Celebrating Accomplishments

With the 4th of July I had thoughts of celebrating. I realized I have a struggle with celebrating myself and my accomplishments. Setting goals and the rewards for achieving them is a new thing for me, and I suck at it. I hit a goal in January, I am just now planning my celebration trip for it. 

Sitting back and looking at what has been accomplished in my life without any fanfare. I need to learn to reward myself for my hard work, dedication, and sometimes sacrifice for a job well done. 

 Learning new things and becoming the person you need to be, is a job in itself. It is needed to hit a new goal, take on a new step in your career. You can't achieve new steps with the knowledge you have to get where you are now. You must go deeper and increase your information to be ready for that next step. Lets dive into How to get there.

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Send an email with questions to skahrhoff@live.com.

Transcript

Shannon Kahrhoff: 0:02

Hello, welcome to Decoding Clients for Stylists. I'm Shannon Kahrhoff. Today I wanna go over some celebrations. You think about your life, how many things you've accomplished. I will be honest. I have to sit and think about things that are accomplishments and how I handle'em. One of my educational outlets that I do was for this podcast. And in there it talks about celebrating everything, celebrating your failures, celebrating your accomplishments, and we wrote down at the beginning, what are we gonna do to reward ourselves for accomplishing this step or that step? And I'll be honest, I fail at rewarding myself for achieving things. To me, I'm the mentality that I know I'm going to get it accomplished. It's just a done deal. It's just a matter of when it's gonna be done. So the idea rewarding myself never really occurred to me much until this class. So I had to go through my paperwork from the beginning of the class in October and remind myself what I was going to celebrate with when I achieved this goal. Well, guess what? It was a trip to Arkansas to go dig for crystals. I love going to Arkansas. I love it. I love the red clay. I love the hills, the trees, just the energy in Arkansas, it feels like home. And one day I will live in Arkansas and I'll be very happy, but. I never let myself go to Arkansas. There were so many other things I needed to achieve, and I didn't feel like it was the right time to go to Arkansas and enjoy my time. Digging in the dirt, sitting up on top of the mountain or the hill of Arkansas and looking over the landscape of it, the smelling of the fresh air of trees and pine and raw dirt. It's just, it's my heaven. So after finding that paper of where I wrote down my goal and my reward, I realized what am I holding myself back for? I absolutely love going there. I have steady income. I can afford to go travel and do whatever I want in whatever manner I want right now. And. It is just taking that time away from work and letting myself enjoy my time. So I was thinking and processing and well, I decided I also was gonna sign up into another class of training and lo and behold, this company is in Arkansas and it's about an hour away from where I want to be up on a hill without any cell service. And. I want to just enjoy my time in peace and quiet and clear thinking. The phone can't ring and distract me. It is my ultimate reward. I don't have to be on call all the time ready to respond to anyone or anything. The next class was in June or September. June. I couldn't do, there's just too much on my books already, but September it's happening. So I have two days I'll be spending in class, in person, stretching my brain, probably freaking myself out with goals and accomplishments and stretching my thinking and my belief to achieve my next goal in my career and honestly in my own life. And then the rest of the week I'm going to drive an hour away and hopefully stay in my little one room cabin with a stream behind it and birds flying and chirping and enjoying my time. So it might've taken nine months for me to actually reward myself with my accomplishment that I promised myself, but it'll be well worth it. I'll be in a better mind space than I was at the beginning. Because I have achieved, I've proven to myself that I can be consistent, that I am finding more of my voice with this and achieving it. Last week, I started my second season in the podcast because I felt like it was time for a little bit of a pivot. Yes, I love my personality code. To me, that's still my core foundation of how I approach people, especially in my career, but also one-on-one in public. I can look at them and I know a little bit more of how to talk to them, to approach'em, to offer my time and, and accept them for who they are. Just in the realm that I understand personalities. So I feel like it is getting closer for me to take that time away to. Let myself rest and reposition my thinking and my strategy and to me, this is fantastic. I know I just babbled on for so many minutes about what I am gifting myself in my time, but. I'm trying to learn how to reward myself and understand how to take a step back from the hustle of my life, from going from one thing to the other to the other, and remember to take that pause and remind myself how far I've come and how far I want to go yet. If that means that I have to put it off just for a little bit, for me to actually feel at peace with my decision and understand it, to me, this is great because for many years I haven't gifted myself anything for putting all this effort and time and energy into so many other things and not so much myself. So today I wanna go over some of the accomplishments that I feel like I have achieved in this life. I have 29 years as a hairstylist, and who would've thought that I'd be 29 years in? Still love doing hair, still love having that one-on-one time with my clients and being a part of their everyday life. Now it is going to pivot along the way as I get older, and I am trying to break my clients into it a little bit more, but it's hard'cause I can't a hundred percent say where I'm going to be, what I'm gonna be doing and how it's gonna happen. Because to me that's not important. I know it's gonna happen. I know I'm making the choices now and the pivots along the way to go to the area that I want. That I will be, because I've grown, learned, and I'm taking classes to better myself and to stretch my belief and my mindset, and I think that's huge because if you don't change and grow and learn to become better, to go towards something more that you want outta your life. What are you gonna do? Your same thinking can't take you to a whole different level unless you're really ready to invest in stretching your, your time and your mind, and not letting other people deter you from everything. If you don't believe in yourself, I can guarantee most other people don't. Because when you take a big leap in a different direction, a lot of people are automatically gonna be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're a lemming. You're supposed to follow us off this ledge over here that they said is the promised land. And if you don't follow us, you're making us look bad. So what the heck are you thinking? You are strange. You are different. You are off the wall. Crazy. Who has ever been called crazy before because she chose to go against the grain? Well, that's me because I have always, I like to follow rules until I think the rules are stupid, and then I like to create my own path. So I've started off in this career and I have done crazy stupid things at times, and when it's not the right space for me to work in anymore, and I've tried growing and changing and they are in the same spot, my thinking isn't aligned the same way I leave. I go find the next opportunity, the next thing, because yes, it's scary. Yes, it's different. Yes, it costs money to change from one place to another. But sometimes the pain of staying the same is worse than the pain of change. And if you are too scared of what could happen by taking that leap off a different direction, you're always gonna stay put in the same spot. It's painful because you already know what's gonna happen. You already have been living this life for so long. Why don't you give your permission to try something new? But this is me. You know, I'm the crazy one. So being different has its ups and its downs, but you have to believe in yourself and understand wholeheartedly that what you're trying to accomplish is achievable. In 98, all of a sudden I got a wild hair and decided that I wanted to go do massage therapy. I loved cutting hair, but I felt like there was more in my life that I needed to do. I do not do massage therapy anymore. It really was not my thing. It was the experience of moving away and learning what I did through that time in Arkansas and the people I met and the knowledge I got from my time in massage therapy school. That I believe was the biggest change. I felt like I could finally get away from the shadow of what everyone expected me to be and who I was in the past, and I could actually figure out who I am personally. I think this is why it's fantastic for young kids to go away to college because you're away from your parents' expectations. You're away from your friends' expectations and influence, and you're allowed to go test out the waters of who you wanna be. And it's miraculous because you don't know what you don't know out there. And if you are too scared to change, I'm, I'm sorry, it's kind of a sad life because you're too scared of failing and it was hard out there. I didn't know anyone moving to Fayetteville, and it was the best thing ever. I met some amazing people that I was in massage therapy school with. I met some nice people at the salon that I worked at when I was there, and I got to understand the joy of working in the mall in the Christmas season. The good, the bad, the ugly, but because I chose something different, it was amazing. So I did that in 98, 99. I came back to Illinois. I did hair and I did massage therapy and it was an adjustment to my life. But along the path, something else different. Became a single mom. It was totally a surprise. Was not expecting, it, did not have, that person there to do the long haul with me. But it was to me a gift from God. And it was something that I knew I had to do and to achieve. And it was the biggest lesson I ever learned in my life. But it was the most magical thing, scarier than I'll get out, but amazing. So I became a single mom and later down the road when she was around five years old, that's the time I took the big leap and started trying to homeschool her because with my job schedule, you can't be an active mom. You are either. Working during the day, which was not the hours that were strong for me in the salon life and. You had to have a support of someone to be there in the evening to pick'em up from school, to make'em dinner, to do homework with, to get him to bed. I didn't have that. That was not my life. So my choice was either jump out of this career that I absolutely love. I love making people beautiful. I love creating new looks and different things. And. That was my whole thing. So my choice was send my daughter to school and go change my career. Go find a job behind the desk that paid me hourly, gave me insurance, and gave me retirement, and whatever else. The perks of being an employee is. And hate it because I can't sit behind a desk. I have a hard time sitting down now doing this podcast because this is not my strength. It's the sitting, still working on a computer is rough. In fact, I was just thinking, I'm gonna get myself a chair so I can do this. Sitting in a chair, comfy, but I could not see myself sitting at a desk for the rest of my life doing paperwork and monotonous details. That is not who I am. So I took the hurdle and did homeschooling. I changed my hours. I went in later, found a babysitter for Grace that could actually happen in the afternoon. My mom was willing to pick her up and feed her supper and do the things in the evening until I got home. So. Grace didn't have homework. She didn't have those responsibilities at night. I did that in the mornings and when Grace was older, she was able to do her own assignments after I was at work. It was easier for her to figure out her own time schedule, what worked better for her thinking and her, her own personal strengths. So I battled on, I was a single mom who owned my own business. I'm a self-employed hairstylist. That's a struggle there too, at times. And then I was a homeschool mom. So you tell people you are a single mom and you homeschool your child and they look at you like, oh, you must get some great money from the father. Hmm. Yeah. You can believe that. Sure. Go ahead. I. I found my own path by leaving salons that I had to leave because it wasn't good for me. Some of it was dead ends. Some of it was limiting thinking. Some of it was just toxic. And until you have your own business and realize how hard it is for moving one salon to another, to try and hope that all of your clientele love you enough to follow you to the next place. It was all in one town. It wasn't like it was even 10 miles away from each other, but it's still changing locations and hoping that you have the context for those clients to follow you. This is a huge hurdle, so. I've done that multiple times, so I'm a pro at it now, but I'm hoping I'm at this spot until I'm done doing hair. But that is jumping off a ledge, hoping for the best because I did take a leap from a hard salon to a nightmare salon to heaven on earth. And I wouldn't have taken the first step to go to a different salon. I would not have made it to the next salon where I understood good business and good owners of a salon and understanding their mentality and how they got to where they are now, I would've missed all of that because I would've just stayed in the same place expecting the same bad pay and the same small town mentality. That was not what I wanted. It was not something I thrived on. So these are some of the things I should have been celebrating because I did the hurdles, I did the jumping, but it was survival to me. It's something that I felt deep in my soul that I needed to do and to create, and I had to find the strength to keep doing it. But I did learn along the way because I learned so many different things by joining a leadership development business. That was not something I ever thought I would join. Because it was definitely not the same thing it was when I first joined, but it taught me so many beliefs and confidence and leadership skills and confidence builders. It. It. It is amazing. I hear these quotes coming out of my mouth sometimes. I'm like, oh yeah, I can hear that person saying that up on stage. And it's in my vocabulary now because this is something that I was told through this, these years of being a part of it. Do you realize how many people laughed in my face'cause they thought I was an idiot for joining it because I didn't make much money off of it. I still see that person's face laughing at me and looking at me in a bar. We were sitting in a bar and the one time I go out with so-called friends and this girl looks at me across the town. She's like, so how's your business? I am like, it's good. Doing pretty good. I'm, I'm happy. I'm learning lots of stuff. She was like, really? How much money have you made? And I'm like, Hmm, not much. But I can tell you a lot of stuff that I've learned, I've learned, I've grown, I've achieved, it's pretty amazing because through all of that knowledge, it made me something much better than I ever could have achieved ever on my own, because I became a better mother, daughter, family member, a better hairstylist all the way around because I started learning how to talk to people, how to relate to them, how to become a quiet leader around people because it's an unspoken thing that so many people need. Do you realize how many people, how many people's lives I've changed by being a, an active listener, letting them express themselves and asking them the questions that I know where these questions can lead them if they let themselves go down that path. But I would've not known any of that stuff. I would've been the idiot straight with only knowledge from cosmetology school on how to talk to people on how to understand. Okay. Without them talking to me directly about what expectations they want without understanding how to carry myself and how to know so many things about myself that only came from those books, from those CDs, from those speeches up on stage, because that's not normal information you get from being a hairstylist, from staying in a small town. I was able to learn so much from so many different leaders that were growing and changing and challenging themselves. I learned from people that had challenges in their life and how they overcame it, how they became confident enough to become a millionaire to help so many different people in the same kind of struggles and more, they learned how to rise themselves in the world, how to invest in things, how to invest in themselves, and how to become a better leader so that they could grow and change and lead even more people. But by knowing that. Most people didn't see the change that it was happening to me because I was quiet. Because whenever you're changing who you are and you're doing a different path, I was not confident enough to scream it off the roof, because no one understood what the heck I was doing. No one understood by me sitting down and reading this book either in between a break from clients, from the hour I get at home, after I get my daughter to sleep, before I go to sleep myself. I had that time to invest in my mind, in my thinking, in my belief systems, and learning how to implement it into my life I never understood how to put it into my career that happened on its own. This whole. Decoding clients. This all happened. It evolved because what I was learning and implementing into my own life slowly evolved into this knowledge. It wasn't overnight. I slowly read it and put it into use, and all of a sudden, honestly, it was a long time later when I was doing this. A six figure stylist and millionaire era class that I really understood exactly what I had in my head. Whenever you're just putting it into use, you don't realize how much you actually know until you have to list out different things and break it down. My thinking it was, honestly, it was kind of shocking to me that I actually knew something that could help other people because. I don't celebrate myself. I don't sit and understand how far I've come. It is my path. It is my journey, and it is one of those things that I, I still don't know how I got here sometimes because there's so many times I fell to my knees praying for help, praying for change. And to be the person I needed to be, to be able to recover from these things in my life, to guide me to the path that I need to take, and it happened. I am now looking back at where I am, thinking about all the prayers, all of the goals, all of the financial settings that I have wanted in my life, and I'm getting there. I need to celebrate myself because when I sat in a class in 2022 and they asked you to write down what is your financial goal? What is your dream income? I wrote it down. Okay thinking, literally thinking, huh, this would be fantastic. Oh my God, if only I achieved this many zeros in my income, that would be phenomenal. Well, guess what? I broke down crying a a few weeks ago because I was going through my education that I'm doing and I had to write down my income and so I figured it out and estimated out if I keep this going, I will achieve that income this year. Now I can't sit back on my my butt and wait for it to happen. I still have to grow and build and become, and I still have to have that work ethic. That all has to be implemented in, and I have to stay active and in there. But to know that I'm this close to achieving this financial goal from three years ago, and I thought it was so unattainable. But you know, gradual steps along the way, reminding myself that I am worth more. It is okay. I am wonderful with hair. Am I perfect? Heck no. I don't know anyone. That's perfect. But I know that I am worth what I'm charging, and I know that my clients love me, and I had a client in my chair asking, or she's already stressing over what's gonna happen one day when I don't do hair. She's already stressing out over that and I can't tell'em not to worry because I don't know. What I'm gonna do. My body doesn't hold out forever. This is a very, very hard career on your body. I'm doing pretty good right now, but I don't want to have to quit. If I blow up my shoulder or my back goes out, or my knees, who knows? I don't want that in my life. I want to be able to enjoy life a hundred percent, even when I'm retired, when I am moved on to something else. So. Celebrating myself celebrating this financial goal that I honestly thought was impossible. That is almost possible, almost attainable, and with the future ahead of me with what I have in front of me offered in this company. And all I have to do is implement it to create the habits that I need to be able to implement what is laid out in front of me. They're giving me the freaking blueprints. All I have to do is follow it, believe in myself and achieve it. What business does that? They want everyone to win, and it's there. It is so attainable. I see all the time. The stylist that I went to classes with. That are blowing the minds of people around them and themselves, because apparently that class that I sat in there with them was their last chance before they gave it all away. Their dreams were gone. They were limping to the finish line of that class, and they are blowing everyone away by their accomplishments. Why? Because they followed the blueprints of this company. They are laying it out for us. It's fantastic. And if you find yourself stuck in your life, you're looking for anything to find accomplishments, peace, happiness, acceptance, maybe you're not in the right place. Maybe it's time for you to look deep and figure out what direction you really need to go. No one's trapped in this world. We're in America for crying out loud. You can create your own business. You can take another job. You're not trapped anywhere, but you do have to make some changes in your life. You cannot go to the next stage of your life with the same thinking. So find something that interests you. Find something that you want to invest your time and energy into Learning more, becoming more. Understanding the possibilities you literally have at your fingertips. We have so many podcasts that are amazing on, on all phones, on all computers. I mean, it's just crazy stupid how much information we have that we can learn from only if you're hungry enough to learn it. If you are hungry enough for change, you can become anything We have. So much ahead of us, but find a direction. You wanna go find a mentor that mastered something in that field that can teach you. Find someone that has that mindset to guide you, to learn from. You have so many people that you can look up to, that you can understand the passion they have for bettering themselves and to give you a hand up and not a handout because if you want to learn more, become more, all you need is someone to give you time to spend time helping you answer your questions, give you some hope. But you have to be the one who does the work. You have to change your thinking. You have to change your habits. You have to know more, learn more, become more, and that's what I did through my whole life. I've constantly been learning in the cosmetology field. I learned more with becoming better, changing my internal voice and building up my subconscious to understanding that I am more, that I have the knowledge, I have the power to create the life that I want for myself. Being able to help others with that mindset along the way is pretty incredible. I'm definitely not where I wanna be yet, but I can honestly look at my life now and celebrate the things that created me with who I am. And for those people that poo poo on your thinking, your difference, your change, use it as your leverage on why you're pushing yourself to become more. Because those people that are giving you trouble for the differences that you are doing in your own life, they're the ones that are struggling because they don't know what the heck you're doing that's so different. That makes you happy. Why the heck are you happy with your life when I'm not happy with my life? So the next time someone gives you crap for being different, look at them and say, oh, you poor thing. You're miserable in your life. You think you're trapped in this life. And if you don't change your thinking, you are. Don't spread your miserable to someone else. Motivate yourself. Think big, think hard, and figure out what direction you wanna go in your life. If you love where you're working, great. Learn more. Learn how to read leadership books. Management books, eh, sure. Learn good habits. Every time that you read a book, you're one step ahead of someone else. The next time you read a book and you implement something from that book, you have just jumped ahead 10 steps. Because there's a difference between reading it and implementing it. If you don't implement anything from it, you just took information in, but it's gonna be gone in the next day. When you pick up the next book or you watch the next movie or something, will it really stick? Who knows? So go celebrate the 4th of July. Have a wonderful time. Enjoy the love of our country, and move on to the best. Could go pick up a book, a leadership book Go pick up anything that's encouraging that can build your mindset. Take baby steps if you need to, but grow and learn and become Have a great week. See you later.