Eleshia Harris: Hi, I'm Eleshia Harris, and I am your host of The Eleshia Show. I am also the founder of eleshialifestyle.com, and I'm so excited that you're here with me and I am here with you. I'm also really appreciative. Each week I'll be sharing strategies and stories and insights to help you enhance your wellbeing and to build your business while still navigating life.

Because sometimes we often try and separate the two, and let's face it, if you are not well, you have no business. So let's try and work with these two things combined because we can to enhance your lifestyle. Again, I'm really excited to have you here. I have wanted to put together a podcast for over two years. And so here I am, ready to share. Let's get into this week's episode.

I asked Michelle to be a guest on my podcast over a year ago, and then I sat on it. When I decided this year to take the plunge and to produce the podcast, I went back out to Michelle and asked her to be one of my guests. And she was like, "Yeah, of course. I said that last year." And I was like, "Oh wow." I'm really excited that we got to sit down and have this really open and frank conversation about business and about just really honing into your magic and your zone of genius, and just really following your own intuition on how you want to run your business. 

A few years ago, Michelle realized that she had lived the same year twice, and we're going to get into what happened and how she turned that around to build a multiple six-figure businesses and now to serve thousands of customers while still following her own intuition, and still staying true to cultivating her own zone of genius. I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. I've re-listened to it a few times now, and every time I do, I get something else out of it. So, yes. Enjoy.

 Hi, Michelle. I'm so excited that you're here as one of my podcast guests. When I thought about doing this podcast, you immediately came to mind because I was so in awe of your story. And when I first came across you in 2018, you were just so endearing to me that I literally laptop everything that I could find that you had done. And then when I got to meet you in person in 2019, and I heard your story again, but in-depth, that's when I was like, "This is a person that I want to be part of her community."

And ever since then, I've quite literally bought a lot of your products that anytime... So I am a superfan and there are two of the products that I haven't bought yet. 

Michelle Rohr: I keep making new ones. 

Eleshia Harris: Exactly, right? So I can't keep up. But every time you release something, I am empowered to buy it because one, I know that you're going to give so much content and so much value that it's easy for me to buy from you because I know you're genuine.

Another thing that comes to mind is when I shaved my hair off, you were one of the first people that came to me and said, "I can really see you now." I'm going to get emotional. But yeah. That to me was kind of permission just to step into my own genius, as you say, and just to start sharing more with the world and just actually listening to me instead of all of the other voices out there that tell you what you should and shouldn't be doing when you're running a business. Yeah, I love it. 

Michelle Rohr: You know that's my jam. 

Eleshia Harris: I know it's your jam. I know it's your jam. So that's why, again as I said, it was really important for me to have you as a guest because I want you to share more of what you do, and I want you to share your story as to how you got to where you are now. 

Michelle Rohr: Should you want me to just start out with the background story?

Eleshia Harris: Yeah, that would be perfect. 

Michelle Rohr: Well, I like to start off with when I had my turning point, which was about a decade ago. I was working in a coffee shop. That was a family business, but the family dynamic for me, as with a lot of people, wasn't healthy. It wasn't a healthy situation. It wasn't like, "Oh, I'm working in the family business." It was really toxic. It was really not good. And so, I had been working, working, working, working, and getting absolutely nowhere. And I got to a point where I realized I've just lived the same year twice. It was a mediocre year. I worked my butt off. I have nothing to show for it. And I just could feel it's like the voice of my higher self came down and said, "Michelle, you need to take 100% responsibility for your life and that is the only way you're going to be able to change your life." And there's something really important about the hundred percent because to even giveaway 1% is to give away your power, to even say, "Well, I can do this much, but this piece, it's because of this person, and until they change their behavior, I can't change this about my life." And that's giving your power away. So even though, "Yes, I was in the midst of having to deal with other people's decisions affecting me. I needed to start to do whatever I possibly could just to break free." 

And that's what I started to do with my life. I took 100% responsibility. And what that looked like in the beginning was doing things I was afraid to do and doing things I didn't feel like doing, because I knew I needed to get out of my comfort zone. So that helped me change my life very quickly because I changed. And that's the key thing, are we don't get enough space to focus on ourselves. It's always, "Okay, here's what you need to do. Oh, you want to start a business? Here's what you need to do. Do you want to change your life? Here's what you need to do." 

But no one gives you the space to look at who are you becoming and honouring that journey because to not make that the most important thing is to be out of alignment with yourself, to be out of integrity with yourself. And then you get right back into that cycle of working, working, working, working, but having nothing to show for it, or even if you do have something to show for it, you hate yourself. You hate your life. You hate everything you just made, you want to burn them all down.

I have been really grounded in this approach of personal growth first, business second, from the beginning. That has always been my dynamic. And also what that has meant was my business is not super-fast, super successful. This has been a decade, and that's something people don't see. They're like, "Michelle, how can I have what you have? How did you do what you do?" I'm like, "You don't want to do what I did." Because you'd be cleaning houses for two years. You would be facing fears right out of the gate. You'd be doing things that terrified you. You'd be cleaning people's floors. That's what I was doing in the beginning of my business.

It took time for the income from what I was doing online to allow me to quit all the things I was doing in life. The thing is, I wasn't unhappy. I was happy because I knew I was on the path to freedom. I knew I was on the path of taking 100% responsibility for my life. Every choice I made was intentional. It wasn't "Oh, I guess this is my lot in life now. Even cleaning houses, that was intentional. I want to be able to put earphones in my ears and listen to podcasts all day. I get to do that when I clean houses. So I've listened to hundreds of podcasts. I was learning about business, learning about other ways of living, exposing myself to other people and other ideas, and being able to just clean houses and not be bothered by anyone. 

And after a couple of years of that, my business got to a point where I was able to quit that because I again was personal development first and business second. I was doing things for myself in my life to take responsibility, and I was sharing it online. I was sharing it on a blog.

My blog was literally secret all society, taking 100% responsibility for my life. I was documenting what I was doing to take responsibility.  And one of the things I was doing was I made this planner. The first name of it was The What Makes Life Work binder.  I was obsessed with what is going to make my life work. But that was a mouthful, so I changed it to Ultimate Life binder. And it was this big clunky school binder that I had stuffed with printables and divided it into sections. This is my health, this is my money, this is my goals, these are my dreams. And I carried that thing everywhere. I would take it with me to my cleaning jobs. So I take it with me to go sit at a coffee shop. And every time I opened it, I had the sense of I'm going somewhere with my life. And I also started sharing it on my blog, and a couple of people who were following my blog, were like, "Can you make it so we can buy it? Can we have that? We don't want to make it from scratch."

And I eventually started selling it on my Etsy store, and it started to make enough money for me to quit cleaning. And also at the same time, I was doing graphic design. Even back in the cafe, I had reached out to a woman, a lot of people know, named Carrie Green. I loved what she was doing, and I kept doing things for her until she hired me. And so I had her as a client. I had my Ultimate Life binders selling on Etsy, and I was able to get to this point where my entire income came from my online business. And that was a turning point. But yeah, that's the background. 

Eleshia Harris: That's amazing. But even just what you just said about carrying your binder everywhere, that is so powerful, and also listening to the podcasts on your cleaning jobs was so... You didn't care about cleaning. You cared about the fact that you were able to be in a place where you had no distractions and you could just take it all in. 

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. I knew where I was going, and I knew what was short term, what was long term. It wasn't just, "Okay. Got to go work, got to make money." It was I'm paying my bills with the cleaning and the babysitting because I was doing that too so that I can keep the pressure off of my business and let that grow and be fun. And it has always been fun. Like some people are like, "Don't you ever feel like giving up? Do you ever feel like quitting?" Business is the fun part for me. This is my playground. I used to clean houses. That was hard. This is the fun part. No, I'm never going to quit it. I keep evolving it and I keep challenging how I am growing it, because I think a lot of the ways that we grow our business actually approaches we adopt from patriarchy and masculinity, and it's not a feminine approach. So right now I'm actually... You mentioned that earlier, what does it mean to be productive as a woman versus "Here are my top 10 tips for productivity and half of them are from the patriarchal paradigm, but I don't even know that because I grew up in it." So it's like it's free regurgitated garbage. So to really challenge it, it is like to allow ourselves to reimagine what this could look like because we don't have anything really to go off of. And even the women who are speaking to this, still have a lot of patriarchal stuff to detox from themselves. Even I do, like on a day-to-day basis. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that was totally something I adopted, not something that is true for me.  So I'm constantly letting go of things that I thought I had to do and be, and so looking forward, it's like, "Okay, what does it look like to have a business that is true?" I was talking to Aimee, who's my unofficial business partner. 

Eleshia Harris: Have you made it official yet? 

Michelle Rohr: We're joint venture partners. So that's easier. We make products together. The thing I was telling Aimee was, "You know what I'm feeling? I want to explore what it would look like to have a sabbatical-based business?"

Eleshia Harris: Wow! I want to hear more about that. 

Michelle Rohr: I want to hear more about it too. Can someone tell me how to do this? That's the thing. No one is out there able to... Everyone is saying the same crap. You need to post every day. You need to email every week. You need to make sure all of your customers are happy, and no one is exploring. What does it look like to really honour yourself as a woman who has a business? Versus "Go make an impact and change the world." And I was like, "What?"

Eleshia Harris:  I'm so glad you said that because this is what this podcast is about. It's about actually one stepping into your own power and not doing everything that you think you have to do and just finding your way. Finding a way that works for you, finding things that you are happy with to be able to build the brand and the business that you want to work for you. 

Michelle Rohr: And the thing is that doesn't mean we're settling. It means we're actually becoming more powerful because when we free ourselves of the "shoulds," which really, we're only meant to serve men and not women. When we free ourselves of those things, then we free other women. And then we do have a global impact, but not because we went out there trying to have a global impact. It's because we freed ourselves. Just you deciding to honour your own desire, it automatically has the power to change other people just by them bearing witness versus you going out there and forcing it and cramming it and hustling it. It's like your real power is in the fact that you can just do something for yourself and then, boom, lives change. You didn't even try. Like even just a couple of days ago, Aimee and I, have a coaching group called The Magic is You, and we came in and did a Facebook Live. And we just were talking about the desires that we were fulfilling for ourselves.

I realized I have a desire to go live in Portugal. And I just, I'm saying yes to that desire. And then when I told Aimee that last week, I told her, "Hey, it's decided I'm moving to Portugal." And Aimee was like, "Really?" And then by the end of the day, she messaged me."It's decided, we're moving to Italy."

Eleshia Harris: But it's that effect, isn't it?

Michelle Rohr: Yes. I wasn't like, "Aimee, you need to move to Italy. Here are all the reasons you need to move." No. It's like, here's what I'm doing. I'm saying yes to myself. And then both Aimee and I came on a Facebook Live for our group, and we were just talking about it. Yes. I want to go to Portugal. I want to go to Italy. This is what we want. And then after that, all these women are like, "I'm going to Hawaii." "I'm leaving Florida." I'm going here." And my sister calls me up and she was very emotional, actually. She was like, "Watching that Facebook Live, I realized I have a desire to live in Europe." And she realized that she had been trying to make her life make sense without saying yes to that desire, but that wasn't making life makes sense.

And so we talked about... Basically, we were just like, "So when are you leaving?" And two days later she's like, "It's done. We're going." I was so scared, but it turns out we can make it work. We can make it happen. I don't even have to worry about the money because of the cost of living... The instant they looked at that desire and decided to say yes, it became possible.

But I wasn't making her do it. I wasn't forcing or working or helping her. I wasn't putting any energy into that, but her life is all of a sudden, completely changed. That is the power we have as women. 

Eleshia Harris: Exactly. Because you said it out loud, you said your desire out loud, and it had the snowball effect that all of these other women had their own desires, but just wasn't taking action on them.

Michelle Rohr: And then imagine the lives they'll impact because they broke free and then those lives break free. All of a sudden you are changing lives, but you didn't go out there to change lives. You just took responsibility that changed your own life, and you should never underestimate the power. And Aimee said this, cause we were talking about how I said I'm going and then 12 hours later, Aimee's like, "We're going to," she was like, "You know, it's because there's something so powerful about seeing a woman say yes to herself."

And then all of a sudden you realize you can say yes to yourself, and that's all we really need to do in anything, business, life, whatever. It makes it safe for us to say yes to ourselves because we're constantly saying no. When we follow this expert advice, whenever, and I know people refer to me as an expert, but I don't like being called an expert. Expert of what? Expert of Etsy? Expert of Pinterest?  No, I'm not. I'm just Michelle.

Eleshia Harris: You're Michelle but you're very good at what you do, and you're good at explaining how to do things and breaking things down. 

Michelle Rohr: Yes, but that's just me being good at being me.  Everyone has that. 

Eleshia Harris: Yeah. I need to ponder on that because I think you hit the spot when you said just, I don't even know how to express this, but I know that last year was very impactful for me just to stop and actually just take care of myself. And if that meant that I wasn't posting because I had to post or I just was taking care of myself and healing my traumas and just working basically shit out for myself. And it didn't matter about anybody else. So when you just said that, I was like, "Whoa." 

Michelle Rohr: But can you see now you draw so much power from that.

Eleshia Harris: Yeah. 

Michelle Rohr: And that's what I mean by giving women the space to do that. We don't give women the space and yet we expect them to show up with power. Why aren't you showing up on video? Don't you know you should be on video? Why aren't you posting everyday? You are talking to a woman who has never been given the chance to stand in her power, and you're not helping her by not giving her that chance.

Eleshia Harris: Yeah. You're not helping, so as you said, that's part of your ethos what you say is, when you step into your own genius, things change and like your sister, literally, they changed. Not even... I was going to say overnight, but it wasn't overnight. It was within a couple of hours you'd made those decisions, right?

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. I think it was only two days ago. It was like 100% a done deal, like done.

Eleshia Harris: Yeah. That's huge. That is huge. So tell us a little bit about your coaching program and just the whole working from your genius, 'cause I'm in one of your programs, and I love it, but we'll talk about that in a second.

Michelle Rohr: Well, my coaching program, where I go really deep into all of this, it's called The Magic is You. And I have been evolving this as I've evolved. This program would not exist if I did not honour my own personal development, trauma work, inner work, making decisions from a place of what do I want. And that's again, another thing that I contest with in business advice is making everything about what your audience wants. What a pit. 

Eleshia Harris: What do you want because what do you want to give to that audience? I don't want to be doing something that I don't enjoy doing because my audience wants that. 

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. You just turn into a robot. 

Eleshia Harris: Right. So I'm with you on that one. I'm like, I don't know. 

Michelle Rohr: I designed this program completely from this is what I want. I didn't ask anyone's opinions, feedback, nothing. If you've ever watched Chef's Table. This is what it looks like for someone to be in their genius. And there was this one woman who, and all the stories have this journey, but this one woman who... I think she quit her job and became a cook, but she was very not sure of herself. And someone saw potential in her and said, "Hey, can I hire you to work in my restaurant? I'll build the restaurant. You be the cook. You be the chef." And in the beginning, she was trying to do what she saw other people do. Like, "Okay, this is what it means to make food for a restaurant." And she was very unsure of herself, and there was this point where she made something and she gave it to the guy who hired her to be the chef. And her attitude was, "Do you like it? How does it taste?" And then, the guy was like, "Yeah..." And this is what we do in business. "I made this, do you like it? Can I sell it? I don't know. Do you like it?"

And she just went through this experience where she just... I don't know what the trigger was. I can't remember, but she just started to go deep on where her intuition wanted to go, where her desires wanted to go. And she started making food that was completely unique to her. So coming back full circle, she got to a point where she would make something, and she would just give it to the guy to eat. Not even ask if he liked it. So she was just like, "Here you go," and walk away. She already knows you're going to love it. I don't need to ask you. The thing that I try to teach women is they need to focus on you. And when you do that, you will create deliciousness. You know, it tastes good. Also, there's going to be people who are like, "I don't like it." But that doesn't matter because I know it tastes good. It doesn't matter if it doesn't fit someone's palate every once in a while. I know it tastes good. I know because it tastes good to me. That's another thing. We don't taste our own food, basically. Are you drinking your own Kool-Aid? Are you eating your own meal? We put stuff out there. How often are you putting stuff out there, saying, "This is wonderful and you should have it and enjoy it and use it and love it." But you don't even do it. It's like someone saying you should exercise every day, but you don't exercise every day. You're not drinking your own Kool-Aid, so you start to come out of integrity.

And we think that it's the product that makes the money, but people don't want your product. They want the energy that you exude. And if you're not in integrity with yourself, that energy isn't there. So the thing we're doing is we hide behind our products. We think it's all about the product. "I made the products." But you're hiding behind it and the energy is just not coming through and you're like, "It's not selling." Because you need to give yourself that space to step into your power so that you don't need to hide anymore. 

Eleshia Harris: Yeah, I've done it. I've done it. I've done it a lot. So I know. I've been hiding. That hit home because of that... Yeah.

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. Well, we hide to protect ourselves. It's self-protection and it's a trauma response. So, what is the solution here? The solution is to heal. Use your business to heal yourself, not to go change the world, change lives, have an impact. It's we're all traumatized people, not just from what happened in childhood, but from the fact that we have generations of being told to be quiet, be servants, be silent, be agreeable. We have all of this programming that does not serve to be successful in business.  And we try to be successful in business, but we don't change the programming. 

Eleshia Harris: Yes. Say that again, Michelle. 

Michelle Rohr: I don't even know if I can say that again. I say this all the time just in different ways. I cannot say it enough because I'm just like one person saying it and everyone's telling you the opposite. And that's where it gets sad, it's because the reason there's a lot of people that are successful, is not because what they're teaching you is true. They're successful because they're feeding into what you think is true, but it's not true. So they're capitalizing on the fact that you're brainwashed and that you haven't stepped into your power, and it's in their best interest that you don't step into your power because then you're not so easy to sell crap to.

The Magic is You is really hard for me to sell. People do not see the value because they're thinking I need a net. I need an audience, I need to make money... And I'm over here saying honour yourself. And they're like, "What's that? I'm not going to spend money on that." So I have to educate people to understand, and then after a million times of me saying the same thing, they're like, "I get it now." And then they sign up. 

Eleshia Harris: Like what you've said, it's because of the programming that we've gone through, but so long. 

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. To be an ethical business owner is to oftentimes sell stuff that isn't easy to sell. I'm not saying that we can't make things work. I have a variety of products. And the reason for that is that's what makes me money to have a variety of things that are selling, even though there's one thing that I really believe in, it's not going to sell as fast as the other things that people are more accustomed to. But I still make sure that I put my philosophy in there.

So even if with a passive income planner girl, people think, "Oh, I'm going to sign up to learn planners and make passive income." And then they get exposed to everything I'm all about. Yes, I'll teach you passive income and planners, but not in any way that you've ever heard. And through that process, they start to become more aware of what's important. And then they're more likely to join The Magic is You, which is why I love the value ladder approach. It's not just, "Oh, buy all these products." It's I know that people have to go through this mental shift, that mental shift, that mental shift, that mental shift until finally, they get to where I can go all in.

Eleshia Harris: Yeah. Saying that, because you've just reminded me of something that I heard you say a couple of weeks back when I was in that course. And you said, and the reason why it stuck is that it's my initials, but you were saying, make it easy, make it lucrative, but make it fun. That's my marital initials, and that is my company name. And I was like, whoa! 

When you put it so easily, I need to do more of that. I need to make it easy. 

Michelle Rohr: Yeah. That is what we overlook. It is because a lot of the programming we get is this attitude of it needs to be hard. You need to suffer, you should be sleeping on your roommate's couch until your company hits a million. We have these examples and maybe for men. Elon Musk slept on a couch and built PayPal with five roommates. Okay, great. But he is not built the same way you are as a woman. He can sleep with a bunch of roommates and build PayPal. We, to be in our power, need beauty. We need ease. We need to be enjoying our lives, but we get so... If you go on YouTube, and I love the motivational videos, but at the same time, it's like, "You need to hustle. You need to grind. You don't need sleep. Sleep is for losers." And you see all of these men running up mountains and you don't see any examples of what it means to be a powerful woman.

And usually, even if you do, it's still very masculine because that's what it meant for a lot of women to succeed was to make it in a man's world. So you can't even look to a woman for advice half the time because they're regurgitating male approaches. And that is why at the end of the day, you have to listen to your intuition. You have to listen to your body. You can't even take everything I say and listen to it. You have to filter it through your intuition because I could be saying something that's not true. I don't know. I'm still learning. I'm still detoxing. I'm still healing trauma. You can't take everything I say at a point value, let alone anyone else, or face value.

And so for women, this is what I teach in The Magic is You, is we have to make the journey just as beautiful as the destination. We can't do any of this garbage of we have to suffer first, we have to work hard first, because what that does for women is it reaffirms the programming that we don't deserve. Because men think they deserve it. They think that they can have the world. From the get-go. So why are we trying to do it their way when they have a completely different mental jumping-off point? We have so much more garbage to get rid of. So the way we clean up that garbage is realizing "I already deserve what I want. I don't need to earn it. I already deserve it." 

And yes, you can have things going on in your life that are financial, that are real, but many, many times women can do more for themselves and won't. Even at this moment, you can look around and be like, "You know what? I'm still digging out the bottom of that lipstick I should have thrown out a year ago." What's going on there? Or I still haven't gotten myself some nice lingerie to wear. I'm still wearing the same old stuff. We could do things now to make life better now for us, but we feel guilty. We feel like, "Oh, well I just, you know, get my business to this point then I'll reward myself." Why are we rewarding ourselves? We already deserve it. So take that reward and give it to yourself now, elevate your energy and be able to build your business from a place of elevated energy and you will get better results. And I've seen this time and time again with my own business is when I take care of myself, I show up more powerfully. When I show up more powerfully, I make more money. So this idea of, I need to put myself last to work on my business and then my business will grow and then I'll reward myself, you never get there because you're just constantly affirming to yourself, I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it. I don't deserve it. And that energy is going to create more of that 

Eleshia Harris: Michelle and I ended up speaking for well over an hour, and the conversation turned into a conversation again that I didn't realize that I needed to have, and so much so that I have decided to split the conversation that we had into two episodes because I had so many aha moments about building my business, but also really healing the past that I wanted to share with you guys, what we discussed. So if you've really enjoyed the first episode tune in next week for the second. Take care.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Eleisha Show. If you know somebody who needs to hear the conversations that we're having, please share it, take a screenshot, and send it to them. Also, I would really love for you to rate and review the podcast as this really helps, and I'd love to read your comments. 

Lastly, remember, you need to invest in yourself first because you are important and amazing. Take care. Until the next time. Bye-bye.