Not-So Kind Regards

How to Get What You Want (No Matter What Happens)

• Maddy Birdcage & Caroline Moss • Season 5 • Episode 13

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In today’s episode, Maddy Birdcage gets raw and real, sharing personal stories and game-changing mindset shifts to help you stop walking through life with a victim mentality. From overcoming health challenges to building a sustainable business, this episode is packed with honest advice, practical tips, and inspiring reminders that life is happening for you, not to you.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why focusing on mindset is the first step to achieving your goals.
  • The truth about overnight success and why you don’t want it.
  • How to stop chasing virality and build an authentic, lasting brand.
  • What it means to shift from a victim mentality to an empowered growth mindset.
  • Practical strategies to take control of your health, business, and social media.


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Speaker 1:

What I want you to understand is that you can't let yourself get wrapped up, get caught up in this victim mentality, feel discouraged all the time, because if that's how you're going to go through life, life's going to be very difficult for you. Life will give you shit things to deal with. Welcome to the Not so Kind Regards podcast.

Speaker 2:

I'm Maddie Birdcage and I'm Caroline Moss. We are done with the digital fluff and pleasantries and we're here to talk straight about brand building, digital marketing and personal growth. Feeling stuck on the content treadmill, overwhelmed by endless marketing advice that just doesn't deliver, time to flip the script and step into Express Mode, the game-changing program built for entrepreneurs who are done playing small. Brought to you by Birdcage School, the online training destination teaching thousands of marketers and entrepreneurs who know they're meant for more. Launching the 29th of January, express Mode gives you lifetime access to fast, bold strategies designed for today's fast-paced AI-driven world. Whether you're juggling multiple responsibilities or striving to stand out in a crowded market, this on-demand program is your ticket to authentic, results-driven marketing. With actionable templates, ai-optimized chat, gpt prompts and strategies tailored for your brand, you'll achieve more in days, not months, and with this launch pricing, you will save big while transforming your business. Join our waitlist now at birdcageschoolcom, because the future won't wait, and neither should you.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to this episode of the Not so Kind Regards podcast. You have got me, maddie Birdcage, doing a solo episode today, and this episode was actually meant to be about giving you a pep talk in order to get you up on your social media, even if you're feeling discouraged. But I actually want to take this episode a little bit wider and make it about how you show up and how you react to what happens around you and how I don't want you to discourage. I don't want anything that happens to you to discourage you from continuing to push forward to your goals. Yes, that will include social media, but it's other things as well. And the reason why I really want to talk about this today is because my year I don't know if you saw on my socials, but my year definitely did not start the way I wanted it to. It started being in hospital, actually having a few nights in the ICU. It just completely. I did not expect that this was what was going to happen to me.

Speaker 1:

If you don't know, I have type 1 diabetes. That is genetic. It is not lifestyle induced. You cannot cure it. Basically, my pancreas. I want you to all understand the value of your pancreas in controlling your blood sugar levels. But basically my pancreas does not make insulin anymore.

Speaker 1:

Insulin is what is required to take sugar in your blood out of your body, I think or just process the sugar in your body. So what that means is, when I eat sugar, which is also carbohydrates, it means that my body doesn't automatically get rid of the sugar and my blood will turn to sugar or turn to acid in my body if I don't manually inject insulin, if I don't put the insulin in my body to transport the sugar through my body. And so what can happen is everything will affect how much or how little insulin you need. If you don't have enough insulin, your blood sugar levels go too high and you end up with too much sugar in your blood, which can put you into a coma or ketoacidosis, where your blood turns to sugar and you die If your bloods go too low blood sugar levels. So if you don't have enough sugar in your blood and you need around five to eight millimoles per liter, I believe that's where all you normies would be sitting. You need around that, and if you don't have that, that's when you start feeling really lightheaded and as a diabetic, because I'm manually injecting this, like telling, I'm manually choosing how much insulin to put into my body. I could completely get it wrong and give myself way too much, where I end up with no sugar or basically no sugar in my blood, in which case I can go into a coma and also die. So you're walking this very um.

Speaker 1:

I don't talk about it a whole lot, I don't dwell on it a whole lot and, if I'm honest, I haven't actually been prioritizing my health a whole lot in the last 12 months. So something I wrote on my vision board for 2025 was that I wanted to be in the best health of my life, not just the best shape, not just look great, but feel the best, have energy, have vitality, have longevity. I want to be around for a very long time for my kids, for my grandkids, and I must be getting older if I'm starting to think like that. But that is the truth. I don't just want quick fixes, I want true health Now.

Speaker 1:

For me, true health starts with managing my blood glucose levels. That is the most single, most important thing I can do, and in the last year or so, I've definitely slacked off my HbA1c. My average blood glucose levels have been sitting a lot higher than they should be and that will shorten your lifespan, that can make you go blind, that can make you lose limbs. That's pretty fucking hectic, and so I need to focus on it, but I haven't been, and so guess what the university did? It was like we're going to give you golden staff, which is antibiotic immune staff, infection and put you in hospital. We're going to send your blood sugars so freaking high that the doctors admit you to ICU and take control of managing your blood glucose levels, because you could go into a coma right now and then maybe then you might take some shit seriously. Maddie, guess what I absolutely did, because when you have nothing but your health to focus on lying in a hospital bed and wondering how the fuck did I get here? And you're having very intelligent, some of the best doctors in the region coming and talking to you and making you realize just how important managing your health is, you can't ignore that, and so why I wanted to share this story was that I could look at being admitted to hospital and all of this as like, oh my God, this is just foreshadowing the terrible year that I'm about to have, and then every time something else like non-desirable, undesirable happens to me, I'm like see another proof that my year is going to be shit.

Speaker 1:

And for a lot of you, that is how you walk through life. That is me being brutally honest. You walk through life with this victim mentality where you are seeking out proof that the world is against you. I know because I used to be like this. I used to have this victim mentality and I can see it in so many of you. Before you start working with us, before you start in the full library where we give you the favorite self mindset membership or you can just enroll in the Favourite Self Mindset Membership for just $49 Australian dollars a month. There is a three day free trial as well, and I encourage you to get into it, because a lot of the time, you don't even realize that you're walking around with this victim mentality, and part of this program is to uncover the limiting beliefs that you were telling yourself and that you are then seeking out and validating yourself and that you are then seeking out and validating.

Speaker 1:

So if we are consciously or unconsciously walking around with these victim mentality, we are basically creating self-fulfilling prophecies. That just means that, as I said, if I have a belief that oh my God, my year is going to be so shit, and then something like I get into a little car accident, for example, my car gets knocked. I'm like, oh see, it's so shit, whereas like if I had a different mentality, where I'm like this year is going to be fucking awesome, and then, like my car gets scratched up or something, it won't be such a big deal, or maybe doing that stopped me from something worse happening. Like it's stopped the burnt toast theory, where it's like you burn your piece of toast so you run late to work, but by running late to work, you miss a potential fatal accident on the road that you could have been in. So it's happening for you.

Speaker 1:

What I want you to understand is that you can't let yourself get wrapped up, get caught up in this victim mentality, feel discouraged all the time, because if, if that's how you're going to go through life, life's going to be very difficult for you. Life will give you shit things to deal with. I want you to switch your thinking and this is how I want you to do it Rather than thinking. Life is happening to me, these things are happening to me. I want you to do it Rather than thinking. Life is happening to me, these things are happening to me. I want you to look at everything through the lens that life is happening for you, just like my hospital stay that happened for me to focus on my health and improve my diabetic levels and improve my overall health so I can reach my vision board.

Speaker 1:

Things like if you are suffering with no sales in your business, for example, right now, which has happened to me in the past I don't want you to look at that as, oh my God, I'm a failure, oh my God, my business is going to go under. Oh my God, I'm the worst person in the world. Why can't I figure this out? Why is this happening to me? That's victim mentality. I want you to think this is happening for me so that I'm pushed enough to learn a system where I can make sales on demand, because that is what happened to me back when my business was really struggling, and there's been instances since then where I mean business goes up and down, but every time it does, when you get pulled back, you get flung so much further forward, because this challenge, this thing that's happening for you, is an opportunity for you to grow from that and to get better, something I believe.

Speaker 1:

What is it that you've asked for. If you've asked for calm and peace, the universe, the gods, god, life source, whatever you want to call it is going to give you chaos, because it's only through suffering the worst that you will learn how to experience peace, regardless of what happens to you. And if you really think about it, think of some of the happiest people you know. I guarantee that they've probably gone through some of the worst shit. The happiest people you know have probably experienced the most pain. Why do they become the happiest people? You know? Because they have gone through it and they've come out the other side and I get goosebumps talking about this. So if you ask for love, you're going to experience heartbreak. I promise you that, because it's only through heartbreak that you will learn hopefully, if you do the work how to love yourself so that, regardless of whether you're with a partner, whether you have friendships, whatever that, your family's, whatever it is you love yourself. You experience heartbreak.

Speaker 1:

If you want love, the lesson or the medicine is to love yourself, and you've heard that before, and that's the reason why. If you want love, the lesson or the medicine is to love yourself, and you've heard that before, and that's the reason why. If you want financial abundance and financial even just financial stability. You're going to get instability so that you learn how to create sales on demand. That's what happened to me. If you want your dream house, I guarantee your current living arrangement is going to become so unbearable that you have no choice but to go out and to find this new house and to make it happen.

Speaker 1:

If we're smart, we won't let us get to a rock bottom where everything seems to have fallen apart. If we are smart, we will do the things before the rug gets pulled out from under us. I'm not always so smart. I tend to ignore things until they just become so unbearable to ignore that. I go and take the action. And so if that's where you are right now, you feel like you're in a rock bottom, your business isn't where you want it to be, your social media isn't working for you. Relations, relationships, are a struggle, whatever it might be. It's because it's a sign that you need to step up and you need to take action and you need to do the work.

Speaker 1:

If we were to lean into this in terms of growing a social media platform, because social media and going viral and all of that stuff it's designed to fuck with your head. These numbers and these metrics are designed to keep us addicted to the platform. So we keep creating content. So we keep making content for these platforms to then use to get people on so that they can sell ads. Remember, if you're not the customer, you are the product. We do not pay to post social media content, therefore, we are the product. So how do they keep us being the product? By getting us addicted to the ups and downs of content creation.

Speaker 1:

So here are some advice around if you are struggling with your social media, specifically, your mindset around social media. The first is I want you to get over the fact that a lot of you don't use social media the way that you could be, because you're afraid. You're afraid of being seen as a wannabe influencer. There's nothing wrong with being an influencer, by the way, but you're worried about being seen as a wannabe influencer. You're worried about showing up inauthentically. You're worried about what other people will think. All of these things are not real Because, number one, if you make sure that you have a strategy that is grounded in your authenticity and that's exactly what we teach through our new program, express Mode how to show up authentically in your social media.

Speaker 1:

If you have a strategy that's grounded in your authenticity, showing up on your social media is actually the best thing you can do, because you will be attracting your ideal people to your socials and to your business. I don't want you to show up as someone else. You don't have to be this bright, shiny, blonde, young, pretty, perfect thing. I want you to just be you and you don't have to wait until you lose the weight. You don't have to wait until you get your hair done. You don't have to wait for any of that stuff until you're wearing makeup. Stop waiting for it and just start showing up and doing it, because the more authentic you can be, the better the quality of your audience will become.

Speaker 1:

No-transcript. Yes, you need to get visibility. Yes, you need some visibility. You need to be maybe getting more than 200 views a video, but you will get there. As long as you keep practicing, you will figure it out how to get a few thousand views. Often, my best performing videos for my business have been the ones that get under 5,000 views, because we're sticking with a really tight audience of really potent people that are perfect for my brand.

Speaker 1:

As soon as we get over that 5, 10 K mark even the audience becomes really broad and often the comment section can turn not ideal. And if that happens to you, you can turn your comments off. You can block people. You have full control. If you're afraid of what people are going to say on your content, don't be because you want people to be commenting. That's the whole point. And if you can't hack it, turn the comments off and realize that you need to do some work in yourself.

Speaker 1:

This leads into my next point, that your social media and your marketing and your business journey and even your personal mindset journey it's a journey you don't like I tell my eight-year-old you don't automatically show up knowing exactly what to do and how to do it and then just be instantly perfect at it. That's not how it works. It is a skill, it is a muscle. It's like you don't walk into the gym day one and lift the heaviest weight in the gym. That's not how it works. And especially if you want to become in that top 1% of creators that gets millions of views every single time they post a video, I personally I don't think I would want that. I mean my ego might like that, but from from a business perspective, getting a million views of video would be pretty unmanageable and not really ideal, but in order to become a very good content creator, a great marketer, a great business person, it's just practice. It's just practice of doing the thing over and over, learning from your mistakes, doing them better next time, but, most importantly, having that mindset where it doesn't happen to you, it happens for you and you are learning from every mistake that you make.

Speaker 1:

The way to handle this is to go into things with the learner's mindset, with the knowledge that this is a new content format. I'm trying, for example I wonder how it's going to go. My sister and I, my content strategist Max and I, we are actually testing this new we just filmed it yesterday a new style of content and like we had her daughter running around at her feet. It wasn't perfect, we didn't have all the props that we necessarily wanted or needed, but we were like, let's just, let's just start, let's just record this and edit it and then see where it lands and see what happens. And if it doesn't work which it probably won't get a whole lot of traction then cool, We'll try and do it better next time. If it does work or we see some signs, how can we do it better next time?

Speaker 1:

Don't go into it thinking that you found the magic solution, that when you post it everything's going to change for you. That will eventually happen, but it probably won't happen on your first go, and I want you to realize that's completely normal. I mean, this leads into the next area that I want you to think about, which is release the expectations that overnight successes happen for everyone. They don't. They happen to like 0.001 percent of people, and even when they do, I've seen it happen. When they do eventually, if it has been such a quick rise, they eventually crash and burn because they don't have the solid foundation.

Speaker 1:

I know that happened to me. I wasn't an overnight success, don't get me wrong. I'd been in business for six or seven years, but we had this growth period of about 12 months where we grew way too quick and it all came crumbling down. Number one, because I think that what I was building wasn't exactly what I really wanted, and so I probably strangled it myself, but also because I always had this feeling that my business was built on sand and it could get ripped out from under me at any stage, and that my business was built on sand and it could get ripped out from under me at any stage. And guess what? It absolutely did, because it was built on sand, because there were no frameworks, there were no machines, there were no marketing machines where I could pull the lever and our reach would go up and our funnels would start bringing more leads. There was no delivery machine where I knew how to scale our delivery of our services up or down, or how do we continue to serve people when we're maxed out as an agency. There was none of that. The school didn't exist, it was just the agency, and it was just the agency, with not a whole lot of process around it, and so when things got busy, it became out of control.

Speaker 1:

But you want things to get busy, right, and so what I want you to think about is you actually don't want an overnight success. I mean again from an ego perspective. It would be nice or it would be easy. It'd be nice to make some quick bucks, but it's not going to be sustained and I would prefer to need to build my business up over a couple of years. If it meant 10, 20 years of sustained success, then be an overnight success, for it to just last a couple of months a year at best.

Speaker 1:

I actually don't think most businesses that go viral on socials and become overnight successes they actually don't last a year is what I've found because I've been approached by a number of them and I've had to decline because I knew that they didn't have the delivery in place. I knew that if we were to scale them again, first of all, they would have unrealistic expectations, but second of all, I know that the delivery can't be sustained and that's not how I want to do business. Release the expectation that you should be an overnight success, that you should be going viral because of one video that you post. Release the idea that the world is against you and that business needs to be hard and that business needs to be always wins. That is not the case. You learn and I know I've learned so much more through the bad thing, the bad things, things that happened for me to learn from. I've learned so much more from them that I've ever learned from any successes where things have just worked and I'm like I don't really know why. I don't know why they've worked, but they worked and this is great. But it's like I probably couldn't replicate that and therein lies the problem.

Speaker 1:

You've got this, guys. You 100% have this what you need. If you are like, okay, maddie, you've pep, talk me up, I'm ready to go, there are two steps that I want you to take right now. One is at the very least, please start working on your mindset through the favorite self mindset membership. I've created this membership as cheaply as I can 49 Australian dollars a month. There is a three day free trial for you to get started on. This is life changing stuff and it is so, so affordable. If you can do nothing else, please start working on your mindset, because I know that when you do, the money will come and you'll be able to upgrade to one of our other programs.

Speaker 1:

If you are at the stage where you're like, okay, I'm ready to take my social media seriously, I'm ready to start showing up. I just I'm scared to do it in an inauthentic way. I want to make sure it's being authentic and I want to make sure that I'm maximizing my time I don't have a whole lot of time then Express Mode is for you. That is the program that helps you clarify not just your favorite self, because you're doing that through the favorite self mindset membership, but we take your favorite self, and then we apply that into a social media brand business setting. So we create your brand strategy about whatever it is that you sell, but it's grounded in your favorite self, your most authentic self, so that you can start showing up confidently on your social media, knowing exactly what you need to be talking about, talking about it in your way, and, yes, we get AI to help you write all of this for you.

Speaker 1:

The biggest surprise that people got from using ChatGPT with our express mode prompts was something that I don't think anyone actually thought was possible, and yet it's completely life-changing. It is that ChatGPT can write more authentically than you can yourself. That ChatGPT can make you more you. That is not what we associate with AI. We associate AI with automation robotics, but by doing it in this way, by using the favorite self prompts, by building on the brand strategy that we create, we are able to finally get out the words that are stuck in our head that we want to tell the world, and yet we've never found the words to do it. Now you can finally do it.

Speaker 1:

Not just that, but once you have this strategy and once you have your initial framework, we then use the chat GPT prompts to write out your marketing funnel, and people hear me talking about marketing funnels all the time and they think they get it, but they're still not a hundred percent sure exactly how to apply it to their business. But this one thing changes all of that, and if you are struggling to truly understand how to use a marketing funnel and apply it to your business, this is the one thing that I want you to do. I want you to, when you're in express mode, make sure that you are using the prompts, step by step, exactly the way that I recommend it, because I promise you you will finally understand how to apply a marketing funnel to your business. This is the realization you will get and this is the feedback that we've had from our students. And, of course, if you are a marketer the full library. We are creating a marketing bundle for you. I don't know if I should be announcing this yet or not. There is a marketer's bundle that is coming your way, including communities and so many exciting things, including chat, gpt prompts as well, and so you need to look out for that.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Enough of this, guys. You've got this. You've got this because you are building. You are not this. Because you are building, you are not chasing. You are building your success. Life is happening for you, not to you. I need to get out of the victim mentality, get into an empowered growth mindset, because the world is literally ready and waiting for you to step up and do this.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for joining us for this latest episode. If If you felt inspired and love what we had to say, make sure you leave a review and you tell us on your favorite platform so that we can reach more people who want to align themselves and become their favorite selves. If you're ready to take some next steps and you want to explore Birdcage School, make sure you visit birdcageschoolcom for programs and mentoring on how to become your favorite self, how to grow an online brand or, if you're a marketer, how to market the way that we do it. Most importantly, don't forget to share. If you've been tuning in on your socials, make sure you tag at birdcage underscore school or share it with your bestie, who needs to hear what we have to say. Until next time, my friends, keep growing, keep dreaming and, of course, keep showing up.