Your Biggest Vision Ep. 13- The Power of Entrepreneurial Community

An entrepreneurial community is one of the biggest supporters of my journey thus far. I have heard the importance of finding like-minded friends early on in my journey, but I’m the first to admit, I didn’t prioritize it until recently.

I thought that because my friends were supportive, I didn’t really need to spend time finding an entrepreneurial community. After all, most of my “spare” time should’ve been spent building my business, right?

It wasn’t until I joined a marketing year-long group program that I saw the true power of an entrepreneurial community. I was blown away by the support, the inspiration, the helpful questions of others, and the space to be the dreamer I was all along. From there, I started pivoting all of my own offerings to have a group component to them as well, and I’m told often that the group elements of my programs are the highlights of them!

This episode shares what exactly I value about entrepreneurial communities, how I find entrepreneurial communities to be part of, and how you can too.

This episode was inspired by and is dedicated to my friend Anna McNaught, who I spent some time with in Los Angeles last week. Anna and I met in a free Facebook group for entrepreneurs years ago when we both started our “blogs”, and we were so grateful for how far we’ve come since then, building businesses that make five figures per month and working for ourselves. I couldn’t have done this without her! Let’s get to the episode.

Podcast of the Episode

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Transcript of the Episode

Hey everyone, happy Monday and welcome to the Your Biggest Vision show, I’m your host Leah and I’m very excited to be here with you for another week, another Monday, another clean slate to do whatever we want with the week and create our businesses and our lives the way we want. I love Mondays, was not always like that I feel very grateful these days that I don’t have to deal with the Sunday scaries or stress about if I got everything done. Maybe you can relate to some of that. And if that is what you’re going through, and you’re working toward either leaving your nine to five job or even just getting through a stressful situation right now just know that you can do this, you’ve got this and there is light at the end of the tunnel. So today, let me just go ahead and write in the screen… I also I think I’m going to go live on Instagram today because why not? I’m in a good mood. I’m excited to talk to you all about today’s theme, which is the importance of community in entrepreneurship and in side hustling, and really in any sort of transformation that you have.

Hey Instagram. Good morning. Happy Monday. We are here with Your Biggest Vision. Mondays are my favorite day, I’m so happy to be here with you guys live. I want to talk to you today. This talk was inspired by a trip that I took about two weeks ago. Maybe for those of you that follow me on Instagram saw that I was in Los Angeles for a while last week for sort of a mix of business and fun. I was there visiting and also sort of working with one of my very good friends Anna Mignot. So our friendship and sort of our story and how we have progressed together since starting our businesses is what inspired me to come talk to you about the importance of finding community, having community and really understanding how it can help grow your business and keep you on track because I really think that Anna and I sort of epitomized the best things I could have imagined about having friends that I met through my business and friends that also have their own businesses. So this is a big shout out to her. She’s been an amazing friend throughout all the years that I’ve had my business.

She’s also been a client of mine in the past, we’ve done amazing things with her business since working together, she’s now having her five figure months, which was a big goal of hers. And in fact, I think it was a goal of hers for a couple of months into 2018… 19. That’s what year it is. She was able to get there much faster. So it’s been a really fun year for her as well. But this is all about how we’ve kind of helped each other and how you can find community if you’re just starting out with a side hustle. Or if you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur. And maybe you don’t really know where to look to find other people to connect with. Or maybe you don’t really see the point, whatever it may be. I just want to share my experience and hopes that it can help you find the support that you need or want in order to make your biggest vision happen. It definitely takes a village no one does this alone. No one, no one does this alone. So I’ll be the first to say that when I started this, I heard a lot of people say, you know, find people that are doing the same thing as you are. Find a community or find like minded entrepreneurs.

I just didn’t really see the point to be totally honest. It’s not that I didn’t want to make new friends or that I wasn’t a nice person. But I have very good friends. My friends have always been very supportive of what I was doing, even when they weren’t doing it. So I never really felt like I was missing out in terms of not having friends that were doing the same thing I was. I thought, you know, I have my supportive then boyfriend. I have my supportive friends. Like I’m fine. And frankly, in that at that time, when I was first getting off the ground, I didn’t see how I had any more time to make any new friends or really even hang out with people. Again, this is just might be a warped view, but this is how I was feeling at the time, I just want to be honest. So I didn’t really pursue that and you know I’m an independent person. I’m also a bit of an introvert, I liked doing things alone, even though I like working alone. So I just didn’t really see this as something that needed to be one of my priorities. And I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase and I heard the phrase, you’re the result of the five people that you surround yourself with or that you’re closest with.

I still was just sort of like, well, you know what, my friends are pretty awesome. They’re not doing what I’m doing. None of them were entrepreneurs at the time. One of my best friends has since become an entrepreneur, but we were all living in New York, we were all really close, a lot of us went to college together. So I still felt confident in fact that I was surrounding myself with with good people and with inspiring people. So as I kind of went through this journey, I’ll just go ahead and share so I met Anna. I met Anna relatively early on actually it’s so amazing to see what we both accomplished because we met him a free Facebook group at the time and she was trying to get her Instagram business off the ground. I think at the time she had around 10,000 Instagram followers and just her perspective now I think she has 110,000 Instagram followers. So she’s come so far.

And at the time I was just starting out, I was just trying to starting to make digital products and I was just starting to sell e-courses and stuff and we met because we wanted to help each other. She sort of wanted to use me as a trial of an Instagram, kind of case study and I wanted to have her go through one of my programs to see if she found results and stuff like that. So we met and we just kind of hit it off and it just so happened that we stayed in touch, we didn’t really mean to be all that intentional about it we didn’t have like good accountability systems unfortunately because it just didn’t work like that but we just clicked so we stayed in touch over the years. Since then you know I don’t even know where to begin with what’s happened since then. Business wise we have seen each other go from starting these sort of hobbies, honestly starting these these side hustles, both of us turning them into businesses, both of us leaving her nine to five jobs, both of us getting to a point where we generated six figures from our once upon a time for fun side hustles and now being in the place where, you know, she just like I shared she’s just hitting her five figure months she saw me hit five figure months last year.

I think that that’s probably one of the reasons she decided to start working with me because she was ready to make that move as well. So needless to say, it’s been a very exciting couple of years for us and I’m so grateful we went through that all together. Kind of the business stuff aside, being in L.A. together really just made us realize it wasn’t about the business accomplishments also so much as the freedom we had created.

Hey, Tanya, she’s another great example of the community. I couldn’t have done this without Tanya as much as my Instagram stories. And she’s one of the people I just referenced that was a best friend at first that was an entrepreneur and now she is which is the coolest.

But anyway, back to this time in L.A.. We were just not only marveling and how far we have come in these three years, but also the fact that we could kind of just spend these couple of days together, you know, doing what we want making our schedule the way we wanted it to, staying in a luxury hotel, drinking champagne early in the afternoon if we wanted. We had the freedom we wanted, which to us was always more important than the money. I guess they kind of go hand in hand. Like we have that freedom because we make the money we do. But it was really exciting to experience it together. So having experienced this with her, and having seen the importance of community in my own journey really inspired me to come talk to you about how to find people that are doing the same things as you or even if they’re not doing the same things that want to support you and how you can find this on your own. So as I said, I was not into this and it was not you know, where do I begin?

When I was starting out, I did try after a little while to find people that were doing what I was doing because I realized I didn’t know a whole lot you know, and we’re not supposed to. How was I supposed to know anything about elite pages, conversion rates, like WordPress plugins, you know, and my friends were just sort of like I couldn’t care less. So I did try to find some community then. I reached out to people on Instagram. I did join free Facebook groups. I set up a free mastermind that I tried to keep up with. Long story short, when I did things for free, none of them worked out only Anna and I just sort of stayed friends over the years. But the free Communities I had tried to create the free groups I had tried to facilitate. They just didn’t go through and it’s not because I didn’t want them to or because I’m a lazy person. It’s just really, really hard to keep that a priority when the priority is always to make money or what you’ve already spent money on. I didn’t really realize this at the time. But then about a year and a half ago I joined a Facebook ads and marketing mastermind that I was I was part of, I obviously wasn’t putting it on it and much about Facebook ads at the time. And I saw very quickly how transformative being in a group was for me.

I thought that I was not going to love it because I thought it was going to want more of the individualized attention. But every single week when we got on the calls, I couldn’t believe how much I learned from other people’s questions and from other people’s perspectives and what other people were doing marketing wise in their businesses that I never would have even thought of. And then on top of that, when I have questions, I wasn’t waiting on one person, the leader of the group to have to respond, I was able to get feedback from people from all different sorts of levels, people that would be my ideal clients, to people that were experts in marketing and seeing that variety was really what gave me a holistic and much more valuable view of my business and things took off very quickly for me from there. So needless to say, I was hooked on group programs pretty much the first time I was in one and I’ve been in some capacity of a group that I pay for ever since then it’s part of my budget every every single month and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.

Especially now that I work on my own, and that I don’t have a nine to five job. Having the community within these groups is truly what makes it feel like I don’t work alone or that I’m in this by myself because I know I’m not. And on my business side, it was about six months after that first time I was in a group program when I turned all of my material into group programs. My entire business model is based off of the group programs I facilitate. At this point, I have four I have one called start your side hustle, which is a group of people that are starting their side hustles.

I have one called Scale Your Side Hustle which is for a group of people wanting to make more money in something they’ve already started. I have one called Limitless List which is all about building your email list and then my highest level, my entrepreneurs that are looking to do something very advanced either leaving their nine to five job and or hitting $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, etc. That’s my mastermind as well and I have heard from everyone in these programs that being in the group was way more valuable than they would have anticipated. And so I think a lot of times when we’re trying to move forward, or we’re trying to see what’s next for us, we might not immediately think that it would be having a community or having other people or having a group that you’re a part of. I know firsthand when I look at further educational opportunities for myself, I usually look at the material I look at the modules, I look at what they’re going to teach me. I have come to a point in my business where I actually value the group aspect and the accountability far more than any sort of materials offered because I think you get to a point once you’ve reached a certain income level where it’s not really about learning new strategies so much. It’s about thinking different, it’s about thinking bigger and it’s about moving quickly.

And those are things that you’re going to be able to do easier when you’re in a group capacity. So you know, I’m not necessarily looking to learn new things. I’m hesitant to say that because of course I very much believe that we are always learning new things. But in terms of meeting like another funnel or another marketing strategy, not so much right now. I’d rather just think of how I could better use the things I’ve already created, how I can, you know, believe in myself more how I can charge more, how I can offer more, what I’ve actually done thus far that’s valuable that I might not be able to see. These have all become apparent to me in the groups that I’ve been a part of. And I know that that has been the experience for many people in my groups as well. Some of the people in my groups are watching right now if any of you guys want to check whether you agree with this or not. But group programs necessarily aside the point here is that I didn’t realize how crucial it was to have people in my life that were doing similar or the same things as I was in order to grow and in order to be happier and in order to not feel alone on this journey.

Anna, seeing her last week was really you know, such a tribute to everything we’ve done and how we’ve done it together, how we’ve been able to work together, how we’ve been able to become very good friends and how we can able to grow our businesses together. So this is definitely dedicated to her. I’m so grateful for her and I can’t imagine having gone through this without her. Before we wrap up, I just want to give you guys a couple tangible tips on how you could find communities of your own and how you could find people that you think would really be, you know, helpful to you.

Hi Zayna, yeah Scale Your Side Hustle was an amazing community. Very happy to have you there and also what I’ve seen to be the most specific benefits of having people that are doing similar things as you in this journey and not doing it alone. So let’s start with the benefits. Here’s what I’ve noticed having a difference between being in groups having friends that are doing the same things as me and having people that I can talk to very specifically about this versus not. So the most basic one, most obvious one is that you know, over happy hour or something if you start talking about conversion rates, or funnels, or click throughs, or your site statistics or whatever people’s eyes don’t like glaze over, as if you’re telling them the most boring thing in the world.

Instead, they’re sort of like, oh, I had luck doing this, and I can tell you how to do this and this was something that was really helpful for me. And you know, X, Y, and Z. So in what would just be sort of a normal conversation, you think, you end up getting so much help so much faster. Because you all can kind of contribute in the same way. Don says, I love the dynamic energy of our group, and how we are all sharing our experiences and supporting one another. I love it John, thank you for sharing. Yeah, I love our mastermind too. I’ve loved all my groups and yeah, my favorite part of my business. And so just having that sort of common ground right away to discuss things with people about what you’re doing, you know, during your work during your days is really, really helpful. That would be the first and most obvious benefit to having a community like this I would say.

The second one and I say this humbly, so forgive me if this in any way sounds a bit, I don’t know braggy, I don’t mean it that way. But the truth is, I have found that being in communities, having people having people that are doing similar things to you, they’re going to support you more in quantum leaps to really high levels much quicker. And it’s not because your friends that aren’t doing similar things don’t want to or can’t, or anything like that. But the reality is the pace at which nine to five jobs usually move is just different than paces of entrepreneurship. When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to move fast, you have no choice, you know, even every day really needs to be some sort of advancement toward your goal. Because when you really think about it, there is no such thing as staying stagnant in life really, at all, you know, you’re either growing downward or you’re growing upward. But there is no stuck like time is always passing. So you’re either using that time to grow your business or you’re losing time in which you could have been growing your business in by default, that makes your business being something that’s declining when you’re not growing it. So, I know that that’s kind of an oversimplified explanation, but just to think about it a bit more tangibly. You can think of if you have a bad day at your nine to five job, or if you just aren’t feeling well or something, or if you, you know, are feeling really stressed, or whatever. Usually, if you have a day where you don’t get as much done as another time, it’s not the end of the world. Yeah, you might be more stressed the next day. Yeah, you might have a little more on your plate at some point, maybe your boss won’t be happy with you or something. But the company as a whole will continue to function. The opposite is true when you’re an entrepreneur, especially on your own. You have to be on your A game and you have to make big leaps personally, internally and in very, very complex ways that aren’t required of you when you are part of a bigger organization because those moves slower. That’s just the way it is. We all know this to be true. You know, big corporations have a lot more leeway, you can think of it as like some sort of huge truck like that’s going to take a lot more to turn or to change than just like a little sexy sports car. I know nothing about cars.

Sorry excuse my lack of brand reference, but that’s kind of how you can view yourself as an entrepreneur. You know, you’re speeding through, you’re going, you’re moving, you are on top of it. And you need to be a well-oiled machine to do so. This car analogy is actually working out well for me if I only knew the name of any kind of car. So if anyone’s watching live and wants to chime in with some sort of brand of a car, that would be helpful. But the point is, when you’re moving really quickly, you’re like, trying to be on your A game you’re trying to get ahead of the traffic, you are trying to be as highly functional as possible. No car can do that alone. It needs to be gassed well, it needs to be oiled well, it needs to have insurance, it needs to look good, it needs to be clean. BMW, thank you. You know what I mean? So the same thing happens when you’re running this own business. And when you have people that are supporting you that are doing the same things as you and that are, you know, understanding how quickly you need to be moving, you’re just going to get a different type of support. It’s because people that are in you know, either nine to five jobs or that don’t want to be entrepreneurs. They just have a different way of dealing with the struggles of their business. It doesn’t make them any less difficult, you know, their jobs, they are dealing with big organizations. They are dealing with big infrastructure and corporate regulations and whatever else might be frustrating them. And that’s fine.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that when you have people that understand the level of which you can and need to move, it helps you move faster. I just want to read really quick Tony said “I have an accountability buddy from Leaders Group to who is now a good friend and client too”. Yeah, amazing. Not to brag about my own program so much. But another thing that has been so great about every program is there’s been no competition. So if that’s something that might freak you out at all. If you think that being sort of in, you know, in community with people that are doing the same things, it might bring up some tension, it really doesn’t, because you start to realize very quickly that there are billions of people in the world and even if you and one other person are providing the same service like spoiler alert other people are already providing the same service as you whether you are next to them or not. You can really actually help each other by sharing what kinds of things are working for you, what kinds of things are not. And in supporting each other with those sort of mechanical shares, you’re able to then give each other more space and more room to be uniquely them and build their brand more uniquely themselves, which is going to help you both because then you’re both going to stand out more. See what I mean? So if you are able to sort of share tips on the things that everyone in your industry probably could know, you have more room to become more different. So competition has never been an issue in groups I’ve been in or in the groups that I posted. So I hope that that would take away any fear of that as well.

So some of the other benefits is that you find… so when I’m just want to read this comment “when people see us as entrepreneurs, and we slow down there thinking there’s something wrong with us”. Yeah, we have to keep moving, right?

So the biggest the probably single biggest mental shift I’ve had to make as an entrepreneur to achieve the success that I have, and I just was talking to my sister about this. She is in. She’s a junior in college. So she’s like about to graduate, she’s about to go, you know, start applying for jobs and everything like that and she’s nervous. And he’s talking about how everyone around her is really not wanting to get a nine to five job. They’re also all really complaining about how stressed they are and how nervous they are, and how scary this is and what if it doesn’t work out. And my sister was telling me that she sits there when she hears everyone complain. And she’s just like, oh my god, how can we all be freaking out about something that we all literally all of us go through, it cannot be that bad, we are all going to do it. Every single person that graduates from college is going to be in a situation where they have to find a job and she also has said that, you know, there’s other options we could do what my sister does like referring me that I work for myself, we could travel for a while. She’s a really creative thinker, and she says that when she says things like that people have all these different reasons for why their situation is putting them at a disadvantage and basically justifying their stress.

So things like well I don’t have as good of a GPA maybe or my major is in a straightforward to get another job as something like maybe accounting for example. Or we live in Boulder and a sister lives in New York, it’s easier. I don’t know where we’re getting that from it’s way more expensive to do things here. But it’s easier to do things there than here you know, you get the picture but the idea is people are enjoying being in the victim mentality so much that they are justifying it so that they can stay in it and I told my sister that she is learning early on the single best thing I learned to get me to this point which is that you have to guard your thoughts away from any sort of victimization like your life depends on it, because guess what your life does. I really believe this with all my soul. Really getting out of any type of you know, rhetoric, complaining, I mean, no one’s perfect.

But the more you can take responsibility for every single situation that you’re in everything that’s happened to you, everything that’s done for you, everything that you can do, the more power you’re going to have. And you are not going to be able to get a good job, to make the money that you want, to quit your nine to five, whatever, you know, big goal you’re working toward, if you don’t feel powerful, because it is hard to do these kinds of things. And it really can only come from a powerful person. But if you’re taking away your power, and you’re giving the power that is controlling your life to external factors, like my sister’s situation, the fact that they live in not a big city or the fact that they majored in something different or the fact that their college charged them a certain amount. So now they have student loans, are you really going to sit there and give the power of your life over to these huge, huge, you know, untouchable factors in life that everyone has to deal with that is like the most disempowering, and I don’t even know for lack of a better word, I guess, sad way to go about it. And I know I’m being harsh on these kids, of course when I was in college, I was stressed about getting a nine to five job. I’m not talking about that. I’m not trying to blame them. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s incredibly important to stay out of a victim mentality whenever you’re trying to do something big. And this is more true than anything, when you’re trying to run your own business. You have to focus on the things that are happening on your behalf, for your behalf, in your favor, and if you focus on things that aren’t going your way, then you’re going to be right and things aren’t going to go your way it is completely essential.

So that has to be the biggest benefit I have found to finding people that are also entrepreneurs is I feel like they are less in victim mentality than the average person I meet in New York City, at a bar, or just at work even, or any other type of situation. People like having other things to blame for the circumstances that they don’t like about their own life. It makes it easier to not have to look in the mirror and think about what they’ve done to get themselves there. This can all be incredibly painful. I’m not saying it’s an easy thing to do. But I knew and I feel like most entrepreneurs get to a point where they realize that that in order to reach their goals, they need to feel as empowered as possible. And the only way you can truly keep your power is if you aren’t giving your power about any circumstance in your life to any other factor, school, job, time, people, none of that it is your life. It is your life. And you have the power within you right now to make what you want happen, whatever that goal is, whatever that vision is, this fits very well in with my show, whatever that vision is, you have the power within you right now to make it come true. So it is your job to continue giving yourself that power every single day. I have found that being in a community with other entrepreneurs helps monitor your own your own thoughts and your own empowerment.

Hey Ellie. I’m just talking about you, you should go back and listen to this because I told the whole story of how smart you are for your age and how how happy I am that you’re learning the lesson early on that the only way to truly reach big goals in life and live the life that you want by design is to have the most control and ownership over every part of your life and to keep out of victim mentality as much as possible.

Someone asks, “How do you deal with potential frustration with people in your life who still have that mentality”? Great question. So we all know what this is like, right? When we’re trying to like, do something big. And we’re like, I’m not going to blame anyone. And then for me, how this would show up is that I would sort of go to hang out with a friend. And then they would like blame their job for the reason they’re not in good shape, because their job takes too much time. And so they don’t have time to go to the gym, or whole foods or whatever it is. So like, they’re mad at their job for the reason that they don’t look the way they want to. Or you know, I have I went to NYU, very expensive school. A lot of people have a lot of student loans, you start talking to them, and they’re mad about the fact that they don’t have savings and their credit is low or whatever, because they went to NYU and they have too many student loans. So now they’re blaming this huge institution that they fully consensually elected to go to for the reason that their finances aren’t the way they want them to be, you see what I mean? So again, these aren’t things that are like making people psychotic. They’re not walking around with a tattoo on their head that says victim. But these things do start to raise red flags. As you start to monitor your own thoughts more. And as you want to be more in control of your own life. And you know that the priority in your life is to stay as empowered and as much ownership as possible.

So there’s a couple things you can do here I have seen people do any, you know, you get to choose the scale of how extreme you want to go to make this happen. I’ve seen people do several different parts of the scale so on the lighter scale, what you can do is just you know, you have to get really disciplined with yourself and basically put a shield around your mind when you hear things like that where you can see that that’s a trigger you can see that that’s a victim statement and you can decide that you’re not going to agree with it, you’re not going to absorb it, you’re not going to internalize it, you can sort of just sit there and nod and smile and in terms of your friendships this will probably do the you know least amount of damage because you on surface on really changing you still sort of letting them venture still sort of letting them listen and everyone has bad days. It’s nice to be a good friend. I get that. On the other side of the spectrum. The Most Extreme side is to cut people like that out of your life. And I know that that is extreme. And you don’t need to do this with everyone. But if you’re starting to see, you know, people come with this pattern of complaining and complaining and complaining, and you realize that you being around them is hurting that positive and empowered energy you’re working really hard on it’s worth thinking about.

You know, I’m never going to tell anyone what to do in terms of who to be friends with or not. It’s very personal, but your light, your thoughts, your motivation, your belief in yourself, is the most important thing in the world. So if things are costing you that or even if things are making it more tiring for you to achieve that, or to stay that way, if it’s taxing on you to be around people like this in any way, you just have to keep asking yourself, is this worth it? What is this costing me? Is this costing me more energy than it’s worth? Is this costing me more emotions than it’s worth? Am I spending more time you know, trying to reverse my thoughts or protect them than it’s worth? And this is deep stuff. It does take a lot of self reflection. It’s not something that can be done overnight. I would journal about it a lot. But I think the best thing you can do is ask yourself whenever you feel like there’s a threat in your life to that empowered state of mind, is this actually worth me fighting off this threat? Or is this not worth it and what I’d be better off without this in my life? Now, when it comes to people that are very close to you, like maybe your spouse or your kids or your parents or you know, sometimes even very, very good friends were coming out of your life would never be an option. This is when it can get a bit trickier because not all the time are people in your life, even your closest people going to be doing this sort of transformational work as you. So again, here you have the same spectrum where you can decide and you know, like I’ve heard stories of people taking extreme measures in situations like that. But in those situations, I would be more inclined to have a conversation with the person and really make it about you. Like, no one is going to be excited for you to sit down with them and be like, so you’ve been complaining a lot. And that’s got to stop, right? Especially when people are already caught up in these stories about how they’re victims to begin with. They’re just going to keep letting them tell themselves that and think that you just don’t understand, you haven’t been through something as hard, as them you don’t really know what it’s like, you have all these benefits and you’re being harsh, like they’re gonna stay in victim mentality. So if you want to talk with them, I would just really make it about you and say that you have found that you don’t function as well or that you function quite a bit better when you really try to negate or subtract any sort of victim statements from your vocabulary. Even though they don’t have they probably don’t mean much on the surface, even though they are natural, even though they’re all we’re all human and we all make mistakes.

You know you saying that it’s about you and you really trying to do what’s best for yourself. And so you ask that they tried to refrain from speaking like that around you or that they rephrase things around you or that they monitor it for themselves, but just making it about not how they’re wrong, or how they are being certain or how they’re complaining too much or they’re being victims, because someone who’s caught up in a victim mentality is not going to respond well to that they’re not going to understand they’re going to blame you there to stay in victim mode whenever they get criticized. So instead of making it about you, and how you function better in this way, or how you will have this goal for yourself, and you’re hoping they can support you in that then it becomes about you and in effect, hopefully it will still end up having the same result. I hope that that’s helpful. It is hard to shut your mouth and smile and nod, I hear you. I’m not really a passive person either.

So I have struggled with that but I have gotten better at it. And I also think that part of it is working on not being such an empathetic person. And I know that might sound a bit harsh. But I see I’ve seen a lot lately on the internet, a lot of people saying that they’re… I don’t know the correct term, but that they’re overly empathetic. Like, they feel people’s energies, they feel people’s pains, and they get, they get really emotional, if other people are emotional, or they get really sad, if other people are sad. And, you know, I think that that’s a really slippery road to go down. Because while on the surface, it might seem like you need to, you know, that you’re very caring, and that you really care about the people around you. In effect, what it does is you’re taking away your power over your own emotions, and you’re giving it to other people around you. And you’re basically telling them that they need to act a certain way in order for you to feel a certain way. And that’s not empowering either. It’s really, you know, bringing it back to you about how you feel, how much are you going to absorb, how much are you going to let things affect you you know, the truth is there’s always going to be things, people, situations, circumstances, that can bring us down if we let it so probably practicing with the ones that we love the most, that are in our lives every single day to make sure that their negativity, or their victim mentality, or whatever it is that they’re going through does not impact you is only going to make you stronger and better suited in the future as you continue to take more control of your life because you’re just not going to let other things you know affect you quite as much.

So I kind of went on this tangent for a while. But I hope that I got the message across that having other people in your life that avoid victim talk that avoid victim mentality that do not let you indulge in your own complaints. Sometimes it can be kind of harsh, but you need it and it’s helpful. That’s probably been the biggest benefit of both hosting and being part of communities of similar entrepreneurs. That’s been a great part of having my friend Anna. Also my best friend Tanya has really come on this journey with me as well. I couldn’t be more grateful for them. And I’m grateful for all of you listening every one of you that’s part of this your biggest vision community. You guys inspire me to do this everyday hearing your stories getting your messages watching you guys take this advice to grow your business, start your side hustle, think differently about yourself, really push the idea of what’s possible for you and your vision and your own life is the most inspiring thing in the world to me. So I hope you guys keep sharing. I’d love to hear from you as always, and I will see you guys next week, every Monday at 10:00 am Eastern Standard time for our next show. In the meantime, here is to your biggest vision. Have a great week guys.