Episode 200: What stories do you carry from your life before business?
If you are lucky enough to even think about starting a business, then you're lucky enough to change and grow as business changes and grows. In today's episode, Fiona shares 7 of her life stories before she founded My Daily Business Coach. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Fiona’s life stories beforse starting My Daily Business Coach
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Joe Barry
I love business coaching. I love group coaching. I love making short courses for people. I love when people have gone through different courses and been like, this has totally changed my mind. In just an hour. And my mind's blown and I've got all these different ideas. I love that. But that is not to say that if I decide to do something else in the future, I won't change. And I think that's one thing that I've had to really work on is thinking, because I started a business like this, this is where I need to stay.
Welcome to episode 200 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I can't even believe that as I'm saying it 200 episodes, that is just incredible. And it makes me just think of the literally thousands of DM we have got about this podcast and the people that are listening to it. That is you. I've absolutely loved doing this podcast. Of course, I'm gonna continue doing this podcast. And I just love hearing from all of you, whether it's through a review, whether it's through DM, whether it's a voice note, whether it's an email, whether it's somebody just randomly at talk saying, Hey, I listen to your podcast or somebody that I've met. It's such a wonderful feeling to feel like you're not just talking into the ether and no one is out there but to feel like not just to people out there, but they're actually being helped by what you're doing.
Thank you. Thank you to every single person who has shared this podcast, who has sent us any kind of information about how they've founded and what they've got out of it, it's been an incredible journey and I'm so excited that we are up to episode 200 and I'm super excited that you are listening to this today. So today it is a coaching episode and I wanted to go through it, I was thinking about, it's episode 200, should I do something big, I to do something different? And I'm actually gonna go through some real lessons that I've learned, not just by doing this episode and 200 episodes of this podcast, but of running my business I'm into my seventh year. And so I sort of wanted to share seven lessons that I've learned and really they relate to stories.
I told myself before I started a business and what I've learned as I've gone through this business. And I hope that there's at least one of these that resonates with you and might give you a different way of looking at things. But before we get stuck into today's episode, I wanted to of course pay my respects, to the traditional owners and custodians on the land, on which I record and have recorded all 200 episodes, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. All right, let's get into today's coaching episode.
So today I wanted to talk about the stories that you carry from your life before business. And what I mean by this is a lot of people, including myself, have had careers and been employed in various jobs before taking the plunge to start their own business. Now, of course, there are people and I work with many people like this, who just knew what they wanted to do from the get-go, started creating it, or maybe created something organically early on and it grew into a business, but there is also a huge part. I would say more people that have been employed in some sort of job and career. And then they have to take the plunge to start their own business. And from that previous life, before we started a business, we have stories and we have ideas, whether they've come from managers or colleagues, or maybe at university, or maybe even before that maybe at like primary school or high school or a friend or a parent has told you something and it has stayed with you and then you bring those stories into your business, some good, some bad, not necessarily good or bad, even just some that help you grow and some that keep you fixed.
And so I wanted you to kind of talk about today, seven of these that I have learned to let go of. And of course, we're all living and learning and changing and developing every single day. So it's not like, I've got rid of them. And I never think about these things ever again, but there are definitely things that I've had to work on and I can really trace pretty much all of them back to my life before running a business. And I think it's something to be aware of because in business, and I've said this before, like we don't review ourselves as the business owners, even if we are enough to our staff and we review them or we go through salary increases and all sorts of things, we don't tend to sit and review ourselves. And it's something I've talked about.
I think I did a whole previous podcast on this, if you'd like to go back to Episode 72, it's all about reviewing yourself and giving yourself a performance, but it's something we don't do very often. And so we are not aware even of the things that we are telling ourselves, because we haven't got somebody else there. Who's saying, do you notice how much you say that to yourself? Or do you notice that X, Y, Z happens and maybe that's because of your limiting beliefs or something else that's going on? We don't really do that. We are very easily able to look at other people and see where their own kind of limiting beliefs happen, but we don't do it ourselves. I know as a business coach, it is really easy for me to talk to people and I see it all the time.
I hear it in the language that they're using. And I think that's one of the best things about having a business coach. You have this accountability person who mirrors back, did you just hear what you said about yourself, or did you hear the language that you're using about this? And that's such a great opportunity. I've had business coaches myself, but outside of that, we don't really sit and think about how am I like performing, or where are these beliefs coming from? And for me, I wanted to go through seven because I think that those stories have definitely hindered me at times. I think perhaps, maybe they've helped me as well, but I definitely feel like the hindering part of them is definitely reducing as I go through my own business journey. So I will share them in no particular order so that maybe somebody who's listening is gonna find one of these useful or resonate or think, that is me.
I totally recognize myself in what Fiona is talking about. So in no particular order, here are kind of seven stories that I think come from my previous life before starting a business that hasn't always served me. So number one more money equals more hard work. Now, I'm laughing because this is such a common myth. I think that is out there. And also, of course, I need to preface this by saying, I understand that I am incredibly privileged to even think about starting a business. I'm also privileged in so many other ways where I live my sexuality, my gender, my skin color, and my age. I mean, there's been so many things that I am privileged to live the life that I do. And I haven't had to potentially struggle as much as others. And I haven't had to fight things in everyday life like racism, ableism, ageism, and so many other things that people have had to endure that I do not.
And have not until this point. And so I wanted to just put a, put that out there because as I go through these things, especially this first one, making more money, doesn't have to always equal more time and more hard work. I also acknowledge my own privilege in saying that, but my experience has been that I always thought that more money earning more equals you work 24/7. That is what I'd learned at all of the places that I'd worked. So I was always in senior roles. I pretty much started my career in senior roles, which was lovely and hard. And I started my career as an editor and a magazine. So I worked there for a short period of time before I became editor. And that was purely thanks to my editor. Who's the incredible Joe Barry who left. And so she left and they desperately needed somebody to fill that.
And she said, “I'm gonna quit.” And I'm sure that they're gonna offer you this because you are the only one who knows where all the tools like we had, this is back of the day way before things like social media. And so we had everything burnt on CD ROM, and we would send it to a printer. And I was the only one who knew kind of where these things were and which files went where, and they were on deadline. And so I always have to say a massive thank you to Joe for quitting when she did, because it was even maybe like a long weekend or something. And we were going to print the next week. And so she knew that by her quitting, the only other person in the business who knew where stuff was, was me. So thank you, Joe, because you gave me massive stuff up, but I started in a senior role and then I continued in a senior role.
So my last job before I started my business was head of marketing at MIMCO. I've also been in charge of the whole kitchen and home category for Amazon in the UK. I worked in senior marketing roles at Audible and everywhere I've worked. This is gonna sound really up myself, but I've often been promoted quickly. And I think that is a great thing. And something I probably should be proud of, but it is also been really hard. Quite often I went from being a peer to being a manager in a short period of time. And that sometimes would cause its own kind of friction, lots of times it didn't. And it was great, but sometimes it did. But I guess what I learned in a lot of those places is you work hard. You work long hours, you are on call all the time, especially when you're working in marketing and say in places where I was also managing the PR team.
So quite often I'd be managing the digital team, the content creation team, and then the PR team. And when you're managing, especially PR where PR is incredibly reactive and a lot of my friends run PR agencies. And I just think hats off because such a stressful reactive environment is also incredibly creative and amazing, but you are constantly what's happening in the news. What are other people doing? Where's our crisis management, like so much plus PR tends to be, especially before COVID a lot of events, a lot of evening work, a lot of getting up early, quite often, we can look at particularly the PR in and see these incredible, beautiful, lovely events that come out and what we don't know what a lot of people don't know unless they have people and friends in that industry is there is so much hard work.
There are people getting up at 6:00 AM, and 4:00 AM to get things, and people are getting up at 4:00 AM to go to the flower market to get the right flowers for events. And then they're staying up till like, they're the last person. They are literally sweeping the floor and making sure that the venue is back to how it was and making sure that everyone had a great time and it's a lot. And so when you are looking after that team, you are also on call as a byproduct of it, even if you're not working in that team because maybe something went wrong, maybe the caterers weren't there, maybe a media person that was supposed to show up, didn't show up, maybe somebody's flight, they missed it. And so everything needs to be organized again. And so I'd gone from place to place, always feeling as if hard work was just part of the parcel.
If you wanna have this senior role and if you wanna get paid, well, you need to be basically owned by the company. And even at Amazon, which I have to say wasn't as full-on as other places that I'd worked, but still was. And there were certain peaks and troughs and there was one period. I remember I actually slept at work. Now I didn't sleep at Amazon under my desk or anything, although that might have been more comfortable. I slept at this really crappy hotel around the corner from Amazon, which at the time was in a slaw. And I slept in this bed was just very strange and weird and I could not sleep all night. And I basically left the office, I think of like 11 o'clock. And I was back in the office at five o'clock in the morning.
And I did that. I think I did that for two or three nights just because we were in this hardcore launch and it had to get done. But I also had that mentality of like, well, I'll stay here until it gets done. When I worked at other places similar, I would get in at like six o'clock in the morning or 6:30, so that I could get a certain amount of work done before meetings started. And anyone who's listening to this, who's been in a senior role, especially at a corporate, you just spend your whole life in meetings. It's like meetings about meetings. And I used to literally be running from one meeting to the other. And so when I started my business, I almost told myself that, okay, well, if you are gonna not work five days a week, and if you're not gonna work morning and evening, then you're just gonna have to expect that you're not gonna earn as much as you wanna earn or as much as other people earn.
Now, one of the big things that I go through with my clients is money mapping. I have a Money Mapping Course. You can find it at mydailybusinesscoach.com/shop. And we go through that because I don't want them to go through this mentality of, you have to work in order to get the money. And in my own business, I've been able to use money mapping, to create systems and create offers, and to create ways of working that enable me to get the income that I need to get, which I have to say is more than anywhere else I've ever worked. And yet I'm working less. So I work usually most weeks, three days a week, I usually work during school hours except for one of those days where my husband looks after the kids or picks him up and does dad duties.
And so the other two days, so Wednesdays and Fridays, I don't work. And I'm with my youngest son tends to not work on the weekends and Mondays, I don't really see clients. So I have created this, but this has not been a quick thing. This is something over, this is my seventh year. As I said, I started at the very end of 2015 or sort of the start of 2016. And so it has taken time, but I wish I had let go of that story that you just have to work crazy if you wanna earn what you wanna earn. And I wish I'd let go of that earlier. Now I'm not one of those people. That's like, everyone can just earn a million dollars overnight. And if you could just follow my five-step formula, definitely not like that.
And I'm not saying for a minute that there haven't been times when it's been a lot of hard work, but I would say that it's never, I've never felt like I've gone into hustle territory. I'm very anti-hustle. I always have been. And I've created a way that works for me. And that's in alignment with my values and the way that I wanna live. So that is the first storytelling, me, that if I wanna earn more money, I will have to work 24/7. I wish I had let go of that a bit earlier. Number two, and this is really a vulnerable one. When I just wrote down these notes, I literally have just written one to seven and the ideas, otherwise, I'm just riffing it. But when I wrote these notes, I thought, do I wanna say this, or do I not wanna say this?
I mean, come on, your in your forties, I'm in 41. Do I really wanna admit this? But I'm going to admit it because it is something that I have struggled with. And it's something that I've had to just let go of, especially in the last couple of years. And that is that you have to look a certain way to be successful, and now I feel sick, even just talking about this, that I'm just gonna put it out there. So I told myself at the start, I'm gonna do it my way and I'm gonna dress the way I wanna dress. But I think I had come from a corporate background where I either had to wear the product that I was head of marketing for, or I had to wear things that I felt made me more professional. And I'm kind of using inverted quotes for that.
And I guess also because I had started my career in senior roles and I was young. I mean, I wasn't that young, but I was in my early twenties. I sometimes felt like I had to dress up older than I was. And then when I started my business, I kind of wanted to wear the stuff that I'd wear on weekends. Like my fun, colorful clothes, or crazy sweaters with like stuff on them or big crazy earrings or, I mean, I kind of have always worn big, crazy earrings. They would go with my, like all-black ensemble with my black blazer and heels and the sort of stuff that I had to wear at corporate, even though I actually in corporate, I often just wore like converse or other things. But I think I told myself that I had to look a certain way.
And as I've had this business, I have gained quite a bit of weight. And I am on my track of losing it and getting he and not losing it for any particular, to be a certain size, but losing it to be healthier. And so even in that, I've told myself, well, don't put yourself forward for that because you are the big one or you look a certain way. And I think it has held me back in certain things. And when I think about my career, a lot of it was in fashion and anyone who's worked in fashion will tell you, it can be a very toxic environment. I had bosses who told me I needed to lose weight. I had one boss who actually said in the middle of a photoshoot, Fiona, you should think about getting a personal trainer.
I had people who told me I needed to wear makeup. I'm somebody who doesn't really wear makeup. I had people comment on my appearance quite a bit in my career. And even when I was pretty slim, I would say. And so I guess that has also been another story that I've told myself that I have had to really work through and just be like, you know what, this is me. And yes, I wear kind of crazy bold things and yes, I have these crazy nails. And literally, if you look back over my years of like the last 15 years, I've always had crazy nails. And so I'm just like, that's me. That's who I am. And if you're not, if you're gonna like judge me for that, then that's on you, not on me. So that was number two.
And it's definitely something that I just sort of let go of in the last couple of years and be like, this is me. If you like me, like me, if you don't, you don't and what you think of me actually is none of my business. And then number three, thinking that you can't have to time off. I think that's another big one. So I remember especially working in retail and head office and e-commerce, times like Christmas and the gifting season and Hanukkah and everything at the end of the year, you can tell yourself, everything's gonna fall apart. If I'm not there. The team needs me as the manager or the leader of the team, I can't be seen to be taking time off. So therefore I won't and you kind of have this whole martyr system.
And so when I started my business, I kind of had that mentality as well. And even just the mentality of like, in Australia you tend to get four weeks off of holidays a year. And so I told myself, okay, I'll have four weeks' holidays a year rather than thinking, this is my business. And I'm in charge of when I get time off and I'm not running a physical business, I guess that needs to be open, but even so, you could have other people working in the business for you. And so I, it took that idea of like, this is the corporate mentality. You get four weeks off. So, therefore, you should have four weeks off in your current business. And I probably did that for the first one or two years. And then I realized I run my own business and I've got a kid that's at school and there's 12 weeks or more of school holidays.
And so as the primary caregiver, I need to take that time off. But also just other things like I remember, especially before my father passed away and my mom had already passed away and my dad was going into a nursing home and he loved movies. Like he loved going to the cinema. I loved going to the cinema too. It's like one of my favorite things. And so sometimes I'd be like, you know what, I'm just gonna take today off and I'm gonna go get dad and we're gonna go do like a 9:30 or 10:00 AM session. And we did, we saw so many movies because let me tell you the 9:30 and 10:00 AM, weekday sessions are always empty. And so quite often we'd have the whole place to ourselves and I'd just always joke and be like, dad, I set it up.
I got the whole cinema for us and we'd see these movies. And I just loved it. I loved having a coffee with my dad. I have so many photos of selfies of me and dad in the cinema. And I just love that. I love that I got to the point where I was like, if I wanna take that time off, I'm gonna take that time off. Likewise. And I've talked about this before, after my mom passed away in April 2017, I just sort of fell apart. And she was my best friend. She was my biggest cheerleader. I talked to her every single day and she just wasn't feeling well. And she passed away within a kind of half an hour, 40 minutes. So it was a huge kind of bombshell that went off and I took five or six weeks off after that. And I just sort of emailed all my clients and said, Hey, this is what's happened.
I don't know when I'll be back. But right now I cannot, my headspace is just not in the right place to best serve you. And all of them to my incredible appreciation and gratefulness for these types of clients. But all of them were like, take your time. And a number of them said you know what? I've had somebody really close to me die. It's crap, take all the time you need. And I always am thankful for them. And for the time that I had, and I always am so thankful that I was not working in corporate where I would've had maybe two or three days off and been expected to come back in and do my work. And so that was another thing. Another kind of story that I told myself from my previous career before business was that you can't take time off and that work needs to be done and work is the most important thing.
And you just need to show up and put your feelings aside and get stuff done. And of course, yes, there are sometimes that that has to happen. But I've learned in my business that if I need something else, something more important to happen, then yes, I can turn, I can turn down work, or I can say I'm taking time off. Number four. And this sort of similar kind of pathway is what I've just talked about is not feeling the need to reply to things immediately. And I'm laughing because I know that some of my clients out there might be like that's a little I under expressing what you do because sometimes you'll leave it days or weeks, but I employ somebody, the incredible Yricka to look after the inbox. So if you need me, you can email us at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com.
And she means that inbox every single day. And Yricka is the one that most likely will get back to you. And I've done that because I don't like feeling like a slave to my inbox. And so occasionally, not occasionally, obviously I look at my emails, but I'm not looking at them all day long, all evening, all weekend. I'm just not. And so one of the things though that I had to get to a point, I think that's taken me years to get to that point to be like, it's okay not to get back to people within 24 hours, I have an assistant for that. And I pay that person. And that is why they partly why they're employed by me so that I'm not having to do that. But it still has that guilt of like, this person emailed me.
And quite often it's like, this person emailed me because they have a question or they have something. And I'm like, cool, just because you have something does not need me to drop everything I'm doing to get back to you. Now, I definitely feel at the places that I worked, it was expected that every single email is replied to and replied quickly. And even if it's at 11 o'clock at night or 5:00 AM in the morning, you get back to me. I remember once having a boss who I emailed her, she'd emailed. I had emailed a whole lot of work on a Sunday. And I remember it was a public holiday on a Monday. And I was at my sister's house in the country and all my sister and my family and my kids and their kids, everyone was playing outside. It was a really beautiful afternoon.
And I was inside doing work for this company. And I emailed this person and I sort of shut my laptop. And then I got back later, of course, because God knows you can't leave it a couple of hours. And I opened the laptop and they had written a really scathing email back. And I just wrote saying, let's talk about this on Tuesday when I'm back. And then they wrote, that's a really thanks for your brevity. And then they sort of said something else that was very passive-aggressive. And I just said, and I just wrote and said, you know what? I have worked all day today. I have not been paid for this. This is a public holiday I'm missing out on valuable time with my friends and family. And I've done the work that I was asked to do. And yet you're still wanting more and more.
And partly, this was me. I had enabled this person to not have boundaries. And so all of that came with me when I started my business and I had the expectation that the client is paying. Therefore, if they say jump, I say, how, and I really had to work on that. And part of that was setting up automated systems to take care of certain things. Part of it was telling my clients, that one of my values is freedom, which is my own freedom as well. All my clients have my phone number. If something is urgent, they can call me or text me. But in most cases, they will work through my assistant, and that's taken years to get to that point. But it's something that I wish I had worked out a little sooner. And I wish I had identified that that story had come with me because of all of the places that I'd worked and in the particular roles and with the particular people that I'd worked, that, that it is not an essential part of the business that you have to have inbox zero, and that you have to be replying to every single person who has any thought and decides to email you within an hour or 24 hours.
So I would just put yourself a little bit off the hook if that is you. Number five. And again, this also goes into everything that I've been talking about, which is to set boundaries now, again, in the particular places that I worked. And I feel like it's just a given in a lot of places that boundaries are either not expected to be set, or if they are set, they're not, they're not respected. And so in particular cases, as I said before, I would have people messaging me at 5:00 AM in the morning and thinking that it was totally fine to send me a text message at 5:00 AM or occasionally I even, I remember I had one boss who said, I can see that you've read this message. Why haven't you replied? And I was like because it's not even seven o'clock in the morning and I don't start work till nine o'clock and I'm not, I've never been one of those people.
Who's like, this is not my job category. I'm not replying, but I did get to the point where I was like, you are just encroaching and encroaching. And even when I'm putting down the boundaries, you're not respecting them. However, I also have to point the blame at myself for this as well, but I've learned with clients and we've turned away work. We've turned away work that doesn't with our values, we've turned away work because somebody's email was incredibly aggressive. And we have said, I don't need that. And neither does my assistant. So I've turned back, I've turned people away because of the way that they talk to my assistant. And they think that I don't see those emails and I do because I have access to that inbox as well. And so I have set boundaries.
I've also set boundaries with the type of work that I take on I've set boundaries with the days that I work. And setting boundaries perhaps was something that I didn't know that I could do in my old life before a business. And it was something, I guess I was seeing the people ahead of me not sit within boundaries, work all weekend, get back to emails whenever, not take a break, not take a holiday. I remember once I traveled overseas for work and I was just getting all of these emails and messages at like 2:00 AM in the time zone that I was at. And I remember I reached out to one of my managers and said, Hey, I'm finding it very hard. People are sending me messages at all hours whilst they do know that I'm on the other side of the world.
And their response was to get a green juice and suck it up. And I just remember thinking, wow. And that was probably because that person was also big expected to be like that whenever they traveled. So it wasn't necessarily that person's, it wasn't just that person. It was all the people ahead of that person that that person was looking at out. And then I was looking at my manager and thinking, they don't stop. They get back to every single thing. So I need to be like that. And so I think that is really been a big part of running my own business has been to set boundaries and to say really important to me is my family. I've lost both of my parents and I have my beautiful children. And I want to not be somebody who looks back with regret about not spending time with people that I need to spend time with.
And so if that means setting boundaries really clear with my clients and with people I work with as well, then my staff and they set boundaries with me. I love Yricka. Who's my amazing assistant. She'll say I'm logging off early because this has happened. Or she doesn't apply to things on the weekend. And I love that. I love it because she is setting her boundaries with me as well. And so it's some, it's a respectful mutual relationship. And I think that is something that I've had to learn over time, but it's a story that I wish I had learned earlier, but I think it's just something that's not talked about. We don't have lunch and learn in corporates about setting boundaries. I don't know, maybe they do now, but they definitely didn't when, when I was working and number six.
So we've gone through five already. Number six was this idea. And I dunno where it came from, to be honest, was that I'm not big enough to employ somebody. So when I first started, lots of people were like, you should employ an assistant. Or I had people all the time that would say, you should just train like five people to do what you do. And then you can have an agency and you can run it. And I knew that I didn't want to do that. I never wanted to have like an office with six people in there that were all working for me. Some people do and they love it. And they're incredible at it. I didn't want to have that. And so I work best. I love working by myself. I also have managed many teams and without blowing my own trumpet too much, I've always got really good reviews.
I've always been like I've had people I've managed, who have said incredible things, and still friends with a lot of people that I've managed in my career. So I don't think I'm a crap manager. I just think that myself, I prefer having at this season in my life with two young children, at least I like having my own space and I love it. So, but I had thought, okay. If I could get to this bigger, then I'll employ somebody, if I could get to this figure, I'll employ somebody. Or I'm not big enough to employ someone. And I guess I was always thinking of employing somebody equaled a full-time employee, rather than, somebody for five hours a week or 10 hours a week or 15 hours a week. And so I wish I had learned that sooner.
I wish I'd let go of that story sooner because I could have just saved myself a lot of stress in the first couple of years of always feeling like I do every single thing myself, as opposed to outsourcing some of that stuff. And I mean, I could not live without Yricka, my assistant. She is just incredible. And there's no way that I could run my business without her. And I wish that I had let go of that idea sooner. Now Yricka is not my first assistant. I've had a number of people that I've worked with over the past couple of years, but it probably took me. I was probably three years in before I employed somebody. And I wish I had done that a lot sooner, even for three hours a week than I had, because I just had this mentality that you need to be a big company or you need to wanna be an agency or something else to employ somebody.
So that's number six. And also I should mention on 0.6 that I also took it, that when I employed somebody, it had to be in Australia and they had to be working with me in an office together. And I think again, that had come from, I don't really know where that had come from, I guess this idea that like you can work properly unless someone's right next to you physically. And so when I first started interviewing VAs, I looked in Australia and I met with a couple of people and I just didn't get a good vibe from them. And I got a vibe very much that this was a stepping stone. They didn't want to do this job, but they were doing it in between. And that's all good. But I wanted someone who really wanted to do this job and was happy to stay the long haul.
I wanted a strong relationship where I could work with somebody for years. And my first VA did work with, for years. Most of them I've worked with for at least a year, if not nine months. And I finally feel like I've found my person now. So Yricka, if you're listening and she will be, cause she does the show notes. You're amazing. And then number seven, the final one. And of course, there's been so many other stories that I've learned to kind of let go of, but number seven is this idea that you can't shift. So when in like change and grow and do something totally different. When I started working, I started as a content and editor of magazines and worked really closely with the salespeople. And prior to that, I'd worked in an ad agency in different places as well, but all of these sort of senior roles.
So let's say the last role that I was in was head of marketing. I felt very much that I had in marketing for a long time, I'd worked in content strategy and branding and it was like, and that's predominantly, still what I do now. But I think with running your own business, you can shift. If I decide that I wanna start a product-based business and e-commerce, I can do that. If I wanna totally shift or I always joke about it, I wanna become a psychologist at some point, I can do that. Maybe I'll be an organizational psychologist for businesses or something else, but I can shift and move. And I think sometimes when you are in, particularly in corporate or in a career that you've been in for a while, you can sometimes have this idea that I'm in the head of marketing, that's the same type of job that I should go for.
Even if I'm gonna quit this company, that's exactly the same role that I should look for in another company. And we don't shift and change. And I remember actually one of the last places I was employed, we had somebody shift from the design team, the product kind of design specs team through to the PR team. And I remember interviewing her because I was managing the PR team or like managing the manager of the PR team. And she was saying, I'm really scared about making this move because what if I stuff up? What if I've lost my chance of being in the design world and I was like, you haven't and you can try and shift and do different things. But I have to say that she was one of the only people that I met in the career that I had prior to starting my business, who did take that opportunity within a company to completely go to a different department.
And I think when we start our businesses, sometimes we can think, well, I've started is this, and this is what I'm gonna have to be the whole time. And when I started, I started as a consultant. I was very much thinking I'm gonna consult corporates. I'm gonna go in. It's a lot of money. It's big companies, big boardrooms, all of that. And I realized, I didn't love it. I still do it from time to time. And II choose companies that I really will enjoy. And maybe I'll go back to that in the future, who knows, but for now, I love business coaching. I love group coaching. I love making short courses for people. I love when people have gone through different courses and been like, this has totally changed my mind.
And wow, in just an hour. And my mind's blown and I've got all these different ideas. I love that. Like, I love it. But that is not to say that if I decide to do something else in the future, I won't change. And I think that's one thing that I've had to really work on is thinking because I started a business like this, this is where I need to stay. And I think it's an incredible part of the business that you can shift and pivot. And we all know that word, that change. And I think it's something that when we have careers in employed roles, it's something that we sometimes think, no, I need to stay. I need to in this title and this range and this bracket of payment and this kind of world, because that's what I've done. And I can't shift and move and change.
And my mom, I know I've talked about her many times. She did shift and change. So she was a midwife. And then a psychiatric nurse for postnatal depression. And then she moved into the social work way in her forties, she went to university, she had four teenagers as well that she was raising. Plus she was working nights as a nurse and she went back and changed. And obviously social work is not that different. You're still working, she was working in the hospital sector, but she shifted and changed and adapted. And I think she was such a great role model to see in my own life that that can be done. There is no age limit. I might start a business when I'm in my seventies doing something completely different. And that's awesome. And so there are seven of the stories that I told myself and that I've slowly let go of.
Most of them, still working on some of them. And so just to recap, number one was working to make more money. I have to work 24/7. Number two is I have to look a certain way to be successful. Number three is I can't possibly take time off. Number four is I have to reply to emails and be on call 24/7. Number five is you can't set boundaries. Number six is that you have to be big and have to employ people on a full-time basis. You can't just employ people for a few hours. And then number seven is that you can't shift change, change your career, change departments, change your pathway. You always can. If you are lucky enough to even think about starting a business, then you're lucky enough to change and grow as business changes and grows. So I hope that has been interesting.
And really helpful at the most. And I would love to know what resonates with you. I'd love to hear from you. So please don't be a stranger. You can send me a DM @mydailybusinesscoach on Instagram. You can send me an email at hello@Mydailybusinesscoach.com. That'll get through to Yricka. If you wanna send one direct, knowing that you may not get a response immediately, you can do that at fiona@mydailybusinesscoach.com, but that is it for today's 200th episode. I have loved doing this podcast. I will continue to do this podcast, and I'm so excited to see where the next hundred episodes takes us. So thank you so much for listening and also a massive thank you to Yricka and also Nezi who worked on the show notes before Yricka, my incredible assistant, and also to Scott from Sound Mind Editing who is the podcast editor of this podcast, and is always such a pleasure to work with and such a nice guy and just an all-around wonderful part of the team.
If it wasn't for them, there's no way that I could have got to 200 episodes. So massive. Thank you. And we'll link to Sound Mind Editing in the show notes. And of course, if you wanna chat to Yricka about your own business, I'm sure she'll be open to hearing from you and you can email her at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. Obviously, I am one of many clients that she works with. Thank you so much for listening. You can find the podcast show notes over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/Podcast/200 as this is episode 200. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusiness coach.
