The Wealth Spa

Ep #66 Finding Your Why

Posted on 12. Nov, 2008 by Elizabeth Potts Weinstein in Life Balance, Radio Show

Elizabeth speaks to The Barefoot Executive, Carrie Wilkerson about Finding Your Why.

Elizabeth and Carrie talk about how they made their transitions into working from home, how working from home brings to you so many changes and how there really is no balance…it’s life happening! 

Elizabeth then answers a listener question about avoiding networking overwhelm from your attendance at conferences or seminars and how to get the most out of the information, ideas and acquaintances you’ve made. Elizabeth then shares her Entrepreneur’s Success Tip of the Week: Listening to Your Intuition within Your Business. 

To learn about Carrie and to receive her free downloadable presentation on Finding Your Why visit The Barefoot Executive. 

Click Here to Download the Show!

Transcript: Welcome everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and this is episode 66 of the Wealth Spa Radio Show if you’re keeping track or want to keep things in order.  Now, today we’ve got a couple different things going on, we typically do.  First, I have our guest for today, our guest expert who is Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive. 

We’re going to be talking about a bunch of different stuff including finding your why then as we get close to the second half of the hour I’ll be answering a question from one of you all.  And this is specifically about, this week I’m actually in Los Angeles at a conference, and I know a lot of you go to conferences and seminars.  How do we keep from overwhelm? And how do we make sure that we’re getting as much use as possible about all the stuff and people and everything that happened at a seminar or a conference?  And then third, the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week which we’ll be talking about as we get close to the top of the hour, this week’s tip is listening to intuition in your business.  Of course, we both want to think with our heads but how do we also think with our hearts or souls or whatever you want to call.

                        Now, before we get into today’s content, I’ve got a couple of announcements.  The first is that we are actually moving from Voice America Business to Blog Talk Radio so we’re not going to be live on Voice America anymore.  We’re going to be live, starting next week, on Blog Talk Radio.  Now for those of you who listen to the recording through the podcasting on thewealthspa.com or your iTunes this doesn’t matter for you, you’re still going to get in the exact same way, shape and form.  If you listen to it live it will be on Blog Talk Radio starting next week.  Now second, we’re actually changing the day of the week and the time, the time stays the same but the day of the week of the show.  So instead of being Wednesdays it’s going to be Thursdays at 11:00am Pacific Time going forward starting on November 20^th.  Now if you can’t or don’t know where the news station is, you can’t remember where any of that is, you don’t have to remember when and where to listen, you can always go to thewealthspa.com that’s thewealthspa.com.  You go there and you can sign up for the show to have it automatically delivered to you by e-mail, RSS Feed or via iTunes, if you’re an iPod or iPhone kind of person and actually you can have iTunes on your computer too.  Also on thewealthspa.com you can listen to archive shows, past shows, write down the site.  You can read transcripts.  We’ve got transcripts of many of the shows for free right there on the site as well as tons of articles and other resources for you about holistic wealth, so if you’re ever confused just go to the wealthspa.com.

                        All right so let me get in to today’s stuff and start introducing the guest for today.  So today we have Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive, she has a ton of experience in a lot of different areas.  She’s been in the corporate world, she’s taught high school, in direct sales, now this internet marketing.  She’s done a lot of different things, has been working from home for over 10 years and Carrie actually also has four kids so working from home is as chaotic as many of us who work at home because we have kids and it can be very crazy.  As the Barefoot Executive, she’s quickly become the definitive resource for helping others achieve extra income and career goals while also working from home so thanks so much for being on the call with us today Carrie.

Carrie:            Thank you so much Elizabeth.  I appreciate the invitation.

Elizabeth:       Great so tell me how, you’ve done all kinds of different things in your career what happened and what was the transition from where you were working before to starting at working at home?

Carrie:            That’s a great question and you know it’s one of those moments that I tell people that, you know, you can oftentimes look back at a pivotal moment in your life.  A moment when everything changes and you may not even realize it at that point but that’s its switch that gets flipped or something that changes everything in your future.  You know, what you thought you were going to do and I was teaching high school and really loving it and I was also working part time at a law firm because, you know, we were married and no kids and we had extra time.  And we were getting ahead financially.  We had just bought our first home.  And so I was teaching high school in an inter-city school and I really adored it and I loved my work.  So my husband and I decided to start our family.  And we adopted two toddlers a brother and sister and they we’re eight months and 2 years and so overnight I became a mom and just as quickly as I became a mom, my priorities changed and just as quickly as my priorities changed, my workplace changed.  I decided that the kids at school were great and yes they needed me and loved me but the fact of the matter is this two little people were now in my home.  I had vowed to a judge and to them that I would take care of them.  They were removed from a very negative situation and I just decided that they were not going to have one more moment of neglect in their life, not one more moment.  And so I purpose in my heart then to be at home with them.  Now I will say to be fair I just intended to be what we called the stay-at-home mom, you know, my mom had done that and she didn’t worry about generating a lot of income from home or working or whatever from home.

And so that’s what I was going to be.  I purpose in my heart to be the domestic goddess that my mother had been and that worked Elizabeth for about 7 weeks.  And I wasn’t cut out for that.  I really wasn’t.  I loved my children and I wanted to be there with them in there space but really the whole scene of being at home and devoting all my energy to that was not working for me.  Now, that is a fulltime job.  I don’t want anybody to go away saying that I said it wasn’t enough to be a stay-at-home mom.  It is absolutely a full time job but it wasn’t the full time job that I felt cut out for.  So I really wanted to be, you know, in the space with some adults and generating some income.  And really there so much going on in my head at any given time, it’s the entrepreneurial ADHD, you know, as what I called it now.  But I just really felt like I wanted to be generating some income.  I wanted to be contributing to the household and I felt like there had to be a way I could do that while I was also at home with them primarily.  So I didn’t start my business or any of my businesses out of a big passion or drive for what I was doing but out of my circumstance that I was committed to being in the space of my kids.  And so then necessity became the mother of invention for me at that point. 

Elizabeth:       So what was the first business that you started?

Carrie:            The first thing I did to generate income from home was actually one of the law firms that I worked with.  I knew because of e-mail and internet that there had to be a way that I could work for them from home so now it wasn’t nearly as it advanced as it is now.  But I did some collections for them and some bookkeeping for them.  And so it was kind of a VA type thing and at the same time, for the social interaction, I joined a direct sales company and decided that it would be a great way for me to get out and learn some business skills because none of my training was business, none of it.  And so I did direct sales while also doing a part-time VA, I didn’t know what to call it at that point but that’s essentially what I did first. 

Elizabeth:       Now as you were working at home with the kids, how difficult was it for you to balance the doing that work with having, you know, toddlers in the house with you all the time?

Carrie:            Well and not only were they toddlers but because of the situation they came from they were very needy toddlers.  We had a lot of therapists coming in and out.  We had a lot of appointments and you know honestly from zero to two kids with a husband that travels for his job, it was huge and it was very overwhelming.  And so, you know, obviously honest I didn’t handle it well.  I had no balance.  I’m kind of an all or nothing kind of girl anyway and so – and I struggled with that a lot.  I argued with myself a lot.  I felt like a failure a lot but now I firmly believed, 10 years later and two more kids later and three more businesses later, now I really feel that balance is kind of a farce.  Elizabeth, I don’t think it exists.  Balance is bogus is my new theme.  I think it’s more like a rhythm.  It’s like music sometimes there are fast times and slow times and it’s an ebb and a flow and until you really find your rhythm with it you’re going to have conflict with yourself because there is no such thing as perfect balance.  There is no pie chart, there is no magic formula, there’s no spreadsheet that can figure out what the perfect balance is.  There are times in your business and times in your life and seasons where you can run with the free head like a race horse and just really get a lot of momentum in your business and really things are quickening and you can do and you can work in some paces that you can’t also do.  And then there are some times that you need to scale back and you need to listen to your body and you need to listen to your family and, you know, kids are pretty great about communicating when they need more of you and, you know, husband are too but we just tend to tune them out.

Elizabeth:       Yeah.  They’re big boys.

Carrie:            Yeah, we tend to think that, you know, they are just being needy but you know, like with baby Barefoot, you know, she’s seventeen months old now and I can pretty much tell when she needs a little more mom time or when I spend too many hours.  And you know she’s also pretty good.  I have an open door policy at my office unless I’m on a call like I am right now.  Most of the day she can come and go pretty freely and climb up in my lap and we called that the baby Barefoot break, you know, she’s pretty good at letting me know when she need me and when I need to be a little more hands on with all that.  So all that to say there’s really not a balance, now the hard thing about working at home is you tend to work all the time or, there’s two extremes.  You tend to either work all the time and never walk away from it or you tend to be distracted by your home and the people in your home so that you never really get down to business.  So there does have to be a balance between that and the best way to figure that out is some scheduled focus work time.

Elizabeth:       Yeah. I guess for me like there’s, you know, I agree with you that there’s no such thing as balance and I kind of have an article that I’m eventually going to write like balance is bull and s-h-i-t because it really is.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And the thing is like, especially I think as if you’re working at home and you’re a mom but it isn’t true for everyone there’s always something that’s going to happen.  You know, my husband hurt his back and was actually diagnosed with having a slip disk this summer and had like weeks where he was just at home, you know, barely able to get out of bed and use the restroom and that and there’s all these things that I was going to launch.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       Didn’t get launch at that time or didn’t get finished and realizing that well you know what right now I need to be a wife and a mom.  And a lot of stuff in the business went on so I didn’t go under but things had to get put aside and that’s always going to happen and the same thing with the business.  And I grew with the concentrated time, like for me, my daughter goes to pre-school two mornings a week and I want to be at home with her most of the time but I need to be able to write and do my radio show and there’s some things where I need to be intent, you know.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And scheduling that intense here’s my six hours week of intense time and then the rest of the time it really depends on how much work I get done depending upon what is going on.

Carrie:            Right.  Well and the truth is if everybody focus on their part-time or fulltime business with six hyper focus hours a week.

Elizabeth:       You’re probably going to get some done.

Carrie:            Oh my goodness.  Oh my goodness, you know, if you can and you know that.  Think of the day before vacation.  Think of how much you get done the day before vacation.  Think about how much you get done the day before an annual review or before, you know, a regional inspection or the day before, you know, the kids are coming home for a summer break.  You know, we fill the time allotted and we’re focus when we need to be.  The fact of the matter is when you work at home, you just tend to think you have all this time and that you’re, we bought into the line  of oh I work for myself.  I can do what I want when I want.  Well, yes you can but then you’re not going to have the results that you want.

Elizabeth:       So we’re about to go to our first break.

Carrie:            Sure.

Elizabeth:       So we’re going to the break.  After the break Carrie will still be with us.  We’ll be talking more about this stuff so stay in tune for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  Again, this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show. We have Carrie Wilkerson on with us, the Barefoot Executive and before this last break, we were talking about balance and how there really is no such thing and really specifically talking about focus time and its funny when I think about, I left my last job 5 years ago actually Halloween, 5 years ago.  And thinking about what I actually did, I was an attorney in a law firm.  I mean, I work a lot long hours but the productivity, you know, how much time we spend chatting and like all this junk.  You don’t work even the 60 hours a week I work, I really wasn’t working 60 hours, you know.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And now that I have less time that’s concentrated business time, I’m so much more productive during those hours because those are the hours that, you know, that’s all that I have.  I’m not chit-chatting during that time unless I get on Twitter or something.

Carrie:            Right.  Well and even then we’re also conditioned to the yes we’re going to work at the law firm and we’re going to put in the 60 hours, and we know what are guaranteed pay check is going to be whether we do 40 hours or 60 hours or regardless of what our results are.  But then you come home and then you realize, okay I can spend 6 hours working and filing papers and dusting my desk or you know on Twitter or on Facebook or whatever but then what’s your paycheck going to be?

Elizabeth:       Right.

Carrie:            You know, when you become result-based pay oriented as oppose to time-based pay oriented, we become more masters of our time.

Elizabeth:       Right.  Yeah and I found like for me one of the reasons I left practicing in the law firms because I’m very very efficient and was incredibly productive and wasn’t compensated for that.  You know, the guy in the office next to me got paid the same amount of money and I was like dude, I did ten times the productivity of you.  How was this possibly fair and equable?  And it wasn’t and they had no way to compensate for that and that’s one of the benefits of being self-employed and also the challenges.  But you can be, if you’re super productive you can get paid based on that, assuming that you’re not just billing by the hour and you know that’s a whole other issue.

Carrie:            Right.  Service-based versus result-based.

Elizabeth:       Yeah but once you switch over result-based, the more efficient you get then there is really no limit on how much money you can potentially make.

Carrie:            Right and that’s a scary leap but it’s also very empowering.  You know, this year all that, I don’t watch TV but you know all the noise about the recession and the economy and this and that and cutting back and all those things.  Honestly, Elizabeth, we’ve had our best year ever.  We’re not accepting that as our reality.  We’re saying that okay if we want to increase our income then here’s where we need to make our changes and here’s where we need to work a little differently and all those things.  We’re not becoming a victim to circumstance so when you take your income in your own hands and set your own pace scale and you know, focus really on results then you take your power back.  I mean, I hate to use one of those bumper stickers slogans but seriously, you take your power back and both of us are self-employed here from the home.  It’s not like I have a salary to fall back on with another job.  We are full-time self-employed 4 children, you know, all here working from home depending on our own income and it doesn’t have to be a scary place it can be a very empowering place.

Elizabeth:       I was at a law firm, two law firms, the second to last [19:57] that declared bankruptcy and went under.  And it was literally like on a Wednesday there was a rumor and on a Friday the partnership voted to disband.  And then the next Monday come in and office depot was coming to repossess the paper, reams of paper. 

Carrie:            Oh wow.

Elizabeth:       And they were taking the soda machine away.  I mean, it was absolute insanity and I mean, I ended up getting taking with a bunch of other attorneys’ law firm cause I was productive and did a good job but I realize that there was no security in a job.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And there’s no such thing is that the only security you have is in yourself.  And so people say isn’t it risky to be self-employed?  I’m like, Yeah but then now I have control instead of being indebted upon some other person or any other business.  I have to go do it myself which means that I have the power to do that.

Carrie:            Right.  Well, exactly and you know it’s difficult to be your own boss.  It’s, you know, it’s a retraining period so that you quit thinking hourly.  It’s a retraining period because you don’t have to be as accountable to somebody for your time or for your efforts.  It’s, you know, there’s usually kind of a detox period after you leave a job.  You come home and you want to hang out in your pajamas and typically, I see this happened a lot there’s the ten pounds, the elastic factors, that I call that.  All of the sudden, you’re with your refrigerator all day, everyday and you’re back and forth and back and forth.

Elizabeth:       And you don’t have to get dress so you don’t.

Carrie:            Right.  So you don’t notice the 10 pounds right away because you’re wearing elastic pajamas and ponytails and no make-up.  Anyway, there is a retraining.  There is a period where you have to discipline yourself.  Because if you are not willing to discipline yourself, someone else will be willing to discipline you for the rest of your life in the form of a job or a boss or, you know, the golden hand cuffs that tie you to your job.  But it really is a powerful thing and so people will ask me all the time, what keeps you going?  What motivates you?  Is it just about the money?  And well, I do have a responsible to support our family.  You know, my husband and I do this together.  We have a responsibility to support the family.  I am really not that money motivated.  I am not a money motivated kind of girl.  But and so this is how where we came up with the whole concept of finding your why.  When I realize that the money wasn’t enough for me to work for.  I mean, Honestly Elizabeth, if we were all that money motivated, we would all be Donald Trump.  There would be nothing that would stop us from achieving our financial goals if we were truly motivated by the dollar, wouldn’t you agree?

Elizabeth:       Oh yeah and if we were willing to compromise everything to do that.

Carrie:            Right.  Right.  And so what you have to find – you have to keep asking yourself what is your why?  And so this is something that I teach people.  Before you can succeed in business, before you can succeed in any personal goals whether its weight loss, whether it’s a relationship that you’re mending, you know, whatever it is you have to find out your why.  And for most of us, especially women, but most of us the money is not enough so you have to say to yourself why am I doing what I’m doing?  And this is where people cross their arms over their chests and they sit back and they say, well it is the money.  You wouldn’t understand my bills, you don’t understand what I’m responsible for or the pay cut that I just took or how much gas is or you know the economy that’s about to have some even more interesting turns.  I do understand that but we are not motivated by the dollar or we’d all be working multiple jobs.  We’d all be working extra businesses so for example, Elizabeth, what was the reason, let’s just role play for a minute.  Let’s talk about your why if you don’t mind.

Elizabeth:       Oh yeah.

Carrie:            That works?  Let’s talk about you were working at a law firm.  What was the main reason you came home?

Elizabeth:       Really the number 1 reason is because I was really kind of bored and angry all the time and frustrated.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And that was what started me looking for something else.  And I knew there had to be something else.  Something where I’d have more, I would just be able to enjoy what I was doing cause I was getting paid a lot of money.

Carrie:            Right.  Right.

Elizabeth:       And I was like but I was just really pissed all the time.  I knew there had to be something else and then as soon as I had that first idea like wow, you know, I could do this.  I’m as smart if not smarter than this people who do this kind of things.  And then that was part of it.  The other part of it, my husband is a partner in a law firm and does work insane hours and travels all over the world and is gone for weeks at a time and I thought we wanted to have children and we couldn’t both be doing that.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       Unless we had a nanny raising our child, you know.  We need balance.

Carrie:            Right.  So you just came out with several whys.  Your first why was that you’re dissatisfied with where you were.  But even then that’s not enough to get most people to make a change because where in a nation.  We’re actually in a, it’s rampant in our society.  People are content being discontent.  It’s the American way where content being discontent.  We’re not dissatisfied enough to make a change but then you also had a why of you want to start a family and so you realize that it’s not going to work with both you doing what you’re doing.  Then you also saw some opportunities.  Now did you have a plan or did you quit and come home and then come up with a plan?

Elizabeth:       I came up with a plan while I was still working.

Carrie:            Okay and so then, then you come home, and do you have any kids now?

Elizabeth:       Yes, I have one daughter.

Carrie:            Okay so then you come home and you start your plan and all of the sudden you have freedom and not a boss and now you’re not angry and upset all the time and so but what keeps you going?  Yes, you’re at home but what’s so great about that?  That’s the question I tell people to answer themselves over and over.  So tell me what’s so great about that?

Elizabeth:       So now, it actually has very much change.  It has fundamentally changed my business.  From the beginning, it was still seeing clients.  I was still trading the hours for dollars.  And I had my daughter in day care and the whole like part of the time because I needed to have that face time with clients.  And I changed my business.  Part of it was I so much enjoyed spending much time with her and I wanted to be able to set up a business where I could be with her and you and I enjoy doing that, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had.  But also for my business side I saw, it’s more about changing people’s lives and the kind of mission of my business.

Carrie:            Right.

Elizabeth:       And of course, making money is wonderful but that’s definitely not the number one reason.

Carrie:            Well and I’m glad that you brought that up and I usually used myself as an example for that, you’re why does evolve.  It doesn’t evolve immediately but you’re why evolves so let’s talk about when I came home from teaching.  We were in a significant amount of debt.  We had overcome over a $100,000 worth of debt.  I was very overweight.  I became more overweight when I initially stayed home.  I gained a lot of weight.  I’ve now lost over 100 pounds.  You know I had a lot of obstacles and I had a lot of reasons why not to do what I was doing but we chose to do it anyway.  So my why initially was these two little people in my home, not the money but being a teacher at the end of the summer, my pay check was going to run out because you know with a year long contract, you still have a little residual income.  So I needed to kick it into gear, I needed income but I also was not willing to leave my children.  So they were my primary why.  So I wanted to be home with them.  Well, what’s so great about that? Well, in my situation my two kids had a lot of special needs.  The primary one being nurtured and loved but my oldest son has also have some needs that were based on choices of his birth mother while he was in utero and so we had a lot of that going on too.

So what’s so great about that?  Well, I’m the primary care giver, I make sure they’re in their appointments, they’re loved, they’re taken care of and I can handle that even when my husband is traveling.  That was my why, that was my driving then they got a little older and then we did pre-school part day pre-school because of their needs and because of their needing to catch up on some of their academia and development and those kinds of things.  We had day pre-school so then I had half the day free but then also we still had the money issues, etc.  So then my why for a brief time became money but it wasn’t enough.  And I look at that time period, Elizabeth, and it’s powerful to me that I see that I see how we got further in debt even while I was working harder than I had been working before because my why was not clear enough.  It was not focused enough so then I said okay my why needs to be to get us out of debt.   Well, what’s so great about that?  Well we would like to have the freedom to not have to make choices on medical care based on money, not to have to make choices on therapy based on money, not to have to worry about, you know, to offer my husband the opportunity to come home from his job.  Well, what’s so great about that?  And that’s how you drill down.  What’s so great about that?  That he was traveling all the time, he was missing so much of their childhood and we wanted him to be able to experience it.  So that being said I was so much more motivated by thinking of us raising our kids together at home fulltime than I was about paying off the credit cards.

Elizabeth:       The thing is, yeah, the paying off the credit card isn’t – getting out of debt is never the real goal.  It’s what do you get by the money or getting out of debt or whatever.  We’re actually almost ready to go to our next break. I wanted to give you the chance to share the website that people can go to, to find out more about this stuff.

Carrie:            Okay, I did a live presentation on finding your why to a women luncheon in Greensburg, North Carolina which was kind of the first time we had really talked about it a lot.  The feedback was so great that now I make it downloadable online.  And you can sign that at www.the-barefoot-executive.com.  It’s a free download, the-barefoot-executive.com.  It’s an audio and a written transcript.

Elizabeth:       Great, so if people want more about this they can go to that.  I’ll share that link one more time.  Thank you for being on this talk so much today, Carrie.

Carrie:            You’re so welcome.

Elizabeth:       Great.  So we’re going to our next break.  After the break I’ll answer the question for the week.  So stay in tune.

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  Again, this is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  And we had Carrie on, Carrie Wilkerson, the Barefoot Executive.  If you want to have any or more information from her, especially, we were talking about the end of the call about finding your why for your business.  You can get that free audio and transcript of her presentation about finding your why and here’s the URL, it’s the, T-H-E – barefoot-executive.com, so the-barefoot-executive.com.  And again that URL will be up on thewealthspa.com once this show goes up whether this afternoon or tomorrow morning.  You can also go there if you missed out on that.

Okay so let’s get in to the question for this week.  And it came up because this week I am in Los Angeles at a conference, the Online Success Blueprint Workshop by Alexandria Brown.  An amazing conference, it’s going to have almost 500 people there.  So it’s huge, huge conference for usually I go to things that are a little bit smaller than that.  It’s you know, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and if you go to conference, you go to seminar whether it’s something that 20 people are at or 20,000, there’s 3 areas that we tend to get overwhelmed.  You know first, the information.  You’re learning tons of information.  You’re presented with tons of ideas that you may want to implement in your business or even in your life.  How do you, it makes you implement some of those so how do you not get overwhelmed?  Second, is with the people.  So, you know, we all go to these conferences, one of the reasons is to network, is to meet new people.  How do you manage that?  How do you meet the right people?  How do you follow-up?  How do you make sure that you don’t lose all those business cards, right?  And third, is the stuff and here I’m talking about the physical stuff, all the junk that you get when go to a trade show, buying information products of the things that you may pick up, physical things.  So how do you deal with all that stuff?  So I wanted to go through the strategies that I use when I go to a conference or a seminar.  And you may be able to get some great ideas for what you can do the next time that you go.

So first let’s talk about ideas and information.  So every time I go to a conference, you know, I always have tons of ideas for my business and I’m not just talking about the stuff that you learn.  I’m talking about the next step.  So you know, you’re sitting there at the conference and they’re coming up with a presentation or they have a panel or whatever.  You can of course take notes about the information that they’re providing and that’s a good thing to do especially for those of you who are kind of visual and it may help to remember, to learn that information.  But a lot of you, like me, may get ideas from what people are talking about.  You get an idea, something you want to implement.  Oh that would be a great article that I could write or that’s a great product that I could develop.  Sometimes it’s not even what they’re talking about.  It’s like it puts things together in your head.  Oh it’s something that I should about my website or I need to tell my assistant to do this or all those ideas that you get at a conference.  You want to make sure that you capture all that stuff.

Now, I’ve done a lot of different things over the years, sometimes, I would take notes on the margin of the hand-outs and sometimes I would take loose sheets of paper or use a paper that you get at a conference.  Here’s what I do now, what I do now is I actually have a journal that I keep.   And it’s not like a diary kind of journal, even though I write all kinds of stuff in it.  The idea of this journal is that whenever I take notes from something, notes from a telephone call, notes, ideas, whatever, all goes in one journal bound hard cover journal, mainly so that I don’t lose anything.  So I don’t have all these random pieces of paper.  So when I go to a conference and I bring my journal and sit there with it.  And I write down all these ideas, all in one place.  It’s a different place than like the notes that I take about a presentation.  If someone is having a presentation, let’s say it’s a legal conference.  It’s about this area of internet law.  Well, I’m not talking about where I’m going, this isn’t where I’m going to necessarily write down, you know, taking notes about this new case that just came out and about that case.  In my journal I’m going to write down, here’s the title of the article that I’m going to write about this case and how it will be applicable to my audience cause you know, my audience are not lawyers who view my websites.  So it’s going to be taking another leap that I’m going to write down or maybe I’m listening to that talk about this internet law and it gives me an idea for a product that I could sell.  So I write those ideas down on my journal.

Here’s the secret.  You’ve got to take another step.  You can’t just write down all these ideas, typically, I’m a crazy entrepreneur, I would leave the conference with like 50 ideas or 100 ideas for my business, I mean it’s insane.  What end up happening in the past would be those would get stuck in a file folder and I wouldn’t use them.  I might implement some of it coz’ some of it you just remember but tons of those ideas would never happened, part of it because there’s just so many, right?  You may walk away with 100 ideas from an amazing conference.  You’re not going to implement them all on the first day, it’s impossible.  You get back to your office and you’ve got tons of work to do.  What I recommend is, the evening of the last day of the conference or on your plane ride home or in the airport, you sit down and get some quiet time, look through that journal.  I love to this in the airport or either on the plane.  You look through your journal of all your ideas and you prioritize and you say who they’ll be delegated to.

Cause it maybe some of those ideas you could literally write one e-mail to your virtual assistant or to a member of your staff or to your webmaster or whatever and send them 5 of those ideas to implement this afternoon.  Or there’s a couple of ideas that would be very fast for you to implement or are the most high priority things that would make you the most money.  So I sit down with all those ideas and I prioritize them.  And I also say who they can be delegated.  Actually, what I do is, I put a little VA with a circle around it and who it’s going to be delegated to.  And then I also, for mine, I put a little dollar sign against which ideas are going to make me money.  And if something is going to make me a lot of money, I put 3 dollar signs next to it.  That way, later on, when I’m trying to get ideas about something about my business, I can easily go back to that page and say okay I want to make more money today.  So I can look through all my ideas on my journal and look for the dollar sign and see where some money making ideas.

I occasionally will also put a little code for things that are just article ideas cause I write a lot of articles.  I have a radio show, I’m generating a gosh awful amount of content and so I always need ideas for the show, ideas for the articles.  So sometimes I put a little code next to things that are ideas.  So I categorize things.  The important thing is you need to this as soon as the conference is over.  It may literally be in the lobby or your hotel room at night.  I typically do it either at the airport or on the plane.  Being on the plane is a great place to think cause it’s nice and quiet unless you’re with your kid or something which I’m traveling who’s 3 ½ it’s not an easy quiet place when I’m by myself.  Then it’s something that I can do.

All right that’s the first idea.  Second is people.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed.  Now, when you’re going to a conference, I suggest that you have specific rules about the kinds of people that you want to meet or what you want them to do for.  So when you’re going to a conference saying okay, maybe, don’t just say I want to get clients or something cause that’s, of course you want to get clients.  But maybe you want to me, for example for me, I might want to meet 3 people I want to do a joint venture with or I want to meet 5 people who will be great guests for the radio show or you may want to have specific people you want to meet.  For example, at a conference that I’m going to this week, Marie Smith, who has been a guest on the radio show, I know she’s going to be there speaking.  And I haven’t met her yet in person.  I’m like, yes, I would definitely want to meet her in person.  So she’s on my list of people to speak to at the conference.  Have a list and write it down so you make sure that you get those goals met. 

Then when you have a stack of business cards, as people are handing you cards and you’re having conversations with them, write on the card.  It may be writing, sometimes I write yellow shirt coz’ it helps me remember who that person is or I’ll write the city they came from or you know has 3 kids or something to remind me of who that person is coz’ I get easily get overwhelmed about the number of people I meet and I kind remember who was who.  Then as soon as you get home, sit down with those business cards and write a really short e-mail and it can be literally be a sentence.  It doesn’t need to be anything [42:24] just it was great to meet you at that conference and I look forward to connecting with you.

Okay, the idea being that you started the dialogue.  So it’s not going to get lost and their e-mail is somewhere in your address book in your computer.  The idea being that you started that conversation cause it’s so often that we don’t follow-up at all.  And following-up doesn’t need to be a big deal even just sending one short e-mail especially when you have 50 people that you have a follow-up with.  Send a short e-mail to start that conversation and then take the stack of business cards and hand them to your virtual assistant or a member of your staff to input them to you know, your address book or contact files or whatever.  Don’t automatically subscribe them to eZine unless they said that it was okay or would say affirmatively wanted to be on that.  But get them in your, however you keep track of all your contacts.

Third is the stuff.  This something that I tend to do at conferences that I get too much stuff and this goes back to your plans for a conference.  When you’re going to go to a conference have a goal for the information you want to walk out with or the things.  Cause it’s very easy to get all this junk that you don’t need and you’re burdened taking it home or buy a whole bunch of programs and information products and all kinds of stuff that was beyond your budget and really isn’t strategic to the goals you have for your business.  And so set before you go to a conference and say I’m not going to spend more than $500 in this conference or you’re only going to buy stuff related to this specific problem that you’re having in your business or you’re only going to take stuff home that’s specifically related to something.

Now we’re about ready to go to our next break.  After the next break I’m going to wrap this question up real quick and then we’ll then be talking about the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week.  So stay in tune for all that after the break.    

BREAK

Elizabeth:       Welcome back everyone.  It’s Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, host of the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  Right before the break, we were talking about conferences and avoiding getting overwhelmed.  And I was specifically talking about all of this stuff.  It’s like going to a trade show?  You can get all this little knickknacky things and all this special stuff.  While you’re there before you stick it all in your luggage, look at the stuff when you’re sitting in your room.  And think about do I really need to take this home with me?  Just because someone gave you something for free doesn’t mean that you have to take it, that you have to keep it.  It maybe that some of stuff are some of the things that you’re going to review when you post about them in your blog.

Some of them may be things that you’re going to take home and give to a specific person or things that you are really going to use.  So it may be information that you want to follow-up on.  But you don’t have to take it all with you.  It’s a great idea to leave that out while you’re still sitting at your hotel room than to take it all home and put it on a pile on the box.  Cause what will happen is then the really great stuff winds up getting lost.  I’ve open up boxes and some stuff from conference that was, you know, a year and a half before that I should have follow-up on.  And would have been a great thing to do or have or use but because it was mixed in with a 100 junky things or things that weren’t applicable.  It never got applied and never got used or utilized.  So the real theme of all this is right after the conference is over, before you come home is when this needs to start.  To prevent overwhelm, you need to prioritize, pick what’s the most important things, doing the follow-ups, taking the notes as early as possible while it’s still in your head.  So when you get home, all you have to do is go ahead and implement the most strategic things for your business or follow-up the most strategic people who are important for your business and yourself.  All right that’s the question for the week.

Next, I want to do the Entrepreneur’s Success Tip for the Week.  This week’s tip is about listening to intuition in your business.  You know, as  a lawyer and a financial adviser I talk a lot about, personally, I talk a lot about, you know, taking action, specific things that you can do in your business and looking at the numbers and business plans and all that stuff.  But we also have a lot of guests in the show who talk a lot about intuition, law of attraction, universal principles and all of these and one of the big issues is balancing both sides.  For those of you, who approach things from that analytical goal-oriented side of things which is a lot of ways my learn default position that I have had growing up and as an adult.  You may start losing touch with your intuition and here’s where it tends to happen, this is where it has happened for me.  A lot of times, other people will have ideas for my business.  So for example, back when I originally started 5 years ago, my husband said you should do estate planning cause at that time I was doing personal financial planning.  And he’s like, you know, you’re a lawyer, doing an estate plan is really easy and actually a straight-forward estate plan is pretty easy.  It’s like you could easily use your practice, you know, you can make another 1000 or a couple thousand dollars a person or a couple on your estate planning or something simply thing that you have to do yadi yadi yada all these logical reasons.

But I’ll tell you, I did not want to do estate plans but I was like, well you know maybe I should.  Anytime you say I should to yourself is always like a big sign that it’s not your intuition.  I was like well maybe I should and so I did.   Also I added estate planning and I got the entrance that you need, and I’ve got the software that you need and all that stuff.  I did estate plans and I did a fine job with people’s estate plans but I hated doing these estate plans, it was boring, I didn’t like talking to people about death.  It was really actually, for the kinds of people that I did, they were very simple.  And I don’t like things that are simple.  I like things that are complicated.  Simplicity is kind of not kind of fun for me.  So I found that I didn’t like doing it and because I didn’t like doing it, it ended up not being very successful.

Now, it made money in the sense of the gross income of estate planning was, you know, thousands of dollars but when you add in all the cost, put the cost and me dealing with it and the time as well as the overhead, I actually didn’t make money on the estate planning stuff.  Now if I had loved it, I probably would have.  I probably would have found a way to make money out of it because it came from someone else, it wasn’t really resonating with what I like to do.  I didn’t really enjoy selling it.  It didn’t succeed.  And it has happened to other things in my business.  You know, people would say you should do some consulting work.  And so, I’d be like, well it would be a way to make money quickly and you know, I threw up some sells pay and sent a bunch of e-mails and blah blah and it’s totally unsuccessful.  Why not?  Coz’ I didn’t want to do it, right?  Even though intellectually, it’s a great idea and on paper it seems a great idea.  It wasn’t something that I resonated with.  When you don’t resonate with something, it makes it hard to sell and people will not want to buy from you.  So if there’s areas in your business where you’re having problems, if there’s things that where you’re, you know, not very successful in a certain area, I want you to think about, you know, should, is this something that I should do? Or someone else told me that I should do?  Or is this something that I actually personally want to do?  Is this something that I personally resonate with?

There’s a wonderful quote that says “if it’s not hell yes, then it’s hell no.”  If there’s something in your life or in your business cause we were talking about business.  And you decided to create a new product, you started to offer a new service line, you decided to put up a new website and you’re not looking at it going oh my god, this is wonderful.  I’m so excited about this.  This totally resonates with who I am and my mission and my purpose in life and blah blah blah.  But if you’re kind of just like, uh okay, I guess, you know, this is okay.  This is pretty good, it can potentially make a lot of money and my coach thinks it’s a great idea and my spouse and these other people.  You know what?  If you really look at yourself to think whether it’s right for you and if you look into the idea that intellectually looks good and it looks good in paper and it makes you feel drained and it makes you feel down.  And it kind of gives you this over-all yucky and depressed kind of feeling then letting that go, you can go to something else you resonate will be the best decision that you can do.  And I found that, when started letting go of all of that stuff that’s when not only did I start enjoying my business a lot more but that’s when I started having a lot more of success and things become more easy and fun.  So that’s the tip for the week.  You know, listen to yourself, listen to your own intuition in your business and stop doing what other people think you “should” or even what you think you “should” do.

All right, again I want to give you a little wrap up.  Again as I talk about the top of the hour, next week we are moving stations.  We are moving to Blog Talk Radio.  If you don’t know what that is, that’s fine.  Just go to thewealthspa.com, sign up to get the show delivered to you automatically, by e-mail, RSS Feed or via iTunes or if you go to thewealthspa.com we would have information about how you can listen to it on Blog Talk Radio.  So you don’t have to stress about getting about getting to the right URL or anything just go to the wealthspa.com and that will tell you what to do.

Now, we’re also changing the day of the show so now we’re on Wednesdays 11:00am Pacific, we’re moving to Thursdays at 11:00am Pacific just coz’ it matches better with my schedule and I don’t have to pre-record as much.  The show will be live most of the time if not all the time so you can call in with questions.  The neat thing about Blog Talk Radio is that there’s a chat feature if you don’t want to call in, you can always actually send me little messages right there and ask questions to be answered on the show.  Of course if you have any other questions you would like answered on the show, you can always go to thewealthspa.com and there’s a little link at the top that says be on the show.  If you would make a great guest expert that’s where you can go to find out how to be a guest expert or if you have a question you want me to answer about law or finance or marketing success or any of that stuffs that’s where you ask that question.  All right, thank you so much for listening and of course, go to thewealthspa.com with any more information about the show and I look forward to speaking with you all next week.  Bye.

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Tags: Carrie Wilkerson, elizabeth potts weinstein, Finding your why, intuition, networking