[00:00:18] Emma: People think I'm super disciplined.
[00:00:20] Spoiler alert, I am not. I hit snooze. I skip workouts, I leave emails unread. Just ask Serena. But somehow, somehow
[00:00:30] I still manage to get the big stuff done.
[00:00:32] You know, the stuff that really matters. So today I thought I'd pull back the curtain. On how I've built a business and a life and a rhythm that works for me, not because I have perfect discipline.
[00:00:44] Not at all, and I'm almost our 50 fifties. Good enough, right? I'm a 50 fifties, good enough girl. Not because I have perfect discipline, Uhuh, but because I figured out what discipline actually looks like
[00:00:57] for real people like me. So let's get into it. First of all, full disclosure, I have discipline as one of my top five strengths, but it's not with everything.
[00:01:08] It's only with the things that I really actually care about. To be honest, I'm gonna give you some really specific examples today on how I'm disciplined and What it means because being disciplined is an absolute blessing at times and an absolute curse at times. And you're probably thinking, how can it be a bad thing?
[00:01:26] Oh, well strap in. Here we go. The first example I wanna give you is when I was a bit younger, so my discipline, if you've listened to any of the podcast episodes before this one, go back to the one where I talk about having four houses before I'm 30. so this is how discipline played out. Then I had four mortgages at 30, so four houses at 30, which sounds amazing, but if anyone's got mortgage, you know what that feels like.
[00:01:55] I worked full-time in my HR [00:02:00] role. I had a side hustle 'cause I was passionate about it and I was studying uni full time. Now you might say, oh, that's pretty disciplined. Well, yeah, getting to those places is pretty disciplined. Where my discipline fell off was probably a little bit of the uni work.
[00:02:17] Doing the uni work I did enough to get through and that's okay because if you've listened to another one of my episodes where I talk about how smart I am, I'm street smart, not academic smart. I was okay with that. So that was one time, long time ago where discipline really. Came off for me. It was a routine, it was a rhythm, and I did enough to get by.
[00:02:41] Very recently, I've done something else. I committed about 18 months ago to doing 20,000 steps a day. You've all heard the story. I get up at 5:00 AM blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I do 20,000 steps a day now. I committed to that and I am unable to let myself off the hook. So if you've got any way to let yourself off the hook, send me your tips.
[00:03:05] I wanna know, I committed to 20,000 steps a day and I thought at the time, easy. Done. Now it did get easier, not gonna lie, and I have done it for. 18 months now. 18 months, and there's a switch in my brain that will not let me turn it off. So 20,000 steps. It is day in, day out. It's nine o'clock at night. I'm at 19,842.
[00:03:31] Gotta get my 200 steps in. That is the craziness about having some goal in your head or something in your mind, so you don't actually have to make the decision ever again.
[00:03:42] That's where the discipline becomes a curse. In business. Imagine if you had so much discipline or stubbornness, we could probably call it that you've rolled out this thing and you will not let it die.
[00:03:54] Even though no one's signing up, no one's wanting to play in that space. No one wants to [00:04:00] buy your offer. We've all been there. We have all been there. When I first started my business eight years ago, almost nine years ago, I had no idea. I had no cash and I had no clients. And I thought to myself, what does someone do that doesn't have an email list, that doesn't have any skin in the game?
[00:04:18] And who is an unknown quantity? What does one do? And I decided that one did pound the pavement. And so this is before COVID. And so I basically pulled all my LinkedIn followers. Together in a spreadsheet and I decided to go and pound the pavement. I did somewhere between three and five cups of tea or coffee a day for six weeks.
[00:04:45] Now one of the ways that I let myself off the hook is by calling things "Experiments"
[00:04:53] And so I experimented for six weeks to see if we could raise some funds, see if we could get some clients, see if we could do all the things. Did it pay off? Yes, absolutely. Was it the right way to do it? Who knows? It worked for us and I had some amazing conversations, and
[00:05:11] to this day, I still have relationships with those people
[00:05:14] now.
[00:05:15] Pounding the pavement, getting sales, doing business development sometimes. As business owners, we struggle with that. We're like, where do we go? We scratch our heads. Where do we go to find our ideal clients? Meanwhile, I'm like, they're kind of everywhere. So I just went everywhere. Of course, I had a stack of appointments, but then if someone canceled in the middle of the day, I wasn't like, oh yeah, yeah, I've got an hour off.
[00:05:40] No way. Who's next on my list? sometimes I make decisions and then I do not let myself off the hook. Sometimes I should let myself off the hook. I remember I rolled out an offer, so I love rolling out offers. So I get an offer, I roll it out, I market it. I see if there's anything in the [00:06:00] system, if there's anything anywhere, if people will buy it.
[00:06:03] I do the testing, all the things, and one of my offers, it's a beautiful offer called A Month of Momentum. So this was an offer. It's 90 minutes with me. It's a standalone offer where you can just dip your toe in the water and see if you like the style of coaching that I do. I'm fairly results driven, so I quite like results.
[00:06:22] So in 90 minutes we can get quite a lot done. I put this offer out there and for a year no one took it. No one took my month of momentum. In fact, it wasn't until maybe 18 months ago, Serena and I were having a, a conversation, a Team McQueen meeting, and I said to Serena, I actually think I might take down a month of momentum.
[00:06:43] No one's buying it. It's just sitting there. It's not doing any harm, but it's also taking up precious space on my website. So why don't we just remove it? Within a week, I had three months of momentums built. Now I do not know why. I don't know what happened. I seem to have more sales calls in the diary, and therefore people either wanted a month of momentum or they wanted to join coaching or whatever it is, and maybe my energy changed around it.
[00:07:08] Maybe I wasn't as stubborn to just like ditch it, which I can do, I can get an offer and I can go, it hasn't worked. Spin it. versus giving it a little bit longer just to stew in its own juices and month of momentum has been a game changer for a lot of people. We've done a lot of good things, so I'm so thrilled that I didn't, I looked at it and I analyzed it and I went, okay, let's just give this little push and see what happens.
[00:07:37] I think discipline means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, discipline means showing up. For me, disciplines means surprise and delight for my clients. For me, it means helping my clients get whatever the results. They're looking for. Some people come to me and they're like, I need to restructure my team.
[00:07:55] I've got no one else to talk about it. Great, let's do that. Because I have a HR background. Others come to me and go, I wanna [00:08:00] hit half a million. I wanna hit a million. How do I do that? I'm here. How do I get there? Cool. And every level of business is also different. You remember when you had $0 in the bank?
[00:08:13] What you did. Do you remember what I did when I had $0 in the pound of the pavement, wrote a lot of content, talked to anyone and everyone showed up everywhere. Like they were the things that I did in my business, less time behind the computer because I just hate computer work. And then as you grow in your business and evolve in your business, so once you hit the a hundred mark, great.
[00:08:35] You good? And then you can hit the 200 mark and then you double the numbers. But. Each level has a specific kind of sacrifice you need to make. And and we have to make sacrifices to get to the next level. there's always trade offs. I've talked about this in the podcast before. There's always trade offs about will we do this?
[00:08:54] Won't we do this? There was a time when I thought to myself, do you know what my target market is? Probably not those under a hundred k. And then I went, do you know what though? I can really help the people under a hundred K because if I give them this thing, then it will push them into a hundred K, which solves whole myriad of problems for women in business.
[00:09:14] And so I decided to stick with it. I decided to go, Nope, I'm gonna play in that space because that's where I can serve. And I've been there and I know what it feels like and I know how much hard work I had to do. I had to be really disciplined in that space, but without discipline or without something holding you.
[00:09:33] And I have to say, it's not just about discipline for me. It is my why. I want women to create a life they love. I want women to make money so they have choices and freedom and all the things, but I could not have done all the things that I have done in almost nine years of business without discipline.
[00:09:51] Now, some people are disciplined about the things that doesn't move their business forward. For me, I'm disciplined about only the things [00:10:00] that move my business forward, and sometimes that comes at a detriment. for instance, I love. Relationships. If you said to me, write some content or get on a call with someone, I would get on a call with someone.
[00:10:17] If you said to me, do some admin or move the needle in one of your programs with one of your people, I would move the needle. So there are some things that I have no discipline about that's admin. Emails, probably all the things I'm actually not good at. I would rather be in front of someone helping them with a solution, helping them with a problem than ferreting around in my admin folder.
[00:10:43] Let's be honest.
[00:10:45] What's important to you?
[00:10:47] Are you putting the discipline? The effort, the structure into place with the things that are important to you in your business. Some people would say revenue. Great. Are you doing the things to increase your revenue? Are you showing up in all the places? Are you picking up the phone? Are you sending out emails?
[00:11:08] Are you talking to people? Are you putting your offers out there? There are so many ways to focus on that. sibility might be important to you. Are you showing up on LinkedIn? Are you serving on LinkedIn? Are you going to events? Can people see you? Are you visible to your target market? And if that's a big rock for you, get disciplined about that.
[00:11:30] The thing about discipline and everyone always thinks I'm very organized and for some things I'm really organized for other things, I don't give a crap. So I work at home. I'm not one of these ladies that go, oh, I have to do a loaded dishes or the washing before I go to my office. No, I don't really give a crap about that.
[00:11:47] I go to my office, it's work hours, I go to my office and anything else can wait. And so I'm, I'm very blessed with that. I can switch off and switch on. Others are not so blessed and cannot do that as much. But what I wanna say [00:12:00] to you and what I wanna leave you with today is discipline, a rhythm, A structure gives you freedom.
[00:12:08] It does give you freedom, and that's why I think I like discipline, because I have freedom, because I can have a look at my calendar, I can see how much white space I've got, I can see what's going to give me energy, what's gonna drain my energy. And by having a structure and the discipline to focus on the big rocks, it actually means more freedom.
[00:12:28] So my questions for you today, or my question for you today is, what are your big rocks? have you got the structure and the discipline around those big rocks to move your business forward? If you like this episode and you think, oh, someone really needs to hear this, a business buddy or a friend, please pass it on and know that we have a YouTube channel.
[00:12:49] I'm showing up there on YouTube and you can have a look at my blonde hair and yellow glasses So check us out there and I hope you have a fab day.
