Look On The Bright Side
Look On The Bright Side
46: It's Time To Get Started
Today I'm telling you, it’s time to get started! In today's episode I’m going to break down for you how I apply the “learn something and then apply it” mindset to my own life.
To catch you up...
We discussed in the first episode of my Start Before You're Ready series what you should do if you have a fear of starting. Part 1 of my Start Before You're Ready framework are 5 important questions I always ask myself before I start anything. Listen to this episode where I share part 1 of my Start Before You're Ready framework - Ep 44: What To Do If You Have A Fear Of Starting?
Now once I've answered those 5 questions in part 1, my journey of getting started continues and I begin to analyze what skills I need. I then organize the resources I need to learn the skills I don't have. This is a critical step in your journey to overcoming fear. The more I know the more confident I am with making small steps towards my goal. Listen to this episode where I share part 2 of my Start Before You're Ready framework - Ep 45: How To "Just Start" When You Have A Fear Of Starting
Now that you're all caught up, today we are discussing Part 3 of my Start Before You're Ready framework: "Learn then Apply".
REFERENCES
Have A Question or Comment? Email me at podcast@jenellbstewart.com
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the general. Be sore, podcast. I am your host and I'll be Stuart and award winning business Coach, keynote speaker and content creator. The Gin L. B. Stuart podcast is designed to educate and power and engage. My goal is to have you feeling uplifted, inspired and empowered after you listen to each episode. Welcome to Episode 46. This episode is the third in my start before you're ready. Siri's where I am tackling your fears of starting in Episode 44 I outlined how to begin like just get out there and get started even when you're afraid. And I shared with you the first phase of my start before you're ready, Framework, where you will ask yourself specific questions to help you organize what it is you want to dio. And then an episode 45 we discussed how to just start even when you have that fear of starting and how you use the information from, um Episode 44 which was the first part of my framework asking yourself those questions and you then evaluate what skills you mean. And in Episode 45 is where I shared with you part two where you start to outline what resource is you will use to help get the skills you need. So that's just kind of like a recap of what we've been talking about. So this episode is the third episode in the series, and like I said today, I'm telling you it's time to get started. Okay, so if you remember from the first episode 44 just saying it again so that if you did not listen to it, you go ahead and listen to it. If you remember from that episode, I share three examples with you of me not knowing how to do something. I talked about my health. I talked about starting a boutique, and I also talked about starting my blawg. And I explained that even though I didn't know how to do these things because of the steps that I use in my framework, I don't have to struggle with with fear of the unknown or fear of failure or fear of any of any types of fears, because I just get started. So it's time to get started. If you've done the work from Episode 44 if you've done the work from episode 45. Remember, I had worksheets for each of those episodes to help you do the work on your own. If you've done that, it's time to get started. So I want to share quote with you that I heard on a podcast sometime ago. I don't even remember the the lady's name, but she said something like, Don't let the gap of where you are now and where you want to be Discourage you and I loved that because when I was listening to it for myself, I said, Wow, that's how I live. I don't look at the distance between what I am doing now and where I want to be and say, Oh, this is gonna take forever. I'm never gonna be able to make that. Um, I don't have the time. I don't I don't do those things. I don't tell myself these things. I always maintain a positive attitude, and I think about what is the next step I can take. And I have talked about this already in the last two episodes. It's not about getting to the finish line that we need to tackle, and that's why a lot of fear shows up for us. It's because we're looking at the finish line. What I'm trying to teach you to Dio is just look at the next step. Just ask yourselves thes questions. As I discussed in part one Episode 44 Just do this research now that you know what skills you need. As I said, an episode 45 which is part two and now I want you don't understand the concept of learning and then applying. You can close the gap of where you are now and where you want to be. Whatever that finish line is for you by learning something from those resource is you wrote down and then applying it versus waiting until you feel you have all of the information and then ultimately you probably won't ever do anything. And the reason for this is because waiting to get all the information is first of all, impossible. And I find it to be an excuse that people use, especially my students, especially my clients. They are using the the fact that they don't have enough information to begin as a crutch to never begin. Am I talking to you as well? Do you tell yourself you need more time because you don't have all of the details. And that's why you can't start then. I'm telling you right now, I want you to learn something and then apply it. Now, I'm gonna use those three examples that I shared with you as a recurring theme to help you understand how I actually do this. So the first example, if you remember, was my weight loss. Okay, So as it relates to the example about my weight, if you remember, I said I wanted to lose weight. My timeline was now, and the skill said that I lacked was I didn't know proper nutrition. I didn't really understand how to eat from my body and for my activity level. And I wasn't seeing results even though what I thought I was doing was accurate. So I got re sources. I talked about books. I talked about podcast videos on YouTube and so on and so forth. So using one of the channels that I fell in love with it was of Channel called Fledge Fitness on YouTube and the host. His name was Edward VII, and he talks about intermittent fasting, and he explains that intermittent fasting is not a diet plan, but instead it is a eating timeline, or you can call it an eating protocol. So if you decide to do intermittent fasting, no one tells you what you should eat. However, the time for when you should be eating is very strict. You pick a eight hour window or it can be even smaller if you want to go more stricter and you eat on Lee. During that time, when I learned this information, I applied it. I didn't wait a week to learn so much more about intermittent fasting. I didn't wait until I felt like I was ready to go on another diet. I immediately said, OK, tomorrow I'm going to eat from 11 to 7 and most days I don't eat breakfast that early anyway, I like toe workout on an empty stomach, so it worked out for me to try that. And so I did it and I immediately saw that there was a change in there was There were benefits in me doing that. First and foremost, I really wasn't able to eat as much between 11 and seven as I could have if I had eaten at 11 and then ended when I felt like it. Maybe nine, right? Also, cutting off my eating at seven meant I couldn't eat late in the evening. You know that mindless snacking when you're watching a movie or you're watching TV or you're scrolling social media and you're just popping a few cookies or crackers or chips in your mouth Or, in my case, popcorn. That was like my mid cap. I loved popcorn, so I couldn't do that. I had to actually eat my popcorn, like right after my meal if I was hungry. Additionally, I learned that even though I didn't understand everything about fasting, that by eating this way there was gonna be some type of fat burn going on. Okay, so that's a perfect example of me learning something and then applying it and not living in fear of Oh my God, it's not the right time. I don't have all the dates I have. I have a trip coming up, like whatever. I just did it. So additionally, I knew that I needed help with nutrition, and it was really important to me that I get help from someone who knew more about it. If you did not listen to my I got a weight loss coach episode. I want to encourage you to listen to that episode because I'm skipping a lot of parts right now. And the parts of skipping our how do you know? Much weight? I gained how depressed I was. I was thinking about doing some type of, like bariatric surgery. All of that. I'm skipping, okay. And I'm going into doing the research to find a health coach. Because I know that people sometimes want to work with professionals and they allow the fact that they don't know where to find them to be the reason that they don't, like, get one. Okay. And that was not going to be my reason any longer. So I decided to Google weight loss coaches and a bunch of resource is come up. A bunch of databases come up. And my first step for me was doing the research. Just clicking on a link, opening it up, seeing who the professional was that claimed to be a weight loss coach. And if you look in a database, you'll see multiple people. They have reviews. And so the database that I ended up clicking on, which was one of the first ones I clicked on. Thank God I didn't have to go through a bunch of them. It was called a thumbtack, and in thumbtack there was a bunch of professionals that were nutritionists, dieticians, weight loss coaches and all of that. And from there I just started going through the steps of becoming a member of that website, which is free, putting in my information what I'm looking for. And then it starts throwing professionals at you. It through many people at me, and I wasn't really sold on the people that it threw at me. And I think because I am a woman of color that I find myself looking toe work with people who can understand my plight and who can understand why and how I may do certain things may understand my family dynamic may understand my emotional dynamic. And so I didn't see anyone that looked like me. I decided that I was going to, um, keep looking and I actually started going on back to Google the page that I was on and looking for more things. And then I got a message from Ah, black woman and I was like, Oh, thank you, God And I immediately went through her reviews. They were all really good. I loved that. She talks about integrative health and it wasn't just about weight loss. It was about the emotional side. It was about all of the things that I felt like I needed because I knew I didn't need another diet plan. I knew I didn't need another workout routine. Now, using the second example of my boutique I shared with you that I wanted to start an online boutique and I had no information at all. I had no skill set about how to set up a website for the store. How to put the inventory on the store. I didn't even know how to get the inventory. How about that? Like I lacked all these things. How do y ship? How do I sell? I didn't have any of this information. So to pick one example from the skills that I lacked, I told you that one of the resource is that I, I found, was my business partner. What? The time was my mentee. She was my mentee. Shoot someone. I was mentoring her name's Aquila If you're a member of my school, you probably are very familiar with the quella. So Aquila had an online boutique at one point, and her business is actually called Miss Church Dress. So I didn't know how to do these things. And I was like, Hey, can we schedule a time to talk about the boutique? I really want to set up a boutique, but I don't know anything about it. And so one of the first things that Aquila told me was you can either set up a net see shop, or you can open up your own store or you can, like, use your own Blawg. So what did I do? I did the research that's taking the first step. The first up isn't launching the boutique. It's just doing the research. Remember what I said to do? Ask yourself these questions and then plug in. What were you gonna get the skills from? So I went on Google and I started looking up at sea shop like how to set up an Etsy shop. I looked up Shopify. I looked up e commerce website and a bunch of other places came up and then I looked up how to set it up on your blood. I decided that because I was very familiar with using my blog's. And I had the skill set of using my blawg that I would try to do it on my WordPress Blawg instead of doing it on a Shopify or an Etsy or some other website where I would have to learn a whole set of new skills because I could do it on my block. I figured, Why not? Right? So I figured out I would need to get a theme for my blawg that had e commerce in it. So that was one thing I learned. I did not wait to learn that I needed to do a whole bunch of other things, like Okay, once I get the theme, then what? I didn't wait to learn all of the ven Watts. I immediately said, OK, where where? Where can I get an e commerce theme? I then went on a Web site that I've used for themes in the past called Theme Forest dot net and I started filtering the themes by e commerce and I began looking through themes, and they had so many designs and That was how I took the next step. So this is another perfect example for those of you who are looking to do some type of online business. You don't have to have all of the steps in place before you begin. I still did not know how I would actually get my inventory. I also didn't know how I would get the inventory on the website. How I would handle shipments, how I would price I don't have any of those skills yet. I just knew from what I call a shared with me, you have to decide where you're gonna host your boutique. I then decided to do research, Did the research. And what did I do after I immediately decided I was going to just do it on my blawg and I started looking for themes. That is what I did. Okay, so now the third example that I've been sharing with you all was me wanting to set up a block. And this is going to be great for those of you who are currently bloggers or newbie bloggers looking to create some space online that you can call your own. Are you a newbie blogger? who has struggled to get your block off the ground. You make a couple blogged Poth, and then you lose steam or no one's reading. No one's commenting, and you have no idea how to get this thing off the grounds. Well, I know exactly how you feel. I was a newbie blogger once, and the Struggle Israel. When I was a newbie blogger, I found great support from other people in my industry. These women helped mentor me. They coached me and they supported me through the highs and the lows of blogging. And as you know, blogging is a full time career for me, and I did this after just a few years of getting my teeth in the game. So I want to work with you. I'm hosting a free training exclusively for bloggers who want to figure out How can I make this my full time gig? If this sounds like something you're interested in, check the show notes for a link to my email list. Sign up and I'll send you all the details. And don't be selfish invited friends. See you soon. All right. So remember when I wanted to start my blawg as I discussed in the previous episodes, I didn't have the information that I needed. This is the recurring fame that I'm sharing with you guys. I did not know what to do. I did not know where to go, right. I had looked up on Google how to start a blawg in most Web sites at the time, said Blogger or WordPress or tumbler. Now, Tumblr didn't feel like the kind of space that I wanted to put a block on because Tumbler, which I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. But it was very much like like a like a Facebook timeline, kind of like how Facebook is right now is very much like that, and I had been on blog's before, and that wasn't the look that I was I was trying to go for, so I was like, That's not gonna work And then I saw the word press, and then I saw the blogger the blog's spot. When I was deciding between Blog's spot and WordPress, I actually went to the blog's that I had frequented and I noticed that a lot of them were on blog's spot, which is called Blocker and I think that's what helped me make my final decision to go with blog's spot versus where it presses that a lot of the bloggers that I was reading already they were there, so that familiarity to a website with being on other people's websites made me feel like I was kind of connected to them. And if I enjoy their blog's and I like the layout of their blog's and this is what they're doing, maybe it would be a good place to start. So that was the research that I did. I just went on, Tumbler said. Not that's not for me, saw WordPress and saw blog's spot, but really didn't know much about them and then decided to use a personal opinion based on what I saw other people doing. And so I decided to set up an account and I came up with the name and I just basically looked at the themes that they had there because they had a bunch of things I didn't even know that that was already built in. And then I chose my color palette, and that was how I started my blogged. That was really it. It wasn't one of those things where I needed to wait like forever until I had all the block post ready. All the images ready? I didn't do that. I never do that. As you can see, I don't ever wait until I have everything. I just get started. You're going to learn that doing this. Learn, apply, learn, apply strategy is gonna help to move you forward because you learn something and then you apply it and then you learn something else, and then you apply it to a quick example. I didn't know how to write a block post, so I set this blogger up and it was public. It was alive, and I didn't know how to write a blob post. I didn't know anything about that, but, hey, I'm educated. I went to school. I can write, right? I've actually read a lot of blog's before, so I figured, Why not just do like a welcome post basically explaining who I am and why I started this block. I started this blood because I wanted to share my natural hair journey. I wanted to encourage, inspire and educate black women around natural here. And I wanted to have a place to chronicle my experience. So I wrote about that, and I decided to come up with new ideas overtime. So I learned more things, and then I begin applying more things. So I'm going to create a worksheet for you, where this will be like the third worksheet you have, where I basically want you to write down. What did you learn and how can you apply it? It's very simple. Whatever it is that you've decided that you're going to focus on as we go through my start before you're ready, Siri's whatever that is, I want you to just learn something and apply it. If you read something, do it. If you watch something, do it. If you listen to something, do it. Just take that next step to get started. Okay? Now, when I come back to you in the fourth episode of the series, which will be in two weeks, we're going to be talking about giving yourself grace through this process. Okay, so I am really, really looking forward to that episode coming out and just a reminder. I have show notes for this episode. You can find a link to it in the description off this episode along with a link to the worksheet that I have for you and any information that I shared, Um, that I would link Thio. Okay, so check down below to grab that. Okay, So before I leave, I want to share quote with you. And this quote is something that I tweeted on Twitter. And it says if you're passionate about something and they're someone else already doing it, this shouldn't be a deterrent. This shows there's a demand challenge yourself to make it your own. And I love that quote so much because I find that a lot of people that have fears are sometimes fearful of their idea or their concept because they think that someone else is doing it so they won't get the same shine that that other person is getting. Or people won't be interested because something out there exists. The idea of elevation and innovation stems off having an idea and then someone else coming up with a better idea of that idea, they basically upgraded or elevate it, make it different, make it unique, make it match what people want, and I think that there is something to be said about seeing someone else's idea, having an enhancement and enhancing it. So All right, ladies, I hope you have an awesome week and I will see you in the next episode. And as always, I love you for listening by.