Tara:
If you don’t first have the clarity and you don’t first have the mindset behind it, you’re not gonna be able to see the answer, even if it was staring you in the face. Because we’re all looking through our own lens. And if my lens is tinted blue, everything I’m looking at is tinted blue. So if I’m looking for something that’s red, I can’t see it, it’s right in front of me, but I can’t see it because I’m looking through this blue lens that’s telling me this thing is purple. That’s not gonna solve my problem. That’s not red. It’s purple.

Jason:
Hello. Welcome to the next Goal Crazy episode. Today I have the privilege of being here with Tara Wagner, who is a business coach. Actually I’ll just let her tell you a little bit about herself. Welcome to the show, Tara.

Tara:
Thank you. Put me on the spot. I didn’t even think about that. Uh, what do I do? I do mindset and business coaching for entrepreneurs who either are already burning out or know that they will burn out and need to avoid it. And so we focus on the things that need to be upgraded or up leveled so that they can get their time back. Yeah. Not just make more money. Making more money is great, but you can always make more money. You cannot get back your time. So that’s what I really focus on.

Jason:
How often do people, when they’re reaching out to you, do they know they feel burnt out at the time? Or, uh, are they just having all sorts of problems and it’s, I mean, the root problem is the burnout, but they don’t even know that that’s the cause.

Tara:
The burnout is the symptom. I think a lot of them know that they’re burning out because it is such a clear symptom. Like you feel it in every cell of your body. You start just, you don’t wanna get up in the morning. It just starts to feel like a drudgery. Something that you loved, you’re starting to hate. But I think they’re noticing that. I think what, what I find the most is that they don’t realize what is causing the burnout. Mm. And how complex it can really be. It’s not just usually one thing. There’s usually multiple areas that we need to examine and actually walk clients through somewhat of an audit so that we can figure out, okay, what are the pieces that are not working for you? And it tends to be really similar fixes.

Despite what’s going on. It’s usually the same things that need to be fixed, but those are the pieces that people get stuck on because we’re so thick in the middle of it. And we feel all the burnout, all the frustration, all of the emotions. Usually a lot of shame because, you know, we think we should have it all figured out and why don’t we, and why isn’t it working? And we’re just like, so in this tornado of emotion and stress that we just can’t see clearly. And you need somebody outside of that situation to come in and be able to just, you know, have a different perspective. Somebody else is gonna be able to look at it differently cuz they’re not right in the thick of it with you.

Jason:
I like that. Yeah. That’s where coach comes in, Right. They can look at it from a different perspective and it forces them to stop and reflect on their life. I mean, you know, we’re talking about my planner, it’s like, lot of times I feel like people just get a lot out of it just because that might be the only forced amount of time they have to stop and think. Right. And it’s like, yes, that’s fruitful.

Tara:
Yes. So that is a huge part of coaching is that you have a chance to stop and think and process and with the, the help of somebody else who’s gonna be able to say, uh, you know, that’s not a helpful line of thought. Let’s like divert this over here. Or asking the questions that are gonna get you to answer things that you didn’t realize were there. Right. It’s really about asking the right questions, which is why I like your planner because it asks the right questions so you’re setting the right intentions so that you’re able to actually see what needs to be seen and do what needs to be done.

Jason:
It is, it’s interesting questions like people. They know the answers, they just don’t know the questions. Right. I mean, my planner is, I mean, this could be a ramp for another, not really a ramp, but it’s like people have used, I’ve got 30,000 people using it to do all these different things. And it’s like, I mean, not to say there’s no value, but there’s like, there’s zero answers in this. It’s only questions. And people have been able to use that to get all the clarity they want just from having great questions to help ’em think in a new way. So it’s interesting.

Tara:
That is, I think that’s probably 80% of it. There is 20% of strategy. I mean, obviously we can know a problem and not know the answer to it. Like, how do we fix this? And that’s where you go and you get strategic coaching, or you go and you do research for something and you do the learning necessary to figure something out. But if you don’t first have the clarity and you don’t first have the mindset behind it, you’re not gonna be able to see the answer, even if it was staring you in the face because we’re all looking through our own lens. And if my lens is tinted blue, everything I’m looking at is tinted blue.

So if I’m looking for something that’s red, I can’t see it, It’s right in front of me, but I can’t see it because I’m looking through this blue lens that’s telling me this thing is purple. That’s not gonna solve my problem. That’s not red, it’s purple. And if we don’t get ourselves in that right place, whether that’s with a coach, with tools, with mindset practices, with any number of things, our psychology is gonna make or break everything we try to do.

Jason:
I like that analogy. You’re looking through a blue lens. Everything’s gonna look blue or purple.

Tara:
Well, purple or what’s the other ones? Freen. Yeah. Right. Yellow and no, yellow and green make blue. I don’t know. I’m obviously not an art major.

Jason:
Hey, it’s a good analogy. So what got you interested in coaching? How did this become part of your journey?

Tara:
Oh my gosh, uh, quite by accident. I had people actually reaching out to me asking if I would coach them because, so I started in business over 20 years ago. My first business was a freaking nightmare. I made all of the mistakes possible, burned myself out hard to the point where

Jason:
That’s where you learned burn out, you learned it the hard way.

Tara:
I learned it, and I learned it a few times after that too. Cause I have a thick head. It takes me a minute to really get the lesson in my bones apparently. But I, I burned out so hard that I’m still dealing with health issues from that first business. Like it actually caused damage. And that’s why I really wanna help people understand like, you will cause damage that is irreversible if you’re not careful. And so after that first business, I closed the doors. I took a couple years to lick my wounds. I did a lot of mindset work. And then because of that mindset work, we were starting to do some really cool stuff in our life. And I was blogging about it and I had people reaching out to me saying, How are you doing this? Can you help me to do these things? I have this goal, I have this dream and I’m scared. How did you overcome this?

Because I had talked about how I had been scared and I overcame it. And so I had people reaching out just for coaching. And so I kind of just fell into it, like, Yeah, I’ll help you. And then figured out along the way, like, actually, you know, I do have this actual process that I take people through. And started teaching that. And it started working really well.

Jason:
So, Okay. So you’re helping people by posting on your blog. And then people start to read it and they need help. Right? They need more help from just a blog post.

Tara:
Yeah. So I was, I was sharing a lot of what I was doing in terms of like, the goals that we were reaching. Like, you know, we were selling all of our stuff and traveling the country full time, things like that. That terrified me.

Jason:
Who’s we? Is this you and your family?

Tara:
This was myself, my husband, and at the time our son was, let’s see, this was 2010, so he was 10, 11 years old.

Jason:
Okay.

Tara:
And so we were talking about, you know, kind of the scary things that we were doing, but how we were overcoming our fears and we were doing the things that we really wanted to do. And I started having people reach out to me saying, you know, I’ve got these goals. I’ve got this vision, I have this thing I really wanna do. Can you help me? Can you coach me? Or, you know, like, how are you doing this? And so I just kind of fell into coaching because people were asking for it, started doing mostly mindset coaching. I did mindset coaching for about seven years. Strictly mindset coaching. Working with, you know, just anyone who needed to work on their mindset to do something big and scary. And then really started to realize that my heart and my soul are with entrepreneurs and small business.

I’m a big believer that small business is a catalyst to the best change because small businesses are so in touch with their communities. They have to be in touch with people, they have to care. They can’t just be like, you know, the Amazons and the Googles of the world and take your money and run. They, they have to really show up to serve. And so I started shifting to focusing on mindset coaching with entrepreneurs. And the messages that I got for them were really different. Same mindset stuff. But the symptoms and the problems that were leading to those mindset things or what those mindset issues were creating for them were different. And so we started talking about burnout. And how do you-

Jason:
Sorry I cut you off here. Were they more stubborn to recognize it was a mindset issue than the people?

Tara:
No, no. The majority of them are more inclined to talk about it because they’re hearing about it. And because I talk about the fact that there’s a few things in our life that are people growing machines, marriage, parenting, and owning a business, it will, I like force you to look at your crap. It will force you to do work on yourself. You will really quickly start to realize where you’re holding yourself back or what your challenges are. You can’t coast through any one of those three things. And so business owners especially would come and they would be like, I know I’m the problem, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing practical about it. You go online and people talk about, you need to work on your mindset and you need to be more positive and you need to have more confidence. And I would hear it over and over again.

Jason:
Way easier said than done.

Tara:
How? Yeah. How? How do you do that? Like, there’s no practical applicable steps to that. And I was like, Oh, I’ve got those. Because that was my frustration when I was dealing with this 2008, 2009, was like, I know it’s mindset stuff, but everything I’m reading on it was Pinterest at the time. Everything I’m reading on Pinterest is just an inspirational quote. Like, what do I actually do to change my mindset? And so I had to do so much learning and so much digging and, and put together my own tools that would really help me to change those things. And that’s what business owners want and need. They want practical stuff. Like we’re practical people at heart. Like, Yes, we can go for some rah rah and some encouragement and some inspiration, but you better tell me what to do at the end of it because I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to wait. And so it started out with just mindset.

Then it got into a lot of like business approach because mindset is your approach to business. And we started talking about boundaries and time management and systems and technology and automations and hiring and just all of the things that went into it. And then getting into marketing and sales and like, how do we do this in a way, my catch phrase is, crush your goals, not your soul. Like how do we do this in a way that allows us to reach our goals but still stay in touch with who we are, not sacrifice our needs, not sacrifice our deeper values, our bigger vision for our life, not sacrifice our life to have a business, but build a business that actually builds a life for us at the same time. And so it’s been kind of an organic journey. Like I call myself a reluctant business coach. Cause I never thought I would be doing business coaching. But I love it because I love making a difference in people’s lives that I know are gonna ripple out into other people’s lives.

So working with other coaches, working with therapists, working with any small business owner because they have to have an impact on somebody else’s day. And knowing that I can help them show up as their best self and not their stressed self, so that they can then have impacts on other people. That’s my heart and soul.

Jason:
I think that’s a good differentiator right there too. Your best self versus your stressed self. What’s does stressed Jason look like versus best version of Jason. Very different.

Tara:
Very different Tara, that’s for sure.

Jason:
Right. Yeah. That’s good to differentiate that. So that’s kind of what led you to your holistic approach, right? So people were reaching out, they had these mindset issues and it’s like, okay, there’s more than just the mindset. We need all these different components.

Tara:
There’s the practical side to it, right? Yes, mindset is the biggest piece of it. For some people it is the main piece. Once they get that, everything else falls into place for other people. They have to change some things about their business. You know, we get a lot of just bad business advice that burns people out.

It’s because most business advice is centered around the idea of making more money. And it’s not centered around the idea of making more time at the same time. And you can have both, but you have to be strategic. And sometimes you do need to choose based on your values and your goals. You know, where do I wanna put my energy? What does make the most sense for me? What does align with my needs and my values the best? And making sure we’re building a business that is ours and not just what we’re told we have to do.

Jason:
Mm-hmm. I think, uh, I really like that. Yeah. Lots of mistakes. You know, before we started recording we were talking about social media and it’s like, there’s so many things out there that tell you what you should do, right? It’s like, I can find an unlimited list. I know this was like a journey that I went through with Goal Crazy of like, there’s books that tell you need to be getting up on stage and talking from stage. You need to be making TikToks. You need to be making blog posts. And it was like eventually it’s just like I just had to choose which one I wanted to do because that’s gotta be someone should somewhere, right? But like, otherwise you’re burnt out. It’s like, not everyone’s method has to be TikTok or Instagram posts. It’s like, which do I wanna do?

Tara:
Not everyone’s method can be. If every single business was on TikTok, TikTok would be meaningless. If every single business was on stage, we would have too many stages. Like there’s no one fit for everybody. And I think that is what is missing in business coaching, is that everybody is selling what they’re selling and what they’re good at. And, and myself too, except that what I’m selling and what I’m good at is helping you think like a business owner and not just follow somebody else’s plans. Like when I teach marketing, I don’t teach “This is the marketing you should do”, I teach, here’s how to figure out the marketing you should do. Here are the different marketing avenues that you have to choose from based on your values, based on your needs. Here’s what you need to be examining, what lines up for you based on your stage of business, based on your values, based on your skillset. And helping people actually think and approach things and really own it. Like we have a saying, I have a program called the Inner Circle. And we have a saying in the Inner Circle: your business, your rules, you have to create a business that aligns with you or you will not stay in business. It will not be sustainable for you.

Now that doesn’t mean you can ignore your clientele. That doesn’t mean that you can, you know, do anything you want. You can do damn near anything you want if you are willing to put in the work necessary to make something work. Like when I first got started, it was podcast or YouTube. Those were my two big things I needed to choose between. My clients were saying podcast, but I knew for myself I wanted to be on YouTube. I talk with my hands. I’m very expressive. I wanted to be able to visualize things or show visuals for people. And so I made the decision to do YouTube also because I knew it was gonna be more sustainable for me. I knew I could create a video that would continue to show to people, you know, months and years down the road.

Jason:
Evergreen. Yeah.

Tara:
It’s a search engine. It promotes for you. So I knew I had to make that decision because it was gonna be sustainable for me. I still had to listen to my audience. I still had to make sure that I was gonna find my audience or be able to bring my audience onto that platform. But ultimately what we’re trying to do is create a business that yes, works for our audience, but also works for us. And if it doesn’t work for us, what is the point? Unless this is a business that you don’t care about and you plan to flip it, that’s great.

Build something, flip it, sell it to somebody else, get rid of it. But at some point you’re gonna have to build something that you really are passionate about and that aligns with your skillset, that aligns with your needs, your values, what you wanna see from your business, what you wanna see from your life. And every business owner out there is going to sell you what worked for them or you know, what works for their clients and that’s great, that works for them. It works for their client. But you have to be the business owner and put that CEO hat on, not the consumer hat and really filter things and say, Okay, this is a great platform or this is a great strategy, but is it my platform? Is it my strategy? Is this gonna work for me in the long run? And that’s, you know, it’s hard to do because marketers are good at marketing, we’re good at selling what we’re good at. And we don’t often, not enough of us.

I really try to, but not enough business owner or business coaches especially are saying, you know, here’s who this is not a good fit for. If you ever read those on sales pages, it’s usually this is not a good fit for somebody who doesn’t wanna make a lot of money. Come on. Like, let’s be real. I’m not good for every business owner, Every business coach is not good for every business owner, but they’re not gonna tell you that. You’ve gotta really filter that and know that for yourself.

Jason:
Well that’s almost just helping people, like almost giving them permission to go do the the thing that they want to do. Right? It’s like there’s all those things they think they should do and it’s like just lean into what you’re good at or like lean into what feels right a little bit. Somebody else might tell you have to be doing this, but it’s like they did that and it works probably cuz they leaned into what they were good at. Like not because that’s the proven path that everyone has to take.

Tara:
Or because they got a little lucky. Like, let’s be honest, there’s an algorithm and there’s some luck to it and you know, you get a post and you have no idea why it went viral until you look back and you examine it, you take it apart and you, you realize, Oh okay, I got lucky, but now I can reproduce this luck. Some people are just gonna get lucky with certain things and then they’re gonna sell what they learned from that luck. That’s not necessarily gonna be the right thing for you. And like what we were talking about in terms of social media, businesses have been building businesses for how long without social media. It’s a really new blip on the radar. And if it doesn’t work for you, if it’s burning you out, if it’s not what you personally enjoy, like I don’t personally enjoy scrolling through Facebook, scrolling on Instagram, I’m not on those platforms. I’m not on TikTok, I’m not doing any of those things. I show up on the platforms that I like and I show up in the way that I like.

I love Facebook groups because it gives me the chance to connect. So I have Facebook groups, I have a public group, I have a private group, I have groups that I am in for other businesses or other goals because those things work for me. But I don’t do Instagram. Every single coach I’ve ever talked to says what you have to be on Instagram. Well, tell you what, I stopped doing Instagram and it had no negative effect on my business. It actually had a positive effect because I had more time and energy to put into what worked for me.

So, I mean, you don’t have to do social media at all. There are literally countless businesses out there that are not on social media, have no social media presence whatsoever. And they are making 6, 7, 8, 9 figures. And why? Because they’re doing what’s working for them. They’re focusing on their business, their stage of business, their talent, their skillset, their mindset, you know, their needs, their goals, and they’ve figured out something else.

Jason:
I think that’s a really good thing. Yeah. I definitely had fallen into that trap for a while of one. It’s like everybody tells you to make posts and it was like, until I probably realized I hated doing it and it like started paying somebody to do it for me. And then it’s like after six months of that, it’s like, then you start to actually look at it like a business owner. Like, this is a terrible return on my money. Like, I can pull this, save the money and there’s no harm done. And I think in a lot of ways, like, you know, when I first launched a business, like you see these people who, they run Facebook ads and they’re, I don’t actually know if they’re overnight millionaires, but they give the illusion of it. And it’s like I didn’t have that with my business. Right? Yeah.

But it’s like now looking back on it, it’s like I’m so grateful because it actually has allowed me to like go on the journey of learning kind of how you were talking earlier about how, you know, marriage, parenting, and business. It’s like they’re all journey inside of ourself, right? And it’s like if I would’ve had to like just flip on some Facebook ads and everything works, it’s like I wouldn’t have had the journey. Like I wouldn’t have actually learned anything, other than got lucky.

Tara:
Yeah. Well, here’s the thing that people don’t realize about this and this, this comes from me being in business for over two decades. Every single one of those people who was an overnight success has probably 10 years experience behind them in other businesses, either their own or somebody else’s. They went through the same journey. It’s just that then they started a new business, applied what they learned and was able to make that one explode overnight. Everybody’s gonna have to go through a journey. Everybody’s journey might be slightly different, but everybody’s gonna have to go through the journey. And if we turn on a business and it was an overnight success that would come with so many problems because our mind would not be ready for that.

Our skillset would not be ready for that. There’s a quote that’s like, if Oprah called today, right? She wanted to highlight your business today, would you be ready? Well, hell no. I wouldn’t be ready. I don’t have the infrastructure, I don’t have the team. I mentally and emotionally probably would not be ready for that. Like that’s a very big step. Things happen in a natural order. It’s not, I mean maybe there’s some law of attraction to it, but the majority of it is just cause and effect. Things will happen when things click into place and things click into place because they take a certain amount of time to click into place. It’s like a plant takes a certain amount of time to grow. You’re not just gonna have it. Like you, you gotta just trust the process and show up to it again as your best self, not your stressed self as often as possible. And learn and develop your skills and learn to be a little bit cynical about other people and their overnight success because there is always a backstory that you don’t know.

And I’m saying this from many, many decades across multiple industries, coaching many different people, collaborating with many different people. Every single person who was a quote unquote overnight success had years of trial and error and testing things behind them years if not decades.

Jason:
Yeah, I agree. That’s a good thing to remember. Okay. So, let’s go back to burnout. Cuz I think these are connected, right? If you’re doing all these things that you should be doing, right? Like I know when I had this list of things that, like the things that I was good at took to really quick and I liked them. So then I was spending all my time doing things I wasn’t good at I hated doing and I got very little results from those. So it was like that’s obviously gonna lead to burnout. You’re doing things you’re bad at getting poor results. Takes forever. But, what do you feel like are some of the common mistakes that lead people business owners to burnout?

Tara:
I think the first common mistake is to, I know how to phrase this in a way that’s gonna sound well, uh, or good. So the first stage of burnout is called the honeymoon phase. It’s when you’re so passionate and excited about what you’re doing that you wanna do it nonstop. And I think the biggest mistake that we make there is that we listen to our emotions to dictate our actions. And if it’s a positive emotion, that’s more tempting to do. I don’t know, maybe a negative emotion would be more tempting for some people, but when you’re really, really excited, it’s hard to turn it off. You don’t wanna turn it off. And that is a huge mistake because you are not filling the other cups in your life. You’re, you stop spending time with friends or family or when you’re with them, your brain is still, you know, working on this exciting business venture that you have. You’re skipping sleep, you’re not exercising, you’re not eating well, you’re not doing basic things that, you know, make your body and mind function. And at first you don’t realize it because of the adrenaline and the fun and the excitement. You can coast on that for months, sometimes years. But at some point the honeymoon phase ends and you are left with the damage control. And that can be to your relationships, that can be to your health, that could be for your business, that could be employees, can be literally anything.

You’ve now established all of these habits and all of this history with the people in your life. And there’s a price to pay for that. And so I think that’s probably the first mistake is like, just because you’re excited doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put in good habits now, put in healthy boundaries around your business. Like, yes, I’m excited, I wanna work past five, but no, I’m gonna stop myself. I’m gonna do whatever I can do to transition my brain over into family mode or home mode or self care mode. Wherever you’re at in your life, I’m gonna be filling these other cups so that I can continue to pour into my business. Because whether it’s weeks or months or years, at some point you’re gonna run dry. You’ve gotta fill the other cups so that they’re not freaking out on you. Lets put it that way. I mean I learned this from, from personal history, like my marriage almost fell apart because of my first business. My husband’s going through the same thing in his business now where he’s two and a half years into a business and it is booming and he is overwhelmed and he’s, you know, trying to do all of the same things and get everything together. But it’s a stress, It’s a stress on all of us. And so understanding that, you know, the impact of that, if you’re not really, really careful, can be detrimental. We are so careful right now to make sure that we have time set aside for our marriage because we don’t wanna have the same mistake that we had 15 years ago. You know, the health issues that I have now, like those, a large majority of those are because of the problems that I faced 15 years ago.

So making sure that you understand that, that you can feel good now and one day wake up and it’s like a light switched and you’re just like, I can’t do this anymore. Your family’s thinking I can’t do this anymore. You cannot, your feelings aren’t facts. You cannot listen to your emotions that say work 24/7. There is a logical piece to this that you just have to say, you know, I’ve gotta have some boundaries or I gotta put some healthy habits into place to make sure that I can sustain this in the long run.

Jason:
Yeah. I like that. I think I definitely saw that too when I was starting my business. It’s like, it almost felt like I need to do this. Like everyone, it seems like that’s what you’re supposed to be. You start a business, you’re supposed to work all hours in the night and it’s like lots of the things I was working on were just a waste of time and money.

Tara:
Oh they are.

Jason:
Just because it’s like if I’m gonna work that long, I fill it with work and it’s like I can only do so many projects at once well. I can only, you know, it’s like sometimes it’s like if I work stay up all night changing tweaks to my ads, it’s like I actually make ’em do way worse than if I just put ’em there and go to sleep.

Tara:
I’m telling you Jason, my first business, I worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day. And I cannot tell you what I filled that time with because I look back at all the things I should have done and I certainly wasn’t doing any of those. It is, what is that law? I can never remember the name of it. Is it Parkinson’s Law or something like that that says the size of the job will expand the time allotted to it. If you give yourself 12 hours, it’s gonna take 12 hours.

If you give yourself four hours, you’re gonna do it in four hours. Because you’re gonna do the most important things first. Hopefully. This is a big challenge that I find with entrepreneurs and we can talk about prioritization. But it forces you to do the most important things or to figure out those most important things. And then everything else takes care of itself. It either happens when it happens or it doesn’t happen cuz it’s not actually needed.

Jason:
Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Let’s talk about prioritizing. So people, they’re getting burned out kind of just to recap that. And a lot of times it’s like because they’re forgetting that they have more aspects to their life
than just their work, right?

Tara:
I mean there’s a lot of things that go into burnout. So it’s mindset. It’s applying the right strategies. It’s making sure that you are not having your brain on all the time that you have, I call it a second brain. Like you need to build a system outside of yourself that can either run without you because it’s all automated and technology or that your team can run without you. They don’t need to be asking you questions because they know where to go to find those answers. And it’s not you. Um, you know, getting a team into place, there’s a lot of different things that can go into, you know, what’s causing somebody’s burnout. But prioritization is a big one. It is a really big one.

The number of people that come to me and they’re like, Well you know, I’ve gotta do all of these things. And I’m like, Okay, what’s your most important thing? Well, they’re all the most important things. That’s not true. Like there is, there are one or two most important things in a business and then some things that can kind of jockey for first or second depending on what’s going on.

But if you don’t understand what to prioritize, like what actually comes first in your week or your day or you know, you just make sure you have time for it whenever it needs to be scheduled. And you’re protecting that time. If you don’t know those things, those things tend to be put on the back burner because they tend to be the most important things. They tend to be the things that maybe scare us the most. And so we can push them off a little bit more. And if we can overcome that and prioritize those things, so many other things become easy.

Jason:
So tips to figuring out what is priority…

Tara:
As a small business, priority is number one sales, number two marketing. Because marketing leads to sales. Cash flow in your business. For example, I had a client one time that was like, well I’ve got all of these things to do and I don’t know what to do first. And we sat down and we looked at the list and some of the list was like, answer some emails, organize something, clean up this, fix this thing, and, and send this $5,000 invoice. Well that’s closest to cash as a business owner, write that down. Closest to cash. Anything that is closest to cash in your business, you do that first, send that invoice. That is always number one.

Sales is always number one. Invoicing. Following up if you had a sales conversation with somebody or a sales call working on your sales pages, working on ads that are leading to sales. Sales related things come first in your business. Marketing comes second and then fulfillment comes third. Fulfillment is if you have clients, if you are fulfilling orders, and I know a lot of people will say, well wait a second, shouldn’t I put that first? No. Because it’s easy to do. It’s not something that’s easy to put off. You’re not gonna put off a client or most of us, you’re not gonna put off a client or customer. Right.

If it becomes hard for you to do Yes. Prioritize that first and then prioritize sales and then marketing. But if it is easy for you to do, it’s easy for me to show up to a client call. It’s easy for my husband to, you know, go to a client’s home and and work on a project. He’s a carpenter. Like it’s easy to do those things, but it’s hard to remember to do the bid, to do the invoicing, to book the sales calls, to show up to those things to increase our skills in those things. So those are the things that you put first, the things that are closest to cash and hardest for you to do. Then client or customer fulfillment and then you can start filling in from there.

Jason:
I like that. Yeah. Cause if you don’t have the sales, none of the other ones are really gonna matter. Right. If you don’t have the sales, you’re not gonna have any orders to fill. Right.

Tara:
Exactly. You have to have cash flow coming in in order to stay in business. It doesn’t matter the number of like, and I’m guilty of this too. We will clean and organize and tweak things on our sales page or our Facebook ads, like you were saying, like we’re all guilty of that. We all have to have a constant reminder of, wait a second, is this closest to cash? Is this actually the first thing I need to be doing? If I do everything else, then I’ll fiddle with things if I feel like fiddling with things. But I have to be careful cause I could spend eight hours fiddling on something just because, hey, my workday was easy today and instead of just taking off early, you know, I feel like I have to fill that time with something. We need to be really, really mindful of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Is this actually helping? Is this adding to our bottom line and our ROI? Like are we getting an ROI?

I loved how you said that earlier about social media. So many people put so much time and energy into social media, but they don’t look at the data. Is this actually bringing in sales? That’s all that matters. If that is not happening, why continue to do it? If you had to pay for every post, you would be much more cautious about making sure those posts were paying you back. But we’re paying in time and energy and we don’t realize that those are things we don’t get back.

Maybe we can rebuild our energy. Sometimes we can’t if we damaged our body so much, but we don’t get back that time. So we have to be very careful to look at the data and make sure that we are prioritizing things that are gonna prioritize our bottom line so that we can stay in business and continue to serve other people. It’s not because money is most important, but it’s because money is gonna impact the most important things.

Jason:
It’s the life blood of your business, right? If you don’t have any cash circulating, like you don’t really have a business. Right. Then it’s just an idea. What do you think, so lots of people who, maybe they’re a business owner who’s working more than they should be right now, working more than they want to be. What do you feel like are some of the first steps to like reducing the number of hours there? Or is it like lot of times just forcing an end time? What do you think?

Tara:
Sometimes it is just forcing an end time. Sometimes it’s, so I break it down into three things, right? There’s mindset, there’s skillset, which is like the business, the strategies that you’re implementing, the things that are going on inside your business. And then we have success habits and success habits are gonna be things like building a habit that forces an end time, right? I wanted to force an end time and in order to do that I would start booking doctor’s appointments or taking the car in, or a hair appointment, anything like that, right after the time I needed to stop working.

So it forced me to actually have that boundary and transition away from work. And then I would come home and I would, you know, get into other things. So the success habits is definitely part of that. Prioritization, that’s a success habit. Time management, that’s a success habit. Taking care of ourselves, right? Like sleeping, eating, moving, whatever that looks like. Whatever we know we need because we all know what we need. We don’t need somebody to tell us like, these are the habits you should have. We know the habits we should have. Making sure that we are making them healthy, making sure that we’re sticking with them, that we’re learning the skills to stick with them. Because that’s just a skill, right? Like anyone who’s read Atomic Habits, like right there, go and read that book that will help you to stick to the habits. Like that is super important. Using the Goal Crazy planner. Like doing the things that are gonna help us to be healthy.

That’s one thing, the mindset piece that is sometimes where some people need to start. Some people are in a good mindset. They really do have a healthy mindset. Their business might be wearing on it, but their mindset is other ways in a pretty good place. Their habits are in a pretty good place, but it’s the strategy, it’s the skills that they’re implementing in their business or that they don’t know that they can implement. And so generally what I do, like when people come into the Inner Circle, those are the three things we focus on in the Inner Circle. We sit down and we audit those things. Like let’s figure out where your holes are, where are your bottlenecks in your business? So I would, I would tell people to do that. Audit the mindset, audit your business, audit your habits and just figure out what do I need to do? What are the areas that are the weakest for me? And then, because I cannot do everything at once, what is the first thing?

If I were to knock this domino down, how many more would it knock down? You’re looking for the one that’s gonna knock down the most. So for some people, they come in and they’re working on mindset stuff and that’s all they’re working on for weeks or months. Some people come in and they’re like, You know what? My mindset is good. I’m stressed, but it’s because of this marketing thing over here. And so we sit down and we, we figure out and we fix and we uplevel and upgrade or streamline or simplify usually their marketing plan. Or maybe all those things are good, but their sales suck. Or maybe all those things are good, but they’re doing everything themselves because they don’t know how to hire or the people they’ve hired, they don’t know how to manage. Right? There’s all these little pieces that will go into it that you just have to audit. You just have to sit down and say, what are my biggest bottlenecks? What are my biggest sources of stress? And is that source of stress actually business or is it me and I’m making it a bottleneck in my business? Like I know what to do but I’m not doing it.

That’s a sign that, it’s a mindset thing. If it’s, I don’t know what to do, but I wanna do it, you probably don’t have much of a mindset thing. Everybody does have some, but you probably just need to focus on skillsets, increasing the skillsets. And if it’s like, you know what, all of these things are working, I’m just freaking overwhelmed. Like it’s too much good stuff. It’s probably success habits you need to be focusing on. What are the habits that you have in your, in your personal life and in your business that you can clean up and adjust and uplevel and upgrade and all that.

Jason:
I like those. I like those three. Yeah. Mindset, skillset, success habits.

Tara:
We call it Healthy Mindset. Healthy Business. Healthy Habits.

Jason:
So that’s kind of the holistic approach. Do an audit. I think that’s probably something people don’t do enough, right? Do an audit of kinda like, the intro, the life crash course in the Goal Crazy planner. So you’re figuring out like, okay, what’s working, what’s not working right now? Like I gotta get clarity on where I’m at right now. I wanna try and figure out where I want to go.

Tara:
Exactly. Exactly why I love that planner so much. Because you cannot start setting goals without understanding where you’re at and understanding where you wanna go. And the number of people that I talk to that don’t know those things, they just set a goal but they don’t know why they have that goal. They don’t exactly know what the goal is and they don’t do any of the work to figure out, you know, what’s gonna get in my way of this goal? Or what skills do I need to reach this goal? Or you know, what do I need to put into place to make this goal easier? Like those are the things that, it’s a process. It’s actually a step by step process to reach a goal. It’s not just I, you know, wanna lose this weight or I wanna make this much money, or I wanna do this thing and I’m just gonna go and do it. That’s why we end up frustrated with ourselves because we think we should just be able to do it, but nobody can just do it. You gotta learn how to do it just with like everything else.

Jason:
Yeah and you need that audit to figure out like, is that one thing I’m chasing after the right thing for me right now? Right? Like, maybe I’m already actually doing well in that category. Or maybe that’s like, that’s not my biggest domino. So that’s kind of just cause more overwhelm cuz I’m adding another moving component to this whole thing.

Tara:
For sure. A lot of people will come to me and say, you know, I think it’s marketing or sales and when we sit down, it’s neither of those things. It’s actually their offer, right? They don’t know their ideal client well enough. They don’t understand what their client actually needs. They created an offer based on something that they wanted and then they didn’t do any market research to validate that offer. And so we have to like go all the way back to the beginning sometimes of like, and it doesn’t mean tearing everything down, starting over. Usually it just means talking to your ideal client and figuring out what’s not clicking, making those adjustments and then all of a sudden your marketing and sales didn’t need to change at all. Or maybe it does a little bit, but it actually starts working now because the foundation is in place. So you really do have to know what comes first in. It’s oftentimes not what we think.

Jason:
I know for me one time, uh, one of the coaches I was working with, we looked at, I kinda like plotted how many hours I had worked versus how much money I made. And it was like the months that I worked more, I made less and it was like uhh.

Tara:
Isn’t it painful?

Jason:
And it was like, the good thing is, is like just work less and it’s like, cuz kind as we talked about, like, I had the amount of time that I was working, so I’ll just, I’d feel it with like, well I’m gonna start this new project and Right. Project takes time. Most time it takes money and it’s like, I can only do so many things well, and

Tara:
And it pulls you away from might be working well. So that thing starts to fall apart. Which it’s tricky to see those things, right? Like, that’s why we have coaches, I have coaches, every coach I know has a coach. You need somebody on the outside of things to spot what you can’t see. And sometimes we need to test things out and we need to play around with things to be able to figure those things out, to be able to make sure that what we’re doing is gonna work. So there are gonna be mistakes and trial and error and there are gonna be frustrations along the way. That’s growth, that’s life. That means you’re actually doing it. Congratulations. You’re not sitting back and doing nothing.

Jason:
That’s what growth looks like.

Tara:
That is exactly what growth looks like. Like it’s messy. There’s learning, there’s, you know, frustrations if you’re human, like those things are gonna happen. But yeah, like making sure that you are not wasting time and energy, I think is one of the, it’s one of the trickiest things that we’re gonna do as business owners because there are so many things you can do. There’s only a few things that you actually need to do.

Jason:
I like that. So what, I guess like, would be a good tip to give somebody right now if they are starting to feel the burnout, like maybe the first step, maybe it’s, you know, how they start with auditing themselves or what would be a tip to kind of start this journey of changing the trajectory they’re on right now?

Tara:
Um, I would say to do the audit, but I know that that can be tricky. Like, generally people don’t know how to audit on their own. Like, we have a whole process to walk people through the audit. You know, I would probably say trust your instincts, number one. Which I know is difficult and is like, well how do you do that? Well, here’s how I do it. You sit down, you breathe, you don’t let yourself talk or think about anything else. Which means if you start to think about something, you just bring yourself back to your breath. Kinda like meditation. All you’re doing is trying to settle your mind so their intuition can talk through all the noise. And then you just ask yourself, what is my next step? What do I need to do? And then you keep breathing and you give yourself a few minutes and usually that answer will surface and it might surface in the form of talk to a coach.

It might surface in the form of Google something, Right? Do some research. Let’s go this path because that is gonna lead you to the answer. Or it might be no answer. And you need to sleep on it and you need to like give it a couple days and trust the process. If you keep asking the question, your mind will find the answer. There’s a mechanism in our brain called the reticular activating system. And if you focus on something, right, you’re focusing your mind on something, your mind starts to bring more of it into focus. So we are inundated with about 40 billion bits of data per second. Our mind can only process about 40 per second, or maybe it’s 4,000 or something like that.

Jason:
Very small percentage.

Tara:
Yeah. Very, very small percentage. But if you tell your mind what to focus on, it starts bringing into focus from those 40 billion bits of data, the thing that is gonna lead you in that direction. And that takes time, it takes, it’s a process, right? If anyone follows a law of attraction, it’s similar things. Sometimes you gotta just give time for the wheels to start rolling and things to start coming towards you. So keep asking the question, keep searching for the answer, keep focusing on it and you’ll find it. And if anybody is like, that sounds like hog wash. Think about if you have ever tried to buy a car and all of a sudden all you saw was that one car that you had your heart set on even in the same color and you’re seeing it everywhere you go, it’s the same thing. Your mind is saying, this is important.

So it’s pulling into focus what’s important. Anyone who has ever been pregnant, been trying to get pregnant, didn’t wanna be pregnant and thought that they were, what happens, Your mind pulls into focus, pregnancy and babies all around you. It’s all you see everywhere. Like that’s just what our brain does. And so use that to your advantage by focusing on the question, focusing on, you know, what do I need? What is my next step? What is the number one thing? What is my domino that’s gonna gonna knock the rest of them down? And then get support when you need support. Don’t feel like you have to figure it all out yourself.

No successful business owner got there by themselves. Every single millionaire or billionaire had help. It is not, there are no self made millionaires. Like that is just the biggest misnomer in the world. Every single person learned from other people. They read books, they hired the right people, they got help. Like we’re communal people. You are not, you know, Superman or Superwoman. Like you gotta just get support where you need support. So figure out for yourself, you know, where do I feel the weakest in my business? Find support in that area. If it’s sales, if it’s marketing, if it’s time management, if it’s mindset, if it’s whatever it is. Boundaries. Find support in that area.

Jason:
I like that. Yeah. Kind of stop and try and figure out what the next thing is. And lot of times it’s gonna be right. We might wanna say, Oh, the next thing is of course Facebook ads. But it’s like, maybe it’s like, I gotta call this kid I used to know who lived on the same street as me. Or like, I don’t know, right? It might be like something random, but yeah, try and separate your mind from what everybody says I should be doing to like, what do I feel like is the right next step for me right now.

Tara:
Exactly. Exactly. And be okay with the fact that you’re gonna test things to find out if you’re right. That’s how we sharpen our intuition. That’s how we sharpen our skills. So let’s say your mind does say, I need to be doing Facebook ads. Okay, what am I, what do I need to do to make sure I do them really well? So, you know, get some skill development, talk to an ads manager, like do some research, learn, absorb, and then implement what you’re learning. Test it out. If it’s not working, tweak some things. Don’t give up yet. Like tweak some things. Trust your initial instinct. Keep learning, keep doing it. It’s called a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, right?

A fixed mindset is like, it should work the first time or I’m gonna be a disaster. Like I’m a failure and this is never gonna work. A growth mindset says I can grow, I can develop, I can figure this out, I can learn, I can get support, it can get better. It is a process and I can take that process, I can go through that process. So making sure that you are just being patient with yourself, giving yourself grace and reminding yourself that you are not going to be perfect, and that does not have anything to do with you being successful.

Jason:
I like that. Trust the process. Be patient, be graceful, and Yeah. You make mistakes. Doesn’t mean you’re a failure. You’re just growing.

Tara:
Welcome to business. You’re gonna keep making them. If you ever feel bad about it, just Google any business owner plus mistakes they’ve made. And you won’t feel so bad as long as you’re not making like big, you know, social, people mistakes. As long as you’re not being a complete butthead to people, you’ll be fine. You’ll learn the rest of, And you’ll, you know what, sometimes you’ll be a butthead too, and you’ll apologize and you’ll learn from that too. Like, it’s, this is business. It is a people growing machine. Welcome to the adventure.

Jason:
Yeah. It’s growth. I like it. Well, this is really good stuff. Thanks for, uh, thanks for sharing all your wisdom with us today. What are some of the best ways for people to connect with you and keep learning more content from you?

Tara:
You know, you asked me this earlier and I didn’t even think about it, but I have a free training that people can do if they’d like. I walked through the three mistakes, and this actually probably answer this question. It walks through the three biggest mistakes that you can correct, and you can correct them by the end of that training.

If you go to xotara.us/training, it’s free to sign up for it. It’ll also explain more about what I do, and it explains more about the Inner Circle. So if somebody is looking for support and, you know, looking to get out of burnout or to create a business that doesn’t burn them out, they can learn more about that there too.

Jason:
Awesome. I like it. Well, thank you so much for being on here today. Appreciate all the help and wisdom you’re able to share. And yeah, let’s Goal Crazy.

Tara:
I love it. Thank you.

Jason:
All right. Thanks Tara.