Saturday and sunday mornings I would get up at 5:00 AM with everybody else in the world was sleeping. I would put in three, four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There were times that it was like healing myself out of bed, but I knew that if I say disciplined that somehow some way it was going to come together for me.
Doug Smith:This is the l three leadership podcast, episode number 217. What's up everyone, and welcome to another episode of the l three leadership podcast. My name is Doug Smith and I am your host and today's episode you'll hear a talk given by top beachbody coach, Melanie Mitro and a recent event that we hosted and you're going to love the talk, but before we get into that, I want to let me know about something that I'm extremely excited about. We're going to be hosting our first annual[inaudible] one day leadership conference on Friday, March Fifteenth, 2019 at the Marriott in cranberry township, right outside of the city of Pittsburgh. So far we've already got Matt Keller lined up to speak Lara Ellsworth and seleme brill and we are so excited to have them and we're going to be locking in a few more speakers and we plan on launching our website with all the details and registration on November first and so stay tuned for that. But for now I just wanted to let you know mark that date on save it Friday, March 15, 2019. Plan on attending. Plan on bringing your team. It's going to be a phenomenal one day leadership event and this is something that we plan to do on an annual basis. So I am so excited. So again, stay tuned. So as I mentioned in today's episode, you'll hear a talk given by top beachbody coach, Melanie Mitro at a recent event that we hosted. If you're unfamiliar with Melanie, I encourage you to follow her. She's an incredible leader. You'll hear her share her story in the talk so I don't want to overdo an introduction, but she was a stay at home mom and became a beach body coach because she got great results by doing insanity. And within three years of becoming a coach, she became the top coach in the organization and that's out of over 300,000 coaches, which is pretty impressive. And not only did she become the top coach, but she's also kept that title four years in a row. So four years is the number one coach and the beach body organization. Just incredible. And what I love about Melania, she's always extremely practical and gives you things that you can take home and implement immediately. And you'll hear that in the talk today. So before we dive into our talk, just a few announcements. I want to thank our sponsor, henny jewelers that are jeweler, owned by my friend and mentor, John Henne, my wife Laura and I got our engagement and wedding rings through Henny Jewelers. And we just think they're an incredible company. Not only do they have great jewelry, but they also invest in people. They give every engaged couple of books to help them prepare for marriage. And we just love that. So if you're in need of a good jeweler, checkout henny[inaudible] dot com. I also want to thank our sponsor, Alex, to landon. Alex is a full time realtor with Keller Williams realty, and if you were looking to buy or sell a house in the Pittsburgh market, Alex is your guy. He's a member and a supporter of l, three leadership and he would love to have an opportunity to connect with you. You can learn more about Alex and Pittsburgh property showcase.com. With that being said, let's dive right into the talk and I'll be back at the end with a few announcements.
Melanie Mitro:My name is Melanie Mitro and I have been working with each body for seven years and over the past seven years I've learned so much about myself that I didn't even know existed. So let me kind of paint the picture before I dive in today. So I am going to talk a little bit about the guiding principles that actually helped me uncover my success and my talents. That sort of the hidden talents that I didn't know that I had. So if I move to the first slide, I am a mom. I have two little boys. I have two kids. They are spot are seven and nine. Landon and Bryce and I have a husband Max. We live about 25 minutes north in Pennsylvania and I about, let's see, seven years ago, May 2nd of 2011. Um, I was really struggling. I have an Undergrad degree in special education. Um, I have, um, I have a master's degree in special Ed. I have an Undergrad in psychology. I was the director of early intervention for Butler county, so I ran all of their birth to three developmental services, their budget. I was on the board for um, early intervention. I would go to Harrisburg and I would do a lot for, for our kids in this area. Loved what I did. But when Matt and I talked about having a family, the one request that I had was that my end goal was to be a stay at home mom. I was going to go to school. I was going to get a degree just in case I ever needed to be able to support myself. I would have that education to back it up, but we talked about it. We planned for it. We saved for it. That was my ultimate goal and whenever we had um, bright landon who is our oldest, I went part time and then when we had bryce, I quit altogether and so we went from having the, these two incomes to a single family income and I was living the dream right essentially is what I thought. But in reality that's where the struggle came in. I wasn't happy with the person that I saw when I looked in the mirror, even though I had two beautiful babies and I was very thankful that I was able to have children. I just was really struggling in the confidence area. I also was struggling with this picture of what I painted as what a stay at home mom she'd be. I envisioned my life going to the park and going for play dates and going out for coffee and random target runs and all of that had to stop because honestly, once we paid all our bills and all the other expenses, we had about$100 leftover on our bank account every single month. So if something broke, that was it. Right. That was our date night, that was our fun money, so I felt very, very constricted and, and that was just another source of frustration because I couldn't just go and enjoy life and so I was scrolling through facebook and I was just randomly made a facebook post, which I was the kind of girl that never posted on facebook other than pictures of my kids and our dog and I would go and see what everybody from college and high school was up to. But other than that, it was not a social media person at all. I didn't have an instagram account. Um, I couldn't even tell you probably you know, how to start a youtube or a blog if, if my life depended on it at that point. But it made this post and I talked about eating celery and wanting to lose weight. And a girl that I knew, our husbands actually went to high school together, reached out to me and I went to her facebook page. She had invited me to join this challenge group. And so I did probably what any of you would do before you would ever answer a message, you do your research. And so I went to her page, I started scrolling. She was a mom, she had two kids. Her body sort of looked like mine. She was happy, she looked confident. She had all of these things that I was screaming for inside. And so I just said, tell me what to do, sign me up. And that started the process. So I came into my first experience with beach body was on the customer end. I started using their products, um, and I got into these accountability groups and fell in love with it and I just found myself naturally telling anybody that would listen how to read nutrition labels and how to make exercise a part of what you're doing. And I just found myself naturally drawn to it. My coach, my sponsor invited me seven times to join the business opportunity before I said yes. So in July of 2011, after numerous conversations with my husband who said, no, you're not signing up for that. It's a pyramid scheme. It's a rip off. It's a scam if you want to go and get a job, let's put the kids in daycare and you can get a real job. And so my husband worked for Heinz. He was an external manufacturing and so he had a very much of that business mindset and this was abstract. This was social media, this was online. It just didn't kind of jive what his background was and he didn't honestly understand and care to understand at that point if I can be completely honest with you. So I took the money that my family gave me for my birthday, signed up and invested in the company and started my own business so that can get overwhelming, but I am in my mind. My goal was to prove him wrong, but in reality I knew that what I, what I was doing worked. I knew that it worked for me. I had this very deep belief in the company and their products and their services and I just had this vision of what I could do and I started to dream up all of these ways that I could connect with other women. Like myself that were struggling and so I started a blog. I started a youtube channel. I opened an account at every waking moment of every single day that I had free. I researched, I stayed up late. I got up at 5:00 AM. I stayed up after the kids went to bed and I built my entire business from zero to over 80,000 followers on instagram. Over$60,000 on facebook. I have a podcast that I've started and I've done it all literally from my kitchen table and so what I'm going to walk you through is over the past seven years, just some of the things, some of the principles that sort of guide me and have helped to develop these skills that I never knew existed because this was not my background, but I had a deep passion and I was willing to make it work. So the first thing is this. My number one thing is you have to let your passion guide you because if you don't believe in what you're doing, it doesn't matter if it is the best business model or best practice out there. If you don't have a deep belief in the product you're promoting or selling or going out there and speaking to clients about, it's not going to succeed, and I watch other people that buy businesses that they are just looking for a quick buck and they see dollar signs. They see that it's been successful in somebody else's hands, but they don't have a passion. They just see the money and they see that they could get rich and they can make it big, but what I've watched is people come into this business that could care less about the products and the people we serve and they fall flat on their face and I really do believe that your passion absolutely guide you and you must believe in what you're doing if you want others to follow. So when I started my business, it wasn't sell, sell, sell. How many clients can I get into into my business? How many people can I sign up? It wasn't about the number in my mind. I looked at this platform facebook at that time in instagram and said, how can I serve my audience? What are the needs that they have based on myself, I didn't know that clean eating existed. I didn't know that you could buy these DVD programs and go into these accountability groups and have this great support. So I started educating people. My content had nothing to do with selling, but it had everything to do with getting people to break down that wall so that they trusted me and so I would put this content out there that gave away free advice, much like what Doug does with his podcast. Right, and that was a great way for other people to start reaching out and asking for my services and then as people started working with me, they would recommend others to me because of that relationship that was built. The second thing is this. A lot of times we compare ourselves in business and maybe the role you're in now, wherever your ad, especially in in the industry that I'm in, it's very easy to look at other people that have built these brands on social media. And I remember when I was first starting out, I was this hot mess mom that had laundry everywhere and dishes everywhere and you know, I had this like sagging skin leftover from having babies and I was a lot of insecurities about stepping out and putting myself out there on social media and I would look at these other people that have been in the industry longer and they looked like they had their lives together. They had great followings. People were engaging in their social media, you know, they were, they were rising up through the ranks and I can remember thinking and just the unlikely underdog, like I am that person that nobody notices in the corner. But guess what? I am willing to outwork the competition and I'm willing to show up. I'm willing to build trust. I want to show people that I am going to be here a year from now and that they can count on me. And so I worked quietly in the background, just doing my thing, showing up, supporting just the small group of clients that I did have. And slowly but surely I started out working the competition. Because when life got crazy for those other people, they slowed down, they stopped and they made excuses and I kept going and so now I sort of look back and I was like, nobody was probably betting on me. I was just that quiet little girl in the corner just doing her thing. But over time my momentum and traction grew because of that discipline. So I always say to my new people, outwork the competition. The next thing is patience. I found this quote and I love it. It's quality, right? Is so important. When things don't happen right away, remember that it takes six months to build a rolls, right Royce and 13 hours to build a Toyota. What do you want to be? The Rolls Royce for the Toyota. I know for me then when I started, I worked, I don't know, 40 hours a week and I probably made a dollar an hour and I was working really, really hard. The first couple of months in my business. I was watching people that would come in the door and they were making money hand over fist right away or they would go to a competitor's company and they were talking about how they were making money right away. But I had this belief and what I was doing and I believed that company that I represented had a product that was absolutely worth it. And so I realized by reading personal development, the slight edge was one of the first books that I read. The compound effect by Darren Hardy and in there that slight edge. That slow and steady. The small seemingly insignificant daily activities. Posting on social media, making new connections, reaching out and developing those relationships. That over time I believe that somehow some way I was going to reach the success that I was looking for. And I believe that this was a company that I was going to do it with. And I had to have patience and I believe in this day and age, everything is just so quick and rapid and we want it now and we have to have it and we're willing to kind of jump ship because we see dollar signs or see a faster growth opportunity. But remember what you want to be. You want to be the Rolls Royce of your organization, right, of the industry that you are a part of. The next one, number four, is discipline. I say this all the time. You have to be disciplined. Nothing is ever going to be candid to you. If you feel like something is too good to be true and opportunity is presented, most likely it is. The grass is never greener on the other side. If you believe in what you're doing, and I believe that sometimes we got to hustle and at the beginning of my business I realized that I had to do 24 slash seven, whatever it took and when everybody else gave up, I had to keep going. I had to outlast that competition. And so this is something that I always share with my team as a stay at home mom building a business and what I like to say, the cracks of time. I had maybe an hour before the kids got up, maybe two hours at nap time, maybe an hour in the evenings. Sometimes that all went to hell in a handbag. If somebody decided they didn't want to take a nap that day, right. And so I would look at these pockets of time and I would ring every single free second out of my day. I went to my husband and I said, look, I have a vision. I know what I can accomplish. I see what other people have been able to do. I want to accomplish x, Y, and Z, right? Whatever it was, financial goals that we had set for ourselves. I said, but I need your buy in. I need you to help me on this. And so we started to make this game plan where certain nights of the week he was going to put the kids to bed so that I could go into our spare room, shut the door and build my business. Saturday and Sunday mornings I would get up at 5:00 AM with everybody else in the world was sleeping. I would put in three, four hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings. There were times that it was like healing myself out of bed. But I knew that if I say discipline that somehow some way it was going to come together for me. And the example I use is if you take those three or four hours on a Saturday and Sunday and you add those up over the 365 days out of the year, right? The 52 weeks, that's how many more hours that I put in than the competition. And then you times that by five or seven years and you were so much further along. It's those little pockets of time that you can squeeze out to make your dreams a reality. And to be quite honest with you, I still do it to this day because I've been disappointed. Just discipline myself to be that kind of person that gets up, gets the work done and moves on with their day. Um, but that's the one thing that really stuck with me is, are you willing to outwork the competition? The next one, number five, is failure. You are going to fail more times than you're going to succeed and you should celebrate every failure you have. It is not a bad thing. It means you've learned a way. Another way that doesn't work. It means that the next time you speak to an employee or somebody that's a part of your organization that you can use that advice, that experience to mentor somebody else. There's so many times that I have just left and figured it out on my way down. And because I lead from the front, my people don't make the same mistakes that sometimes they do as I do, but at least I can give them that advice because in the back of my mind, if I can cut their learning curve in half or way more productive as a team. And so I look, I welcome failure as an opportunity to number one, stop and reflect what worked, what didn't work. Was it a bad idea? Could I just reshape it a little bit? Could I take maybe the image and change the image of the way I put content out there, change the wording and try it again. Could I try, you know, putting an idea out there at a different time of the month because it might be more well received and I have this process of failing, reflecting, refining, then presenting the idea and do it and doing it again and everything I do has this constant cycle of failing, reflecting, refining, and doing it again, and learning from those mistakes and failures along the way has helped me to truly find these tiny little pockets of success that have helped really move my business forward in a monumental way. The next thing is, how many of you know John Maxwell? John Maxwell is anything leadership. I am on it. I got to hear him speak at. I went to an entree leadership events which is hosted by Dave Ramsey, uh, last year in this past year. I've gone to two of his events now, which they are awesome. And John Maxwell was our speaker last year and I've heard him speak a few times through, through beachbody events as well, but he got up on stage and he started to talk about how he was at the age where he could retire. And he started to talk about he could go and golf everyday and sit on his front porch and drink lemonade, but he chooses to get out this trusty old notebook and interview somebody every single day. That man has so much knowledge and power in that brain. He, he has has done some written so many incredible books. He would be the last person you would think that would just retired, right? But he goes, no, there is something to be learned every single day. I'm gonna. Find somebody in the industry that is younger than me. I'm going to find somebody in the industry that is doing something better than me that is innovating faster than I am, and I'm going to sit down, I'm going to have them for coffee and I'm going to pick their brain. And I thought, man, he has checked his ego at the door. It doesn't matter what the title that he plays in a company. He wants to learn from other people. That speaks volumes, that shows that he is always willing to learn. And I look at over the past seven years when I started doing business, everything was facebook, I wrote blogs, Youtube, and all of a sudden instagram has has a rose up through the ranks and instagram stories and podcasts. None of those skills I had seven years ago. But instead of digging in my heels and saying, this is the way I built my business, I'm not moving off of this platform. I noticed that my attraction was going down and instead of digging in my heels, I said, what are you doing? You knew people that are coming in the door that are pulling in these crazy numbers that I've never even seen before. What are you doing? I checked my ego at the door. It didn't matter that I was the for time, top coach and accompany. I knew that if I wanted to continue to thrive, I had to innovate. So I take that from John Maxwell and I always asked myself at the end of every day, what have I learned? And the last thing I want to leave you guys with, this is a big one. I feel like when I started, it was about checking off the boxes, reaching all of the titles, getting all of the accolades, walking across every stage, getting every award that the company would offer, winning every trip that I could, incentive trip that I could go on and I did it all, but the end of the day when I look back at all that has happened to me and all that I have learned. The one thing is that it's not about the things I've accomplished, but it's who I become in the process and building this business is not just about those accolades and they're great, but a big part of who I am is focusing on when I do business with people, how do I want to leave them? At the end of the day, what kind of legacy do I want to pass onto my children and so every morning when my feet hit the floor, I think about that. What are my kids going to say when they scroll back through my social media, when they listened to my podcast, when they read all my blog posts, what are the people going to stay about me when I'm not in the room and everyday I strive to do business that matters, that makes a difference, that leaves a positive impact in this world and that lights my soul on fire and I truly believe that that is where success comes from, is from right here, is knowing that you do a job that makes an impact and matters and that you leave your team better than they were when they walked in the door. So I hope those principles help you and guide you and of course I'd be happy to answer some questions, but I am going to turn it back over to doug. Thank you so much for having me today,
Doug Smith:everyone. Thank you so much for listening to Melanie's talk. I hope it added value to your life. You can find ways to connect with her and links to everything that she discussed in her talk in the show notes at l, three leadership.org forward slash episode two. Oh, seven. As always, we encourage you to sign up for our email list on our website and that'll be the best way that you can stay up to date with everything we're doing here at l. three leadership. And as always, I like to end with a quote and I'll quote John Maxwell today. I heard this, uh, this weekend, literally got so fired up. I just loved it in context and he said this, he said, leadership is not a perk. It is a responsibility that is an absolute fact. Leadership is not a perk. It is a responsibility. Thank you so much for listening and being a part of l, three leadership. Lara and I appreciate you so much and we will talk to you next episode.