PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Okay, today we're going to talk about the top mindset shifts that have helped me and lots of my clients get to six figures. But I do want to share where I got these because I got them from people who are way smarter than me and that's how I like to do a lot of things in my life, is to get the info from people that are smarter and further ahead.

I did not make these up. I did not figure these out on my own. In fact, I struggled for a long time until I figured these out because I asked other people. I want you to know that. I want you to know that because I want it to give you full confidence that this is not something that you have to be a specific type of person to own these, to have a specific type of success, or to be at a certain level.

You can't be too far beyond these in case you're worried that that's a problem. Wherever you are and wherever you want to go, these are going to help you do that faster. The reason why these are going to help you do anything in your life, but we're going to keep it to styling and helping your clients today faster, is that what these three beliefs have in common is that they require you to change your self-concept in order to get to the next level.

Changing your self-concept isn't something that happens in one day when you suddenly accomplish something. You don't desire to have a five-figure styling package, and then you sell it, and then that day you're like, “Okay, I'm like a six-figure business owner.”

You have to keep doing it over and over again. Because what you'll notice is that you'll have success and then you’ll be like, “Oh, crap, how am I going to do this again?” Well, one of the ways that you get out of that type of thinking, because all that does is create more drama—and we're going to talk about creating drama in your business today and how to not do that—all that does is just create a whole nother level instead of problems when you have an accomplishment and then you think, “Oh crap, how am I going to keep this up?”

But I think we've all done that. But if your self-concept is one of someone who just keeps moving forward with the belief that everything you're doing is getting better and better, even if there are stumbles along the way, that will not be your first thought when you practice a new self-concept.

I would also want to argue at the top of this—not that anyone's asking me to argue it—but I just want to drive the point home about how important this specific type of mindset work is.

Sure, you can try to manifest $100,000. You can work on your relationship with money. You can do all of those things. You can think happy thoughts. You can believe or whatever people are telling people to get to the next level.

But if you don't have it within your self-concept that you're someone who can do those things, then you're just having a lot of thoughts. Those thoughts probably are not going to impact your actions and those actions are not going to impact your reality, so you're not going to get the results you want.

But when your self-concept is such that you believe certain things, certain foundational things which are these about yourself and about running your business, then whatever you want gets handled faster because it's already coded in your self-concept that you are somebody who takes the actions to get what you want and it doesn't matter what you want.

Instead of working on your mindset around the thing that you want, money, whatever, to be thinner, whatever, if you believe the three things I'm going to tell you today on a foundational level, you get out of having to do the work on all the little mini things along the way. Sure, there's going to be some things that maybe we have trauma around or we have particularly strong wounds around.

While those things are important, you can still be successful with trauma and wounds. You can still be successful with a shitty relationship with your parents. You can be successful in your business and still have lots of things that are not handled.

I want you to know that because so often I see stylists thinking they're not ready to take the next step, because there's this other thing they have to handle in their life, they have to get that perfect in order to, and it's usually something around, “Well, I have to believe in myself. I have to fix my mindset.”

No, you need to believe that your self-concept is such that you will handle whatever comes up for you. You don't just manifest that. You don't just don't think about that. You take action and it becomes the case.

Now again, I'm not saying there's not a place for therapy. I'm not saying there's not a place for self-reflection. But even with those things, they are not excuses to not move forward. They're not excuses to stay stuck. They are things that complement the process of moving forward so you can do it more quickly because you have insights into reality. You have insights into your blocks.

What all of the three things we're going to talk about today help you embed in your self-concept, what they do is they help you decide that regardless of what comes up and regardless of what happens in the past, there's going to be a way forward because that's just the way you've decided reality is.

I'm going to have to get into this a little bit more specifically with the first thought for that to make it clear, but the reason why I want you to make this a centerpiece of your business and what you work on is because it's real interesting to me how many of us as stylists—and do not get me wrong, I did this for years, so no judgment—but how many of us use our marketing and our messaging that we're helping people get more comfortable with themselves? We're helping them become more themselves. We're helping them become more themselves. We’re helping them become self-expressed. We’re helping them take action, that they deserve this in their life.

But, we are not looking at how we're changing our own self-concept, because that's what you're doing when you're a stylist. If you are—I don't even care if you're transactional or transformational—if you want your client to look in the mirror and be like, “Oh, my gosh, I didn't know I could feel this great, look this way, or feel this confident, or whatever it is,” then you are asking them to either enhance a self-concept that's already there, they already do feel good about themselves and now they feel amazing.

Or you're hoping that the experience they have with you is going to help them move towards a new type of self-concept. It's kind of weird if we don't also do that ourselves. It's also easy to not do that if this isn't something you've ever heard of and you're usually thinking of mindset as something like just have positive thoughts or journal all the negative beliefs you have and then rewrite them in different ways until you believe them. Sure, you can do that, that's great.

But if you don't believe you're someone who takes action on those beliefs, we are right back where we started. That is why I think that this is a piece of business development if you will, for you to put on your to-do list.

I like to work on these types of thoughts with myself, connected to something else I'm doing, like walking every morning, or at the end of the day, before I get my daughter, I try to sit quietly for 15 minutes, which sometimes happens, sometimes it doesn't, and look back at my day and reframe it according to whatever one of these beliefs that I am struggling with most because it's a process, it's not like you believe it and then all of a sudden you never have like a negative thought towards it. Again, it's just a practice.

The first one is you have to adopt the belief and the mindset that you will figure this out. You have to decide that you will no longer indulge in the belief that you don't know. This one hit me in the face like a ton of bricks many, many years ago.

I'll never forget before the pandemic, I was in our old apartment that was horrendous. My husband was getting his PhD. The business had just hit six figures and I kept being like, “When will I be able to slow down?” The answer was always like, “I don't know. I don't know when things are going to feel less stressful. I don't know.”

I was listening to a podcast by Brooke Castillo who runs a business called The Life Coach School. It's also a great podcast. She said something about, I believe the episode was about indulgent emotion, emotions that we indulge in and thoughts that we repeatedly have, that have a payoff, but seem negative.

So this was one of the indulgent emotions, is saying that you don’t know, “I don't know how to get to the next level of my business. I don't know how to lose weight.” I don't know how to, in my case, make my life feel like I could actually get off of the treadmill of never feeling like I was where I wanted to be. Even though I'd hit my goals, it still wasn't enough because I guess I thought making a certain amount of money would make me internally feel a certain way. It most certainly did not. Imagine my surprise when that happened.

What she said in this episode was that indulgent emotions have a very specific goal—I don't want to say evolutionarily—but they serve a purpose and it's to keep you safe. That's what your brain's always going to try do. It's always going to try to keep you safe. That's just because that's how we used to survive back in the day. You needed to conserve your energy because you had to go out in the world and find shelter, find food, whatever.

You're literally evolutionarily designed and programmed to do the opposite of what we need to do in modern life, which is to not keep yourself "safe" all the time because most of our physical safety—in most cases, I'm saying in the best of circumstances—our safety is not in danger.

Certainly not in your business, even if something goes wrong, nine times out of ten, it's not going to put you in actual harm's way, like physical harm's way, but it will feel that way internally.

That is the idea, indulgent emotions are really kind of leftover thought patterns that we rehearse that aren't helpful but they keep us safe from either real or perceived issues.

I believe that 80% of the time it's like perceived problems that are not there. If it's not—actually I should say this—if it is a reality that it's probably not an indulgent emotion, the indulgent emotion means that you're habitually going back to it without anything on the outside forcing you to do that.

If you're in a bad situation, like you're in an abusive situation, for example, you need to get out of it, sure, but you also need to understand how to do that safely. You need a lot of different pieces of that puzzle.

Having the thought “I need to leave” is not the same thing as an indulgent emotion just to be clear, because your reality is an actual present threat. So, indulgent emotions are such a fascinating idea, because it makes us have to be on to ourselves. That's why this really hit me like a ton of bricks.

What I love about this is she gave the reframe of becoming someone who will just figure things out. Marie Forleo used to say this back in the day—she's one of the OGs of the online business world—she used to say, "Everything is figureoutable." It really stuck with me for 15 years now, and she's right, especially right now.

What I see more often than not is I see stylists getting stuck, especially if they're not at like $100,000 or they're not a consistent income month with stuff that is absolutely figureoutable, whether they hire me or somebody else, or they literally could just Google search this.

You don't know how to make a better online client form, Google it. You don't know how to hook up your HoneyBook to your website, Google it. I believe almost anything that you could learn about becoming a stylist, like actually the doing of a closet edit, a shopping session, you could actually find that online.

I know there are people that will teach it to you in a program and that's great, but also the reason why I have not started with a lower level, like intro to styling sort of service is because it literally exists for free. I'm not going to waste your time.

There's not a whole lot of things about how to get your business to the next level and how to really take your business seriously as a business owner in the styling world. There just isn't.

So people will teach you how to set up a business, but they will not teach you what to do when once you hit the fan basically. One of the things I think is so important is in order to really get yourself to as far as you can on your own without investing, it's not doing all the free stuff. It's being in action and ingesting the free information while you're in the doing of it.

You don't know how to set up your website with your scheduler, let's just use that, your Calendly. Just go on YouTube and Google it. Probably a seven-year-old will tell you how to do it because it's wild to me, the stuff that kids are able to teach adults how to do.

Then there you go. That's good free information. That's a good use of your time, less of a good use of your time is probably sitting on repeated calls over and over with a bunch of stylists who are also trying to get their mindset right because who you associate with impacts your results. That's true online and that's true in all the ways.

You have to become someone who will figure it out. When you adopt that identity, the rooms you were in drastically change. When that happens—and I do even just mean the “online rooms” you're in—when that happens and you get around people who are also committed to figuring it out, it is wild how fast your life changes.

I want that for you, because when you identify as someone who will always figure it out, and you just commit to that, the whole world moves in your favor. That's why I love the three things we're going to talk about today, like the mindset shifts because I've been thinking about them over and over again, like, what are the three, if I could only give you three?

These are the ones that I think completely alter reality in your favor because you are now in control of your reality when you adopt these things. When you become someone who will always figure things out, there's no world in which whatever happened in your past and whatever could or might happen in your future becomes the dominant fear.

You will not be defined by your past if you decide you're someone who will always figure this out. Because if your past experience is, for example, that you have not gotten any clients on social media and all of your best clients have come to you through Google searches, it is not evidence, the past, the past experience you've had on social media that you haven't gotten clients there, is not evidence that your ideal client isn't there.

If you decide, like, “I just don't know. I just don't know why I can't get any clients on social media,” I'm telling you right now, there are stylists every day making a ton of money getting clients on social media. There is a solution here. If somebody else has done something, there is a solution.

Then the question is, what are you getting indulging in the idea that you just don't know? Well, you get to be safe, you don't have to put yourself out there. You can't say that you failed at something, even though you absolutely never failed like I don't even know what that means. You just decide to stop, that's all that failure is. Just redefine that.

But the problem is that the stylist who goes on to say Instagram and decides that her ideal client is there shows up super differently than the stylist who's like, “Well, my past experience is telling me that they all come through Google searches, so I'm not going to bother.”

Two different identities completely, and it totally dictates how they interact the kind of messaging they're putting out there. So, when you decide you're someone who’ll always figure things out, instead of saying, “Huh, none of my ideal clients have found me on social media, I don’t know what that’s about, can’t figure it out,” over and over again, you got a choice. You either get to decide that having that thought repeatedly and not doing anything about it, means that’s not important to you, which is kind of the default, by the way.

If you are not doing anything about it, and it’s going on and on, it ain't hurting you bad enough or your self-concept needs to be, so thoroughly rewritten that that's probably something you're doing in your whole life.

That belief that you don't know should be so uncomfortable that after you've had the thought three times, you cannot bear it anymore. You cannot bear it or you decide, “You know what, this isn't a problem that's important to me right now.”

I do that every single day. Every single day I have a list of things that I have not gone to in this business and every single day I have to decide, “Is this worth the energy to worry about and figure out? Or are we putting it aside again and I'll revisit it later?” Every day the list of things is pretty long that I'm not worrying about right now.

Because I know the things that move my business forward, I know what my life capacity is right now, I'll figure all of it out. I will. I also know the importance of certain things.

That's what I want for you to step into because you've adopted the idea that you'll figure it out. It's either, “I have to figure it out immediately because it's important and I'll figure it out.”

I keep having this thought over and over again, how important is it to me, then you kind of look at that and say, “Hmm, it is important to move it up to scale or it's not important. I'm either going to forget about it forever or I'm just going to put it over here and not worry about it.”

Now your life just got so much clearer. Your behavior just got so much more precise and I'm telling you when that happens and you get into action, the right people show up, the right message appears. You're on a walk, the podcast guest that you're listening to says the right thing because you shifted your identity to be someone who always figures it out.

Okay, one of the next ones was a really tough pill to swallow. I was on this really fancy retreat with this business coach and the other women in my Mastermind that I hired probably like seven or eight years ago.

Two of the women in the group, everyone there was like at least a six-figure entrepreneur, but some of them were millionaires. It was all women. There were like 10 of us. I invested in this Mastermind way before. I think when I invested in it, I had probably made like $15,000 and it was $30,000 for the year. I was really stepping out of my league here.

I ended up hitting six figures that year, no problem, but it’s absolutely a result of the energy of stepping into something before I was ready and deciding, as I said in the last one, that I would figure it out. That's how I know that this works, is because I've done it over and over again, and I've done it scared, decided that I'm going to figure it out.

But we go on this Tulum retreat. It was like the fanciest, highest end. They had a whole hotel that was on the beach with different huts. The whole thing shut down for us. We were the only people there. We have a private chef. It was wild. It was the best experience of my life or one of them.

They had this one night after dinner, where the two women on the panel, who were there anyways, were on a panel. There were two women on this panel that we had one night who were millionaires. They had multi-multi-million dollar businesses that they started.

They talked about what they believed were the things that contributed to their success. They both said this one thing over and over and I was like, "No." It's so funny how hard it was for me to accept this and it's such a good indicator of how and why I kept myself back for like so long in my business.

They said that great businesses, successful, profitable, inconsistent businesses are boring and you need to accept that. Let me tell you, I was like, “What?” It was like a record scratched in my brain. I have come to believe this to be so, so true. I'm telling you right now, I see that in this business. I see that every single day in this business.

But before you get all like, “Eh, this sounds like no fun,” just stick with me. There are two different kinds of excitement that I've learned as I've gotten older, probably learned this lesson late in life, but here we are.

One is that excitement can come from things that dysregulate your nervous system which usually are things that we grew up with, and they are chaotic but they're familiar.

You have that sick feeling in your stomach where you're like, “No, you probably shouldn't interact with this person or do this thing.” But it also feels like home. That can also be the case in your business.

That kind of drama can also happen in your business, not just with clients, though that can be the case, but just like in the people that you hire and the posts that you put out on social media and the newsletter that you hit send on, but you don't really believe in it, you just saw other stylists do it.

Again, it doesn't have to be the most dramatic thing, but these are examples. You have that feeling. Now another type of excitement, if you will, is a quieter, I would call it more like fulfillment, and that's what I would call what I experience in this business.

My relationships are solid. My belief in this working out the way I want, it's just already handled in my mind. I don't have to wake up every day and try to prove it to myself. I'm not looking for other people to validate it to me.

Do I have hard days? Absolutely. But one of the things I notice is that they're very specific and circumstantial and they end up being things that happen that just like show up in my life. They're not the result of my bad behavior, if you will, happening to me over and over.

This is basically what I meant earlier at the top of this episode when I said you don't want to create drama in your business because what most people are doing inadvertently is creating drama in their business because it feels safe to them to have drama because their self-concept is somebody that has drama in their life or there's someone that just doesn't know or there's somebody that just always fails or whatever, and their business is just like validating that over and over, and it's creating drama, and they don't even see it.

That's why the first thing I talked about in this episode was always just committing to being someone who figures it out. You don't have to know how, you don't have to know how that's going to happen, you just have to commit to being someone that figures it out, and then you take your next step and your next step, and then finally you figure it out.

That is not going in line with drama. That will create a boring business and that business will be successful. But at the end of you figuring it out, whatever the problem is, you'll feel this sense of fulfillment, pride, and true confidence, like actual confidence, because you did it and it's just not as exciting as it is to have a more dramatic business. It just isn't.

I think depending on how you grew up and the beliefs you have about yourself, your level of drama will be different than someone else's. But I want you to be thinking, “Is my business boring enough?”

Let me give you an example of a very sneaky, unexpected way that we create drama in our business. We feel like, “Oh, no, I don't have enough clients. My marketing isn't working.”

Instead of trying different things in our marketing and continually showing up and being consistent even when we're not being clapped for, even when we're not getting the likes, we stop and oftentimes that correlates with us creating new services and new branding. We build a new website.

You are creating drama, my friend, because the reason why your styling offers aren't selling isn't because there's a problem with the offers. I mean, again, there may be a problem with those offers, I have not seen them, but think about it logically. The people you're marketing to haven't even experienced those offers yet, so they can't have a problem with the offer, they have to have a problem with the way you're talking about the offer.

It's not fun to show up every day and continually practice your marketing and the way you talk about your offer and connect with people if you don't feel validated. Your job isn't to be validated on social media as a business owner, your job is to change people's lives as a stylist and create relationships so that you can sell in a way that feels good to you.

If any part of you is looking for validation from your social media and that's why you're not consistent and then you're creating all these other little fires where you're changing your offers and doing all these other things and it's not coming from a place of, “Okay this offer hasn’t been really successful and now it's burning me out. I got to make a pivot,” if it's not coming from that place, stop changing your offers unless you understand why you're changing the offer.

I'm not against you changing your services, but I want to know why because the majority of stylists have services they don't even know why they have in the first place so they don't know what they're talking to. That all becomes a big cluster fuck.

What I want for you is to be like, “What am I avoiding here in order to create more drama in my business?” Oftentimes, that's unintentional because you're trying to unconsciously validate your beliefs about yourself that it won't work or whatever, whatever your thing is, that was mine.

I want you to look at like, “How do I create drama in my business? Is it when I don't show up consistently and then decide that the story is nobody likes my content?” Because I had to nip that in the bud with a stylist this week, “Well, nobody likes my content.” What are you talking about? You just booked four clients. “Well, I don't know if they came from my content.” I'll tell you one thing, I don't know if they came from your content either, but it certainly didn't hurt.

Turned out two of them did, by the way, when I made a go check. You can't make assumptions if you don't ask questions, and then you can't make changes that are rational and logical and not filled with drama if you're not asking questions and getting data.

You have to accept as these millionaires shared that your business has got to be boring to be successful because it needs to be consistent enough, your actions need to be consistent enough in your marketing, in your sales, in your services so that you can see where you can improve them and that is how your business gets great.

It gets great by iterating so you launch services to one group of people. I have one niche and you don't like it or it's a bad fit. Okay, cool. Let's change the service to see if it fits the niche better and then do it for two months. We know that that feels better.

Then we can say, “Okay, now we have enough information to know the service fits the niche better. Do we need to change the niche because they're just not vibing with you?” Okay, great. Now we can do that from a place that makes sense and you just brought in more money because you stayed consistent.

That's an example of the kind of boring work you have to do. You'll be busy. Don't get me wrong. But when you get that win from figuring out what the actual problem is, as opposed to running and changing everything, it will feel good to you. It won't feel the kind of overwhelming high you might want to get from your business but that's not the job of your business. Your business's job is not to validate you. Your business's job is to generate income and serve, period, as a stylist.

If you were selling like nuts and bolts or something in a hardware store, I would not maybe argue that though, I guess you could argue that's some form of service. But you know what I'm trying to say. You're a service-based business. You probably got into this because you wanted to help people. Let's not lose sight of that.

Your validation and getting your ego stroked by your business, intentionally or not, because I believe most of us are not doing it intentionally, but that is causing drama and it is not what we're here for.

Boring business, if you look at someone like Alex Hormozi and his wife, Leila, I bet they're really boring, like they're just boring. People who really do well and are very successful, all my coaches, all the people that I look up to in business, when I ask them about these things, because trust that I do, like, “What are you eating for breakfast?” Like, “What are you doing?” I'm so annoyed, it's always the same thing.

If you're someone who struggles with routines like me, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying you have to master a nine-part morning routine. I'm saying, where are you causing problems in your business? Could you get one step closer to just having a few small anchor routines you do throughout the day so you don't totally spin out and not know what comes next? That's all that I mean.

If you're somebody like me that struggles with routines, I'm not saying you need to get that on lock. I'm saying what small steps could you take to do better? The last belief mindset shift that is really connected to your identity that is super helpful I have found in service of the last two shifts that I discussed, which is being comfortable with your business, being boring specifically, but also just being committed to figuring it out, is giving up the belief that there will be some end date, some event, some piece of press, some marketing or messaging thing that's going to absolutely transform your business and “save it.”

What I have learned from that kind of thinking over the years is that it puts so much pressure on us to perform in one instance when in reality your business is probably not that fragile.

We don't even realize we do this. Like I said earlier in the show, I thought when I hit $100,000, I would feel like I was successful. I used to also think that when I finally “built the business in three cities,” which is a very bizarrely arbitrary goal that I had for myself, absolutely nobody thought that that was something that made the most sense or that was a way of being successful, that was prominent in the industry and I was like trying to copy other people or thought that was a marker of success I needed to be a “legitimate stylist,” that wasn't even it.

I don't even know where that idea came from, that I needed clients in different states. When I say I established the business in three cities, I specifically mean that I had more than five, in some cases, like 10 clients in other cities and I was in Boston as my main one and then I had Washington, DC clients. Then I had clients in New York, like the suburbs of New York.

I don't know why I would go into a market, see that it was a good market, and then play the game with myself of like, “How many clients can I get here?” There was a real cost to my personal life. There was a real cost to how difficult it was to try to get pregnant and to go through IVF during that time.

Maybe that was the reason I did it, because I was trying to be distracted, but I am saying that because I thought, “Once I get clients in this state, or maybe once I make this much money, or I get this type of client, or I start to be able to only take one client a month to make my financial goals, I'll be happy.” But I wasn't. I wasn't fulfilled.

I think there's a lot of reasons for that that are personal to each of us, that we kind of have that. But if I could have known year two in business when I was making $50,000 or $75,000 that the day that I got asked by a major shoe company to sign a $35,000 deal, I wouldn't necessarily feel like a different person, it probably would have changed my behaviors.

If I had known that me winning over clients in different states just because I could wasn't going to fulfill me, then maybe that's a game I wouldn't have kept playing. I say that because when you give up the belief that there is some day, some event, some amount of money, some coach that's going to fix it or save you, even if you don't realize that that's what you're waiting for, you get a level of freedom and you get a clarity of decision making that is not available to you when you are chasing things to make you feel good.

I know it's weird to talk about your business in this way. The last point I made was “Don't try to get validation from your business, let it be boring.” That's a weird thing to say. It sounds like I'm talking about a romantic relationship and yet we are in a relationship with our business and in the same way we could expect other people to save us from ourselves or take away bad feelings when really we need to learn how to self-soothe, the same is true of your business.

It's just a little bit more sneaky because we really applaud ambition in our society. Listen, I'm all for it. I am all for you sitting here and deciding, “You know what? I want to do it because I want to do it.” Then you go in and do it, whatever that is in your business.

But if you don't have the idea also in your mind that your guiding the principle is “Does it feel right to me? Does it feel good to me?” and I don't mean does it feel right in the sense that you knew how to do it before, anything we do for the first time is going to feel tricky or maybe hard, but it just doesn't resonate with you. It didn't really resonate with me to be in hotel rooms constantly in different parts of the country, it just really wasn't what I thought it would be.

Instead of being like, “Okay, cool, I played that game, I'm all done now,” it became an issue of like, “Well, maybe just one more, maybe just one more.” This is really the best news I'm going to give you, if you give up this idea that something's going to fix or save your business, outside of being consistent, outside of showing up consistently, getting clients, going back, making the adjustments to the business model, connecting with people, and then doing that all again once you realize, “Hey, I have a different goal for myself or I want to fulfill something else,” when you stop and that is the measure of how you run the business, everything just feels less overwhelming and less dramatic.

I remember thinking when I got on this podcast, there was this professional athlete that had the podcast and he had me on during the pandemic, and like all stylists, I don't care what anyone tells you, it was a really difficult time for my business as it was for everyone. I remember when they shut down, like most states, I lost like $30,000 in business in one day. It was horrible because I had retainer clients.

I remember being asked on this big podcast and he had a huge listenership of like professionals. He was a former athlete who went into self-development, kind of like a Tony Robbins kind of vibe and I thought, "Well, this will be it. This will change my business," it made zero difference, zero. I have even heard my coaches talk about getting into big press outlets and how it made no difference to their overall business.

They just had to keep showing up and keep doing the same webinar, keep selling in the DMs, keep building their relationships, and that's how they got to millions. I agree with that. I don't know anyone that I have talked to, and I've asked around who feels like they had this one event that saved their business or brought them to the next level.

Are there cases where business blows up, like on TikTok for example? I've even had a client on here talk about how she had a couple of her videos go viral, but it did create an increase in her business, or in her sales calls, and in some cases, it created a quick cash injection to her business. But they weren't necessarily all the right clients, all those sales calls that took up all of her time were not well vetted because she didn't have the systems.

It wasn't something she could sustain because even though she had the injection, the business model wasn't set up to have repeat clients and to make the most of every client, and shift through people on sales calls who might not be a good fit.

We tend to think if you got more followers or whatever, it would make a difference. It might make a difference if you go viral, but in the sense that you'll make a small amount of money. I've had about five clients go viral this year and it's really stressful. It also shows them all of the holes in their business, and it honestly made them feel worse.

It took so much energy to maintain that level of sales that then their marketing fell off. Then the next month, after that big injection of people and interest, they were at a low again. Net, net, the business was actually the same over time because they couldn't sustain that level of interest.

That's the thing we forget about when we think that the next thing in the future is going to be the thing that solves all of our current distress. That's that every different level has a new devil. Every different level has a new thing that we have to overcome and learn.

I hope these mindset shifts have been helpful. I hope that when you're having a tough day you can go back to them and think, “Hmm, which of these do I need to try on again in practice?” And just remember, we all get to the top one step at a time.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.