[0.0] In this lessons episode, discover why scaling a successful business can come with hidden personal costs.
[5.3] Understand how relentless growth can blur the line between ambition and self-worth,
[9.4] explore why building a personal brand requires serving others rather than chasing validation,
[13.8] and uncover how burnout and difficult seasons can reveal a more meaningful path forward.
[25.9] So the problem that simply view a solving was personal brand.
[28.7] Yes.
[29.6] And then why that back to that thought, why does no one carry your personal brand is,
[35.2] when all you were doing was building persons.
[36.8] Yeah, it was for people.
[37.6] I was pretty provocative thing I put on Twitter.
[39.9] And I read about that in my first book, B.
[42.6] So I built a personal branding agency rooted on the premise of authenticity.
[47.9] That to build a brand from ego is doing Iran is what a lot of people do,
[55.2] which is why the idea of personal brand is sort of gross to people.
[58.9] What people think that they never want to do it.
[60.7] What do you mean from ego?
[61.4] So when you're simply self promoting, when it's all about you, when you're the star of
[66.5] your own platform, you're not your community as the star, they're the main character,
[71.2] that you're showing up to be seen without any purpose or service towards your community.
[79.2] The biggest secret about building a personal brand, this what I said in my Twitter account,
[84.0] is that no one cares about you, no one cares about your brand.
[86.2] What do people care about themselves?
[88.3] And so everything that you create has to come from a place of service.
[92.3] If you want to resonate online and create loyalty, create trust,
[96.3] create a compound of fact of growth to create clients.
[100.3] It has to really come from your heart.
[102.3] You have to be of service knowing that you're just the vessel,
[106.3] you're just the channel.
[107.3] Your gifts are needed.
[108.3] You were put here for a reason.
[110.3] You are special.
[111.3] With so are the people that you serve.
[113.3] And if you architect content every time you go post,
[116.3] whether it's a YouTube channel, a tweet, a blog, a talk, a book, and you put your audience first
[124.2] in every single thing you say and do. You're going to resonate. You're going to find your people
[130.7] because they feel like you care about them. And so it's great you should care about your personal
[136.3] brand. You should care immensely about it, but don't care about that more than you care about
[143.2] the people that you serve because I think that's really what we're here to do. I think that's when
[147.5] we're in our highest vibration when we're helping other people. You know what's interesting though?
[152.5] So the issue, not the issue. Difficultie people have is we just spoke about how entrepreneurship
[159.6] is a shit show and everybody feels like an imposter. Everybody's trying to build shit and
[165.0] nobody wants to open up as to what's really going on in their life or their business.
[169.6] Because if you actually spoke about what's going on in your business,
[173.7] arguable that it would even be received well, because it's such a mess. It's so chaotic, right?
[180.7] Right. Yeah.
[182.4] So if I'm trying to inspire and I'm trying to teach, how am I going to tell them that
[190.6] my video editing team for my podcast didn't follow the SOPs for like the 10th time in a row?
[195.5] because that's what's going on.
[197.7] But that's not helping or teaching or inspiring anybody.
[202.1] So then I feel that there is its disconnect
[205.5] between what I'm experiencing as a business leader.
[208.4] And then what I'm putting it under the world
[210.7] as a personal brand.
[211.8] So maybe I could try and teach and inspire,
[213.9] but it's not really what's going on every single day.
[218.0] So what even as from a personal example,
[220.0] what I've tried to do is turn my content into like lesson
[224.5] that I should have learned already.
[226.5] Beautiful.
[227.4] That I'm actually just telling myself.
[229.4] Yes.
[230.2] And that's where it does well so far.
[231.9] But I think a lot of people have a hard time
[234.1] being that vulnerable.
[235.9] I think it's difficult.
[237.8] I think it's a couple thoughts there.
[239.9] I think it's important to take your audience
[242.3] on a journey with you.
[243.6] I think it's important to be the student out loud,
[247.4] to some degree, as much as you are a teacher.
[250.7] I think people resonate with truth in a way
[254.5] that they don't resonate with perfection.
[257.4] And it's a fine line.
[260.3] I'm with you too.
[261.5] I just started in my whole new business.
[263.2] And it is somewhat clunky and chaotic.
[266.5] And I'm figuring it out as I go.
[268.0] And I haven't wanted to share it.
[269.7] It's not necessarily for my audience to know yet.
[272.6] Because here's what I say of so many thoughts on this.
[276.2] I'll take you back to when I was first on Facebook,
[280.1] back in like 2010.
[282.9] I was going through the most horrific breakup
[285.4] with the sky that I was with for five years.
[288.3] I loved him so much.
[289.5] We had this horrible breakup.
[290.9] It was so, so painful.
[293.1] And I was new to social media
[294.5] and I didn't really, you know,
[296.1] understand what it was gonna be.
[298.2] And I was getting on Facebook at the time.
[299.9] History wasn't even out yet.
[301.7] And like being really cathartic
[303.6] and talking about my breakup and my posts.
[306.6] And my friend of mine, who was a little older than me,
[309.7] She pulled me aside.
[310.8] She was like, Jessica, the internet is not a place for you
[314.3] to process.
[316.8] Give your therapist for that.
[319.1] The internet is a place for you to share wisdom
[321.9] once you've learned your lessons.
[324.1] So break up, go through the breakup,
[326.1] feel all the feelings, talk to your mom, talk to your therapist,
[328.6] heal from this, and then come back online in 6.79 months
[332.4] when you've grieved it and have gotten over it.
[335.7] and you have new lessons to share about love
[339.0] to your audience of women and relationships.
[343.1] And I'll never forget that.
[344.3] And I think that principle has always run,
[346.9] is true for me as possible because I'd like to share what
[349.5] I'm going through.
[351.1] But certain things, whether it's personal or professional,
[353.3] simply aren't for the public.
[354.8] And it's your audience probably doesn't need to know
[359.0] that your YouTube guide didn't follow the SOPs.
[361.9] But you can talk about it once you've figured out
[365.7] and come back and share that.
[367.0] And that would be so relevant of what you learned
[369.5] so that they can learn it too.
[371.3] And the second thing I was going to say
[373.7] is it's so important to find community
[375.9] of other like-minded entrepreneurs
[378.1] and talk about these things in private spaces.
[380.0] That's why masterminds exist.
[381.7] That's why coach group coaching programs exist.
[385.3] That's just why a network is so powerful.
[387.3] I was mentioning all those women I'm seeing tomorrow
[389.5] and having dinner with here in Miami.
[391.5] Those are all women that are playing this game too.
[393.7] And those are some of my favorite spaces
[395.9] because we all get to just be so honest and private.
[399.4] And it's healing.
[400.9] Yeah.
[401.9] When you look back at sort of the journey you went on
[405.8] with simply beat, like I would say,
[410.9] I would ask the question, like, are you happy?
[412.4] You went through all those experiences?
[414.5] Do you wish anything could have been done differently?
[416.7] Because an agency is a very difficult business.
[418.6] Yeah.
[419.5] An agency, like, like, okay.
[421.2] So I want to talk after this because when you build a personal brand and you build a large podcast,
[429.2] then your friends start asking like, can you do this for me?
[432.2] Yeah.
[432.7] And I think that's how an agency starts to form.
[435.0] And I'm like, very, I'm very careful not to not to, because I don't know if it's scalable.
[441.2] I've, I've worked with tons of agencies.
[444.2] I mean, the margins seem like they're patient thin.
[448.2] They're just absolute shit.
[449.6] I see the people that work for them don't even like working for them because they're like
[452.9] all overworked and underpaid.
[455.4] So is this a business that you are happy building in retrospect?
[459.8] You just described my life for seven years.
[462.0] Although I did pay my people really well, I was above market for sure.
[465.8] Good.
[466.8] It's exactly what happened.
[468.3] I wanted to build my own personal brand.
[470.1] I had run a business before simply be around a magazine.
[475.7] People knew me as this girl that could do marketing and branding really well.
[478.4] I started getting clients right away to pay the bills
[481.3] in consulting mode.
[483.8] And all I really ever wanted to do was build my own brand,
[486.4] but I was really good at building brand.
[487.9] And so clients just kept coming and I kept saying,
[490.7] yes, and the truth is I loved my clients.
[494.0] I wouldn't work with anybody unless I loved them.
[495.9] I believed in them.
[496.9] I wanted them to be amplified in the world.
[499.0] I loved that I could be the person to help them do that.
[502.6] But it is a beast of a business model
[505.3] because the more clients you get,
[506.8] the more people you have to hire.
[508.9] And you're selling time, you're selling ideas,
[513.3] you're selling strategy, and we were brilliant at it.
[515.8] That's why I continued to grow.
[517.0] We were really great in our clients were happy.
[519.8] But there's a lot of attrition in the agency space.
[522.8] It attracts typically a very emo-creative type,
[526.9] which I'm here for, but I had a lot of Gen Z millennial people
[530.6] who were just putting it on their resume.
[533.8] And I was building my dream.
[535.1] I was building my soul's vision and I wanted a family.
[539.8] And you're always on.
[542.6] It's a services-based businesses, regardless of what it is.
[548.9] Our brutal, but to answer your question, Scott,
[551.0] I wouldn't take any of it back.
[553.3] It was a total accident that I created an agency.
[557.0] I became one of the top agencies in the country.
[560.7] I really grew my chops as a leader.
[564.9] I've created and trademarked a methodology that I put in my book that now almost 100,000
[569.5] people have read.
[571.0] I feel like it was all divine.
[573.8] I'm pretty spiritual, as you know.
[576.6] And I am so grateful that it led me here because I learned some of the deepest, darkest
[583.6] lessons is where I found my light.
[586.5] And that's kind of what my new message is all for.
[589.1] And yeah, I don't regret it.
[591.3] So when you, when you speak about your new message and light, and this is like you're writing
[596.9] another book about this now, I don't, I don't really know much about what this book is
[600.0] actually about.
[601.4] So what prompted the, the thesis of light and the concept of light and then it's really
[607.2] called light work.
[608.2] Yeah, the light work.
[609.4] So what is, what does that mean?
[612.0] So it's a big question.
[614.0] Because it's like, you know, your spiritual, but I'm sure there's like a very like tangible
[618.8] entrepreneur component to it as well.
[620.6] There is.
[621.6] So what does this mean?
[622.6] So I started writing this book when I was coming out of the depths of my burnout.
[628.6] So simply be, yeah.
[630.6] Oh yeah.
[631.6] After, after we spoke, after we spoke about our body.
[635.4] That was, that was like October of 22.
[638.8] I know the date.
[639.8] So it's October of 22.
[641.6] A couple weeks after I met you, I went to Egypt on a spiritual pilgrimage.
[649.7] That was completely predestined.
[652.0] I could not have planned that trip more effectively or perfectly.
[658.4] And I had a full on death and age.
[663.0] Like I had a total ego death in that country.
[665.6] I had a massive experience in one of the temples.
[668.0] I write about all of this in my book.
[671.2] And my system activated.
[676.2] And I was really able to understand the truth of my human experience, especially in those
[681.4] last few years, building a business as a high performing female entrepreneur that was highly
[686.5] addicted to success, that was very much measuring her value based on how much money she
[691.8] was making, how much, you know, accolade she was receiving.
[698.0] The world was reflecting back to me that I was winning, but I was miserable inside.
[704.8] the end of 2022, I wanted to burn it all down, speaking of your question of what was running
[709.9] agency like. It was the hardest thing. And so I've always been spiritual. I've always really
[717.0] felt more like a spiritual being having a human experience more so than even an entrepreneur.
[724.1] It's sort of been, I've been pretty open online about my spiritual practice, but it hasn't really
[728.0] been out loud. This is really me coming out of the closet. In the spiritual world and the
[734.8] community is saying, I'm a teacher of this. To be a light worker today, which is what my book
[743.3] stands for, it's called the light work, reclaim your feminine power, book for women, but men can get
[750.5] a lot out of it to live your cosmic truth, not your truth, but your cosmic truth. And when you do
[756.9] do those two things you can't but help illuminate the world and that's that
[760.4] illuminate the world is the end of the subject line and
[764.7] I think that we're really in a very dark and heavy time on our planet just turn on the news and
[771.7] it is so important for us to show up in our full
[776.3] Magnificence our full power our full confidence our full sovereignty our full conviction in who we are
[782.0] And how we find that light is through the dark.
[786.1] And to accept these dark challenges, whether they're personal or professional and we as women
[789.8] and people have them all, is where we find our brightest light.
[793.5] Thanks for tuning in.
[795.4] If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss
[799.0] an episode.
[800.0] And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description
[803.8] to watch the full episode.
[805.5] See you in the next one.