel like I’m a pretty organized person. But then I watch these people who do this on YouTube or there’s now like Netflix shows-
Shane Sams: What’s that Netflix show called? What is that girl’s name?
Priscilla Y.: Marie Kondo.
Shane Sams: Yes, yes like-
Priscilla Y.: That’s like the tidying up.
Shane Sams: Yes, everyone’s obsessed with her right now, right? Like-
Priscilla Y.: She’s a crazy, she’s the fairy godmother of my industry.
Jocelyn Sams: So I look at things like that and I’m like, oh wow. I thought I was organized, but maybe I’m not as organized as I once thought.
Shane Sams: I’m at a mastermind and a guy watched that show the other day on Netflix, one of the guys gets on to our mastermind. We have like a little circle where you leave messages and talk to each other. And he goes, “Dude, I just watched a show on Netflix and I immediately cleaned my garage and sold all my stuff.” Like he watched it in the morning and just spent the rest of the day cleaning out his house.
Priscilla Y.: I love it.
Shane Sams: So do people pay you by the hour or do they pay you by the job? Like how does that work? And then like how many hours? I guess that just takes up a full time job every week, doesn’t it?
Priscilla Y.: Yeah, so well, I don’t work more than part-time because I prioritize my kids. My husband travels two to three days out of the week, so I’m kind of a one woman show with my family as well and part of the time. And so I only work part-time, I’m just coming off of maternity leave. But before maternity leave I was working about 20 hours a week with clients within their home. And then usually there was about five to eight hours of backend stuff that I could do while the kids were napping or sleeping or whatever. So yes, I do charge by the hour. I’ve kind of played around with charging by the project, but that doesn’t necessarily work with organizing because some people are very quick at editing and others are not. So I found that an hourly rate was the most fair to me.
Shane Sams: Yeah, that’s easy to explain to people too, like this it’s this much an hour, let’s just get in there and see how long it takes, right?
Priscilla Y.: Totally, yeah.
Shane Sams: So the reason you’re kind of going toward this online thing is not that you want to even give up organizing, you just want to be able to scale your income, but you physically don’t have enough hours to go get any more jobs. And I’m looking at your sheet here and it says you really don’t want to hire other people to be organizers under you because you don’t really like building, you don’t want to build a business like that. Correct?
Priscilla Y.: That’s right. So I’ve done that before. I’ve had assistants, I had a team of three assistants at one point. And you know what, it’s just so stressful. You’re responsible for people that worked for… I mean, you guys know this, you have people that work for you, you’re responsible for other people. And my number one priority is my family. So I always felt like I was being torn in different directions. And so scaling that way, which I know a lot of professional organizers do, is scaling with as a team. But my family is so young, I really just can’t focus that way. So for me, scaling online to share my knowledge is something that would be much more reasonable.
Jocelyn Sams: I totally understand what you’re saying about working with people. That’s something that’s really stressful for me. I know a lot of people love working with the team and they love team building and all that comes with it. But I’m just not one of those people. I like working by myself and there’s-
Priscilla Y.: Me too.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I think that there’s nothing wrong with that.
Shane Sams: Nothing, wrong with that.
Jocelyn Sams: You just have to realize what works best for you and you have to run that way. And that’s kind of the way that we’ve decided to build our business.
Shane Sams: We actually re-wrote our core values a couple of months ago and one of our core values in our company is scale income without hiring people whenever possible, we literally wrote that into our core values. Because I do have a lot of friends, they believe in the most important job of the CEO is to hire the team and to hire great people and great people grow your business. And we just don’t want that even if it prevents us from going to another level like-
Priscilla Y.: Thank you for saying that-
Shane Sams: Yeah, you do have to have some support either part time contractors, like we all do that. We hire things out maybe by the job, by the task. But we’ve got people that work with us regularly, but right now we were up to the point where we had 14 people working with us and we have scaled back now to two not counting our personal assistant in the house. So it’s, we didn’t like it. We did not like it. Maybe that will keep us from becoming a $10 million company someday but who cares? We have a peace of mind. We have time with our kids. I got up this morning and played chutes and ladders with my kids. Right?
Priscilla Y.: I love it.
Shane Sams: So it’s like, why does it matter if we hire 75 people and we have this big company, like that’s not what success has to look like. And everyone out there listening right now, you have permission to grow your business without hiring a bunch of people.
Jocelyn Sams: And the way that you want to do it.
Priscilla Y.: Thank you so much for saying that because for me, I feel like everything that you consume, all of the business developments that I’m consuming is saying be a leader, lead more people and I’m like, “Oh crap, I’m not a leader. Am I bad at business?”
Shane Sams: No, you’re not. That’s a great point. You don’t even have to be the leader of all the things in your business. There’s sometimes where you just turn things over to a contractor they do it in three weeks and we’re out and we don’t have to deal with them anymore. Right?
Priscilla Y.: When you’re strained, right.
Shane Sams: Yeah, and it’s actually just doing what you want to do. Jocelyn and I like interacting with people online. We like to do a podcast, we like to do our forums, we like to get emails from our exclusive members and we have a little Voxer program. One thing that Jocelyn and I really, really don’t like to do all the time is one on one coaching, like on a call, like where we have the schedule. And we get up and there’s five people there. Everyone told us well, you can’t do high ticket offers without one on one getting in people’s faces and being there with them. And I’m like, yes we can. We invented a new program, we use an app called Voxer, it’s like walkie talkies and we talk back and forth to people and we were like, we don’t have to make appointments. Our calendar doesn’t fill up.
Shane Sams: So if the kids have practice we can go do it and we can do it from anywhere. So you can invent any online business structure that you want as long as it works for you. And that’s what everybody else really needs to do.
Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Priscilla, you’re just getting started online and we actually selected you for our podcast from our community. So we have different areas of discussion. And you had recently gotten on talking about some things that you’re working on. So tell us a little bit about that. What have you been doing so far?
Priscilla Y.: So I’ve mainly been working on my lead magnet and I toyed around a little bit with idea of making it a video but then it was getting just too long. So I decided to make it a simple checklist and a big thing in organizing is spring cleaning. So it’s just a simple annual spring cleaning checklist, kind of master lists for the house of things that you wouldn’t normally remember to do. And so now I’m just trying to figure out how to best get it out there. I already have a website for my current service business, there’s a blog attached to that. I also have an Instagram audience, a small one and some Facebook followers and a very small email list.
Shane Sams: Okay, let me get some mindset, we’re about to get into some deep stuff here but let me just talk about this. You don’t have a small list. I’m looking at the numbers here. You already have 144 subscribers. Your open rate is like 55% average, which is insanity. That’s like 75 humans paying attention to you, right? You have 700 and something followers on Instagram, 500 and something followers on Facebook. Jocelyn, our first email list that we ever emailed out to. It was only like 200 people, but it was 200 real people who bought Jocelyn’s product and made like almost $3,000. So don’t think that’s small. There’s probably hundreds if not thousands of people listening right now that are like, “Dang, I haven’t even released a lead magnet. I don’t even have an email list. I’ve not even started my Instagram.” That’s amazing that you’re at the very beginning of your journey and you already created that kind of audience.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I love how you just decided like, “Hey, I’m working on this video lead magnet but it’s not working for me. I don’t like it. It’s too long. I’m just going to do something else.” Like some people would just stop right then and be like, “Oh this lead magnet thing’s too hard can’t do this, I’m out.” But you didn’t do that, you said, “Okay, well this is too hard or it’s too time consuming so I’m going to do something else.”
Shane Sams: Yeah, and you’ve actually taken action. That’s the people we love to talk to you in the community. We saw you in the forums working through this lead magnet, getting this thing done, bouncing back and forth between, and I think I’m going to do a video, but then the video didn’t work and I’ve got this thing and now you’ve actually got content out there. You’ve got some people paying attention to you, and really we’re just going to figure out how to turn that into an actual income. Okay. Before we get into your deep technical questions about the business stuff, I want to talk a little bit about fears, obstacles, and mindset issues that usually hold entrepreneurs back from whatever they’re doing online because these are the things that actually stop us. Usually the technical stuff, you can fight for it. It’s just a matter of grinding it out.
Shane Sams: But sometimes those doubts, those disbeliefs, those things internally inside of us or externally that are trying to hold us back or what really stop people from being successful. So when people fill out the form to come onto the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast it’s like, Hey, what a fear or a mindset issue or an obstacle? Something that’s holding you back?
Jocelyn Sams: Most people, they might list one, maybe two. But Priscilla, she’s an over achiever.
Shane Sams: She’s an over achiever. She’s organized, she’s got five and it’s like a bulleted checklist. Like you can see the personal organization of your fears.
Jocelyn Sams: So we did this podcast intake form and earlier Shane was just kind of like reading it out before we get on the phone and I was like, okay, check, check, check. I feel like I was playing online business bingo. Okay, here’s this mindset-
Shane Sams: I think these are the five biggest fears that everybody has. Right?
Jocelyn Sams: Bingo!
Shane Sams: Bingo, got it. All right, so we’ve got this, we have a bulleted list. Normally we tackle one fear on the show, we’re just going to have a kind of a lightning round of fear and obstacles.
Jocelyn Sams: We like to over deliver in this podcast.
Shane Sams: We’re going to over deliver, so get back guys, everybody out there. I guarantee you in the next few minutes you’re going to hear a fear or five that you have holding you back right now in life. Okay. All right. So what I’m going to do is we’re going to read the fears to you, okay? And then you take us and give us a little more information about the fear and then we’re going to talk about some strategies maybe for overcoming it.
Jocelyn Sams: And we’re not hating on you of course.
Shane Sams: No, not hate on you. Everybody has fears.
Jocelyn Sams: I’m happy to provide entertainment.
Shane Sams: That’s right. Okay, all right, Jocelyn, let’s go to fear or obstacle number one.
Jocelyn Sams: All right so number one. Hold on, I got to scroll just a little bit here.
Shane Sams: There’s so many fears. We had to scroll back up. It was below the fold.
Jocelyn Sams: No, in fairness, in fairness I had accidentally closed the calendar. Okay, number one, I know families need my product but I’m not sure people are willing to pay for it. I find a lot of what I would sell for free on Pinterest, blogs, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Shane Sams: So that’s kind of a fear of maybe people won’t see the value in it. So where does that come from? Tell us a little bit more about why that’s holding you back.
Priscilla Y.: Well, I think really where it comes from is I’m a pretty resourceful person on my own and so a lot of what I’ve learned, I’ve had to learn by going on Pinterest and reading tons of blogs. And observing the way other people do things and in my mind, other people do that too. I’m like, “Why would they pay me for the knowledge that I have around this if they can go and do what I did? Which is go onto Pinterest or blogs or get these ideas themselves.”
Shane Sams: Yeah. I think you and Jocelyn might have the same brain cells because that’s one of the things that really gets her fired up is, well I just go figure things out like trips, whatever, why doesn’t anyone else do this?
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. There is this I don’t know if it’s a book or a system, I don’t know. But anyway, it’s one of the personality assessments. I can’t remember which one, but you basically identify as like a quick start or a fact finder and I’m a fact finder. It’s the one with the numbers, I can’t remember what it’s called. But anyway-
Shane Sams: Is it the Enneagrams?
Jocelyn Sams: No, I don’t think it’s the Enneagram, it’s another one that has like, well-
Shane Sams: It’s one of those things that tells you your basic personality traits.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I’m a fact finder and those things are really interesting to me. I love to Google search, I love to dig in and research things and find out all the information. And I feel like there aren’t really a lot of people like that. And I think I never realized that for a really long time. I just kind of assumed that everyone else was like me.
Shane Sams: Except Shane, I’m a quick start.
Jocelyn Sams: That’s a given. But I just kind of assumed that everyone else was like me. And as I started in business, I realized that most people just want to have things handed to them. They don’t like to dig in and do the research. A lot of people don’t. There are some people who do and they will probably never buy your product, but they’re not your market.
Shane Sams: And this goes back to it, fears are always defeated by truth, right? The problem is, sometimes we’re in the forest and we can’t see the forest for the trees and we can’t see the truth. The truth that beats this fear almost every time is that people are not buying your content, okay? What they’re buying is leadership. What they’re buying is curation. What they’re buying is someone who’s walked the path to show them the potholes in the road. That’s what everything is like you don’t really sell courses, you create courses, but then you put the courses together to give a system to people that they can follow without having to go research it for four hours. Okay, so like that’s what the flip your life blueprint is, we have so much content in the flip your life blueprint, right? There’s dozens of courses, thousands of conversations and comments. There’s so much stuff in there, but that’s not why people like the blueprint.
Shane Sams: They like the blueprint because it says at the top, step one, watch this video and do it. And then it says step two, step three, step four and just guides you through the process without you having to look it up, without you having to go search for everything and watch the magician’s hands and totally deconstruct exactly how this stuff works. Right? And if you embrace that truth, you realize people will pay for the process. For example, I bet there’s a lot of people out there who have thought to themselves, and you may have thought this in the beginning, is anyone really going to pay me to come in their house and help them sort their junk drawer like right? Did you feel that when you first started doing it?
Priscilla Y.: Oh yeah.
Shane Sams: Right? Because they didn’t want to organize the junk drawer, they wanted to pay you to help do it. And it’s the same thing with online business. Okay.
Priscilla Y.: Okay.
Shane Sams: Yeah. So people will pay for this. We have seen other community members in a similar space create products in this world and it’s worked. Okay. So we’ll talk a little bit more about what those it looks like. All right, so fear or obstacle number two on the organized checklist.
Jocelyn Sams: I’m scrolling again. Okay. Number two says, I’m not sure I’m tech savvy enough. I built my own website, taught myself MailChimp and some other tools but I feel really overwhelmed by online business terms and tools. Doing keyword research was a challenge. Is that a red flag?
Shane Sams: Okay. Priscilla, you literally said, I don’t think I’m tech savvy enough but-
Jocelyn Sams: I have learned 67 tools however-
Shane Sams: However, I built a website, taught myself how to integrate MailChimp and other email tools and I’ve learned a lot of other tools, but there’s one tool can be a little speed bump, is this a red flag, do I need to turn back now?
Jocelyn Sams: Priscilla, it’s over. Sorry.
Shane Sams: Yeah, right.
Jocelyn Sams: Just kidding.
Shane Sams: The tech stuff is so funny because if you think about it, every piece of technology that we encounter, we have to learn it. Like you didn’t know how to use an iPhone when you first got it, right? Back in the day I remember when I got my first flip phone, I got the razor, that Motorola Razor.
Jocelyn Sams: I was going to say back the in 19s but it wasn’t in the 19s.
Shane Sams: It was like the early twos or whatever it’s called. But I got this thing, but like I didn’t know how to text on it. I had to figure out that you had to type the words like-
Jocelyn Sams: And you had to hit the button three times-
Shane Sams: Hit the button three times before it switched over. But like everything is new, everything is totally new and you figured all this other stuff out, why couldn’t you figure the next thing out? Or if you can’t figure that out, you just find another path and use another tool. Right? What hung you up about doing keyword research? Was it the tool or was it the process of finding good keywords for your brand?
Priscilla Y.: It was both. So initially the tool was set up for my service business and the key words are different for this than my service business so changing the keywords alone, I found difficult and I like, this cannot be this hard, why am I having a hard time with is. And then once I got it I was kind of clueless as to what the data was pulling out. Like what am I looking at here, what is this two point whatever or number? So-
Shane Sams: What tool are you using?
Priscilla Y.: Google.
Shane Sams: The Google key word tool.
Priscilla Y.: Yeah. And so then I found a video on YouTube that kind of broke it down. And I still feel like I don’t fully understand it, but I kind of narrowed in what is a decent range versus, that didn’t get any keyword searches then, then that’s probably not the direction.
Shane Sams: Sure.
Priscilla Y.: But. Yeah.
Shane Sams: And see, what I heard there, you may not have a full grasp of what you’re doing with the keyword research tool, but you’re doing exactly what it takes to overcome the tech fear. You’re wrestling with it, right? I can do as many courses. Like we got tech courses in there about WordPress, we have keyword research stuff. It’s more strategic, not exactly with those tools. Right. But until you actually get on the bicycle and try to stay up, you’re never going to be able to ride the bicycle. You can watch a course about how to ride a bicycle. You can have someone sit over coffee and tell you how to ride the bicycle, but until your butt’s in the seat and your feet are on the pedals, you’re not riding a bicycle.
Shane Sams: Right. And what happened when you learn how to ride a bike? You fell. I remember when you learned how to drive a car. I remember, let me tell you a story about me driving. So I was learning how to drive a car and I was like 16 right? And my dad had an office parking lot and he was like, we bring two cars over to the parking lot and I had to practice parallel parking right, before I could go take my driver’s test. So Dad’s like, all right, look, you’ve got the whole parking lot. I want you to just get used to it in here when nobody’s around you. I’m going to go inside and do some paperwork and get stuff done. So I’ve got one of our cars right beside the other car so I kind of parallel park once and mess it up.
Shane Sams: I do it again and get way far and I’m like, man, I’m not close enough. I can’t get to the car. So I get a little closer to the other car and I cut the wheel and I’m not kidding you. The one car went under the other car and lifted it off the ground and I was like, oh no. And I pulled it back in drive and I hit the gas and I pulled off and I just heard this big kaboom kaboom and the other car fell to the ground and started like popping like somebody was hitting switches in a rap video and it was insane. And I looked around, I was looking over at the mirror, the window, and dad was looking down at his papers. I got out and made sure for somehow, it didn’t barely do anything but like scratch it a little bit, but somehow I got the car under the other car and I was like, oh my gosh. But I eventually I figured out how to parallel park. I passed my driver’s test unlike my wife and-
Jocelyn Sams: Hey.
Shane Sams: And I was able to do that, but I had some problems figuring out the new tech, you know what I’m saying? So you’re doing… That’s how you beat the tech challenge is you don’t try to figure it all out. You just go play with it. You break stuff, you put it back together, and eventually that fear will go away and it’ll start serving you better. Okay?
Priscilla Y.: Okay.
Jocelyn Sams: All right.
Shane Sams: Fear number three. Scroll the checklist one more time.
Jocelyn Sams: Okay, I didn’t have to scroll too far, this one’s kind of short. Okay. It says, I’m a perfectionist. In other words, procrastinator/scaredy cat.
Shane Sams: Why do you think you’re a perfectionist? And also why do you think it’s related to being a scaredy cat?
Priscilla Y.: Oh, well, I mean, c’mon let’s be real here. Any time somebody has to have something perfect, it’s because they’re afraid if it’s not, they’ll look stupid. There are very few people that are perfectionists. Just because it just bothers them if something isn’t just the right, I think a lot of times, at least for me it’s related to, “Oh man, I don’t want egg on my face here.”
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And listen, maybe we should start a support group Priscilla.
Shane Sams: I think you and Jocelyn definitely need to start a support group because you all have the exact same-
Priscilla Y.: I’m in.
Jocelyn Sams: I’m pretty sure that we’re the same person and I’m sorry about that. No, I’m just kidding. Okay. So all right, I’m with you. I think mine a lot of times is fear of what might happen if it isn’t ‘perfect.’ That’s a lot of what bothers me. I don’t know if that’s what bothers you.
Shane Sams: Especially when you’re trying to meet external expectations. I think Jocelyn wrestles with that more. I think you do too, a little bit hearing these fears because you’re more… It’s not necessarily that you’re not going to get it perfect. And I would say in your own life you might be a little more forgiving as a perfectionist, but it’s like, what if it’s not perfect then the other person expected perfection or they always-
Priscilla Y.: And they’re disappointed.
Jocelyn Sams: Yes. And for me it’s about, okay if the results don’t turn out the way that I think they should be or the way someone else thinks they should be, what might happen then? It’s like that fear of something unknown to me and I don’t like that. That’s why I try to very tightly control things, which is not a good thing.
Shane Sams: That’s why I don’t let Jocelyn read emails that I send out before I send them because Jocelyn will spend four hours. The first thing she does is she has this super power where she can look at a 5,000 word block of text and go, there’s not a period in sentence 38 and she can just like, you accidentally used a there instead of their, like she can just see grammatical errors it’s like she can process the whole thing.
Jocelyn Sams: It’s sort of like they blink red to me. I don’t know like I can-
Priscilla Y.: It’s a gift.
Shane Sams: Yes, it’s a gift.
Jocelyn Sams: It is, it’s a very annoying gift and a very annoying superpower.
Shane Sams: The most annoying superpower you could ever have.
Jocelyn Sams: You have to have those people in the world.
Shane Sams: It’s funny because I’ll send an email and Jocelyn’s like on the list so she’ll see it after the fact. She’ll be like, “Really, you sent this to humans? You let people do this?” I’m kind of like, whatever, there are 90% of people like me that don’t even read it. I’ll be kind of like, all the grammar Nazis will just unsubscribe and leave. I’m just kidding, don’t unsubscribe and don’t get mad at me if you love grammar, Jocelyn loves grammar.
Jocelyn Sams: And if you get an email with a misspelling or an incorrect pronunciation, just know it wasn’t me.
Shane Sams: It is not Joc. She actually at one part wanted me to put down at the bottom, like typed by Shane so no one would judge her for any of my spelling errors, right. Because I sign things Shane and Jocelyn, so anyway, but the point is, like it is those external expectations, that’s the feel here.
Priscilla Y.: I totally identify with that.
Shane Sams: Yes and it can make you put things off because you’re afraid of getting judged. We had a problem with a local business recently and Jocelyn had been telling me about it and telling me about it and telling me about it and telling me about it and I was like, can we just say something to them? And she’s like, no, because then the external conflict would come in or the judgment or the, what if they don’t agree with us. Right. And I finally just sent an email because I was just like, and I sent Jocelyn a text, I said, I sent an email of everything you told me, no mercy. And she was just like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you just did that.” But anyway, it’s like sometimes you just, the only way to beat this fear is to just do it and be scared and absorb any negativity that comes. And that’s really, really hard.
Shane Sams: So being a perfectionist is really hard, but I find that the best thing to do in this situation, when people start doing things consistently, you overcome it. Like let’s say you’re afraid to do YouTube videos. Well, let’s just use this as a fear, right? Because you’re, you’re a perfectionist. You want to edit them. You want them to look as good as everybody else’s. The way to beat that fear is to do live Q and A’s or videos, 10 minutes a day, every day for a month.
Jocelyn Sams: That cannot be edited.
Shane Sams: That cannot be edited. That cannot be stopped, once you turn the camera on, it goes. They may not be the best videos you could ever release, but you’ll get so used to doing that thing that it’ll eventually feel like habit and you won’t even care anymore.
Jocelyn Sams: And just become the person who’s perfectly imperfect, that’s what we try to do, I mean, we sit here and record this podcast every week and we’re very unapologetic that we’re not perfect. If you’re looking for somebody who is super polished, we’re probably not the people for you.
Shane Sams: Yeah. We have an editor and we have our little rig here, like basically you have this little bitty soundboard with two mics and it’s plugged into a USB port. We don’t have the fancy editing and maybe our audio is not the best of some other podcasts, but the point for us is to help as many people as fast as possible, right? So we don’t have time to deal with the perfection and the audio files and all that stuff, like the content’s where the money is, that’s where the gold is. That’s where the help comes from and we can’t be slowed down by our perfectionism. If we’re going to help as many people as possible.
Priscilla Y.: So that’s also what makes you guys so relatable too and I guess I’ll have to remember that in my business is that really, I want my audience to relate or I want to be able to relate to them and they’re not perfect either.
Jocelyn Sams: Absolutely. And something that helps me a lot is just thinking about how no matter what, no matter if your content or whatever you’re doing is as perfect as you want it to be or as perfect as you think someone else wants it to be, there’s always going to be somebody who’s not going to like it and it doesn’t matter. Like you could halfway do it and someone’s not going to like it. Or you can do it 150% and someone’s not going to like it. So just knowing that always gives me a little bit of sense of ease just knowing that. There’s always going to be people out there in the world who are going to be negative about whatever it is that you’re doing. You just have to brush it off and move on.
Priscilla Y.: I can do that.
Shane Sams: All right, now that we’ve punched perfectionism in the face, let’s go on to fear/obstacle number four on Priscilla’s list.
Jocelyn Sams: All right, number four it says until the fall when my daughter goes to school full time and I get a part time nanny for my son, time is a major challenge. I have about three hours a day I can dedicate to business since I’m still working with clients that time also has to be used for back office hours for my current business.
Shane Sams: Okay. So this is the kind of fear I don’t have enough time to get everything done. Is that what you’re saying here?
Priscilla Y.: Yeah. Absolutely.
Shane Sams: Where does that come from though? Because three hours is a lot of time. Like if you point that way, do you feel like you should be doing something else that you’re not doing enough? Everybody has the time veer for different reasons. It might be like I’ve only got one hour a day and maybe I’m using that and I should be holding my kids or playing with my kids or hanging out with my spouse or whatever. Or maybe I should be taking care of myself and relaxing like what’s the fear there? Like why do you feel like that’s not enough time?
Priscilla Y.: So I think the fear goes back to fear number two which is about the tech stuff, or not feeling tech savvy enough. It’s taking me so long to learn some of these things or I feel like it is, that a big chunk of that time that I have is just spent learning. And I know you guys say that it’ll go by faster and I believe that. But I’m learning a lot of this on the fly, and so I feel like that’s the part that makes me feel like I’m just learning and not creating and therefore I’m not putting stuff out. And so it feels like not enough time.
Shane Sams: The fear of time usually comes from looking at other people and comparing what they’re doing or seeing what’s possible or trying to get there as fast as possible. And one of the biggest mistakes that we see beginners make, or even entrepreneurs at a higher level, is trying to get to the next level like it’s a race, right? Because in reality some people may feel a desperation to get out of their job or a desperation to get to the next level or they’re really inspired because they see someone made something happen, right? But then, and then it all of a sudden turns into a race.
Shane Sams: But it’s not a race. It doesn’t matter if it takes you one year, two years or three years to get everything done. Everyone’s going to do this at a different timeframe and everyone has to learn how to do the next step before they can take the next step, right? So it’s not about like getting there as fast as possible. It’s really just about getting there, in my mastermind this morning, we were sharing like we had a little, one of our people in our mastermind in my mastermind asked where were you 10 years ago? Right? And it was crazy because one guy was like, man, 10 years ago I had just moved to a new town and gotten a job and I was making $2,000 a month and my wife and I was making nothing but, and then he said last month was our first six figure profit month, but that was 10 years ago.
Shane Sams: And it’s not like he was like looking at the span trying to get there in 10 years or it was the same journey we all take. We’re inspired because we see somebody else, he had started three other businesses before this one worked, but he had stuck with it for 10 years and he had gotten to the promise land. Right? And that’s really what everyone has got to. It’s just like the Bible says, you’ve got to run your own race, right. And if you start comparing yourself and you start feeling the pressures or you start feeling that desperation, you’re going to try to rush through the process and then that’s just going to make you run off the rails. If the train goes too fast, it’s going to crash, right? So try to reframe it as not that I don’t have enough time, I’ve got plenty of time because I don’t have to finish in a year.
Shane Sams: I don’t have to finish in two years. I’ve just got to take the next step and learn it. Maybe that’s what you do today and then tomorrow you do the thing and then you learn the next step and just slow down and get it right before you try to get it done quickly.
Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, and I would just encourage you to make sure that all of the things that you’re thinking about are actually important, and I say this because it’s something that I struggle with a lot of times. I will look and say, okay, well, our landing page has a problem and our SEO is not 100% optimized.
Shane Sams: You didn’t put a period at the end of that sentence, Shane when you wrote that copy.
Jocelyn Sams: We need to be on Pinterest posting regularly. We need to be on Instagram, we need to be on Facebook. We need to be figuring out where we are in the rankings for this keyword. I have all of these things in my mind all the time, but they’re not always important. All of them.
Shane Sams: Especially like when you get sucked into a podcast that talks about a new tool you’ve never heard of and you’re like, “Ooh, I bet that would help my business.” And like really? I was talking to somebody the other day about needle movers, the only needle movers really in your business are that you’re creating valuable content. You’re getting Opt-ins for leads and you’re telling your leads about your product to sell. There’s really nothing else you really need to do in your business. If everyone would just do those three things every day. Create a piece of content, release it, make sure the content points to an Opt-in, get the email.
Jocelyn Sams: Tell those people-
Shane Sams: Tell those people you have something for sale.
Jocelyn Sams: … You have something cool that can solve their problem.
Shane Sams: Yeah. That’s the needle movers man. All this other stuff. Yeah. After that, if you’ve got time, you share it on 100 social media networks and you do all these other things but focus on the needle movers so you’re not caught up in learning so much stuff, right?
Priscilla Y.: Grow the needle movers.
Shane Sams: Yes, exactly. Yes. It’s all you got to do. Okay?
Priscilla Y.: Got It.
Jocelyn Sams: All right.
Shane Sams: Fear or obstacle. We’ve made it to the fifth thing on the list and then we can get back to technical questions. Okay. But we’re just, we’re busting through the walls of fear today y’all so what is fear number five on the checklist?
Jocelyn Sams: All right, it says, I’m not sure if I should create a course to sell product at a membership etc. The content has to be easy to digest yet actionable.
Shane Sams: So is this basically you’ve got your lead magnet and you’re kind of not sure what to do with, like what to sell to them?
Priscilla Y.: Yeah, I mean I feel like my avatar is somewhat unique and I’m sure everybody says this, but busy moms tend to have very little time, and I see it a lot in my service business where follow through is really difficult. So a course sounds great but then my worry is will they complete it? A membership sounds amazing, but then my fear is will they interact with it? And so I guess it’s kind of a fear that I’m not going to create the right content for my avatar.
Shane Sams: This is actually a really common fear that a lot of people get stuck at this point. They’re like, okay, what are they going to buy? Right? There’s two parts of this and some of this is going to sound counterintuitive. Okay?
Priscilla Y.: Okay.
Shane Sams: The first thing you have, you do have one, it is awesome that you’re thinking about how your people are going to consume the content. That’s a big deal because you do have to create something that people can get results from or why create it. You got to care about how your people’s success. Now the problem is when you go too far down that rabbit hole, you take all the responsibility from them taking action and put it on to you and you hold the weight and the anxiety of all of that. But here’s the truth. It is your customer’s responsibility to take action on what you’re giving them. It is not your responsibility. If you buy a jug of milk, it’s your job to drink it before it spoils. That’s the truth. Or you wasted your money, right? And anyone who’s going to sell online has to realize that maybe half your people may not take advantage of what you give them. They may come in, they may buy your thing and they may just not use it, and that’s on them because all you can do is show people the path, right? You can’t make them walk the path. It’s the old horse to water. You can’t make them drink. Right?
Shane Sams: So that that’s how you overcome this fear is to realize that in in any time you’re coaching or teaching or providing a course or a membership, you’re all your half is to give them the opportunity. It is their responsibility to take advantage of that opportunity.
Jocelyn Sams: So the amazing advantage that you have right now is that you already have an audience. You have people following you on email, you have people following you on social media. The best thing to do honestly is just put it out there. Say, “Hey guys, I’m thinking about creating something really cool for you all and I was just wondering what would be the most beneficial to you? Here are a couple of ideas I have, what do you think about these or do you have any additional ideas?”
Shane Sams: And also not getting caught up in what other people are doing, right? For example, like we sell video, we have video courses with PowerPoint slides, right? But if you’ll notice inside of the flip your life blueprint, we also have Mp3s that you can listen to the course, right? We also have workbooks that you can download and write in and print things out. Okay, so you say people are busy. Well, what if your entire product that they bought from you was literally podcast they can listen to on the way to work on the way to the soccer game and it was telling them what to do when they got home to organize something and then it was like a Facebook group that they’re already on Facebook. That’s where your community lives. It doesn’t have to look like what the experts do or me and Jocelyn or anybody else like if you talk to your audience, you can build the product that they’re more likely to consume, right?
Shane Sams: So you overcome this fear in two ways, what product should I create? One, what do your people say they want? Two, I am not responsible for their actions and success. I’m only responsible to lead them and give them opportunity. Once you embrace those two things, it’s pretty easy to get over the fact and just go create the product instead of sitting around and worrying about it all the time.
Priscilla Y.: That’s so helpful.
Jocelyn Sams: All right Priscilla, I hope that you feel a little bit better about some of these fears and mindset struggles and please don’t think that we are picking on Priscilla because we did ask her if it was okay to kind of poke fun at her a little bit and she said-
Shane Sams: It’s all her fault. She’s the organizer and she sent us a check list. And we got to go through the check list. That’s just the way it is.
Jocelyn Sams: So we are now going to jump into what you have been working on and how we can help you move forward.
Priscilla Y.: Thanks you guys. I actually hearing all that stuff to me actually made me laugh too. I don’t feel picked on at all and I just hope that it helps other people out there who might have at least one or two of those fears and I so what’s next for me is I have this lead magnet now and I need to figure out what’s next. Where do I focus next? I think it’s creating content, but I’d love to hear from you guys where you would go.
Shane Sams: The thing that we always say is product first, right? When we say product first we, what we mean is you create a lead magnet, which is a product that you exchange for contact information and you create a product that you can exchange for money. Okay, so you’ve got your lead magnet, you’re getting emails, you’re getting a social media following kind of built up here. The next step for you is to go to those people that are following you and for anybody listening, I don’t care if you’ve got 10 emails or 200 emails or 2000 emails. If you have 10 people paying attention to you, you got an audience, right? Let them kind of tell you what they need, what should the course look like? Ask them specific questions. Do you want a video course that shows you how to organize your kitchen? Do you want me to do some kind of virtual coaching thing where we FaceTime and you walk me through your house and I create a plan for you from the comfort of my own home? Do you want me to create audio files that you can listen to and then take action?
Shane Sams: Or do you want to actually see me cleaning a house and fixing up the organization in the bedrooms? Go to them and ask them what they want and then create the smallest version of that product so that they have something to buy.
Jocelyn Sams: And always remember that just because you ask someone a question or they give you an opinion, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it. If they say something and 10 people agree that they want to see you do A, B, C and you don’t want to do A, B, C, then don’t do it. I think sometimes people feel a little bit of pressure when they say, okay, what do you want me to do? And if Shane and I were to ask that, a lot of people would probably say, do one on one coaching. Well we don’t want to do one on one coaching right now so we’re not going to do that. So ask people but then also determine based on what they told you, like what fits in with your life and what you want to do.
Shane Sams: And the key here again is create the simplest version of that product that you can put a price tag on, right? I mean it may be something as simple as people want to know how to organize their bedroom because they feel discombobulated and uncomfortable and they’re not resting well because they don’t have this oasis to retreat to at night, right? It could be something like that. Maybe you just create that. You do a one week bedroom challenge. You have a video that shows you the 10 steps of straightening it and you just make that and charge 25 bucks for it. It’s just something to make money, right?
Shane Sams: But get your product done. Because what happens is when you have a way to get leads and a way to sell something, now you have a place to point all this content you create to and that’s how you make money online. And realize that it’s going to evolve. This is not the product that’s going to call the shot for the Babe Ruth home run. This is the first product and then you’ll learn and then you’ll make the second iteration and then you’ll learn and eventually you’ll have this big thing that can be sold for a couple of 100 bucks. It’s really convenient for your audience. It’s convenient for you and all of a sudden you’ve got a way to scale that income past those 20 hours that you’re actually able to work a week.
Priscilla Y.: I like that a lot, I feel like it just took so much off of my plate or off of my shoulders hearing that I don’t have to make the big product right now.
Shane Sams: No, you just have to make the first. Jocelyn created the biggest product I’ve ever seen when she made her one year lesson plans. Right. And, but she did it one month at a time and sold it one month at a time and then the next year-
Jocelyn Sams: I had the whole package-
Shane Sams: Ready to go. So people think we just wrote a bunch of lesson plans in a month and we sold all these things. That’s not what happened. It was like a one year epic process plus an entire summer of putting it back together into something that could be sold in a big product. So it’s like this is a process. It’s not a race. When you’re done, you’ll know it because things will start happening. You just have to slow down and take the next step and get something for sale. Once you get something for sale, it’s off to the races.
Priscilla Y.: Okay.
Jocelyn Sams: All right. Priscilla. Normally in this part of the show, we ask people what your action step is going to be, but I’m actually today going to give you some homework and your homework is to ask your audience what they would like see from you as a paid product.
Shane Sams: And then you will know your next step and you can go build that thing for them and put a price tag on it. And like honestly, I’m challenging you to have this done in like 30 days. Put a time limit on yourself. Get this first thing done and out there based on that feedback and see what happens.
Jocelyn Sams: And he’s just talking about a product, not the final product. Right?
Priscilla Y.: I got it. Yeah, I think, I know I can do that.
Jocelyn Sams: All right. We’re excited. We can’t wait to see what happens next.
Shane Sams: Well, listen, Priscilla, thank you so much for being on the show today, man. We always thank people for being so transparent with their fear, but you were transparent with five or six fears, so thank you so much. I’m sure that everybody out there listening probably got so much value from this show just being able to bust through those fears and ready to take action for themselves.
Jocelyn Sams: And I feel you sister. I’ll see you at the 12 step program. Okay.
Priscilla Y.: Thanks Jocelyn. I feel like I’m in good company.
Shane Sams: Wow. What a great episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, man. It was awesome going through all of those fears that were holding Priscilla back, but they really hold us all back. Just slamming those fears in the face over and over and over again. Guys, if you can get over your fears, if you can get over your obstacles, you can do all of the other stuff that really makes it happen in your online business. That’s what we do inside of the Flip Your Life Community every single week, we work together to overcome these fears, push through all of the obstacles, get all of the little things done that build a business, that build a life that change our family’s future, and we do it together. We would love to help you get past your fears, obstacles, any difficulties you’re having, in your entrepreneurial journey inside of the Flip Your Life Community.
Shane Sams: You can learn more about the Flip Your Life Community at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We have courses and trainings and a community that is constantly talking about how to get past these things and how to get to the next level. We’d love to have you inside there as well. That’s flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. All right, guys, before we go today, we’d like to close with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of inspiration from the Bible, not only in our life but for our business. Today’s Bible verse comes from Proverbs 13 verse 11 and it says, dishonest money dwindles away but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow. Just like we talked about in the show today, guys, it’s not a race. Baby steps will get you closer to the goal than no steps at all, but the point is to move forward little by little, until we find that success, until we flip our lives and we change our family trees forever. That’s all the time we have for this week guys. Until next time, get out there, take action, and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We’ll see you then.
Jocelyn Sams: Bye.
Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:
- Priscilla’s Website
- Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information
- Flip Your Life community
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