The Jasmine Star Show

Turn Business (and Personal) Rejection Into Redirection

• Jasmine Star

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I’m going to be real with you—sometimes the biggest business breakthroughs don’t happen on stage, in a meeting, or during a strategy session. They happen when your feelings get hurt, your plans go sideways, and you say “yes” anyway.

In this episode, I’m sharing the behind-the-scenes story of how a last-minute trip to Nashville turned into one of the most impactful mastermind experiences of my year—all because I chose to show up, even when I felt excluded.

Here’s the tea: I wasn’t invited to a mastermind dinner I thought I’d be part of. And, like any human with a beating heart, I had a lot of feelings. I let myself sit in them. I reached out to my girl Amy Porterfield. And instead of letting the exclusion define me, I made a new story—and booked a plane ticket.

Spoiler: That trip led to a powerful mini mastermind with some of the most brilliant female entrepreneurs I know (Jenna Kutcher, Bonnie Christine, and more), and I walked away 1% better—and with 5 key takeaways you can apply to your business today.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • Why rest is just as productive as hustle
  • How to reframe moments of rejection
  • What “choosing a better story” looks like in action
  • The power of informal opportunities
  • How to squeeze value out of every experience (even the ones that don’t go as planned)

Whether you're navigating disappointment or wondering if it’s worth hopping on a plane last-minute, I hope this episode encourages you to trust the process and say yes to what could be next.

Because the truth is, the right rooms won't just open for you—they’ll find you when you're ready.

Click play to hear all of this and:

[00:54] Why Rejection Hurt: Unpacking a Business Exclusion

[02:44] Choose a Better Story: How I Reframed the Narrative

[03:42] How Vulnerability Sparked a New Opportunity

[04:32] The 1% Rule: Why Small Gains Lead to Big Growth

[05:28] 32 Hours in Nashville: High-Energy Learning & Connections

[08:04] Informal Masterminds Matter: What This Trip Taught Me

[10:22] Why Being Present (Even When Disappointed) Still Pays Off

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For full show notes, visit jasminestar.com/podcast/episode560

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  As I'm building businesses, it's tempting for me to go, go, go. And not having a time just to take a step back and pause and, like, reevaluate. What am I doing? Is this the right step? The rest is just as important as the work. Have you ever thrown yourself into an opportunity without knowing all of the details? Just find a way to make it work. Have you ever just said, if I can just get into the room like myself, I'm gonna get in the room kind of girl. Sometimes I believe that life throws you opportunities. And today I just want to give you an inside look about a last minute opportunity that I said yes to. On the belief that something amazing and good was going to come from it. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where we talk about scaling your seven figure business into eight figures and doing it by saying yes to opportunities. Okay, let's back up a little bit. I had planned to have a meeting with somebody who lived in Nashville.

Jasmine Star 00:00:54  We had originally just said we were going to hop online. It was going to be a consultation for one hour and then two intersecting opportunities happen. But I want to back up a little bit. Last April, I was in Austin for an event, and I was there and I ran into a group of entrepreneurs, and we spent the afternoon for a project that we were working on. It was there at lunch that one of the entrepreneurs started talking about how he was going to mastermind with a group of guys there in Austin. Now, I want to be very clear. I do not expect at all to be invited to any and all events. I don't even expect to be invited to other masterminding events. However, I do kind of sort of think that when you are coming across like it's a flex or a brag, that's something you can keep to yourself now. Hey. To each their own. But what I'm saying is, in business, if I roll, if there's an opportunity that I am talking about and I'm not inviting other people, I'm probably not going to share that information.

Jasmine Star 00:01:50  It's neither here nor there. Different strokes for different folks. I do business different, but I will tell you, I feel in a certain way, like the stories I tell myself was like, well, maybe my business wasn't big enough to be invited to the event. Maybe because I'm X, Y, or Z, right? We can all tell ourselves stories about why we were not invited. I am simply deciding to say, listen, I can choose my story. And so the story that I chose was that invitation and that dinner and that mastermind was not for me. I chose that story. It didn't make it any easier. I went back to the hotel. I was talking with JD and I was like, I just think that I'm in my feelings about this. I sent a text message to my friend Amy Porterfield, and I said, I think these are my exact words. Bump them and bump that. I literally felt like I was on the outside and I tried. I was like, choose a better story, choose a better story, choose a better story.

Jasmine Star 00:02:44  And I was just like, what was it that that invite just was not extended. What was it? And even though I didn't know the answer, I reached out to two people that I trust deeply to speak into the business side and who will always help me tell a better story. That is my husband and business partner and my good friend, Amy Porterfield. After I sent her a voice memo and I was like, and you want to know what? Bump them and bump that. And she said, I don't know what you're doing. In a few days she's like, but you know, that meeting in Nashville, she's like, I'm going to be speaking at an event, and Jenna Kutcher is flying in for that event to speak at it, and Stacey is flying into that event, and Bonnie, Christine is going to be meeting with Michael Hyatt. That's her mentor. And she's like, we all happen to be in Nashville. She's like, you have that meeting. She's like, why don't you take that meeting in person, fly out the day before a little earlier, and then we can mastermind and so on the back of me being excluded from one thing, she made sure that, hey, if we all happen to be in the same city, let's do our own thing our own way.

Jasmine Star 00:03:42  That was an unexpected opportunity that probably would not have happened had I not reached out to somebody and expressed, I'm feeling a certain way. So business tip number one bring people into your journey. Have them help you choose a better story, and you don't know what opportunities are going to pop up from there. Okay, so I decided I am going to fly out to Nashville. So I booked a ticket, I think 3 or 4 days in advance. Now, my goal any time I go to one of these events is just to get 1% better. In fact, at the time of this recording, I went to an event in LA yesterday, and in the middle of the event I realized, you know what? This is probably not the best use of my time. And JD and I and Luna went out to LA. We had dinner together, and then he took her to the Santa Monica pier for the very first time. She went on a roller coaster. She ate cotton candy for the first time.

Jasmine Star 00:04:32  She's five years old. Listen, we try to say no to sugar, but Baby Girl got cotton candy while I went to this event. Halfway through the event, I texted JD and I said, I don't think that this is the best use of my time, but I'm going to try to get better. Why? The philosophy of everything I learn, I can get 1% better. So we got in the car last night and JD had said, hey, I'm really sorry that the event wasn't what you had expected. And I said, do you want to know what I'm going to tell you? Three things that I learned that hopefully these three things will help me get 1% better, even if I didn't want to be there. And so I applied the same methodology again and again in my business. And so when I went to Nashville, I was like, have no expectations. What you want to learn is how to get 1% better. Now there's a couple things that I wanted to clarify going in is I was going to go to Nashville for about 32 hours, and I accepted the terms that it was going to be a wild trip, but I was like 32 hours, 1% better, a great group of phenomenal, brilliant, powerhouse female entrepreneurs.

Jasmine Star 00:05:28  Okay, I'm all in. Now, a couple things that I want to clarify for this story, because we're going to get into the things that I learned for my business so that you can use them for your business as well. This was not formalized. This was just like, hey, we happened to be in the same town at the same date, so why don't we all just roll in? So Amy's husband was spending the weekend by the lake with her dog, and she's like, I'm going to be myself. Why doesn't everybody just come stay at my house? Oh, okay. So we all just rolled into her house and we did not have a focused agenda. And I think that's what I want to be like. Very clear is oftentimes I think that we think there has to be a host. There has to be an agenda. There has to be topics. There has to be formally speakers and not at all. Anytime you can get around a group of people who are just as passionate about business.

Jasmine Star 00:06:10  Say yes to that opportunity I landed. I think it was close to midnight in Nashville, rolled in to Amy's house, and then went immediately to bed. On that day that I flew from Los Angeles to Nashville, I recorded, I think six podcast that day. One of the guests of my podcast was Shelby Sapp. I will link to her episode in the show notes. It was a phenomenal episode, but I specifically invited her to speak around sales, because sales is a part of my business that I'm going all in and really focusing on in 2025. In fact, at the time of this recording, we are building out our own in-house dedicated sales department. Oh, okay.

Jasmine Star 00:06:55  This is something we've never done before.

Jasmine Star 00:06:58  Sales for me. And here's the thing. This podcast is not to explain how we're building out our sales department. I am creating. Oh my gosh. Makes me nervous just saying it. I am creating a podcast for how we're building out our sales department from the ground up, and I'm making it a little vlog style.

Jasmine Star 00:07:14  Right now, what we're doing is we're investing in consulting and helping us build this. And I'm doing a video diary. I'm recording like maybe 1 or 2 videos, like two, three minutes a week, talking about the process, talking about what I'm learning. Talking about all the things that are going wrong. That podcast is going to come in the future. But please know that strategically, as a CEO, I'm looking into the future and asking who in my network, what on my platforms, who can I get in contact with to help set me up for success? Shelby was one of those people who came in and laid the framework and kind of opened my eyes to the things that I need to do and how I need to change my perspectives. So just I'm putting this in context for where my mind was when I was flying to Nashville. Okay. So Shelby recorded that day. We ended our podcast day around 2 or 3. We started at 730 in the morning. We did a ton of podcasts, got on a flight to LA, flew and they woke up the next morning.

Jasmine Star 00:08:09  So what was hop on my mind still was sales. Now my focus when I went in there was to learn everything I could from their perspective. So Jenna Kutcher's, Amy Porterfield, Stacey Tuthill and Bonnie Christine, I was just going to ask everything about them because my focus was on sales. So all of my questions to each of them was going to be, what is your sales experience? Do you have in-house sales teams? What do you see really working right now in the landscape of personal branding, building out products, having a product suite that is both digital and physical? Okay, now before I get in to the business side of it, my 1% getting better actually didn't come from the business conversations. So my unexpected lesson number one from this very last minute opportunity was oh, okay, the morning. So I land, I go to bed like at 12 or 1 Nashville time, we wake up and we have a personal trainer come to the house because Amy has her own gym. So we had a workout in the morning and her personal trainer comes and it is like 8:00 in the morning and we have music bumping and we are sweating.

Jasmine Star 00:09:19  We're getting our minds right to get our bodies right, to get the business right. And my unexpected lesson came from the trainer. So we were divided up into two sections. There was five of us getting trained, and it was basically the tall girls against the mini girls. I was on the short side, so myself and a woman by the name of Bonnie Christine were on the petite side. And so we were working out together and we had a series of three exercises to do in a given set. And so I finished my three workouts, and then I was going to start the second set, and the trainer looked at me and she said, the break is just as important as the work. You just finish this set of three. I need you to take a break. That was the first time somebody ever told me, girl, sit down. So I sat down and I thought to myself, the rest is just as important as the work. As I'm building businesses, it's tempting for me to go, go, go.

Jasmine Star 00:10:11  And not having a time just to take a step back and pause and reevaluate. What am I doing? Is this the right step? So unexpected lessons. The rest is just as important as the work. I have a tendency to rush from thing to thing. In business. I have a tendency to say this is the goal, and then the minute that we hit that, it's like, on to the next thing. Whoa, whoa, wait. The pause was going to be the rest is just as important in the work. Now I talk about this from a workout perspective. But that same day during lunch a couple hours later, I couldn't stop thinking with what that trainer had said, and I texted JD and I said, hey, in a couple of weeks, I'm slated to fly to San Francisco. I was just going to go for the afternoon. Do you want to turn that trip into three days for us in Napa? He responded back was like, immediately say less? Absolutely. I'ma book some tickets.

Jasmine Star 00:11:01  So had I not put myself in a new situation to think about things in a new way, because I was just going to fly to San Francisco for the day, fly back and do our regular weekend at home. But instead I said, what if we were to able to take a work weekend to work on the business and not just in the business? The second unexpected lesson that I had learned is to rise to the level of your expander. So as Bonnie and I were training, we were doing squats and we were doing rack squats, and I was pushing myself. I was ready to work out. And Bonnie is probably an inch shorter than I am. She's she looks like Tinkerbell. She's adorable and she's strong. So we were mapping our weights pretty much the same way until the very last set. And I am telling you, when you work with a trainer that squat, you're going real low. I'm like, this is the lowest I've ever gone in a squat. Okay, third one, I'm totally burnt out.

Jasmine Star 00:11:52  Third set. And then what do I see Bonnie Christine do? She adds on 25 extra pounds and I'm like, oh my God. And I'm watching her do it. She finishes her set of ten. Everybody's hyping her up. And so when I step up to the rack, the trainer begins to remove the weights. And I said, no, absolutely not. I just saw what was possible from somebody who is expanding my possibilities of what is possible. And so my lesson was to get around expanders. This idea was first explained to me by my best friend. She's dating. She's in New York City, and she says that she's opening herself to be around different people so that they show her what's actually possible. And so, just like any girl, she loves a good bouquet of flowers, except for the fact that she was taking a poetry class in New York City late at night after her workday. And there was a gentleman in the class, and they struck up conversations. They would walk to coffee shops.

Jasmine Star 00:12:50  And in one of these conversations, she tells him her love of cheese. Oh, she just loves a good cheese. And so he invited her on a date. And he arrives to the date. And instead of a bouquet of flowers, he has designed a bouquet of her favorite cheeses. He went to a cheese store, had them designed these cheeses like a bouquet of flowers, and brought them to her. And she had said that this man became an expander, that the type of man who she wants in the future is going to be the type of person who has the capacity to bring a bouquet of cheese, flowers. I had not thought of something about that conversation two years ago. So when I was squatting with Bonnie, I realized she's an expander. She's showing me what's possible not just for myself, but the very things that I want. So business lesson for you is challenge yourself to find an expander and rise to the level of the game that they play. So I want to take in from these two unexpected lessons.

Jasmine Star 00:13:52  Number one, the break is just as important as the work. And number two, rise to the level of your expander. And then I want to talk about how those two lessons that I learned early in the morning brought me into the day of masterminding. So I just want to clarify. There's this idea of mastermind. The most classic definition of a mastermind is a group of people together, focusing on a topic, because the sum is greater than their individual parts. This isn't one plus one equals two. This is one plus one equals 75. When you are around a group of people who think different and bigger, those expanders, you get different results. So when you go into a mastermind, nobody has an agenda. Nobody is telling you what to do. Nobody is telling you how to do it. You're just having conversations that are open in your mind to doing things in different ways. It is on you in that mastermind to figure it out. Nobody will hand-hold you. Nobody will keep you accountable.

Jasmine Star 00:14:49  This is you coming up with your own solutions and you figuring out how to achieve those desired results. So what was my biggest takeaway from this unexpected opportunity to mastermind? I was going to build out a sales team, and I was going to do something that scared me. And up until this point, the team and I were going to do it entirely on our own. We had already been making movements and strides. We had built timelines to do those very things. On the back of having a few hours to sit with these brilliant women, there were some very big changes. We decided to hire a consultant aka training, because we wanted quicker results, and so they had said, hey, you're going to probably expect to spend $20,000 for a 90 day program to go in and get trained. That was not expected. It wasn't on my radar. They gave me great recommendations. They talked about their experiences. They talked about what trainers did for them. They talked about the immediate ROI. And I was like, well, that's dumb of me.

Jasmine Star 00:15:47  If I don't hear what these women have done to set their businesses up to the level of success, they expanded me. Number two, they told us quickly to set up KPIs, key performance indicators around what we're expecting our team to do and achieve. Number three, we're going to assign a team leader to offer sales calls. Feedback. We need to get that in real time so that we start drilling down what our key values are and how we keep our conversions high. Number four, and this is for us to create detailed SOPs, standard operating procedures of how we do it. Done. Oftentimes oftentimes you'll get things going. You're going to do it. And then later you do a post. I'm going to do a post SOP. What we're doing now from the ground up is we're building the SOP right now with us as we do it, so that we're not doing it later on. We're going to set ourselves up for success, and we're doing this slightly different than we have in the past. Number five, I ask them, well, how do you keep your best closers? What are the best mechanisms? They had said you want a steady flow of warm leads.

Jasmine Star 00:16:46  You want to prepare these people for the sale. You want to make it as easy as humanly possible for your closers to get those results. And you want to have a clear culture of the business. You want somebody who's closing on your team, who just not just appreciates the business, but appreciates what does the business want to do. And you as the leader, I got all of that in an afternoon with a group of brilliant women, and I wanted to make sure that I was sharing what I was learning with you. A lot has changed since that conversation. I'm going to get into all of the details, but what I will tell you was, oh my gosh, this is so much of a bigger project than I ever anticipated. And I also feel very excited, I feel nervous, I totally do. I totally do. Right now we're recruiting. At the time of this recording, we are recruiting for our closers. We're recruiting for centers. This is a new division and a new part of me, and I wouldn't have stepped up in such a big way had I not been expanded.

Jasmine Star 00:17:40  So the rest is just as important as the work. Going to Napa and talking to JD on the back of planning that trip was how do we function different? What kind of business are we building? How big are we going to make this? And then rising to the level of your expander. And I'm just so appreciative of the group of people that was able to expand me. And I hope that this podcast is an expansion for you. I want you to get into the room, any room, and until you have those opportunities, I hope that this podcast serves as your room for expansion. I can't wait to share about the lessons that I'm learning about leadership, creating a new department from the ground up and all the good, bad, and the ugly. Now I want to end the show with a reminder of how I started the show. If people don't invite you into the room, bump them and bump that. No, I'm just kidding. I'm actually not kidding. I mean, that was petty, but I'm gonna be petty.

Jasmine Star 00:18:35  I'm gonna be petty if you're not invited. Create your own room. Let people into your journey. Connect with people vulnerably and real. Say yes to unexpected opportunities. Trust that you can figure things out. Commit to getting 1% better every day and be open to learning unexpected lessons. Thank you so much. In this episode, it all impacted you on your journey. Share it with a friend. Let's do this together. So collectively we get 1% better as a community. Thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show.