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In this episode, we delve into the crucial topic of learning from mistakes in business, emphasizing the value of sharing her own missteps to help others navigate similar challenges. With a focus on personal growth and development, listeners get to explore the lessons we learned, particularly regarding the dangers of over-relying on external guidance. Through candid reflection and storytelling, get ready for an insightful discussion on the importance of taking control of one’s business decisions.
Highlights:
- Sharing Mistakes: Angela emphasizes the importance of sharing her business mistakes to help others avoid similar pitfalls.
- Learning from Others: Reflects on the value of learning from others’ mistakes, which can spare one from unnecessary pain and internal work.
- The Costly Mistake: Angela recounts a significant mistake from around 2016-17 that cost her approximately $10,000.
- Trusting External Guidance: Despite initial enthusiasm, Angela realized she had trusted external guidance over her own business instincts, leading to detrimental changes.
- Taking Control: After the experience, Angela resolved to take more control over her business decisions and develop a comprehensive plan.
- Building a Foundation: Shares her strategy of creating a yearly, quarterly, and monthly plan to guide business growth effectively.
- Evaluating Opportunities: Advises listeners to critically evaluate business opportunities based on alignment with their goals.
- Focus on Actions: Emphasizes focusing on daily actions rather than overwhelming overarching goals.
- Invitation to Learn: Invites listeners to learn more about her Rockstar Success Circle, which offers support and guidance for business owners.
- Empowerment: Encourages listeners to prioritize their own instincts and decisions in business, avoiding costly mistakes.
Learn the significance of taking ownership of your business choices and learning from both your own mistakes and those of others. Through proactive planning and discernment, you can empower yourselves to make informed decisions that align with your goals and values. As you continue on your entrepreneurial path, we hope those words serve as a beacon of guidance, helping you navigate the complexities of business with clarity and confidence.
Click Here for the transcript
[00:00:00] Angela Mondor – The Geeky Girl: Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving.
And welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. I want to talk to you about something really important and it’s the lessons that I learned in my business that I want to share with you because I believe in sharing my mistakes.
I believe in making sure that other people have the ability not to make the same mistakes. Now, you might still make these mistakes, and that’s okay. We all make mistakes, and mistakes allow us to learn. I just think that if you can learn from somebody else’s mistakes, instead of you having to make them yourself.
Then it’s easier. I’ve learned, I’ve learned things both ways. I’ve learned by making my own mistakes, but I’ve also learned by watching other people and making sure that I don’t make their same mistakes. And here we are changing, changing to this quarter two now. See? And so I figured if I could share with you one of my It wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I don’t know if it’s my biggest mistake, but it certainly was a mistake that really brought some serious light to not only just my business, but also the way that I help other people.
And by doing so I get to help you in the process. I think it’s a win win. So I’d love to hear what you have to say about, or what you think about learning from your mistakes versus learning from other people’s mistakes. Because I think it’s a huge difference. Learning from my mistakes when I do it myself, sometimes there’s a lot of pain around it. Sometimes there’s a lot of work that needs to be done that isn’t just like work inside the business, but there’s like a lot of internal work that needs to be done too, right?
There’s some mental health stuff that needs to be gone through. Maybe there’s some stories I’ve been telling myself that I need to change. And there’s a lot of work in that way. But when I learn from somebody else’s mistake, they’ve done a lot of that work for me, sometimes. Because they’re just bringing me the sad truth of what happened to them, and I can commiserate, and I can feel connected to them, and I can learn from their ways of doing things and help them.
which will then help me eventually to do things differently. So I don’t remember the year. I would say it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 2016, 17 is what I’m thinking that also really doesn’t fricking matter cause this happens all the time. I was coming towards the end of the year. I’m excited. Of course that, you know the holiday season was upon us.
Things were happening. The new year was coming. I love a new year. It’s sort of like going to school the first, first day at a school and you get all your new school supplies. Like the new year seems to bring that energy out in me. And there was an opportunity that presented itself. Now there’s opportunities that present themselves all the time in our businesses and they present themselves.
in a much, in a lot of different ways inside our businesses. But nonetheless, this opportunity came across my desk and I was interested. I liked the person who was speaking to me. I connected to that person. I felt like they knew what I was trying to get done in my business. I felt like they knew what I needed in my business.
Notice how the language is in there saying, I thought that they knew me, that they knew my business. Okay. That’s, that’s the first mistake. I was relying on them to understand what I wanted in my business. When really that was my job. My job was to know what I wanted in my business and where I wanted to go.
Nonetheless, I digress. This is how I’ve learned. Okay. So we go through this. Sales process and it was a lengthy sales process. I remember sitting in my car, because of course, I was you know, driving my daughter around to hockey practices and stuff, and taking phone calls at all hours, because you’re working things in.
My kids were younger then. And maybe it was even before 2016. Gosh, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Anyway when some of these times I’d be, I remember sitting in my car and I remember taking these phone calls and I remember speaking to this person and them telling me about their program and they were so, so clear about what their program was about.
They were so clear on how it was going to be amazing and all these things. And I bought it and it was the wrong move, but I didn’t know that at the time. It took me, it took me a while to figure out it wasn’t the right move even. Now, there’s some great things that came out of that. First of all, I learned a whole lot about me, my business, and how I should be doing, should, here I go shitting on myself, but I also met some amazing people who I’m friends with today.
But that’s not the piece of the story I want you to hear. Today I want to talk to you about the mistake, and why it was a mistake, and how you can avoid these mistakes moving forward. So when we talk about this mistake, I want you to know that it was approximately a 10, 000 mistake, give or take. And the reason why it was a 10, 000 mistake is simply because of the fees that it took for me to be part of that program.
Plus part of that program required me to travel to another country because of course I’m Canadian. I went to the States. You know, there’s hotel fees and those kinds of things to attend seminars, yada, yada. It’s neighboring around the 10, 000, maybe more, but it’s about 10, 000. And it wasn’t until even after I went to that retreat, did I realize, oh my gosh, this is not the right answer for me.
I didn’t have a plan, but I had a thought as to how I wanted to move my business forward. And then while I was in this program, the facilitator of the program, The person running the program kept telling me that if I didn’t do it their way, okay, here’s some more language that’s important. If I didn’t do it their way, then if I failed, it wasn’t their fault because I didn’t do it their way.
And there was no way that I could put any blame on anybody but myself if I didn’t do it, they told me to do. This is where it all goes south, people. I didn’t realize until the program was It’s, I don’t know, it was a, it was a year long program. So that’s the other piece of this. It was a long program. It was a year long program.
And I don’t know if it was like seven, eight, nine months in, something like that, where it was like, Oh my God, this, this doesn’t feel right. The things that they’re getting me to do, the things that I’m allowing them to change in my business, because I was allowing them to make changes in my business because they told me that I should.
These changes were taking me further away. So not only was it a 10, 10, 000 mistake in terms of how much it cost me part of the program, but it also took money away from my business because my business actually did worse by making these changes. That’s not all in that person. It’s my decision. It was my decision to do it.
I decided to listen to them, yada, yada, yada, but I want you to understand the languages of these items and how this language can help you find these flags for yourself. So now here’s the thing that year, once it was over and I went, Oh, I don’t want anybody to tell me ever again, what I should do in my business.
I don’t want them to be the driver of what it is that’s supposed to happen in my business. I want to take more control over that. I decided that it was time for me to really have a serious plan on how I was going to move forward. And then from there. It became really clear how important that was. And my business has been successful every year since.
So the, the story piece is the fact that the opportunity landed on my desk. Now, opportunities are going to land on your desk all the time. They come in through email. I mean, this week alone, I think I’ve had, I don’t know, two or three that are just simply free summits or free things to attend, which is great if they align with my goals.
If they align with where I want to take the business. So it’s all fine and good to spend a bunch of time learning how to send emails. But if you’re not email marketing, if you’re not actually sending active email to your list, if that’s not something you want to do, then you’re not doing things that are helping your business.
So that’s why in the rockstar success circle, we spend that time to make that yearly plan. Then we, every quarter we check in, we make sure the quarterly plan is in line with not only what we wanted to accomplish for the year, but also in line with where we are and where we want to head now, now that the year’s begun.
And then every month we get together to review the monthly plan, to make sure that it’s following through with the things that need to happen for the quarterly plan. This is the foundation that I built. After that massive debacle, it has kept me, it has kept me successful. It has helped kept keep my business growing.
And now when a business opportunity lands across my desk, however, it comes across, whether somebody recommends something to me, whether I see it in an email, whether it’s an ad on social media, it doesn’t matter how the information comes to me, but when an opportunity shows up, cause that’s what they are.
There are opportunities. I can then look at the opportunity and say. Is this a no, not now, meaning I need it, but not right now. I don’t need it for another six months or a year or maybe two years. Who knows? Or is it a no, not ever. That is never something I want to do with my business. Or is it a checkmark?
Yes. Yes. Now that’s something that I want to learn or grow or bring into my business now or working on right now. There’s not a wrong answer to this situation, regardless of who’s putting it on. It could be your best friend in business, it could be your business bestie is putting something on, and if it’s not right for you, then you can still support them by sharing that information with other people who it might be right for, but it doesn’t mean to say you have to be there.
Okay. Deep breath. This can be difficult because there’s so many shiny objects out there. There’s so many things that we want to see and do and be part of, but they’re not always the right things for you right now. And so that’s what I want you to take away. Think about what it is that you’re doing in your business right now.
Do you have a plan for this year? Do you know where you want to go? Is it broken down in a way that’s easy for you to focus on the little things? So you’re not overwhelmed by this massive, great, big thing that you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to hit a sales goal you’ve never hit before, then don’t focus on the sales goal.
I know it sounds weird, right? Focus on the actions you do every day. How are you getting to that goal? These are some of the things we deal with in the Rockstar Success Circle. If you want to learn more, let us know. Definitely you can leave us a comment, send us an email at clientcare at geekygirl. ca.
I’ll I would love to discuss it with you and see if it’s the right fit for you. At the end of the day, what I hope that you get from this is the fact that you have the ability to choose how you run, how you run your business. And you don’t have to make the massive 10, 000 mistake that I did. There’s been many more mistakes along the way, but you don’t have to make that mistake for yourself, because I’ve given you some tools to avoid that mistake.
You can move forward right now and choose different things. You can choose to say, Hey, You know, there’s this chick, Angela, she’s like the geeky girl. And she said some stuff that have resonated with me. And yeah, I don’t need to take advantage of all of those offers. I don’t have to sign up for all of those freebies because they’re not a right fit for me at the moment.
Now, if they’re a right fit for you, but just not right now, and it’s something you can sign up for and keep somewhere, then I encourage you to go ahead and do that. We use ClickUp to keep those kinds of things because we know it’s searchable and I can find it and there’s a place for me to put it in there so that I can go back and look for those things later so I don’t get lost.
Especially, especially when you sign up with so many things in your email, it just gets lost in there. It’s really difficult to search. Nonetheless, I digress. I encourage you to think about Yourself, your business, where you want to head, not about how anybody else thinks you should run your business. So I hope you take that lesson.
I told me, take it to heart. I hope that one day something crosses your desk and you think, I remember there’s this chick, Angela, you know, like the geeky girl. Yeah. She said something and I hope it helps you make the decision that is the difference between failing and succeeding inside your business.
I’ll be of a fantastic day and I look forward to talking to you next time.