Episode 159: Claim Your Life & Business Model
There’s pressure all around us - to do things a certain way, to live life toward specific goals, to make money from specific products, and to essentially create a model for our lives dictated by other people’s rules, thoughts, and ideals.
When was the last time you took a minute to truly consider what YOUR ideal life & business model could look like?
Today on the Mindful Productivity Podcast we’ll be exploring just that: all the things you can consider when it comes to claiming a new model for your life & business that truly lights you up!
Links Mentioned in the Show:
Transcript:
You're listening to episode 159 of The Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And this week I want to talk about not only identifying but reclaiming what your ideal life and business model might look like. So often we feel the pressure from external circumstances.
From other people, we follow from other people we look up to mentor, you name it, about what we should be striving for.
What our success should look like.
But most importantly, you might be feeling the pressure of how you should get there.
What your business model should look like.
The types of products or services you offer.
And also what kind of life you're living. And when was the last time you really sat down to ask yourself some of these questions that I'm going to be talking about today in terms of really considering what your life model looks like right now.
What you really strive for.
Who you really are.
And what are the things that you really want to cultivate next in this chapter of your life? Because as we know, life is always ebbing, flowing, changing, and we're always adapting as humans.
So let's go ahead and get into this week's episode.
I think you're going to find it really cozy, validating, welcoming, and hopefully it brings some new ideas and permission slips your way in terms of what comes next in your life and business. Welcome to The Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now.
Welcome back to the podcast.
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I wanted to talk about something that's been on my mind for a long time.
And that is really thinking about the ways we think about how we get to the goals that we set for ourselves. And these are goals like revenue projections in your business that you might be running. These are things like how we want to live our life and the pace at which we live it. And these aren't new revelations, right? These aren't new things. I'm sure you've thought about this before, but this episode is really for you. If it's been a minute since you've asked yourself some of these questions and you've given yourself some space to explore this specifically in this chapter of your life. And I think that we have many different cycles. I've heard people talk about sevenyear cycles. I definitely feel a shift after a decade. But I also feel shifts and seasons of chapters in my life throughout the actual seasons every year. And I think it's important to check in with ourselves because at any given time, you may actually want to be going at a different pace than what you're currently moving at. Right? And what I mean by that is how fast you're working towards your goals, how fast you're wanting to change or not change, how much pressure you're putting on yourself, what kind of deadlines or not that you might have, and how quickly your expectations are of yourself to get to those various destinations or continue on those various paths.
I have been thinking about this a lot. I'm sure we all get there. But one thing I really want to touch on today is a pretty big mindset shift. That for me was a big deal. I don't know if you need to hear it. And that really is the fact that there are endless ways to get what you want in life. There is not only one way to make money. There is not one way to see whatever your version of success is. There is not only one way to be happy. There's not one way to do relationships or one way to have friends or one way to raise kids or whatever. Right? There are endless ways. And I point this out to say that I think sometimes, especially as business owners, we get caught up in what's the magic solution? What do I need to make myself do so that I can hit a revenue goal or have this much time off in my business or see this much recurring revenue? Whatever? What is the magic solution? And so we invest in maybe some of these higher ticket offers that promise that if you just do these specific things and you commit to this action plan and you don't veer off, you will get the exact results that I've seen.
And I went through those programs. And sometimes it's true. And other times it's not. But you know what it comes down to? What it really comes down to. Whatever your goal is, whether you want to increase your speed running or start running, or whether you want to start a business or you want to start selling planners or you want to open an Etsy shop, you name it, whatever it is. The truth is, here's the big thing. If you don't feel good doing it, if it doesn't work for you, if it doesn't bring you some kind of joy, it won't work. You won't do it. I'm not saying that moving towards your goals will not be difficult. I'm not saying that you should never feel discomfort. I'm not saying that things should never challenge you. What I am saying is that there might be something that you're following right now or subscribe to mentally that's not serving you. I'll give you an example. Last year I enrolled in a program, and it was so helpful, and there was so much more about it that was helpful. And I stayed in it for about five months. But the premise of it was to make one offer in your business, and that's it.
And that works for some people, right? Having one core offer, only selling one thing, only talking about one thing, or essentially taking everything that you've ever thought of and putting it into one big, larger product and then charging quite a bit more for it. Here's why I ended up leaving that program. Because any kind of tangent or any kind of step outside of that or, hey, conversations around like, could I make it work this way? Was shot down. No, you need to follow the model. You need to only have one product. Do not question the model. Do not question this process. This is how you will scale your business. And I don't doubt that that could work and does work. It does work for some people, but it didn't work for me. And not because I'm special or not, because I have some magic brain that other people don't. Just because my way of thinking, my creative process felt so hindered and stifled by that way of thinking that I could not go through the materials and actually do the work it required, because it required niching down in a way that really felt restraining.
And this idea, this notion of this applies to anything in your life. If you're wanting to move your body and you decide you're going to commit to an online program, whether it teaches you how to run or it's something you do every morning on a video for 20 minutes, if that program tells you that you can only do this kind of movement to improve your fitness or your health or whatever you're working toward on your physical health, if it says the only way you can do it is by doing 50 squats every morning and nothing else, well, could I take a break sometimes and maybe walk? No, you have to do 50 squats every morning. Well, could I maybe do yoga today instead of that? No, you have to do 50 squats every day. When you think about it that way, doesn't that make you feel like, well, that's stupid, right? But that's what some online programs, when it comes to business tell us is that you can't be creative. You can't give in, quote, unquote, to your humanness. If you want to be successful, you have to be a robot, and I am not here for it.
Now, the argument against this, right or for this other business model is. But you actually give yourself more freedom by focusing on one thing. And this is just an example, right. This is a personal example. You actually give yourself more freedom if you focus on one thing, you actually give yourself more money. And that also could be true. But what I'm finding right now in my life is that if I set up either my life or my business model dictated by someone else down to the T, and there's no room for creating it or being a little bit different or throwing up different colors on the wall in the room I'm in, then I start to feel trapped. And that's how I felt in a couple of different programs that I've joined where I suddenly wasn't doing the work anymore, because when I was looking for support and feedback, it was if you're not doing it the way I said, then what are you doing here? And I just think that sucks. Right. But I think that's the mentality that we're hearing about a lot in the online business space that in order to be successful, you've got to pick something, you've got to stick to it.
And any time that your feeble human brain wants to be creative or wants to do something different or wants to look at something shiny for a minute, you're doing it wrong. Now, I'm a big proponent of talking about focus projects. Right. I talk about them a lot in my business and how that can really help with mindful productivity. Because you are creating a focus, you're creating something that guides you back to the main path. Like, oh, what's that? Oh, wait, let's come back to the main freeway we're on. Let's come back. Right. Because we go on too many side roads, we'll end up in the middle of nowhere, and we'll become lost and frustrated. Yes, I think we can all agree on that. However, I think that there's many, many different freeways that we can take towards our goals. And there's nothing wrong with taking exits now and then and sightseeing along the way or experimenting in our business or saying, hey, I've been on this freeway for a while, but I kind of want to go this way. I have driven across the United States two times now, once with my husband, once by myself, with Bella, my Bulldog.
And I've done it different ways. Right. I went two different ways each time. I ended up getting across the US in about four or five days each time, and took totally different routes. Right. Saw totally different things, had a totally different experience. But at the end of the day, I got from point A to point B. I'm sharing this because I just want to remind you that in your life, in your business, you get to decide what your business model looks like, and it can look vastly different from what other people are telling you. I think what's great about some of these other online programs that help you create structure around maybe a specific business model is that they give you the tools. So if you see something and you're like, I think that business model would work for me. That makes a lot of sense. I want to play with that. Then you can join these programs and they give you a step by step foundation for how to do that thing, right? For how to offer one specific service, or for how to create an Etsy shop and build your business that way, or for how to create a customer journey based off of one product first or many offers that lead to a bigger offer.
There's so many ways to do it. The key is understanding what drives you and also understanding that you can change your mind along the way. My business model has shifted over the years, and I know that in the future it will likely shift again. Right now, I run a course model style business. So the way that I have things set up in my business is that I have some freebies, and I do have some planners. Like, I have the Mindful Productivity Guide, I have the Brain Dump book. And those things can sometimes be the first things that people are willing to invest in or buy. Right. Because they're lower priced offers. And you also get, like, a physical planner Journal. That's cool. And that's where people often start. And then that leads to some of my other courses and programs that are both self paced and that do have live components and support calls within them in communities. Right. That's my business model. That was not always my business model. When I first started my business, my business model was purely coaching, one on one coaching. And I really enjoyed that for a while. Until I didn't, until I personally was not able to scale it from an energetic standpoint.
From an energy management standpoint. Right. I think there are ways to scale your business no matter what you do. There's a lot of people that tell you you can't scale unless you make courses. I don't think that's true. I don't think a lot of these things are true that people say. But for me, the reason why I wasn't growing my business doing one on one coaching was because it drained me. If I had a coaching call with somebody, I was so present and so there, and it was so much fun. But by the end of it, right when I got off the call and an hour later, after I finished doing all their notes and sending them everything that we talked about, I didn't have any more creative energy left. Like, I could do things around the house or I could run errands. But I didn't have that creative stuff. I needed to produce this podcast, to write blog posts, to interact with my community. And that bothered me. It bothered me that, oh, when it comes to coaching, I only have this much capacity and it goes really, really, really fast. And so my experiment for a while was you can charge more for coaching and have fewer clients.
But I also didn't like that. Right. I didn't like having to charge my clients more. It was absolutely worth it for sure. But it didn't feel as available and it just didn't feel as good for me to sell it. Right. So again, there's nothing wrong with charging higher prices for your products or services if that feels good to you, if it makes sense. I think ethically, if people are actually getting the results that you can provide, great. But it wasn't working for me. So I changed my business model. And now one of the things that I do that feels really good in my business is that I offer extended payment plans for most of my courses. Right. So people don't have to buy publish with purpose, for example, upfront in one chunk they can pay for over the course of right now, I think it's ten months, and that feels really good. I like saying, hey, here's an easier way for you to enroll. And with anything in life, in business, there comes a risk if you commit to something. If you open yourself up to something, you then have new boundaries you have to set.
You have new boundaries that you have to manage. Right. So with offering an extended payment plan, there are some times when students fail to make a payment or it doesn't go through and I have to follow up with them. That's a risk, right. But a risk I'm willing to take. And normally it's not a big deal. People are humans. Things happen. That's an example. Whatever you decide that you want your model of life or business to look like, you have to understand that it's going to come with its own set of things that you have to navigate. And I think that's another thing, too, is that we think, well, if I Canva only just figure out the lifestyle I want to live, whether and that could encompass the things you eat, how you eat, when you eat, how you move your body, how you spend your free time. Right. What kind of things or activities or events you do, what kind of things for your house or your life that you invest in that bring you joy and happiness, whatever you decide that you want to participate in those things are going to come with their own set of nuances, challenge, challenges, emotions and so forth.
And I think it's just worth remembering that no matter what you choose, no matter what you decide to try out or experiment with, you're never going to find something in your life and business that's perfect. You're never going to find something that doesn't have those elements to it. Right. There's never going to be a relationship you have that doesn't come with difficult conversations. There's never going to be a business model that you find that doesn't come with some sort of difficult email that you may have to respond to. You're never going to find a content marketing plan that at some point may cause you to shift or reconsider how consistent you are or rethink what you want to share. You're never going to find permanence in your life in very specific ways. And let's explore that for a minute more, because I think we still okay, I'll speak for me because I Canva speak for you. I still sometimes believe that if I just have more self awareness or if I just know myself more or do more of the work, that I will find some relevance of permanence in a specific thing in my life.
And it's just not true. And it's liberating, though, right? Because okay, there have been chapters in my life where I have done a certain workout plan or I used to run so many miles a day and lift and do things, and that worked. And that maintained the energy level and the physical body that I had at the time. And it really made sense for me in my life before I was married, before this happened, right before all these other things. And that time in my life, it worked. But those kind of goals, those paths that would lead to physical fitness, for example, in a certain way no longer work or are applicable to my life now in the same way that I did them before, because I lived a very specific lifestyle a decade ago. I had limited responsibility compared to what I have now, but I still had a lot going on in my life now. I had a lot going on in my life then. Maybe you can relate earlier in my life in different ways than I do now. I had different levels of commitments, different boundaries, and with that came different lifestyle and life and business model choices.
I was working on nine to five then, so I didn't have a business, but different model choices that paved the way for my how paved the way for how I'm doing things, how I'm getting there. And so right now in your life, instead of beating yourself up for, oh, I used to do things this way, or I used to do this in my business and it used to work. Why can't I just make myself do that again? Why can't I just force myself to do those things again? Why not consider that you're in a new chapter of your life and it's not any better or worse per se than where you were before, but that it's going to require maybe a different way of doing things because of various energy levels, various responsibilities, various environmental factors, where you live, what your time looks like, what's available to you in terms of how you can work or how you can get things done. Or maybe you don't have hours at a time to do something. Maybe you only have 20 minutes. Maybe you only have three minutes, right? Who knows? You have to take all those things into consideration.
You have to get real with your current set of circumstances and then make changes. Because once you accept the reality you're in and figure out how you can adapt to it, to implement new habits or new strategies in your business, then you actually can slowly change your reality, so to speak, right? You can change what outputs you do and what inputs you receive. But I think it starts from right. Oh, big circle. Starting from where you are, right? Like the first episode of this podcast giving yourself permission to start from where you are and when you're thinking about what your life model could look like, a couple of things that I mean, there is not just like the basic stuff, right? Like all the things society tells us, like do you want to get married? Do you want to have kids? Do you want to buy a house? Do you want to rent all those things? Right. We all know them. We all think about them. Maybe you participate in some of them. But there's so much more to identifying our life model. It's also thinking about how you spend your free time. What are the things that you allow in your life when you get home for the day or when you stop working for the day?
Are there things that you do right away? Do you have a TV front and center in your living room that makes it really easy for that to be the first thing that you turn on? Or do you have a giant bookshelf in front of your couch that invites you into reading? Do you keep bright lights on late into the night that make it hard to fall asleep? Right? Or do you have practices and rituals that allow you to slow down and think about things? How do you spend your time on the weekend? How do you want to spend your time on the weekend? I'll give you a great example of how I lived a summer of my life like I never lived before. And it felt like a completely different life outside of work. And when it was the summer after, I lost my dad, so I was 23, 24. So I lost my dad and then turned 24 shortly thereafter, like a month later. Anyway, summer being 24, and that summer I felt so lost in my life and I wanted to do something, I wanted to commit to something different that would make me have a completely different experience that would expose me to a different way of living and a different set of people.
But I couldn't quit my job and move across the country or rent a camper van and blah, blah, blah. I couldn't do that. I mean, I could have, but I didn't want to. That was too much. So I was like, well, what can I do on the weekends that would change my life? And it's so interesting because when I think back on this summer, I don't think about my nine to five job. I think about every single weeknight and every single weekend that summer. And you know what I was doing? I was hanging out with a new group of people, and I found a new group of people because I went to this party one night, and there was a friend of a friend of a friend. And they said, we're going to go hiking tomorrow. It was like a Friday night. We're going to go hiking tomorrow morning. And I think it was actually at Wallace, I want to say Wallace Falls or something like that state park in Washington. They said, we're going to go hiking tomorrow. And it came out of my mouth. I said, Can I go with you? And they were like, yeah.
And I knew these people, and one of my friends was going to go, too. So it's not like I was getting in a car with people I didn't know at all, right? But they were like, yeah. And so the next day, I didn't have hiking shoes. I just had yoga pants and my tennis shoes. I went on this hike. I went on this hike to a place I'd never been before. And I'd been hiking before, but not, like a full day hike. I went hiking. I didn't use my phone. I had new conversations with new people. I was outside. I was seeing parts of the forest and the wilderness that I had never seen before. And you know what I was doing? I was changing my reality. I was living a new life just like that. Overnight, I was living a new life. And I loved it so much that every single weekend that summer, I was going hiking, whether we went somewhere far or short, like, maybe we even only went on a mile or two hike. There was another hike. I went where I did this, like, peak hike. That was super hard.
And I had the hardest time getting to the top. And I had this. We paired up into different buddies, and I had this guy with me that was, like, super in shape. Like, I'm talking super in shape, like, washboard ABS in shape and super nice. And I was not in shape. And he just kept stopping. I don't know. It felt like, seriously, every five to ten minutes, I'd be like, hunched over on a tree, like, oh, my God, I can't breathe. And he'd be like, Then let's stop. And what was so beautiful about that moment, for example, was that he met me where I was. He was like, if you need to stop and catch your breath, let's do that. And he gave me that permission to do that for myself and also didn't make me feel bad for needing to pause, that eventually we got to the top. And guess what? We didn't take that much longer than the rest of the group. I think maybe we were ten or 15 minutes behind them after all my little breaks. Point is right. That's just another example of a way to get where you want to go.
It was a different way of walking up that mountain. I took breaks and I still got to where I wanted to go. And I also changed my reality very quickly. So I think some of these things that we hear about mindset shifts, about adapting, they're not mutually exclusive. Right. You can take a long time to change your life, and you can also do things rapidly where overnight, seemingly, you have experiences that are life changing. You know, those hikes were life changing for me. They gave me energy. They gave me hope again. I felt like if I can climb a mountain after losing my dad, maybe I can get through anything. I've never done this before. Maybe I can do other new things I've never done before. So really thinking about ways that you can challenge yourself, but that you can also challenge yourself and go at your own pace. You can create a business model for yourself, but you can also do it your way. So if you're currently in a program or under the mentorship of someone and you're like, I want to do this, but I also kind of need to take pauses, or I need to take that exit every now and then, or go on an old country road to get back onto the freeway to find my why again, or find my creativity.
If someone tells you that you can't or they don't give you permission to pause, I consider that a red flag because I think those pauses and those little side ventures are vital. And just like anything you're doing in your life, what's the point? If you can't enjoy the process along the way, and understanding that there are so many limitless ways to make money in your business to help other people to do things is just so liberating because it can also be overwhelming. But it's so liberating because all of a sudden you realize that it's actually not about finding a perfect business model. It's not about finding a perfect lifestyle in your life. It's actually just figuring out and experimenting and getting curious with what works for you right now, what feels good, what motivates you, what gets you to move your body, what gets you to sell in your business, what gets you to talk about what you're offering. And if a certain business model isn't helping you do those things or a certain lifestyle isn't helping you do those things, then you won't do them right? So give yourself permission to start from where you are.
Do it your way, and be flexible. Experiment it's okay. Experimentation in your business is going to help your business thrive more than you think. I think we get so nervous about experimenting when it can really help us in so many ways. So I hope this episode was helpful for you if there were any big AHA moments for you or anything you're like. Oh my gosh. Yes, I totally agree with that or resonate with that or actually I have a different thought about that. Please tag me on Instagram mindful Productivity Podcast Blog Take a picture of the podcast, share it in your stories or tell me where you're listening. I'd love to have a conversation with you and share what you're sharing in my stories as well. Okay that's this week's episode you can find more information about how to work with me, how to become more mindfully productive in your life and business. Publish your own planner and so much more by going over mindful productivity podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead and I hope you take some time to think about what you want your life and business model to look like right now in this chapter of your life.
