Podcast

Episode 42: What It’s Really Like To Invest In Yourself

Episode 42 - What Its Really Like to Invest in Yourself-min

In the last two years, I’ve experienced an incredible amount of growth – both in myself and in my business. And in the last two years, I’ve started investing – both in myself and in my business.

It’s no coincidence. Without investing in myself I would not be where I am today. I believe that you don’t NEED to invest money in yourself to get to where you want to go but it for sure speeds up the process and makes it a million times easier. At least that’s been my experience!

In this podcast episode, I’m sharing every investment I’ve made over the last two years so that I can tell you what the process is like from my perspective, including how I make decisions, how I know how much to spend, how I know whether something will be worth it etc. I also chat about the MAGIC that investing in myself has created as well as all the unexpected opportunities and relationships that have flowed from it.

My hope with this episode is to give you an inside look at the things that have made all the difference in my personal and business growth. And by doing so, I hope I inspire you to start investing in yourself so you too can make your dreams a reality.

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I am chatting about what is really like to invest in yourself

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi and welcome to Episode 42 of The Smart Twenties Podcast. This is a podcast where I share personal growth and life advice for women in their twenties and today, I am chatting about what is really like to invest in yourself and more specifically I’m talking about what it’s really been like to invest in myself because of course I’m always sharing what I’ve learned from my own experience and I know from listening to other podcasts and having conversations with people that a lot of people have similar experiences, but I really want to talk about what it has been like for me to invest in myself over the last couple of years, including like whether I’ve had the money, whether it’s been scary, what kind of things I’ve invested in, how much I’ve spent, how I’ve known when it’s time to spend money because you’re on a personal growth journey of your own.

I know that at some point in time if you haven’t already started thinking about it, you will start thinking about whether you should invest in maybe an online course in a coach, in a program. Something has come up. I’m sure already that you’ve thought, oh, maybe that would be a really great thing to invest in and to help accelerate my personal growth or my business or whatever it is. So I’ve written a big long list of all the things that I can think of off the top of my head that I have invested money in and exactly how much it was. Some things are from a few years ago and I can’t really remember exactly how much I spent that. I definitely know rough figures, so I’ve included all the numbers for you so that I’m not being vague about everything. I want to make sure that I’m being as helpful as possible.

I also want to mention, if you don’t already know, I have started offering private coaching to women who want my help to get out of their own way and reach their full potential. So if you do want to invest in yourself and you really resonate with me and want me to help you accelerate your personal growth journey or start your business or whatever it is, you can find out more at smart-twenties.com/coaching or you can send me an email at sam@smart-twenties.com. For those of you who’ve already signed up, I’m so excited to get started. I absolutely love helping women one-on-one. So in this episode I’m just going to be chatting through all the different things that I’ve personally invested in, just so you can start thinking about where you are in terms of investing in yourself.

I also wanted to share this because I haven’t always had the money sitting around to invest in myself. I think that often we can see investing in ourselves as like I need that money in savings before I can spend it. Basically every time I’ve made a huge investment in myself, I haven’t had the money sitting there. I’ve usually had to use payment plans, which is why I also offer payment plan options, but I’ve found that really taking that financial gamble is kind of also what really made sure that I’d get the most out of it because I knew that I had skin in the game. I didn’t want to waste my money. I’m going to be chatting through all of that, but I did just want to let you know that I am now offering one-on-one private coaching in a six-week coaching program.

I’m just super happy about it. I don’t think I mentioned it though in my last podcast episode, so you might not be aware of it. So I just wanted to make sure that, so I’ve got some notes here. Not too many really just a list of dot points of all the things that I have invested in. In my experience, investing in myself has always required a huge leap of faith. There have only been a few times where I’ve really been like, “Yes, I’m going to invest in this and this will a hundred percent be worth it” normally my thoughts are more along the line of, I don’t know if I should invest in this. It might not be worth it. I don’t want to waste my money. I don’t have the money and all of those kinds of thoughts. And normally it takes me, I would say at least a few months to make a decision to invest in something I normally have to hear about it quite a few times and just think it over.

And there are very few investments that I’ve really made impulsively. but I will be talking through each investment one by one and going through all of that and getting into the specifics and everything. So if you want to know more about that, we’re talking about that in a bed. But yeah, I did just want to mention that it has always required a leap of faith and I have always doubted whether or not it would be worth it particularly with more of the investments where it’s been a big financial outlay, especially when I have known that it would be quite a financial stretch, and that I was going to really have to, like, it was going to be challenging to pay them money. Those ones have been the scariest for me, but I’ve also found that when I have invested in those different coaches or programs, they have accelerated my journey so much that I would definitely, like if I had to go through it again, I’d invest in every single thing that I did invest in.

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that I could have had invested in that would have accelerated it even further. So I am always looking at ways that I can invest in myself and towards the end of my list I’ve got the things that I invested in recently. Like I made an investment earlier this week and I’ve made quite yet. I’m always making quite a few. So yeah, I’m going to chat through them and I just want say as well, I feel like the truth with investing in yourself is that you could actually do it alone. You could figure it out by yourself. I don’t think like for these kinds of investments, there are definitely ways to hack together your own results. And a lot of the things I invest in people who are teaching me and there are people that have figured it out themselves without doing courses or they have done their own set of different courses and have their own experiences.

So it’s not like if you don’t invest in yourself you won’t be able to figure it out alone. I just find that if I do try to figure it out alone, which a lot of things I’ve been like, “No, I’m not going to invest in it. I’ll just figure it out myself. I’m smart. I’m ambitious enough” whatever, it’s just taking me so much longer and has been so much harder than the times that I have directly learn from someone who’s done it. And also when I’ve had that direct one-on-one or interactive experience where someone could show me my thinking and I think the reason I believe so strongly in coaching and that I want to be a coach, I am a coach and that I have invested in coaching is because a coach is basically a mirror and they show you what you can’t see yourself.

And so there are so many breakthroughs that I’ve had with different coaches and doing different courses and different personal development programs that I very much doubt I would have been able to have the same breakthroughs by myself. I have had like different breakthroughs. And when I say breakthrough, I mean like that. You can see a blind spot. Like he can see something about yourself you’d never seen before. I have had those kinds of experiences like watching ab, renee brown YouTube videos. I was like, “Oh my God, this is exactly what I like.”

I’ve had those experiences with free content, but for sure the bulk of them have been when I’ve invested in myself. And I think it’s really because when you invest in yourself, when you pay money for it, you are actively trying to create that experience. You’re really open and committed to growing. Whereas if you’re scared to make the investment. And when I say you, I mean me. When I’ve been scared to make an investment, I really haven’t been open to the change and open to the growth. Even though intellectually I have been. I think at a deeper subconscious level, if I haven’t been ready to put my money where my mouth is, then I haven’t truly been committed. And it’s not that you need to spend money like time is an investment to a huge investment and you can get a lot from investing your time and for sure if you don’t have much money you can invest your time and then as you get more money you can invest money so you don’t have to spend as much time.

But I’ve just found that for me, money is something that really makes me committed because as a real, like if I’m spending money in that can’t spend it on something else and I really want to make sure that money that I’m spending is worth it and I want to prove myself right that it’ll be worth it and I’m also just so much more committed.

So I think if you’re not willing to invest money in yourself, you can invest time and you can do it alone. It’s not like there’s a magic bullet out there that you can’t figure out if you do it by yourself. But I just found I’ve accelerated my journey so much both personally and with my business. So they’re both highly interweaved like my mentality and my personal life is very similar and reflected in my business. So working on my personal development and my beliefs about myself has a huge impact on my business and working on myself as an entrepreneur has a huge impact on my personal life and both improves the other.

There’s very few investments I’ve made when the money has been sitting there has always been a stretch and has always been that voice in the back of my head that’s like maybe this won’t be worth it, what if it’s a waste of money, but I’ve learned that that voice is just fear and normally it has never for me being correct because every investment I’ve made has been worth it because I have made it worth it.

You can’t invest in a program and a coach and expect them to do the work and there are people who make investments and they don’t get much out of them because it’s upon the person who’s investing to show up for that experience and be really, really committed. And normally if you spend money, it’s the same like you know, if you’re paying for a personal trainer, which I will talk about in a bit, you’re much more committed than if you are just going to the gym yourself. And it’s not that really the personal trainer has anything particularly groundbreaking to share. They usually just telling us what we already know. Not saying that to diminish personal training. I’m a huge believer in it. I think it’s the same with coaching also. You’re just hearing what you know, but you’re ready to hear it and you’re actually going to act on it.

So it’s like with personal training as the example, it’s not really that they have anything magical to share. It’s just that when people are paying that money for it, they’re much more committed than when they’re just paying $20 a week for a gym membership or they’re just running in the park by themselves generally speaking. So when you invest you’re the one who makes it worth it and investing time or money means that you can’t put that time or money into other things, which usually makes people more motivated. One of the things I want to mention as well, so I was speaking to one of my coaching clients about this. She was saying that she has had a lot of trouble investing in herself, including like buying personal development books and basically like any kind of investment, even as small as a $10 or $20 investment because she doesn’t apply what she learns for free.

So she thinks that if she pays for it, like she said she doesn’t deserve to be, to have something that she’s paid for because she doesn’t even use the stuff that she has gotten for free and that she’s scared that if she doesn’t even apply what she’s already got, then why is she going to actually make the most of something that she’s paid for? And I really think the opposite is true, that if you have been struggling to apply the advice that you’re getting for free either on podcasts like these on blogs, on Instagram, on YouTube, paying for it will often transform the experience. It’s why I started investing in myself. I really realized that I had all this free information and I was doing nothing with it and I thought if I pay for this, I’m actually going to make it worth it.

And that’s what did happen and it was incredibly powerful. But I think if you’re worried like, I’m not even applying the free stuff, why would I think I’d be able to apply the paid stuff? Say for example, if it’s a course and you’re like, “But I’m already reading that blog and not doing the exercises that they recommend. So why would I sign up for a course? Because I probably won’t do the exercises” it’s so different when you pay. I’m sure you can think of something that you have paid for and that you have also gotten for free and that you, like most people I would say, unless you have piles of cash sitting around, most people will put a lot more effort and will really invest a lot more energy and be a lot more committed when they have paid for something.

So if you’re worried that you shouldn’t invest in yourself because you haven’t been applying the free things that you’ve been learning, I really think the opposite of that is true because you have skin in the game. And for me, as I was saying, I really started investing because I realized I wasn’t self motivated enough to apply all the free stuff that I was learning and I wanted to really start fast tracking everything. And I’ve spoken about this investment before and now I’m going to like go through all of the investments that I’ve made, the in-a-rough order, some investments are ongoing but some of them, a lot of them are just coaching or a program or whatever. So I’ve tried to put them roughly in about the right order and starting back in 2016.

So the first time that I really invested in myself, I would say when it comes to both personal growth and business, I really think that the same thing was investing in a course called Your First 1K by Mariah Coz which was a course about how to get your first 1000 email subscribers and make your first $1,000. So at the time I had been blogging for about two and a half years. I had about 200 email subscribers and I hadn’t made a cent from my blog and I was kinda just like, “Enough is enough”. I have been trying to figure this out by myself for two and a half years, I haven’t been able to do it and I’m going to invest in something that is going to help me.

The course was about US$400. I did use a payment plan. So I think I paid about two lots of $200, which to me was a huge investment. Huge, huge, huge. Especially considering at the time, blogging didn’t even look like it could ever become something that I would do for a living. It was like, as I was saying, I had 200 subscribers, not many page views. And I was very inconsistent with my blogging and I really was just so in my own way about it.

I think at the time I must have already told Steve by then about it, but I think I hadn’t told a lot of my friends at that point. Like it really wasn’t something that I’d allowed to be part of my self image and my identity and making this investment really just changed the way that I saw myself. And it really just, allowed me to give myself permission to go for it. So when I invested in that course, I don’t think that that was anything particularly groundbreaking about it. Not to say it wasn’t a great course, like it did put all the information in the right order and what it did was, because it’s step by step, I could just stop having to try and reconcile all of these different blog posts that I was finding through Pinterest because as you probably know, and also if you don’t have a blog, all of this applies to everything. Like I’m just talking about blogging because that’s why I’ve invested in. That’s why my business relates to, but it really applies to anything. If you’re a photographer, if you’re some other kind of creative or if you’re in a corporate job and you’re investing in things for personal development, whatever, this order supplies. But a lot of these things will be about blogging because that’s what I’m doing. But I know a lot of you have blogs or you’re wanting to start a blog or you have a business.

The course really just allow me to put my blinkers on and focus. And it was step by step by step, it really reduced a lot of the overwhelm. It allowed me to have so much more clarity, which made me take action along with the fact that I had paid for it. So I’m like, hell yeah, I’m going to make the most of this. And that course helped me launch Dream Habit, which was my first course, which launched in September 2016 nearly two years ago. Crazy.

So that was my real first investment in, I think both my personal development and my business. The next thing I invested in a couple months later was coaching with a coach called Jen Carrington. She is still a coach. She’s a coach for creative entrepreneurs. And I had been listening to her podcast. I think for about at least six months. I’d heard her saying that she was a coach and I just really felt like I resonated with her and I just knew from listening to her podcast that she would be the perfect person to help me. It took me forever to get out of my own way enough to actually, get in touch and to book in coaching with her. I booked it on the 22nd of June because I can just remember it so clearly, but I don’t think we started until July or September, late July or August because she had a bit of a waitlist.

But I did a six-month coaching program with her, which was one session every two weeks. It was, I think around AUD$2000 at the time. It’s much more expensive now. it’s a much bigger investment to work with her now. But at the time, I think she was maybe a few years into it, I’m not sure but that was what the price was and that’s what I invested. I had to use a payment plan. I had to put it on my credit because I didn’t have the money in savings or anything like that, but I just knew that I needed to do something and I needed someone who would make it feel normal and I needed her because she was doing what I wanted to do and I just really feel like I knew deep down that I just needed at least one person in my life that was- that thought of what I was doing was normal.

It’s not like, well I barely talking about what I was doing to anyone else, but like when I talk about it with Steve, he was very supportive but it didn’t really have any idea what blogging is or like how you could turn that into a career or anything like that. And I just wanted someone that was already doing it and she was working as a coach and I really wanted to be a coach as well. So I invested in that. I remember actually when I was telling Steve about making the investment, I thought he was going to be like, “This is ridiculous that you’re spending the money and we’re driving down to the coast and I remember just telling him, I’ve just decided to sign up for this coaching program” it’s about $2,000, he was like, “Oh yeah. So like about the price of a uni subject.”

I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s right” like it is, like I have a Law degree of Finance degree and a Diploma in French and I have about $75,000 of student debt. It’s different here in Australia. We don’t have the same student line pressure that people in the US do because you only pay it back once. You earn a certain amount of money and then you only pay back a certain percentage like depending on your income and so it’s much less stressful from what I hear of people in the US who are paying back their student loans. And I think- typically people in Australia are a lot less concerned with paying back their student loans than in the US or other countries. But it was just really interesting when he said that because I saw that I was really willing to invest in formal education that everyone approved of and was a normal thing, but I was so scared to invest this money in myself in something that was not typical.

And actually with the coaching client I was mentioning before, she was saying that part of the reason she struggled as well to invest in ourselves is because she’s been brought up being told you need to be really responsible. And she was saying that she has like responsible with money and that she has about $20,000 in student debt and that she had really wanted to invest in this online course about starting a home business, which was $600. But she couldn’t justify paying it off and she didn’t want to go into debt for it. I was like, “Oh, but how you’re going to pay off the 20 grand for the student loans?” She was like, “I’ve got a really clear plan” I was like, “But you can’t pay off $600” and when we really got down to it, it was that she saw investing in formal education where you get a little certificate at the end as responsible spending the same way that many of us see investing in a house as responsible and not.

Most of us don’t have any. If you have a mortgage, don’t have any huge qualms about owing that much money because it’s socially acceptable. Most people do it. It’s recommended instead of when it’s investing in yourself, you don’t get a little certificate at the end. There’s no clear pathway like you have to. It’s really self motivated, self reliant. It feels a lot riskier, but when I think about the amount of money I spent on my formal education and compare that with the amount of money I’ve invested in my business, I’ve invested way less in my business. Even though I’m not using my uni degrees, I am like. I’ve learned a lot from them. I have no regrets and I had a great experience, but I’ve just, my me, myself as well have a similar mindset and I’m working very hard to overcome it and I will talk more on that towards the end of the episode, but I have saying investing in formal education and a house and things like that as responsible and then investing in myself and things where you don’t get a certificate and not everyone’s doing as irresponsible and like a luxury.

So I have been really making sure that I get myself out of that mindset because it makes no sense logically, but especially feel like a people pleaser and you’re scared of rejection. I think it is very normal to see it as totally fine to invest your money in an education you might not use, like you might be halfway through a degree, might have finished a degree that you don’t use and yet it’s scary spending like even $500 on a course. Even though you know for sure that course is going to be super helpful or getting a coat like comparatively the cost of that is so much less. Then a like a college or university course or a subject, but yeah, it really, it can seem like it’s really irresponsible because that’s what we’ve been drilled in, drilled with as we’ve grown up and so I really want us to talk about all of this as well because I’ve just found so much value in investing in myself and if there’s even just one person I can help with this podcast episode to get out of the mentality that it’s irresponsible and risky to invest in yourself and start seeing it as a must and the thing that’s going to change everything.

Then this will all be worth it. So Yeah, I invested in coaching with Jan and that was really great in the sense that she, I just gave myself permission. I remember the first coaching session we’re going through like what are your goals? And I was saying like, you know, I’d like to become a coach and I would really like to leave my full time job thinking that like I had never had anyone think that that was a good option. Mind you, barely told anyone, but I had just projected it that no one would ever think it was good. She’s like, “Yeah, that sounds good” Like, “Wait, huh? Like, aren’t you going to say that’s crazy?” So she really gave me or talking to her. I really gave myself permission to want what I wanted and she really made it feel normal by meeting up with her online every.

She was in the UK, so every two weeks really just helped me see where I was holding myself back. it really helped me create a plan to move forward and I got so much out of that coaching with her and it really helped me get out of my own way basically. Like that was really the beginning. That and investing in the course together. Those things really helped me start to get out of my own way. And I had been trying. It felt like I was trying so hard before them, but I can really see that like I was spending so much time struggling and doing busy work and trying to figure out things on my own and not believing in myself enough to spend money on myself and then I was just like, “Fuck it, why can’t I spend money on something that’s so important to me and that is going to change my life” and that’s when I started spending money and it is totally paid off.

So the next thing I’ve written is investing in books. This is something that probably should’ve been put first. I’ve written next to it. Money spent on a book is always money well spent because that is really what I learned from my mom and my dad. That books are always worth it. I’ve never had any problem spending money on a book and whenever I talk to my Dad and talk about anything, he’ll be like, “Yeah, I’ve just read a book on that” Or “I have a book on that” so I’ve always loved investing in books and I think that that completely undervalued in the sense that when someone writes a book, in most cases, they have spent maybe two to three years piecing together and personal development books, but I also definitely believe in fiction and all of that, but they have spent maybe two years putting together and summarizing succinctly everything that they know on a topic.

And so I have been trying, I’ve been failing the last few weeks, but I have been making an effort to read more because I think the information in a book, it’s so much more valuable than me always just like scrolling through Instagram or getting all these quick little bits of advice. I do believe in that and I love podcasts episodes and everything and they’ve completely changed my life. But books have as well, and I’ve spoken about this at quite a few times, but especially when I started applying the books because as I mentioned, if something’s free or cheap, it is easy not to apply it. So most people who read a book, and this was myself included, read a book, get super inspired, three days later they’ve forgotten most of the content and they move on with their life and maybe there might be one little bit from the book that continues, but when I really started to study my books so and I have a highlighter when I’ve got tabs, my whole experience change.

And so I see books in a totally new way. I don’t do the highlighting and tabby when I’m reading fiction, there’s absolutely no need and I read fiction books for a different reason than I read personal development and business fictions, more of an escape and creative thinking and that kind of thing. and business strategy and mindset though. There are so many gems in fiction books. I recently finished those into high Pato, which is probably at least my 10th time through the series. There are so many wise things in that book, like in that series, I, I, it’s probably why it’s so good and well I’ll navigate over Harry potter, but books, something I’ve invested in, I invested in personal training. This was something for me that really showed me, I guess, the approach that most people have, myself included towards investing in something that most people don’t invest in.

So I started investing in personal training and I think I just got the taste for it after investing in that course and just started like, yeah, I’m going to spend my money. So, I had been like, I’ve been into the gym from, I think when I say you’re 10 and 11, I’ve always been like very okay with a bit, definitely all or nothing for a lot of it. And my last podcast, episode, episode 41 was actually on my fitness journey and how I created a growth mindset and got myself out of the all or nothing mindset. So listened to that if you want to know more. But I was really like, I don’t know exactly why even. But I just thought that if I got a personal trainer, it would really help me and encourage me to be consistent, to take everything to the next level, to just really invest that in my health, in my fitness, have something solid to work towards.

I really felt like at the time that I needed something to work on that wasn’t my business and my blog. I just wanted something that I just did for me and I had definitely been doing that already. I was going to the gym, I was super into Bikram Yoga for a couple of years, just so many different things I had been doing, but I can’t even remember exactly why now that I decided to invest in personal training and it was $80 per session, which was an hour and I was just like, that’s ridiculous. That’s so much money to spend when I could do it myself. I was also contending with Steve who believed that you don’t need a personal trainer. I didn’t need to pass on training, that I could just do it myself. And this really highlights I think the power of embarrassing because yes, I could do it myself.

That wasn’t the issue. Like I wasn’t doing it because I couldn’t do it myself. I was doing it because I knew it was going to be easier and it was going to be better if I had someone there to be kicking me accountable to be helping me achieve my goals, to be showing me the exercises I needed to do. Yes, there’s a million free things I could piece together. But again, I just hadn’t been getting the results. I was trapped in all or nothing and I just wanted someone that was with me together in the journey. so yeah, so that was why I started investing in personal training and I really became fitter set. I’ve ever been. I’m, I’m not doing personal training anymore because my personal trainer, jace, who is a very good friend of mine, moved overseas and then I just didn’t get another personal training when he left.

I really felt like I was in a very good habit when he left that I didn’t need necessarily another one. I think I worked with him for maybe like a year or so. but that really helps me and I see it now as $80 being such a small investment, not the $80 is nothing, but considering what I got out of it, it definitely seems worth it. And when I was saying before that, it really showed me what other people think. Like when I was telling people I’ve got a personal trainer and like I wasn’t overweight. I wasn’t like, it wasn’t like, yeah, you definitely need a pet. I was fit, I was healthy. And to invest in something, to take yourself from good to great instead of most people in the inverse when they’re going from wanting to go from rock bottom and like everyone’s like, well, yeah, I agree.

You need to invest in yourself. You need to fix it. But when there’s nothing to be fixed necessarily, most people like, well why would you invest in it? Like it’s already good enough, can’t you just be happy with what you have? I know so many of you as well, like you have a good life, you have a good education, you have supportive friends and family. You have a steady job, you’re smart, you’re ambitious, you’ve got a netflix account, you’ve got like everything’s covered and yet you’re still wanting more and I think that really has a lot of us have been taught growing up, not by anyone intentionally, but this is just kind of society as a whole that you know, it’s greedy to want more than having like good and if you’re above average, that should be enough. Why can’t you just be happy with that and to just really like settle.

So many people just settle for being about a beverage that’s not a word average or slightly above average because there’s so much stigma around investing in yourself when you’re already good at something. But if you think about coaches and you think about all of that, like the top athletes in the world all have coaches like Roger Federer has a tennis coach. Why would he need a tennis coach? He’s like one of the best in the world and has been for about a decade and yet he needs someone to keep teaching him, to keep learning from like everyone needs a coach or someone to help them. Take their life to the next level and I don’t think that you need to have a bad life. Like I think so many people feel trapped because on Instagram and everywhere, like you can see other people suffering with the media and stuff and it’s like, well, you know, I have everything need.

I’ve got a full belly, I’ve got a warm bed, I’ve got clothes, I’ve got like, you know, I’m taken care of. I should be happy with what I’ve got. But I think so many people trapped in that. I definitely felt trapped that like everything looks great from the outside. I’m doing everything I meant to be doing and yet this isn’t enough. Like I just felt like I could be making so much more of a contribution to the world then I was making when I was working in accounting and I felt very replaceable and I felt that there were a lot of people who could do a better job at it than me. Like it wasn’t my gift. I love crunching numbers. I was in insolvency accounting, so it’s not like maybe the accounting that you’d be thinking, but I do love crunchy and a good number and that kind of thing, but I still felt like I’m not meant to be here, but everything looked great.

You know, I’ve got my law degree, I got my finance degree and working in a corporate job for a really good accounting firm, you know, I’m like taking all the boxes but just not feeling satisfied and I think that a lot of us have been taught that should be enough when yes, it is enough, but it’s okay to want more. It’s okay to one to make more of a contribution. It’s okay to invest in yourself. And so when I was investing in personal training, I really had everyone’s beliefs reflected back to me and it was just so interesting because if I had spent $80 on a dress every week, even if I had never worn the dress, even if it just sat in my wardrobe with the tag on, no one would say anything about it because that’s what most people do. Most people don’t invest in improving themselves so often we’re met with a lot of people around us being like, what are you doing that’s a waste of money.

You could do it by yourself. Yes, you could do it by yourself, but you can do it quicker and better with someone helping you. And Steve for sure, like he was saying that, you know, you don’t need a pet, you can do it yourself. Like it’s all good. And when I’d come home and say like, “Hey, this is what I did today in PT” be like, “Oh, you should do this slightly different in this. Slightly different in this slightly different” he is an impersonal trainer. Steve would probably be a really great one but I was like, “I’m paying a PT so I don’t have to think about what to do. And I am for sure not there to be like actually Steve, my boyfriend who’s not a PT thinks that you’re doing this wrong and that I should actually do three sets of 10 instead of” whatever it was or changing my grip or doing a certain move differently or that one’s on actually good. This movie’s about. It’s like that’s not why I’m doing pd, I’m not doing it so that I can improve it. Like I’m just doing it because I just wanted someone to tell me what to do and to follow it.

I just felt so overwhelmed trying to figure out exactly what program to do, when to do it, how to do it. All of that. Even though I felt fairly confident in the gym already, he definitely have any issues walking into a gym and using the equipment and all of that, which I know some people do have. I didn’t have any of that, but I was just like, I just want to like, I just felt like in my business, my blog, which wasn’t yet a business really with my blog, I was just in charge all the time and I just wanted to not be in charge for a bit and investing in pat was really a way that I could just let someone else being charged for a bit.

And I know that might sound weird, but when you’re just struggling along, it can be really nice to have someone who knows exactly what you need to do, just tell you to do it, when to do it. I really like became the fittest I have been ever and also in the most growth mindset and just had such a healthy relationship was with it. I don’t think it always goes like that for everyone. And it did require a lot from me to make sure that it was going in that direction. But I made sure that it wasn’t focused on my appearance, which I had been before and that it was really focused on performance and on consistency and on effort rather than a particular result. But of course, because I was putting effort in so consistently, the results came so, so that I can get through all of these.

I’m going to keep going. I could probably do a whole podcast episode on each investment. But the next investment I’ve written down his blog themes. So this is something that came up when I was teaching my blogging workshops recently. And if you missed out on those, I will be relaunching them as a package at some point this month, so before the end of August, that will be available and you can join The Smart Twenties Facebook Bloggers group as well once you sign up. So I know a lot of you have been asking when I’m going to do another blogging workshop and in those I really teach mindset and technical stuff as well, but it’s really about how to get out of the perfectionist mindset and persist and how to really like all the mindset stuff that I can’t really see anyone else teaching. So anyway, in those workshops, people were asking me about themes and I wanted to share that a feel things I’ve invested in and I shared this in the workshops, but I’ll share it here as well.

I invested in a theme from Etsy. I invested in this- I think actually this should maybe be the first investment it was when I was traveling at the end of 2015. I was in Europe, I was in Budapest when I bought it and I paid for the girl to install it because I didn’t have a computer with me, though it’s super simple to install that stuff yourself and that was really the first thing I think that I invested in with my blog because that was before I invested in the course and other programs. So yeah, I think that was really the first investment. Then the second thing I got was from Pipdig. I’m going to link all of this stuff in the show notes by the way, which you’ll find at smart-twenties.com/episode42. So if you want to look at any of the programs or anything that I mentioned in this, go and check that out.

So yeah, the second thing was from Pipdig and I actually just recently bought a new theme that you guys haven’t yet seen, but it’s from Station7. So all of those eventually inexpensive. I think the first one I paid for installation, so it was maybe 150 and the second two. I think we’re about 70 to 80 each, so yeah, the just other investments, I don’t have too much to say on them except that like I did have a free theme for the first two years. There was no issue with it, but I just wanted something a little prettier so I decided to invest in that and then I invested. Hmm. Is this in the right order? That’d be about right. I invested in Melyssa Griffin’s Pinterest course, Pinfinite growth, which was about AUD$500 I think. I think maybe it was like three US$97, so I invested in that.

This is after I quit my full time job, so at some point in that, like I did the coaching with Jen and I finished up with her at the end of that year and then in March, the next year I left my full time job. And I’ve spoken about that in previous episodes. I will not go into that story again for the $50 million at that time, but I think in my first and third episode, episode one and episode three, I really go into that story. So this is now after I have quit my job. So I invested in Melyssa Griffin’s Pinterest course, because Pinterest was and is where I get the majority of my blog traffic and she had really grown her blog with Pinterest and this was one of the investments of any of them that I feel might not have been as worth it. I definitely learned a lot from the course, but I’d already done so much of my own research, and lists and read so many of her blog posts and had really been following her very, very closely that I felt like, oh, I don’t know because I did actually put a lot into pack.

There was a lot in her course that she didn’t share and now is a lot that I put into practice because I did the course. So I do think it was worth it. but I really just wanted to up my Pinterest game and make sure that I was getting traffic from that. I think actually the reason that course for me, I feel a bit like that about it is because I didn’t fully commit to it and I had this belief of like I already know what to do. Like I’m already good at Pinterest that I didn’t come to it with fresh eyes. I didn’t do a lot of the things she recommended actually. and I think that that’s why it didn’t pay off and for sure if I had really put it in, put in the work, I’m a hundred percent sure it would have been definitely like a no-brainer hundred percent worth it.

But because I didn’t go to it with that commitment, I think it was because where I was at at the time just quit my job and I was in this period of doing a lot of busy work and I’m not doing the things that mattered. So I was doing stuff like this. Pinterest cost, even though my Pinterest was already good when I wasn’t writing blog posts, I wasn’t posting on Instagram. I didn’t have my podcast yet. I didn’t have a YouTube channel yet. Actually, no, I think maybe I just started it but I really wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t promoting my blog, free or paid promotion, nothing. Like I was just basically doing busy work because I was so scared to be putting in effort and have it fail. And I was like not putting in a hundred percent effort so that if it failed I could be like, “Oh, but if I’d tried harder it would have worked.”

I’ve spoken about this mentality before, but really holding back efforts to be like, to allow there to be that excuse that If I tried harder I would have done better. That is something that has come up for me so many times. I’m much better now Still comes up every now and again but that was that investment. The next investment is a program that I did called Money & You, which was about $2,500 which I paid in a payment plan in $500 increments and this program was good, but I think that I was probably further along– like it actually this, I do think it was good. I think I’ve spent better money elsewhere for sure, like, I would say I got a lot more out of doing the Landmark Forum. It also depends where you are and everything like that. But I learned a lot from like, that really showed me myself sabotaging behavior money.

And was this course like In-Person Weekend, super intense, like long, long, long days. I think it was actually, I want to say it was like a night, so a few hours at night and then three days that were like 9:00 AM, like two of the nights went till 3:00 AM. Oh yeah, I don’t know. It was a bit nuts. Anyway, it was very intense. And there are programs like that that are very intense as in you basically only at the program or you’re asleep and I find that they are really transformative but also like I have to write off the complete week after it. So I knew I really learned a lot about myself. There were all these games, so a lot of what’s taught is through games, games that you like, are similar to what you think of if you played at high school game to learn something.

And so there’d be a game. A lot of it was related to money but a lot of it related to personal development and again, they’re the same thing to me. So I really stopped from doing that my self-sabotaging behavior because I basically almost every game I didn’t try because I thought immediately like there’s no way I can win this game so I’m just going to not try and just how I behave. Like it’s hard to explain it. But I just really saw myself in a lot of ways. I also saw during that course that I still had a lot of work to do around my mom passing away when I was 11, that I still, at the time I thought it was grief and this is why I think that, and maybe there was a portion that was grief, but at that time, I think the reason why I got so much more out of the Landmark Forum is because when I was doing the Money & You course program, like you really had to be open and vulnerable and I did get to a point where I was like bawling my eyes out and physically shaking.

And I thought that that was great. And the thing as well is in that program, they didn’t really tell you what to do with anything. It was just like you experienced it and then it was kinda like, “Hey, you have to figure out what the issue is” so, I’ll talk about the Landmark Forum in a bit and I’ve spoken about it before, but what I have since realized that is that it actually wasn’t really grief. It was shame. And it wasn’t until I saw and if I didn’t do many new– that triggered a chain of events that led to the breakthrough I had at the Landmark Forum which I will share. God, this is going to go– this is 50 minutes already. Anyway, I’m going to keep going. So I really had, yeah, I just saw myself that was really like a mirror but I didn’t quite know what to do with what I’d learned.

And then through that I met one of the other participants whose name is Kit and he was working in coaching previously. And I got along really well with him and he had already told me some very helpful things and I was like, “Can you coach me?” and if you watched my series, my vlogs that I was doing on YouTube, you will have heard me talking about Kit because I was doing that at a similar time to when I was coaching with Kit. And I shared a lot of what we talked about in different coaching sessions. So you can always go back and find that on YouTube if you care. So, so from doing money in you I met Kit and that investment was about $500 per month and we just met up for an hour every week and he really helped me. he didn’t have any real experience with blogging or like didn’t really know what Instagram was, all of that kind of thing, but he really helped me get out of my own way and he really helped show me that I was speaking about what I was doing in such a diminishing way that I wouldn’t even let myself be like, “Yes, it’s going well” or like I just couldn’t. I was always like, you know, like, “Yeah, it’s good but this, this, this, but I’m not making much money but” on and on and on. So he really helped me with that. He helped me start to get into a really good routine with working. I was meeting up with him every week, which I think every week is such a good increment. When I was doing with Jen every fortnight, I really found that there was too much time in between catch ups that I’d spent about a week of it fluffing around and then a week doing software as when it was every week I really had to get my ass into gear and it was, I could really feel the consistency of having the weekly meetings. So I definitely enjoy doing a weekly, like having weekly accountability instead of fortnightly or every two weeks. so he helped me a lot and it got to a point where I had gotten out of my own way enough that then I could do stuff myself.

Like I kind of outgrew it in the sense that he didn’t have business experience, like he had business experience but not online business experience. So I just felt like I needed someone that I could bounce, like get strategy and business ideas and that kind of thing, which he wasn’t able to do, but he helped me so much with getting out of my own way, seeing my value. I’m really getting, creating routine. And it was incredibly valuable and he had been chained through Landmark. So he’s the reason that I did the Landmark Forum kept recommending it again. It took me. He recommended it from the beginning. He was like, “I think this would be really great for you.” He was never pushy about it, but he’s like, “By the way, there’s this thing I a hundred percent believe in it. It really helped me” and I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t need it.”

So I think it was September when I signed up for Landmark and it was June when we started coaching. So it often takes me a few months to wrap my head around something, and to really decide to go for it. So two things that came from investing in the coaching with Kit and I wanted to mention it that these have a [inaudible 00:52:50] effect as well because it is kind of like that you invest in one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. Which is why it’s so powerful to invest because if you don’t invest in the first thing, then you never get the things that come after it. So through him, I decided that I want to incorporate Smart Twenties, I think because of my insolvency background that I had had. I have an acute awareness of what happens when people don’t pay their taxes and aren’t financially responsible with their business.

And I really wanted to not be one of those people. And also Steve and I were thinking of buying a house which we did end up buying in November. We hadn’t found this house yet, but we had plans to buy a house and I just didn’t want that to be on the table if something went wrong, I wanted to have separate liability and to just have my company being its own thing. And so I wanted to have an accountant because even though I have a law degree, I have a finance degree, I am pretty smart. I could probably figure it out. All the informations on Google. I just think it’s one of those things like you don’t know what you don’t know. And I really wanted to make sure that I had someone who knew it and like I got her to do my, like I love doing my own tax, and I got her to do my tax that year because I was like, “I don’t know what I don’t know” and like there will all these kinds of different things that she could do that I had no idea like relating to having a sole trade or small business. Anyway, definitely worth the money and she has just done my financial statements for the company I incorporated a year ago.

So she’s on the financial statements and my company tax return and personal tax return. Anyway, the point is that I have invested in accountant and Kit was the one that recommended her because I was like, “I have no idea where to find an accountant” like, you know, there are big firms with that. There are just so many. And I really wanted to pass on recommendation” and then I asked Kit and he recommended my accountant and she’s been great. I just needed a recommendation and it came from him because I just wanted someone that I knew I could trust and got the online stuff. so yeah, so invested in her, done. I invested in the Landmark Forum which is like a three-day, very intense. Again, similar to money, new kind of, but very different, but a three-day in person program that I did in November last year.

And it was in that actually it was before that, that I realized, and I’ve spoken about this before and I go into it in my episode that I did about the breakthroughs I’ve had in personal development. but it was during that, like once I signed up for the Landmark Forum before I did it, I’m kid helped me see that I had had all this shame around money and then I had. And then seeing that made me see that I also had like this being ashamed was a pattern and that I had felt ashamed that I didn’t have a mother even though I did, you know what I mean? Like I had attached shame and I still can’t even believe now when I talk about it, like I can talk about it, like I don’t have all this emotional charge around it. Whereas before I just couldn’t even mentioned her without just being like completely shaking physically.

It was just this like deep buried down shame. So I had that breakthrough, which was absolutely huge and I also had a huge breakthrough around me thinking I’m not good enough. And since then my story about I’m not good enough has like 95% evaporated. It’s– I can’t even explain because I knew intellectually before it that I was good enough and we all hear it. You’re good enough, you are enough. Whatever. It doesn’t make a difference if you don’t believe it. And through during that personal development work that was very intense, very required, a lot of vulnerability and to feel a lot of things, not for the faint of heart. I’m through doing that. I really had that, like actually get it. Not Intellectually, but actually truly got it. So that was good that I did the advanced course in March, this year so the Landmark Forum just so we’re talking about money, wait, let me tell you how much for accounting work.

So I think it was maybe like $400 that I paid her initially to do my tax return and then this time I think it’s about a thousand dollars just as a ballpark of how much it cost. So, just because I wanted to be open and share how much money I’m investing. So Landmark Forum, I think the first ones maybe like I want to say $700. I can’t remember exactly– under a thousand, but more than $500. And then I did the Landmark advanced course in March, which was good. But for me I found like I got a lot more out of the Landmark Forum. The Landmark Advanced course has a different focus. It’s like the Landmark Forums focused on you. Whereas the Landmark Advanced course for his own like at the level of community and it was really good and I got a lot from it and when I was in it, I signed up to do the final course, but then I haven’t done it.

Like I don’t know if I will at this stage. I feel like I’ve gotten so much from doing the Landmark stuff, but I feel like I didn’t even know how to describe it at the moment. I’m not thinking that I will do the final course even though I paid for it. It was $340. I don’t really care about sunk costs if I’ve already paid for something. I’m not going to do it just because I paid for it. I know that’s mainly like sounding conflicting with what I said about, if you paid for it then you’re going to really put the effort in. But I’m going to put the effort in if it is something that I wanted to do, but then there are some things that I’ve bought and then I’m like, “Actually I don’t want to do that” and I’m happy to just let the money go. That probably not how I say it, like that sounds really conflicting and like it doesn’t make sense because you can’t have it both ways.

But I find that when it is something that I’ve really wanted to do and I’m not doing it because I’ve just been scared to do it then and like I know that thing’s going to take me to the next level. Then I really put the effort in and make it worth it. But if I bought something that I then don’t think like I’m sure if I do it I would get a lot from it. But it is a huge time commitment. It’s like a weekly time commitment and then one day every month and all this stuff and I just don’t feel like it’s the best fit for me at the moment. So yeah, that’s probably confusing that I explained it like that.

But sometimes I’m like, no, I’ve spent the money, but I don’t want to spend the time. Sorry. That’s why that is. So I invested in self coaching scholars, which is Brooke Castillo. Is there a podcast episode where I mentioned her name? I don’t think so. I’m actually this last week I’ve been listening to so much of Kathrin Zenkina from Manifestation Babe, probably talking about it next that I was like, “I don’t think I’ve had Brooke’s voice this week” so I watched one of her videos last night. That’s in the Self coaching scholars program. She coaches people live. It’s amazing if you’re not, if you never see anyone get coached live. I think that’s like from in Money & You they did it in the Landmark Forum and the advanced course, you get to watch people be coached. You don’t ever have to be coached yourself, but seeing people get coached, it is incredibly powerful.

I’ve had so many breakthroughs just from seeing someone else get coached because I feel like when I’m hearing someone else get coached and like every issue is basically the same issue at some level, but when you hear someone else get coached on something similar but slightly different, you can see the problem and you can see the solution and you can see the thinking and completely different way and when you’re not in it, you’re not defensive, you’re not really attached to it. And if you’re just watching someone, like I’ve just found it so powerful and I think like a lot of the breakthroughs that I had, in Money & You as well, like it’s, it was such a blur. But that was some really powerful moments. Like I will never forget of watching people getting coached and like huge.

I like basically tear up thinking about the things that I saw people work through. Same in the Landmark Forum and the advanced course. And so in self coaching scholars, Brooke coaches people. So anyway, the program is US$297 a month. So it’s about 400 Australian. She announced it at the beginning of 2017 and you guys know I’m such a big fan of Brooke. Like the day I made her is going to be the best day. So, I’m, I say that like it’s definitely happening because in my mind it is definitely happening. There’s just no data on it yet. But anyway, sorry. She launched her self coaching scholars program, which I get so many emails about, like do I recommend it? A hundred percent, of course, I recommend it. I love it. I begin in nearly a full year and Brooke has so many amazing courses, but I find particularly helpful to self, like the, there’s a monthly theme and a monthly workbook, but I find I get the most from watching other people get coached.

I could be also getting coached but because she’s in the US and most of it is in the wee hours of the morning, which I could wake up for it and I just haven’t. But I get so much from watching people being coached and just the different. So many different things. Like I can’t speak highly enough. But having said that, even though in box number one fan and I have been following her podcast very closely for about a year and a half, she announced that she was doing self coaching scholars. I was like, “Oh no, that’s too much money” Like when I found out how much it was like, “Ugh, I can’t pay that amount of money” and it took me until September, so like nine months. And part of the reason is because she was saying like, you know, I teach all my best stuff on the podcast for free. If you can’t afford it, you can just really apply what I do on the podcast.

So when she’d been saying that, I say, “Okay, I’m going to really make an effort to apply what she talks about on the podcast” and I really struggled with it and I then I was in the mentality of like, “Well, if I’m not going to apply this, then I won’t get much from her program.” Anyway, I came to my senses in September and I was like this, I know this is going to be amazing. I know that by getting myself in there and paying the money like the way that I equated it as well, so $400 a month, and it’s an ongoing, like he can cancel it at any time. but $400 a month. I was like, “That’s like $100 a week for my mental health and if I’m willing to pay $80 a week plus a gym membership. So I was paying about $100 a week for my physical health. Why am I not willing to put the same investment into my mind” at that time I’d finished coaching with- actually no, I think I was still was a bit of overlap when I was coaching with Kit. I really don’t know why it took me forever, but basically I was like, “Why wouldn’t this be amazing? I just need something to follow. I need someone who’s just going to lay out the steps, I really wanted to watch her coach other people” I was hearing her talk about on the podcast. I was like, “Why am I not just investing in it?” So I signed up. I’ve never regretted it for a second, definitely it was a financial stretch in the beginning and I was like, “I don’t know how we’re going to keep paying this money” but for sure it was worth it and I have been paying for it and it’s amazing.

So that is something that I definitely have found a lot of value from and I think the reason when I’ve been talking about a Landmark Forum stuff and doing the third course and everything is that I find that, I think at the highest level old personal development comes back to the same point. but the way that the Landmark people describe it compared to Brooke, I just resonate so much more with like I found Landmark was great for breakthroughs. I had breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough in their courses but hen I found, I’ll go home from the three-day intense course and it was very challenging to apply anything myself in between the Landmark Forum and the Advanced course, I did a weekly follow on. It was like 10 sessions over a 10-week period. It was included in the cost of the Landmark Forum.

I think the Landmark Forum is very good value for money, very, very good. You get a lot from it in terms of time and resources and everything like that. So, I did this course in between, but I just found that I really struggled to like, I don’t know even how to describe it, but the way that Landmark taught, I found it’s great when someone’s coaching you in that method and Kit was coaching me using the way that they talk about things, but I really struggled to do it myself and I found that in Brooks course and with Brooks model, which a lot of you guys know because I’ve gotten you into her podcasts, but she basically has this formula for figuring out, you know, what the issue is, or I don’t even know. That’s not a great way to explain it, but it’s based on your thoughts.

Create your feelings, create your actions, create your results so you can plug something into the thought line and see what feelings, actions and results will follow. You can plug something into the results line and see what actions created that, what feeling created the action and what thought created the feeling. And I just found that to be a really helpful way that I can coach myself. I have been able to coach myself through a lot of situations. and I will talk about actually how I use that to make an investment decision that I made this last week. I hope you guys are loving the long podcast episode because I still got a lot to say and I did two Facebook Lives this morning. I did one in, I don’t know if I mentioned this at the beginning of the episode that feels like so long ago now, but, I did one in the smart 20th community group and one of The Smart Twenties Bloggers Group and I had planned each to go for half an hour and I just talked for an hour in both.

I’m pretty sure. So I have chatted a lot today, not to anyone except myself. Anyway, so yeah, I hope this is helpful though and I know I love hearing this stuff from other people. I love hearing the numbers. I love hearing where the things were worth it and just getting a real, like I’m really trying to be as transparent and open as I possibly can be. So I just find that with the Self-coaching Scholars and the way that broke teachers, I just vibe with that so well I think and she speaks about it a lot, that she really wants to be an example of what’s possible as a coach and as a female entrepreneur or just an entrepreneur. We don’t need to call a female entrepreneur, just an entrepreneur and I really think that she is such a great example and I love following her for that and I just find that I really aspire to just have an approach to life that she has.

I also really liked that she talks about that life is 50/50, that you’re not meant to feel happy all the time just because I think so many of us do believe that we should feel happy all the time and if we don’t, something’s wrong and then we feel bad about feeling bad and then we feel bad about feeling bad about feeling bad and then it just kind of ends up being shitty. But if you’d like, “Okay, well half of life is going to feel average or I’m going to feel anxious, I’m going to feel worried or I’m going to feel uncomfortable and that’s okay” and then you stop trying to escape it and then you actually have a better feeling life because you’re not constantly trying to escape anyway. There’s so much I’ve learned from her. It’s very infused through what I teach on this podcast on my blog and my Instagram.

A lot of the time I feel like maybe I’m just like, I worry, I actually am concerned sometimes that I’m just like a lesser, not a lesser version of broke, but that I’m just repeating what she has said without adding anything extra to it. I know for sure that it’s not the case because I do look at all her teachings through my own lens and everything like that, but sometimes I’m like, oh my God, I’m just so obsessed with her work that basically that’s all that I share. So that’s something that I invested in in September and continue to do so on a monthly basis. So that’s $400 also because I mentioned before that I have incorporated smart twenties. All of these personal development, professional development costs are paid by the company, which is kind of in a way me, but legally separate. so I’m using the money that I make from my online courses and coaching and that kind of thing to pay for it.

I’m just to be clear. So now we’re getting to more recent things. Actually, there’s a few things I want to cover off that I’ve just kind of always been investing in or have for the last couple of years. So I’ve always had it basically a gym membership. It’s something that I really see as a very good use of my money. I love going to the gym. I find that when I’m just working out at home, I’m really not doing much if I’ve ever been like I’m going to save money on gym membership and just work out from home. It just doesn’t happen. I really liked being in a separate space and I will get onto this again when I talk about coworking behind, so I really liked being in a separate space. When I’m at the gym, I like it to be an event. I like to actually go to the gym and then leave the gym.

It might be different if I had a super flashy gym at home, but even then I’ve lived in apartments before that have a gem within the complex and I have used them a bit, but I still much prefer going to a gym and I think also because they have more equipment and machines and all of that. So I’ve always basically, since I’ve been an adult, I think since year 11, 10, 11 maybe 10’s too young. Year 11, I’ve had a gym membership and I see that as very good use of my money. I also pay $19 per month. The Kayla Itsines’ Sweat App, which is a bloody godsend. Like I probably would have a PT again if it wasn’t for this app because she, like Kayla had seen as speaking of people that I absolutely admire her. She in my mind is just fucking killing it because she has just got such a strong community and she is, has a product that in my eyes is exactly what I want.

And also in all her interviews that I’ve watched, she just seems like the most humble to go. Like she still has one-on-one coaching clients that I’m sure wouldn’t be that expensive because she just really enjoys doing it. Like considering she has 10 million Instagram followers, I’m sure she could charge anything for our personal session. but anyway, so basically I have this sweat app which is a fine app, if you don’t know what it is. And she has teamed up with Kelsey Wells who is, I’m pretty sure who just got big on Instagram because she did Kayla’s Bikini Body Guide. And also, Sjanna, I don’t know how to pronounce her name. I haven’t done hers. Sjana Elise who has yoga, so in the app there’s Body and Mind, BBG Stronger, BBG Post-pregnancy stuff, which I don’t have kid so I’m not doing that and I do the one that is called Power which is actually Kelsey Wells’ program, but I absolutely love it because I found that like even with PT you get a list of all the exercises and it requires like you need to have this machine and this machine at the same time and they’re on opposite sides of the gym or like you know you’re going to need like the machines are the most popular machines and I just felt like stressed whenever I was at the gym because I had to rely on certain bits of equipment and then I had to like save bits of equipment and it just was super stressful for me. But in this program, you only have a need one thing at once or if you need two things you can do something on the floor next to the machine.

So I have just found it to be the best thing ever. Like they’ve really thought through what the gym experience is like where I think a lot of programs, they think about what the exercises are like but don’t think about, “Okay, well, when I’m on the gym floor, do I want to be having to save three pieces of equipment at once at the gym time?” So that’s something that I invest in as well, which is $20. I have actually just signed up. I changed gyms like once every six months. I swear to God, I’m always changing gyms because I just go to wherever is most convenient. So I had been going to a gym that’s near my house, but I have just signed up for a coworking space, which I’ll talk about again in a second, but there’s a gym right next to the coworking space. So I signed up for that and quit my local gym.

Anyway, going back, I invested in a lot of different programs for my business. So when I first started, I didn’t have any. I was using like free Mailchimp for my emails and I didn’t buy a blog theme until a couple of years in as I was saying, so I don’t think that was really many expenses except at the beginning of this should be number one. I invested in hosting and I’ve gotten so many questions about this when I’ve talked about it in my blogging workshop. Should you invest in hosting? Shouldn’t you? What the hell is hosting? Hosting is basically, I have no idea about tech stuff, you guys, but basically someone, somewhere has your files on their server is how I would explain it. Probably a horrible explanation. This is why I try not to get into it too deep.

I just know that I need it and I buy it. But I had started actually a few free wordpress blogs. I actually, this is really funny. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this. I got an email the other day on my old Gmail account back in the day. I used to have smart-twenties@gmail.com before I set it up with Google to have sam@smart-twenties.com and it said: Your WordPress blog, Minty Marshmallow. I had a blog code, Minty Marshmallow, I mean, is that a word? Is that a bad name? I’d say so, but I had a few other ones too with similarly great names as well and they’re all free and then I was like, “I need to actually pay for this blog because I’m not going to put the effort in, if I don’t and why not?” Just like, even though I think it was like 100 bucks.

And to me that was like, that was money I didn’t really want to be spending, but I think as well because I’d heard about it on so many podcasts, I just really had the belief that I needed to start investing and that really was, I think the OG, the original investment that I made in my blog and in my personal development because blogging is what a hundred percent kicked off my personal development journey. I barely even realized that I was a perfectionist until I started a blog. So that is probably the first thing that I invested in in. I know I’m going off on incredible tangents and this is a long episode, but I love– guys, I love long podcast episodes. I love like going along in my car and then I get to walk and then during work I’m looking forward to listening to it again.

Then I get home and then I’m looking forward to listening to it again the next day. So anyway, if you’re doing that, hello. And I love doing that. So I invested in a few different things I invested in. I’m trying to go, “Oh my God” it constantly, I’m trying to say them in the order that it would have been. First of all, I would have invested in ConvertKit. So that was something that came up when I did that course Your First 1K and I kind of saw that if I was going to be successful, if I achieve my goals with that course, then it was going to be financially better to be using ConvertKit, which have recently changed our name to SEVA. I much prefer the name ConvertKit. But anyway, they have recently changed that name, but I signed up with them and that was $29 a month when I didn’t really even have many people in my email list.

And I definitely saw that it’s like US$29 as well. So like AUD$40. It’s like, “Oh, it just seems like way too much money” but I invested, I think all of these things like, each time I invested in myself, I really had to believe in myself a little more and a little more and a little more and it all adds up. So invested in ConvertKit when I was launching dream habit, I needed a platform to do that. And the one that was recommended was teachable, which I definitely recommend as well as combat Kit. I love them both. So I invested in teachable, which was US$99 a month. That seemed like, I don’t know, a huge stretch. I think initially for the first few months as a planet study, $9 a month, but then you have to, you can only get paid out once per month.

Whereas on the $99 plan and they haven’t increased surprising since then, so it’s not like it goes up all the time. I’m the $99 plan. You can get paid out directly via Stripe or Paypal and you get paid as soon as you get. You don’t have to get paid through teachable. You get paid through Paypal and Stripe, which means you get the money basically a couple of days after the person purchases a course. So. And also it makes sense once you’re selling a certain amount of courses that it pays itself off. I also signed up for Leadpages around the same time and Leadpages is $150 a month. No, no, it’s not true. It is $150 per quarter. I think there’s a, I want to say it’s a AUD$150 per quarter. I think it might be like US$111 or something like that and all of these things and I know I spoke about a lot of US dollars and I know that I also charge people in US dollars.

I actually got an email about that this morning is because most of you guys are in the US and most of the things I buy are in the US dollar as well, which still doesn’t really. I still have to pay the conversion anyway, so I’m Leadpages, which is a program that I use. If you go to my blog and you see any opt in boxes, pop up boxes, everything except this, the bar that’s along the top of my blog, which is actually called SumoMe’ something like that AppSumo maybe they did that, but I sign up for that before that costs money. Now that costs money, but I got in and I was like [inaudible 01:21:07] when it was free so I don’t pay for that, but everything else comes from Leadpages that as well as like that is a huge investment. I don’t know who’s going to be worth the money, but the boxes look so much prettier and I just liked that I could customize them and do all sorts of things, so I invested in that.

A few other things I invest in, not all of them, but I quickly had a look through my bank statement Planoly, which is what I use for Instagram scheduling. If you are on Instagram and you’re not using it, I highly recommend it. There’s a few other ones that do the same thing, but basically you get a grid and you can plan photos and see what they’d look like as if you had posted them and shuffle them around and schedule things. It doesn’t post automatically do I think maybe now it can, but I like to add hashtags after it in the first comment. So I do it manually, but it can, like it just really helps me plan out everything and see what it’ll look like and I can upload heaps of photos in there at once and then just have it as a bank instead of having to always go through my camera roll.

Basically if I’m on Instagram. I was getting so stressed about like every time you needed to post it was like, “Okay, I have to go through my camera roll. I have to like make an image right now” whereas I can batch it together and put it in Planoly and then someone also asked me for this workflow, so I’m going to share it here as well because some of you might be interested. So I get now a lot of questions about how I create my Instagram quotes. So process is first is to what do I do? I write the quote in Google docs, then I copy and paste it into Canva. I have my own template in Canva so there is no like nothing in Canva that looks like my quotes. It’s something that I made myself. If you’re wanting to do it, I highly recommend creating your own template and not copy mine or someone else’s because part of what like I make mine the same way so that when someone sees it they don’t even have to see my name to know that it’s me and I therefore don’t recommend you copy mine or someone else’s because you want to create your own so that when people say yours, they think it’s yours, not someone else’s.

So I do that. Put it in Canva, fiddle around with it to get it formatted properly. Then I export it as a pdf. I use a program called small pdf, which is another one of my investments I think at $6 a month that converts it from a pdf to a jpeg. You can export straight from jpeg from Canva, but it comes out blurry. I used to do it like that before I realized that that was the issue. You can, if you scroll back quite a bit on my Instagram account, you can see that they used to be quite blurry and small. PDF is actually free if you do less than two images a day, but there are some days that I need to do more than two images, so I pay for it. Then once I have done that and got it into the jpeg, I put it in Planoly and I write my caption.

Then I go on my phone, I open the app and I post it to Instagram from Planoly. I don’t know if I’m saying that right, Planoly. Anyway, that’s what I do and I also invest in Canva. That is a free version that was more than enough for me for a very long time, but I now have the paid version. That’s just a few extra features. I invest money into Libsyn, which hosts my podcast episodes. I was investing in Boardbooster before it closed, which was a Pinterest pinning tool. I think there are definitely other things as well like my hosting for my blog which is ongoing and different things like that, so that is some more things that I’ve invested in. I have also been investing for a few years now into the Headspace app, which is about 20 bucks per month. I think it might be 19 per month where I just use that to meditate and on that app has the dreamiest British voice and some months I don’t use it like, I go in and out with meditation, but I just always like having it there. It’s a small investment in my mental health and just my general well-being. So now I’m going to talk about some more recent things. So the next one is that I have invested in Kathrin Zenkina’s VIP Tribe, which basically I haven’t spoken about her too much. I think recently I’ve started to talk about him more. So Kathrin Zenkina, I think she’s 25 or 26 she has a blog Becoming An Empire called Manifestation Babe. And she talks about like when I was starting to get into affirmations again earlier this year and I was following like, [NAMES 1:26:20] who were all Youtubers.

I somehow stumbled upon Kathrin and I used to follow her like back when she started I think when she only had like a thousand or so followers on Instagram. And then I rediscovered her again and she has achieved my impossible goal of like in terms of income, the goal that I’m working towards this year. And she is just to me like the same as Brooke. I really just, just her vibes, like she talks about, things that are a lot more spiritual, a lot of which I don’t really like and I talk about this all the time, but I listened to so many people that I don’t agree or I don’t do everything that they say- like Kathrin talks a lot about, like, you might sage your room or you might get your crystals, we might draw a card. All of this stuff like, I’m not super interested in that stuff, but the stuff that she talks about mindset wise, I find so helpful that it’s okay.

Like I’m okay to hear other things that I’m not super into. It doesn’t diminish it in any way, shape or form for me. So she’s definitely a lot more spiritual and teachers, a lot of things that are very new to me and I feel like a beginner in, but I just find her approach to the law of attraction, affirmations, all of that stuff to be super helpful. And she walks the walk as well and I just really find her super inspiring and love her energy. So I invested in her VIP Tribe, which is just where she has some extra resources and stuff which is US$49 per month, so I think I invested in that maybe like a month and a half ago and I have been enjoying that. So then I also invested in co-working, so I have spoken about this. I think it was my June 2018 live updates.

I won’t go into it, but I am now working from a co-working space except when I’m with coaching clients or when I’m recording podcast episodes like this one and that has been enormously helpful. The investment for that, I just have a hot desk. I don’t have a designated desk, but the investment for that is 200. I think it’s $200 a month, including GST. I’m also, I just wanted to mention, sorry I’m jumping around all over the place that Libsyn that I do for podcasting is $20 a month. I didn’t mention Xero, it’s the accounting platform that I use, it’s $50 a month. Boardbooster was like $30 a month. Planoly’s like $12.99 a month. Canva’s $60.99 a month. SmallPDF, I think I was paying $6 a month. ConvertKit, I now pay- it was $150 a month because you pay to get more subscribers, but I actually just very recently sent out an email to all of the people that haven’t been opening my emails.

It’s very common if you’re a blogger and people on new emails, it’s normal. They go to spam or people just see it from you and delete it, but they don’t unsubscribe. Whatever I get- I’ve had huge amounts of subscribers too, so that’s totally fine but I sent an email being like, “Hey, do you still want my emails? If so, click on this. If not, I’ll delete you soon” and so I cleared a whole lot out so that I’m back now. I think it’s going to be maybe like $120 a month because there’s no need to pay for people on my list who aren’t opening my emails. I don’t want to keep spamming them if they don’t want my emails, all of that. I only want to email people who want my emails, so just to go back. So the cost of co-working is about $200 a month and I also then have to pay you for a street parking, which is about $8 a day to park on the street, so that’s maybe like an extra hundred something per month and that has been the best money for sure that I’m spending because when I’m at home I feel like I’m at home.

When I’m at my co-working space I feel like I’m at work and it has just really helped me to create just a much better feeling of- I don’t want to say, balanced, that is a hundred percent the wrong word. But I would say that I definitely feel more productive when I’m working. I’m more rested when I’m at home and it just has given me real permission. I’ve given myself permission to rest at home and I’m not distracted when I’m at the co-working space. Like that is a lot of stuff happening around and there’s people, but I liked that like, hey, otherwise we’d be working from cafes and stuff. I don’t like sitting in a room by myself in complete silence, but I just like being in that vibe where everyone else that is working and it’s dog friendly and there are cute dogs and all of that kind of thing. So that is  [inaudible 01:31:21] whole money well spent.

And I’ve spoken about this as well on that June 2018 live update episode that I did. But the reason like I’ve been talking about doing that for a year, so this is really going back to like sometimes it takes me forever to invest. So I had been thinking about signing up for a co-working space. I’ve been telling people I’d been doing it and you know, when it gets to a point where you hear something come out of your mouth so many times, but then you don’t do it and you start to get frustrated with yourself and you’re like, why the hell do I keep telling people I’m thinking about going to a co-working space if I have. If I like, that’s not clear in my, so I kind of got to a point where I was like, “What the fuck” and then I was reading The 4-Hour Workweek.

I spoke about this I think as well in the episode that I did recently on The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss that I did that fear setting exercise that I speak about so often and saw that the reason I hadn’t done it was that I didn’t believe I was a real entrepreneur and that I had to be a real entrepreneur to be at a co-working space even though that’s totally not true and a lot of people that are employees of like, they’re in small little firms or they’re working remotely and things like that too. But I just did not have. I just was like, “That’s something that someone like me can’t do” and then when I saw that that was the belief, I was like, “Well that’s the dumbest thing ever.” But it’s so funny when you see your real fear, you’re like, that makes no sense.

But when it’s this vague, like you never really investigate your fear. It just seemed so, I don’t know, it’s just always there. So anyway, I saw that that was my fear because I’d been talking about it for so long. I’d already researched all the coworking spaces. I knew which one I wanted to work from. I arranged a inspection that day and signed up that day so often once it takes me like a few months to decide and then once I decide I do it straight away. Like with Self-coaching Scholars took me nine months and then one day I was like not standing up and I signed up that day with a lot of the big investments. I think when I did coaching with Jen with the online courses, liked it so much. I’ve been like, “No, I’m not going to do it” and then suddenly one day like, “Enough’s enough” and then I just signed up that day.

It seems to be the pattern when I think back on it, so invested in co-working. Another thing I have invested in his Instagram advertising, and I wanted to mention this because my Instagram has grown quite significantly and I don’t want you to be sitting there thinking it has been organic and I think this is so interesting too, is that there seems to be so much shame around not having organic social media growth, and that if it’s paid as in if you’re paying, like I want to distinguish, advertising is different to buying followers. It’s different to getting bots to comment on people’s posts and like them, it’s different to invest in your own time in following and unfollowing people are liking the million of their photos. I’m paying for an Instagram ad. So what I personally do is I have my quotes that I spent a lot of time writing for Instagram and then a lot of them are very popular and people share them and put them in their and tag their friends, which is great.

So I only ever, I just boost it through Instagram. I don’t use it, the facebook ads manager or anything. I just promote the ones that I think will do the best and I spend between $50 and $250 a week, but, and my Instagram has grown. I had 6,000 followers at the end of March and it’s the beginning of August and I have 18.1 thousand, so it has tripled since, like it took me- I saw it in my account and everything that mean an August start on my account in August 2014. So four years ago. And then I had, I think I grew it like originally it was organically. Oh, what happened, I like was so sporadic with it. Anyway. Then towards the end of 2017 I was like, “Okay, I need to start doing something about this Instagram stuff.” That’s when I started writing my quotes about a year ago now. And then GaryVee, Gary Vaynerchuk is someone that I follow for strategy advice as well as mindset advice, a business.

He was saying that he thinks Instagram ads are grossly underpriced, which I a hundred percent agree because there’s so much stigma around not having organic growth. I definitely do not support buying bots, buying followers. All promoting it does is get it in front of more people and they have a choice whether or not to like it, whether or not to follow you, whether or not to share it, but because what I’m promoting, I don’t think this would work necessarily for anything but because what I’m promoting, like I don’t promote the photos of me because no one’s going to post a photo of me on their feed or in their story, but people definitely post my quotes and I made them in a style like that is a lot of strategy behind it. My quotes for example, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m on Instagram @smarttwenties.

 

My quotes are in a color. You can also make it black and white if you wanted by editing, like through the Instagram app for people who only postings in black and white, but it’s like feminine but not super branded like some people if you have, I think if there are quotes, they are too branded, people don’t share them or if your name’s too big, people don’t share them. And I’ve started to notice people wide out my name when I share them, which is frustrating, but it’s part of it. So as in, as part of it as an icon, get frustrated because it’s just going to happen but I put my name on them and my Instagram handle because I know that things don’t get credited when they’re shared. And then if my name isn’t right under the text, like I don’t even put it in the corner, it has to be right under evenly. Now people whited out sometimes. Please don’t be one of those people if you’ve ever done that to someone else, especially if they’ve written it themselves and spent hours slaving away to get it just right. so I have my name on there so that I like, there’s inbuilt credit and people can find it and I get dams for people who say I found your, Instagram because someone posted your quote and it had your handle on it. So that strategic and I’ve made it like a style that would fit into most of the kinds of accounts that I would want to be featured on. It looks like cohesive with that. It’s not anything crazy anyway.

So I promote them and I spend about $50 to $250 per week, which is quite an investment, but it is something that I see as very important. so yeah, I just wanted to share that as well. It’s not organic and I think like “They’ve picked brands like no one’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe, Sephora buys ads” like they don’t have real, real customers or real people that love them because I bought the ads to get people there. Like no one thinks about that with companies. But I think with personal brands as a lot of stigma around not having organic growth because organic used to be the only way that you could grow before ads existed. So anyway, I’m just capitalizing on what I believe are underpriced ads and grow my Instagram following, which helps more people find my podcast and people find my blog more people want to work with me as a coach. So many things it just funnels through.

So anyway, I wanted to mention that I’m trying to really cover like everything that I’ve been spending money on. So another thing as well is I have invested in it to freelancers to help me with this podcast and hello to you guys because they will be hearing this and so one of them transcribes the episodes for me and one of them uploads the episode to my blog, creates a blog post, puts a transcription in there, makes the Pinterest image. These are all things that I was doing and until like a couple months ago, when I was reading The 4-Hour Workweek, I wanted to just start experimenting with outsourcing and getting help and what it would be like to hire someone and how to be a good boss and all of that kind of thing because that is a skill I will need to learn. So I wanted to get started. And with my podcasts it was such a clear workflow. I already had very clear like step one, step two, step three.

It was something that was definitely needed. I wasn’t outsourcing busy work and I wanted to create more podcasts episodes. But the thing I love about podcasts is this bit where I’m sitting down and chatting and I don’t so much like doing all the backend stuff which I have done now for five years myself. And there’s– at this point, like I’ve got my own formula so there’s nothing really creative about it. I’m just following my own formula that someone else could easily follow it if I share it with them. So I have invested in to two freelancers to help me with that. And just to disclose as well, because I’m wanting to shut the cost of it. I think it cost me, I want to say maybe around a dollar a minute-ish for my podcast. So this one is going to be more expensive because I have been talking for a long time and to have everything uploaded and stuff I think costs around Australia maybe like $25 per episode. And I’ve absolutely loved having that. It has helped me so much because now with my podcast, I just get to do the bit that I absolutely love and then it’s just like magic and it appears in my podcast’s theme when it’s meant to you and it’s been completely amazing. I have loved working with these two women and they have made it a dream-come-true for me and it’s just so nice, like there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that I do in every other area. So it is nice that for my podcasts I can just do the creative bit and have someone take care of the rest.

So now I’m down to my two last investments for the last couple of months. One was a coaching session that I did with Erin May Henry has The Erin May Show, I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing the price because it is all over her website, but I paid $500 Australian for a one off session with her, which was an hour and a half. I think it went a bit over time though, but that was incredibly helpful. So I invested in that because I just felt like I have at this point like something wasn’t adding up. There are people that can support themselves full time from their businesses that have a lot less followers, a lot less readers and like I don’t just have empty numbers. They’re people who are really interested and love what I do. I get so much positive feedback. I’ve really created a community and I haven’t been able to get myself to the point that I want to be at. And so I just wanted someone who could give me an outside perspective.

As I was saying about two hours ago now, coaching is really like a mirror and it’s just someone to help you see what you can’t see. And Erin’s gave me so much great advice in that call. It was really just like I’m so in my business and I may that I can’t see what I look like to other people because I’ve got all my own insecurity is going on and I’ve. And as well I know what, like I know what I do, I know what I offer and so it’s not always obvious to me like when I’m not offering that or things like that. so she really helped me gain an outside perspective which is why coaching so good you get that outside perspective. You get the judgement-free perspective because if you go to a friend or someone, they’ll have all their own opinions and often that reflecting back their insecurities as well of themselves that they have or their own ideas about it.

But because Erin has a similar, not the same business, like she does personal branding stuff, but she has a similar business [inaudible 01:44:08] like she offers similar thing, she offers coaching, she offers online courses and trainings and all of that kind of thing. So I just wanted someone who has been where I am and it’s just a couple steps ahead to really help me like get through this bit that I’m in at the moment. So that has been, that was incredibly helpful. I’m still working on it like the list I have of things to do from that coaching session that I did. I think it was the 7th of July, so a month ago now I’m still working through. It has a lot of change happening behind the scenes that I’m super excited about that I will be sharing with you all soon but $500 for one coaching session was something that initially I was like “That’s a lot just for a one off” like there was a week of support after it but it was still like just one chat and no ongoing support.

I really found previously that with coaching, what I loved was that you can come back the next week and the next week, and the next week and they’ll help you dive deeper and deeper and deeper and really work through the issues because normally you do the first coaching session, you get super excited and then the next session is like, okay, here’s everything that I struggled with in the last week. So I was a bit worried about not having the next session after, but I just wanted to invest in the one off session and it was definitely totally worth it. I’m really good. Erin was amazing and I found that super helpful. And then this week we are finally on my last investment. This has been so interesting for me though, to really think about all the things I’ve invested in, why I’ve invested in them, to really see that I have invested in quite a lot and quite a lot of different things and how one thing flows into the other.

And there are still a lot of things I want to invest in, in the future. and I also want to start investing in a coach again because even though I’m doing self coaching scholars, I still need someone to see, help me see things I can’t see. Anyway, so I have been doing a lot of work lately on money mindset because with my impossible goal of making a $500,000 this year, part of the reason it seemed completely impossible is my money mindset. And I’ve had a lot of scarcity around money. I’ve had a lot of shame around money or lack of money and it hasn’t always been like that, but more so just in the last few years, which I’ve spoken about in detail. I’m on my breakthrough episodes that I did. So I won’t go into that again. But I can just see that doing this money mindset work no matter how good I am at anything else I’m doing, if I’m not willing to be paid for the things that it easiest for me.

Like I have found with coaching and even with my online courses before I. it’s been really challenging for me to believe that the things that come the easiest to me I should get paid the most for because I’ve grown up really getting taught that I think by the media more so than any particular person that you get paid for doing things you don’t like and you get paid because things are hard and you get paid because things take time and to now be in a position where I can get paid to do the thing that I absolutely love doing and that I know is my true calling and it’s something that is so easy to me and it’s something that is so helpful to other people that I could get paid like really well to do something that feels really easy, just kind of blows my mind and it needs to not blow my mind.

It needs to be normal. otherwise I’m really going to limit myself in what I offer in the help that I provide. And money really is just a reflection of how much value I’m providing. And the more money I make it means the more of a contribution I’m making it to the world because for everyone that’s giving me that money, I’m getting value, I’m giving them value in return for it. It’s an exchange. It’s not me just taking money. So I really need to do a lot of work on my money mindset. I used to actually talk about money when I was first starting blogging and then I feel like that was before I’d done traveling then and I’d saved up a huge amount for exchange and then one of my holidays I just overspent. Not by a ridiculous amount, but I just then had like this pattern of applying change things I felt really ashamed about it.

And then I’ve just felt like trapped in the scarcity mindset and I’ve noticed like there’s only a certain amount of money that I feel comfortable with. And once I exceed that amount of money I find things to spend it on or like unexpected expenses come up. And it’s like that thermostat. Like I have it set to a certain amount of money that I think I deserve to make and if it ever gets above that I do things to bring it back down so I can still feel comfortable. So I’m doing this personal work to really up my thermostat and be comfortable with a larger amount of money and to really have an abundance mindset because I sometimes still fall into the scarcity mindset of thinking that if I have more money it means other people have less money and I know that there are people who’ll be listening to this who think, yeah, that is how it works because when someone gives you, they’re literally losing money.

Like the money has gone from that bank account and entered yours. But I’m really working to change into an abundance mindset which is money is everywhere. Like when you look around, it is like the things that money has bought and just just I want to help people as well with money mindset, but I know that I need to do my own work on that too which is, I haven’t talked about it much lately in the last couple of years because I only want to talk about things that I actually feel that I have something helpful to share and I think sharing, I’m sharing all of this because I think that sharing where I’m at currently is going to be helpful, especially once I have transformed my money mindset and allowed myself to start being paid very well to do things that come easily to me to start feeling comfortable having large amounts of money to start investing more in myself. All of that like I want to be an example of that and I just want to encourage others to do the same and help them get into that mindset too. So all of this is leading to my most recent investment, which is The Rich Babe Academy, which is Kathrin Zenkina’s course. So as I was saying, she’s from Manifestation Babe and I’ve been in her VIP Tribe and I just find like her advice. So incredibly helpful, she has a free 21-day challenge. It’s like in a book, but she also did a facebook live series on it that is about, how to manifest that thousand dollars in 21 days. But I didn’t really do it for that. I did it more for like I just need to change my mindset around money and I love the mindset that she has and that’s how I want to think about it and I want to steal some of her thoughts.

So I’ve been following her closely, listening to her a lot in the last couple of months and her Rich Babe Academy, which is starting tomorrow, which I’m super excited about. It’s just an online course. But I’d been like, “Ugh. Like I don’t have the money to invest in this like it’s US$2000. Like I don’t have the money sitting around. And I did sign up for the patron and the payment plan options. But I was like, “I need this” and the fact that I’m not willing to like that I’m scared to invest in. It really just showed me my scarcity mindset. And I’ve really noticed over the last year even like it’s not like having more money doesn’t solve scarcity. I think that we think, I know I definitely have thought before that when I get more money then I’ll believe that I have it in abundance. But what I’ve found is that fear of not having enough just turns into fear of losing it and if you have a fear of losing it, you tend to spend it or like make something happen so that you don’t have it there to lose.

And that’s what I’ve been doing and I have really seen that no matter how much money making, if I don’t get out of this, I will just keep bringing myself back down to only be able to have like a few thousand dollars. And it’s interesting because it’s so different with the money that Steve and I have for the house because I see that as completely separate money. But when it comes to my personal money, I just see it as like I should only have a certain amount. It’s been so interesting to. I won’t go on forever. But I had been. So I’ve been talking about achieving my impossible goal on my podcast and my Instagram to really just show you, like to be open about what I’m working on. And then it’s really just been interesting now that I have started offering coaching and people are questioning like, is this just sort of part of your way to make your impossible goal? And is this just, you know, someone said like, you shouldn’t be taking out your ambitions on your followers. Like just because you want to make money doesn’t mean you should be charging this amount. And it’s just like so fascinating to me. I hundred percent believe in the amount I charged and I believe I’m worth much more, but I just, it’s interesting. Then once you start to believe and improve your money mindset, you still have everyone else with these other money mindsets trying to bring you back into the scarcity and believing that it’s wrong to be making money from something. And it’s, I’ve found it really challenging as well for that reason to really lift my money mindset because I’ve been talking openly about me, him money, and I want to be someone that normalizes that and

I think part of the reason so many of us have a shitty money mindset is because no one’s talking about money and when someone does talk about money, then they’re questioned about whether that actually been helpful. Like someone said on my Instagram, “Are you actually trying to help or is this just you trying to achieve your goal?” like I hope you guys are listening. If I don’t know how much attention you pay, I don’t do sponsored posts I don’t like. I’m not here promoting things. There’s so much money I could be making from things I don’t believe in. I only want to make money from things that I believe in and things that I believe it truly helpful and it does feel like when someone says that, it’s like, oh but I know I can never please everyone and sorry, I just try not to think about it but it has been so interesting when I’ve been public about my financial goals, which most people keep private probably for this reason. Anyway, keep going and doing it because I think it is so important and I found it so helpful when people share their own figures like Kathrin does and Brooke Castillo does and they share what they make and I find that that really helps normalize it and removes a lot of the stigma and I want to be one of those people that positively contributes to it.

But I’ve just found it really fascinating that now I’m stepping up to the next level in my business- of course now people are starting to come out and saying like, “You’re just selling out all of this stuff” and it’s like, okay, and if that’s you, you know, don’t want to follow me like this. And this is the other thing as well. I’m not making anyone pay me. That’s basically everything I do, including this podcast, which I’ve been recording for two hours is free. There’s plenty of stuff you can do that I offered for free, 90% of it is free. So if you don’t want to give me Money & You feel like I’m just doing it so I can reach my goal you don’t need. But I am investing in Rich Babe Academy also because I want to support Kathrin. Like when someone is helping me so much for free, I am much more inclined to buy something of theirs even if I’m not going to particularly use it.

I think that’s part of the reason I also bought Melyssa Griffin Pinterest course and also Brooke Castillo’s because I was like, “You helped me so much for free” like it feels like I’m robbing you to not be paying you and like to just feel entitled to all this free stuff. So I really want us to support Kathrin and her business and I think she’s doing amazing things and also I really want to improve my money mindset and it’s a six week online course and it’s the most expensive like course, it’s just online that I’ve invested in besides, let’s not forget about all my degree, degree situation, which was a lot more than that, but that is a recent investment I made and I did a model. So I’m just going to wrap it up in a minute. I did a model, so as I was saying, Brooke Castillo has the self coaching model, where it’s your thoughts create your feelings, your actions, create your results.

So I wrote that out, CTFAR in thought I wrote this isn’t going to be worth it, and then I could see the feelings and actions and results that that would create, which is me staying in my same money mindset. Then I tried a new thought, which is this money is going to come back to me tenfold. As soon as I saw that, that was a thought that was available. I signed up and I was like, I just need to get out of my own way about it and again it does take me a while to invest in things. And with Rich Babe Academy, she launched it. I think actually maybe I haven’t been following her while she launched it, but she definitely launch another course that’s not specifically about money but about manifesting like lots of different things.

So I didn’t invest in that then, but it was in the back of my mind and then this time I was like, okay, I really want to do this and I’m going to make sure it’s worth it and I’m going to make sure that from the things that I learned in her course. I’m going to make at least 10 times that amount of money and I’m in control of that. Even if it’s the most amazing course. If I’m not taking responsibility for what I’m learning, then it’s like, it doesn’t matter if it’s the best thing in the world. I have to be fully responsible. I have to be there soaking it up. So unfortunately her online streams that she does or like 3:00 AM my time so I won’t be watching them live but I’m really excited to get started on that tomorrow and I have been really like doing like I’ve been listening to her non-stop this week and I’ve found that just listening to only her and Brooke and I’m really just having like tunnel vision. I just feel like already just only hearing their thoughts over and over again instead of hearing like all of the other thoughts that people have and trying to reconcile all conflicting advice. I just found it incredibly helpful and I can just feel the difference in myself, especially around money as well.

But I will go into that in the future because I have officially been talking for two hours. If you’re still listening, thank you for being here. I appreciate you so, so much. And I will link everything in the show notes, all of the different things that I mentioned, all of the investments that I’ve made. If you’re interested in them and yeah, you can find that at smart-twenties.com/episode42. And you can also find out if you’d like to work with me one-on-one. You can find out more about that at smart-twenties.com/coaching. I hope you are having a lovely day and I will talk to you next time, bye.

 

Author: Sam Brown