Hey, badass. Happy Wednesday. If you are listening to this episode while it's dropping fresh, I am currently sitting here with a manual breast pump fused onto my boob, pumping milk, and expressing milk while I am recording a podcast episode. And as ridiculous as I look right now, it's funny because, for me, this is my definition of success.
I have come back to work this week after taking time off following the birth of my baby, and I feel so energised refreshed creative, and just so excited to get back into it. And Never have I felt such a desire to go so hard. And I don't mean necessarily work harder than pull-ups of hours, but now I've got this little muse in my life.
It's what I want to do the most for her. I want my definition of success to be true and continue to be true because Rosie five years ago would have freaked out if she could see how successful on my terms, according to my definition, my life is right now. And I am making it happen. And I'm integrating.
Being a mum, flexibility, being at home, so much time to spend with my baby, plus the intellectual stimulation, the creativity, the money, let's be honest. I'm still running this business. It's just, I feel like I have everything I could have dreamed of and more. And now I get to dream even bigger from here.
What is this life?
[00:01:33] Reflecting on the Journey to Success
And so I've been thinking a lot about the concept of success lately. And then I've, of course, been thinking about what creates that success. How do you become successful in business or as successful as you want to become?
And I think there are a lot of things that people do to attempt To achieve this level and I think that there are a lot of things that people do and then And I think that there are a lot of things that people do In an attempt to achieve this level of success or the level of success that feels successful for them their definition of success And they're spending a lot of precious time and energy on the wrong thing So that's what we're going to talk about today.
What? You think might create success in your online business versus what does and I just want to remind you because it's easy for me to be sitting here five years in so comfortable with such a predictable revenue stream and passive income flowing and evergreen income flowing and active income flowing and being able to Run two businesses simultaneously while working part-time and earning, a relatively ridiculous sum of money.
It's easy for me to sit here comfortably and say, yay for success. But I just want to remind you before jumping into the episode that you should never underestimate. How much your life can change in just one year, just 12 months from now. If you go for it, you could be shocked at what your life looks like.
In September 2019, I was unemployed, I had quit corporate, and I'd moved back to New Zealand. It'd been 4 months, and I had about 6 months' worth of savings to be able to pay my bills, so I had about 2 months left before I knew that I needed to seriously start looking for a job and my big goal was to make 50k that year from Badass Careers to simply pay my bills and be able to work from anywhere.
That was my primary goal, was to be able to work from anywhere and live between New Zealand and France. And just one year later. I had made my first 150K, I had hired my first team member, and then four years later, we had clocked 3 million in revenue, and then five years later, here I am, working less than I've Ever worked in my life, earning incredible money, loving on my baby and doing the thing.
And that first 12 months changed everything for me. Cause I knew that I could do it. It shifted that mindset towards, wow, I've made 150 K online. Why not 500? Why not a million? And I wish I could give you the one thing, that one secret to success, that one thing you need to do to focus on, And everything else would fall into place.
It'd be a pretty quick podcast episode, right? We could wrap it up right now. And there is no one thing. There are many different ways, different avenues, different mindsets, and different kinds of people who can achieve their dream definition of success. There's not going to be just one thing just because I did it or just because someone else did it.
However. Absolutely. From what I have experienced myself and observed within my community of peers and group coaching programs and masterminds, there is a collection of things. Of principles of mindsets that will 100 percent facilitate your success and your empire-building. And of course, a collection of things that people are wasting very precious time and mental energy focusing on That are getting them Nowhere near where they want to go.
It's just pure procrastination so These common things are what a lot of beginner entrepreneurs are focusing on when they should absolutely be looking at things differently, attacking things differently, and taking different kinds of action. If 12 months from now, three years from now, five years from now, you want to be living the stream life that you can't even believe could be possible for yourself right now.
So let's jump in and walk through the things that you think will make you successful in online business versus what actually will.
[00:06:02] The Myth of Perfect Timing
Now, the first thing that you think may make you a success is this concept of timing, this concept of there being the perfect moment. So many people are waiting for that idea that they'll have that no one else has thought of, and therefore they're earliest to market, right?
I need to get in. Early into a market to be successful or they feel like there's going to be this magical moment that they feel ready When they have a coaching qualification or they've wrapped up that project at work and have magically so much more time to focus on it as if when does that ever happen like life is full right or when they have that moment of Crystal clear clarity and suddenly, it's like the clouds have parted and they can see the exact roadmap of what to do and where to go.
And it's I'm waiting for my moment where I've got that clarity. I'm waiting for the moment when I feel qualified. I'm waiting for the moment when I have that idea. And I realised that I'm so early and I've gotten onto it so quickly. I've picked up on a trend, something like that. This concept of Needing the perfect moment for success to follow.
And this is simply not true. You do not need to be early to market. When I decided to become a career coach and found Badass Careers, I looked up career coach on LinkedIn and I filtered it by people only, no organizations, no companies, nothing like that. There were still over 150, 000 results. There are a lot of career coaches.
I was not There have been people who have been career coaching for many decades. I am not an early adopter. I am not a trendsetter. Many people are doing it and doing it well. In terms of feeling qualified, I did have that imposter syndrome upfront because I had never operated independently as a coach and I didn't have a coaching certification, which I thought I needed at the time.
But I'm so happy that didn't stop me because I got my coaching certification over a year into my first year of coaching. business after going in full-time. And imagine if I had waited, I'd be down 150K. I wouldn't have learned. I wouldn't have been resourceful. I wouldn't have built my audience in business.
I wouldn't have hired my first team member. I would have been procrastinating. And sometimes waiting for that moment of having this perfect idea of clarity and knowing exactly what your business will look like. In reality, what you need to do to truly be successful is move with your best guess, form a hypothesis about your general direction and your niche the kind of people you want to work with, and the kind of content you want to create.
And you have to just be open to that changing and updating it as you go. Because sometimes you don't get to decide what will happen. The market will. The market will resonate with certain kinds of content or certain kinds of offers that you put out there more than others. And that will change and shape your direction as well.
So there's no such thing as this perfect moment, right? Like when you decide to just go for it, things can happen quicker than you ever imagined. The best entrepreneurs say, look, I don't know. I've never done that before, but I can figure it out. They don't spend months and years stuck in information-collecting mode.
They learn something and they apply it. They learn something and go, they teach themselves something and they figure it out immediately. That's the vibe for success.
[00:09:38] The Trap of Aesthetics and Branding
The second thing that a lot of people get caught up on and think is going to make them successful and somehow lead to sales is having a fancy logo, a pretty website, and a professional brand photographer.
They're in chapter one of their journeys and they're looking at chapter They're in chapter one of their journey and they're looking at other entrepreneurs who are in chapter 20, chapter 40. And they have all of these fancy aesthetic things, these beautiful websites. And they think that they'll never be able to emulate that success if they can't stand out or compete in that way.
And let me tell you when I started badass careers. I cleared out my personal savings account and spent 3, 000 getting a logo and website built. And this is my biggest regret in business because it shows such a degree of naivety, but also just such a waste of money. The colors were just my favorite colors at the time, like the colors that I used to decorate my apartment in Paris.
And there were these sort of five different, cheap, basic, weird ways of working with me. And I couldn't afford a copywriter, so I wrote the words myself, and I didn't know what I was doing. It was just a shitshow. But most importantly, I hadn't done the inner work to understand my unique brand. I didn't know what to say because I didn't know who I was, and so I was looking externally and being like, Oh, that sounds good, or that's a cool word, or, oh, I'm gonna say something like that too.
And, it just is so patchy. And if anything is going to tank your sales, people will not understand why your website looks and sounds like that. And then your content or when they're on a call with you, it sounds different. And I'm here to tell you, that you can make millions without a website.
I know plenty of people who have done it. Social media, the DMS social media a PDF that you send people social media and a basic landing page, a logo on Canva, a photo shoot that you do yourself or with a friend and you just look up good poses to do. It's more than enough, okay? People will never buy from you because of a fancy website.
They will never buy from you because they like your typography. They will buy because you made them feel something. So instead of focusing on how the brand looks, You need to shift your focus onto how your brand feels, who you are, what you're going to double down on in that, what you believe in, and what the results you create.
You need to focus on creating a movement a community a brand and a mission that people want to be a part of. And once this has been articulated and practiced and embodied and done, Then you can figure out how you communicate it. And then you think about a website. Okay. Let the success of being your brand pay for your website and logo down the road.
If that's something that you want to have. Another big thing is that a lot of beginner entrepreneurs, people starting outside hustlers, especially those looking ahead, looking at your muses, looking at your role models, looking at your gurus, trying to figure out how they got to where they got to.
[00:13:01] Confidence Through Action
A lot of people think that something that you need To be successful, for your business to be a success is confidence.
You need to have confidence for this to be a success. And I can tell you firsthand, I'm not a very confident person and I never have been. I wish I could tell you a happier story. I wish I could tell you a happier story than that, but that's just not my story. In the corporate workplace, I used to dread presentations.
It took me many years of working and learning and development and training To finally get to the point where I was shy and trembling in presentations, but I didn't feel like I was going to faint. I remember it took me well over two hours to film my first 15-minute YouTube video for Not Even French.
I was overthinking it, I was overthinking it, I was so scared, I was so afraid of the judgment. And honestly, the first time I went live and hosted a live masterclass I just couldn't be myself. I presented the whole way through with my phone voice hello, welcome to my masterclass. And I just, I didn't feel well, I didn't feel well.
And so this is a whole journey. This is a whole thing. And what I can tell you, sitting here today feeling so much more confident and where putting content on the internet just doesn't phase me whatsoever, and going live for a master class barely phases me whatsoever. It's only really when I'm delivering something brand new or something that doesn't feel quite as mastered yet that I get those nerves but what I can tell you is that it's action that breeds confidence.
You can never wait to feel confident before taking action, because if you did that, you just wouldn't get started. At least I wouldn't have. This is because, from a neuroscience perspective, the reason you're not feeling confident is that your brain doesn't have the evidence that you've been capable of doing it before.
And it doesn't want to go into the unknown, and it doesn't want to take risks and get out of the comfort zone, because that's where it's at. Judgment can happen because that's where judgment can happen. That's where rejection can happen. Okay, and so by taking Action by taking baby steps you give your brain evidence that you can do things in this new area of life and When you overcome obstacles, your brain can remember those, and that's proof of resilience, proof that you could figure it out.
And when you go through challenges, you uncover or reveal hidden strengths you didn't even know that you had, and that's more information for your brain that you can do it. And over time, your brain goes from, I can't do that, I've never done that. I wouldn't know how to. Hey, I haven't done that exact thing before, but I have evidence that I've done something similar in this realm.
Okay. And it gives you that much more confidence to give it a go. And when Figure it out, test, learn, tweak, fail, go again and figure it out. Your brain has that evidence like, Hey, I'm capable of doing this kind of thing. And so you've got to build up a bank of past progress for your brain to provide it with that proof of your future potential.
So we have to, as entrepreneurs commit to progress. Commit to action because if we're waiting around to feel confident knowledgeable and Ready, it's just not going to happen. Grow your confidence as you go. Build your confidence as you go. Confidence is a symptom of all the actions that you have taken.
Confidence is a symptom of the action And speaking of knowledge, that's another thing that people think they need to have an incredible abundance before they get started.
[00:17:12] The Fluid Nature of Expertise
They need to be world-leading, thought leaders, PhDs, you name it, on that topic to be able to get started. They need to be the expert, the go-to.
And I can tell you that expertise isn't a destination that you're going to reach. Expertise is inside you. It's inherent. And you are an expert to someone right now. Okay. Expertise is fluid. It's on an endpoint. Because, At what point could I say to myself, I'm done? I am a careers expert. There's always something new that I could learn.
There's always an innovation coming out. There are always trends market changes and societal and behavioral changes. I will never be done. And getting started with the expertise, That you have today, knowing that you are 10 percent ahead of someone else, two steps ahead of someone else. And you are therefore an expert to someone else who hasn't done the thing before.
That is going to be key. Now, when I started Badass Careers, I knew because it was my purpose that I wanted to help people to truly love their work and feel fulfilled at work. To do that, they needed to uncover a sense of career direction, and career clarity. To do that, they needed to uncover a sense of career purpose, career direction, and career clarity.
And even though I had worked for many years in human resources and training and development, I had mostly trained on things like leadership development, and things around emotional intelligence, making change happen in organizations business strategy, and things like that. It wasn't to do with your purpose.
And of course, I had worked in generalizations. And of course, I'd worked as an HR generalist doing things like recruitment and onboarding and performance reviews and those kinds of things. So of course I had skills around CVs and resumes and LinkedIn. Of course, I had skills around leadership development and things like that.
But I had never, ever taught someone to find their purpose. I'd danced around it, but I hadn't done it. And I wanted to build a business around something at its core I had never done before. So the career's direction made sense for me and I had a degree of expertise, but I needed to learn a lot to be able to create The Career Glow-Up, which at its core helps people figure out their career purpose and then make it happen.
And so I was reading relentlessly. listening to hundreds of podcasts, looking at academic journal articles, looking at articles online by thought leaders, listening to training and online events taking part in conversations around this, and looking at my own life experience, my own career experience, and chatting to friends and family and acquaintances about this concept.
I created my methodology around purpose finding, and then I tested it for free with beta clients before I felt like an expert. You become an expert. I wasn't born an HR careers expert, and I didn't reach an endpoint and a destination with it. It's fluid, okay? Don't get too attached to this, or overwhelmed or overcome, by this idea of being an expert.
What you need is to be able to hold both being an imperfect person, who is Always learning and always growing and will never be done while simultaneously knowing that you can be a leader and an expert to someone who could be guided by you and be led by you and backing yourself in that.
Same kind of thing for business knowledge. People think that they need an MBA to do this. People think that they need a business degree, a marketing degree, whatever it is, to do what we do. And I can tell you that you cannot learn this stuff anywhere. You honestly can't. You, there's no way that universities could keep up.
There's no way that academia could keep up. It's changing too quickly. So you can't wait for this concept of getting a degree in online business or whatever it is. To think that you're able to get started you need to be committed to a relentless learning trajectory You need to just like the expertise Whether it's the expertise on your subject matter or expertise on being a CEO and a business owner.
You need to be committed to growth learning expansion to evolution. It's about getting resourceful and thinking It's okay to be a beginner. I'm not above this. I'm not too good to do this. I will do what it takes to learn this for the first time and master it before I even dream of delegating this.
You are not above anything. It's okay to be a beginner and have a beginner's mindset. There's a lot of joy and fun and growth in being a beginner, and it's about embracing it and not being ashamed of it.
[00:22:27] The Reality of Hard Work and Persistence
Another thing that people think will result in some kind of success is the concept of hacking the system.
And honestly, if I see one more post claiming that someone made 1. 2 million dollars in six months working two hours a day, I am going to scream. Because even if something crazy happened where You know, the internet's a vast place, right? This could have happened to a few people, for sure, where they won the creator lottery.
For example, they were promoting a product using affiliate marketing, and they did a couple of viral TikToks with the product, with the affiliate link. They blew up, and they made lots of money from it, okay? I'm not saying that hasn't happened. Of course, it would have happened to some people. But even if something crazy like that did happen to you, It probably won't last, it isn't repeatable, and it can't be taught, it can't be systematised or put together in a method that results in that thing happening again and again.
Because it was a fluke. And I'm here to tell you, The hard news, that there is no hacking the system. Okay. If you want an extraordinary life, you need to put in extraordinary work and thinking and purpose and channel it into your business. Like when I was working 50-hour weeks at L'Oreal, this big corporate role at the headquarters in Paris for the number one beauty brand in the world.
Going hard in my day job. I was dedicating mornings, lunch breaks, Sundays, you name it, to building my Not Even French YouTube channel. And for a very long time, that was for very little return. At least a year. And I kept saying to myself, I had heard this quote and it resonated with me.
And it essentially says something like, If you want to One day, live like no one else can. You need to show up today like no one else will. And That meant that I was pulling probably 60, 70 hour weeks, most weeks. And when I started Badass Careers, I probably pulled 40 to 60-hour weeks for that first year.
I was very close to burnout before I was able to make my first hire and start figuring stuff out in a more sustainable way. Okay. I made a lot of mistakes. And I'm not wearing that as some sort of busy badge of honor. You can take a lot more time with it than I did. But I guess my point is if it were easy, everyone would be an online millionaire.
And so there aren't any hacks or tricks or gimmicks that you need to be following and trying to jump on. You just need to commit to a sustainable business model, growing a personal brand and audience in a community. Where you can change your niche and you can go from not even French to Badass Careers, to Badass Empires and have people follow you because you're building.
A long-term strategic business. You're committed to the vision and you show up as if it's already happened and you go hard, even if you don't see the return for a long time, even if it's a slow burn, that's the attitude we're going to need. Now, just jumping back to this concept of qualifications and certifications, I want to reiterate this concept of a coaching certification because a lot of people get hung up on this and they don't believe that it's an integrity for them to get started before they have a certification.
Now, firstly, The coaching industry isn't regulated as such, therefore no one certification proves that you are a capable coach. You can get qualified by, you can get certified by the International Coaching Federation, the ICF, which I wanted to do, which I wanted to do eventually for myself, for my self-confidence.
But I was coaching people and getting people results well before I got my qualification. And my honest opinion is that it didn't enhance my coaching. It only made me feel better about myself coaching, to be honest. So that's coming from a mindset lack, right? And what I would say is that you're a coach if you can get people results.
People hire coaches not because they're perfect or, they've achieved. Exactly what they want because sometimes the person you're coaching wants to achieve even more than you, right? Think about Olympians. Their coaches haven't necessarily won Olympic medals. They help to bring out the best in them and help them to achieve their goals.
So it's that concept. Can you help someone With a dash of your knowledge and expertise, but also hold space for someone, listening to someone using your empathy, asking the right questions, and holding them accountable? Can you help someone to get results? Get them from point A to point B. You need to have a burning desire to help people.
You need to have emotional intelligence. You need to be able to hold the space for someone else and make it all about them, not about you. You need to have these kinds of qualities that certification can never teach you. Again, wanting to reiterate, that is what success looks like as a coach. It's about doing things like setting boundaries and having hard conversations.
It's about not projecting one negative client experience onto your entire existence. It's about a lot of things, but it's not about the certification. That is just something that, most people get to make themselves feel better about themselves, which is valid. Valid. Which is valid.
Hands up. Been there, done that. Another common thing that people think will Be the thing that makes them successful and makes their business thrive is posting every single day on social media You know if you've listened to my previous episode about Three types of content you need to make sales and stand out online You'll know that it's all about posting Not content to post content and not daily content just to post daily content, but it's about posting the right content and getting the right people in your world and having content ideas flow to you easily because you're posting the right things and you are educating and showing up and channeling your message from inside of you.
Not what other people are doing. It's about landing that magnetic messaging that makes people say, wow, you're in my head. How did you know you got it? Are you spying on me? I trust that you have felt exactly what I'm feeling right now. Or you can empathise with it to an extreme degree. That is what needs to be the focus.
Not on posting every day, but posting the right content.
Other principles of success. People think that you need to have invested heavily in a huge amount of coaches and a huge amount of courses. My philosophy on this is having a maximum of one to two mentors at any one time who you're listening to. Because otherwise you're going to get into information overload and you're going to consume, but not So I want you to focus and I want you to not just consume the information but execute and apply the information.
Okay, commit to showing up and that's why you can't have too many voices and too much chatter happening in your mind. When I went from trying to listen to ten people at once to just focusing on one to two people, I saw a massive increase in my success because more information doesn't equal more success and more sales.
more action does. So I would challenge you to focus on one sprint of work or learning or involvement to do this thing, one focus area at a time. It might be getting started. It might be building out your evergreen funnel. It might be whatever it is. And if you can prioritise, the one good investment, not lots of budget ones, not patchworking it with that 1, 500 program over here and that 500 program over here on lots of different things and trying to sync it all together.
One all-in-one kind of program or business coach and do it that way. Focus, and clarity, breed that action, and breed those results. In my first year of business, I narrowed it down to just one mentor Invested in her program, and applied every single module of it. And that built my first 150 K years of badass careers.
And that's the energy that I'm bringing to my coaching as well. I want it to be that one-stop shop feeling of those foundations that are going to be sustainable and set you up for success. That's the vibe. Another common myth about success is that people think you do need to spend money on your business and invest in paid ads, for example.
And. I've made over three million dollars in four years organically. That's just absolutely not the case. Paid ads aren't my thing. They have worked for other people. I don't use them. I don't enjoy them. I don't want to. That's my position on them. I would rather. Master content marketing as a skill and be able to grow my business and have that degree of control of growing my business Because if Facebook runs away if Instagram shuts down if whatever I've got the skill set and I can go again And I can go again, and I can go again if ad prices double doesn't affect me.
I've got The skillset to be able to build an audience and sell to that audience. So you do not have to invest money in ads. You don't have to invest money in anything. You can start this business with a social media account and a pretty PDF of the offer that you've made on Canva. This business can be bootstrapped for free.
[00:32:53] The Role of Luck and Consistency
And the last principle of success that I want to touch on is the concept of luck. Wow, Rosie, look at your business. You're so lucky. And I'm not here to say that luck isn't involved, but I believe that luck is a product of this kind of world of being there. Showing up luck can come from a foundation where you have taken radical responsibility for your success.
You do the uncomfortable things that other people won't you show up consistently because you've learned to fall in love with the process of doing the thing and not just the outcome. You genuinely have a sense of purpose. You genuinely enjoy what you do and people can feel it. And you persist in the face of failure, in the face of disappointment, in the face of not seeing results for a while until things start to snowball.
And it's through being there that luck can happen. So I remember going semi-viral on Badass Careers after 18 months. And I had been posting probably, not every day, but I would say probably 300 content pieces out of 365 days of the year, that first year of Badass Careers. That's the kind of ratio.
I was posting a lot and it was good quality content. I was going hard and I had quite a small audience still. And I had a couple of reels go viral and it boosted my audience growth. I'm talking about the order of magnitude going from 20k followers to 100k followers. That's luck.
You can't always predict going viral. That's just something that surprises you and that can happen. But if I hadn't been showing up and refining my messaging getting better as a content creator and building relationships with people for the past 18 months, I would have never had the opportunity for that luck to strike me, of course.
So yes, luck can happen to you in business for sure. I'm not going to doubt that. However, it's always fun to leave yourself open to the magic, but it's not luck that will make you successful. It's all of the other things I've just mentioned. That will bring luck and success.
[00:35:12] Conclusion and Encouragement
So as always, if this episode has helped you to have a shift, you're thinking differently, or you're feeling differently about something, please reach out.
Let me know. Send me a DM, over on Instagram. Send me a DM on Instagram. I love chatting with you. I love to hear from you and I want an update on this empire that you're building, please. So all that said and done, go out there, be successful, Achieve, and create your definition of success one step at a time, one day at a time.
You won't believe where you'll be if you just go for it. One year from now, five years from now, I can tell you, it looks damn good on the other side. I'll talk soon. See you in the next episode.
