Episode #42: Your Business, Your Rules: Permission to Choose Differently

Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode of Design your dream life podcast. I am Cara, I am your host. I'm so glad that you are here today. I'm gonna try and make this one a short one.

Today I am just another episode of me just going off the cuff. I randomly do these ones where I honestly don't do any planning. I'm just like thought into my brain. I'm just gonna record and see what happens.

And that's what today's episode is going to be about. Because I have been having a lot of conversations lately with some of my really good friends about purpose and business.

And I just, I want to get that out into the world.

And it's really interesting because there's been so many much shift in the digital marketing space, in the digital business space of going into a personal brand that you need to personally brand yourself.

And some of my friends and I, we chit chat about this and it's really interesting because as I go and I sit in this because sometimes you build something because you think you should, not because it's necessarily the right path for you, but not because you think that it is like your life purpose. But it's okay if I have the skills and the ability, like I should do this or I could do this.

And then it's so easy to gaslight ourselves into thinking something's an amazing idea and then also saying, if we have resistance to something that what does that mean? What are we making that mean?

And it's so funny because for so many years, and I just want to share with you recent epiphanies that I've had because maybe this might relate to some of you. If you have been struggling with what path do you want to pursue next or where do you want to go next?

And for me, I have really been doing that work and going internally and trying to figure out that next step for me.

And I'll give you some backstory to some of this for myself, but what I want to say is just because you think you should do something or it, people are saying, oh, personal brand, that's it. It's community and personal brand, especially with AI and with all of this stuff.

And so then let's say you go down doing like the personal brand and let's say you just find yourself like for me, the podcast and my podcast is about 10 months old. And I said I would commit to this for a year. It's almost a year. And I have to decide what I want to do with my podcast.

I really do love It, But I have to think about where this fits in my world and where I want to go. And all of this comes together as again, do I want to have a personal brand? Do I want to do that? And for so many years I've battled with it, right?

I've gone to the forefront and then go back behind and done that over and over again. And for many years I thought to myself, oh, it was me. Scared to be seen and allowing myself to even believe that.

And then as I've been on this specific journey, I've realized that's actually not the case. Like I'm not afraid to be seen.

I've been showing up and I've been saying my truth and I have been here doing the things like I'm not afraid to be seen. So if that's not it, is there something else at play here?

And I think for me, I love to go inside and do a lot of reflection and a lot of self thought, like thoughtwork. I like to even say personal conversations with myself. What is it that I'm truly trying to build here?

And I like to always reverse in a backward sense. First of all, what is the lifestyle? What are my boundaries? What are the values that I have? And based on that, what is it that I want to create?

And it's so funny because for the longest time I'm like, oh my gosh, like I have to do something that is my life's purpose, my work. And it's so interesting because I had a conversation and basically I won't say who the conversation's with, so I won't call this person out.

But we were having this conversation and I was like, do you honestly think like what you're doing is like your purpose, your life's purpose? And the person had said to me, but if what I am doing is bringing me happiness and joy, isn't my purpose to be happy and joyful?

Isn't that a full circle thing? And I'm like, gosh, that's a really interesting point. And at what point do you know what is truly fulfilling?

Like I get fulfilled doing lots of things. I get fulfilled working with my client. I get there's so much fulfillment there for me.

And for me I have had that personal struggle where instead of building a personal brand, I decided to be a high ticket service provider. That is where I decided to go instead of a personal brand. And I love my work. I absolutely love it.

I work with a small handful of clients that I've worked with for some of them six years now. And I've always said to them, if I won a hundred million dollars tomorrow, I would still show up for you, because I love what I do.

And so it's so fascinating for me when I have something like this. Like, I have something successful. And this is why I want to share this, because maybe some of you are on this path.

I have something successful, something that lights me up, something that I really enjoy doing. But there's always something in the back of my mind saying, but you should be creating this for yourself. You should be.

Because right now you don't have. You don't hold all the power. Your clients could leave you, but with that, you could always get new clients.

But if you have your own business, you could also have a traffic source die. You could have your funnels die. You could have. Do you know what I'm saying? That could happen in a regular business as well.

And it's so interesting because the thoughts that I have had for so many years are like, I should do this for myself. It's like, I have to prove it to myself that I create my own big digital empire.

And then that in turn led to when that has to be a personal brand, because that's what we have to do nowadays. And I don't know a lot of, like, recently I've just called bullshit to myself on all of that. Like, I don't have to create a massive personal brand.

I don't have to do any of that. Like, I can create digital assets and many different things. That doesn't require necessarily me to be a face or a voice or an authority on anything.

And so I just wanted to share that with you guys, because if any of you are struggling with where you think you should go and you follow down a path and you're doing the thing, but there still is something that feels. I don't know if I want to say it's in alignment, but it's not, like, in complete alignment. And you're like, what am I really doing here?

It's okay to pull back and ask yourself all of these questions. Like, literally, I've taken this summer and I've asked myself, if I a. If I knew I wasn't. If I knew I couldn't fail, what business would I create?

If I knew that, if I knew with certainty that I couldn't fail, like, I could absolutely create it, what would I create? And what was the lifestyle around that? And for me, lifestyle is huge. This is why I do what I do. I love my lifestyle.

And anything that I create, to me is just it's not worth sacrificing my lifestyle.

And it was so fascinating because again, another conversation with a friend and I and she's a seven figure earner and we're saying like we've bought ourself jobs and we really wanted to push our mindset and our thoughts of but do we really want to create wealth with a business?

And I think the lines get blurred a little bit because in the digital world it's so easy a to become more of like a personal brand or do digital products or and whatever that bucket is that you want to fall down. And then there is so example we were talking about and I don't remember her name.

She sold her business for a hundred million dollars with her Pilates studios. She had a hundred studios and she built them one by one.

And she when you think about traditional business and you think of okay, I'm going to build, let's say a Pilates studio, she might start as an instructor there and she sets all the frameworks and she creates all the systems and then she steps out and then she lets it run and then she's just duplicating that over and over again a hundred times. Not now. I'm simplifying that. And yes, in theory that sounds simple but is definitely very hard.

But in business, especially in our digital world, I think true business kind of gets blurred in that sense because especially if you're running a personal brand like that is generally something you cannot sell. It doesn't run without you.

And so for me, I am trying to push the boundaries of saying if I want to truly own my version of a digital business because digital business is to me the best opportunity in the world. It's way more expensive to do something like a Pilates studio or do a franchise or any kind of brick and mortar like this is where it's at.

But trying to take that idea of that traditional business of even if you were to own car washes and all that, like you spend the time and you set it up for you to step back. And so for me I feel like that is something I definitely want to explore and that is a challenge I want to take on.

Now can you do that with a personal brand? I guess some people might say yes, you can. I don't know that. I don't know that I could.

But I do think there are lots of other opportunities and ideas that you could do that with in the digital landscape. And I'm just exploring all of that.

So anyways, I just wanted to do a quick episode to Come in here and just give you permission to ask yourself questions and pull back and ask yourself, like, am I doing things? Because I think I should do this. Like, I have all of this business and marketing funnels, ads, expertise. So should I be a business coach?

That would be the easiest path to cash, right? That would be the easiest transition. But for me, I think I'm just realizing is that I love the service side of that.

It allows me my creativity to shine and for me to show up in ways that I get excited to show up. And it lets me impact only just a small amount of people instead of a huge amount of people.

But maybe the huge amount of people that I want to impact is not necessarily in that same niche. You know what I'm saying? And so it's just really interesting.

And I think for so many years I've battled between the two and I've always felt, what do I want to say? I don't know if guilty is the right word, but I don't know, maybe I was making it mean that I wasn't successful if I didn't have my own thing.

But what I have really come to realize is the impact and the millions of dollars that I have made for all of my clients. Yes, that isn't my own. I understand that. But I'm a key player in all of that and I love doing it. So I don't know, it's just, it's fascinating.

Now, do I still want to dabble over here and create some digital assets? A hundred percent. It's just whether or not I want it to be a personal brand or not, which again, I didn't know until I started going down.

Like, the podcast is something that I have been very committed to and I've gotten some emails from some of my listeners and thank you for anyone who has emailed me on any episode. I just appreciate you so much and your kind words. They definitely mean a lot. And a few of you have messaged about my voice. Thank you.

About my voice and that you could listen to it all day. That makes my heart sing. But I honestly, it's been such an amazing journey. And so I just want to say as I'm.

I don't know where the podcast is going and I don't know what turn I'm going to make. I will definitely keep you guys in the loop, but I wanted to give you permission to.

If you are going down a path that you think you should go down, but you're not a hundred percent sure and you think that it is fear or it's other things. And then you. I want to give you permission to sit in it and find out if it truly is fear or not.

And for me, I finally sat in this long enough to know, like, it's not fear. This isn't fear. The decisions that I'm making, the conversations that I'm having are not fear based.

I'm not doing this because I'm scared of something.

And so once I eliminated that, because we are, I feel like we're trained to believe that, especially in, like, the coaching or life coaching space, it's, oh, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid? And you're like, yeah, I'm afraid of that. And it's easy to say, yeah, I'm afraid.

But sometimes that's a bit of a fricking cop out, right? Because we can easily say, oh, yeah, I'm afraid.

And it's, yeah, maybe at the beginning I was afraid, but me saying that I'm still afraid now that I've sat with it and I've shown up and I've done some things, it's, no, I'm not afraid. I'm just like, is this the path that I truly want to take?

If I think of my values and my goals and what I actually want to create, and the answer is right now is I'm not sure. And that is okay, too. I just want people to know that you can sit in uncertainty and that's okay.

Like, you can be in a point where I've had all summer to reflect on this and I'm still reflecting on it and I don't have an answer, you guys. I do know that I want to take bold action on a few things that I'm thinking in my head.

But, like, it's okay to sit in uncertainty for a little bit and just figure it out. Because I think when you're uncertain and you get quiet and you just keep asking yourselves the right question, the answer will always appear.

So with that being said, have an amazing week, my friends. I will see you on the next episode.