Hello and welcome to episode four, this is Kelly Reynolds. I had a long outline written for this episode.  I’m a new podcaster,  that's the kind of the way it works. You want to know what you're saying. And I sat here and I have, I I'm looking at the outline now, there's probably like 10 points of things that I wanted to tell you about that I thought were really important. But then I sat at our dinner table and I thought about what really makes a business tick. Your mindset, it is 95% of business. It is more important than finances, which you will never hear me say anything is more important than finances. Mindset is the whole gig.

There's a whole Henry Ford quote that I will never remember that says something to the fact of if you believe you can't, then you can't. It is the whole enchilada. If you don't think that you can do this, you can't. Business is hard. Going out on your own is hard.  Picking a thing that you want to do for the rest of your life is hard. Sitting at a desk pretending to work, getting a paycheck, that's easy. I remember doing that. That's corporate life. If that's what you want to do, dude, more power to you. But when you want to start a business, when you feel the need to help other people by what you can do, all of those things that you're like, no, I could do this. I could help someone here. That is when it gets good, but it's hard, but you know what? The best things in life are hard. Marriage is hard.  Kids are hard. I want you to start thinking this is going to be hard, but it's going to be awesome. I want you to understand that it's hard and then make it easy. Business is risking everything right? You, you are going to risk all the things you are going to do every day.

You're not going to get a regular paycheck. You have to go sell things. You have to go do a whole bunch of things that you don't even know how to do. It's scary. You're never sure if you're on the right path. There's no compass to say, Oh, this is due North. There's nothing. You have to just believe. You must believe it will work. It has to work, God damn it, because you are trying so hard. Now are the things we can try and make better? Yes, of course. There are times where you understand that this is hard and there are times when you're going to get help because it will make it easier, but I don't want you to ever think that it will just be easy. It will never just be easy. It will always be hard and it will always be great and those two things will happen at the exact same time because all of this is a gamble.

You think I have this fantastic idea that can help people and they will pay me. I'm going to go do it and they pay you and it's fantastic. But it's always a risk, always a risk. We're in the middle of the pandemic, everything's going crazy and you're like, well, maybe they don't want to pay me anymore or maybe I don't want to do this anymore. And everything changes. And that's the great fun thing about business. And then you will come up with, what if we did this? Oh my God, I am called crazy. At least once a day. I am called crazy all the time. Do you know why? Because I am coming up with ideas constantly, constantly. Most of them are just drive my husband crazy. I think all of the ideas in the beginning are crazy.

And I think that's so many of us are skeptical when someone else, whoever that person is, they come in and they say you're crazy and you feel like, am I delusional? Maybe you are, but what if you have the greatest idea that's ever come to mankind and someone told you it was, it was crazy. It was delusional. And you said, Oh, you're right. I'm sorry. What would we be missing right now? What could we do if we didn't care about being called crazy? Who cares what they think? Most people who are sitting on the sidelines calling you crazy are too tired or too busy or too something to do anything about their ideas. So they are going to tell you that you shouldn't do anything about yours either. And then we can all sit here together and wallow. And I am here to remind you that you started in this crazy ass thing called business for a god damn reason.

You started because you had an idea, you had an idea of what you could do and what you could sell and how you could help people. Think of all the ways in the middle of the pandemic, we are helping people right now I'm talking to you trying to get you to get off the god damn couch and do something with yourself. And there are tons of other people that have these wonderful ideas that are going out and doing something. They are becoming the force to be reckoned with. All of those things that no one thought of before. There was no problem before that needed this solution. But now there is that problem and we need that solution. And here are the entrepreneurs ready to do it. Having a great opportunity in apocalypse is wonderful. Don't let everyone make you feel guilty because you have great ideas right now.

Well, we need the wonderful ideas that you have. So when people tell you you're crazy, it'll never work. Don't you fucking believe them. You don't have time for that. We don't have time for that. People need what we have. We have things that can help. So why the hell wouldn’t we help? So what I'm saying is, mindset is your most important part of your business. If you don't believe you can, then you can't. If you don't believe you can get it done, if you don't believe in the thing, it will not happen. The stories we tell ourselves are everything. Everything. Every movie has some guy standing in a mirror talking himself into something, right? Well, we can talk ourselves out of it just as easily, right? If you just took your own self chatter for a little bit and started listening to what you tell yourself. You're not worth it. You can't do it. You're too fat. All of the terrible things, terrible things we tell ourselves. We are telling ourselves that in that mirror, just like that guy in the movie, except we're telling ourselves shitty things.

We need to remember that the stories we tell ourselves are everything. It works both ways and instead of telling ourselves we're shitty, we should start telling ourselves we're awesome because we are awesome. I'm awesome. You're awesome. We're awesome. The hard thing is that so many times we don't even realize what we're saying to ourselves. I hear so many people and you know what, like once I started learning more about mindset and paying attention to what's going on, I started hearing what other people tell themselves.  And it made me so sad for what they say to themselves.

So the one thing that always gets me is “I could never”.  Oh, I could never do that. I could never. What you do in that sentence is shut down any hope of you doing whatever the end of the sentence is. I could never garden. Oh, I could never start a business. Oh, I could never make a hundred thousand dollars in a year. All of these ridiculous things, they're just words. Why are we saying them? What if I said, well, I could, sure, of course, of course I can make a hundred thousand dollars this year. Why wouldn't I? It's literally a change in a sentence and it can be the change in everything. The stories we tell ourselves are the key. Having your own business is hard. You need to be in the game. You need to be paying attention to the things you say to yourself.

Most things that you want to are going to be hard. A lot of people are going to say, it's easy. Buy my course. It's easy. Do this thing. It's easy. If you blank business is not going to be easy. This shit's hard. It's scary and it's fucking awesome. I'm totally blowing my Apple like explicit rating today, but it's awesome. I am recording this podcast by myself in an office in my house. This is where I live. This is fantastic. My kid’s inside, I gardened all day. I live a fantastic life. I don't want to live an exceptional life. Any of you could do this. It's all mindset. I've decided I'm going to have an awesome life and I'm going to make a good living and then I'm going to figure out how the hell I'm going to do that. I spend a lot of time thinking about it and working hard on it. Of course it's going to be hard. Anything, anything that's worth any amount of, anything is hard.

I was having a really crappy week a couple months ago. I just couldn't get out of my funk. I don't know what I'm doing. Everyone's better than me. We've all had those weeks. You see someone's post and you think, Oh my God, they're so fantastic. I am not worthy and I'm never going to be as good as them. I had like a week like that where I just kept seeing things and I was like, Whoa, and that moment I don't believe that I'm good enough. That is the moment where you're the only one who can pick you up. You are the only one to be able to pick yourself up at that moment. I have an enormous amount of white stickies in a maniacally straight line on my filing cabinet. My filing cabinet is black, so you can really see them in every call and everyone makes fun of me for it, but that's okay. And every one of those is like a quote or a saying or something that is resonated with me that says, get your head out of your ass and go do your great thing because someone needs you to do your thing.

Every once in a while when I get really in a bad place, I walk over there and I read them out. I don't know if you've ever seen Moonstruck.  Cher, just whacks Nicholas cage in the face and it's the best moment of ”Snap out of it”. That is what that wall is for me and I think we all have to create that, especially when we work by ourselves. I walk over to that wall and that's my little Cher snap out of it. It's get your shit together. We have things to do. I can't have you wallowing all day. And that is one of the hard things about being an entrepreneur in so many other circumstances. Our boss tells us to get her shit together. When you're the boss and you're in a room by yourself a lot, it's very hard to see your way out of it.

My original outline for this episode was a lot of platitudes and um, some quotes. But what I want to say to you is this is hard and you're going to be great, but you're going to have to find a way. Remind yourself to get the hell out of the doldrums. The days where you don't want to get out of your pjs, the days where it sucks or I don't want to do this work anymore. I'm just going to go, I don't know, sell roses on the street. These are the times where you need to have a fail safe. A thing that will catch you. A thing that says, get back in there, lady. You got work to do. If any of us are in business and believe that we do good work, that we have a place that we help people, then our whininess can't win.

I have a board behind my computer so I, I look at it all day. There are pictures up there of the things that I want in life.  When days get tough and I just want to be like, “I'm out”, I look at this and there are things that I want on this board. There is the farm that I want. There is this happy marriage that I want to keep going. There's also a P and L, a fake P and L. (Profit and loss. For those who have not listened to the first three episodes) It is what I want this year to look like. The Reynolds OBM agency, P and L for January through December, 2020 and at the end of it is a ridiculous number. It's ridiculous. And when I first made it, I thought it was kind of a joke. I'm going to make a silly, stupid goal and then I put it up there and then I looked at it every single day.

Since then, it's the middle of May and I have looked at it every day.  And I have come from that's ridiculous. That's never going to happen to, huh to well, how the hell are we going to make that happen to,  I've got a plan to make that happen. This is all the work of mindset, believing that this is going to be hard, but it is so worth it and then when you believe, okay, all right, I'm in, I'm in for this. Turning around and saying, not only am I in, I am in, let's go! And even if I fall short, we will be so much further than any other goal I've ever made.

I'm going to give you a little tough love. We are in the middle of all of this crazy pandemic and I know it's rough. If any of you are having like serious issues, like you need some help and you need to chill out, you haven't slept in six weeks, go take care of yourselves. But let's do an analogy. You're on a diet. You lost 20 pounds. You feel pretty good about yourself. You get to the Corona virus. We're going to stay in for two months. Let's eat all the cookies. Why not? It's a pandemic. I can eat all the cookies. There is no god damn reason for you to all the cookies except that it's a big fat excuse. It's just an excuse. You don't eat all the cookies. It's just that you gave yourself the out. If you need help, that is a different thing than going, this is too hard. I'm going to eat all the cookies. Don’t eat all the cookies. Your ass will be bigger. Your business will not be as good.

Stay focused. Look, I know that you can do this. I know that I can do this.  I know that we're in this together. You and I, we are going to figure this out. No one knows how to do this. If you've listened to any other podcasts or any other email lists are all, everyone's like freaking out. They don't know what to do. They don't know what that they don't know what their content is. They don't know any of it. This is where we get to write the greatest story ever. So do you want to eat all the cookies and sit on the couch or this is the time when we figure out how we get it done, how our businesses grow, how we feed our families, how we make a better life, how we help other people. This is the time. If you want to tell me it's too hard. I'd rather just see cookies all day. Well, I'm sorry. That's not the way business works.

It's not. This is hard. I'm going to need you to show up. I believe that you can do this. You have to believe that you can do this and you need to do whatever you can, whatever you need to do to figure that out. Whatever book you need to read, whatever podcasts you need. If you need to go out and go for a run or go in the garden and shake all the bad ju ju off, whatever it is that you need to do to get it done. It wouldn't be any fun if it was easy. That's why we get into it. If you want a paycheck and someone to just check a box next to your name, go get a job somewhere. This, this is everything. Having your own gig, making your own rules, working around your whole life.

Pick something. Write down a life that you want. How much money do you want to make? How many hours do you want to work? Whatever you want to do, but you have to pick it. Then believe it's possible and figure out how to make it happen. The biggest obstacle I see is that people don't believe they can do it. They don't believe that they can have a business that makes their life work. Everyone told me when I left wall street that I was crazy. I volunteered for a layoff. Credit Swiss was giving layoffs. I was so burnt out. I raised my hand and I said, please get me out of here. Give me a package. I'm out. And I came home and I refinished furniture for awhile because I couldn't handle ever dealing with business again. And then after a little while I was like, okay, painting furniture is not the way I want to spend the rest of my life.

So I started this gig, well, what's become this gig? And then I started thinking like, what do I want? How do I want to do this? Do I want to work 12 hours a day? Do I want to walk my son to school before a pandemic issues? I walked my son to school every morning. Was I at every teacher thing and every birthday party? Yeah, because I decided those are on my calendar and people had to work around them. Do I work really hard? Absolutely. Is it maybe a weekend when I'm recording this? It might be because I was inspired and I wanted to talk to you. But I have built a business that works for my life because I believed I could. I want you to start thinking about what you want to do, how you want to live, what that looks like, what kind of business do you want to build?

Do you want to have weekends off? Do you want to work two days a week? Do you want to, I don't know, travel all the time. What do you want to do? Maybe you just want to not commute anymore. Oh God, I understand that. I saved like 20 hours of my week. What do you want to do? Start thinking about it and then slowly it will creep into your head. I don't want to do this anymore. How do I not do that anymore? How do I build a business that makes sure I don't do this anymore? And then you'll start saying, I want to do this thing. I want to do this because I'm good at it. I want to do this because I can help people. And then you'll start thinking slowly, slowly of all the ways you can help instead of, I don't want to, it'll be, I can't wait. I can't wait to do this. I wake up every morning with all these fantastic ideas of what I'm going to do and sometimes it drives me crazy cause it's 6:15 and I just want to goddamn sleep on a Sunday. But it's wonderful to wake up with so many ideas.  I know you can do it. I'll see you next week.