Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais:

Welcome to the Your Biggest Vision show. I’m your host Leah, and today we are talking all about what to do when you are at an income ceiling and you are trying to break through and raise your income at another level. I’m very passionate about this topic because I don’t think it’s talked about enough and it’s so, so real. So, just a little bit of background so that you all know what I mean by an income ceiling. I hope that you… I don’t hope you can relate to it in the sense that I hope you’re at a ceiling, but I have a sense that you might know what I’m talking about if you’re an entrepreneur and you are trying to break through and raise your income. So, first of all, you all know the deal when you’re on social media and you see other people posting about how much money they’ve made or how much money they made in a month or how much they signed a client for whatever the thing is they’re talking about and it can feel like, wow, they’ve made this huge breakthrough. Why am I so stuck? Why aren’t I able to get to that next level?

I am one of those people that has very publicly shared my income and my business progression. That wasn’t always the most natural thing for me. But I do it because I think it’s really important to show people that it is possible to run your own business, to work full time, to work by yourself. Things that I desperately wanted to know and here when I was at my nine to five job and when I was very unhappy. So I like sharing it even though it’s a bit bizarre. But my point is I imagine that sometimes people see what I’ve shared when I was able to quit my nine to five job, when I had my first five figure month, when I hit six figures in revenue and thought, wow, she’s progressing really quickly. How can she get there so quickly? How did she get there so quickly? Why aren’t I going that quickly? Or whatever the story may be. Maybe you’re not, hopefully you’re not, but I want to be clear and let you know that with each income accomplishment, each time I did get to a new income level, each time I did achieve a new goal, it was only after usually being at a ceiling for a while. So in no way has my business ever been this really pretty line that’s straight and goes up and you know, then all of a sudden I met six figures. Even if it was like a slow progression, it never went like that. Typically what it looked more like was going up a little bit to an income level and then plateauing for quite awhile. Then finally going up again and then plateauing once again.

Sometimes I even would go up, plateau, dip, and then finally get back up. Plateau again, dip again, go back up. So it’s always felt like these jumps happen in chunks basically. Never in a slow, clear progression. The reason I am not all that freaked out about this is because it’s funny, I don’t know if these two are related, but I think it’s worth sharing anyway. When I was in high school, I studied abroad in France for a year and I don’t really know who let me do this, but I did not speak French at all. I just really wanted to go and I really wanted to learn French and now I do speak French, but when I got there I didn’t. So I basically spent that whole year learning French and talking to my host family and everything else like that and you know, learning the language and I remember it feeling the same way then. I remembered not ever feeling like my French was slowly progressing. It did not feel like day by day I got better. It felt like I would be able to not say anything and then all of a sudden I’d make this kind of big jump and I’d be able to understand things really easily and then nothing would really happen and I’d feel like I would plateau. Then a couple of weeks or maybe a month later, all of a sudden I could have a conversation with someone with a thick accent or something like that. And I would get like this huge high from it. So my point is, I don’t think it’s unusual for things to go in that sort of non-progression way and for things to happen in these kind of jumps and, and then plateau for a little while and the reason I think that this is, you know, if you read a lot of personal development books, they really say clearly. I know Marianne Williamson talks about this a lot and I’m a big fan of hers. You have to totally embody the person that you currently are or the place that you are in, or the lessons you need to learn before you can move on. So if you aren’t getting passed a ceiling in your income or if you aren’t getting passed to ceiling in anything in your life, you need to ask yourself, what else am I doing? What else can I do to learn more in this place? What else can I do to get the most out of the place I’m in right now? Who else do I need to become in order to get to that next level? I’m going to give you three actionable steps today to actually apply to this because it can sound a bit abstract, but the takeaway here when we go into this is two things.

One, if you are feeling like you’re at a plateau with your income, your business, or anything else, then the first thing you should probably recognize is that there’s just other things you might need to learn or be or do or have in this place first before you can go to the next level. If you don’t do that and you surpass these lessons or these learnings or these beings are these gifts or whatever it is there and go to the next place, you haven’t really built a solid foundation from which you are ready to move up yet. So that next place might feel good for a second. You might get an income injection for a second, but because the foundation before it isn’t really built correctly, it’s likely that it’s going to collapse from under you or that you might have one of the situations which I’ve had where you will then actually take a dip in your income before you even go up back to where you were again. So it can be a little complicated. But I think having that awareness about what’s going on and why things might stay stagnant is really helpful.

Then the second thing I want you to go into this understanding is that it’s so powerful to feel really grateful about being at a standstill. I know you might be wanting to punch me through the computer or your phone, however you’re listening to this, but hear me out here. In my experience, when you are feeling like you can’t reach the next level or that you’re stagnant where you are, it’s usually because you’re on the verge of something really exciting, a breakthrough that’s going to be really different. You know, we can’t get to the level from where we are now or where we’ve been. What got you here won’t get you there. I think Brendon Burchard says that quote and it’s so true here. What got you here won’t get you there.

So continuing to do sales the same way, continuing to charge the same prices, continuing to have the same clients, continuing to have the same routine. Some of those things might need to change in order for you to get to where you want to be next and that’s because if you keep doing things the way you’re doing now, you’re going to stay exactly where you are. So typically that stagnation or that ceiling is I call it will be an exciting sign and something you should feel grateful about because it means that you’re about to break through to something even more exciting and new and challenging and creative and whatever else you want it to be in. The final note is that if you are, this is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten ever. So I really want you guys to hone in and hear this. If you are resonating with this right now and you’ve ever felt stuck in a place of stagnation. If you’re feeling like that, if you’re feeling like I’m not growing as quickly as I once was or my income should be raising more than it is right now, or why aren’t I making money on the projected track that I’ve laid out for myself? Don’t create drama around that. No one’s interested in you freaking out about something that’s completely in your control. I don’t mean that in an offensive way, but I do think it’s very easy for people to feel like they can spiral when one thing isn’t going the way they wanted and they can start thinking, well, maybe I’m not good enough for this, or maybe I should have done something better or different and now I don’t have as much money and maybe I should be firing someone on my team or maybe I should be cutting out my expense.

That’s a huge energy suck that helps. No one, it does not help you get to the next level. It does not help your clients, your audience, your customers, whoever it is that you’re trying to reach, feel like they are excited about hiring you, or working with you because they kind of see you stressed out. Like I mentioned, I really believe that these points of stagnation and these ceilings are our blessings. They are invitations for you to change, something to grow, to burst literally out of the ceiling that you’re under. Quite frankly, I think it’s boring to have a business without them. That is what nine to five jobs are. Those are the slow progressions working up the ladder. And that’s not what entrepreneurs really want. So, you know, we have to remember why we started this and that we chose to be in this and with the amazing parts of it, with the freedom, with the financial abundance, with the creative power that we get to have can also come with some in stable times. Some insecure times, sometimes when you don’t really know what’s going to be next. It’s your choice if you perceive those times as signs that things aren’t going well enough, a reason for you to go into a freak out mode, a reason for you to indulge with the roller coaster, or if you perceive it as a time to get excited about what’s coming next, to get excited about learning how you’re going to break through and to put your energy around that, around the excitement around the gratitude, around the anticipation of what better is coming.

Really just ask yourself how, how great can this get? How much fun can I have doing this and I think that when you show up with these ceilings in that energy, you’re going to break through a lot faster. You’re going to have a lot more fun doing it and it’s just going to be a way that’s more sustainable because if you break through something in a zone of freak out and then you’re usually making decisions based out of fear which typically aren’t sustainable, they’re usually band aid decisions is what I call them. They help you get a little bit to a place, but they’re not really going to be the long lasting success that you want.

Okay. I’m going to get into the three steps now that I suggest you take. If you are in a plateau and you’re looking to break through, but I wanted to just be really clear that we are deciding to treat these plateaus as gifts, as something that is exciting as something that implies something else is coming and that we are not going to go into freak out about it. Alright, here are our three steps for when you are excited to break through your income ceiling, no matter where it is, let’s get going.

Step one is to get a reality check with yourself. So as I mentioned before, what, what got you here will never get you there. That’s just not how it works. And so if you are continuing to do what you’ve always done and expecting things to be different than you need to be honest with yourself and admit that that’s not going to work and that you need to do something different, even if you don’t know what it is, I want you to release yourself of the pressure of feeling like you have to have the answer before you decide that something needs to change. You can just decide something needs to change or realize that what you’re doing is only what got you to where you’re at right now. And if you want something bigger or better, you’re going to need to do something bigger or better.

But a lot of times I see people that are frustrated with their income or they’re frustrated with where they’re at in their business and they want big results, but they’re not necessarily putting in big efforts. This doesn’t mean that they’re not trying. This isn’t about judging anyone, it’s just about being honest. The worst thing you can do is compare what your efforts are to someone else’s and think that they’re not putting in all this effort. So why are they having success in your not or whatever, because you’ll never actually know what they’re doing and you’ll never actually even know what their success really is. It’s a losing game to compare yourself to others. So ask yourself, what do you need to do that’s bigger? What would you need to do that is going to make things different for you? What would things look like if you were at a completely bigger step?

So if you have gotten yourself to a place, let’s say for example, where you make $2,000 per month and now you are hoping to get to $5,000 a month and so you are hoping to sell more of what you’ve already created, your hoping to keep selling it or you’re hoping to, you know, just kind of keep doing what you’re doing but on a, but just continue doing it. That is probably not going to work. That might be a place where you are feeling frustrated. If you have been in that situation and you feel like, well, things got me to $2,000 a month, so if I just do more of it, why won’t to get me to $5,000? I’m not saying it can’t, sometimes it will. But if you’re feeling in that stuck place, this is going to be one of those times where you get to decide that this is an exciting moment and you get to think about, well, what else could this be? What else could I sell? What else could I do? What else could I put out there? What else could I do marketing wise? What other messages could I have? What else? What else, what else?

You don’t need to dump everything on your plate. You don’t have to do everything that might come to your mind, but it will require you to think differently and think out of the box. So if you are feeling stuck, the first thing you need to do is really sit down with yourself and think, what is the reality of what’s going on right now? What is the reality of how I’m making money right now? What does the reality need to be to get to this next income goal? I’ll share one of my own examples that I’m very honest about. I at one point wanted to do more ecourse sell sales. I wanted that to be a bigger percentage of my income than it was at the time. So I spent a month working on selling this ecourse and was really hoping that I would set myself up for a place where it was selling a lot more and I was really excited. I thought it would be a good pivot for me. I loved this ecourse and I hadn’t really done a good job getting it out there because I was so occupied with my live programs. So I was super excited about this kind of additional leg. However, because ecourses are quite a bit less expensive than my live programs obviously, cause that’s where I actually work with people one on one. I would have needed to, needed to sell so many more than I did or was able to, to have it match the same amount of income that I was making doing more service based work.

So that month was a tough month for me. I did not make my usual income amount. I did not break it. I actually was a big dip and that’s because I needed to have a reality check with myself trying to sell something that is a 10th of the price of something else. And in one month hoping to make as much from it as I was doing the other higher ticket items was just not going to work and that was my own fault. But this was again a chance for me to think, all right, I didn’t break my income goal this month. Why not? What do I need to do? What is the reality of it? And the reality was it was a lower cost situation. I couldn’t charge as much for it. So I needed to have sold several more than I did and that didn’t happen and that’s not a bad thing. But now I can sort of know, okay, well what else in, you know, in those situations, again, if you’re ever pivoting, how can you pivot slower? How can you pivot smarter? How can you hire people to help you pivot? Things like that.

Okay. Step two, if you are feeling that you are at a ceiling, is to get focus. This is probably one of the biggest handicaps of entrepreneurs is that they have shiny object syndrome so bad and they don’t focus on what they need to do. I did a whole podcast episode on Shiny Object Syndrome. I think it was episode like 36 or something like that. So you can go back and listen to it if you haven’t yet. But it’s a huge crippler. I think that when entrepreneurs get into their business, and especially an online business where there’s lots of personal development chatter, they get really carried away by the fact that they’re visionaries in their creatives and that is exciting and it is hugely helpful when you’re an entrepreneur. In fact, I don’t think you can be an entrepreneur if you’re not a visionary, but you have to be equally as disciplined if not more. You have to stay focused. So many people throw in the towel when they don’t see the quick win or they see other people succeeding and they think that it means that they’re failing or they get excited about some other opportunity that might promise to make them money faster. So they stop whatever they’re doing in the middle of it and then carry on with something else before they’ve even seen it through. Those are all taking away from focus. There is no substitution for honest on interrupted focus, putting your head down and doing the work.

So ask yourself that question too. Are you really staying focused or are you chasing the next shiny thing? Are you comparing yourself with others? Are you giving yourself excuses for why you’re not working as much or as hard as you should? Are you playing the victim in any place? And I’m not saying these in a judgmental way, I just want you to be honest because I want you to break through the ceiling. I feel like I’m a pretty self disciplined person by nature. I think it’s one of my better traits as a worker, but I have to crack down on myself all the time. And even actually as my business grows more, I find myself having to focus more because it can be even easier to become kind of lost and your heads, in the clouds or anything like that. It doesn’t matter how far in business you get, you have to keep focusing and staying focused and staying committed. I think one of the powerful things I realized, and I’m going to do a whole episode on this actually, but one of the powerful things I realized about two years into my business was that this shiny object syndrome, all these marketing tools out there that are meant to get you to buy them because they promise that you will be able to make money really quickly, really passively, really easily, whatever the case may be. I’m not saying that they’re lies. I don’t think they are. I think you can do whatever you set your mind to, but if you see those and you respond to them in a sense that feels like that looks easier than what I’m doing now. I want to do that because I think it will work better than what I’m doing now and I think it will work quicker.

Oftentimes that is something in you looking for a shortcut and that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lazy, but it might mean you’re lazy. It also might mean you’re not really willing to do the work that it takes to get to your goals. It also means that you might feel like you’re in a little bit of a victim mode because you think that things haven’t been working for you. It can mean all sorts of different things, but really pay attention if you are falling victim to other shiny objects because it often plays the most on people that are feeling like they are not willing to do the work that they might be needing to do right now to get the results that they want.

Then the third step to get you out of your ceilings. So just to recap, the first two were getting a reality check about where you’re at and what got you here and what isn’t going to keep getting you further. Two, getting focused. Remembering that this is not a shortcut, this is not an easy path. If everyone could do this, then everyone would, but people don’t. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of trial and error, so stay focused. Then three, get help. This has been a huge, huge booster for me is releasing myself of the idea that I had to learn how to do all of these on my own. So at almost every income I’ve had every income jump or big step, like quitting my nine to five job, releasing a group program, starting to use advertisements, which really grew my audience, starting to get more serious with social media, getting to six figures, etc. I’ve always hired people to help me along the way. I didn’t at first, it took me a while because I thought entrepreneurship meant doing everything alone. I don’t know why, but now I’m really clear about realizing, okay, now my goal is to get to $50,000 in a month or whatever it might be. I don’t know how to do that. If I knew how to do that, then I would be doing it. But I don’t know how, which is why it’s not happening.

So why torture myself and make myself think that I am incompetent, that I’m unlucky, that I don’t have what it takes. All these other things that can come up in when I could just hire someone who could show me how to do it. Other people have done it, other people know how to do it. Other people have done all the trial and error that I will put myself through if I don’t, you know, have someone show me the way. So don’t try to do everything alone. Get help, get mentors, get people that know what they’re doing, outsource things if that’s what you need to buy your time back, it’s going to look different for everyone. But that is what mentors and coaches are here for. They want to help you and you should let them help you. So those are the three simple steps to take when you are hitting a ceiling. One, get a reality check. Two, get focused. Three, get help. And importantly, don’t get dramatic. Don’t get freaked out. Don’t go into some sort of despair about what’s happening. You don’t have time to do that. If you want to think about how to break through ceilings quicker cause remember ceilings will always exist. It is not a perfect progression path up I’ve established that from the beginning. But if you want the thing you can help is getting quicker at breaking through those ceilings, then I highly recommend getting into these fat patterns as quickly as possible when you find out that you’re at a ceiling so you can address the problem and break through much quicker.

If you are looking for a mentor who can help you get out of your nine to five job, who can help you get to five figures a month, who can help you take whatever creative vision you have and build an actual business platform behind it. That’s my specialty. Then I would love to chat with you. I have four really amazing opportunities available right now that end the month of July and they won’t be available for the rest of the year, so that’s two spots to work with me, one on one which is not usually open and a very exciting opportunity. This will really be for you if you’re ready to get to around $5,000 to $10,000 a month in your income. If you’re just starting out, you could let me know that you’re just starting out and we could talk and see if it might be right for you.

If you’re really just wanting to do this the accelerated way and you’re wanting to do it right from the beginning and go all in. I love that. So let me know. But I think most of the time it’s going to be best for people that are trying to get to around $5,000 to $10,000 a month. And then I have two spots open in my high level mastermind. My mastermind is one of the things I am most proud of about in my business. I have seen my clients in that program get incredible results and the doors open again from July going through December. It’s a six month cohort. It’s very intimate, it’s very high attention. It’s what I put actually most of my time into in my business and there’s only two spots left. So if you are interested in one of those being yours, then reach out to us, let me know and in Facebook I will put a link below this so you can set up a free call with us. We can get in touch and see if one of these four very unique, very exciting spots are right for you. You, the accelerated visionary that wants to have a really solid platform behind their vision and behind their goals so that you know that this is a weall fueled machine. That’s what I’m able to do.

This is not for you if you want to stay in a side hustle forever, this is not for you. If you’re willing to only be making $100 a month, this is not for you. If you are not willing to go all in, this is for you. If you are ready to totally break the limits of what you thought is possible for yourself and your business and you as a public figure and you as a visionary and put it into a whole new perspective where you can join one of the most respected and well thought of experts in your niche and, and make a business out of it that looks exactly like you want it to.

So we’ll put the call for this below the video. If you’re listening to this podcast episode, just email us at help@urbantwentysomething.com and we’ll be in touch with you and we can see if one of these is right for you. There’s no need to do this alone. There is no need for this to take very long. There is no need for you not to be completely in love with your business and your path and your income and that is my mission. So no matter what, I hope you guys have a great day and a great week, and I am always in support of your biggest vision. I’m cheering for you all. I hope that this helped and that you break through your next ceiling faster and harder and braver than ever before and I will talk to you guys soon.

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