Transcript Ep #208: From Plans to Pivot

1:48  

Well, hey, friend, welcome back to another episode. I cannot believe it is how we’re halfway through summer. Heck, I saw on Facebook this week, people are starting back in school in Arizona which reminds me that you know, depending on where you live, determines back to school time. Over here in Sager farm country, we’re doing great. We’re gonna do a little update around what’s the happening over here. But today’s conversation is one I hadn’t planned on recording but I decided that this is something that we need to talk about because so often in business, whether you’re onstage as a speaker, or you’re facilitating a webinar, or you are just executing on just your business strategy. 

A lot of times it can be really frustrating when things don’t go according to plan, whether that’s tech mishaps, whether that’s someone not showing up or a client canceling on you, or someone being disruptive in your room or a piece of content that you felt was going to be easy to teach somehow became really sticky and your audience wasn’t getting it. Maybe it’s a, in your business, you had really big plans for a launch of a new program or a new product and it flopped, or you have these big dreams for having a social schedule or social media schedule and it didn’t quote unquote, work. The outcome wasn’t there. There was a lot of effort without a lot of payoff. Whatever it is in these scenarios that I described to you, it can be really emotional and frustrating and debilitating.It can be flat out frickin annoying when things do not turn out the way you planned. 

And today, what I want to do is have a conversation with you about embracing flexibility in your business and being committed to the outcome and the vision that you have whether it’s the outcome of having a successful webinar, meaning people come and they have a great experience and ultimately you sell your program, or maybe it’s doing a keynote on stage and wowing your client and really helping the audience have some ahas, whether that’s a you rolling out a new shop online for your business to sell digital products. Let’s let go of the need for the plan to be right and be more focused on getting to that end outcome which is what you’re after in business for you and for your audience and for potentially the client who hired you, if that’s the case.

4:35  

I think so often where I see clients get frustrated, I also bring in a parenting reference here. I see my kids get really frustrated when they have a picture in their mind of how they think things are gonna go and it just doesn’t. So for example, in towards the end of the year, y’all know I’ve been, we have had to sell our house in our old town that we lived in to move over to Bend, and part of that wonderful experience selling a house meant that I had to keep the motherfricking house clean for like six weeks while we were living into it to be open house ready, to be showing ready, to be just ready at all times. And I don’t know about you, but I am not a Instagrammable home decor person. My house is very lifted, like I’m not obsessed with cleaning, or decluttering, or organization. I am, I want my house to be yes clean but I’m more like interested in having experiences in my home and enjoying my home with my family than spending my time obsessively putting things into caddies. Just me, alright. 

5:41  

So anyways, in the Spring, we were probably, I don’t know, three to four weeks into having our house in the market and quite frankly, my husband and I were starting to get really annoyed that this was taking friggin forever and there was one day in particular that it was really, really hot weather and our realtor had reached out and for that day, there were three showing requests. There was one at like, nine o’clock in the morning, another one right around noon, and another one at like three o’clock. And I’m like mother frickin seriously, all on the same day. I work from home. How the heck am I supposed to get anything done? So I’m like, whatever. We want to sell the house. We got to make it happen. So we went ahead and said yes and the night before, the noon one canceled. So I’m like, alright, that’s annoying. I plan my day around it, but whatever. 

6:34  

So in the morning, I worked I think from a coffee shop but the afternoon one was going to be really tricky because it was at, I don’t know if, say 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, the tricky part was our oldest son got home from the bus at 2:20 which meant that we had to scoop him up and get the hell out of the house along with our two dogs. We have golden retrievers and we had to get the hell out to be ready so that turnaround time was really intense. Okay, you’re all probably thinking like Heather, this was the most boring story ever. Where are we go with this? 

Well, when Owen, my oldest gets home from school, he walks inside, drops off his stuff like he normally does and he gets ready to go play with one of his friends. And we’re like, no, no, we have to leave and I’ll summarize the conversation for you. But if you have kids or you know an eight year old, eight year olds can be a little dramatic. What escalated was a very, very frustrated child, who he had a picture in his mind around how the afternoon was gonna go. He’s going to come home. He’s gonna grab a beef stick. He was gonna I don’t know, grab other stack in the and there he was going to head out and go bicycling. I don’t why did I say that? Like kids don’t say bicycling, but whatever. 

He was gonna ride his bike with his friend. They were going to head over to a little mini mart thing and buy some war heads like he had this whole plan mapped out in his head. Let’s just for a moment realize that none of these things were actually approved, nor did he talk to mom or dad about it and we had actually hadn’t come up with a plan yet but in his brain, this was the plan. And the fact that we were taking this plan away from him as a reality and saying, we gotta leave. We wanted to go on a walk. We gotta leave. Let’s like, get out the door. We have literally five minutes to get out into that sweaty, frickin heat, and get out so that someone might buy our house, it was a very dramatic thing. 

8:34  

And later, when we reflected back on it. I’m like, alright, well, we didn’t really do a great job as parents managing expectations. I planned to talk to him about it before, the night before and before he went to school but we didn’t, and at the end of the day, I can be really frickin annoyed and be like, just get with it, dude. But also, we all know what it’s like to have this picture in our head around what we want and then have someone else interject and create the plants or take our freedom of agency or freedom of choice or whatever else. Things just change. We don’t really love change just in general for human behavior. In fact, there’s whole organizations in companies around organizational development focused on behavior change, like it’s a huge function in HR. 

9:20  

Anyways, this whole idea that we expect, one, kids to just go with it, but two, as adults we frickin hate it. Moral of the story, I’ll just tell you my little annoyance with that whole experience wasn’t the kid thing. He was awesome. We ended up on a long journey in a very hot heat. We made some stupid choices, tried to go for a walk and then to go pick up the younger child and we took the dogs and then we ended up at Safeway and it was his whole thing. Anyways, the showing was like a total disaster. They literally were in or out of our house in four minutes. So this whole thing could have been avoided had we known that they were only there for a hot second. Not the point of the story, but screw those frickin people. 

9:59  

The thing I wanted to bring up is this whole point about being disappointed, that things don’t go according to the picture you have in your head is very, very normal. And while you might be thinking, okay, Heather, that was an eight year old kid like da,da,da? What’s that got to do with me? I would bet that you probably create these images in your mind of how you want things to go in your life and your business. I mean, think about it. You have an upcoming webinar coming up, or maybe even have an idea for a reel or an Instagram, or you have a picture around how you want a workshop to go, or how you want a conversation to go with another person. 

10:37  

We all are really good storytellers in our brain, visualizing what’s going to happen. Now some of us have unfortunate, dramatic nightmare abilities, where the picture we face is like the most dramatic, like, destructive version possible because we worry a little too much. I’m trying not to do that anymore. But we do play these little mini movies in our mind thinking about how things are going to go. And the reality is most often, they do not go according to that picture but when we’re so obsessed with it going that certain way, we miss really beautiful opportunities, and that’s what I want to talk about today which is being open to being flexible, being open to the experience, not the like tied to the exact process. 

11:31  

Now, for some of you, you might be cringing going, Heather, I thrive on having a plan. I need to know what’s coming. I need to know exactly how this is going to play out. And to that I tell you a friend, it doesn’t matter how much control you think you have. Shit is going to happen. Something is going to happen and go sideways and your plans are going to be disrupted. Even the most perfectly executed plans, they have flops, they have unexpected things that happen. I think you would agree with that. But so I think in business, what I want you really thinking about as you embrace this next season in your business, really getting clear around where are you holding on a little too tight, needing to keep control around what happens next? 

12:16  

Maybe that for you comes into your revenue. Do you have a choke hold on, I’m not making enough money so I need this whole thing to play out, this lunch has to go so perfectly or, I don’t know. Do you have this like exact thing in your brain of exactly how it needs to happen for it to be successful? Is there opportunity for you to be a little bit more open, a little bit more flexible around what it’ll take to get there. Now, as a speaker, as someone who teaches speakers, my specialty is really facilitating great workshops, facilitating groups, whether that’s through a training, like in an actual training, but facilitating the learning in that training, whether that’s doing keynotes with Q&A’s. I’m really, really good at facilitation. And essentially, my definition of what I defined facilitation as, facilitation is different than just being a presenter or speaker. Facilitation is really bringing your audience along in the process and embracing their questions, embracing their experience to create a custom experience with the people in the room, and it’s actually a very, it’s a finessed skill. 

13:27  

Now back in the day when I was teaching a lot of corporate workshops, luckily before that, how I really got my start into speaking a lot of it was emceeing events. Now I’m seeing which was like, welcome to the event. Here’s where the bathrooms are, here’s when we’re going to eat lunch, like that was kind of my role. But a combination of like my job as a facilitator or as an emcee was to ensure that people in the room had what they needed to feel comfortable, to be able to be fully present and not be thinking about, oh my gosh, where do I go next, or where am I going to get coffee, or who do I go for this? Like when we have all these questions consuming our mind, we’re not able to be fully present. 

14:09  

So fast forward, when I became a speaker, when I started facilitating more live trainings, seminars, two week boot camps, live in person, I was just doing a lot of in person and virtual but primarily in person speaking, and what I realized was the more and more I did, the more comfortable and confident I got with facilitation. You see, one of the challenges that I see a lot of people have when it comes to speaking or overall being an instructor, or trainer, or presenter is we fear what people think about us, what their objections might be. We fear what they might be thinking about content and there is a level of desire to prove to the audience that what we’re teaching is the right thing or that we are qualified or credible and should be the one teaching it. And I think any experienced facilitator, trainer, or speaker would tell you that the best speakers are also the most humble. That they allow space for spontaneity in their presentations. In fact, one of my favorite speakers, her name is Judy. She teaches improv. She was actually on the show a couple of years ago but she literally teaches improv and how like the ability to allow improvisation in your life, playing with fear, playing with conversations, allowing the unexpected and treating as an opportunity for what to do next. I think we can all benefit a little bit more of that spontaneity. 

15:50  

I wanted to make this relevant to business. I also want to share with you around how I’m embracing flexibility and change right now in this season in business. So I’m gonna share with you just a couple insider things around what’s been going on in my life and business and what’s coming down the pike as they say. But what I have for you, what I want you to think about is this is really applicable in twofold. So one, I want you to start thinking about how you can embrace a little bit more spontaneity when you speak. Now, when you first start doing guest speaking or if you are delivering a relatively new topic, you want to keep the spontaneity to like a specific thing. 

So for example, it does not mean that you just overall be like, what questions do you have? What are you thinking and you don’t just throw out random open ended questions to your audience? You make them specific, especially the less experienced you are facilitating in a group, right? So be more specific with your questions. So like point it down, laser ask some questions of your audience in one specific section of your talk, or if you’re going to answer questions at the end, make this questions relevant to the specific topic or a section of your talk that you talked about. Make your questions clear and you will get better questions from your audience so that’s one thing. I just wanted to open up this idea of embracing flexibility in your presentations, but I also want to challenge you to embrace a little bit more flexibility when how you’re running your business. 

17:20  

So is there anything right now where are processes or plans that you previously put in place? There was a lot of P’s. Plans you previously put in place in your business. Are you feeling stressed out by those plans? Do you find yourself ignoring the plans you put in place? Gosh, this is like lots of P’s happening? But you’re with me, right? Have you ever had that or is that happening right now where you are not delivering on the plan that you thought would be the best idea ever? 

17:56  

I think it’s time for you to maybe to say there’s something wrong with a plan if you’re not able to stick with it. This is a chance for you to be flexible and say, all right, it doesn’t matter how much time I put into it. That’s a sunk time cost, my friend. It’s time for you to adapt and say, what can I give in this season? If you have a plan that you had and that you are delaying executing, what’s the delay? There’s something happening there? What do we need to do to be a bit more flexible? Do you need to flush something down the toilet? Do you need to get out of a commitment that you made because you’re not the best person for the job at this season in your life? Sometimes or prior commitments, we just keep them because we feel guilty or we don’t want to be in A-hole or for whatever reason. But part of this being flexible to life, being open for how things happen, is it means that sometimes you need to kind of like cut it out if you’ve over committed, if you have over planned, if you are overly stressed around how you’re showing up in your business? My friend, what can you do to cut the clutter and simplify? That was I mean, kind of cheesy or could really be quote card on Instagram or some sort but that’s really what it comes down to. 

19:28  

Okay, that’s a little bit of my reflections for you, what comes to mind and now let me, there’s kind of a context around what’s been going on with me. So in quick summation, if you’ve been a listener for the show for a while, you know that a lot has happened in my life and business this year. So we are, let’s see. What year is it? 2018,  19, 20, 21, 22, 23. This summer, in fact, in September I am officially celebrating the five year anniversary of Heather Sager LLC. It is when I filed my my business registry. It was when I took my very first check as a paid speaker, an official consultant to get everything in and here we are five years later, and this year has been the biggest year of change and transformation ever, so let’s just do a fun little quick recap down memory lane. 

20:19  

A year ago, at this time, I was announcing a new partnership and a new company, The Speaker Co which I merged companies with a presentation designer, Emily. We share all about that on the podcast, we had a Grandal time and about six months into the partnership. We realized, mulligan, whoopsie whoopsie. We are great together but for where we’re going next, we need to independently move back and to be separate organizations and just collaborate. And so I’ve spent the last six months untangling the pieces that I put together. I’m talking offers, I’m talking tech, I’m talking messaging, I’m talking all the things that I had built or that we built together in the one company. I had to tangle that back down. 

21:01  

Now I share that in context is because I am so grateful to that opportunity and going into partnership. There’s so much that I learned from that. I do not regret it for a second. I do not regret it for a second and actually being open to that partnership required me to be flexible. Never on earth did I think I would ever get a business partner but the gift of having one were so many beautiful lessons, so much clarifying around what I want my business to feel like, to look like, what I want my offers to be and the same, quite frankly, for Em. In fact, sidenote, the time I’m recording this, She and I just spent two hours on Zoom earlier and I actually hired her to help me with the project. Our companies work together really, really well so there’s no hard feelings and no regrets by any means, but with it this year has been a lot of change. 

21:50  

So coming out of that partnership, I announced that in end of January and so I’ve been working through that. I also talked about how I launched then a new program, the Signature Talk Accelerator which came out in March, facilitated in April. Sidenote that’s coming up. It’s coming up again, Signature Talk Accelerator is happening, October 10th, 11th and 12th. Enrollment starting in, let’s see it starting in September and doors open September 18, so save the date if you’ve been waiting. I’m so frickin excited about the next round of that. I’ll talk about that later down the road on the podcast that will be coming up here soon. 

22:27  

But I’ve really had to do a ton of reflection this year to decide, alright, what do I want the next chapter to be? And as you’ve probably been following along, you’ve heard me talk about in the podcast, on social, I also announced a couple weeks ago, months ago, I don’t remember at this point that I am pregnant with baby number three. So I’m gonna answer on this podcast episode because I haven’t answered it publicly yet and promised that I would. The question I have gotten more than anything else was, was this baby planned? Which I know might be a weird question for someone to ask you. You might be thinking that. You might have been thinking that yourself. Also, and just for context, if you don’t know me and you’re relatively new to my world. I am 40 years old next March so I am not a young mom by any means, and I have two older kids, eight and five so this is a pretty big gap with this baby so I understand why people ask that question but for context, this is important for my business. 

23:33  

So to give a little just serious quick answer. Yes, this baby was planned and very unexpected and what I mean by that, I’m not going to get into the whole personal story here. I’m sure. I mean, maybe at some point, I’ll do an episode on that as like a bonus but this just feels like overkill but let me know if you want to know the details. I’m fine. I mean, I don’t mean like the details of like how I made the baby, like that. That’s a little too much. I realized how that sounded as I was saying it, anyways. The point was with my other kids, this might be TMI, but at this point, I feel like you know a lot about me so here we go. 

24:12  

I really struggled to get pregnant with both of my other children. My first pregnancy it took us, I don’t know, seven or eight months to conceive and I had a miscarriage, five weeks and I thought it was my fault because I chose to run in a race. I was a runner at the time. I ran in a race. The weekend after the run I was pregnant. Nothing’s running was something crazy. It took it easy, but I miscarried that next Monday and I blamed myself. Fast forward, it took us then almost a year to get pregnant again with my oldest child, Owen and then when I was trying to conceive with Levi, it took us again almost a year. 

24:53  

Now what was that from, was I, did I have fertility issues? I do not know. I just know I had a very high stress, high, very busy life at the time and sure it was probably not the healthiest in each of those scenarios. I’m not going to really get into that but the point was, it was hard for me to get pregnant. I did not have, I do not associate when people talk about, I talked about this on the show, I had a wonderful guest talk about syncing your cycle to your energetic parts of your business and that’s never worked for me because my cycle would be like 70 days, at some point. 

25:32  

Now, since I’ve started my own business and I left crazy corporate and all of the stress that came with that and the travel, things have really leveled out for me. But still, I just assumed things would be hard. So when my husband and I started the conversation last Fall, to be perfectly honest with you, I have always wanted to have more than two kids. I’m the youngest of six. I wanted a big family but I felt that ship sailed because I started having kids when my mom ended having kids so I just kind of thought that was over and my husband is always been like two kids max so I’ve always teased him about it over the years and I jokingly brought it up in the Fall and for the first time ever, he entertained the conversation. 

And then I was like, WTF. I thought we were done here so that was kind of funny. But he said the most sweet thing ever to me and I’m so grateful for that. And he said, Heather, fast forward 10 years from now, I would rather be in chaos mode with three children. Of course, I’ll love every single one of them but I would rather have that than living in regret of you resenting the fact that we never tried and of course, I got all teary. And I’m like, alright, well that, nobody actually think about it like that, like, oops, do I want to do that all over again? Like hello, dirty diapers? No sleep, like that’s a lot. I got a good thing going on right now. 

26:52  

But we came up with the agreement that we would try and if we were not pregnant by my 39th birthday, that was it. I’m do, I’m not gonna go past that. My husband is a couple years older than me. I was like, you, we’ll just call it good. And kid you not, my friend I got pregnant the weekend of my birthday so that might be a little TMI. But the context, if you followed me along at the time, I was in like crazy launch mode. It was hilarious. We had a lot going on and I like talking about threading the needle, mad stallion but all this to say this was very wanted but I never expected to happen. In fact, I was shocked. I found out I was pregnant in urgent care. I had to go to urgent care for a bug bite that got infected on my ankle, the next month. So that’s how I find out was pregnant. There’s little mini story that you didn’t need to know but now you’re like, oh, that’s now you feel like you know a little bit more slash you have the insider scoop on my uterus slash evidently in my sex life. 

27:58  

So gonna be back with the theme of this episode, being committed to the outcome, but being flexible and how we get there. Alright, flexible and how we get there. I did not have having a third child, that was not on my vision board. That was not like a huge thing that I was like, dead set on having but it was always something that I wanted and because of having the willingness to have that conversation, because of the lack of stress in my life, and me creating a lot of space, I have the environment for it to happen which is pretty freakin cool. But also the gift that that has given me now in this season in my business is really what I wanted to share with you today. 

Because you’re sitting here, I mean, you’re probably not in this exact boat that I’m in because this is a very unique boat but I’m very fashionable boat if I will say. But I’m in a season of going how do I embrace this change? Not only right now, physically with my energy, with myself, physically growing, with us moving across the state, with mean very, really needing to take time off this Fall and no longer having an employer with maternity leave, right? So there are these big questions I’m having to ask myself. And it’s been the biggest gift. I mean, it’s also been like a lot, like it is a lot happening. But the biggest gift because it’s forcing me to be really clear and saying the same question I asked you. 

Did I have plans that I was so committed to but really were not critical? Was I committed to tasks or to have commitments with other people that really were me saying yes out of have not wanting to be rude or trying to be likable, but they really weren’t the best timing for me. Perhaps start thinking about do I have the the business model? the offer suite? Do I have things set up to really afford, I don’t mean afford for financially but essentially lay out the the type of lifestyle and business structure I want moving forward? These are questions that I don’t think you have to get knocked up to ask yourself my friend so that’s what I’m doing today for you. But let me share with you a couple of the, we’ll get tactical here. Here’s like a couple of very specific things that we have changed on my team slash are changing. 

30:30  

So number one, it is going to be a really stupid one but I don’t know maybe it’ll be interesting to you. Websites, like let’s talk granular website. Okay, so one of the changes that I have been delaying making over the last six months is when my, when Emily and I decided to part ways The Speaker Co. The Speaker Co brand was a DBA on on my current LLC so I maintain that that branding, and I had to ask the question of do I want to keep using The Speaker Co or do I want to go back to the Heather Sager LLC brand? And honestly, that was a really hard decision for me to make. So I split it off, I reopened Heathersager.com. I simplified The Speaker Co website but I’ve had two websites, all year, two Instagram accounts, like two brands, if you will, and they’ve complemented. I slapped the logos together to have it say, The Speaker Co by Heather Sager. I mean, it worked. I’m not gonna say it’s been smooth by any nature but I would imagine from public facing it has been a very smooth transition. However, it’s still two brands. 

31:48  

So I had to make the choice of am I going to stick with the non personal brand and go with The Speaker Co name or am I going to lead with Heather Sager? And honestly, there are pros and cons of both and this is not a conversation to tell you to go with your personal brand name or go with a company name. But for me what I decided in the vision of what I have over the next 10, 20 years, going with the Heather Sager brand is the best choice for me. So I made the bold decision to not allow sunk costs and sunk time costs dictates decision, and I decided The Speaker Co brand, blowing it up. It’s gone. As of next week, this, you’re gonna hear this episode this week, but next week, that is completely sunsetting. I’m working on getting all The Speaker Co branding removed. 

There’ll be a new Heathersager.com in place which I’ll talk to you about that here in a second, web tech because that’s another question I had to answer and that might be super geeky and you might be interested in but I decided The Speaker Co brand, it doesn’t need to happen. It’s great for so many things but the end of the day if I had to be the most simplistic possible, it’s got to be sunset. Now, will it never come back? I don’t know. I’m gonna have learned as a parent, never say never but right now it’s gonna go away. So Heather Sager is the sole brand moving forward with all my courses and programs underneath it. 

33:13  

So with that brings me that question around tech. Okay, tech and websites. So here’s the funny thing. This is like a super geeky thing, but I don’t know. I’d like having business owner conversations around this. So one of the questions I had recently was around tech stacks. Last a couple weeks ago, I got to talk to Inside Amy Porterfield, Momentum Membership, and their tech conversations, like show up different tech tools which is kind of funny because I’m not like an overly techie person. I’m proficient at tech and I use it very wisely but I’m not like the tech person, like I’m not the person that you’re gonna, like, send me all your questions because I’m gonna laugh and be like, send it to Doreethy. She’s my assistant. She knows. She’s like amazing and all these things. 

33:57  

Anyways, so we had the tech conundrum, that we had two different platforms for our websites. Heather Sager currently is all built on Kajabi and The Speaker Co we built on the platform, Show it via with WordPress, blogging plugin and we love the Showit site for Speaker Co, like it’s beautiful. I love it. I love that WordPress. I started using LeadPages for all of our opt-ins. I love the data that comes with it. I’m just in love, in love, in love and the hard time is I’d already have Heather Sager completely built on the Kajabi. I already paid for Kajabi, all of my courses are on Kajabi. My checkout system is Kajabi. It’s really been hard this year going I don’t need to have both. So I will tell you six weeks ago when I made the decision to axe The Speaker Co brand I also made the decision to put everything back on Kajabi. The plan, logical plan, it made sense in an effort to simplify. Great thing about Kajabi is I’m an affiliate. I use it all the time. People tell me hey, what do you ask me? What do you use? Show how easy it is to be a speaker with courses. We use Kajabi. It’s great for everything. Wonderful. 

35:05  

Well, here’s the curveball. Two weeks ago, I decided I need to be flexible on the plan and I changed my mind because you know what’s fun? Business owner you, you’re a grown ass person. You too can change your mind. So two weeks ago, I made the decision of F it. No, I am going to build Heathersager.com on Showit. It’s beautiful web site that I would love to be on but I was worried that it would just take too much time to move things over. My worry was we had to move all the blog post articles over. My worry was oh my gosh, like so many things to move over. Well, one logical little fact, two logical little facts actually deterred me and allowed me to make the decision very swiftly. Number one, my amazing assistant reminded me that we had already built pretty much all of the blog posts on the new Showit website because we’d already started that transition with Speaker Co so those were like 80%. Done. Boom. Number two, the sales page for my super amazing program, the Signature Talk Accelerator was all built on Showit and whilst we could build it on Kajabi, I don’t want to pay a designer to do that. I already paid that once and it’s so pretty.  It’s so pretty and it’s functional and it’s wonderful. The time it would take for me to rebuild it on Kajabi would take me forever in a day and it would look ugly AF, aand that’s the most consuming page on a website anyways. 

36:39  

So that was a very quick decision of it would take me less time to build out the homepage, the about page, the work with me page, like the main functions you needed in a website. It would take me less time to build that on Showit than it would on building a sales page on Kajabi. That might be shocking to some of you if you don’t have long form sales pages but it just, it didn’t make sense and ultimately, I like the visuals, the Showit site better and I would love to be there with WordPress. So that was the decision which is pretty cool. So we made that decision a couple weeks ago. We’ve been working on it. The design looks great and I’m excited for that to launch next Thursday. So on next week’s episode, celebrate, we’ll officially have show notes. What’s great is instead of having to go down to the notes under we’ll listen to podcast if you ever want to pull show notes for the episode, you’ll be able to as of next week, not right now but heathersager.com/whatever the episode number is. So Heather sager.com/210, /110, fordward slash whatever the number of the episode is, you can always find the fully visualized version of the podcast episode which I think is frickin awesome. 

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Anyways, I share this with you not because it’s lik, hurray, ,look at the new website. I share this with you because as a business owner, our ability to make decisions determines our ability to be successful and it’s not about making the right decision, but it’s making swift decision because I’ve said this many times before, the longer you sit in indecision and the like, the longer you’re like delaying getting some kind of results that you can take action off, whether the results you wanted or ones you didn’t, that delay is going to screw you over. 

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So my point of this episode and this like rambled banter here today is I see far too many business owners feel guilty or feel like they failed when things do not go according to plan. But my friend, you not only have the right to. You have a necessity to change your mind as you need because plans changed, environments change, life changes. There’s all these other dynamic factors around you. If you hold yourself to the expectation that you have to stick with the plan because that was the plan, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to move with the opportunities. There are lessons there for you to learn. There are opportunities flying at your motherfreakin face that you’re ignoring because your eyes are down on the plan. 

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Now what I don’t want you to do is get distracted by shiny object syndrome and always be looking for new shit to try. That’s not what this is about but you have to really be focused around, are there opportunities around me that I am saying yes to that I maybe shouldn’t or are there opportunities around me that I am ignoring because of my need to do things a certain way? For me this has meant being open to change my mind. It’s being open to let go of things I’ve already invested a shit ton of money on and spent a lot of time on. It’s also been about me not feeling guilty for quote-unquote failing. I had a really good episode around that. I think in March that came out we’ll link it to the show notes but it’s not feeling guilty for past choices. They’re all lessons for your future. It’s also about you getting out of commitments that are not serving you. 

So yeah, one of the things I’ve gotten really good at, at the last 90 days, which I’ll tell you doesn’t feel good at the time, is saying no to people who have very logical requests, whether it’s a guest speaking request or it’s I don’t know, just asking whether it’s of my time, or my contributions, or my services. I have to say no. I’ve had to turn down a lot of one on one clients. I just run out of money because this season in life, it doesn’t fit in the business model. It doesn’t fit in the container I have for my business during the day when I have kids at home, when I’m planning for maternity leave, and I’m planning for the most epic live program ever. That’s happening in October. 

Sidenote, we have three levels to choose from in the Signature Talk  accelerator. I’m very, very excited. So depending on where you’re at in your business, and what you want to get out of the Accelerator, whether you’re looking to get paid to speak, you’re wanting to sell your services in the back end, you’re just wanting to get your messaging and your story down. There are different levels of that. This frickin thing is going to be so like, I’m so frickin proud of it, so proud of it. It is coming. But because of my commitment to my future, I’m having to say no to things in the present, and I really want you thinking about what do you need to say no too. What do you need to maybe, maybe a commitment that you made that you need to get out of? I don’t know. I know you’re like but I have to follow through. Y’all follow through. It’s one of those things, if you’re following through begrudgingly, it’s gonna serve the other person better if you gracefully bow out and allow someone else to take that seat. 

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Allow yourself to quote-unquote, fail. Allow yourself not to be the perfect, whatever version that you have in your head. You’re going to flop, my friend, and you may as well just have fun with it and embrace it. That is part of the journey. Be flexible. That’s what a lot of this is about. All right, this edition of Sager rambles for an hour is that conclusion. I hope you have had an incredible week. I am thinking of you, I am cheering for you. 

I just realized now as we wrap this episode, this officially was my first podcast episode in my new studio here in Bend, Oregon. I know I’ve recorded some intros for you for the last few episodes but this is the first official episode coming to you from Bend. So we’re doing great here. We love the farm. We’re loving it. I am so excited to see many of you this Fall as we get ready for the Signature Talk Accelerator if you want more information on that. Just keep an eye out on your email if you’re on my list or on my Instagram Stories. Full disclosure, right now neither of my websites Heathersager.com or The Speaker Co are actually working because I did a dumb thing and decided to change domain providers and all of them have shut down. Ah, that’s an embarrassing. I probably should not admit but also it’s whatever. I’m gonna have a new website in a week. So we’re gonna call this Heather offline week but I’m around you’ll see all new website, all new links and everything happening next week but if you need me in the meantime come, send me a DM, send me a DM on Instagram. I’d love to hear how you’re doing. I’d love to hear how this message hit you today. Most importantly with that I’d love to hear with what you’re going to do with it. Alright, my friend I will see you again next week.