103. How One Lesson From My Dad Shaped My Entire Life (and Doula Business)

What if the biggest thing standing between you and your next level isn't a lack of talent, strategy, or opportunity...

But your willingness to invest in yourself?

In this episode, I'm sharing a deeply personal story about how my dad taught me the principles of investing from a young age, helping me build an investment portfolio long before I ever became an entrepreneur. 

Those lessons didn't just shape how I think about money- they shaped how I think about growth, leadership, business, and legacy.

Over the last year alone, I've invested tens of thousands of dollars into coaching, mentorship, masterminds, conferences, and personal development. In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on why.

We'll talk about:

✨ The difference between spending money and making investments

✨ Borrowed belief and why proximity matters

✨ Accountability, hyper-focus, and faster decision-making

✨ The logical business reasons to invest, including ROI and tax advantages

✨ Why investing in yourself isn't just a business decision- it's a legacy decision

If you've been sitting on the fence about your next investment, this episode may completely change the way you think about growth.

Because the most expensive decision isn't always investing.

Sometimes it's staying exactly where you are.

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Transcript

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Every single skill that I learn impacts my family. Every leadership lesson impacts my parenting, impacts my son. Every business lesson creates more freedom, more opportunities, more flexibility, more choices. So the investments that I make today don't stop with me. They ripple forward into my family, into my clients, into the doulas that I coach, into the mothers that they serve, into the lives that those mothers touch, that is legacy. And when I think about investing from that perspective, the conversation changes immediately. Welcome to the Six Figure Doula podcast. This is where confidence becomes currency. If you're a birth worker who's ready to stop overthinking, stop undercharging, and start leading like you mean it, then you're not here by accident. Every week we talk about sales without the ick, money without shame, and building a business that actually holds you and your clients. Welcome home, Dula. Happy Tuesday, my beautiful friends. Today I want to talk about something that has really changed the trajectory of my life and my business, my net worth, my confidence, ultimately my legacy. Like it's really a big deal. And that is investing. And I'm not even just talking about investing money, although we will get there. I'm talking about investing in your overall personal growth, also your skill set, investing in mentorship, you know, becoming the person capable of creating the life that you want. And before we talk about all of the details, I want to tell you where this really started. This episode actually was born out of some reflection that I was doing over the last week as we celebrated Father's Day. And the truth is, I learned about investing long before I became an entrepreneur. I learned it from my dad. And growing up, my dad taught me something that most people never learn, or they learn it very late in life. And he taught me that money was not meant to simply sit in a bank account. So very early on, like teenage years, I'm talking, my dad taught me that every dollar had a job and that investing wasn't something that just wealthy people did. Investing was how people became wealthy. And I remember him helping me build an investment portfolio from a very young age. And he taught me about stocks and he taught me about interest and long-term thinking. He taught me about patience and risk tolerance. He taught me about, you know, delayed gratification before I fully even appreciated how those powerful lessons would impact my life. And while other kids uh were spending, you know, their money that they received in real time, my dad was teaching me to think years ahead, like decades ahead, and to ask questions like, well, what's the return on that? Or what happens if this grows over time? What is the opportunity cost of doing nothing? And at the time I thought we were talking about money and money alone. But looking back, I realized we were talking about life because the same principles apply everywhere. Money compounds, but so do your skills, and so does your confidence and your leadership and your relationships and your business knowledge and every single investment that you make into yourself has the potential to create returns for years, decades. And that is why investing in coaching felt so natural to me when I became an entrepreneur. I never viewed coaching as spending money, especially spending money I didn't have, because at the time I didn't have it. I viewed it as buying an asset that I would then own. Because unlike a stock portfolio, nobody can take away your skills. Nobody could repossess your confidence. Nobody can destroy your leadership or your knowledge or your experience when the market crashes. The lessons that you've learned. And my dad taught me how to invest money, but entrepreneurship taught me how to invest in myself. And both lessons have completely changed things for me. And I want to talk a little bit about it and hope that this reframes investing for you because it is such a powerful tool. And I think one of the biggest lies that entrepreneurs tell themselves is I will invest when I make more money, or I will hire the coach after I hit my next income goal. I will join the mastermind when business is more stable. I will get support once I figure things out on my own first. But what if making more money is actually on the other side of the investment? What if the stability that you are waiting for is created by the decision that you are avoiding? And the reality is that every major breakthrough that I have personally experienced came after I made a decision, before I felt ready. Not after, before. And that is hella uncomfortable. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. And most of us want certainty. We want guarantees and proof. We want to know the investment will work before we make the investment. But entrepreneurship does not reward certainty, it rewards courage. And everybody, for the most part, understands compound interest when it comes to money, right? You put money into an account, you leave it there, and over time it grows. But almost nobody talks about compound interest when it comes to personal development. But every single coach that I have hired built upon the previous coach that I had hired. Every book that I read built upon the previous lessons. Every event that I attended built upon the previous event. All the uncomfortable investments expanded my capacity. And those lessons will never disappear because they stack. The sales skills that I learned and trained for for years are still generating revenue today. The leadership lessons that I learned years ago still influence how I coach today. Even the mindset shifts still influence how I make decisions today. That is compound interest. And it's one of the reasons that I continue investing so heavily in myself. And over the last year alone, I have invested more money into coaching and mentorship and conferences and personal development than most people spend on a car. And every time I make another investment, I have to ask myself, you know, these questions that linger, the logical questions that kind of make it uncomfortable for me. At what point do you stop investing, Lisa? And my answer is simple because every single level of my business has been unlocked by an investment. Every single one, every income jump, every identity shift, breakthroughs, major decisions, expansions. There is a direct line between the rooms that I've entered and the results that I've created. And it's not because someone handed me success, it's because every investment changed the way that I think and then the way that I move and the way that I show up in that season. And I do think there's a lot of confusion for a lot of people around this because people think that they're paying for the information, but you're not. Information has never been cheaper. You can Google just about anything. You can ask AI, you can listen to podcasts, absorb YouTube, read books. Information is abundant. What you're paying for is clarity and perspective. You're paying for proximity and accountability, direct feedback, pattern recognition, decision making, and a lot of times identity expansion. And most entrepreneurs do not have a problem accessing the information. Usually it is more around the clarity piece. It's a focus problem, it's a lack of making decisions. And one of the greatest returns that I've ever received from coaching is speed. So let's say you're facing a problem in your business. You could spend six months trying to figure it out yourself. Or you could spend one hour talking to someone who's already been there, already solved it. That's what coaching really is. You are buying time back. You are buying years of trial and error. You're buying shortcuts, not the easy way. You are collapsing time. You're buying someone who can identify the bottleneck faster than you can. Someone who can say, this isn't actually your problem. Here's what I would focus on. Do more of this. Stop focusing on that. I cannot even calculate how much time coaching has saved me. Literal years. And there have been seasons where I couldn't see the next level. I was very much stuck. I couldn't feel it. I didn't really believe it. I felt like there was no pathway, but my coach could. And sometimes that's enough. Sometimes someone else's belief carries you until your own belief catches up. There were moments throughout my journey when I questioned everything. And it still happens, right? There were moments when I wondered if I was qualified. Why did I feel so behind? When I wondered if I was building something impossible. And having somebody look at me and say, keep going. You are closer than you think. This is normal. Do not give up. Those moments mattered more than any strategy because strategy doesn't work if you stop, if you quit. And let's face it, most people, most doulas, don't need to add motivation, but they absolutely need accountability. They benefit from having someone in their corner asking, did you finish that task? Did you follow through? Did you make the offer? Did you post the content? Did you launch? Did you send the email that you said you were going to send? Because left to our own devices, we avoid discomfort. We are human beings. And unfortunately, almost every breakthrough in business lives inside discomfort. Coaching keeps me focused and accountable and it helps me separate what's important from what's merely urgent. And that kind of hyper focus is priceless. And then we all can agree that business is simply a series of decisions, right? Do I raise my prices? Do I make this pivot? Do I build this offer? Do I wait? Do I invest? And the faster you make quality decisions, the faster your business grows. Coaching allows me to make decisions in hours instead of months. Because instead of sitting in confusion or overthinking my options, I have someone helping me process the decision in real time who gets me, who understands, who cares. That speed compounds, just like everything else. And there is a practical side of this because this isn't all just mindset. Many of the investments that I've made are legitimate business expenses. They are investments into leadership, sales, and marketing and systems, operations, skills. They are going to improve my earning capacity. They help me become a stronger CEO. They reduce my taxable income and they create opportunities that generate revenue long after the investment is made. So the ROI, it's not always going to be immediate. Sometimes it's direct, sometimes it's delayed, but almost every major investment that I have made has paid me back over and over and over. And here's something fascinating. Every single major milestone in my business happened shortly after an investment. And it wasn't because the coach that I hired at the time had magic powers or that the program was the only program, right? But it was because commitment changes behavior. So when I invest, I pay attention differently, I implement differently and I move. I become more resourceful. I stop looking for excuses. I start looking for solutions. The investment forces me to rise. And every major tipping point in my business can be traced back to a moment when I decided to bet on myself. And here's here's another thing. I want to take this a layer deeper because this isn't even really about money. And I know that that may surprise you, but for me, it's about legacy. Every single skill that I learn impacts my family. Every leadership lesson impacts my parenting, impacts my son. Every business lesson creates more freedom, more opportunities, more flexibility, more choices. So the investments that I make today don't stop with me. They ripple forward into my family, into my clients, into the doulas that I coach, into the mothers that they serve, into the lives that those mothers touch, that is legacy. And when I think about investing from that perspective, the conversation changes immediately because I'm not simply building revenue. I'm building something that will outlive me. And whenever I'm considering an investment, I ask myself a single question. What is it costing me to stay exactly where I am? Not what does the investment cost? What does stagnation cost? What does another year of confusion cost? What does another month of undercharging cost? What does another year of waiting mean for me? Another year of trying to figure it out alone and be frustrated and defeated. Because in my experience, the most expensive decision is rarely the investment. The most expensive decision is staying the freaking same. And if you happen to be sitting on a decision in this moment, so maybe you are at a crossroads, maybe this is your reminder. Not necessarily to hire a coach, but to stop treating your growth like an expense and start treating it like an investment. Because every version of you that you're dreaming about becoming lives on the other side of a decision. And my dad taught me that money grows when you invest it. Entrepreneurship taught me that people do too. And if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it is that the greatest return on investment will always come from the person staring back at you in the mirror. The future version of you is counting on the decisions you're making today. So the question is what are you willing to invest in becoming? Okay, all until next time, keep serving, keep growing, and keep betting on yourself.