Bonus episode with Anita: Lessons from 2023 (work + personal)

How do I grow my business faster? What's the secret to success? How can design a business that serves me, not the other way around?

Your host, Steph Taylor, asked all of these questions right before she built a million-dollar online business from the ground up in just a few short years. But she made every mistake along the way.

Now, Steph's sharing the strategies she wishes she'd known when she was dreaming up her business plan from her corporate cubicle. The advice she wishes she'd had when she was juggling painful clients, answering client calls at 3 am and wondering if she would ever find financial freedom with her business.

If you ever feel like you're the only one who hasn't cracked the secret to success in your online business, this show is for you.

If you have big dreams but feel like you're not getting anywhere, this show is for you.

If you wish you could put your growth on 8x speed and skip straight to the good part, this show is for you.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips, and strategies to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom and even more joy.

Prepare to walk away from every episode feeling inspired to take action. Because the secret sauce is Imperfect Action.

 

 

Steph Taylor and Anita Siek: Our biggest lessons from 2023, both business and personal.

The biggest lesson for me has been the magic is in the things that I've been avoiding. In every area of my life, I'm constantly looking for the shiny pill, the quick fix, there's gotta be an easy answer to this, that is not the difficult thing that I'm avoiding doing.
And sometimes the solution is just to do the thing that I don't want to do. And it's really easy to pretend that the thing doesn't exist and to put it off. Let me give you a simple one. For me, I love outlining podcast episodes, but for some reason I have so much resistance when it comes to hitting record.
Once I'm talking, I love it. There's so much resistance for me in actually hitting that record button and getting going with it. So I put them off and I put them off and I put them off and then I leave them to the last minute and it creates extra work for my team because now suddenly they've got to do it last minute.
So for me, I could avoid so much extra stress for me. I could avoid so much extra stress for my team by just not avoiding doing the simple task, instead of looking for all sorts of magic productivity hacks and ways to get more stuff done. So that's a big one for me.

Why do you feel like you avoid the hitting? What are you afraid of?

Oh, it's the same reason most of us procrastinate stuff. It's because of the uncomfortable feeling associated with doing the thing, right? Like for me, it's the uncomfortable feeling of, now I have to be on. I have to talk into a microphone. I have to have the lights on.
I have to not get it wrong. It's all of the discomfort involved with that. Even though I've done over 700 episodes, it doesn't really go away.

I love the fact that you shared that, because I feel like, and that includes myself, I feel like so much of your audience, especially listening to this episode right now, but also myself included, you know, you produce like what, two, three episodes a week?

Yes, three a week. And I think two is already a lot over at Brandfetti. But you speak and you produce these pieces of content with so much ease from our, from my lens, right? But hearing the fact that sometimes it is hard to press record.
Sometimes it is hard where you have to get into the zone or this mode. And you mentioned before that you've got to get in it. You're just thinking, I don't want to do it. It's because I want to do a great job, right? I want it to be really good. So then I tell myself like, oh, I'll be in a better headspace to record tomorrow or, you know, I'll feel more ready to do it tomorrow.
It's literally anything that you're procrastinating when you're telling yourself that it's because you want to do a good job.

It's interesting how this also applies to personal life as well, and all the things I try to avoid in my personal life.

Oh, absolutely.

Okay, so that's one of them. Magic is in the things that you are avoiding. Yes, what's your first one?

Oh, my first big lesson of 2023. I'd probably say I've really felt like I learned a lot about myself in 2023 and that a big part of me and how I choose to make decisions, and this was a big one for me, was this narrative of I keep doing something or I'm doing something because I don't want to fail.
And this was really big for me. So I will continue to pursue something because I don't want to fail. And optimism is beautiful, and I'm usually a pretty optimistic, positive person, but they say that winners also know how to quit certain things, but I'm this person who's just like, no, I know I was taught, if you're not getting the result that you want, it's because you didn't try hard enough, right?
But that is almost like a double-edged sword where sometimes we're pursuing the thing that we actually don't want or we didn't even have that time to consider is that actually what we want. So one of the biggest lessons for me is realizing, am I actually doing this because I really want to do it or is it because I'm doing this because I don't want to fail?

I'm going to ask you a follow up question on this. How are you going forward? How are you going to discern between the things that you genuinely don't want to do that aren't aligned versus the things that you maybe feel a bit of resistance towards because it's challenging or something needs to change first.
So how are you going to tell the difference between a give-up and a quit versus a pivot?

That's such a good question. I've been simmering on this quite a lot. One of my advisors and mentors asked me this question and he said, with anything that you do in business or in life, it usually serves something for you.
So for example, I know I absolutely love creating the container for my mastermind because I can actually feel like I'm creating life transformations. So that's what it serves for me. There's the internal. Knowing an internal desire for me to want to continue pursuing that thing, because it just meets that.
But as soon as with one area of my business, which I'll make an announcement soon around a big pivot that I'm doing this year, when he asked me, okay, so this particular area of the business, what does it serve for you? And I'm just thought, That I didn't fail. And that was just an immediate wow moment.
And I think, for me, it is going that extra step and actually asking, do I want to create this? Because it is serving that sparkly idea that I had at 2 or 3 a. m. or is this actually going one step further closer towards the business and life that I want to create? And ── the quote I've kind of come down to or the motto or the mantra is, am I making this decision based on the business and the person that I want to become, or the business or person that I am maintaining or band-aiding. Am I doing this to make sure that I'm not building the kind of business that I don't want? So am I moving away from what I don't want rather than am I moving towards what I do want?
I mean, I wish more people talked about things like this, right? Because people think that we as business owners, or people in business for more than three, four years, we always make the most perfect decision. But it doesn't work that way. I make mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes last year.
A lot of beautiful silver linings, but also you make mistakes, but it's not a bad thing. You put yourself out there and you did the thing and now you collect data and you learn from it.

Absolutely.

What else, Steph? What else is another one? Oh, that actually reminded me of a big one that wasn't on my little list that I brainstormed before, but it's to collect more experiences. Let's put it that way. So to take more action, to do more experimenting, to play and see what happens rather than sitting there trying to make a decision when I don't have all of the facts that I need to make that decision. And the only way that I can get those facts is to take that action and then get the feedback on it.
Uh, so that's been a huge one for me as well. Like I would often, sit there and think, Oh, what is the right way to do this? And, you know, even as my podcast is called Imperfect Action, I'm so big on taking imperfect action in some areas, but then in other areas of my life, I struggle to take that imperfect action.
And for me, it's really been learning, like, how can I start to take that imperfect action in all areas of my life? How can I start to just be like, cool. It doesn't matter if this isn't the right thing to do, but let's just see what happens. And we'll figure out pretty quickly by taking action if it was the right way or the wrong way.
And if it's the wrong way, then we can learn from it. We can course correct. Now we have a little bit more to work with than if we're just sitting there in our brains, spinning around, spinning those little wheels. Like, I don't know if I should do this. Is this the right thing? And then the answer never comes to us and we never make any progress.

You know what? I resonate with that so much. I actually feel like when we all started our businesses, we had so much fun and it was so experimental. I don't know about you, but I was like, yeah, like throw this over here, throw that over there, throw this over there. And it was, it was like, there was nothing at stake.

Yeah, there's nothing at stake. There is no expectation from anyone. It's almost as though you arrive in this brand new city in a country that no one knows about you at all. And you get to just play, but now it's like we've created a brand and there's so much more at stake, right? You say the wrong thing, or you do the wrong thing, or it's like there's a typo.
I made a typo today in one of our carousels, right? A hundred percent human error, but it's just like you then may get pulled out.

I feel like it's moments like this where I think, Oh, it makes me want to just create something completely brand new and have that zing and that feeling of play again.

Yes. And for me, where else in my life can I create that? Where can I have that in other areas of my life? But I love what you said though, about there's so much more at stake. Because I think a lot of people, when they're starting out in business, they don't appreciate it.
I know I didn't appreciate that. Like the ability to just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what happens. And so many people, especially what I see with people who are launching things for the first time, they might be launching their first course and they're like, Oh, well, I want to wait until my audience is bigger so that I can have a big launch.
And it's like, well, actually, no, you don't want to be doing your first launch in front of a massive audience because there's so much more that can go wrong when you've got a big audience. It's kind of like learning how to drive on the freeway rather than on the little dead end road.
There's a lot more at stake. You make a typo, 10,000 people see it instead of a hundred people. Everything's at a much bigger scale. It's not just that you're making more sales. But it's also everything you're doing is at a bigger scale.

That reminded me of one of the things that was a really big takeaway for me too, in 2023.
I'm a recovering people pleaser and I feel like you're so good at this Steph, in the realm of like boundaries, butI am that person that when I see a DM or when I see a voice note and I have to reply. But I received a message from someone recently that really had me feel quite wobbly and it really tested me. And she said something along the lines of, I recently saw a post that you put out there about like human connection and I love the element of connecting with my audience and my clients and students, et cetera.
And I felt like it was a bit ironic. She said that I have been trying to connect with you for the last, you know, two, three, four months and I've been emailing you, I've been DMing you, but no replies. And she was really honest. And to be honest, I am glad and I'm like grateful for her openness and transparency, but it really wobbled me where I'm literally like, ── oh my goodness, I physically and mentally do not have the bandwidth to actually reply to each and every single email and message.
And I did reply to her and shared the fact that, for me, it's actually quite important to protect my energy too. So that when I do show up, it is the 110 percent connection that I have with my friends, with family or with clients and students. And I also am not the only person that monitors my DMs and emails anymore, you know?
So that reminded me of the other thing for me that last year, it's just the fact that just because you don't reply to every single DM or message or voice note that you receive, this doesn't mean you don't care.
It's the fact that you have to be really firm and strict with your own energy so that when you do show up, it is at that 110 percent to that person or to that community that you're in front of.

Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's a really tricky one because, of course you want to reply to everybody. Of course you want to be able to help everybody out.
You want to connect with everybody.

The way my brain works, I really struggle to remember names and faces and details. Which is so awkward. You remember my face though. I remember your face because I've seen it a few hundred times. But if I meet somebody in real life, for example, who they might have been through one of my programs and they might have been on some of the calls, it takes like a minute before my brain will kind of connect the dots and be like, oh, that's that person.
This is their business. This is what we've talked about. I don't know if that's a me thing or if that happens to other people. But so a lot of the time when I'm trying to keep up with DMs, that's really using up a lot of the brainpower that I have for the names and the faces and the details.
So I find that really exhausting. Maybe it's an ADHD thing. Maybe it's an introvert thing. I don't know what it is, but it's impossible to be able to give 100 percent to your clients and your students and your podcast listeners, as well as then every individual person in your audience.
And it's only going to get harder as our businesses grow.

I was just going to ask you,  do you personally check your DMs? Do you just take yourself out completely? How do you protect your energy.

So we have a really good system in place where one of my team members she goes into DM's inbox, everything, and triages everything.
And if there's something that I need to reply to, she'll allocate it to me. If there's, you know, something that somebody else in the team needs to, she'll assign that to that person. And that way we're kind of all on top of it, but it's not perfect. Sometimes it doesn't pull through messages.
Sometimes things get missed because they're in the message requests. And it's never personal and it's never that we don't care, it's just that sometimes technology fails us and sometimes we genuinely do just miss messages. It's one of those things where I feel like I remember there was one time where we were in the middle of a launch and someone joined the program.
And one of our zaps didn't zap, and they didn't receive the logins and all of that. And I also didn't check my DMs until a few hours later, but the person didn't receive the logins and this impacted her experience. And she was literally like, no, you know what, like the fact that I didn't even receive this, I now want a refund.
It's one of those moments where I'm like, if you also do not understand that technology cannot always be perfect, then we don't want that energy either, we're just trying to do the best that we can with what we've got.

That's the other element of when somebody wants that level of human connection. They also need to understand that there is a real human on the other side who does not have the capacity to be on top of all of the things, constantly checking DMs.
I think treat your clients or treat the people that you buy from the way that you want your clients to treat you. If you would want one of your clients to be asking for a refund because they didn't get the email straight away. Then yeah, be the person who asks for the refund because of that.
But if you want your clients to be understanding, then you need to be understanding as well. I think it works that way too. You kind of attract what they put out there.

What else would you say? Any final lessons, maybe even personally for you? I mean, all of the lessons that I've shared apply both business and personal, right?
Because, you know, how you do one thing, how you do everything, all of that. It all bleeds. You know, it all, it all applies in all different areas. Uh, I think a really big one that actually came up for me, Toro, it's the start of last year, uh, when I was in, um, Phoenix for James Wedmore's leadership event. And one of the first exercises that he had us do was identify like all of the areas in our businesses and our lives where we were out of integrity.
So where we were saying one thing and then doing something different. And that for me was like this big. Oh, oh, like every time that I say, oh, I'm going to get up early and work out tomorrow morning and I don't. That's eroding a little bit of my self trust. Every time I say to my team, Oh, I'm going to record that podcast episode today, and then I don't, that's, there's losing a little bit of trust for me.
So that's a huge thing and it's very much a work in progress. I think it's one of the hardest things to do is to have that level of integrity of where your, everything you're saying is aligned with what you're doing. But yeah, that's a little, that's a work in progress lesson. That's tricky though, because it's like, how do you find the balance between saying that you'll do, so for example, I'm going to record a podcast today, but then you don't end up doing it because you're just not, maybe it is the, just the physical, mental, you just, you do not have the bandwidth today to do it.

How do you find that balance, right? Between saying you'll do something, but actually when you're awake that day, your body is screaming for you to rest. I guess, okay, so let's, ─ maybe we'll look at it like a little bit more zoomed out. It's like saying that, oh, I'm going to be the, I'm the kind of person who is really organized and records all my podcast episodes a week ahead, but then you end up actually recording them last minute all the time.
So it's not like a one off event. But I don't know. I feel like if we were to know exactly how, and we could literally be so disciplined. And this is, this goes back to me. Embracing the idea of, yeah, you need to have an element of discipline or consistency, whatever, let's talk podcast. I love to have the idea that I can batch X amount of podcasts.
And sometimes I can, but sometimes I'm literally recording it the day before. And there's nothing, ─ totally nothing I would hope that my team, I don't know. Would not be like, Oh, wow. Cannot trust her now. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I mean, this isn't, but I'm not really talking about discipline so much as the intent.
So let's use another example. Then let's say that I. So like one of my biggest values is freedom. Probably my biggest value is freedom. And then something that would be out of integrity with myself would be then if I were to go and launch a 12 month one on one client coaching program where I have to every, every week I'm talking to a couple of different clients and I have no space in my calendar.
Right. That's out of integrity with myself. And I'm going to know pretty quickly because that feels really like, Oh, even just saying that I'm like, The thought of having a calendar full of calls. I hate that. A hundred percent. How, how do you think moving into 2024 then you're going to really assess, and I guess this is coming full circle with this episode, right?
Because we kind of kickstarted off too with ─ me sharing how it's like, sometimes we make these decisions and I approach decisions because it's like, I don't want to fail or I don't want to. Like how can we keep in sync with, you know.  The integrity or like the, one of your biggest values is freedom, but you've created an offer that actually takes you, like, literally a jail for yourself.

What are you going to do this year to kind of keep, keep in alignment or to the best that you can? And maybe you can keep me accountable to this, but doing like a little integrity audit where like, I don't know, once or twice a year, like all of the areas where I'm out of integrity. That's not a bad idea.
It's actually not a bad idea. It's actually not a bad idea. I think it's so important to  share. And, and I think usually when we approach decisions and it's very easy to do when a lot of us are, you know, running a business by ourselves and we don't have a co founder to kind of like keep ourselves accountable, but it's like, it's very easy to be like, yep, I will make that decision.
It's like, ━─ uh, you know, actually that's going to keep you away from being able to do all the things that you want to do. Go completely offline. You know, exactly. I like it. I like it. Do you have any last lessons to share?

Any last lessons?  I think if I was to wrap 2023 as a chapter in a book in one word, it would be alignment, the word alignment.
So if I was to look at 2023 as like a chapter in a book, it would be alignment slash realignment. I think It was a year where I took risks. It was a year where I, yep, showed the heck up. I think there was a lot of areas that I was in full alignment, but I think I arrived at the end of the year where I was like, wow, very much somewhat similar to you where you're like, Hmm, that does not feel good.
Yeah. And, but there was a part of me that was just like, you know what, maybe that's just you being scared, or maybe that's just you. You know, um, doing something completely new when really it was just not in alignment to the business and the life that I wanted to create. And I think I arrived towards the end of 2023 realizing that I've got to trust myself a lot more.
Like, I feel like I had these like little flags being like you should, you should look at this. And I was just like, no, no, no, no. It's fine. It's good.

Avoiding it or even just being like, you know what? I am not going to listen to anyone. I'm just going to do it and it's interesting.
Cause once I made that decision, which was a pretty big decision for our business, which I record a separate episode about it. Uh, but once I did it, so many people around me were like, you know what? I kind of knew that was going to happen.
Um, but you can't tell people to make certain decisions. They've got to arrive there themselves. So realignment is probably my word. And gosh, it's a really nice feeling. It's a really, really nice feeling. Um, ─ so yeah, creating space to actually explore whether or not you are in alignment, I think is important for us to actually arrive there.

 

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