Today, we're thinking about slowpreneurship and starting the new year without a bang with Stephanie Pellett.
Stephanie is a creative coach and consultant for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Her goal is to make your business more sustainable, more expansive, and ultimately more fun for you by streamlining your systems, improving your customer experience, and updating your unhelpful limiting beliefs. She was a host on the Learn With Shopify YouTube Channel and has taught classes in partnership with Creative Mornings and Make Lemonade.
She is also the host of the podcast Slowpreneur: Business without the Busy, which aims to spark conversations about new ways of living and working. When she’s not teaching about stumbling blocks to productivity & coaching clients out of imposter syndrome, you can find her reading novels and spending time outside with her dog Bruno (preferably simultaneously).
In today's episode, we discuss:
CONNECT WITH STEPH
On Instagram @stephpellett
On her website at www.stephaniepellett.com
Learn about The Profoundery & come to a Productivity Party
Listen to the Slowpreneur Podcast
Hosted by @kirstimcnabney
Find links, inspiration and updates on @thinkingaboutpodcast
This episode was edited by Amanda Wan of Wan Media
Today, we're thinking about slowpreneurship and starting the new year without a bang with Stephanie Pellett.
Stephanie is a creative coach and consultant for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Her goal is to make your business more sustainable, more expansive, and ultimately more fun for you by streamlining your systems, improving your customer experience, and updating your unhelpful limiting beliefs. She was a host on the Learn With Shopify YouTube Channel and has taught classes in partnership with Creative Mornings and Make Lemonade.
She is also the host of the podcast Slowpreneur: Business without the Busy, which aims to spark conversations about new ways of living and working. When she’s not teaching about stumbling blocks to productivity & coaching clients out of imposter syndrome, you can find her reading novels and spending time outside with her dog Bruno (preferably simultaneously).
In today's episode, we discuss:
CONNECT WITH STEPH
On Instagram @stephpellett
On her website at www.stephaniepellett.com
Learn about The Profoundery & come to a Productivity Party
Listen to the Slowpreneur Podcast
Hosted by @kirstimcnabney
Find links, inspiration and updates on @thinkingaboutpodcast
This episode was edited by Amanda Wan of Wan Media
Welcome to the Thinking About podcast, your digital equivalent to late-night chats with good friends to keep you thinking. I'm Kirstie, and together we'll join interesting people for deep, meaningful conversations that will help elevate our lives, leave us with actionable outcomes and keep us thinking for days to come. Hello and welcome back to the Thinking About podcast. If you've never been here before, my name is Kirstie. I promise you that my voice does not sound like this to the whole episode, and if you have been here before, specifically last week, you will know that I was planning to tell you all the things that I was loving, so we can stay connected, love the same things, do all the fun stuff before we dive into our episodes. But, as you can probably tell, I feel awful because I have been fighting a flu all week. All week is only Tuesday, but that's fine. Anyways, I don't have anything exciting to share other than how great sleeping is and Southern Charm episodes that I have slept through, so we will just skip right ahead. But if you did listen to last week's episode and you messaged me with recommendations about my hair routine, thank you so much, or just anything in general. I got a lot of messages about last week's episode and it never is not amazing to me. So thank you for listening, thank you for being here. If you're here for the first time ever, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here.
Speaker 1:We talk about things that keep you thinking and with interesting people, and today we're starting the new year off of the bang with one of the most interesting people that I know. She is absolutely brilliant. She is one of the most resourceful people I know. That is what I will call her, because she's one of those people that can just give you the right resource or thought process or metaphor that you need in the moment that you need it, and I think that that's like an unmatched talent and I'm really excited that you get to experience it to you.
Speaker 1:Stephanie Pellett's official bio is that she is a creative coach and consultant for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Her goal is to make your business more sustainable, more expansive and, ultimately, more fun for you by streamlining your systems, improving your customer experience and updating your unhelpful, limiting beliefs. She was the host on the Learn With Shop of my YouTube channel and has taught classes in partnership with Creative Mornings and Make Lemonade. She's also the host of the podcast Slow Printer Business Without the Busy, which aims to spark conversations about new ways of living and working. When she's not teaching about stumbling blocks to productivity and coaching clients like me out of imposter syndrome, you can find her reading novels and spending time outside with her dog, bruno, preferably simultaneously. In today's episode, stephanie and I are talking about what slow prunership is. If you've never heard of it, it's going to blow your mind.
Speaker 1:If you're here and listening to the thinking about podcasts, you will love this concept. Essentially, as slow printers, we're fans of long-term thinking, pacing ourselves, building communities, setting and following our boundaries and not necessarily hustling hard, because it's building a sustainable business. It is something that I had never heard of before. I met Steph and the whole concept completely changed my life, not to mention the community that she has fostered, called the Profoundery, which I am a part of, which just gives me an opportunity to connect with other like-minded people, gives me a place to check in. It has made me feel so much less alone in being a slow printer, and working with Steph directly one-on-one last year made the biggest shifts in my business instead of made so far.
Speaker 1:I could literally fangirl all day and you'll actually hear in the episode that I did. I'm going to let you get to it, but she's going to teach us all about slow prunership. One of my favorite parts of this whole episode is Steph gave us really detailed questions to ask ourselves when we're feeling like we're on the brink of burnout, so that we can start making shifts to get back aligned with who we are and who we want our business to be. I think that that's going to be incredibly resourceful for people, so like save that part of the episode I want to say it's around 20 to 30 minutes.
Speaker 1:We also talk about what's not in in 2024. We filmed this in November with the intention of it coming out now, so you'll hear all of our thoughts leading into the new year, which was really fun to go back to. And just like give myself a reminder, especially this week as I have been sick, and we talk about what we're not doing in business this year, which may arguably be better than setting goals.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited for you to hear it. She also gives us about 105 resources throughout the episode which I will make a note of so that we can all download them all or read them or buy them or whatever it is, because if Steph says something is good, I immediately believe that it is. If you like the episode, as always, please feel free to send me a message on Instagram at either curseymcnabney or thinking about podcasts, and reach out to Steph at Stephanie Pellet, and I will have all of those things in the show notes. You can send us a group message and tell us what kept you thinking from the episode. You can find all of the links to the ways to connect with Steph and myself in the show notes and stay engaged with us. We have so many good episodes coming up.
Speaker 1:If you love the episode a lot, please feel free to leave a review, because it will help our show grow and keep us bringing on more and more guests that are going to help you stay thinking in your life, and it will help us bring Steph on even more, because I know that you're going to want it after you listen to the episode, because I for sure did. I hope you have a fabulous week. Hopefully next week when I talk to you I won't sound like this Eugh. Have a good one, hi, steph. Welcome to the Thinking About Podcast. I am incredibly excited to have you here.
Speaker 2:Welcome. I was supposed to say this too.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you for joining us. If people have not heard the intro yet, because maybe they skipped it because they didn't want to hear my voice, I will just reiterate, because I know that future of me will be saying this, that you have very much improved my life, from listening to your podcast to working with you. I just think that you, the energy that you bring, is very calming, but like brilliant, and that has translated through working together. So I am incredibly excited to share all of your wisdom with the thinking about people of the world. So thanks for being here and to get started, what are you currently thinking about?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me. I also have loved working with you and getting to know you. You split into my DMs, I think for the first time.
Speaker 1:I followed you for a long time, yeah, and then I didn't DM for a while.
Speaker 2:But I think the first time you DMed it was with like a very thoughtful voice memo, and I think that just tells everybody what they need to know about you and your warm energy and enthusiasm for the things that you love, so I'm very honored to be here. Thank you for asking me. And what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about a lot of things. I just moved, so I'm thinking about how to set up my apartment. I'm thinking about the humanitarian crises in the world and how I can be more politically active to support people who are struggling and, most importantly, I'm thinking about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey and whether it's a PR relationship. Maybe by the time this episode airs we will have our answer.
Speaker 1:But I know that's something that.
Speaker 1:I both think about so this is true on a daily basis. Honestly, you don't even need an introduction, because I think that that specific three pointer will tell people everything they need to know about you and all of the reasons why I like you as a human. But yes, I completely agree on all friends. I was listening to your doom scrolling episode today, which was great, and, yeah, I have so many thoughts that I have been afraid to just like put together. I feel like I needed to just sit with it and I've gone to a point where I'm like, okay, you need to like also use your voice, because it's necessary right now. So I appreciate that you're doing that and I saw it on your stories today, so you're encouraging me as well. And on the Taylor Travis note, what are thoughts right now?
Speaker 2:Because I need, I need to discuss my thoughts briefly for anyone who is not not caring about this topic at all. I need more photos, because right now we're just getting nothing and that is not okay with me, so let's bring it back.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree I just need more. I mean more as a social media manager. We need it for memes on my side, but also what's happening. I actually haven't heard much in the last week, probably because I've been doing scrolling more than anything, but I could use. I could use a little bit of that 1989 vault songs. I can't.
Speaker 2:I'm also thinking about those. Yeah, I'm thinking about those every minute of every day.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now that you know that Steph cares about social justice and Taylor Swift, so she's cool and part of the gang Can you tell us a little bit about yourself before we dive into all the exciting things that I want to talk about today?
Speaker 2:Yes, sure, hi y'all. I'm Steph, I am a business coach. I say I'm a business coach for intentional entrepreneurs, so people who want to make a difference in the world. They want to have a business that supports them as a human being and also supports other human beings.
Speaker 2:And I do that in a few different ways. I have retreats that I do, I coach people one on one and I have my community that I absolutely love, that you personally are part of, called the profoundery, where we basically provide accountability and education and, most importantly, like community, like genuine people caring about each other. Community, because entrepreneurship can be a lonely time. So I'm very passionate about. I've seen so many business kind of like go under over the years and I'm very passionate about helping business owners continue with the work they're meant to do in the world. So I see it as my job to help you do your job and help support the people you need to help. So that's me in a nutshell. That's perfect. Yeah, and I have a podcast. It's called Slow Priner Business Without the Busy. So it's all about how we can build a more intentional and sustainable business, if that's something that you struggle with. So those are all the topics that I care about.
Speaker 1:I just remembered the DM the voice out DM that I sent you. It was in November of last year. It was after listening to your podcast. This is not supposed to be about me, but I'm going to tell you this story anyways. So it was about like not having to do everything the hard way. I think this is an important story for people to understand about you, and you had an example in that podcast. This all just like literally slapped me in the face, this memory.
Speaker 1:But you were talking about how someone didn't have to make dinner with 800 ingredients and they could literally just have like salad out of a bag.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's the exact example, but it like gave me permission, as someone who likes to make high class meals all the time, that like it's okay to just cook something from the freezer sometimes.
Speaker 1:And then it just drove me down this path of like all these other things that I could do in my life. And that's how I feel every time I listen to your podcast or talk to you or take part in anything that you do in the profounder. So I think that that's really important context for people to understand that, like you're like living and breathing what you say, that you do and it actually has changed my trajectory of business and I think that it's very important and exciting. When I was writing down what I wanted to talk to you about, I realized I don't know your origin story, so like I know the impact of what you've done for me and other people, and I will also say that I just got off my second, second random co-working of the week from the community. So if you're looking for entrepreneurs, it really is like really great people that that are easy to work with and like your team. Tell me how it started, because I don't know that and I want you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually a bit of a windy path, as I think so many people's business stories really are. There's always some randomness thrown in and some magic. I started out fresh little baby stuff out of university. I pitched the Red 10 sisters on being their intern. The Red 10 sisters was a online business that supported women's reproductive and sexual health, and Kim and Amy are still in the profoundly today, which is an amazing sort of full circle thing that has happened over the years. But basically they were hiring an intern and I said can I create a YouTube channel for you? Because I had been watching lots of YouTube channels. Did I know the first thing about making a YouTube channel? I did not that. I was a baby and so I thought I could do anything and I had been an internet kid, so I taught myself a lot about blogs and online editing and things like that. So I started out with them. They said, yes, we built their YouTube channel for a few years and it was amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, I was working other jobs at the time and then they hired me to be kind of like an all around marketing assistant slash social media person, slash virtual assistant and I started getting clients like through word of mouth and very slowly kind of built up a business. I was living abroad in a few different places at the time, so that helped because at one point I was teaching English and Korea, so that was my main money source and so I could just get clients slowly. And then when I moved home I just decided I don't want to, you know, go get a regular job. So I just tried to amp it up, got a few more clients and that is what I did for a few years. I loved it. I loved working with all these different types of clients. I worked as a small publisher. I worked with all kinds of incredible businesses, but somewhere along the line I realized that there were some like bigger picture, like common threads.
Speaker 2:I was seeing that it wasn't really my place as the virtual assistant, marketing assistant, to consult on those things. But I had all these ideas for how things could be better and at a certain point I just started offering consulting. Again, I was young, I thought I could. Just I was just like I can give you advice. I've seen all these different businesses, I've worked with so many businesses over the year and so I started doing that slowly but surely, started realizing that, as much as I loved it, people don't actually need so much advice. It's not advice that they need. They actually need support, they need accountability, they need momentum, they need motivation, and so there was a very intuitive move from the consulting side to the coaching side.
Speaker 2:That's how it's unfolded from there, because I've realized that a big, big part of my job is not giving you the answers. It's helping you find the answers by asking the right questions or by just giving you literally the space to do the thing you already know you need to do, which is nine times out of 10. Most of my clients already are in that space. They just need a little bit of digging under the surface for us to identify what is the thing you already know you want to do. I always want it to be coming from your values, from your actual life, your care responsibilities, like the reality of your life. Everything that I do is very client-driven, client-led and based on that individual person's values. That's a long-winded way of saying that I've followed what my clients have needed. If I'm putting it into a very simple sentence, I've always looked for how can I be the most helpful and then try to find a way to fit my business into that niche.
Speaker 1:I love that. I think that that's such a smart thing to do, I think from a product perspective. There's a lot of stories where people are like I made this because I needed it, or I couldn't find this supplement, so I created it, and I feel like yours is a service-based version of that.
Speaker 1:You're like I realized that all of my clients were needing these things, and this is how I switched into it, which I think is good, and it also, I would assume, because you're going around with it. It's also like leading into what you care about the most in your business too, right At the same time, which is nice. It's a very symbiotic relationship. What about the profoundery? How did you start a community space where?
Speaker 1:not only are you working one-on-one with people, but you're actually creating a community between people, which I think is really hard, and you do a great job of.
Speaker 2:Thank you. The profoundery actually came out of, not some online course or coach telling me I should have a membership community.
Speaker 1:We're going to come back to that.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah it came out of. I had been running these really small groups where I was kind of playing at this idea of I can work with you one-on-one, but sometimes when you hear something from your peer rather than your coach, it lands very differently and so I could say the same exact thing. But then you hear it from business owner B down the block and business owner A is suddenly like wow, that's exactly what I made it to here. And so I had been doing what I called the foundry just foundry, which was three entrepreneurs in a small group for six to 12 months, and basically at the end of that it was kind of like a lot of them had come through this process, they were in a better place, but they still wanted some support. It felt like I was sort of dropping them off like daycare not daycare, that's not the right metaphor but I was like we'd work together and then we're like bye, and they still wanted some support, but they just didn't need that full amount of intensity that we had been doing in that program. And so I started the profoundry essentially as like an alumni membership for people who had been through the foundry, and it's since evolved quite a bit.
Speaker 2:It was never only exclusively for that, but that was sort of my intention behind it, and over the years it's started to really attract, like, I think, a lot of people who are maybe more introverted, who don't necessarily want to go out and do traditional networking, but they really deeply care and they really want to meet people who they're aligned with and they want accountability. If they're working alone in their house, it can be hard to stay on track, and so productivity parties, like you mentioned, are a really big facet of the program and those I had actually started doing when COVID hit. I did a couple months of online co-working. It wasn't really a membership, but it was like you could get a pass for a few months and that was so successful that I thought, okay, there's clue, we can keep progress, yeah. So that's kind of how it started and grown from there.
Speaker 1:That's great. It's so cool to hear the story. I'm like I feel like I usually understand the background story of people because I stalk them, not actually but like a little bit.
Speaker 1:And like the nicest way possible. But, yeah, I feel like I have spent so much time being so like amazed by all that you do that it's so nice to hear the beginning stories of it, and I love what you said about your beginning with YouTube and how you're like I'm going to do this. I don't know how, but I'll just offer it to someone and I think that's really scary. And I have been talking a lot about trying new things and becoming new at something and not being an expert in something or like going for your goals, which requires that. What do you think is advice that you could take, looking back to just try something out, even if you're not selling it to other people, but if you want to and that's something you want to start as a side hustle or whatever not that you have to you can just enjoy something. Or maybe you want to start a YouTube and you've never done it, Like what is your advice from just jumping in that you think is important for other people to know?
Speaker 2:Mm, that's such a great question. One thought that's coming to mind is my friend, rachel Kelly from Make Lemonade. She has this phrase, or the saying that she talks about, of believing in her own delusion or being a bit delusional, and I think I was kind of getting at that earlier, talking about how I had never done a YouTube channel, but I just thought I can figure it out, and there is a little bit of audacity in that, and so I think part of it is believing in yourself, believing that you can figure things out. I was also applying for an internship, so the stakes were very low, so I think that would be. My second point is, if you want to try something and it feels new to you, I see a lot of recommendations like still to this day, of people encouraging you to. You know, jump in with both feet and quit your full-time job and leap in the net will appear. I mean, it's such a cliche at this point, but we're still seeing it, and I think what I would say is how can you start in the scrappiest way possible and do your MVP which is like a Seth Godin phrase of your minimum viable product or your minimum viable service, and see whether there's any kind of interest or need for that. I mean, I know that's kind of how you started. You had a friend who said do you want to do social for my business? That's just starting out, and you didn't leave everything behind and immediately jump in. You tried it and you saw and you learned and you got data.
Speaker 2:I think there is just so much to be said for seeing things that we do in our lives or in our businesses as like fact-finding missions or data mining. You know we're trying it just to get information because we don't know where we want to go until we start going. Rob Bell has this great phrase of you can't steer a parked car. So we are often trying to steer our lives or our businesses toward a particular direction based only on thought, and I love I'm just bringing out all of these phrases are coming to my mind.
Speaker 2:But Marie Forleo also has a phrase that clarity comes from engagement, not thought. So when we are thinking, thinking, thinking like, oh, it's going to be perfect for me to leave this job behind and bake cupcakes without actually trying out what it feels like to bake cupcakes eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to make that business model work. We might be missing some important information. So I would say start small. Start small in cheap ways that you can. You know, test, test your market, test your family and friends, see whether anyone is recommending you to anyone else and build your skills slowly, like there's no rush, you're not in a race, so you can take your time 100%.
Speaker 1:I was talking about this on the recording yesterday. She was talking about starting her agency and she was like we thought of the idea but like we had mortgages so we had to keep working. And I was like, yes, there's just this like bullshit excuse my language thing where people are like, oh, you can just start today and be a fucking millionaire. No, it's not true, and it might be for like one person in the world, but I hate that language and we're going to get into that. But before we do, this is kind of along the same lines.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about slow partnership, because I had never heard the term until I started listening to your podcast and I just think that in a world that is so, do this one thing and you'll be a bajillionaire and sell this product that you just don't even have to ever try to sell through passive income and you'll be a bajillionaire and own a country like so much nonsense. And I think that it leads to a lot of disappointment for people that easily fall into that trap, because it's hard to see that and be like oh, that's not actually realistic until you're doing the thing, like you just said. But it also can lead to burnout if you are trying to do something and it's not getting there, or you're not being smart about it, or you're not living in your own values, whatever, and I think that slow partnership is the antidote to that. So I want to talk a little bit about what it is and why it's so important to you.
Speaker 2:And the last questions yeah, it is sort of a bit of a counter cultural approach to take, to be honest, and when I came up with the name which I did come up with the name myself, but then later realized that there are other slope earners in the world I Googled it and I was like oh wow, we've got a lot of people out here Like my people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and honestly, have become my people. I have connected with different people in the slope earnership community. My friend Geraldine, for example, who's in Montreal, is also kind of leading the charge of slope earnership in Montreal, and there's a woman in France. So there's a lot of us who are thinking this way. But, yeah, when I first came up with the name, I told my boyfriend about it and he liked the concept, but he was worried about the connotation of the word slow because it is so against what we think of when we think of business, and he was worried that people weren't going to get it.
Speaker 2:And I honestly just that maybe we want to use it even more because it is a bit of a button pusher. Right, when you first hear this idea of being a slope earner, it's not immediately obvious that you want to cling to that identity, but to me it's like any kind of slow living movement that we're seeing. So there's, you know, slow living, there's slow food, there's, there's all these kinds of movements that really represent a return to more intentionality, looking at, kind of the infrastructure underlying the things in your life or the practices that you have. And to me that's what slope earnership points to. It's not about how quickly you grow your business. It's about how it feels to grow your business and that could mean growing at actually a pretty rapid cliff, as long as you still feel good the whole time and you feel like you're supporting yourself and your people and it doesn't feel overwhelming.
Speaker 2:The moment that it feels overwhelming, then it no longer is like what I would call a slow business.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I like to kind of back check that for people.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that you have to be willing to just make no money, and that wouldn't be a slope earnership experience either but it's sort of this idea that we want to build a business that feels good for us and does good in the world in a way that is intentional and sustainable, and oftentimes that means questioning the status quo. It means questioning all of the values that we've inherited about how a business should be run, about how many hours we need to work in a day, about how much vacation we need to take, about our boundaries Like there's just endless amounts of interrogations that we need to do with all of these things that somehow we've inherited, that we may not even know we're holding onto. I mean, that's part of the thing is that sometimes we realize that we're actually perpetuating the very systems and habits that we wanted to avoid by becoming our own boss. There was a reason we became a business owner. It was to have more freedom. And then we realized, oh, I'm actually here, just working harder than I ever did for a boss.
Speaker 2:So it's a process of interrogation. It's not like an ending place, but it's a process of questioning and building in a way that actually supports you.
Speaker 1:I love that. I remember one of the first meetings we ever had. You talk to me about how I am in charge of what I'm doing and I actually get to like lay it out, and I come back to that so often, like I find in any of the times where I'm overwhelmed and like I don't want to do this anymore, I just want to go work at a coffee shop, which stuff also has a really good theory on that I share a lot.
Speaker 2:Coffee shop thing is so prevalent, like I see it in myself.
Speaker 1:Mine is chapters. Mine is also chapters.
Speaker 2:Mine is chapters. I'm going to go quit everything and work in chapters. My theory on it and I think this is probably the one I shared with you if it's not the one you remember, correct me but I always think it's about a desire to not have to do as much emotional labor, like it is so difficult to manage all of the responsibilities in one's business and sometimes we just want to be an employee. You don't want to have to think about the big picture, we don't want to think about all the implications of everything that we're doing, because it is really exhausting. But the problem is again with that. Like reality versus imagining the actual reality of going to work at a coffee shop would probably suck. I mean, there are people who love it, but for me, when I'm thinking of that, it's not. It's the fantasy of it, it's not the actual day-to-day reality of it, and for me I think it would suck. My back would hurt, I'd be on my feet all day.
Speaker 1:We are not used to standing up this much.
Speaker 2:I'm not used to standing up that day. I'm sending out so much love to all my baristas because they are an important facet of our society. But I guess my point is that the fantasy does not align with the actual reality, and so that fantasy that we're having is usually because we're not actually taking care of ourselves and we're not eliminating some of the stresses that would reduce the amount of emotional labor we have to do on an everyday basis. So it's this imagined answer that will not actually solve all your problems, but we think it will. Is that what we remember? We say yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:And yesterday my friend was like in a voice note she's like I just want to be a data entry person. I was like that's such a lie.
Speaker 1:I was like I totally got what you're saying, because there are days last week I was like I don't want to figure it all out anymore and I think that, like until you this is not something I understood until I started working for myself is like there's a lot you have to figure out a lot of the time. I'm actually glad that I brought it up and got you to explain that, because I think that even in it makes me feel good to know that even in a slow printer life of someone that I look up to, you still have moments where you're like I'd rather go work in chapters.
Speaker 2:As recently as last month. It just happens, and I think so. My framework around slow printership is always pointing to three things strategy you have behind your business, the systems you have in your business and the self care that you have in your business. And so when those three things are not in alignment or you're not actively working on each of them, again there's no endpoint, we're never going to be done, but we do have to kind of address all three of those things as we run our business.
Speaker 2:When you're not and you start to go into burnout territory as a result of not having a solid strategy or solid systems or solid self care practices, that's when you're going to start to notice the sort of canary in the coal mine moments, which I think that that's actually a really great sign. We can actually look to ourselves when we're saying something like that to our friend, we're texting our friend and I want to just go work as a data entry person, like red flag should go up in your own that that is a sign that you need more support from either somebody else that you're working with or yourself. You need to set up a better system or something right. You need a break, you need better boundaries and we have to look for what those little, those little signs are, because they actually are great clues that we need more support in our lives and our businesses.
Speaker 1:I love that. Can you give some examples of questions If someone's listening to this or they think of it in a couple of weeks where they're having a moment where they recognize a red flag, that can help pull them back into what they may need to be fixing within that system?
Speaker 2:Yes. So I'll actually start with self care, because I think that that's sometimes the most accessible and easy one. So I would have your habits devolved, because I think we have this idea of our ideal habits that we sometimes have not done in months, but we still are thinking the fact that we used to do that Like. For me it would be. For example and I talked about this on the doom scrolling episode I used to wake up and not check Instagram. I used to like have a whole period in the morning where I just wouldn't be on Instagram. I still kind of have that identity about myself. However, for the last at least couple of weeks, I wake up and I go on Instagram, like in bed. So the first question would be have I actually stuck to those good habits that I know support me, or have I devolved into habits that are not as supportive and starting to identify what those are? So social media is a huge one. Checking your Instagram constantly, checking your email constantly, checking your TikTok If you're like scrolling for any more than minutes a day, that's a good place to start. In the self care category, I would also put boundaries. So do you feel like your work day has an end. Do you feel like clients have a time where they no longer can contact you or you are no longer beholden to being in communication with them After a certain point in your afternoon or evening? If not, that needs to get re-solidified. When was the last time you took a vacation or a day off from work entirely? Again, this is not. We have this idea of ourselves as someone who takes a weekend off or takes a break, and then we sometimes look at the actual reality of our calendar and we're like oh, I did work last Sunday. Oh, I did work the Saturday. Before that I did have a client project that I was working on on Friday night. So, fact checking your ideas about your habits versus your actual habits. So that's kind of the self care one In terms of your systems I would look at.
Speaker 2:Are there tasks that you are doing repetitively, that are driving you insane, that are manual and clunky, that you know there's a way you could replace that, you know that there's a way that you could fix that, and it just has been feeling like you don't have any time but like these are the kinds of things that make time, so they're always a good use of time. So, for example. I think a great example in this category is schedulers. There are a lot of people who resist putting up a scheduler for client calls or podcast recordings or whatever the case may be. If you have identified that that is a place that would be supportive to you, can you set aside a block of time to just set that up? It probably won't take you longer than an hour and then it will save you so much time.
Speaker 2:So the second question would be is there a system that I know would support me right now that I'm not implementing so strategy? I think of both in terms of business model and in terms of marketing. And so for marketing, I would encourage you to look at like what are you doing? Just by rote, just by habit? Do you have this idea that you need to post a reel every single day and that's exhausting you? Can you actually look at your analytics? Can you actually look at what's moving the needle and question whether or not that is an effective strategy for your business?
Speaker 2:A lot of these things are just about taking a beat, taking up a little beat, a little pause and reevaluating, and I know it can be really hard to do that, especially when you're in a state of burnout, but it is about reevaluating and, similarly, for business model reevaluating like am I pushing a product that's clearly not selling? Am I wasting all my energy trying to build a podcast that makes me no money? Maybe that's not the best use of my time right now. Maybe that is burning me out.
Speaker 1:It could not be.
Speaker 2:It could be that the podcast is something that is supportive to you in other ways, but if you're feeling struggling financially right now, looking at where you're spending your time, that's where I would start.
Speaker 1:That's amazing and I also on the habits that we used to have. I started working out regularly, finally again, and all of my Spotify made for me workout playlist are 2018. And I'm like, oh, so this habit that I think that I have is actually many years old, but that's okay, it is what it is.
Speaker 1:How often do you think people should be reflecting on these things? Because I do think from reflecting through, I'm just this is just like a hype up episode for you, but I do really mean it. From reflecting in, like your monthly sessions, when I'm committed to those, I find that I lay my life out better because I'm actually taking a minute to do that. It forces me to do it. That is something I need the accountability for. But how often would you say that people should be reflecting on questions like these? Because it's easier to do it ahead of time.
Speaker 1:Obviously, easier said than done, but it's easier to do it ahead of time than doing it in that burn out state like you mentioned.
Speaker 2:Totally, I agree. I like a monthly check in. That's why we added it into the community, because it was something that I think we did. It maybe once and then I realized, oh, this is, this is actually really helpful. And it is true that that accountability piece can be hard and obviously people can do that without this community. You could get a buddy.
Speaker 2:I used to be part of a mastermind group and that was a really helpful checkpoint because it'd be a month later and you could reflect on like, wow, I actually have accomplished a lot of things, or here's what's not working. It's an intentional pause. So creating a peer group or even just one other business friend can be a really great way to do that. You just include a little bit of formal structure to make sure it sticks. So I like a monthly routine.
Speaker 2:I also think, as we said before, noticing what your red flags are, identifying them and then being able to do it in response to a red flag is also a great option.
Speaker 2:And then, if you have any kind of other thing in your business, can you tack on a tiny bit of reflection onto that thing.
Speaker 2:So, for example, for me, I've been really trying to keep up with my bookkeeping this year. That's a new habit for me in 2023 to do it every week on Fridays, and so if I were trying to also include more of a checkpoint for myself, I might just have it stack it on top of something else. So maybe it's like you check your analytics every Tuesday morning for your socials and in your website. Can you just like have two questions that you add at the bottom, which is like what was really annoying last week or what would make this week better, or you know what's clearly not working that I can just drop? I always love that question because it's like very fun to brainstorm, so I think those would be my strategies. I know how hard it is, but I do think it's so worth its weight in gold to take a moment to pause in and think about what needs to change, because you have the answer. You probably already have the answer.
Speaker 1:I love those. That is so good. I feel like it's given us a lot of things to think about so that we can all be slow printers, because we should be, because sustainable business building is smart. We are heading into 2024. We are and I don't know if you know this, if you've never listened to the Slope and Air podcast, but Steph has some great hot take, and so I want to dive into some of your hot takes for January 1st. As we go into a world of you have to be better. Oh God, hit me with some hot takes that you are taking into 2024.
Speaker 2:Okay, the first one that comes to mind is New Year New. You, dan, straight to jail Go. Do I even need to explain this one? You're fine. How else do I have to tell this to you? You're fine, you're actually great, you're wonderful, you're doing your best. It's not your fault If anyone says New Year New. You just spam them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are not even that kind of wording anymore. My first one is bullshit goals Mine that I just read on my 2023 list that I was looking back at being like what actually was my goal. I had one that said get 10,000 followers on TikTok, and I was not posting anything on TikTok and I had no actual plan for why I wanted that. So we're not setting ridiculous goals based on numbers without any sort of thought to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the arbitrariness of that I feel like, where you just it's sometimes there's to happen when you're trying to set goals and after you do the first few, you're like then trying to think of more, and so you're just like looking around being like what are other people up to 10,000 followers on TikTok? That sounds good? Sure, why not? But yes, it's so arbitrary and it's not based on any. It wasn't even based on a part of your strategy. Did you even have a TikTok at that time?
Speaker 1:I had one, but for fun. My part B to that is from your friendly neighborhood social media manager do not set follower goals In 2024, it does not matter how many people you have, unless you have a bajillion, but you should pay attention to engaging and taking care of your audience and converting them possibly. Yes, rather than saying you want a million followers and I will die on that hill.
Speaker 2:That is such good advice. Thank you for saying that. I feel like these follower goals are getting out of control, and I also want to just remind people that being an influencer is not the business model for everyone. It is a viable business model, but it's not for everyone. So you know, sometimes you're comparing your followers to somebody whose literal job, that is, is to have that many followers, whereas you have another complete business. Your job is not to have that many followers. I think that that's yeah, that's just such a good one.
Speaker 2:In general, I am also kind of against setting goals where you don't have 100% control over the outcome. This is just me, and I think that this is hard because it is a bit controversial. Obviously, when normally only set goals, it would be something like you know, get a book published. But for most people, if you wanted to go the traditional publishing route, I'm talking about, obviously, if you want to self publish, that is something within your control. But if you're saying you want to have a book traditionally published, setting the goal to have a book traditionally published is just going to set you up for a lot of angst, I feel, because you don't have control over that goal. What you could have control over is writing a book, pitching it to publishers, reaching out to an agent. Those are all goals that you have action over, you have like autonomy over, and trying to set up goals where you don't have autonomy over the outcome is just a recipe, in my mind, for discouragement.
Speaker 1:I agree 100%. I feel like you can only do what's in your control, and I also think that there's this built up idea of manifestation. I have thoughts. I actually do really like manifestation, but I think that it comes with work. And the pieces of the puzzle of publishing a book come from all those little steps that you just said. And another hot take on top of that is like what if we just set goals in a smaller time frame?
Speaker 2:that could eventually get us there. It's like let's set a whole goal.
Speaker 1:And it's actually so funny talking about this, and I talked about it yesterday too I am a goal follower. I am an Enneagram 3. I love achieving goals, but I have a very different view of what my goals look like, what my life looks like, than I did five years ago, and I think that that's okay. So here's an example of that I set all these goals in 2023. And then I got to the summer which stuff knows and I had a freaking breakdown because I was like oh, I already did all the things that I want to do. What am I going to do with the rest of this year, which has turned itself around, and like I'm very happy with it? But if we stop putting pressure on ourselves for a whole 12 months, which is a really long time, even though you're like, oh my God, how is it already November? If we actually set it in reasonable pieces, we can be excited about it and not be looking back in November and being like oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought I wanted to do that. I didn't even realize anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I find we don't always recognize, like, how much we do change over the course of 12 months and so your goals that you set for yourself in a certain time may not even be relevant to you anymore, they might not even be exciting. And sometimes we get into these traps of feeling beholden to goals that we set when we are a different version of ourselves and it can be really hard because it feels like we're failing at a goal that we set ourselves, can be really hard to let go of that goal Once it's set, but it's not hard to not set it in the first place Because then we're not beholden to anything. We can just respond to how we feel in any given season of our life. So, as I was saying, I don't necessarily think of myself as a big, like yearly goal person. I am a goal person but I struggle with the year long goal thing. Okay, another hot take on the goals front. Can we stop telling people to set BHAG goals? You have you heard this term before?
Speaker 1:Big, hairy audacious goals. Oh my God, yeah, what if we just set goals we can actually achieve, so we don't feel bad about ourselves?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but my friend Ashley Bowden, who's the gentle business coach. She often talks about how, like there's this demonization of the comfort zone and how we're constantly being encouraged to get out of our comfort zone. But the reality is that you think about a baby. Babies only grow when they feel safe and held and comfortable. You grow when you have your basic needs met and you feel safe and secure and cared for. And I have seen that for myself when I throw myself off a cliff and feel terrified. Those are not actually the times where I feel like I'm growing the most.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you might have to figure out some shit on the way down off that cliff and you might get to the bottom and you're mangled and you feel like, oh, I learned some things. Of course you learned some things, like you had to learn things, and I'm not going to say that anything you learned is bad Like great, I'm glad you learned it. But at the same time, I think you could have achieved those same results by like I don't know, like walking down the stairs of the cliff, like I don't know if this metaphor holds up. But yeah, I just feel there's nothing wrong with setting a big goal, there's nothing wrong with having high dreams and aspirations. I feel, in this world of like constant caveating, I have to say that that, yes, I want you to have the big things that you want. I think the problem is there's a lot of coaches that are kind of relying on a rhetoric of you're playing small and you don't believe in yourself and you need to invest in yourself more, and the reason they're doing that I think what I want people to understand from like a business literacy perspective is the reason they're doing that is so that they can raise the stakes, so that they can raise the amount of money that you're willing to invest in yourself.
Speaker 2:In my hot takes episode, I talk a lot about this idea of like investing in yourself and how. I think it's like very harmful and dangerous and also just deeply, deeply annoying to me when people are asking for like tens of thousands of dollars or expertise that they don't necessarily have. Like they're not giving you tens of thousands of dollars in return, but what they're trying to do by getting you to set those really big goals is they're hanging their program or they're coaching off of that hook of that goal. So they're saying, like you want this big thing, then you need to make a big investment so you can grow the amount needed to get to where you want to go, and so it's just important, like I think, for people to understand.
Speaker 2:It's not always coming from a place of, like true professional development advice. It's often coming from a place of trying to sell you something, and I think that that can be harmful. So there's no harm in setting a big goal that scares you a little. Just make sure you're not doing it because you feel pressured from an outside source to do that or you feel like if it's not big, then you're somehow doing it wrong. Any person who's telling you that if your goals are smaller than beyond Oprah and make $5 million this year, like they have a slightly different vested interest, I think, in the reason why they're making you feel bad about your goals being, like, normal size goals.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with that. I feel like sometimes I watch people just sign up for program after program after program and I'm like what if we just didn't do that? What if we just picked something that like felt good to you and you could just use all that time and energy and money to like do what you actually want? It actually scares me when people like understand why it works from a marketing perspective, but using other people's scarcity. I'm over that. I don't believe in like unethically marketing to people and making them feel small so that they'll buy things from you. And often those are the people and you have to go click the show note link and listen to Steph's episode because it just covers. I was literally like yes, yes, the entire time.
Speaker 1:But, like I, just I feel such an ick about people that are like I made eight bajillion dollars last year and you can too, if you just buy my course. No, that's not true. That's literally not. I hate it. I hate it so much it infuriates me I cannot handle it. Do you have any more hot business takes or do you want to move into what we're saying no to in our businesses in 2024?
Speaker 2:I think that's most of them. I think the only other one that comes to mind is the sense of like, urgency and rushing that happens in January. I've heard a lot of people like throw around this statistic about how, like, most people abandon their goals by February 14th and like don't be one of those people. And to me it's like again, like this is this is a manipulation, right? This is not necessarily like true inspiration trying to encourage you to do the things you want to do. We've already discussed sometimes we're not necessarily the best people at even knowing what our goals should be in advance. Sometimes we're getting goals from places outside of ourselves that aren't actually reflective of what we really want, and so if certain things fall by the wayside, like maybe that's okay, maybe it wasn't really a valuable goal to begin with. But then also this urgency, this like scarcity, this rushing, hurrying energy.
Speaker 2:Last year I was so over it, I was so burnt out on this whole culture of like goal setting. I did not even set, I did not even do a goal setting workshop in the profoundly which I normally usually do, and I talk about the way that I think of goals and how I work backwards from goals and things like that. But I was like no, I don't want to contribute to this sense of pressure that, like you know, january 1st is an arbitrary date, if anyone needs to be reminded of that. Like it's just made up, it's completely made up. Like it is random, like I know people who kind of use their birthday as their start date. I know people who use September as their start date. I know people who don't even want a start date and they're just like my life is unfolding in front of me, so just yeah. Anybody who's kind of pressuring you to like make this your best year yet and you only have like a certain amount of time. Like you got time, you have time, you have time.
Speaker 1:I agree. There's just the more that I've thought about it. Also, I'm freaking tired at the end of holidays, like it's busy leading up to them. Then you have all of these expectations of like all the things that you need to be like. Maybe just take a beat before we have to be the best version of ourselves five seconds after that. And also, I also just like hate when people make people that are trying to do things feel bad, like I. If I ever hear someone be like oh, I hate the gym in January because people are there, why is that still something people are talking about Like, why did that not get ended when we were like 10 years old? Because it's not kind. And if people are trying to make changes at any point of the year, I think that the best thing you can do is be supportive of it.
Speaker 2:That's so true, yeah.
Speaker 1:What are you saying no to for your business or your life in 2024?
Speaker 2:Okay, this one is more prescriptive, but I think, like for everybody, we've kind of been talking about it around in this episode, but like I think just unethical marketing in general, like are we just collectively over it at this point? No, no more, no more of this. Like if I see one more pop up that's like, oh, so you're gonna like go off the page because you're not really ready to like go to the next level. Like I'm going to burn my computer to the ground, Like we need to stop. We need to stop. So I just feel like it's become so prevalent. It's like a cancer.
Speaker 2:Honestly, it's kind of infecting everyone, because, as with the traditional pyramid scheme, the people at the top of the pyramid are succeeding. They are making millions and millions of dollars, and so it's not that it's not working as designed. It is working as designed, but the problem is that now we have all of these people at the bottom of the pyramid trying to be the person at the top of the pyramid, using the same tactics that the person at the top of the pyramid used to get to the top, and it's not going to work for them. Because we know how MLMs work very quickly in just a few generations, you run out of enough people in the world to sell to you. There's literally not enough numbers to support it. So just this unethical language, marketing, scarcity, urgency, like we're saying no to that. I think. Goodbye, agree.
Speaker 1:I agree, mine is, I'm not working for free.
Speaker 2:Oh, good one, Good one Even friends and family.
Speaker 1:I don't need to do your favor anymore. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:This is my job. I thought about that a lot this year. I was supposed to do something for someone and I was like you know what? I would never walk up to someone that's a breeze and be like, oh, can you just make me a coffee when they're at home, people are like, oh, you have that skill, so you can just do this small thing for me, but I would be charging someone that I didn't know to do that and I think that that is time that I own that 100%.
Speaker 2:I think let's all say no to that in 2024. Unless you are in the infancy of your business and you need to do a couple of small exchanges or portfolio building.
Speaker 1:Which is totally worth it.
Speaker 2:I'm talking two to four. We're talking two to four. Once you have hit the fourth threshold, it is over for you. That's enough, but everyone else no more of that. I think another one in that category is I would like for all of us to say no to succumbing to the 80-20 rule of bad clients. So if you notice that you have 80% of your clients are amazing and then 20% of your clients take up 80% of your time, energy, mental bandwidth, frustration, etc. Please do yourself and all of us a favor and just cut them out and suddenly you will be left with 80% that are wonderful and you will be amazed at how much more time you have to yourself and how much more emotional balance you have in your life. What do you think about that, Christy?
Speaker 1:I stand by that message and I will say that the level of growth that you can achieve from cutting off something that's not working for you is so much. It's worth so much more than trying to make it work Like obviously not.
Speaker 2:It's worth so much more than whatever money you were getting from that client.
Speaker 1:And like, as someone who has done this this year with the support of the other person on this chat, I will say that it's very scary and there are moments that are really hard, but like every single second of it is worth it once you get to the other side of it. And so if you can find like accountability or someone that can help you through that, if you're not feeling like it's something that you can do yourself, I would highly recommend that.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:But it's really worth it. I wasn't the one that was yours. It's 100% worth it. I would say I am not working outside of work hours as much as possible unless it's an emergency next year.
Speaker 1:I was on a pod or a webinar earlier this week and she was talking about boundaries that she had set in her business. I think she's in like year five of her social media agency and like she was like so mine is not only the time, because I feel like the days that I have I've been noticing my red flag and the days that I have an actual end time, it's making a huge difference. But on the webinar she was talking about how she charges clients $175 if they miss a meeting and I was like I do not need to put up with all of the things that I put up with Like this is also my business that I get to protect my time from, and my business doesn't have to be everything in my life and so I am not bending over backwards 24 seven for people anymore.
Speaker 1:Someone that was on the podcast, her name's Devon really great episode, she said. But on the episode she said that her favorite advice was just because you are unprepared, doesn't make an emergency for me. She said it much more eloquently than that and I think that the more that I target that in my business and my life, the better I do for myself, and that's really what matters the most. So I guess having an end of the day and end of my work day, but also really respecting my boundaries, is what I'm saying yes to. It's not really now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're saying no to breaking your own boundaries, right? I think something I talk about in my inbox, zero course, is this idea that, like we teach people how to treat us, actually it's like training a dog. Like if you feed the dog every time he comes and begs for food, he will come and beg for food. So if you answer an email every time someone sends you an email after seven PM, they will think, okay, cool, she's fine with it, I'll just continue sending her emails after seven PM. And so I think that sticking to your own boundaries can be really hard, but it's actually only hard like once or twice and then it's never hard again, whereas when you break your own boundaries, it's hard every single time Because you're agonizing over what you need to do or if you should respond or whatever.
Speaker 2:Okay, one of mine is following anyone who makes me feel behind in my business, and sometimes there are people where I kind of like check in on them, like I'm not allowed to follow them or I get in trouble from my friends because I will literally immediately spiral, and I'll be like why am I spiraling? And it's like you literally just did a deep dive onto this other business coach's Instagram and now you feel you know some type of way, so following or checking on anyone that makes me feel behind, specifically behind. If it's like inspiration or whatever about, fine, but if I feel behind or feel like I'm not doing enough, then instant mute, goodbye forever.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that.
Speaker 1:My next one is I'm not having an employee mindset in my business anymore.
Speaker 1:I so I have come to the conclusion that has taken me a long time that well, I guess not a long time, but the time that I have been doing this that I I don't know if it's people pleasing or just like how I like to work whatever I like.
Speaker 1:I was always like, oh, I can just like do all of these things for everyone and make them happy and like whatever. And I am shifting my mindset, I would say over the last six months, to be like people are hiring me to give them advice or to or to do the thing that I am good at and I'm owning that and I'm like I'm talking, I'm standing up for myself when it comes to things. I'm saying that it's not the best way to do something if someone gives me an idea, and like it's been done on social for like two years, like I'm not afraid to tell them that anymore. And also like back to the end of the day thing is like this is a business that I'm running and I'm running it in the way that works for me, and like I am more than happy to be there for everyone while I'm doing the work for them that they have paid me to do. But I don't have to be everyone's savior and I'm not curing cancer so like I can work with the boundaries that I set, essentially, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I support this a hundred times, thank you. All I want is for you to have the best boundaries ever, so you can just play in your adorable golf tournament or whatever it is that you're a pro. I don't know anything about golf, so I've probably got all the words wrong but that's okay. I want you to have more of that in your life. Thank you, thank you so much Do you have any more. Oh, we're saying no to buying courses. We don't need Any and all MLMs giving clients our phone numbers.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, yes, I'm bad for that.
Speaker 2:Also like conducting too much business through the DMs. That's a personal one, but I personally feel that it gets out of hand very quickly to have like multiple places where you're trying to conduct business specifically. So I still respond to DMs, I chat with people, but the minute that it goes into like let's set up a call, I'm like great, what's your email? Because otherwise I know myself I will lose stuff, I will forget stuff, and so I would say like limiting the amount of ways that people can contact you is generally a way to feel a little less overwhelmed in your business. Just as a general rule, some people are fine with it, but if you were fine with it you would already know you would like be like this advice does not apply to me and, if you're listening, being like oh my gosh, when that client texted me yesterday, because there's something about texting that feels more immediate and it feels harder to ignore than an email where it's easier to be like I can leave that until the morning.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I'm okay with texts for the most part. I will not be working in voice notes anymore. Ooh yeah, yeah, I have to make notes, then I have to make sure.
Speaker 2:I'm fully present.
Speaker 1:Like none of that is coming through. So I am actually from that same webinar that I went to. I am. I'm gonna try and strictly stick to emails as much as possible, because then it doesn't get lost and like when you're juggling a lot of people it's hard to keep track of and I don't like doing the back and forth on 800 different channels. That's a no for me. It's a no for me. Dog. I had another one but I forgot it so we can move into our every episode questions.
Speaker 1:And then maybe, if it comes back to me, I'll let you know, but I think that those are good and if you are listening to this, I would encourage you to make a list not of goals, but of things that you're saying no to this year because, it's actually quite empowering and I'm excited.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna write them down when I get back, when I get that, when we get off this call, and I also feel like you should come back in like six months and we should check it on the nose. You know we love that. Okay, First and foremost, we love recommendation. I know you're a big reader, so I'm very excited about this. What are you currently reading, listening to or loving that we should check out? It does not even have to be current. It can be any time at all.
Speaker 2:Great question. Can it be a long answer, Well?
Speaker 1:okay, so I am listening to 1989 Taylor's version Deluxe Edition.
Speaker 2:Specifically, I'm listening to the whole tracks on repeat. I'm obsessed with them pretty much equally, which is kind of rare for me.
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:I also I think, in terms of listening, if you've been listening to this episode and you are like vibing with what we're talking about with like MLMs and Scammy, da da da. I would recommend the podcast the Dream. It is so good and the most recent season I had like fallen off. I didn't listen to season two. Season one was great. Didn't listen to season two for some reason, I don't know, and I caught back up with season three, which was excellent. It's like very a lot of what we're talking about now and I think people would really really resonate with it. If you've been enjoying some of what we're talking about here, it's all about MLMs and things of that nature. So highly, highly recommend Okay reading.
Speaker 2:I am currently reading. I read a lot of romance and this is because during the pandemic, I realized I needed something that had a guaranteed happy, happily ever after moment. I find it very psychologically helpful for me and I also started during the pandemic a feminist romance novel book club because I needed to discuss the way that romance novels have been disparaged by both women and men in our culture, even though they are one of the only forms of art that are generally created by women for women. And isn't that an interesting coincidence. And also that it's about love, and also that it's about the happily ever after.
Speaker 1:So anyway, read a lot of romance.
Speaker 2:So right now I'm reading this book called the Kiss Curse, which is very cozy like autumn Halloweeny romance.
Speaker 2:I'm also reading an arc of Tessa Bailey's new book called Fan Girl Down, which I cannot but divulge how I got it, but it's very good. It's about a golfer and his like super fan who becomes his caddy. It's like a corny premise, but I'm obsessed with her. So I'm reading that. But then you threw me off by saying like, what do I recommend in general? And so I have to put in a plug for my all time favorite book, which is Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. I think it is one of the best books ever created and I give it as a gift. I read it all the time. I think about the essays from that book all the time, and so, if anyone hasn't read it, I think it is a great instruction manual on how to be a good human.
Speaker 1:So I think that's it. I love that. I love that so much. It's one of my favorite books too. One of my best friends gave it to me.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I was, when I left university, she gave it to me and it was it's like the greatest book ever. Okay, so many thoughts there. First of all, can you do a slow printer episode about feminist book club.
Speaker 2:Maybe yeah. I have a lot of thoughts.
Speaker 1:I also just started reading romance novels in the last year. I love them. I'm like slowly getting into that. I've never read a Tessa Bailey book Girl, so we got to do that. My first one that like convinced me that I would like them was Every Summer After by Carly.
Speaker 2:Fortune Nice.
Speaker 1:Which I loved. I'm currently reading in five years, which I also am liking.
Speaker 2:Very good.
Speaker 1:So maybe you can give me like a list of romance novels that I should check out, Cause, honestly, they're so good and like it's just it's. I've decided that it's like a hot version of hallmark movies and like why wasn't I reading these before you know, Does it?
Speaker 2:make sense, yeah, and we have to interrogate also why we were conditioned to think that it makes you stupid to like a romance novel. Everyone needs to think about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, I need, I need you to do an episode about that. It doesn't really make sense, but whatever, it's fine. What is your favorite thing about yourself?
Speaker 2:My favorite thing about myself. What a great that is such a great question, kirstie.
Speaker 1:It is my favorite my favorite question and it really throws people off a lot of the time, but the answers that I have got over the year and whatever that I've been doing this are the most beautiful answers I've ever heard on the podcast.
Speaker 2:I think my answer is that my favorite thing about myself is my intuition. I think I have a very strong intuition and I can usually feel what the right answer is or the right direction is. And I'm somebody who takes in a lot of information and so I always think of my intuition as like the processing, like I take in all this information and then my intuition like spits out the answer. And there have been times in my life where, even as recently as last year, I wasn't listening to my intuition. I was sort of like going down a path that I kind of knew wasn't really the right path. And I've recently made the decision to move to a new city and that was a hundred percent based on my intuition and it's literally like it unlocked something for me and now I have that connection back but it just makes me feel connected to myself and the universe and all good things. So I, yeah, I love it. I love it and I want to deepen my connection with it because it's like a very cool part of myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yes, oh, my God, I love that. Is there somebody?
Speaker 2:that keeps you thinking. Okay, somebody who keeps me thinking. The first person that comes to mind is Stacey Lee Kong. Do you know Friday Things? No, oh, yes, yeah. So Stacey writes Friday Things, which is like a weekly newsletter every week. That's about how can I describe it? It's like about pop culture and culture and politics and everything that she writes. I always just feel like she has her finger on the pulse in such a beautiful, progressive way, and she always writes in a way that makes me learn and think. And she talks a lot about, like, media literacy, because she's a journalist and so she's learned a lot about how the media can frame various stories, whether it's about a celebrity divorce, whether it's about, you know, world conflict. She always has this really unique lens. So I love learning from her.
Speaker 2:And then I think, from like the business perspective, I learned a lot from Jason and Caroline Zuck from Wandering Ainsley. I listened to their podcast. I'm also part of their membership, but I just think that they have this really great way of like doing everything a bit differently. Like their whole thing is about being unboring business coaches and I just love the way that they think about the world.
Speaker 2:Jason is like weird and wacky and not afraid to do things like totally differently. He had a whole business for like years where it was called I wear your shirt and every day he like sold his like advertising space on his body. Like he was one of the first people to like sell his last name to a company as a marketing employee. Like he's just an interesting dude. And then Caroline, his wife, just is so good at like putting ideas into interesting metaphors and frameworks and making things clear, and they have so much good free content on their podcasts and on their blogs. So if you're a business owner who's like just starting out, like highly recommend. And they are a very like slow printer they don't call it that, but very slow printer vibes.
Speaker 1:I love that. I did not know. Friday Things was a newsletter, I only followed them online.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a newsletter and her pieces are always like so well written, so good, just like so in depth and well-cited and smart. She just so fast.
Speaker 1:I have an obsession with journalists right now. I've always appreciated them but, like, I've been reading a lot of articles and listening to podcasts by journalists and I just think that it's such a special gift to be able to be curious and look into things and then also make them make sense to the world through words.
Speaker 2:I think that it's beautiful.
Speaker 1:I thought of a third one. Sorry, yes, tell me.
Speaker 2:Which is a journalist, so you didn't think of him, but it's Michael Hobbs, who people might know from. He has a lot of podcasts, maintenance phases and an excellent one that he has about like debunking food, food, shit. If books could kill is like one about like airport books and like breaking them down. It brings me such joy. It's like basically debunking, like freaking all my stuff, like all of these other books that are all like really popular in the culture. And then his Twitter, like just following him on Twitter. I don't, I'm not on Twitter, but I'll go on just to look at his profile and see what he's talking about, because everything he shares I'm always like again with that like finger on the pulse kind of energy where he's unpacking things. So he really makes me think and I really like him.
Speaker 1:I like that and I like that you're giving us recommendations, because I feel like you always have the perfect quote, the perfect resource for anything that's happening, like if you I learned that from listening to the podcast. So if you want early access to who Steph S is the person, that's a really good starting point. But you should just come and hang out with us in the boundary, the profound but. But yeah, I like that we get to like dive inside your brain and see who you're hanging out with, because it always leaves me with things to think about. So that's exciting. What is the best advice you've ever received?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, you just sort of the heavy hitters. I will say that I prepared for this one because I was like I want to do it justice. So I have three, but they're very quick, that's fine. The first one was from my mom and she said nobody is smarter than you. And so, like I remember, I was obsessed with some teacher or leader and I was talking about their framework and like how you know, oh, it's so smart. And she was like nobody is smarter than you, like she's not inherently better, she's not inherently smarter. Of course people can have more training than you or, like go to school, but you don't have to take someone's opinion as fact just because they're sharing it. So I thought that one was really good.
Speaker 2:My dad once told me when I was deciding whether or not to stay full time in my business or get a job or whatever, and I was really in a moment of transition. I thought he was gonna go the traditional route and say go get a job. And instead he said you know, I would see how far you can push it. And it was just like this real freedom you know of, like the pressure's off, like you don't have to achieve anything, but like how far can you push it? It's almost like turning it into a game and then, I know, isn't it nice.
Speaker 2:I was like that's what I said. And then the third one is from my partner. He is so supportive of me, he just believes in me so much, Like he just believes I can do anything. And so he tells me that sometimes I'll have these like hair braids schemes, about wanting to start like a book memorabilia business or this and that, and he's like I think you can do anything you wanna do. And so I would give that advice to every single person listening to this. Like I think you can do anything that you wanna do. I think you can figure it out. I really do. I really actually do think you can do anything.
Speaker 1:I do believe that.
Speaker 2:Right. And I think- I mean, I think, you guys are empowering You're like oh, yeah, I could.
Speaker 1:It's really nice to have someone that you like deeply care about, believe in what you're doing. Like I remember saying to Mark and I did not believe that I could do it at the time I remember being like I can't keep doing both Like what if I just tried to do this? And I like fully said that for him to be like now, just stick with your job. And he was like, yeah, of course. Like why wouldn't you? And then I was like, are you sure?
Speaker 2:And he was like let's try this again.
Speaker 1:He was like you love working. And then I was like, but what if I can't pay the bills? And he was like, well, we'll figure it out. And my best friend asked me once if I would have done it if I didn't have a partner. And I don't think so, and it's not because of the security of that, but I think that that moment was like so important to me to believe that I could do it, that like then I could build the fact that I believed it too. So I think that that's really special and I love that you have supportive people in your life that are there for you, cause I think that it's important. And if you don't, you can reach out to us and we will be your support because you can do anything you want to do.
Speaker 2:You honestly can.
Speaker 1:This is the final question, and then you've made it through the gauntlet of thinking about, until you come back again, cause you will when can people find you? How can they work with you? Tell us all of the things, because this is your moment.
Speaker 2:This is my moment, okay, well, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm at StephPellet with 2Ls and 2Ts, or StephaniePelletcom, and all the information is there. You can also come and join us for a productivity party for free if you want. That offer is always available. If you just head to my website, it's right at the bottom of the page and you can come and hang out and see what the community is like and it's a really good time. It's a really good vibe and there's no pressure and we're not going to try to scam you. So that's also available. But those are the best places to find me, or you can search SlowPrinter on your podcast app and dive in. There's a lot of episodes now, which is something I'm very proud of.
Speaker 1:Yay, thank you so much for doing this. This was the most fun. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the Thinking About Podcast. I hope it got you thinking and keeps you thinking for days to come. If the episode inspired you, excited you or gave you something to think about, please feel free to send it to a loved one or a friend, and if you really loved it, you can leave us a rating or review. Wherever you get your podcast, it helps the show grow, it helps us tell our guests how important they are to you and, of course, it lets you help me know what keeps you thinking so we can bring out amazing guests. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next week.