Biz Bestie Chat with Lee Chaix McDonough

2022 feels like a year of experimentation, curiosity, and growth, and this is going to be echoed in my business this year.

This is just one of the many topics new guest Lee Chaix McDonough and I talked about in our Biz Bestie Q1 Chat, but we also talked about…

• How to let your intuition and experience guide you in your online business.

• The pros and cons of work-from-home life.

• Why connecting with the soul of your offer is important.

• The leaps that can help you meet your growth edge.

Tweaks to bring true rest into your schedule. We both revealed SO much about what we have planned for next year, and I may have let the name of my upcoming offer slip…

Want to get in on the details? Tune into the first Biz Bestie Chat of 2022 on the Empathy Rising podcast now.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey, Risers. Welcome to Episode 140 of Empathy Rising. I'm jazzed today because we are bringing back the Biz Bestie Chat series this year. If you followed the podcast in 2021, you remember I did this with a really good friend of mine, and a great coach for clinicians, Amber Lyda of the Online Therapist Group. 

If you haven't listened to those episodes, go back and make sure that you tune in. It's where we really take you behind the scenes of our businesses and of really our lives, and what's going on. There's some tears, there's some laughter, there's definitely some vulnerability. I decided to bring this series back again this year with another one of my biz besties, Lee Chaix McDonough. 

Lee, as I call her, runs the Coach With Clarity Collective. So if you know that part of your side hustle is going to be coaching and you really want to beef up on your coaching skills and the difference between coaching and therapy, make sure you head on over to Coach With Clarity to check her out.

Lee has been a good friend of mine for years, we have hung out in person, which is rare with these online biz besties that you meet, and just the first time that we chatted, it was like best friends at first sight. Even though it was online, we just energetically met and matched each other and have since then on. So, I'm excited for you to hear our chat today. We'll be talking all throughout the year in quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, and quarter four. So, here is our first Biz Bestie Chat.

Marissa (M): Hey, Risers. I am really excited for this episode. If you remember back to 2021, if you were following the podcasts back then I did a biz bestie series with a good friend of mine, Amber Lyda.

And this year for 2022, I'm continuing the series because most of you said that it was really fun and helpful and you'd loved the behind-the-scenes and the vulnerability and the realness, and this year I'm switching it up and bringing another Biz Bestie on the show, Lee Chaix McDonough. So we'll have her introduce herself, tell us a little bit about how she works, what she does, and then we're just going to chit chat like two business owner best friends do, and talk about what we're working on.

So Lee, if you could introduce yourself to our listeners, tell us a little bit about … because you come from a clinical background, which is really cool, and then tell us a lot about Coach With Clarity, The Collective, and some of your offers and things. 

Lee (L): Absolutely. First off, Marissa, I am so excited to be doing this with you this year. I've been looking forward to it for ages, so we're just going to have so much fun. So thanks for having me, and again, for your listeners who are not already familiar with my work, my name is Lee Chaix McDonough. I'm the founder of Coach With Clarity, which is a training and education company for intuitive, innovative life and business coaches.

And as you mentioned, I do come from a clinical background. I still am a licensed clinical social worker though I'm not currently practicing as a therapist, and I did primarily social work in public health for almost 15 years before moving into the coaching profession. I did a fair amount of one-on-one business coaching and I found that the more people I worked with, the more questions I got about how to become a coach and how to leverage all of your existing skills and education and training and experience into a coaching practice, and so that's what I do now. 

I still do one-on-one work because I love it and I never want to fully give it up. But really, the heart of my business now is the Coach With Clarity Collective, and I still have to get used to saying that because for two and a half years now it's been the Coach with Clarity Membership and I haven't even put the new logo on my website yet, but I'm in the process of rebranding the Membership into the Collective, which we can talk about in a little bit, but that's essentially my community for people who are starting growing and even scaling their coaching practice. We look at how to be a masterful coach. 

So there's certainly some skill-building, and then there's also some coaching-specific business stuff as well. So the collective is my main offer, and then I'm also the head of a certification program, which is accredited by the international coaching Federation for people who are seeking a coaching credential. So that's just a little bit about me in the work that I do. 

M: Yeah, and I send a ton of students your way when they know that coaching is going to be their thing, right? When you come into Side Hustle, what I'm really showing you is how to have an online program, and I really focus on one-to-many, most of my students, it's almost split 50/50 between membership sites and group programs. I do have a few that are like, "I want to do a course” or “I want to do something like this", but really, the bread and butter is a membership site or coaching program, but every once in a while I have, or I'm sorry—group coaching program. 

Every once in a while I have a student who's "I really just want to still do this one-on-one work, but I want to do it in the coaching realm", and that's when I send them over to you to really master that difference between the coaching and the therapy skills. 

L: Well I appreciate that, thank you, and I think because of my background, I do tend to attract a lot of therapists and I love working with therapists. Initially, when I first started, my focus was exclusively therapists. Over the last few years, I've really broadened it so that again, I do have a healthy number of therapists and healthcare providers, but also I'm working with realtors, I'm working with brick-and-mortar business owners and I love that because I feel like especially inside the collective having that diversity of experience really strengthens the program because everyone brings something to the table. 

It's not just me sitting there telling people what to do. It really is a collaborative process. I love having the diversity of thought and experience within the collective. 

M: Yeah, I love that. So, we're here sitting like the beginning of the year, just a couple of days into the year. You guys listening will hear this a couple of weeks later. But you are somebody who I know that really does solid business planning. You really take those CEO days seriously, you block them off on your calendar, you run projections, you run plans more so than I do. I get an overview, "this is what I'm doing", but I don't plan like you do it. 

So can you just walk us through a little bit about what those planning days look like or those forecasting days look like for you, and then maybe share a little bit about what you've worked on for quarter one.

L: Absolutely, and I will say my whole planning process has been a bit of an evolution. Even now I'm still working out what really works for me, and I think planning, it can be such an individualized process. But I want to start off by saying just because I do it this way doesn't mean it's the only way or even the right way, but I love carving time out in my calendar, a full day to really immerse myself in my business and specifically in my business vision and then looking at: Okay, knowing that this is my vision, how do I want to operationalize that? What do I actually need to be doing on a day-to-day, week to week, month to month basis in order to bring that vision to life? 

So I think, sometimes, end-of-year is when I love doing that kind of annual forecasting, so in December I spent some time really looking at 2022 and what I wanted to bring forth, and then on a more regular basis, I will do a quarterly CEO day where I'm looking at the upcoming quarter and what my goals are, what I charted out in that annual planning, and then I'll also do a monthly CEO day to kind of plan for the upcoming month as well. 

So I try to hold Mondays as my day for admin and all of the behind-the-scenes work that comes with running a business, and so typically it'll be maybe the last Monday of the month where I'm looking at the upcoming month. I'm getting really clear on what I want that to look like, or if it's the last Monday of the quarter, I'll do that for the quarter as well. 

M: Yeah, I think that's really fascinating. Do you think that the fact that you have an evergreen offer plays into that, like, why? Because the reason I don't think I look at it that closely is because I make all my money for the year in November. I made my December, or my 2022 money. 

Some of it started coming in August, very few, and then September a chunk, October chunk, the majority of it in November a little bit in December, and then I always have a couple of people join Side Hustle in January. It just always works that way, but then that's my revenue for the whole year, and I'm curious—a little selfishly, which we'll probably explore it a little bit: When you're switching to more like an Evergreen offer or something like that, is that why you look at things more closely, or if that helps you?

L: I love that question, Marissa, because I'm in a transition period right now with my offers because up until September 30th, 2021, the members was an Evergreen offer. You could always enroll. And yes, I do think that having that regular planning time, whether monthly or quarterly helped me take stock of where I was. 

Am I meeting my benchmarks? How are my key performance indicators looking? All of that and then deciding, okay, knowing where I am now, what needs to happen in the next 30 days or 90 days in order to hit that next benchmark? And part of that, absolutely, was connected to revenue, connected to new members, that sort of thing. I am experimenting. 2022 is my year of experimentation, which is why I love actually that we're doing this in 2022 because I'm trying some new things this year. I don't know if they're going to work. I have a hunch they will, or I wouldn't be doing them. 

But I may learn some new things about myself as a business owner and about my business and one of the transitions I'm making is, again, moving from the "Coach With Clarity Membership" to the "Coach With Clarity Collective" and having it be a specified enrollment time. I, right now, intend on launching it three times this year, and when it's open it's open, when it's not, for the most part, it won't be. 

There's a little asterisk by that because I do intend on having some kind of behind-the-scenes ways of joining if people want to, but for the most part, I'm moving away from Evergreen. I know that I feel like I'm the salmon swimming upstream because I know everyone, do you know what I mean? Everyone wants to go evergreen and I'm like, I don't know if I want to do that. I've been doing that for two years. I'd like to try something else. 

M: A hundred percent and where I really felt that way was when I took Side Hustle from six months to now nine months, and there was one other program on the market for therapists, by another therapist, Side-Hustle-type stuff, and it had started as a nine-month program and she relaunched it as a five-week program, and now she markets it as the most efficient and effective. Like, she's really going for that shorter timeframe, and then there's another program on the market that's longer-term, but it's evergreen. 

It's not a closed cohort like mine, and so when I went from six months to nine months, I'm like, "is anybody going to want a longer container, a bigger container?" But, I knew intuitively—which is something you help me with all the time—that was the right answer. But it was exactly what you're describing. Everybody in the industry and the market is going one way and I'm going directly to the opposite way. 

L: And how did that work for you?

M: Fantastically.

L: Yeah, and I think there's a lesson there, Marissa. Number one, trusting your gut, following your intuition, but also number two, realizing that sometimes when everyone is zigging, we need to zag and that can be the differentiating piece that allows us to connect directly with our people.

M: Now, do you think some of that's intuitive, which we like to go to the woo side, for sure, but do you think also some of that comes with experience? Because I know when I was new in the online space, I just followed what everybody told me to do and I got results and everything. 

But making that decision to go from six months to nine months, that was directly against the grain, and my coach, Jacqueline, who you're familiar with as well, she's even talked to me about this. She's like "if you had tried to launch the nine-month version from the beginning, it wouldn't have been the same", you know what I mean? So some of it, I think, might be our guts telling us. But I think some of it also is just experience.

L: I think you are exactly right. I think there's a couple of factors at play. Number one is having the experience of doing it, maybe the traditional way or the most common way, seeing what about that worked and what didn't, and allowing that to inform your decision-making process. I think too, the other thing is you and I have been in business both for a while now, so we have built communities. 

We've built relationships, we've established a level of trust and credibility so that when we make a big change in our businesses, people are willing to go with us because they trust us. I think that's the other piece too, and that does come with time. Relationships, strong, deep relationships, they're not built overnight, and so I think that time piece plays in there. 

M: Yeah, I completely agree. So moving from this more of an Evergreen, people-can-join-all-the-time model, you were doing these, the part of your CEO days helped with that, with their benchmarks and things like that. Now, moving to more of a launch model, do you still foresee yourself doing monthly check-ins? And how will that kind of play in? 

L: Yeah, I do. I do in part, just because it's also my time to do my monthly review to look at my key performance indicators, and for me that looks like: How are the podcast downloads looking, how are my email opt-ins looking, how many new members or new clients do I have? Really looking at the measures in my business that indicate my business, my overall health. 

Some of those are revenue-based certainly, but a lot of them are relational and that's something that we'll always be a part of my business, I hope. I want it to be, but having that monthly time allows me just to do a temperature check, and so I will definitely be making some modifications to how I structure that time because I'm moving from evergreen to open-closed cart model, but I love them too much to give them up. They really feel almost like mini-retreats. I love a good retreat. I know you do too, and so I really treat my CEO days like a mini-retreat and so I don't want to lose that. 

M: Do you do anything special or go anywhere special or do you just do it in your regular office?

L: Sometimes I do. But honestly, and in fact, I'm in my office right now and I just, there's something about this space. I love the energy. I love the vibe. I come here and I feel "oh, this is where I belong" and so sometimes it's as simple as lighting a candle, getting my diffuser going with some lovely smelling oils, and doing some meditation and really grounding into the space. 

This is one of these expenses that I have, my office rent is probably something where if I were talking with an accountant or a consultant, they'd say, "Lee, you don't really need an office. You can work from home if you want" and they would be absolutely correct, but, I also know that when I'm in my office space, I am more productive, I'm more efficient, and I feel better about myself and my business. And so for me, that is an investment worth making in my business. I'm pretty fortunate too, that the city that I live in our rents are relatively low. So it's not an exorbitant expense by any means, and yeah, it's just something that I've decided to prioritize my business, less because it has a direct financial positive outcome, but more because it just serves my process, and ultimately, I feel like it serves my business. 

M: Yeah. I was actually just talking to Josh about this. I can't remember the last time I got dressed, because I drop the kids off for school, I go straight to the gym, I come home and then I start working. So I'm wearing sometimes stinky gym clothes, and then I'm like "oh crap. I gotta go pick my kids up in the same clothes", but I have no reason to because I'm not seeing anybody. I'm not leaving my house and all this stuff, and I've thought about the draw of actually having an office to go. 

Getting up in the morning, probably still taking the kids to school unless I can get them on the bus, but swinging through the Starbucks drive-through or going into a place. Of course, we still have pandemic stuff to think about, but seeing people in my day, getting dressed for my day, getting like ready, and these are things that I haven't done in years because I had little kids, but then because even though my kids are not so little anymore, now I just work from home. So I do think there's an energetic difference. 

L: Yeah, I think you're right. And I don't mean to suggest that the only way you can cultivate that energetic difference is by renting an office somewhere else, you can absolutely create that in your own home, and so if you're someone who works from home, I think there are routines that you can put into place to generate that experience of: Okay, this is something separate, this is something different and I can connect with that energy. 

But for me, I'm very grateful that I have the opportunity to rent a space that's 10 minutes from my house, in the heart of historic downtown Newburn. It's beautiful and vibrant. Yeah, and I'm going to be honest with you, Marissa. This is the first time I've been in my office since going on winter break. So it's been a few weeks and I had a great break, and then I came home and I was feeling so unmotivated. I really didn't want to do anything. 

I've been feeling down actually, and it's funny, I've literally been in this office now for I don't know, half an hour, and I'm already feeling energized. I'm already feeling like, okay, I'm starting to find my groove again. And so I think for each of us, whether it's a space, whether it's a place, whether it is, an object or an action, if we can find that thing that we can ground into, that helps us feel more connected to ourselves in our business, let's find that and let's really center that in the work that we do. 

M: I love that. So, what are some of the things that you will be projecting or looking forward to in Q1? What are some of the plans that you've laid out?

L: Yes. So the big one is reopening the membership, AKA the collective, and not only am I experimenting with moving from evergreen to open-closed cart, but part of the reason I'm changing the name is because a membership indicates you have to pay every month or every quarter or every year to be a part of it, and I'm going to try something new for 2022. 

I am moving towards having unlimited access. So once you pay, you are always a part of it. Which is terrifying and exciting all at the same time, and so it will be one amount and I am going to have a payment plan. So if people want to pay over five months or over 10 months, they can, but I want it to be clear that if you commit to that payment plan, you're committing to it. This is not a membership that you can opt-in and opt-out of, and so that was one reason why I decided to change the name, to minimize any sort of confusion there. 

Also I wanted to change the name because I felt like membership didn't really fully encompass all of the good work that people were doing in there, and it didn't really describe the kind of community that I aspire to build and the idea of having a collective of coaches who are working together to build their coaching mastery and grow their coaching practices that I just felt was really encapsulated by this idea of being a collective. So quarter one is all about rebranding, relaunching, and trying out this new model and seeing how it goes.

M: Are you nervous for the experiment piece because you're stepping into something that you don't necessarily know? When I launch, I can pretty solidly say, okay, this is what's gonna happen, just because I'm so familiar with it. But are you excited about experimenting? Nervous about experimenting? 

L: Yeah, I'm nervous. Part of me feels really comfortable with this, again, because my gut is saying this is the year to try this out.

M: Yeah. 

L: My gut isn't necessarily saying this is going to go gangbusters, but my gut is saying: This is the year to try this. Whatever happens, you are going to gain from it. So while I am nervous, because I've never done this before, and I think a lot of people would be like, what are you doing? You shouldn't be doing unlimited. That's not smart. I know there's a lot of well-known online business gurus who really are against that.

So again, this is me swimming upstream. This is me trying something different. And I know there's going to be some hiccups. I'm going to have to do some explaining about what unlimited access means. Initially, I was … even with my current members, I was talking about lifetime membership, and lifetime is a weird word to use because we're talking about the lifetime of the program and so that's why I've decided to talk about it more as “unlimited” because whoever joins as an unlimited member will get unlimited access for the duration of the program. 

And I fully intend on this program going on for years and years to come because I love it. But I'm human, and I don't want to make promises that I can't fulfill. So this idea of calling it unlimited just sits better with me. 

M: Yeah. I like that. One of the things I really admire about you is … "careful" is the word that comes to mind, but that's not the one that I want to use, but you're very considerate of the way you communicate, the way that it comes across with your audience, the way that it affects you and your family and your life, you consider things from lots of angles and I just think that's really cool. 

L: Thank you. 

M: I do. I don't think I'm communicating exactly what I want to say, but there's a lot of people who just "ah, what the hell", and I do think you have some of that. You have some quick-start energy to you too, but you're just very thoughtful of the way that everybody is impacted by everything you do. 

L: Thank you. I think so, and actually that's quite a compliment. That means a lot to me coming from you, and I think for what I have found because I do have a lot of quick-start energy, I get an idea and I want to go with it immediate thing and what I have found is that when I connect with my intuition, I get a very clear sense of yes, no, or somewhere in between.

But that doesn't mean I necessarily have to take action on it immediately, and that's certainly been the case with other pieces of my business, the certification program being one of them. My intuition for years was saying “this will be a part of your business—not yet. This will be a part of your business—not yet" and then finally the moment came where it was like, "now's the time." 

So it's finding that balance between wanting to take action on every idea and then understanding where the right point in my business journey is to incorporate that, and I don't always get that right. Believe me, I don't, but it's something that I'm working on, and again, 2022, this is the year of experimentation and curiosity and innovation and just trying things out because that's how we grow. 

M: I just got goosebumps when you were talking about that because you, more than anybody, know all the details of what I have coming up. Business-wise and my listeners, especially those who've been listening for a long time have known that I've been dropping Easter Eggs, I think they're called, whatever, about this lifestyle offer, and became very …  It feels like it's kind of cliche, but I had a life-changing experience during quarantine. 

We were locked down for nine weeks. I think we left our house three times to grocery shop and that's it, and it was just profoundly life-changing for me, and I knew I needed this to be part of my work with a capital W like, this is my Work in the world, my purpose in the world, and that was almost two years ago. 

Now, we're talking in January, this is late March, early, April of 2020. So almost two years now and now in 2022 is when this offer is actually going to be birthed and going to come to light. And there's been times where it's been, like, burning in me. I need to talk about this. I need to get things down and I'd be boxing you and I'd be like, "here's the detail, here's the detail. What do you think about this? I'm sorry, I'm blowing up your Voxer, but it's just, now's the time to talk about it right now", and then it'll be two or three months where I hardly even think about it, and then another huge download or whatever will come. 

I'm a little nervous right now because I'm in one of those off periods where it's not burning in me right now, and I'm like what does that mean? Because I've made the decision to launch it this year, like, it's not burning, is it a bad thing? I know it'll come back. I've hired, I've joined, and we'll talk about spending money because both of us have spent some money, but one mastermind was a 12K price point that I will pay monthly—a thousand dollars a month. 

I like monthly payments in my business and I like making monthly payments. It just computes for me and I purchased a big package with an astrologer, a business astrologer for the whole year. So I've made two monetary investments this year in this new program. I'm still running Side Hustle. Nothing in that arena is changing, but I want to also have a lifestyle-focused offer for the first time on this podcast.

The other day, I recorded an episode talking about it and talking about this type of subject matter, which is not tasky structured business staff and oh, my, it makes me … I'm nervous right now. I'm blushing right now, talking with you about it because it's so new. It's so different. 

People know me for one thing, but I think when the people who know me for this one thing start looking at this new thing, it's going to make perfect sense because it's always talked about a side hustle in terms of lifestyle first business. Second, I've always talked about that, but now this offer is going to say, okay, we said lifestyle first business second, but what are you doing in that lifestyle? I don't think it's that different, but sometimes I think it's way different. I don't know. 

L: Well, it's a different topic, but not necessarily a different focus. It's still very brand cohesive for you. You've always been about this.

M: I hope so I guess.

L: No, you have, you're just now coming at it from a different direction, and I want to go back to when you were talking about how at some points you feel lit up and on fire, and then maybe there's like a down period. The image that came to my mind was—you'll love this—was a harvest. It's a very exciting time when we're planting the seeds and we're like, "oh, I can't wait to see what this is going to be" and then we have to wait. 

We have to let the soil and everything do its work and underneath there's going to be moments where, "oh, it's sprouting, oh, it's growing”, and then it'll look dormant. And then we get that first little tendril that sprouts up, and that's really exciting too, but it's still not ready even though we can see it. It's still not ready. We have to wait for it to fully bloom before we're ready to harvest, and I think those downtimes, there's still growth happening behind the scenes, underneath the soil and that's a necessary part. 

I think if we try to rush it, then actually we wind up jeopardizing the health of that seed or that idea. I think what you're describing is actually a healthy way to approach bringing new things to life and in our businesses yes. In our lives, too. 

M: Yeah. That really resonates with me. Thank you for sharing that. I'm like sitting in that. I appreciate it. I guess I feel a little bit…  "shame" is the word. I don't feel ashamed about it. I guess maybe it's this going against the stream, which is like becoming our theme for this episode but there's so many people who are "just launch it, just get it out there, done is better than perfect", and I'm not sitting on this to make it perfect. 

I understand that the offer will change and evolve and refine. It's not that when it comes out, it's going to be perfect. That's not what this is about, but it's just like you had mentioned. It's just not time. It's just not, it's not time. 

L: I think that "just get it out there, done is better than perfect" is ideal for people who have been sitting on a great idea and who have been scared to take action, because they're afraid of being judged. They're afraid of failing all of those things that are totally normal and that we all deal with. 

That's not what's going on for you right now, though. Your concept is developing. It's nurturing, it's growing, and it would be premature to rush it to market before it's ready. So it comes down to "am I holding onto this out of fear or am I holding onto this because it wants more time?" And that's where connecting with the soul of your offer becomes so important because it will tell you what it needs, and you're so good at tuning into that and listening. 

M: Yeah. There's so many of these things, I feel conceited maybe saying this: there's so many of these things that are just natural to me. They're just normal. They're natural, "oh, this is what's going to happen" and maybe I've talked to you about this before, how do I know if I'm listening to my intuition? You've reflected to me, "you're very intuitive", and I don't feel intuitive because it doesn't, I guess maybe because it doesn't take work for me to be intuitive. 

I'm not actually like, okay, sit down, where's my intuition? There's just things that I just know, and I didn't work for it at all, and so I dunno why conceited as coming up for me, easy makes me think of people who just have things given to them. I don't know what it is.

L: So I think that is totally understandable and I think also, particularly those of us who are women or female-identifying, we have been conditioned to not step into our strengths, to not claim our power and so when we acknowledge, yes, I'm really good at this. Yes, this comes naturally to me. 

It feels like we're doing something wrong and let's just put that to rest. It is 100% acceptable to own our strengths, to claim our power, and to say, "this is what I want to be known for and this is what I'm really good at". What's so funny too is that the things that come naturally to us tend to be our strengths and we don't see them that way because they feel so natural and again, we've been conditioned to believe we have to work for what we want. There's gotta be effort, and it's like well does there? Can there be a sense of ease that comes with the work?

M: Yeah, because I would say this doesn't even feel natural. I feel like I would have a reverence for something if it felt natural to me, I'd be like, oh yeah, this comes in, that would be cool. This feels, oh, it wasn't hard so it's not worth anything, which is really shitty. 

L: There's a lot to unpack there, but like you're doing that work right now. 

M: Yeah, and I think part of why this offer is taking longer to "ripen", so to speak, is because there's work I have to do to be able to hold that container, and we've talked about this before, in terms of traditional imposter syndrome, “do I know enough to guide people in this?”, and you've helped me through that. 

But I don't even think it's necessarily, now that I'm on the other side of that, I don't think it was, "do I know enough?" it was, "have I done enough of this work to be able to guide people in this work?" and that's what I did all of 2021 and it's not done by any means. I still definitely have my own personal work too, but I feel as if now I can say I'm walking my talk instead of just asking other people to do it.

L: Absolutely. So I want to ask you because you asked me what my first quarter looks like. What do you see unfolding in your first quarter of 2022? 

M: So, Side Hustle, at the time of recording, our welcome week is in two weeks and then our first week of classes is in three weeks and so the first quarter, the first phase of Side Hustle is really the biggest phase. Students don't think it is, but it is because it's offered conception and funnel built and then, halfway through month two, the students are like, "oh, this is a lot". I've intentionally added two weeks to Side Hustle this time. So I guess it's nine and a half months. I made it even longer. 

L: It's like pregnancy!

M: So I started a week earlier this year and then graduation will be one week later next year. So the welcome week is earlier and the graduation is later, but the bulk of the work actually is the same. It makes sense when you look at the calendar, I promise, it makes sense. But I did two weeks of just build, we have no calls during those weeks. We have no lessons during those weeks. It's just build, and that's feedback that I've had for the last previous couple of rounds: The build part is hard when - for me to build and then pay attention to now I'm in module four and learning something totally new because I'm in a different phase. We switched to marketing and then, but I'm still building. 

So really, in terms of that stuff is really going to be just guiding students through probably the biggest hurdle of the program. The other things fall into place much easier. So energetically I'll be focusing there a lot. What's so great this time is—this happened in 2019 it or no, it happened in 2020. It did not happen in 2021. And it has happened again for 2022, is when I was saying I've made all my revenue, I've made everything I need to make, to hit my bunch marks in 2022. So I don't need to launch anything else this year. 

I will because it will be fun. I'll have some workshops, I'll have some events, because that's just what's fun for me, but from a revenue standpoint, I don't need to. So I'm glad that energetically, I can just really tune into the students and not be divided where I will be a little bit divided is thinking about legacy stuff. I'm just going to be audience-building on a massive scale. 

Leslie Tagorda, if anybody is interested in business astrologers, she's somebody we both have worked with. She's the person I bought the big program from. I've spent $8,000 on that one. So altogether I've spent 20,000 this year on coaching and I forget where I was going with that. Leslie. So, I'll just be like, I'll have meetings with her and just really keying into launching legacy. Oh, that's what I was going for. She sent me over this review for my new moon for January and she said, "I want you to like, based on your chart, you should be bringing in massive millions". 

I've never played around with those words before at all. I've never wanted an audience of millions. It's always just been more important to me to have a qualified buying audience. I don't care how big it is, but to be asked to think that way. So I'll just, I really, what I'm focusing on in quarter one, probably quarter two and quarter three for legacy is just audience building and probably in a bigger way than I've ever done. 

L: How exciting? Yeah. Scary. All of the things.

M: I said, I've spoken on the stage before in 2019 I spoke at therapy re-imagined and it was in-person of course because it was before COVID happened and that was… I was the only one who had a speech, other people brought slideshows and did what I would consider more of a presentation. I tried to do a motivational speech. Jo Muirhead, I know you're familiar with, and some of the listeners might be familiar with, she came up to me afterward and she was like, "I'm so proud of you for actually speaking" and it was really scary and then I've done a couple of presentations two years in a row. 

I've presented at Killing It Camp, which is just a conference. Both of those have been virtual. Last year was supposed to be in person, but it wasn't. Anyway, so this year I applied to speak in LA at my first non-therapist event. That's part of what's scary about this is moving beyond the therapy audience, moving to gen pop. That part is scary, and I know you've done that move. You started a real niche and then moved beyond. 

L: Yes, I would say, I'm still doing that and it's still scary, and for me, it's tricky because I'm doing that within the same business, whereas you are building a complimentary business, but creating a new audience for that and I think both of us are facing our own set of challenges and victories. 

M: Yeah, and that was really in 2020 - that's what I - the decisions I made about legacy—Oh PS it's called legacy, by the way. That's the first time I've said the name. That was the first decision I made about legacy back in 2020 was is this going to be just an offer under my current business for therapists or is this going to be a separate business?, which is parallel to what my audience goes through, which is am I going to keep this under my therapy practice or build a separate business? 

You and I share very similar viewpoints on building it separately from your therapy practice, but that was the decision I had to make too, and it is going to be something separate. Of course, I'm going to be inviting my therapist audience to come along if they're interested in the lifestyle stuff, but I'm also going to be reaching beyond the therapy niche for this lifestyle offer and it's terrifying.

L: And that's all about meeting our growth edges. When we hit that point where it's like, "Ooh, okay, I could take a step back and be really comfortable, or I could take a step forward and get a little, or a lot uncomfortable in the interest of growth and development and expansion". 

And let me be clear; there's nothing wrong with taking a step back into comfort, and there have been times in my business where I've done that, where I've consciously decided, nope, I'm going to take a step back and I'm just going to stay with what I know. And that has been what I've needed at the time so that I could then prepare for that next step forward, and meeting that growth edge, and finding that growth, and that's what you've been navigating too. 

M: Can you share a little bit more about that? Like an example of when you've done that?

L: I would say actually the last three to four months, I've done that. So when I closed enrollment to the membership at the end of September, I decided I wanted to spend the next three-ish months (it's proving to be a little longer than that), but not marketing, not well - no, that's not fair to say because I'm still doing the podcast... I'm still putting myself out there, more accurately, not selling. 

I really have not been in sales mode for a few months now so that I could step back and really dive into the membership. What's working, what's not, what needs to be restructured. I had hoped to do that in the fourth quarter of 2020, and I would say I definitely made that my focus and I need a little more time. So I'm being generous with myself. I'm expanding my timeline a bit. I hope to get it done by the end of this month. 

That was stepping back into a comfort zone for me, choosing not to continue to sell as I was revitalizing this program and what's interesting though, what I'm finding right now, as I'm starting to think about the relaunch is, oh, that doesn't feel very comfortable and I don't want to do that. And I have to be willing to step outside of this comfort zone that I've created for myself. So that requires some momentum and that's what I'm working on rebuilding because it is really easy to get stuck in your comfort zone and not want to leave it. 

M: Yeah. The thing that came to me when you were talking is the idea of working in your business versus on your business, right? In your businesses, just the day-to-day, this is what I'm doing, and then in your business, it's the CEO days that you take that we've been talking about. 

The light’s shining right on my face. You guys can't see it, but Lee probably sees this funny line going down. But there's also this idea of working. You can apply this to the self, like working in yourself and working on yourself like day to day, not coasting, isn't the right word, but like just, okay, I'm just doing me right now and now I want to sit down and do some actual work and sit and maybe you like go to therapy. 

Or maybe you're going to buy a coaching program or whatever that might be. And then there's probably another period where you're just like, okay, I'm at this level and I'm going to work on myself some more than I'm at this level. So I don't know. That just came through when you were talking. 

L: I see that. And I think it's probably mirroring what's going on for me personally, too, outside of my business, when I think about some of the things that I want to work on in terms of reclaiming my health and vitality and refocusing on some of my core relationships, it is really easy to coast. 

It is really easy to do the bare minimum or just do what you've always done and it takes a lot of effort to go outside that and try something new. So that probably, I'm just having this revelation right now. That's probably why part of me is, oh, just stay where it's comfortable because I have been doing other things in other areas and so finding that balance can be tricky. 

M: I do want to reiterate what you said. Is there something wrong with that? Because we do need periods of rest, right? There's a difference. I think between coasting if we want to have that negative connotation to it, doing the bare minimum, and resting. Those are two very different things, and rest is very necessary and essential. 

L: I actually was working on some of my intentions for 2022, and one of them is cultivating rest. Honest to God, true rest, and that is something I am not good at because even on the days where I'm not working, even on the days when I'm on vacation, I'm still checking my email, my work email, I'm still checking Facebook. I'm doing all of that stuff that does not promote rest. 

I'm guilty of that and it's hard to rest when you still have one toe in the work world. In 2022, I'm starting to think about: What does it look like to intentionally cultivate rest? And for me, it's a huge trust issue because it's ooh, if I step away from my business for a day or a week, will it still be okay? Will my clients be okay? Will my members be okay, will my communities? Like, is it safe for me to do that? 

So that's some of the work that I think also awaits me in the coming year is trusting my business, trusting the foundations that I've created and really then modeling the behavior that I hope my coaches do too, which is yes, take time to rest. You deserve it. 

M: Yeah. That's one of the things that I'm going to be looking at in Legacy and something that I've had to look out for me in, and something I've worked on with Jacqueline a bit is, white space is great, but I almost need to… I don't like the term "structure"... my rest. I don't like the word structure, but be intentional about my rest because I was giving myself lots of white space in 2021. I only ran one offer. I didn't even have the mastermind last year, and so I had a lot of white space, but I was like sitting on my couch, scrolling through my phone. Which wasn't actually restorative, right? 

I think rest, and restoration, restore, they're all that same root word. Being more intentional about my rest, getting outside reading books that enrich me those types of things. It's different than Netflix. Don't get me wrong. I'll Netflix, especially depending on where I'm at in my cycle. Netflixing a show could totally be restorative for me, but if I'm only doing that, I start to feel worse, not better. 

L: Yes. You know what? I love that Marissa. I think that is such an important distinction, and I'm thinking about how in 2021, this wasn't… initially, it wasn't an intentional decision and then it became one. But I realized that when I was watching the news, I was feeling terrible. Watching the news, whether it was the evening news or morning shows or cable news, like I could, if I had it on the television, I felt like crap, but when I would listen to news podcasts, which I do quite a bit, I wasn't having that same energetic response, and so I started realizing, okay, when I'm watching television news, even though I'm doing it to stay informed because I want to be an informed citizen, it's not helping me. It's actually hurting me. 

So I made the decision no more TV news. I will not consume news through a television screen or through video is probably a more accurate way to say it. Something about just the visual images, it just wasn't working for me, but at the same time, I don't want to just tune the world out, and I still want to bear witness to things that are happening that are important that we need to be discussing. And so it's not about, "I'm just not going to take news in",  it's being really intentional about how I consume that content, and so podcasts are quite honestly are the ways that I'm getting my news now and it has made such a difference.

It, for whatever reason, it relates to this idea of restoration because watching the news is not a restorative act for me, but listening to it actually makes me feel better about myself.

M: Yeah, yeah. I love that. That's a small tweak, right? And I think sometimes we think these massive changes are what needs to take place, but sometimes it's just a small tweak or a small change but I think what you did was listen to yourself, listen to your responses instead of gloss over them, instead of ignore them, you keyed in and tuned into those and you made the change. I think that's a big thing too, is a lot of times we realize something's not working for us, but we don't actually make the change. 

L: Yeah, I am guilty of that. I have long lists of things. It's "oh yes, let's do this" and then I don't actually put them into play but cutting out TV news was a small but important step for me with that.

M: I think that's really neat. To wrap things up, what is something like… maybe let's set an intention. Do you want to do that? 

L: Yes. 

M: Let's set an intention for quarter one and then we'll check back in on it in quarter two. 

L: Okay. My intention for quarter one is to compassionately and intentionally relaunch my collective, and I want to be really deliberate about the words that I use because I know that this episode will become a touchstone for me. It's going to be an accountability measure and already I'm finding myself feeling overwhelmed by all of the things that I have to do to get this done and I've created, admittedly, an arbitrary deadline. 

I want to do it by February, and as I think about everything that needs to happen, I don't know if it's compassionate to hold myself to this deadline that nobody has set for me, except me. So for the first quarter, I want to be very intentional about how I roll out this relaunch, how I roll out the collective, and to do it in a way that feels good for all involved, including me, and so being compassionate and being, just offering myself some grace when it comes to timing and workload and everything that goes into a relaunch. 

M: Yeah. I love that. I felt that when you're saying it. I think that's really cool. 

L: Thank you. Alright. My friend, what is your intention? No pressure. 

M: Yeah. It's not the pressure of coming up with the thing to share. It's the pressure of getting out of the comfort zone because I know that this is the right move. I'm just nervous, very nervous about it. 

My intention for quarter one is to play bigger in terms of visibility to pitch the big podcasts. So my following, my external vanity metric following, doesn't necessarily reflect that I've been in business for seven years. My revenue share does, right? These internal measures reflect that I've been in business for seven years. 

I've been letting that keep me from pitching some of the bigger places because they do have that external, they look like a big business, and so my intention for quarter one is to get over that. To know that maybe I'm not on the same visibility stage as some of these people, but I certainly have the credibility to be on that stage, and so I'm going to step out on that stage. I'm going to take my space on it. So in quarter one, I'm going to play bigger in terms of my visibility that I go for pitching bigger podcasts, pitching bigger audiences, collaborating on bigger platforms.

L: Yes. I can't wait to see how we both do with this. 

M: I'm so nervous. Thank you so much for your time, we will set a date for quarter two, get it on the calendar. We'll look back on this and then we'll just update where we're at in the spring and then like I said, we'll have something to look back on, but we'll also have updates on where we're at and it'll go through the year like that. So I'm excited. 

L: I can't wait. I'm already excited.

M: Thank you so much for your time and your energy today. I love you. 

L: I love you too, Marissa. So, thank you for having me. Alright. Talk with you soon. 

M: Alright, that was just really lovely for me. I'm still on a high from that. Every time I hang out with Lee, it's like that. We just really not only see each other support each other, get each other, but we just riff off each other and have just a really cool relationship, so I hope that shows through in this episode and the episodes coming forward in the rest of the year. 

If you liked what we were talking about in terms of lifestyle and intentions, and intuition then you're really going to like what I'm talking about over in my little corner of the internet, where I'm talking about Legacy. Legacy is my lifestyle offer that will be coming later this year, but until then we're setting up our little cozy nook where we're just going to talk about this kind of stuff going forward. If it interests you feel free to sign up over at marissalawton.com/legacy and that is where you can get into our little intuition club, I guess I'll call it. 

Alright, right next week we will be back with more of our business-focused side-hustle focused episodes and until then, keep on rising.

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