Whatever Is Excellent with Leanne Tuggle
Encouragement and Inspiration for women choosing to rise above the “just survive” mentality and instead set their mind on thriving in all that they say and do. The ultimate goal is to equip you to pursue whatever is excellent in the midst of your ordinary life and in all that you say and do.
Whatever Is Excellent with Leanne Tuggle
26: The Courage to Create: Taking Action Before You're Ready with Ine-Wilme
What if the key to creative excellence wasn't perfection but courage?
Professional cellist-turned-business coach Ina-Wilme reveals transformative insights on unlocking your creative potential while maintaining excellence in both business and motherhood.
After spending seven months meticulously crafting a course that initially earned less than $1,000, Ina learned a pivotal lesson that changed everything: "When you create before you're ready, you get the answers to the test." Her journey from classical musician to entrepreneurial coach demonstrates that real growth happens when we stop waiting for perfection and start creating with and for our audience.
For mother entrepreneurs struggling to balance creative pursuits with family life, Ina offers a refreshing perspective: "My work is a break from being a mom, and being a mom is a break from my work." This mindset shift transforms what could feel like constant demands into complementary roles that energize rather than deplete. Through her "CEO-executor-mom" daily rhythm, she demonstrates how structured boundaries can maximize productivity while preserving quality family time.
Drawing powerful parallels between music and business, Ina distinguishes between excellence and perfectionism. Like a musician who must play many notes rather than perfecting just one, entrepreneurs must embrace quantity alongside quality. "If you have ideas but don't publish them, what's the point of having them in the first place?" she challenges. Using the farming analogy of planting 700 million seeds knowing only 40% will survive, Ina encourages creators to sow abundantly with courage rather than sparingly with fear.
Ready to move past creative blocks? Discover Ina's practical "next action model" for identifying your immediate next step without overwhelming yourself. Connect with her on Instagram @Ina.Wilme to continue exploring how music principles can transform your creative process and business growth.
Interested in working with Ine? Click the link below to get on her list for the next workshop:
Find YOUR Million Dollar Idea Workshop with Ine-Wilme
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I am so pleased to introduce to you today a very, very special guest. This woman is one of a kind and she is so brilliant, but I think the thing I love about her the most is her heart of gold. I am so excited for you to hear from Ina today and to soak up all of the goodness that she has to share with us. So, without further ado, I want to introduce you to Ina, and Ina, thank you so much for being here on Whatever is Excellent. Can you just share a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?
Ine:Absolutely Well. First of all, thank you so much, leanne, for having me on the show. I have looked at your journey and just seen how you've grown as an entrepreneur and as a mom over I think I've I've known you maybe three, three, four years, something like that, yeah, and it's just been just a joy to see. So I'm so excited about our conversation today. So, to answer your question, um, I am a professionally trained cellist and I started the cello when I was about five years old. So for over two decades now I've been playing the cello and it's been a massive part of my life and I always knew that the cello had to be a part of what I created. But a part of me, when I was about 18, 19, was resisting that, because it is a hard instrument. It is something that requires excellence and a level of excellence that is very, very difficult to get to. It requires 10,000 hours of practice, which I had had, um, but I was in this loop of constantly comparing myself to people who had gone to Juilliard, people who were enrolled in, like Curtis, institute of Music and Colburn, like all of these big schools, and I thought to myself, well, if I'm not going to go to college maybe I should just go do something else. And I remember it was the last day of working as a receptionist for my dad. My dad is a doctor and for five months I was filling in for this other receptionist. My very first job. It was my very last day, because this other one would come back the next day. My very first job, it was my very last day, because this other one would come back the next day. And I saw this thing on something my friend had posted for a network marketing business and I thought, huh, she's making money simply by posting on social media, a skill that I want to learn anyways. How about I just enroll? So I go and buy like the $800 kit. I had absolutely no business doing that. Um, like on a whim, probably the biggest thing I've ever bought in my entire life at that till that point. And that is how I fell into business.
Ine:Like I just started entrepreneurship because I knew I didn't want the nine to five. I'd been doing that for five months. It was sucking the life out of me and I knew I wanted to do something with business. So that is how I got started. But then COVID hit and the students that I was teaching online not online yet, but in person. I mean, um had to be switched online. So I was kind of keeping the cello in the background performing um, keeping my skillset up, but not really seeing a big future yet. My skill set up, but not really seeing a big future yet. So I had to switch them all online and I realized there is more freedom financially here as there is in network marketing, and network marketing gave me the start.
Ine:But I knew I needed to go deeper. I needed to find my zone of genius, the thing that I could be excellent at, and long, long story short, after the course of like two and a half years of brainwashing myself into thinking learning the cello is the thing for people to excel in life, I realized I wanted to work with entrepreneurs. And that brought me to back to my first love of business again, where I wanted to make entrepreneurs learn the cello. That was initially the thing, but then I realized that they all want to wait to learn the cello till they have their dream library, till their kids are graduated, till their business is making a million dollars.
Ine:I heard all of these objections and I stuck to the game, but it wasn't working. I knew I had to pivot and finally, in October last year, I pivoted. I actually started using my music skills as a professional cellist for business coaching, and that is what I do now. So all of these twists and turns that I never could have expected brought me to where I am today. I now am a business coach and I help entrepreneurs unlock their creativity and really have these creative breakthroughs using the principles of music, without them actually needing to learn the cello. So amazing. That is like the I don't know five minute version of a seven year long entrepreneurship journey.
Leanne:That's incredible and honestly, I applaud you to be able to condense it, seven years, into five minutes. That's amazing. There are so many good things that you said in there, and of course, one word that stands out is excellence and just wanting to do everything with excellence, and I can see that being a thread that has run through all of the last seven years. And there's another thing that you said that really popped out at me too, which is that zone of genius, and I know we're going to come back to that in just a little bit.
Leanne:Um I I also hear this like desire. You have to be creative and to create something. You have a desire. You're naturally creative and artistic with the cello, but you have this innate desire to create. And I think and I hear in a lot of conversations that I have with women entrepreneurs and just women in general that we all have this desire to create. And I think, especially as we move into this spring season, we kind of have that itch or that desire to create something new or refresh something old or do something that feels like it could flourish and bloom in the season. And so I'd love to hear just a little bit about why you believe taking action before you feel ready, cause it sounds like there was a lot of instances where you were pivoting or doing something just a little bit different. Why do you think taking action before you're ready is so important for success?
Ine:That is such a good question, leanne, and it truly is a core belief that I have that I try to transfer over to the entrepreneurs that I work with, and, as usual, there's a short version and a long version of that answer. Um, the short version is it is because when you create before you're ready, you get the answers to the test. You get the answers you need in order to know what do people even want, and I learned this the hard way when I first started my business uh, trying to teach entrepreneurs how to learn the cello. It didn't start off that way. Initially. I was just trying to get new students into one-on-one coaching, and then I created a course, which it took me seven months behind the scenes to create this course. When I launched it, I made less than a thousand dollars for seven months of work, and I'd had this idea a year before I even started creating it. So a year and seven months later, I had almost nothing to show for my work, because I didn't create it with the people. I didn't create it for the people. I created it for myself, because I thought that I knew what they wanted. I thought that I knew what they wanted. I thought that I knew how to put things together and that course ended up having success later on because I learned sales skills. But it would have been so much easier if I had just started before I was ready, started getting to conversations, started doing the research that is required of us to create before we're ready.
Ine:So it makes me like think about the word ready. What does it mean to be ready? And we have to think about being ready physically, like we get ready every day. I got ready, put on makeup, clothes, like all those things for this interview. But it's deeper than that. Being ready is a state of mind where you can take action despite your emotions. And you have to be ready spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. And you have to be ready for opportunities. So these opportunities they kind of come from nowhere, they come from left field, somewhere where you really don't expect them to come. But if you are in a mindset of I don't, I'm not ready to send this lead, a link, because of the scarcity mindset or because of thinking you're not good enough, or thinking you need to learn another skill or get another certification or whatever it might be for you, you are not ready mentally, then You're not ready emotionally, what it means to be ready is being in a state of belief in yourself, trusting that what you have is valuable, that your ideas are valuable and that you can create something that has value in the marketplace when you take action. So it comes down to taking action before you're ready and, honestly, the best products in the world are created this way.
Ine:Um, the first iPhone, it was nowhere near where it is now. I don't know what we're at like iPhone 16, 17. I've lost track long, long time ago. But each iteration of the iPhone was made based off of feedback. It was made based off of what people were looking for in the marketplace. The first iPhone wasn't the absolute be. In an end, all Steve jobs thought he was never going to have to work again in a day in his life. No, like, his passion was creating something based off of what other people were telling him they needed. So when we work with people, when we create for the people, we can create when they're ready, not when you're ready, and that's the key.
Leanne:I love that. That's so good, and it also makes it not about you, yes, about others, and I think that that is the key of creativity. There is a part of creating that's for you, but really it's to add value to others, and I think that you really encapsulated that. Now, a lot of women who listen here are also mothers, so they have this desire to create and they also are in the midst of raising families, and you, I know, are also a mother. So what mindset shifts do you think are essential for mothers who want to thrive in both a business and in their family?
Ine:I like that. You ask what mindset shifts, because the reality is is that when we become a mother, our entire identity changes and our mindset is often related to how we see ourselves. In fact, our mindset is almost always related to how we see ourselves. In fact, our mindset is almost always related to how we see ourselves. So if we become a mother and we think to ourselves our best years are over, we are only a mom and that anything else is going to take us away from being a mother, then it will. Then any pursuit you try, anything you create, is going to take you away from being a mother. It's going to take away from that level of excellence you want as a mother. Then it will. Then any pursuit you try, anything you create, is going to take you away from being a mother. It's going to take away from that level of excellence you want as a mother because you believe it will.
Ine:And my husband told me when I was pregnant with my first um we we didn't plan to have him. It was a complete surprise and I remember telling him everything is going to change, like what's going to happen to my business. It is barely on its legs. In fact, when I got pregnant with Francis, I was on week two of that very same course. I was teaching it live, week two of that course that had only made a thousand dollars, um, barely. I sold three for $300 each, so $900. Anyways, he told me something that changed everything for me and that made it possible for me to be the mom that I want to be today, with excellence, and be the business owner. And that was is Ina.
Ine:If you believe that what you're doing is taking you away from your, from your baby, it's going to take you away. But if you believe that it's making you a better mother, that it's making you more excellent because you are fulfilling your passions, you're fulfilling the gifting that God put you on this earth, you are going to be a better mother. For it. You don't have to follow the script that most people do. You can be unique in and of it, in and of yourself, and have a unique journey of motherhood where our son actually can see his mother creating something, creating a life of like a legacy and of freedom.
Ine:And I'm so passionate about this because we're literally recording this 18 minutes after I put him in bed. He's in his nap right now and I have this policy. I don't work when he's awake, I work only when he's sleeping, because that is a version of excellence that I have for myself and I I know that I can do it now because I'm I'm constantly experiencing 10 X jumps in my business, especially in the last year, but it took the mindset of that. It is the very thing that's making me a better mother. It's not taking me away. Um, yeah, there, there was one more thought there, but I'm sure it'll come back if it's important.
Leanne:So good. I just love that. I love hearing that your role as a mother is making you better in both your role as the mom, but then also in your business. You are using your time well and you are setting up these parameters for yourself so that you are able to really be excellent in both, and I love that. You said that it's about believing that it is making you better and not worse, that it's that choosing to focus on the positive versus any negative.
Ine:I think it doesn't take any time at all to have that. No, it can be instant. And then you have to do it daily.
Leanne:Yes, yes, oh, that's so great. So I'm curious, speaking of this and you kind of touched on a little bit with working during nap time Can you share some of the rhythms that you've built into your home and business to foster that creativity?
Ine:Oh, I'd love to. This comes down to my creative process. Um, I was talking to my sister over the weekend. We had the opportunity to go for dinner just the two of us, no kids, and she was asking me you know, like, if you could summarize what you do in one sentence, like, what is the transformation you give people, what would it be? And I realized it was the creative process.
Ine:The creative process of both getting bored and doing active work, so the passive and the active parts of creating, which I've actually designed my entire day based on. So, for instance, I consider my block of 8am to noon, or like 8am to 1pm, actually when, when Francis is awake as my most creative part of the day, because I get to be, I get to get bored, I get to do dishes, fold laundry, go play outside with him, go go for walks, um, clean the house, like do all of these, these brainless tasks that I used to hate so much, I actually don't hate them anymore Now that I've become a mom, which is crazy, because the laundry is about 10 times more when you become a mom. That in and of itself let alone the dishes and the yogurt like thrown across the room is almost two. So you can just just imagine. But I've I've grown to love it because that's where my best ideas come. So one of the rhythms that I have is the CEO executor mom rhythm, and what that means is the first 15 minutes of my day I go, I'm in CEO mode. This is like 5am to 5.15am and I'm looking through the quarterly plan that I have, I'm looking through the weekly plan that I set up, the daily plan, my minute to minute plan. I'm really just going into goal mode. I'm visualizing what my biggest goals are. And then, from 5.15am to 8am, when Francis wakes up, that is my executing slash, deep work phase. That's when I trust the CEO. I trust CEO Ina, who set up the things that I need to do. I trust her and I do the work. That is when my deepest work is done.
Ine:When Francis wakes up at 8, we immediately have breakfast. He has an hour of playtime where I can then do a little bit more work. We go for walks. I actually do sales messages during my walks, like on voice memos. So it's it's blended between being a mom and also being being an entrepreneur, but it's blended in the perfect way because the clients actually they hear his little voice in the background and they realize that I'm creating on the go, I'm I'm doing the thing that they want to do. So from there on it's 1 PM. 1 to 3 PM is like my filming block. So 1 22 PM, here we go. Um, that's my filming block, once again very much in executing the work mode. And then from 3 PMm, when his bedtime is, is once again five hours of being a mom. So there's a very, very good flow that took a while to get used to and really implement in my life.
Ine:But the passive work, like the passive tasks, like where I'm being a present mother and I'm laughing with him, I'm having fun. I keep my notebook with me and I write down every idea that comes up. I capture it immediately and without judgment because I know it's coming from a place where my brain is relaxed. So my work is a break from being a mom. Being a mom is a break from my work. So I'm either constantly on relaxation mode or constantly in work mode. It's really a choice. You can choose that being a mom and a working mom is a grind 100%, 12 hours a day, 14 hour days, or 24 seven for that matter or you can see it, as you're constantly having a break from the other side. It really is up to you and because of that you can have boundless energy, like my energy is is high all day long. Well, 3 PM, I crash a little bit, but going outside for our walk, here's that, oh, I love that.
Leanne:But then you go for a walk and recharge again.
Ine:That's so good, and that's then a break.
Leanne:I really, I really do love this idea and I can totally resonate with your best ideas coming from those mundane moments. I find that also, my kids are a little bit older and often they provide me with so much content and so many ideas, just with the things they say, or even the conflict resolution that we have to engage in. It's amazing, so much more for you in store as Frances gets older too. I'm so glad as a woman of excellence, because clearly you are. You have put your entire life together in a way that really maximizes your zone of genius and everything that you're really good at. What would you say is the difference between pursuing excellence and falling into perfectionism?
Ine:Hmm, there is a definite difference and even as you were introducing the question, I was thinking to myself there's a gift and a cost to excellence. Often, um, but it's once again almost the mindset shift between the two. So perfectionism is when we think that we are striving for excellence, but it's actually a form of procrastination. Destination Perfectionism is when we don't trust ourselves enough to hit publish, to put ourselves in a vulnerable place. And as a cellist, I've been performing thousands upon thousands of hours now and I've been performing for over 20 years, and every single performance I have to say I don't feel ready. I don't feel like it's perfect. It can always be better. And there are always moments in the performance where I may be a little bit scared to publish the notes, to put the notes out there and to make them come to life. But in that moment I have to trust myself. I've like, even as I'm standing, as I'm sitting here, I'm like better posture, I'm feeling grounded because I know that my internal sense of trust comes through and how I, how I execute and deliver every note. And it's like the exact same thing with producing something of excellence in our businesses. If we have standards that we want to achieve. That is phenomenal. We need standards of excellence in order to have a 10 X, 10 X jump. Like I was reading the book, 10 X is easier than two X when I had my first 17 X jump back in November, and one of the things that he said is that you have to upgrade your standards. But if you think about upgrading your standards within each individual piece of content or each, let's say, note, like if I'm using the cello analogy again there's a point to which the quantity needs to become more. We can't just have the most beautiful one single note, having played absolutely stunningly, and then you just leave the stage. You can't have just one note, meaning you can't just have one post. You can't just have one YouTube video and then call it quits because nobody cared how many hundreds of hours you put into that one thing to make it so perfect. So then we hold onto our ideas because they seem perfect to us before we hit launch. When we hit launch, when we hit publish even though that is the definition of being a creator putting your work out there we still have a sense that it's perfect and that it's safe, and that the idea is going to stay almost sacred because nobody sees it.
Ine:Yeah, but the thing that I always ask my entrepreneurs that I work with is if you have ideas but you don't publish them, what is the point of having the ideas in the first place? You have the ideas to solve someone else's problem. You have the ideas to solve your own problem and you realize that can help someone else If you can muster up the courage. It's more about the courage than about anything else. That is when excellence can be attained, because if you keep your ideas to yourself, if you don't actually publish them, then they cannot thrive. Your ideas will die, and you are either always growing or you're dying. There's no middle ground. So if you're waiting, you're actually dying, but if you're taking action, despite being scared, that is when you're growing. Um, one of my favorite quotes by James Clear is most of the time, people don't need more information, they need more courage, and that is the differentiator between someone who truly attains excellence versus staying in perfectionism wow, that's so good courage.
Leanne:There's so many great analogies here, even just with this spring season too. We want to grow, we want to flourish and to allow those ideas to have the courage to put them out there and and to create something that we can be proud of, that our kids can celebrate. There's just so so many, so many great things in there. I love it, man.
Ine:I just had another epiphany of spring. I often talk about the principle of the harvest. Yes, and I think I you know, and I think you know where I'm going with this. If we're in a spring phase of life, we're creating, we feel the energy, we don't see the harvest yet the only way to get to the harvest six months later is to actually plant the seeds. Yes, and farmers I recently looked this up they don't plant just one seed, as we all know. They plant over. I think it was like 700 million seeds, wow, per spring. Like that is quantity. They also make sure that the quality is there. But if they only plan one perfect quality seed, they will never reap a harvest because only 40% of the those hundreds of millions of seeds actually survive.
Ine:Right, and if you're in the spring season and you're feeling this desire to create create anyways, knowing that you're not going to reap a harvest until later, because the rule of the harvest, the law of the harvest, is you always reap what you sow, but you always reap later than you sow as well. Yeah, but you always reap what you sow. You will always see some sort of result from the seeds you sow and what you create in a spring season of life. Um, but I just had to had to continue that analogy because I suddenly had the so that's so beautiful.
Leanne:I love that so so much. One other question that I have for you, as we kind of wrap it up here too, is what advice like one piece of advice would you give to a woman who is eager to create in this season and just simply needs to know what is that next step, that next right step to begin?
Ine:You know, I actually have a framework for this that I teach in my challenge. It is called the 15 minute business plan. So I'm not going to give you the 15 minute business plan right now. You're going to have to sign up for the workshop for that, um, I'll make sure Leanne has the link, but there is a part of it that I can share right now. And it is the next action model.
Ine:Um, this is from the book getting things done by David Allen phenomenal book, but don't waste your time reading it. Just take this number one thing, um, from what I'm about to tell you. And what do we need is three ingredients. First one is what is your ideal outcome for the project or this big idea that you have? What is your ideal outcome? Number two what is the worst case scenario Like? If you were to hit launch, if you were to start talking about it, if you were to start selling it, what would be the worst case scenario? And we go there so that we can part.
Ine:Part two of number two is accept that. And then step three is how can we improve upon the worst? And usually, if we can accept the worst case scenario, we gain courage. And then, finally, if we can improve upon the worst, we discover our next right action and then we bring it through a filter. That filter is if you had literally nothing to do right now, you could work on your idea. What would you do? Is that? And the answer to this is almost never. Record six different YouTube videos and hit publish on them. That's never the answer. If that is the next next step like to start creating content on youtube, maybe the next right step is brainstorm six different beliefs people need to believe before they can buy from you. That is the only next step, and then from next reveals itself. Write the youtube script and then the next step reveals itself. But always focus on the next right action and you will not fail. The next right action formula is the way to go.
Leanne:I love that. Wow, I there is so much incredible wisdom here that you have shared with us. You know I am so thankful. I know that I will be re listening to this episode and taking even more notes than I already have. Um, I'm so excited for how this is going to bless so many women who really want to step into their God-given zone of genius. If there were listeners here that really wanted to get in touch with you, how could they do that?
Ine:The place that I create most of my content, in fact, on Instagram stories is where I kind of brain dump new ideas. Um, instagram Okay stories is where I kind of brain dump new ideas. Um, instagram would be the place. And my Instagram handle is InaWilmay Um I N E dot W I L M E. And if you listen to this episode and you want to send me a voice message or a DM, you can just say uh, I found you on Leanne's podcast and I'd love to know where you come from and I would be so happy to continue chatting. And, um, yeah, dm conversations is is often where ideas thrive.
Leanne:I love that and while you're on a walk too. Yes, exactly, that's so good. I love that. Well. Thank you so much for being here and just sharing all of this wisdom with us, and and I look forward to hearing the stories of how this blesses other people. So thank you so much, ina.
Ine:Thank you, leanne, this was just an honor.