This episode is for you if you are going to through any type of heartbreaks. We are not just talking about relationship heartbreak, we are talking about heartbreaks in general, and that’s including career transitions, bankruptcy and other hardships.

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Sara Avant Stover (she/her) is an author; teacher and mentor in women’s spirituality and entrepreneurship; and a Certified Internal Family Systems Practitioner. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Summa cum Laude from Columbia University’s all-women’s Barnard College, she had a cancer scare, moved to Thailand, and embarked on a decade-long healing and spiritual odyssey throughout Asia. Since then, she’s gone on to uplift tens of thousands of women worldwide. Sara has been featured in Yoga Journal, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Natural Health, and on ABC, NBC, and CBS. She lives in Boulder, CO.

In this episode we talked about:

• Why is it important to expand the heartbreak conversation beyond just grief, break ups, and death.
• How do single heartbreaks then lead to cascading losses?
• How can we become more aware of how this impacts us?
• Where do you see most women getting stuck on their heartbreak journeys and why?
• What are the most important mindsets or practices women need to embrace during their heartbreak journeys so they don’t get stuck?
• and so much more

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

I love your newest book about heartbreak. And since we’re talking about healing from heartbreak today, I felt it was important to point out that we are not just talking about relationship heartbreaks. We are talking about any heartbreak in general, and that can include career transitions, bankruptcies, and other hardships, right?

What are some examples of types of heartbreaks that you’ve seen or worked with with your clients, Sarah?

Well, I also wanna name that this book also includes the global heartbreaks that we’re experiencing with climate change, with political divisiveness, with the level of uncertainty that we’re all living with. And this global heartbreak just moved to the forefront with the pandemic. So even if we as individuals are not living with heartbreak right now, we are all living with this broader context of this global anguish that’s happening right now.

And other forms of personal heartbreak that I speak about, in the introduction, I actually named like 21 different kinds of heartbreak. And some examples are losing a home in a natural disaster, or being a refugee of war, getting a challenging health diagnosis, your own or one from a loved one, raising a troubled teen, caring for an elderly parent, losing a pet, going through menopause, having an identity shift. All of these are examples of heartbreak.

And of course, there are many more as well.

I love that. As long as we’re human, we’re breathing, inevitably we’re going to go through some type of heartbreak, right? Why do you think it’s important to expand the heartbreak conversation beyond just grief, breakups, and death? Like the usual ones?

Because we already live in a heartbreak illiterate culture, where we’re all encouraged to hurry up and move on with it at all costs. And when this happens, we are already invalidating our own experience of suffering when we’re moving through a challenging season of life. But then when we turn to a book about grief or heartbreak, and it’s only talking about death or the end of romantic relationships, which of course are very valid forms of heartbreak.

But if that’s all that we’re reading about or really learning about, and we’re not feeling included there, then we can feel even more kind of estranged and outside of the normal flow of daily life. So I really wanted to make this an all-inclusive space so that people who are just experiencing any form of challenge can really recognize that their suffering is valid too and needs time and care and attention. Yes.

And I think we go through these difficulties and heartbreaks for a reason. I believe everything happens for a reason. And I think in life, like you talk about, there are so many types of heartbreaks that we can’t escape them.

These heartbreaks are actually mandatory in our life, right? But what we get out of these heartbreaks, if we choose to have a personal transformation through these heartbreaks, that is a choice. Would you agree with me?

Absolutely. One of the kind of taglines for the book is heartbreak is mandatory, transformation is a choice. And something that I see very often is because we live in a society that urges us to hurry up and move on with it and to put a smile on and just paint everything with pink paint, we often get stuck because we’re not feeling the feelings.

We’re not feeling the grief. We’re not feeling the anger. We’re not feeling the depression, the anxiety.

When we’re not feeling it, it can’t heal. And so the transformation actually happens by choosing to turn in and to feel those hard things and to get the support that we need to. And this book is a simple way to get that support, to just kind of learn how to be with these challenging emotions so that they can help to carry us through, so that they can help to bring us to the shores of our new lives.

And where have you seen most of the women that you’ve worked with getting stuck on their heartbreak journey?

Being afraid to feel the grief. I’ve worked with some women who went through a major heartbreak in childhood and still have not felt that grief. And they’re feeling disconnected from their creativity and wondering why.

And when we trace it back, it’s because they’re still afraid to feel the pain from that experience. I also see women getting stuck in anger, either suppressing the anger and turning it in on themselves or expressing it outwards through bitterness and resentment. And both of those things are normal and valid parts of the process.

But if we stay there, because we’re not fully feeling the anger, we’re not just letting that fire burn us and help us to transform into something else, we’re gonna get stuck there too. That is so true.

We want to feel the emotions, right? That’s a normal part of life. We’re human beings.

You don’t wanna- And we’re not taught how to feel. And especially as women, it’d be very taboo to grieve or to be angry. And we especially are taught to be pleasant and to be nice no matter what.

And so that can really hold us back during these times that are really asking us to fall apart and to get messy and to become undone.

So what are the most important mindsets would you say that women should practice if they’re going through any type of heartbreak?

One is to let it take as long as it takes. There is no set timeline. There is no right amount of time that you should be grieving.

And to really let your process lead you wherever it leads you. Another one is that there’s nothing wrong with you. We can feel a lot of shame.

We can feel like we’re really messed up when something isn’t working out the way that we wanted it to, or when it doesn’t look good to other people’s eyes. But the truth is there’s nothing wrong with any of us. And we all experience these things.

This is part of being human. And the last one I would say is this too shall pass. And that’s a phrase that I have at the beginning of the book.

I know it’s a very universal phrase and it’s very true that there isn’t permanence. Things shift and change. And even these hard seasons of life, they’ll pass.

Oh, I can’t agree more. Everything, I mean, even our life right now is temporary. Right?

Just, I mean, if we think back when the pandemic first happened, it seemed like it was never ending. And look at us now, we’re on the other side already. Right?

Absolutely. You know, there’s a fine line between thinking positively and really healing. What do you think about that? Putting that bandage, right? Just thinking positively. Is that beneficial to a heartbreak journey?

Yes and no. It is during the later stages. But in the earlier stages, we really want to embrace the concept that you have to feel it to heal it.

And it’s very normal to not be thinking positively when your world is falling apart. And if we try to again, paint that all over with pink paint, we’re going to get stuck because we’re not actually turning into what is and that what is, is the medicine that’s going to transform us. So the positive thinking will be a natural outcome of the healing when we allow it to happen.

But I think it’s a mindset that you can get through it. That in itself is a positive thinking though, right? It’s believing that yes, it’s going to take time to heal.

And we are always, all of us, we’re always healing from something in life. But I always believe, knowing that I will have the confidence to get through it. Just like you said, we can’t put a timeline on how long that’s going to take, but I have to believe that there is an end to this tunnel.

And I also want to validate that there’s sometimes devastation that’s so intense that it’s very natural and normal to doubt that we’ll make it through or that we have the capacity to. And there were certainly many points along my journey that I write about in the book where I felt that way, where I wanted to give up, where I just thought it was never going to end. And that’s also one of the reasons why I put that, why I made this book so encouraging to keep reminding people of this because we need other people in our lives to reflect back to us that we can do it, that they believe in us, even when we lose sight of that within ourselves.

That is so true. I always say this, I believe in everyone more than I believe in myself and more than everyone believes in themselves as well, because we are blinded, but someone else might have that bird’s eye view. For example, I’m a coach, I do that.

And you as well, Sarah, you have that bird’s eye view over your client’s journey as well. So working with a coach, whoever it is that you resonate with will help you expedite the journey for sure, but definitely seek help if you are in the midst of it, but it will take time. What other tips do you have for women who are looking for a transformation?

Well, another thing that I find is important is to have some sort of a spiritual connection. And I want to really emphasize that by spiritual, I don’t mean religious. If that means religious for you, that’s great too.

But by spiritual, I mean just a connection with something that’s greater than us. And that could be a connection with nature, with universe, with source, with spirit, or if we know that as God or goddess, whatever it is for us, that connection helps us to do what you were just saying, Lucy, to hold that bigger perspective and to remember that there is something bigger holding us, that we’re not breathing ourselves, we’re not beating our own hearts. None of us know how we got here or where we go when we die, but there is a larger mystery that’s living through us.

And if we can tune into that, that can help us to keep finding our next right step as we’re stumbling through the dark.

That higher power is there. It doesn’t matter who you believe in, but you gotta believe the higher power is there and everything’s happening for a reason and that you are learning from it. Nothing is extra.

Everything is mandatory in this journey. And you are in this journey for a reason and you are remarkable in your own ways. Sarah, what was your heartbreak journey?

What was the most devastating heartbreak you experienced personally?

It was the one that I open up this book with. It’s kind of like the first, I write about serial heartbreaks that I experienced between 2016 and 2020. And the first heartbreak was finding out the news of a really devastating betrayal where my former fiance came home one night and told me that he had been cheating on me, not just with one person, one time, but with many people over many years.

And with that news, I just felt like my entire sense of self was just spliced open, was just split apart. And it took me a long time. It took me several years to really weave myself back together again.

And this book was born out of that experience.

And what was most helpful for you to get out of that heartbreak?

A few things. One was what we were talking about, feeling the feelings and getting support to do that when I found that to be hard. Another thing that we just spoke about, having a connection to a higher power and really using prayer and using ritual to connect me with that higher power, using journaling to open up to a deeper wisdom to help guide me.

And the third thing was a cutting edge psychotherapeutic technology called Internal Family Systems or IFS that I now am certified in that helps us to work with the different parts of our personality that can feel challenged during heartbreak. The parts of us that feel grief, that feel anxiety, that feel depression. And also the younger parts of us, like the older wounds from past heartbreaks that maybe were unresolved, that come back to the surface in adulthood when we’re moving through challenging times.

So combination of those three things, I would say is what supported me the most.

And how did this system, the IFS system help you heal from your heartbreak exactly?

It helped me to really go back to those childhood wounds that were not fully resolved and that had come back up to the surface during the heartbreak. And that were somehow unconsciously driving the bus of my life. For instance, they were the parts of me that led me to be in that kind of relationship in the first place.

Parts of me that I didn’t realize it at the time, but held a deep sense of unworthiness, that held a fear of abandonment that allowed me to tolerate being in a relationship where I was being lied to so much. And so IFS helped me to heal those parts of me and to really emerge with a deeper sense of wholeness and a sense of being at home in myself.

I love that. And do you feel like now looking back in hindsight, do you think that relationship now for it happened for bringing you your abundance now?

Yes, and I don’t say this in a Pollyanna kind of way, but I really see that as that experience and everything that happened in those several years that I write about as one of the greatest gifts or maybe the greatest gift that I’ve ever experienced because I could not be who I am right now. I could not have the life that I have right now without having gone through that. I would not wish that on anyone, but I trust that that was my path.

And I’m just so proud of who I am as a result of all that.

I love everything you just said. And I asked that question exactly for the same reason. I am so grateful for each heartbreak I ever experienced in my whole life because once you’re on the other side, you really get to appreciate what it teaches you and what kind of transformation and opportunities and new profound ways of thinking that it’ll bring you and the rest of your life is a new beginning.

So in that, I am grateful.

Yes, and that’s us living the truth of choosing that transformation, right? Having to go through that heartbreak and then choosing the transformation so that we can experience this fruition on the other side of it.

And that is the decision. And that is the decision that you can make that will either change you or break you, right? You can let the situation break you if you don’t choose to let it become your opportunity of transformation.

And that’s why we’re here today because we hope that in every negativity you find in life, you see that as an opportunity for an upgrade in your life, no matter how hard it is. And actually the harder it is now, the easier it is on the other side and the bigger the transformation.

I totally agree.

Be grateful for everything life throws at us. And Sarah, in the difficult times, is there a favorite quote that you go by to help you live your better life?

Yes, this is a quote that I share at the beginning of the conclusion to the book. And this was a quote that was kind of like my lighthouse through those years, because I just saw that of, I saw this quote and I just felt like I want to get to that point. So this is by, I’m not sure if I’m saying his name correctly.

So forgive me if I’m not, Paruki Murakami. Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over.

But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.

100%. Well, thank you for sharing your story and your insights on heartbreak with us today, Sarah. It was a pleasure to have you. Where can we find you?

The best place is at my website, sarahavantstover.com. And there you can find my book wherever books are sold.

And you can also find me on Instagram at sarahavonstover. And my podcast is called Herself. So any of those places I’d love to connect.

Beautiful, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Hello hello beautiful souls, this episode is for you if just thinking about entering a room full of strangers, without a friend by your side makes you want to crawl into a shell or simply cancel.

While bringing a plus-one to a social event is completely fine, I’ve found that it is much more fun, productive and beneficial to actually go to events solo, and that’s what I’ve been doing so here is the why and the how.

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Why do I go to events alone now? Primarily for five reasons:

1. Independence and freedom: When you go alone, you’re free to explore and engage with others without being chained to the expectations of another person. You have the autonomy to make decisions based solely on your own preferences and interests. When you’re solo, you have the freedom to come and go as you please, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the event however you wish or take breaks whenever you need to. You’re not bound by the schedules or preferences of others.
2. Better Networking: Being alone encourages you to reach out and connect with new people. Without having to comfort to familiar group or your friend, you’re more likely to strike up conversations with strangers, potentially expanding your social and professional networks. I usually talk to the first person I see who is either sitting next to me, also alone or arrives early like I did. 
3. Opportunity for Introspection: I am a big advocate for doing reflection work to improve our lives. So being alone in a social setting can provide that much needed valuable time for introspection and self-reflections. It allows you to observe your surroundings, contemplate your thoughts and feelings, and more importantly gain insights into yourself. I love taking notes and reflect on them.
4. Openness to New Experiences: Without the safety net of companionship, you may be more open to trying new things or engaging in activities you might have otherwise said no to. This openness can lead to unexpected discoveries and new experiences and new opportunities worth going alone for.
5. Personal Growth: I know it can be hard to step in the door alone. But stepping out of your comfort zone by attending events alone can be a powerful way to build your self confidence. It challenges you to rely on your own social skills and adaptability, in turn upgrading your personal growth and resilience.

And if you still need a dose of confidence to make going to events alone not only happen but make the experience even more enjoyable, here are my top tips: 

1. Remember You Belong: One of the top reasons you can feel lonely and daunting at an event alone is saying to yourself that “you don’t belong”. Reaffirm and remind yourself that you were invited for a reason. You chose to attend for a reason. The ad you saw on Instagram or wherever that led you here was meant for you. Whatever it is that brought you to where you are now was for a reason. You have every right to be there and enjoy yourself just like everyone else.
2. Set Realistic Expectations: Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to be the life of the party or make a certain number of friends or that you must get a number of collaborations. Instead, focus on simply enjoying the event and being open to new connections. I go to events with no agenda other than having fun. If a new opportunity rises from that, that’s icing on the cake. I’ve indeed signed clients from events, but that was never my agenda, my intentions were always to be authentically myself and to really make friends. Shift your focus from worrying about how you’re perceived to simply enjoying the experience. Engage in activities you genuinely enjoy or seek out conversations that bring you happiness.
3. Start Small: Begin by starting conversations with just one or two people. It can be less overwhelming to focus on building connections with a few individuals rather than trying to mingle with the entire crowd. I’ve been to events where I talked to hundreds and I’ve also been to events where I only talked to one or two people. But guess what, it’s the events where I only talked to one or two people, they are still on my feed and we’re still supporting each other and keeping the connection. 
4. Ask Open-Ended Questions: People generally enjoy talking about themselves. Ask open-ended questions that encourage them to share more about themselves, which can help break the ice and if they are the person that got to talk more, they will actually remember this conversation as a very good one. .
5. Find Common Ground: Look for common interests or experiences that you can bond over with others. This can help you feel more connected and confident in social interactions.
6. Take Breaks if Needed: It’s okay to step away from the crowd for a few minutes if you need a breather. Find a quiet corner or step outside for some fresh air to recharge and gather your thoughts. I always bring some extra snacks to events where I can just go out in the middle of a session to get some sun and get a quick bite to recharge. Back in March I was at the Alt Summit, on the first day I went back to my room and took a nap in the afternoon. The second day when I told people that I took a nap everyone’s reaction was that I was so brave and that they wished they had given themselves permission to take more breaks. And I was like it’s my life, of course I get to take breaks whenever I need to. Even when I pay for a conference, my health and wellbeing is still my top priority. 
7. Focus on Having More Fun: Before the event, visualize yourself having a great time and making meaningful connections. Positive visualization can help boost your confidence and ease anxiety before you go. And While at the event, shift your focus from worrying about how you’re perceived to simply enjoying the experience. Engage in activities you genuinely enjoy or seek out conversations that bring you happiness.

Remember, it’s perfectly normal to feel nervous in any social situation, especially when attending events alone. Be patient with yourself and recognize that social skills, like any other skill, is a learned skill and it will improve with practice and time. So go on adventures to attend social events solo and let me know how it went! Cheers to your continued journey to your own uprising and I’ll see you next week. 

Whether you’re looking to quit drinking permanently or are just taking a break, this episode is to help you quick alcohol.

We are not talking about alcoholics who need rehab today, we are talking about high achieving women who are regularly getting promoted at work or already running a profitable business, your relationships might be fine too, and you are not getting into any legal trouble, but you simply find yourself drinking more than you want to.

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Marci Rossi is a Certified Alcohol-Free Coach, Success Coach, Mindset Coach, and NLP Practitioner.

In this episode we talked about:

• Why willpower doesn’t work when quiting alcohol
• What are some of your best tips before someone ever even starts trying to quit
• What not to do when quiting alcohol
• and so much more …

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Whether you’re looking to quit drinking permanently or just taking a break, this episode is for you to help you quit alcohol. And we are not talking about alcoholics who need rehabs. We are talking about high-achieving women who are regularly getting promoted at work or already are running a profitable business.

Your relationships might be fine too. And you’re not getting into any legal trouble. We’re not talking about any of those, but you are simply finding yourself drinking more than you want to.

And for that reason, I have my special guest, Marci Rossi here today. She is a certified alcohol-free coach, success coach, mindset coach, and NLP practitioner. Welcome to the show, Marci.

Thanks so much for having me, Lucy.

Excited for our chat. Let’s start from the beginning. How often did you use to drink yourself?

It’s kind of varied depending on what was going on in my life. When I was really depressed and really stressed, it would, of course, skyrocket. It would be almost every day.

There were times in my life that it was every day. Other than that, it was, you know, normal quote-unquote drinking, right? So on the weekends would be when I would drink or maybe a particularly hard day and have a glass of wine at night.

But really, when I was struggling most, either in my career or personally, that’s when alcohol just became my default to turn to in order to relieve some of that stress and pressure that I was putting on myself.

So what was your breaking point? What was that point that you decided that you needed to quit?

My breaking point was kind of an extended point, right? So there was a big, huge gap between when I decided I needed to quit and when I was ready to quit. So it started with a dry January for me about four years ago.

Maybe I think four or five years ago was the first one. I’ve always been someone really into health. I love to read about the latest antioxidants and superfoods and all this kind of thing.

So I approached it from kind of a health benefit of just what would happen to my body if I took a break. And I went to the library and got a bunch of books about alcohol, hoping I could read about how terrible it was and I wouldn’t want it anymore. And I took this break and I ended up drinking maybe three times that month.

But one of those days, it was just a really hard day at work. And one of those days was somebody’s birthday. And so those things didn’t count, right?

But I was kind of arguing with myself too, because I knew it was just supposed to be 30 days. So I thought, okay, whatever, I did my best. And I tried it again the next couple of years.

And only one time was I able to make it the entire 31 days without drinking. And I was miserable. I had a countdown on my phone of when it would be February 1st.

I was thinking about what that first drink was gonna be. I was obsessing about the fact that I couldn’t drink. And that to me signified that there was a problem.

If I couldn’t go 30 days without being miserable, there was too much of a dependence there for me. But even at that point, I knew, okay, I have a problem, but I wasn’t ready to do anything about it. I think something that a very dangerous conception that we have in our world is that you have to kind of hit that rock bottom moment to decide to change.

And this was not a rock bottom for me. Like it was disappointing to realize that I was so dependent on alcohol, but I wasn’t getting into trouble. Kind of, you know, like you said earlier, I wasn’t getting arrested.

My relationships were fine. I was getting promoted every single year, year after year for five years in a row. Everything was going well, but there was this dependence there that just didn’t feel comfortable in my skin.

You know, I’m a control freak. I like to be in control of things. And this had control over me, which was really upsetting.

But it just took so much time for me to kind of accept it. Like I recognized it, but I didn’t wanna accept it. So it wasn’t until maybe 10 months later that I decided, okay, like something has to change at this point and I can’t do it on my own.

I’ve already tried. I couldn’t go 30 days. I’m not gonna be able to go the rest of my life.

And that wasn’t really the decision at that point anyway. I wasn’t trying to quit forever. I was trying to get it back under control because I had lost control.

And that’s an incredibly uncomfortable feeling for me, so.

And a lot of people I know try to quit and doesn’t work because they’re solely depending on their willpower. Yes. Would you agree with me that depending on your willpower alone does not work?

Absolutely. I mean, for any behavior change, right? Like if we’re trying to focus on willpower, people know generally that willpower is limited.

And so if you can start early in the morning, it’s easy to say no. I think it’s generally easy for most of us to say no to a drink at nine or 10 in the morning. But then when you’ve had to kind of say no to things all day long, by the time five o’clock rolls around, you don’t have that power left.

I think that’s a problem with a lot of coaching programs these days is they focus just on behavior, which is what willpower does. Willpower says you don’t drink or don’t drink today. And that’s just on the behavior.

But if you can remove the desire to drink, you don’t have to worry about the behavior, right? So I don’t have to convince myself, no, you don’t want to drink right now because no, I don’t want to drink. Like there’s nothing beneficial to me.

I don’t see any reason why it would add to my life without subtracting at least as much. So I think that’s the key there is when we focus on the behavior, we still have those subconscious desires, which means that we are fighting and we will have to continue fighting for the rest of our lives. I don’t want to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to do that. I would rather just not want the substance to begin with. And then it’s just kind of a one-time decision and I’m free forever at that point.

I love that. So let’s go back and talk about desire then. What are some of the most common types of desires that you’ve seen working with your clients?

The number one, I think is relaxing, right? So that was definitely key for me. It’s definitely key for these really driven women who want to achieve or achievement is very key.

And to relax at the end of the day, to shut off our brains. Like if we are constantly thinking of the next thing, thinking of how we can succeed, how we can achieve that next goal, our brain is constantly going and that’s exhausting. And alcohol does kind of slow down your brain.

That is the physiological response to it. So that could be kind of tempting to shut it down, but really it’s just kind of pressing pause on things. And so instead of allowing you to go after things that will remove some of the stress, like you’re not gonna solve your problems when you’re drinking.

I know I never did, but you’re gonna be just pressing pause on those struggles that you’re having. So stress is a big one. I think we, especially in alcohol, we tend to focus on kind of the immediate reaction instead of the long-term reaction.

So yes, when you drink, then immediately you’re gonna feel that kind of relief, that little slowing down of the mind, which can be interpreted as relaxation. But then you don’t realize that several hours later, in order to compensate for bringing you down, your body brings you back up, right? So there’s the homeostasis effect there where your body’s releasing cortisol and adrenaline to kind of counteract that lowering effect that it has had.

And those are stimulating hormones, right? Cortisol is the stress hormone. Adrenaline is what you get when you go skydiving or go jumping off a plane or doing these crazy activities, riding a roller coaster.

So that’s coursing through your body. And for me, I never put two and two together. Like I recognized I was waking up around three, four in the morning when I had had a heavy night drinking and my heart would be racing and I’d be thinking of all the stupid things I’m sure I said that night, but I didn’t tie that to the alcohol because there was that delay there.

And I think that’s such a big problem with alcohol as we think about what it’s gonna do in this exact moment and forget what it’s gonna continue to do over time, over time to our skin, to our body, to our weight, to our mind, to our mental health. We think, okay, this is just gonna solve this one issue and it creates more. So stress, relaxation is definitely one of the biggest.

I think another big problem is that alcohol is everywhere. It is everywhere, right? So you wanna do something healthy and you wanna go to the gym and it’s yoga and wine night.

Or if you wanna go to book club, the book is kind of secondary. It’s really just an excuse to drink wine. And it’s a lot of people, there’s some judgment around alcohol and there’s still this notion that if you quit, it’s because you had a problem, not because you’re prioritizing your own health and your future.

And so it can be scary to make these changes because you’re opening yourself up to that judgment, right? That you’re allowing people to form these opinions of you and thinking that you’re an alcoholic and thinking that you have these issues when really you’re just trying to do what’s best for you instead of just following the herd. So I think those are the two big ones, especially that I see with my clients is wanting to relax and also still wanting to fit in.

Belonging is such a key human need and it can be scary to think that we’re gonna do something that can kind of separate us from the herd, that can maybe isolate us from our friends or our family members or our loved ones, that sort of thing. So those are two, I think, that keep us really stuck in this cycle of continuing to drink, even if we’re realizing it’s not necessarily doing us any favors.

Such great insight. And obviously, if you try to find alternatives to relaxation, there are plenty, yes, right? There are tons of activities that you can do that fulfills your moments of joy.

But in terms of being left out, like you talked about, right? Wanting to be in a certain herd, how do you tackle that problem with your client?

So I think part of it is realizing that how we expect people to behave is not necessarily how things are gonna happen, right? So we may assume that if we quit drinking, our friends, families, partners, loved ones are going to shut us out. We forget that there’s the possibility that they may follow in our footsteps, right?

By changing our behavior, we’re gonna be changing the relationships, but there’s a possibility that we’re changing those relationships for the better, right? So a lot of times we hang out with friends and we’re drinking, but we’re not really connecting on a deeper level. I’m sure, actually, I’m not gonna speak for you, but I can speak for myself that I have had moments where I’m drinking and I make these quote unquote friends for the night, and then it does relationships just end because it’s just completely superficial.

It’s just based on who we turn into when we drink, right? Those conversations that we have that we don’t remember the next day, that’s not a true authentic connection with another human being. So we kind of sacrifice that depth and authenticity when we choose to drink.

And there’s the possibility that other people will see our behavior and decide to model it. They’ll see the changes in our physical health, in our appearance, in our mental health, and realize that this is something that they may want to pursue as well. There’s also a possibility that it doesn’t really necessarily have to change anything.

Like I still go to trivia nights. I still go to bars. I still go out.

You can still have fun with your friends without having a drink, especially these days, it’s continuing to grow with different options, both at the grocery stores and in the bars and restaurants where you have options to try different mocktails. You can still go out without necessarily having to have alcohol there, still be out and socialize that way.

So- I resonate a lot with everything you just said. I mean, there’s no right or wrong answer. I think it’s really about your decision and you having control over your life instead of letting it control you.

Yes, for sure.

So what are some other best tips you have for someone who maybe have tried at times and have failed before? Words of encouragement there.

Sure. So I can tell you it did not work for me. Reading about the dangers of alcohol did not work.

I know a ton and I can scare you up and down of all the different things that alcohol can do, but that wasn’t enough for me to change my behavior because something inside me said I need it. And it wasn’t until I took a deeper look at what that voice was saying and what I thought it was giving me that I was able to change that behavior. So things that didn’t work, just focusing on behavior.

I’m not going to drink today. Okay, I’m not going to drink after, you know, after Friday or I’m not going to drink after Monday. I’m not going to do this, that, and the other rules didn’t work for me.

I just found excuses to break them. Scaring myself into it didn’t work for me. Telling myself about, you know, the cancer risks didn’t help me.

It just scared me. And then I wanted to drink more to relieve that fear, right? So what did work for me was looking at those behaviors.

And that was something that I couldn’t have done alone. I did it in a coaching program. So I didn’t realize that coaching was an option.

I knew of it in terms of athletes, but didn’t understand that that was a profession or a course of treatment, essentially. And I knew also that rehab wasn’t for me. I was not drinking every day.

I was not getting in trouble. I didn’t need to take 30 days away from my life or longer to change my behavior. So that wasn’t an option.

And AA didn’t resonate with me. I think it can be very helpful for a lot of people, but I did not want to surrender to a higher power. I told you, I’m a control freak.

I wanted to take this in my own hands. I wanted to do this. And so surrendering to a higher power didn’t resonate with me.

And I’ve also met a few people in AA that still want to drink 5, 10, 20 years later. And I don’t want to be that, I told you. I don’t want to fight for the rest of my life.

I want to be one and done. I got stuff to do. I can’t be wasting mental energy on trying not to drink.

So I fortunately found a group coaching program, and we went through all the thoughts and beliefs that I had about alcohol. And changing those just completely removed the desire. There’s nothing in there, I believe, that’s going to add to my life.

So there’s no temptation there. And when there’s no temptation, you don’t have to struggle. You don’t have to fight.

Your behavior just changes naturally. So that was really important. That’s my tip, is to understand what it is that you think you like about drinking.

So some of the common ones I went through already was relaxation and socialization. But people, there’s status, right? So people that collect fancy wines and want to know, that was me when we went to dinner.

I wanted to have the wine list because I felt important knowing what it was that I was choosing. To celebrate. Imagine celebrating without champagne.

These are two things that we hold very closely together, but they don’t have to equal each other. Sometimes we drink actually to feel sad, to feel some emotions when we’re kind of numb. You know, it turns on those tears, those artificial, that artificial sadness that creates to socialize, to have fun, to relax, to fit in, you know, if you’re going to go for networking, to give us confidence.

Oh, I hated networking without a drink in hand because I just felt so, I mean, I felt insecure. I felt like I didn’t have anything important to say. I judged myself a lot.

And eventually I realized that it’s just a skill and it’s a skill I haven’t had to develop because I let alcohol do that for me. I let alcohol tell me that I’m not brave enough, that I’m not smart enough, that I’m not funny enough without it. And I internalized that belief that I am just not enough, period.

So it wasn’t until I took the chance and opportunities to network, to go try different events without a drink in hand that I can start to build that skill, right? I’m still not the most extroverted person in the entire world, but it’s coming. And with that comes the confidence to continue to do it going forward.

So it’s really taking a moment to think about what it is that you think alcohol is providing and analyzing whether or not that’s true. Now, some of those you can refute with science. Like I said, like the stress, you can look at the science and see what alcohol actually does to your body or you can decide whether or not that belief is serving you.

Like when I thought that alcohol made me funnier and wittier and more confident, it was really telling me that I’m less funny, less confident without it. And that’s just not something that I wanted to accept. So I got to challenge those beliefs and put them into practice to see is this actually something that’s true for me and does it empower me to make the kinds of decisions that I want in my life.

Woo, so good. Wow, Marci, touched upon a lot of good points there. And I think that gives our audience, if you are in this season of your life, definitely get help so that you can transform your mindset, right?

You can shift those perspectives and that’s gonna make a world of difference because what we hold onto as our belief, those limiting beliefs, that’s what’s limiting you.

For sure, I think people just don’t realize how many limiting beliefs they have around alcohol. It’s all the reasons you’re saying you need it is all the reasons you’re telling yourself you’re not enough without it, so.

Beautiful, and it’s a perfect time for a reminder that enough is a decision.

Yes, yes, love that.

Awesome, so what is your favorite quote that you go by in life?

I don’t know who this particularly is attributed to, but I can do hard things. That is the statement that I live by. It is something that I never believed until I did something I thought I would never do.

I had no intention of quitting drinking. I thought drinking was what made life livable and fun. And I did something that I never expected would happen and I’m better off for it.

I thought if I ever quit, I would be miserable and I can’t imagine the level of happiness that I have now. So being able to do hard things, I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the number of things that we can do. Everything that we’ve gone through in life has gotten us to where we are.

We’ve survived it all to get here, right? So we are so much stronger than we stop and give ourselves credit for. So that is definitely a quote that I live by.

So good. Thank you so much for being with us. Where can we find you?

I am at Coach Marci Rossi everywhere.

Perfect, thank you.

Thanks so much, Lucy.

This episode is for you if you have been thinking about making some extra income by starting a franchise business. 

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Liz Leonard is an esteemed Franchise Advisor, owner of multiple businesses, author of Your Franchise Fast Pass: Your Guide to Finding Your Ideal Business, and renowned speaker. She is dedicated to helping individuals find opportunities to build their wealth and achieve entrepreneurial success, and the best part is: there is no charge for her amazing services. 

Things we talked about in this episode: 

• Who is the right fit for franchise busineses
• The types of opportunities available for women
• The investment amount you are looking at. 
• And so much more…

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to another episode. And I’m really excited to have today’s chat because today’s episode is for you if you are a high achieving entrepreneur who’s looking for a different maybe a different type of income stream. And that’s where my expert comes in today. Liz Leonard.

She is amazing. She is an esteemed franchise advisor, owner of multiple businesses, author of your franchise, Fast Pass, and renowned speaker. So after leaving corporate America, she pursued a path of entrepreneurship grew several successful businesses, and she sold these businesses as well before pivoting to franchise ownership.

So we’re here today to talk about franchises. Welcome to the show, Liz.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Awesome. So we were just having a little tiny conversation before I hit the record button that as an entrepreneur, we wear so many hats, and it’s okay, just not at the same time, but we could do a lot, right?

Absolutely.

Balance. Very important and orchestrating businesses and people and investments and building wealth. It’s a lot to think about in our world.

Yeah, but when it comes to balance, for me, it’s really more about choosing priority. So if right now, what’s on top of your priority, choose that, right. And if at the moment, if you choose to start a franchise, this episode is your priority.

So let’s go back and start from the beginning, Liz, who would you think a franchise business is good for?

Many different people, I would start with people that are in career transition, that maybe have been aged out of their job, that is a reality in our world. Most of my clients are men and couples, investors, partnerpreneurs is kind of my fun name for the two partners, which I have many of those families that want to build a legacy. I have a lot of couples that their children have graduated from college.

So they’ve gone from student to young adult and thinking, could we do a business together? So we’ve actually done that as well. And then I think there are people that just want to plan their exit strategy for corporate America, they want to know there’s recurring revenue at the end of this road.

And so if they can start planning that now planting the seeds and doing the research and exploring options, that’s definitely an opportunity as well. So we have a lot of different people.

Yeah. And I think when we think of franchise, we think of really big corporations that charge millions of dollars to own a franchise, where in reality, there are also a lot more franchises that have a lower entry fee. Am I correct?

Oh, you are. It’s the best kept secret in franchising. And you’re right, everybody’s mind naturally goes to food.

That’s I think, just in terms of our culture, what we think about food, fitness, haircare, those are really the big anchor stores for franchising. But now there is something called home service brands. And those are really essential service brands.

And if we kind of back up in time, and you look at COVID, and everybody was not traveling, they were home, they were investing in passive income through real estate. So that particular, you know, pandemic, if you will, catapulted these essential service brands. So anything to do with a piece of real estate, your home, your office building, it doesn’t matter what it is, all requires something to be warrantied, installed, repaired from floor to ceiling, and interior, exterior, there’s a franchise out there.

And if there’s hundreds of them, so I won’t list them all today. But my husband and I actually own one. It’s a great example.

We have a kitchen remodeling franchise, but we really specialize in refacing and redooring to kind of save money for people and conserve on the cabinet boxes. If they’re good quality, we can keep them and give them a fresh look. And it’s a much more, you know, moderate price, but anything that you could think of, and a lot of people see these vehicles on the highway, and you’re in California, correct?

So you know, there’s a lot of these vehicles on the highway. And what we find is not everybody’s handy mechanical. And so they outsource everything.

So they pick up the phone, and they call. So whether it’s, you know, trash removal, whether it’s landscaping, painting, roofing, security, flooring, glass, it just goes on and on. So those are a lower entry point.

Those are usually under $250,000. And the best part, low overhead, lower investment, which you already mentioned, and stronger margins. So those are three beautiful things.

And we do have a lot of brick and mortar brands as well. But that has to be usually a better fit for a high level investor that’s looking for a semi-absentee model. I will note most of the home service brands, the business model has been designed for an owner operator.

But there are, I would say, probably 20 or 30 brands that I have in my inventory of 700 brands that would allow them to put a manager in it and run it. So I have a very robust inventory. Having a large inventory is not always, you know, great.

It’s a lot of work to research these companies and get to know everybody. Some of them are young, some of them are old. But we have a little bit of everything for everyone.

Talking about everyone, you mentioned most of your clients are men, and a lot of them are married couple ownership. How about, would it be possible to franchise a brand for a single woman?

Absolutely. I do have, we interviewed eight franchisees in the book, which I know we’re going to talk about at the end. So I have a couple ladies in there that really had the motivation, motivation drives success, and they wanted to do their own thing.

One of them was laid off. The other one worked for Procter & Gamble and had really moved up through the ranks. And she and her husband obviously operate the business, but she wanted to build her own wealth.

And, you know, working for somebody is great. You build a hefty retirement account, but when you leave, you don’t have a lot to show for it. So there are a lot of people and a lot of women that I meet that are investing in real estate.

And so if you think about real estate and the conversation we just had about the buildings and what they need, there are a lot of opportunities out there. So property management is a great example. Very simple.

We have a couple of brands in that space. And if you’re investing in passive income and building rental properties, you’re going to need somebody to manage it depending on where you live and if you’re working a job or traveling or family demands. So yeah, there’s a lot of options out there for single women.

I like the keyword passive. We all want passive income because we don’t want our business to run us. Definitely not.

My podcast is all about running your business and growing your business, growing extra income without burnout. So I really like it when you say you can have a manager come in and manage for you, right? Because that’s what we actually want from entrepreneurship is the freedom not to be working from the day to day.

Absolutely. Most of the franchise companies that, you know, a lot of the candidates are interviewing with, so to speak, and researching and exploring, they actually learn a little bit about the business model and the franchisors will tell them, we do not want you working in it. We want you working on it.

You need to hire the right team. You need to do the right recruiting, be smart about it, have enough working capital. We also help a lot of people with the funding pieces, which is another whole probably separate conversation.

But if you’re going to be looking at kind of a semi-absentee model, which means maybe 20 hours a week overseeing your manager and your financials and your KPI dashboard, you’re going to need working capital, right? Because you need to hire a team. So we send people out to get pre-qualified, which gives them kind of confidence.

And it’s just great prep work to know what you can afford.

So you mentioned the semi-absentee model, you still have to work about approximately 20 hours a week. Does that hour get less if you already start running the business?

I think 20 is a great kind of general analogy to give. There are a lot of businesses that will say 7 to 10, but for today’s podcast, I want to play it safe because when you’re launching a new business, everybody listening knows there’s a lot of work on the front end. And we call it heavy lifting is just the term that I use.

And once you get the heavy lifting done, the manager goes to training with you. All cylinders are running smoothly. You probably can back off, but that’s going to be really an owner decision.

And really that trust that you have in the manager, the ability of that person to make decisions that you would want them to make. So it’s kind of a personal decision on the hours that you want to contribute to the business. But I know the franchisors will definitely have some examples.

And then you get to interview franchisees across the country, which is one of the best parts. We call it validation. So you actually can kind of try it before you buy it.

So to speak, you get to interview them and say, how many hours are you putting in? So on year two, what were you putting in? What are you putting in year five?

You can ask them about your year over year growth. So there’s a lot of great opportunities there to actually get the inside scoop on everything that they’re wondering about before they sign an agreement.

I guess that is part of the beauty of franchising because the model is already tested and tried before you so that you actually can interview these businesses and get really an idea versus where you’re starting a business from the ground up.

Absolutely. I’ve done both, by the way.

And they’re both hard. So I think that franchising is about partnership and aligning yourself with the right systems. And as you’ve already mentioned, technology plays a really big role in every business now.

And it’s changed over the years. And if you’re looking to be an entrepreneur and open your own business, you have to really consider all of those startup costs. And so many people that I are thinking about opening their own business and buying an existing business.

But I tell them that I would compare and contrast. I would look at both. What do you have to lose?

So exploring different opportunities will give you different data points. And you’ll also get financial information from the franchisees. So it’s definitely a research project from start to finish.

And it does take about six to eight weeks to explore companies. We always have people look multiple brands.

You know, I’ve seen these ads before at the franchise conferences that you can start a franchise as low as even $10,000. Would you say those smaller businesses are ideal?

I would say no. The first one that comes to mind would be vending machines for that particular low investment. And what are you buying for that amount of money?

I don’t have a lot of those brands with that low of an investment. I would say any of the service brands 150 might be a threshold. We have some coaching and training opportunities as well.

For a lot of people that are at the end of their career want to leverage, you know, everything they’ve done. But those are definitely a lower investment. But those signs always alarm me to be honest.

And it’s alarming because I don’t think that they’re real. I mean, if you were to ask me, do I have a franchise in my inventory of 700 brands that you could get for 10 grand? I don’t.

The answer is no. And the return on the investment. So if you invest 10 grand, what are you going to get?

I mean, you know, businesses require people and systems, operations, accounting, finance, all of these things, you have to put money in. And I mean, I’ve done it. So you have to think about if you put 10 grand in, what are you going to get for return on your investment, you know, you have to be able to create cash flow.

And cash flow is something that people want to build and sell. You know, most people get into franchising to have a 10 year agreement or a seven year agreement with the partnership. And then they build this cash flow, they have a great brand that’s recognized across the country, and then they exit and sell it.

So all of that working capital that was initiated and funded for your business is going to pay off long term.

Thank you. And talking about exits, you actually also exited.

So the first two businesses, just to clarify, we’re not franchises, but I will tell you why I entered into the franchise world. My first business, I had a corporate career in senior health care. So I’ve been a W two employee for many, many years when our girls were young.

And then when the girls were four and seven, now they’re 21 and 24. But we didn’t have an accredited center with education in terms of placing them every day while mom was at work. I was working at the hospital at the time and the demand was there and I recognized demand and I got fired up about it.

And I said to my husband, we should open an accredited child care center. There’s nothing here in our community. And lo and behold, we did.

We opened in a recession. And I will share that a lot of people ask me about recession resistant. I get that all the time.

I would say that the child care industry was recession resistant. I lived it. And moms had to go back to work and they needed to go get obviously a W two job or a 1099 job.

So we built that, we sold it. We did hire somebody in California who had actually built 14 schools. And the analogy that I want to share with people is we hired an expert to walk beside me to help me launch that business.

I could not fail. Our SBA loan was $1.2 million. House on the line, everything.

I quit my job. So we built it, we sold it. And having the systems to implement into that business, I didn’t have to start every little thing.

And so when we sold it, we kind of stumbled upon a self storage business that was passive. And we thought, oh, we need another business. What are we going to do?

So we looked into franchising. And then I met somebody just like me. And I was probably a little bit of a challenge as a candidate because I wanted zero employees, which again, can be a whole nother conversation about how to build a business with employees.

But I learned really by boots on the ground, how to manage 22 women and 140 children in a 10,000 square foot building, but it went really well. And so when we found Kitchen Tune Up, it fit my husband. It fit my husband to a tee with his skillset and our investment level in our market.

So that’s why I’m really passionate about it is there is a business out there for everybody. And if we can match people based on skills, which we give people a skills assessment, we also look at their market very closely. We meet the spouse we meet, sometimes I meet the whole family.

And so we really want to spend time on this matching process. And it just takes time to get to know each other. It’s fun.

Yeah, it does sound fun.

Would you say it’s a lot easier to get SBA loan because you’re working with a more known brand?

Not necessarily, I think SBA funding and we’ve had two of them, we had one for the child care center, and we had one for the self storage business, they were both about a million. And it’s really based on your credit score, and debt ratio, and all of those personal items. I think an experienced brand probably helps with confidence, and it helps with peace of mind.

I think SBA may or may not approve an emerging brand that doesn’t have a lot of units open because there’s no track record yet. But obviously, if you think about franchising, every business starts out new. Some have corporate locations, though, so they’ve already tested and trialed everything.

So that’s always something that people are learning and exploring when they meet with the brands too, they get to understand that they’ve had five to seven corporate units of testing through the year. So I think it’s more of a personalized approach, but we send everybody to have a phone call, it’s free. And it also is a reality check that, oh, I’m thinking about really doing this.

And I’m thinking about an SBA loan, and now I need to find a business.

Thank you so much. And I think this would give a lot of people more curiosity and confidence to look into the franchise model, which has been around for years, right?

A very long time.

Okay, so as you mentioned, you had so many businesses, and throughout this process, when you hit a bump, what do you do to reset yourself?

Yeah, that is a loaded question. I think everybody listening to the call has been there might even be there today. I like to get out in nature.

I like to take a break, I need to hit the reset button, step away from email and all the pings that we’re getting all day long. I love walking my dog, I love being on the ocean. So I’m a nature girl.

And it really does help me reset and vacations. I’m a big supporter of vacations. It’s like the only way to turn it off.

But I think having a good support team also helps to not get to that burnout stage. And asking for help and enfranchising many companies have business coaches to help. So when you get stuck, and we all do ask for help.

Perfect. Is there a favorite quote you go by in life? The one that I’d like to share, because I don’t know if everybody’s familiar with it.

I almost put it in my book, but I didn’t. But the entrepreneurs credo, what all business owners want. I think everybody I won’t read it, it is long, but I encourage everybody to just take a look at the entrepreneurs credo.

And it does go back in history. It’s a wonderful, wonderful, very short, but I won’t read it by Thomas Paine. So take a look at the entrepreneurs credo, it speaks to all of us, and everything of what we’re trying to accomplish, what we’re trying to do is succeed and build wealth for our own family.

Perfect. Well, your book is called franchise fast pass your guide to finding your ideal business. And I know it’s out on Amazon, where else can we connect with you?

I have a very dedicated website for the book, it is franchise fastpass book.com pretty simple to remember, and people can submit their names kind of get on the VIP list. The book actually just rolled out this week, we have a lot of work to do to get this marketed, but it’s built as a tool and a resource. I’m an educator.

And so there’s a lot of great pieces of information that will help people be proactive and really understand the research that they’re going to need to do to make an informed decision. And I will help them do all of that. And there’s no charge to work with me, which is, I know, amazing for people listening, but I paid a finder’s fee by the company, like a high level recruiter, once we kind of get through the process of elimination and finding the right brand.

Wow, isn’t that amazing? Okay, well, thank you for being with us, Liz. And all your information will be listed in the show notes below.

Thank you so much for having me.

I’m happy to talk with anybody who wants to explore franchising. It’s a fun world. It’s a big world.

This episode is for you if you want to learn how to use reading fiction books to influece and change your real life. 

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Aurora Winter, MBA, is a creative entrepreneur who has built several 7-figure companies, bestselling author, TV writer-producer and the founder of SamePagePublishing. Using her expertise in film and neuroscience, she helps people tell memorable stories that build brands, books, and businesses. A popular media guest, Aurora has been featured on ABC, CBS, KTLA, Huffington Post, Oprah Radio and more. 

Things talked about:

• What is the relationship between fiction and reality?

• Benefits of reading fiction books

• and so much more…

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

And the reason for this topic is I am avid reader of nonfictions, I mean, I read at least two nonfiction books a month. And I, I know you write both fiction and nonfiction books. I mean, I love both genres and I don’t know about you, Aurora. I could not have survived COVID without reading my fiction books. Like I was not able to read any nonfiction books when I was stressed out during the worst times of the pandemic.

Well, the pandemic or why I started writing fiction again, and I’ve, I wanted to just share this, how fiction can change reality topic for your busy, successful female entrepreneurs.

Because I think sometimes we don’t give ourselves permission to read fiction because we think we’re just wasting time and we should read nonfiction. But actually we need to have both inputs, the logical, sensible, how to input, but also the inspirational or the emotional input. And during COVID I asked myself, you know, if not now, when.

Specifically, I had always wanted to write a fantasy series like C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe inspired me so much. I realized reading that book that gosh, writers are kind of like wizards and they can transport us to another place and time just with words on a piece of paper. And so when COVID hit, reminding us all that life is not guaranteed and you might not even have tomorrow, decided to give myself permission to write fantasy.

So I have this new fantasy series called Magic, Mystery and the Multiverse, and it’s on Kickstarter. The first book is available. The next book’s coming out on Kickstarter, but the themes in the book underneath an entertaining, inspiring story that actually BBC’s expressed interest in turning into a TV series is a message that really matters to me.

So good books or good movies or good songs are like that. There’s a message that matters. And the message that matter to me, matters to me, is about freedom of speech.

So the evil people in Magic, Mystery and the Multiverse are censors. And I feel strongly that by, it’s for young adults. So, you know, kids 10 and up could really enjoy the book.

And I think, you know, if you lecture somebody as a mom or dad, that doesn’t go so well, but if you give them something interesting and engaging and entertaining to read, that perhaps opens their mind to something new. So I feel like not only is the book entertaining, but it matters to me to, to help cancel the cancel culture, which I’m totally against and how fiction can change reality. Just one more quick, and then I want to hear Lucy’s timing in on this is everything is twice created.

First, you need a blueprint and then you can create the thing. And fiction is brilliant at showing us either what not to create like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Those were warning us, don’t go there kind of stories or a song like Katy Perry’s Roar, you know, kind of became like, yeah, you’re a woman, you can roar.

And so we need to tap into the emotion. We can launch movement with something that dramatizes whatever you care about. So this is why I believe and know that fiction can change reality from Animal Forum to 1984 to various different stories that have often been in banned books.

But they’ve helped to do great things like women, seeing that there could be women as the boss of the home, women voting, women running businesses. Yeah, things that are reality today used to be only possible in books. Yeah, yeah.

And now, well, for example, Star Trek was a great leader in that. The Gene Roddenberry’s TV series helped people to think about equal opportunity. You know, Uhura was like a woman.

She was wearing a short skirt, but she was a woman and she was a woman of color. And yet she was in a position of power. And so I, I see that I love it to be part of my responsibility as an author to usher in books that can make a difference.

I also write nonfiction, but I think we need to rest our brains and we also need to be inspired and encouraged and see some other, some other possibilities.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially for busy women.

I think we get so caught up in the notion and feeling of not enough. Like I’m behind, I’m lacking more information. Let me read this other nonfiction book, which is great.

We’re learning, right? I’m an incessant learner myself. I’m constantly reading nonfiction books, but yet at the same time, it’s really important to have those fiction, me time, down times, because that’s self love right there. That’s self worth.

You are worthy of having the luxury of indulging in your favorite fiction series.

Yeah. And it can be self care.

It can be an indulgence. It can be relaxation and it can also fuel you and inspire you. Like I hope in the book, Magic, Mystery in the Multiverse, I have created some invitational things that, that were in Harry Potter.

Like Harry Potter helped us remember and reconnect to the value of friendship, right? And the courage that it takes to stand up to your friends with Neville Longbottom standing up to Harry Potter. So the fiction can also help remind us, you know, why are we a mom? Why are we a business owner? Why are we doing whatever? The values that we care about can fuel us so much more than just how much money did I make this month? How about you, Lucy? What kind of books do you like reading? What genre do you like reading? Fantasy or Thriller, Romance or Mystery? I’m a sucker for mystery. A good old murder.

But you know what? Like I tell my teenage daughter, she just started, I mean, she refused to read. I tried to give her all types of books when she was younger and she just hates picture books. She hated reading period.

I’m like, how could this happen? I love reading. Reading is like one of my most fun hobbies. And once she became like, she’s like 12 now, once she became 10, I’m like, okay, well, let’s start you up with some young, like teenage murder books.

And then immediately she fell in love. So it’s not about if you love a certain genre or not. There’s a book out there for you.

There’s a book out there for you. It’s a puzzle. I just got to find your thing.

Right? So now when she read the back cover, she’s like FBI. Okay. I don’t even need to think about it.

I’m in.

She’d probably like the Inheritance Games. That’s kind of fun.

You might enjoy a book that I helped a client produce and publish, Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer, which has got almost 3000 reviews on Amazon. So it’s a great whodunit sort of thing. That’s inspired by a true story.

Confessions of an Accidental Lawyer, but it’s a legal drama.

I don’t have the book with me right now, but I think the book she’s reading right now is the Confession of the Accident Murder. So it’s just one word off, but one word off, one word off.

But, and the point is, I think we really have to have a different perspective and also know that even when fiction books are written, the author has to give so much work to writing enough evidence and nonfiction facts into the book as well, just like how all these murder mysteries, they are written alongside of tons of police officers and government workers so that the details, even though the storyline might be made up, you’re learning about all different genres and departments of the world and of our society. And that’s important. I think that’s another way of learning, but it’s an entertaining one.

And it’s kind of a puzzle. So it challenges your mind. Like one of the things I love is that, is neuroscience with the study of how the brain works and how it works in communication.

And one thing that I just love learning is that struggle actually grows, our brain grows the myelin in our brain. So when we are deeply focused on something and we’re challenged, like you might be challenged when you’re trying to figure out who done it in a murder mystery, you’re trying to solve that puzzle, you’re actually growing your brain. So myelin can go at Billy goat trail speed, like two miles an hour.

But if you keep practicing or you keep focusing right on the edge of, of your area of competence, like just 2% or 4% over where you’re competent, you can grow the myelin sheath and it can change the speed by a hundred fold or more. So instead of your response for, it could be for thinking, or it could also be for sports, like for an activity, like hitting that ball can go from two miles an hour to 200 miles an hour. So that’s another benefit of fiction that it actually changes reality and can help you get a sharper brain, which you can then use on your everyday problems.

Absolutely. And something else that’s true is that the fiction books have most of the time heroes as well, right? Your favorite character or a character you’re rooting for that, that you actually look up to that’s saving the world or saving the story or storyline. But because we look up to these characters, we tend to try to behave in a similar pattern.

We see their heroism and their power. And that actually empowers us.

I’m so glad that you brought that up, Lucy.

So the hero’s journey is behind many books and many movies. And I believe that stories are like the DNA of humanity and it’s how humanity tries to teach the next generation and the generation after that, the right way to live. Actually, data doesn’t tell you how to live.

Doesn’t tell you how to be a good person. Doesn’t tell you what matters. Data only tells you what is the information, but the information needs to be filtered by what is the right thing to do or what are we attempting to do here? And those values are coming mostly from stories.

It’s stories that tell us, like you said, Lucy, what does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be the person with the white hat? Who’s doing the good things? What does it mean to, to deal with challenge? Like heroes are always facing incredible challenges and they struggle and they struggle growing their myelin, changing their brain, but then they have the epiphany and always the hero’s journey results in coming back basically with the Holy Grail, which you’re supposed to bring back to the community and help others. So this story, Joseph Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And it’s basically, he made the point, he was a professor that throughout humanity’s history, there’ve been so many different versions of this hero’s journey.

Why is this story structure so prevalent? And it’s exactly what you said, Lucy. We want to be guided, be inspired to be heroic, and we need to be reminded that life has struggle. It has suffering, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not a hero.

A hero pushes through in spite of the dragon and saves the day, right? Yeah. It’s so funny that you mentioned the hero’s journey. I love every hero’s journey.

And I think just like our lives, it goes through ups and downs, just like the hero’s journey. And that’s exactly why we need to remind ourselves. We want to live.

I always say that we want to live the epic life, right? Just how, how you have an epic scene from a movie or a book. That epicness does not come until you choose to develop yourself, right? To go through that journey, that development of yourself. So that is exactly what we want for every listener here is to, to be open to different scenes, right? Be open to the ending and not attached to what’s going to happen in the story, but just be open minded to be entertained by this life.

Exactly. Well, Magic Mystery of the Multiverse is a trilogy of books and it is about a young girl, Anna, who’s 13 years old and she’s from Los Angeles, like you, Lucy. And she’s an aspiring actress.

So she is a very confident, bold, physical, athletic girl. And she always thinks what could go right. She doesn’t ever imagine what could go wrong.

Her younger brother is 11 years old and he’s the opposite. He’s more of an Eeyore kind of character. He’s always thinking what could go wrong.

And he’s also recovering from cancer. So his health is frail. So we’ve got these two dramatically opposed characters.

One is confident and outgoing and optimistic. The other one is frail and pessimistic. And they go on this adventure, kind of a Doctor Who sort of adventure through the multiverse, and they face these incredible challenges dealing with the censors who want to chop out their tongues and do other horrific things to them and the planets that they visit, but throughout there’s this theme of the siblings looking after each other.

The brother is surprisingly heroic. We’ve come to get used to the sister always rescuing her brother who’s younger and frailer, but in a dramatic scene, it’s a role reversal. And the brother does something extremely heroic and surprising facing the adversary, facing the evil censor and saves his sister’s life.

And so that’s important to me. I want kids and everyone to think about the love and loyalty between siblings. And I have that kind of relationship with my brother sometimes.

I feel like I’m always the one looking after him. But then every now and again, it’s the role reversal. And I want us to also be open to that possibility.

Things don’t always have to be the way that you expect them. And to just honor that anybody can be a hero, even the most unexpected person, even the youngest, weakest, sickest person can be heroic if they so choose. Wow.

Amazing. My daughter’s name is Annabelle and she’s almost 13. So I’m heading to Kickstarter now and it’s yeah, I got my copy.

We go to Kickstarter and just search magic mystery in the multiverse. And I would appreciate that support. But on Kickstarter, you can offer extra things.

So I had full color designs of the characters and bookmarks and extra things that you couldn’t offer or can’t easily offer just on Amazon. So Kickstarter is a fun, a fun platform. Perfect.

Well, in your days running your multi businesses, what is a favorite quote that you go by? You can do it. I think that the favorite quote I go by is really that you can do it attitude. If there’s a will, there is a way.

And that what I learned, what I just shared with you a few minutes ago about Mylan is like, if it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean you’re going the wrong way. It means you are learning. Actually, you know, what I often say is the quote that my mother always said to me is there’s no growth in the comfort zone.

So beware the comfort zone. There’s no growth there. And it’s easy for us to to coast.

Right. I’ve reinvented myself every decade or every couple of years with different businesses because I’m kind of a restless or curious or creative person. But it’s every time I reinvent myself or start a new business like now I’ve got the same page publishing, which helps people with their books.

It’s like, oh, well, I’m comfortable doing the old thing. I could just keep on doing that. But then you end up living a groundhog day life.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to have multiple experiences? So beware the comfort zone. There’s no growth there. That’s a quote from my mother.

What about you, Lucy? What’s a favorite quote that that you live by or perhaps that your mother passed on to you?

For me, it’s yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is the gift, which is why we call it the present.

I love that. That’s great.

All Aurora’s links are in the show notes so you can connect with her and check out and support her Kickstarter.

Thank you so much, Lucy. I really appreciate the connecting with you. What a great show you’ve got.

Thank you.