Leah Gervais:

Welcome back to the show everyone, Leah here. And today, this week I am celebrating that, uh, as of March, we crossed another seven figure sales year in my seven-figure business. If you’ve been following me for some time, you know that I’ve already done this before. I refer to myself as a seven-figure business owner and assume firmly behind that.

Uh, but there have been any, and, and when I say seven figures in sales, the definition is, and it’s very important for me to be transparent about this because we live in an internet business world where there’s a lot of people who are not being transparent and a lot of confusion and a lot of shadiness, frankly. Um, and it’s very important to me to be as open as possible. So when I say seven figures in sales in a year, I mean that over the past 12 consecutive months, my seven-figure business contracted 1 million worth of sales.

And when I say contracted a sale, my definition of that is a contract is signed, A deposit is paid. So it’s different from seven figures in cash. That’s kind of a different goal. Um, it’s specifically seven figures in sales. That is what I focus on. The first time I did it was because I was pregnant and I wanted to be able to project my recurring revenue for quite some time since I knew I was going on maternity leave. 

And that is what we were able to do again. Now, that does mean that in between there were any given kind of 12 month snapshots, where some of the months, some of those 12 months, we weren’t at seven figures. And that’s okay. I, you know, I think it’s actually really important to point that out because I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to achieve a goal and then feel like if we ever aren’t at that new normal, then we’re somehow failing.

And that’s absolutely not true. And in fact, that’s quite toxic thinking, especially for women that have other priorities in life. Like if you’re a mother or if you have other personal things that you’re looking to focus on, like travel, or maybe you’re getting married or maybe you’re taking care of your health.

And I know that there’s a lot of thought gurus out there that talk about how once you hit a new normal, you never have to go back. I think that that can be really damaging ways of thinking, honestly. So that was not the situation for me. I hit that and then my seven-figure  business didn’t always maintain that 12 month seven figure sales status. 

It dipped below, and that’s okay. I had a baby , so I went on maternity leave. I dramatically scaled back my work weeks. And in fact, I’m much prouder of the fact that I hit this seven figure sales goal this time around because I did it only working three days a week.

I did it as a mom. I mean, it was pretty incredible to do it while pregnant, but it also is pretty incredible to do it with my baby here. Um, still breastfeeding him being a very present and hands-on mom. 

Anyway, you’re not here to talk to probably listen to all these details, but what I do wanna share with you are three foundational pieces that I think I have been laying, oh, for years now that allowed this to happen and allowed this to happen, working only 30 hours a week and allowed this to happen.

Working with clients that I really love and allowed this to happen, happens with me really being pickier than ever and also less stressed out than ever. The truth is, the first time that I did this was when I was pregnant, I was working six or seven days a week.

That’s just the honest truth. I don’t, I don’t remember feeling burnt out because I’ve never really let myself get to that place slash. I love my seven-figure business, so I’ve only ever really worked on it when I’ve wanted to. It’s not like I was working a hundred hour weeks at that point, but certainly I didn’t, you know, I didn’t have a kid. It was just my husband and I, he’s an entrepreneur too. We work a lot. We did.

 Anyway, now, now we know I don’t because I have just a different season of life. Um, so it certainly feels a bit more leveraged this time around. So I wanted to just pull back three basic basic things about what I’ve been doing either internally or externally for the past seven years that allowed this to come to fruition. And it has taken all of those seven years.

I don’t think it needs to take you seven years to hit seven figures, although even that is relatively fast. If you look at it like any other industry, I know that the coaching industry can make you feel like you’re behind if you don’t hit seven figures in year one. 

But the point is, there are certain things that take time and that the benefit of which you will see with consistency, see in the following three areas I’m going to talk about. And you get to really own what your trade-offs are to grow your seven-figure business, how fast or how slow you want. For instance, I certainly could have hit seven figures either sooner or, uh, with more consistency if I was okay working more, but I’m not because it’s not something I’m willing to give up while my son is so young. 

So I always really think it’s important to come back to our ownership with where we’re at in business and recognize that pretty much everything about where you’re at is a choice that you’ve made, whether you’ve consciously made it or not.

And that’s not meant to put a lot of pressure on you or meant to make you feel like you’ve set yourself up for something that you don’t want. It’s meant to put you back in a place of power and think, would I trade situations I’m currently in for more success, for more growth, for more momentum? 

And if the answer is yes, then you can start trading those. If the answer is no, then you can own where you’re at and recognize that there’s no race and there’s certainly no prize for making the most money, but hating your life or hating your seven-figure business or getting completely burnt out. 

So let’s look at the three references here. The three foundational pieces that I really have laid the groundwork for year after year that I think have allowed this to flourish and that I really wish I would’ve understood earlier on.

That’s why I wanna talk about them So clearly. The first is the biggest one, which is I believe that my energy and my point of attraction, this is a bit woowoo, but I, I believe it, so I’m going to share it, is the best it’s ever been. And best is kind of a subjective word because I don’t think our energy’s ever really wrong. 

So there’s no best versus worst. It’s more like I am recognizing that if you look at the emotional scale of the, the, uh, the, um, uh, let me see what it’s called. I think it’s the scale of emotions. I believe it’s an Abraham Hicks tool.

I’m not sure who started it, but it’s an emotional guidance scale and it lays out the different emotions from the lowest vibrational point to the highest. And it helps you see how emotions that you might be frequently feeling could explain why you might be attracting things into your life that you don’t wanna be experiencing.

And this can be hard for people to wrap their heads around. I wanna talk about this very carefully because what you’ll see if you look up this emotional guidance scale is that the bottom emotion, meaning the least positive, the lowest vibration is guilt. 

And when I started studying my own energy and setting the law of attraction and understanding metaphysics, that was one of the most guilt ridden times of my life because I’ve talked about this publicly before. But, uh, guilt was a huge byproduct of the loss of my dad.

And when I was grieving, I was experiencing tons of guilt. I felt like I couldn’t do anything right around how I was processing his grief or how I was or wasn’t showing up in my seven-figure business or how I wasn’t, or was showing up at my nine to five job, which I still had at the time. And I was really trying to give myself space to do all of them. And as a result, I ended up feeling like I could do none of them and I could do none of them, right?

So guilt was a very frequent feeling of mine. And when I would hear if I would’ve heard something like this, like my own negative emotions are the reason for the negative things in my life that honestly probably could have made me feel worse about myself. And what does that make you feel? Guilt, which brings you even lower in that emotional vibration scale.

So I’m not here to make you feel guilty, that’s not what this is about. It is about understanding the power that you have, and it is about understanding that things can change quicker than you think. And what I don’t think I understood and what I think has been so mind blowing is just how many things don’t actually have any meaning to them unless we assign meaning to it ourselves. 

An example of this is that when I started my now seven-figure business, I went into credit card debt. I’m very open about this, and it was a hugely shameful thing for me. I grew up with parents that did not encourage credit card debt at all. And my dad was a C P A and I felt like he would’ve been ashamed of me for having made that decision. I had no real proof that I was going to make that money back. It felt like a huge risk. It felt very irresponsible. I was too

Embarrassed to tell people I didn’t even wanna tell my now husband because I was worried that he would be nervous about marrying me and joining finances because I had this credit card debt. Now, what did I make that mean? Why did I allow that to feel so much shame? Because in my mind, credit card debt meant I’m irresponsible. I don’t have enough money to pay for something, so I’m going to live above me, above my means to pay for it. Um, and I don’t have patience otherwise, I could save this money and pay for it upfront.

And I was so certain that those things were true, that I didn’t recognize that they were just things I had decided to believe. And that’s what I’m talking about here. And that’s why I think my energy is at an all time, I would say like positive fi, positive high, because I now take nearly nothing as fact.

I now take nearly nothing at face value. I’ve now been able to dissect and reexamine almost every part of my life or anything that comes up that makes me feel triggered and ask if that’s really something that’s true or if it’s something I’m assigning belief to. For example, going back to my debt, when I started recognizing, hey, this debt doesn’t actually need to mean that I’m responsible. It doesn’t actually need to mean that I can’t afford this. 

What if I just simply allow this debt to mean that I took a chance on myself and I’m paying something off over time and it’s going to be more expensive than if I paid it off upfront, but I don’t really care in either situation. The truth is there. The truth is what you decided to be. And I think that until you have that awareness, the truth can feel so concrete, right?

Like I got that perception of what debt meant from my parents, who I love, who I admire, who I wanna be like when I grow up. Who was I to question what their definition of debt was until I started realizing that we all get to choose our own definitions of things. We all get to attach our own meaning to things. 

Now where we can set yourself free of this, because here’s the honest truth that no one really wants to hear or that’s hard to hear. You get to choose all day long what meaning you’re assigning to anything, to anything. Your feelings are a choice. Where this feels heavy, where this feels too easy, where this feels challenging in practice is we haven’t actually taken the time to look at why the certain meanings that we assign to things that feel so heavy are there. So let me give you another example of what I’m talking about here.

I know this is quite abstract, but I think if you really can get this concept, you’ll recognize how joyful and playful life can be, because nothing really needs to be negative unless you let it be. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have problems in life. No one’s life is perfect and certain things are okay to have negative connotations with because certain things are negative, and that’s okay. 

But you get to decide what they are instead of feeling like you’ve inherited a set of beliefs that aren’t actually helping you at all. So when I was still at my nine to five job, when I would run flash sales or I would get on sales calls, or I would do Instagram lives or whatever to try to sell something, if someone said no, if I didn’t make a sale, that would be, I would take that I, it, it sucked is what I’m trying to say.

It did not feel good. It would make me feel crappy. It would make me re-examine my offerings. It would make me second guess myself. It would make me feel frustrated. It would make me feel scared. And again, when I was going through that, this all felt so natural to me. No one likes to be rejected. No one likes to have someone say no. No one likes to feel like they did something they’re proud of, and then no one else sees the good in it. That all felt very normal. 

But now I can look back and think, what meaning was I attaching to those nos? Well, every no felt like a threat to the business that I had just put on a credit card. Of course, remember I just shared how vulnerable that made me feel. Every no felt like a threat to me leaving my nine to five job, which I really wanted to do.

Every “no” felt like a personal dis to me. And because my business is so personal, it made me feel like people were saying no to me. Like I wasn’t good enough. Like they didn’t like me, they didn’t wanna work with me, they didn’t trust me. And before I knew how much I was deciding to take those on, those felt like fact, they felt like absolute fact. 

Now I can look back and see that absolutely none of that needs to be true. A no can simply be a no. It’s not the right time. I’m not the right person. There’s more people out there. I’m not the right one for them. Uh, they’re not ready. They don’t trust themselves. They, for whatever reason, don’t click with me. All of those things can be equally true, and that’s what I decide to, to attach meaning to nos to more.

Now, in fact, I get more no’s than ever, right? . I wouldn’t be making seven figures in sales if I didn’t sell quite frequently, which means I get nos, I just don’t care anymore. They just don’t make me, they don’t mean they don’t mean anything to me anymore. If there’s constructive feedback, of course, I’m not in denial. This isn’t about lying to yourself. It’s not about being delusional. It’s about taking your power back with your own emotions.

And when we hear people say, the reason why I said, I think it’s frustrating to hear people say, you can choose what  does or doesn’t trigger you. You can choose how you feel. Your energy is completely up to you. How you feel, what you attract is completely up to you. The reason why that’s frustrating is because it feels like it’s not that easy. It feels like there’s so much attached to what we’re feeling and what we’re experiencing, that it’s not something you can just turn off.

It doesn’t feel easy to wake up stressed about money and just be like, oh, I’m not gonna be stressed about money, right? Because there’s all these reasons why you should be. So the work here, the internal work, and this is something I’ve done with coaches over the years a lot, and this is something I do with my clients, especially my long-term clients, um, that that I do like v i p days in a year long container with I can really dig deep with them, is we identify what’s at the end of what I call the domino of doubt. 

So that when something challenging does happen, instead of you thinking, I didn’t make this sale, that must mean my seven-figure business isn’t doing a good job. Or that must mean I’m not good enough. We identify where that frustration is coming from, kind of what’s bouldering it down, anchoring it down.

And that is where you really can find the freedom to just be like, nah, I’m not gonna listen to that. And a lot of times those deep, I guess like anchors, things that are really holding you back in those moments or that are at the end of the domino of doubt are really personal and really threatening to your identity, your dreams, the things you care about most, the things you’ve worked the hardest for.

 So those can be things like a no isn’t just a no to you or a stress about money isn’t just a stress about money to you. It is threatening the house that you wanna live in or the trip you wanna take, or the relationship you have with your partner or the vision that you have for your business or, uh, what you thought would happen this month or what you thought would happen this year, and how that might affect your family planning.

Like there can be so much weight there. That’s why it’s hard to just say, my emotions are a choice. It’s up to me to feel stressed or not feel stressed. I don’t have to let this in. That’s true. But until you can identify how heavy it is that is preventing you from just dismissing those, you’ll never really be able to do it. 

But if you can see, oh my God, what awareness, every time something challenging happens to me, I’m letting it root back to this huge weight that I’m carrying. You start to have a lot more self-compassion and perspective about how you really don’t have to entertain those thoughts. And every no doesn’t have to be a threat to the dream that you have for your life. That’s how we start slowly taking our power back. 

And going back to the emotional guidance scale, something that really helped me is recognizing that when I’m in those challenged emotion states, whether that’s frustration or stress or anger or guilt, and instead of having this like toxic mindset of how do I get to happiness, joy, excitement, giving myself permission to just feel neutral about something has been a huge game changer in my seven-figure business.

And it’s allowed me to make such better decisions, not be reactive and make decisions from what my business needs, not from what I’m feeling or what I am reactively feeling. So this was a little bit wordy. I hope that this was clear. Essentially the bottom line is I feel I don’t think I ever could have wrapped my mind around the level of conviction, the level of inner certainty, the level of i on the prize focus that I would be able to cultivate at a seven figure level. 

And now that I’ve, I’m here with many of the seven-figure business owners I’ve looked up to over the years, I haven’t spoken to them all directly about this, but I imagine they have that same level of, this is what I’m doing, nothing’s gonna stop me. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to me how many nos I get, how many hateful comments I get, how many whatever other obstacles people are afraid of, how many annoying team members I get, how many X, y, and z things happen.

Nothing’s stopping me. This is happening. I am so sure. And then when you start to have these annoying regular things happen, they just think they’re like a bug bite. They’re like a tiny, tiny bump along your greater journey. And I have never felt more unavailable for unnecessary stress, a ro the entrepreneurial roller coaster. Um, it’s just not part of my day anymore, and it feels so good and so free to be in that place.

 All right, shifting gears, excuse me, slightly. The second foundational piece that is really critical and amazing to see happen is the unsexy, but ever so reliable sense of consistency. I have been working in my business, creating, putting content out there, connecting with people, creating relationships, and putting myself out there publicly for seven years now. 

I have probably created something, posted something, written, something emailed someone, done something to grow that brand almost every day of all of those seven years, even if it was something as simple as, um, a quick Instagram story or even if it’s something where I’m completely off, but I have ads running or I have a team member posting on my behalf, or I have an email scheduled almost every day something is happening.

And I’ve talked about this before, but it is amazing to see the tipping point of that effort. I think it is extremely clear with, especially with content creation and value and providing education to your audience in the, the, the amount of the teeter-totter. How dramatically it shifts is so remarkable to see. Because in the beginning you are creating, creating, creating, creating. 

And it feels like no one cares, no one’s listening, no one’s engaging. Is this even working? Is this mic on? And you kind of feel like you’re, uh, just a hamster in a wheel, just churning out content, trying to do as much as possible. And then after I would say about two years, the teeter-totter kind of evened out and it more felt like, okay, I’m creating regularly. I’m creating frequently. That is all still happening, but I am creating a community as well.

And I am starting to see these relationships form and clients are resigning with me and I do have good testimonials and I do have a sense of, you know, an audience and a platform that I feel really proud of and that I feel like I have a connection with. And all of it starts to feel like, okay, I am still doing a ton and I am still working a lot, but I am starting to see some results from it.

And it’s a little bit confusing in that place because I think what was very easy for me to do was to quantify pretty much everything I was doing and try to measure how effective every single thing was. That’s not entirely effective. I’m a big numbers girl, but with content creation, I feel like there is a sense of just being omnipresent that you can’t ever really measure.

I can’t tell you how many people have joined my programs bought from me and I have been able to see, or they’ve even told me, I’ve never commented on, on, commented on a thing, never messaged you, never even liked something, but saw what you were doing the whole time. And when the time was right, I had seen so much of what you did that I knew you were the right person for me. 

So that is totally pulling the sea. And now that has teetered to the other point where I still create a good amount of content, but oh my God, the amount of email subscribers, clients, customers, messages, um, just sales frankly, that come from content I created five years ago, six years ago, automations that I’ve built out, media features I was in a long time ago. Pinterest pins that I created when I had no clue what I was doing. It is baffling and so fulfilling and almost , it almost feels like cheating because it’s like, oh my God, I haven’t even talked about that.

Looked at that, thought about that for years and it’s converting in this way, but it’s not cheating. It’s consistency and it’s hard work paying off. And I think a big part of what I’m very proud of with the seven figure mark this time around is that it’s felt more effortless than ever. But the clear thing that I wanna convey is that that came from an enormous amount of effort.

It’s just like running or exercising in the beginning. It feels very hard if you’re out of shape, if you’re new to it, if it’s something that’s you’ve never done before, running just a mile can feel challenging. Lifting just a few weight can feel challenging. But if you’re consistent daily or several times a week with it, over time it starts feeling easy. You can’t even remember what it was like to not be able to do it with such effortless feelings.

That is exactly how this is. So that’s a very simple one. It really is. No surprise. I think we all can exactly understand how that would come to fruition. Consistency and the teeter-totter effect of like, you have so many sales out in the harbor right now that people can’t help but find you. Um, but getting to that teeter-totter point, most people can’t do, most people don’t stick with it. They get in their head, they are so sick of not hearing back from their audience. They feel frustrated, they feel lonely. 

Whatever sort of emotions come up from them and what meaning they attach to them, like I just talked about, takes them out of the game. And it’s really a shame because it really is not that much of a science, it’s just a a numbers game in a sense. I mean, you have to have good content of course, but it’s just like exercising.

And I’m sure everything that I laid out here sounds very obvious. If you do it for a while, it then very much pays off. It’s extremely, extremely worth it.

All right, the third foundational piece that I laid that, gosh, I could talk about this all day. For the love of God, take sales training, learn how to sell. This has got to be the biggest thing blocking people from money that they want. It’s not that they’re not smart, it’s not that they don’t have a vision, it’s not that they’re not good at what they do.

And it’s not even that they don’t have an audience. It’s that they do not understand how to communicate with that audience. They do not know how to sell, and they’re completely blocking themselves from the abundance that’s waiting for them because they’ve never learned how to sell. It baffles me.

So many entrepreneurs get into this because they love the service they provide. Maybe they’re a health coach, maybe they’re a relationship coach, maybe they’re an artist, maybe they are, you know, whatever, um, a marketing coach even. But they’ve never actually had to sell anything. 

And this was me. I came into this having worked in the legal field and in the nonprofit field, neither of which required sales for me at all, and neither of which even required me to be client facing. Frankly. I really did a lot of internal support only. So I fell extremely behind with this. But I made it my mission to master it so much now that I can teach it. 

And I never will understand why people don’t want to learn it in a proper way and just sort of feel like if they talk about what they’re doing enough, it will automatically convert.

And it really, really robs you of what you can do and the potential that you have. Because sales is an art. There is a strategy behind it, and it is something you can get better at if you know how to do it. And so often I see people, you know, come, come to me, message me, they’re frustrated. They feel like, well, I have this thing. No one’s biting, um, no one’s, you know, buying from me. 

And I go and look at their, their platform or platforms. And either they’ve never talked about it, like I couldn’t even figure out what they were selling from their public platforms. And if I can’t, as someone who knows what to look for, how can a public audience and uh, or um, they sell the logistics of what they’re doing. They just say, you can work with me for three months for this much money with this many calls, DM me to apply.

No one’s get, no one’s paying for calls. People are paying for results. And being able to message those and craft that messaging effectively is what it is about to learn sales and learn sales for your audience and learn sales for, uh, your, your personality type and learn sales for your business goals and your financial goals. 

Um, I am grateful , just like anything in life that sales was what I was worse at because it is something that I overly focused on. And it is now one of the things I feel not best at in the sense that like I’m so good at it, but just so authentic in it, in that I am very detached from who does or doesn’t join my programs for the most part because I’m so confident that I’m clear about who I can help and what I can do. And if they don’t want it, that’s completely fine.

It could be because they don’t like me, that’s cool. It could be because they’re not ready. That’s fine. It could be because they don’t trust themselves. That’s sad. But you know, there’s nothing I can do about that. But if they are ready and if they want the result I can give them, then I know that they’ll work with me.

 And I know I can convey that. And that has brought a huge amount, that has brought the security into my life and business that entrepreneurs think they get from nine to five jobs, right? That’s a huge thing. Entrepreneurs say they want, I want security, I want consistency. I want to feel safe. It’s a very natural human emotion, but it’s almost impossible with the nature of entrepreneurship because there is nothing promised to you. You are completely reliant on yourself. You’re also heavily reliant on others who you can’t control at all.

As well as external factors like the market, the economy, all of that type of stuff. So the thing that you most can control is how effective and clear you are at sales so that you can make as many as possible no matter who you talk to, no matter what the market looks like, no matter what the economy is, no matter if you need to take a day off, that is the safety and security that you’re probably looking for.

 Um, and that is what I have found within my own sales strategy. So if you are developing sales, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I probably need sales training, get into signature sales. It’s incredible. It’s extremely thorough with its content. You don’t need to go through every single thing to start getting value out of it. In fact, I think with the first four videos, you’ll have a lot of aha moments about how you can make this a lot easier for yourself.

Plus I coach in it. You have a Slack channel with us there. It will transform the sales aspect of your business. All right, everyone, I hope that you found this helpful and I hope that this gave you some clarity about where you’re at on the path to seven figures or whatever financial goal you are working toward.

 Um, most of all, I hope it puts you back into a place of power and recognizes that you have more control over your emotions than you might give yourself credit for. You have more control over your, uh, consistency and creation. Hey Denise. She says, I absolutely love the program. So happy to have you. Thank you. 

You have more control over the content creation that you are doing than you think, and it will pay off if you keep going with it and don’t, don’t give up. And you have more control over your sales conversions than you might ever realize, um, if you just know how to do it.

 So here’s to your power, here’s to your goals. I will talk to you guys very soon. I hope you have a fabulous rest of your day. Thank you so much for tuning in and lots of love. Bye everyone.

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