Ep45: Are You Overlooking Experiences That Could Be Your Biggest Business Advantage?

There are experiences in your life that, at the time, didn’t seem that important.

Or didn’t feel relevant.
Or felt like they served one clear purpose only.
Or even felt like they were holding you back, or like they were unhelpful.

And then later…

They become the very thing that supports you in your business (and life).

In this episode, I share a reflection on a couple of ways this has shown up in my own journey as a starting point to invite you to reflect on your own experiences which you may not be giving enough credit to.

From intentionally learning video skills to market one of my businesses, but not realising just how impactful the skills I went on to master over a few years would be in a completely unexpected circumstance…

To experiences I didn’t choose in the same way, that for a long time I questioned and thought were disadvantages and unhelpful, and have since realised have created some of my greatest strengths in what I do today supporting clients to grow their online offers.

This isn’t a strategy episode.

It’s an invitation to pause and look at your own journey differently.

Inside this episode, I share:

• How past experiences can shape your business in ways you don’t expect - in a good way.
• The difference between intentional skill-building vs unexpected life experiences.
• Why things that once (or currently) felt unhelpful can later become strengths.
• How hindsight often reveals value you couldn’t see at the time.
• Why this perspective can shift how you move forward in your business and look for the learnings in current circumstances and experiences.

If you’ve ever questioned parts of your path (past or present), have felt like certain experiences didn’t “make sense”, or are wondering how something you’re going through could ever be helpful…

This episode is for you.

🎧 Listen now to: Are You Overlooking Experiences That Could Be Your Biggest Business Advantage?

If you had a takeaway or ‘aha’ from this episode and want to share it with your business besties and community, screenshot and share it on Instagram, tagging me at @jada.businessmentor. I’d love to shout out your takeaways and your support!

💬 Let’s connect!
Instagram: @jada.businessmentor
Email: jada@riseandshinecollective.com.au

→ DM me on Instagram @jada.businessmentor or send me an email to jada@riseandshinecollective.com.au if you’re ready to explore live launching in a more aligned, ease-filled, and higher-converting way through 1:1 Aligned Launch Coaching & Consulting, or you want personalised and strategic support to create or grow an online offering (course, membership or program).

And please hit follow, leave a review, and share this episode with a business bestie if you’ve found it helpful.

Transcript

Ep45: Are You Overlooking Experiences That Could Be Your Biggest Business Advantage?

Episode 45. Welcome to the Aligned and Thriving podcast for ambitious female entrepreneurs where we align systems, strategies, and self for sustainable success. My name's Jada. I'm your host. I have been an entrepreneur for over 15 years now across multiple different businesses, and I am so passionate about supporting you to grow your online business.

So that it is aligned with the life that you want, who you are and the people that you want to serve, and helping you to make that dream a reality through digital offer growth from development through to the growth phase, through to scaling and a specialization in live events based selling into your.

Digital offers, which is IE live launching. Let's get into this week's episode.

On this episode, I want to take you through a little bit of reflection, so I'm gonna share some [00:01:00] reflections and encourage you to do a similar thing, and as I'm sharing to think about how this might affect you and how you can reflect on. Some of the things that have happened to you or that you have done or experienced or learned, through your life, maybe through business, through jobs, through just life and living through family that have impacted you in a way that is now really helpful.

For me, commonly in my morning routine, I do some journaling and I write down things that I am grateful for, and these days very regularly. A line is featured, which is, I'm so grateful for all of the experiences that have shaped who I am, what I know how I function, because I can now see that so many pieces of my life that I either found potentially challenging at the time or maybe I saw as,

[00:02:00] being weaknesses or, , challenges in the way that I'm, or that I, , grew up or kind of disadvantages if you like, or things that I thought in the past were unhelpful traits. I can now see. Just how much they have impacted who I am and how I function and how I'm able to support people in what I do today as well as circumstances, experiences, choices.

Experiences that were choices or just felt like they weren't choices at the time, and how much I'm now grateful for so many of those things and how I can now see how helpful they are in the whole kind of web or ecosystem of my knowledge, my experience. To be the person I am today and to be able to share my expertise and knowledge and those experiences with others to help them to, I guess, collapse time, move through those things, or also be able to.

[00:03:00] See that in others or be able to have that empathy of what other people are going through as well. So I thought I would share some significant ones with you to help us to get to know each other some more, but also to encourage you to think about some of the things that you may have in the past seen as negative or difficult or unhelpful.

, And. How you might be able to look back now and see how they're actually supporting you to be, do and have what you are who you are today. So I thought that I would rewind the clock quite a bit in my story and take you back to when I was just around eight years old when. My mom announced to me that she had pulled me out of school.

Now, I didn't like school at the time. We had changed schools initially. I loved school. , And then my parents split up and we moved, , to Queensland, my mom and the three of us kids. And I started going to a new school and I had some uncomfortable, , experiences with the [00:04:00] teachers and. I was struggling at school.

I didn't like it. I didn't like going anyway, that's not what this is about. My mom pulled me out of school and I ended up being homeschooled or more so really unschooled for the remainder of, I guess my schooling years. And in fact, I stopped doing schooling quite early and moved into working quite early, but that's kind of skipping a whole chunk of time.

Anyway, what that meant is that. For many years, I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time thinking, and I always felt at the time, not super aware at the time, but I felt lonely sometimes, and I. Always was very observant of the world around me and would spend a lot of time processing what I saw, what I heard, what I thought about things, and later on, for a long time I felt like that was.

Not super helpful to me, it felt like it was a bit of a block in being more extroverted. I [00:05:00] tended to, in social situations, as I got older, into my teens and young adulthood, I would tend to kind of be that wallflower. I would be that person who was observing the whole room, didn't feel super comfortable to just go up to people and have a chat.

And I would often analyze, you know, conversations or situations. And when I would walk into a room and still today I can kind of feel the energy or the, the vibe of the room and I pick up on other people's feelings and things like that. , And so very sensitive in that way. And for a long time into my adulthood, I felt like that was Detrimental. Detrimental to who I wanted to be detrimental to, I guess, how I wanted to be perceived, maybe. But more than that, really it was more detrimental to, , I guess the kind of person that I wanted to be and the kinds of things that I wanted to do. And I wished that it felt more comfortable to just walk up to people and chat to people and have conversations with people like I could see other people doing.

But in retrospect, as [00:06:00] I look at that. One of my superpowers is just how observant I am and just how much of a deep thinker I am so that I will often read into and see so much more depth and so many more layers than necessarily other people are taking in, and I will be able to analyze and break down complex things.

And understand them and help other people to understand them. So I can now see that that tendency or that way of being is in fact a superpower. And while I have over my adult years a. Practiced being more, I guess, extroverted if you like, or more comfortable with, you know, walking into a room and saying hi and speaking to people.

And I continue to practice to become more comfortable with that because I want to meet new people and I want to be more comfortable with that on purpose. Not because I think you have to be, but because I know that it opens opportunities and [00:07:00] I do like getting to know people. And so I practice that to become more comfortable.

And I'm certainly a lot more comfortable now. In fact, some people, , who would know me. Would be surprised to know that I find that challenging and certainly in circumstances where I feel comfortable. , And certainly in smaller groups you wouldn't notice that about me, and in fact, you probably wouldn't notice it at a big, huge event with thousands of people because I have taught myself, how to feel comfortable and confident in those situations and be able to move through those situations as myself, but also as that version of myself who is.

Able to do that now. That's one of the examples that I wanted to share. Maybe you can relate, maybe it's kind of sparked a thought for you where you're thinking, oh yeah, that thing that I used to think, or even that you maybe currently think is an unhelpful trait or an unhelpful way of being, or a period of your life that you feel like was a bit lost or wasn't doing anything for you.

Maybe it'll help you to reframe that and look at actually what you were able to get out of [00:08:00] that. And in fact, it might even be one of your superpowers, just like mine. Another one that I wanted to share that often comes up for me and was so incredibly impactful was 

In thousand 17, I was the CEO and marketing manager of our Latin dance studio, which I still own with my husband, and I knew that we needed to get better at our video marketing. And I knew at the time that it wasn't really feasible for us to bring in a professional videographer regularly enough, an editor, to be able to create the volume of video content that we needed to be sharing in on social media, organic promotions, and also through our Facebook ads at the time, meta ads that we really needed to be using for our dance studio because it was such a visual.

Forum, right? It's dancing. So we really needed to be getting into video much more. And so I was looking around and I decided to take on getting mentorship and learning [00:09:00] about video marketing. So from the filming to the editing to how I could use that in different ways with a vision to be able to take out dance studio online from being just bricks and mortar, , and be able to.

Create the quantity and the quality of video that we really needed for our business. So I took on learning that with some mentors. And went deep. I learned about the all of those pieces. So from the filming all the way to the editing, to the post-production, to how to actually use that, how to script different ways that I could be utilizing video that I hadn't really thought about before, and I've proceeded to do that.

 And keep on learning for a number of years. Now. At the time, I knew exactly what I was needed it for, exactly what I was using it for. So I thought, and I did take it through to being able to do much more regular organic video utilizing videos through our Facebook ads and growing the business in that way.

I also was able to start using it to [00:10:00] nurture and support Our students through video follow up from their classes, and I was able to learn about building funnels and

How to utilize videos to attract new people in, and then lead them towards joining our classes and how to set up our very first online course all the way from the planning to the filming. To the setting up of the new platform online and all of those different pieces. It was such a huge learning journey.

And at the time, this is probably a little bit of a different example, I absolutely was utilizing it straight away. It had a purpose straight away and I knew what it was for. But fast forward to 2020 in March, you might wanna think back and remember what was happening then, and. Myself and my whole family had just arrived in Brazil.

We'd arrived in Brazil to see my husband's family, he's from Brazil, and to celebrate my husband's mom's hundredth birthday, which was really amazing. And [00:11:00] we had been there, thankfully. We had had the celebration on the first weekend we arrived and we had been in Brazil for about six or seven days. When my team from Australia was reaching out frantically, saying we needed to come home, things were rapidly changing, the pandemic was spreading.

It wasn't just over in Asia anymore. Things were gonna likely close down and we needed to get on the soonest flight back to Australia. You remember the time. So at first we're like, really couldn't, maybe we'll just extend our stay by a few weeks. Oh, I'm glad we didn't do that. , That's a story for another day.

We did end up on the very last flight back from South America to Australia. Thankfully. Otherwise we would've been there for a couple of years anyway, so we couldn't get on a flight straight away. The first flight we could get on from memory was around 10 days later. Maybe even almost two weeks now, interestingly, Brazil or the state we were in in Brazil locked down before Australia did.

So anyway, we went to one of my husband's [00:12:00] brother's houses where it was just our family there and we were pretty much already in, , isolation there. And in the meantime, the Queensland government announced that all of The services, the shops, all that kind of thing would be closing down. Literally like on the Friday, they would be closing down on the Monday.

So meanwhile, we're in Brazil, our whole team is back in Australia, and we've gotta make a plan. We've gotta figure out what are we going to do? How are we going to keep things going? How are we gonna keep our business functioning without being able to run our glasses in studio anymore? So all of a sudden it felt like, oh wow.

Full body, like, oh, I've just spent the last two and a half years learning all about video creation, production, and utilization, and now. I feel like even though I'd already been using it for the business is what all of this has been leading to, and I am so grateful that I have spent all of this time so that I was able to, via Zoom, teach my whole [00:13:00] team how to use the microphones, where to set up the lights, how to set up the camera.

What angles to use, how to get the sound so that we could have two instructors teaching, how we needed to process that, how we were gonna organize the files, who was going to be editing those files, what we were going to do to quickly create an online platform so that we could create. Not just like the majority of of other dance teachers, just kind of move into a Facebook group and deliver things.

A Facebook live, , on, in a Facebook group. No, we were able to move our whole business, or the majority of it anyway, onto a platform because I already knew how. I'd already done it before, and I was able to guide my team on how to do that. I was able to give them a plan, keep them calm, teach them the skills that they needed, and I was able to be that person who was editing all these different lessons to get them all up so that we were able to create a library, not just something that would be lost, but [00:14:00] something that would be able to be used ongoing as well.

And so it was in that moment where I was like, wow. How fortunate that I chose to take on learning about video creation, production, and marketing over the last few years because it set us apart and it meant that from all the way across the other side of the world, I was able to support our team to create something quite remarkable in a very short amount of time.

So that's. Another example of the kind of thing where you just don't know what you're currently doing, , or how what you're currently doing or what's happened in the past or each experience that you have, or each thing that you learn or experience that you have is going to impact and support you later on in life.

I mean, I've got many, many other examples. I just wanted to give a couple to really get you thinking about what in your life. Have you maybe been seen [00:15:00] as negative or unhelpful or had a lens where you thought it was unimportant, but when you actually think about it, it has helped you to become the person that you are, and it has helped you to have the knowledge that you have.

It has helped you to be able to connect with or understand certain types of people, and you're able to really pull in on all those experiences or to have a think about where else could you be leaning into experience that you have from your life to help you right now. And I'd really love to hear from you, as I've shared, is there something that has come to mind where you're like, oh my gosh, like it never really occurred to me just how much X experience or choice or period of life has actually had such a.

Big impact and in hindsight, positive impact or being so helpful now that I stop and think about it or something that you are so grateful for that maybe at the time you weren't [00:16:00] sure why you were doing it or it didn't really feel good or it didn't really feel comfortable. I have had so many in business, I couldn't even count them.

And so many instances where at the time it was so uncomfortable and hard. But it's often those moments and those experiences and those learnings that set us up to have the resilience, the knowledge, the empathy, the knowhow, the experience. All of those things that we can then lean into and use. Or maybe you are in one of those times right now, like you're in something where you're like, I don't know the purpose of this.

Like maybe you're in a job or you're going through a season that is hard or uncomfortable, or it's not really what you like doing, and you are wondering How is this ever going to be helpful to me? Or why is this happening to me? Or I can't see, any kind of positive out of this particular situation.

And of course there are certainly situations in life where there just is not really any positive out of them. , [00:17:00] I mean, we always learn and we grow. So there is that positive. But maybe you are in something now and you're kinda like wondering. If it's ever going to be helpful to you or maybe you can't see how that experience could ever support you in the future.

Oftentimes it's like a job that we're in or something like that, and I want you to just know that you never know what an experience or a season is going to support you with in the future. Maybe you can start to see it now. Maybe you can't see it now, but in the future you'll be able to look back and know what you took out of that.

So hopefully this has just generated a bit of reflection for you. Hopefully it has given you a little insight into me, some of my story. Hopefully you can start to see some of your experiences in a new and different light. I would so love to hear from you over on Instagram in the dms and for you to share if this has.

, Kind of brought something to light for you or helped you to shift lenses or see something differently, or just have a [00:18:00] bit of a chat around all of this that I'm sharing. And most importantly, what I would encourage you to do is to be grateful for your past because your past. Has helped you to become the person that you are today and to be grateful for experiences that we're having and purposeful about them so that we can take that into our future as well.

So an encouragement on some journaling around that, or maybe adding it into your daily gratitude like I do. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope this episode has been helpful. 

As always, if you have enjoyed it, please leave me a five star review. Leave me a comment and share it with another business bestie who you think that this episode could also help. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll see you next time on another episode.