Obstacles vs Opportunities

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 140.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach.

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth, using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy that you're here. I'm so happy that I'm here. I know that sounds funny, but we are going to have a fun episode today, all about opportunities and obstacles.

I'm going to share with you a short story right at the beginning, but before we get there, I want to remind you that my Money Healing course is currently on sale for $61.

I really believe that if you have a desire in your heart, G-d put those thoughts into your mind, those desires into your heart, to bring your work into the world. For you to show up boldly to sell to your ideal clients. To go and market without thinking that people are going to think that you're desperate for them to work with you.

But you're really showing up in all of your fullness. You have no icky feelings about money. You're not thinking that you're being manipulative. And you're actually receiving all the money that's possible for you, that G-d designated for you. And you're serving your people, because the money is always a reflection of the numbers of people that you're serving and the value that you're putting into the world.

And you are holding on to money. If all of the money just slips through your fingers and you're not building what I like to call a “financial freedom fund”, for the unexpected things that happen in life… If you just need a little bit of wiggle room, a little bit of freedom, and you're not saving and investing for the future, there are some glitches in your relationship with money and we want to make sure that you heal those.

My course is available now, and it is on special for $61, in honor of my 61st birthday. So, go to my website DebbieSassen.com/money-healing. Use the coupon code “61” when you buy the course and it will reduce the price for you from $197 to $61.

I really want you to heal your relationship with money because you have so much more to give the world. So, make sure you go there and find that. The course is on sale until next week, August 7th, if you're listening to this podcast in July or the beginning of August, 2024, when it's been released. If you missed it, well, the course is still available, and it is so valuable that you can still buy it at the full price of $197.

Now, let us talk about opportunities versus obstacles. It's fascinating that I really wanted to record this topic for this week. And then an obstacle, which became an opportunity, came my way just yesterday before I recorded this podcast.

We were supposed to leave to Germany. It's kind of a reunion. I probably talked about it on the podcast last week, but I kind of forgot also. But if you've been around me for a while, then you probably know that my grandfather owned a department store in a little town in Germany called Paderborn.

Because of the Nuremberg Laws, my grandfather was forced to sell his store, his department store… Pretty big department store. We're talking three floors, 10 shop front windows. We're not talking about a little, tiny 60sq.m. type of store.

But it was a very large department store, especially for the early 1900s when my grandfather… My grandfather was born in 1900 and passed away in 1993. May his memory be for a blessing. And because of the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany, my grandfather had to sell his department store for a small fraction of the value of the department store.

A couple of years ago, a bank, the Volksbank, bought up the property and they turned it into a bank; because they're a bank. There is an exhibit going on at the moment on the Jewish history of Paderborn, and my grandfather and our family are being mentioned.

By the time you listen to this podcast, I will already be back in Israel. But what happened was that there was an IT outage. I don't know if you remember, but at the end of July there was an IT outage, and a lot of air flights were canceled or they were delayed. We were one of the lucky ones in that our flights were delayed by 24 hours.

So, I had this obstacle, which was that I really wanted, we, our whole family… there are nine of us flying… we wanted to get to Germany. We wanted to spend time there a little bit ahead of our trip. We got delayed by 24 hours, and in the end we're also coming back 24 hours later. So, it worked out fine.

But it gave me an opportunity, because I had the entire day cleared off on my calendar. So, do you know what I did? I went and I got my eyebrows done, I waxed my mustache, and I went to Ikea and bought a few knickknacks for the bathroom.

These are things that I say I'm always going to get around to. “I'll get around to it. And that ‘get around to it’ never really happens. It's not like a ping-ping-ping, things that are really annoying me and in my way.

But here I was on a Monday morning with nothing on my schedule. It was such a delightful opportunity to go and take care of things and to treat myself just a little bit better ahead of seeing all my family. I know they will definitely notice that my eyebrows just look like a rock star, or something like that.

Anyway, let's get back to business and talk about your opportunities versus your obstacles. Because we all have limiting beliefs about what we think we can't do, what we think is realistic, what's possible, what's logical for business owners like us, how much we can charge, how long people will work with us.

Is it going to be a six-month contract? A three-month contract? How much are they going to pay for your website or web copy? We throw out these limiting beliefs as if they are truths in the world. And I have to tell you that most of the time they are lies that your brain is feeding you.

If you really want to make a big impact in the world, you have to be willing to explore what's happening in your brain and in your mind, and the vibrations in your body that it causes when you are telling yourself stories and limiting beliefs.

So, anytime you're feeling some resistance, if you're feeling uncomfortable, that is an opportunity. It's not an obstacle. It is an opportunity for you to explore what your brain is offering you on default.

And when you spend time journaling… And it's really important. People forget to journal. I'm one of those people, by the way, who forgets to journal…. So, hand on my heart that this is a practice that we come back to again and again and again.

Actually, some people like to journal in thought, maybe while they're walking. That's another thing that I do, by the way. G-d and I have great conversations when I'm out on a morning walk. Some people like to dance things out or meditate.

I do really, really believe that writing out your limiting beliefs gives you an opportunity to have some distance from them. You can actually become a gentle observer of what's happening in your mind. And when you're that gentle observer, you can actually question because now you've written it down on paper.

You can be like, “Oh, is that thought serving me? What if it's possible that that's not true? How do I know that it is absolutely true? What would I like to think and feel instead of whatever is written here?”

In fact, I'm going to send you back to my podcast episode on thought work and the 1% shift. I think I referenced it last week as well, if I'm not mistaken. But really being able to manage your mind and shifting your beliefs is a game changer. It will change everything in your business.

Really you changing your vibration, those vibrations in your body, the feelings that are being created every time you are thinking a limiting thought about money, about your clients, about your ability to sell, about marketing your business…

Which so many people think is icky, and they don't want people to think poorly of them because they're out there selling their business and marketing and telling people, “Hey, I'm great.” It has nothing to do with you. Really, it’s you have an amazing offer and you want to be able to help the people who are looking for you.

Your marketing is never about you. It's always about serving your clients. And so, if you're thinking, “Oh no, what are people going to think about me? They're going to think I'm all egotistical,” this is your opportunity to start changing the way you're thinking about your marketing.

And of course, your relationship with money. If you're thinking, “People like me don't make that kind of money. I was brought up on the wrong side of the tracks. My parents never taught me anything about money,” newsflash, most parents never taught their kids anything about money. Neither did our school system. So, you are right there with the rest of us who have to learn it from the bottom up.

If you have memories from your past about money and you're like, ‘no, no, no. Money makes people evil. Money ruins people,’ and you don't want anything to do with money, let me just share with you that you can do a lot of good in the world when you have more money besides taking care of yourself and your family, and taking care of yourself when you are retired and making sure that you have enough money so that you're not going to be a burden; G-d forbid to your children.

I promise you that it is so much easier to show up in your business with abundance when you're not having scarcity about every dollar, about every dime in your business. You just have more expansion and more abundance.

And you can never get poor enough. Let's say you really are rejecting and repelling money. You can never get poor enough to help the poor people. So, my really strong recommendation is for you to welcome in money, and you be one of the good ones out there, and take the money that you have and give your 10% donations… We call it ma'aser in Hebrew... your 10%, your 20%. If you have more money than you need, make more money and give more money away.

There is really nothing wrong with you earning more money. Let's talk about other opportunities that you have in your business. Let's say that you have a sales conversation with a potential client and that potential client says no, and you're feeling rejected or dejected. Or something has gone wrong in your business.

This is an opportunity for you to figure out, “Was this really my ideal client? Is there something that I said on the sales conversation that pushed her away? Maybe I judged her or I made her feel unsafe.” If you are getting no after no after no on your sales conversations, this is a beautiful opportunity for you to evaluate and figure out, “What am I saying that's not working? What am I saying that's not landing with my clients?”

If you take 100% responsibility for your sales conversations, this is an opportunity for you to figure out how you can serve your clients better. This is never an opportunity for you to say, “Okay, I'm just going to discount my prices by 50% and then everything's going to be fine,” because it's just not true. There are buyers at every price point.

So, if you have an offer, and you have fallen out of the ability to sell your offer well, or you're stepping up into the next price, or you're learning how to sell a new offer, every single no is an opportunity for you to hone your skills, refine your sales conversations, and get better for the next one.

Similarly, if you're finding that people are unsubscribing from your email list… By the way, you have an email list, don't you? If you're in business, you have to have an email list because the subscribers to your email list are the only people that you… It sounds weird… but you own them until they unsubscribe.

If you're marketing your business on social media which, by the way, I like to do… I recently recorded a podcast on different ways that you can market where you don't need social media… but even networking, the only people that you really have that beautiful connecting relationship with is through your email list.

As I like to say, relationships create revenue. And you want to have relationships with the subscribers to your email list and give them lots of valuable content like a podcast, for example… and other weekly emails that I send out to my people… that gives them valuable content.

So, if people are unsubscribing in droves, you've got to figure out why. Are they just not your people? Which is very possible. Maybe they thought you were one thing... When I was a financial planner, I sent out content about financial planning, and then, as I slowly shifted and pivoted my business to money coaching and business coaching, I lost people because the content that I was sharing was no longer relevant to them.

This is an opportunity for you to bless and release those people. Thank them for the time that they were with you and release them. Let them go out into the world. Let them go out into the universe and find the people that they need to be with to get the results that they want in their life or in their business.

It's also maybe an opportunity for you to refine your copywriting skills. What I find with some of my clients… because I do copywriting evaluations. I help my clients with their copywriting in my signature program, Wired for Wealth. I review them, I look at them, I rewrite some of them sometimes.

What I find is that the language sometimes is just very fluffy. It's vague. I'm reading it and I'm thinking, “This really doesn't talk to me. Even if I was your client, this is just saying really nothing. I want to bring the languaging down to earth.

Sometimes people talk in terms of, ‘oh, have your best life and fulfill all your desires,’ and it's just not specific enough. Then I'm like, “I don't even know what you mean.” In fact, today I was reviewing an email for one of my clients, that my client was sending out to their client, and it was very long, lots of details, and I was sensing some judgment in the email.

So, my response to my client was, “You have to keep it simple and take out all of these lines where, if I were your client, I would feel that you were judging me, my money, and my situation. It just didn't feel good as a potential reader.”

If you don't give yourself the opportunity to step back and read your own emails and ask yourself, “How would I respond to this if I was receiving this in my inbox?” … Because if your emails aren't landing with your people, you could be repelling them, and/or you could be just talking in big fluffy terms. You could be talking around in circles. And you're not connecting with your ideal client.

Again, relationships create revenue. You have to make a relationship with your person. You have to know what they want and desire, but very, very specifically, so that you can talk to them. Sometimes you talk to their pain points, or what's annoying them. And sometimes you talk to their desires. Don't always hit on those pain points and really try to rub salt into the wound, because that doesn't show your people where you're going to take them.

If you're getting unsubscribes, or people are just not opening and engaging your emails, there has to be a reason and you have an opportunity to fix your copywriting skills.

Some people will hire copywriters who will write email sequences for them, and maybe that's okay later on, in the later stages of your business. I have hired people in the past to write me email series for my launches, but I really do most of my copywriting myself because this is how I learn.

I get valuable information on what's important in my business. What do my clients want to hear? What's going to be valuable for them? I want to be the one who is thinking about my clients and talking to them through my emails, and nobody is ever going to have my voice as well as I do. This is such an important skill that you really, really do want to develop as a business owner.

Another thing is, if people aren't responding to your posts on social media, if you are one of those people who are out there on social media or maybe even networking and people are feeling they're not connecting with you, the question is: What's in your energy? Again, relationships create revenue.

Do you show up to a networking meeting, or do you show up in social media trying to create relationships? Are you posting and ghosting? Meaning, you put something up on the interwebs and then you run away, and you're not creating relationships with anybody else out there.

It's a two-way street out there. You share your valuable content, and then you go out and you talk to people live in a networking meeting, live in a coffee chat, whether it's a one-on-one in-person coffee chat or whether it's a virtual coffee chat.

Also, all the ways you talk to people, social media, whatever, are you being a relationship partner? Are you commenting on their things? Are you giving them helpful advice? Are you being a human being, or are you just being a sleazy snake oil salesperson and the only thing you're doing is selling, selling, selling and if this isn't your ideal client, then you're just out of here?

You really never know where things are going to land. So, I really encourage you to create relationships.

Don't assume ahead of time that such and such a person is not a potential client for you, or potential referral partner for you. Just be a human being. Be nice. Be helpful. And if it's not happening for you, that you aren’t creating relationships with people, you have to take responsibility, that radical responsibility, and ask yourself why.

Here's what I know from being in business for over a decade. If you look at everything that happens as an opportunity to improve, an opportunity to tweak, and not as an obstacle, you will improve your business.

That includes your time management. So, look at the ways you're spending your time in your business. Look at the people that you hire. Maybe you've made some bad hiring decisions. This is an opportunity to figure out what your business really needs and to change the way you're hiring people the next time.

You have to be willing to take a step back. Maybe you need a Monday morning, like I had today, and figure out what your business needs from you, what you need from you, and what the world needs from you. You have to look at it as an opportunity.

Don't be the person who's playing the role of a victim and be “Oh, woe is me. Things never work out for me. How come for her it's always working out, but for me it's not working out? Sob, sob, sob.” That's a person who is not playing this game of showing up and serving her people and really making a difference in the world.

So, look at your day. Look at your week. Look at your month. Go backwards. You can even now look at the first half of the year. And by the time this podcast gets released, you can look at the first seven months of the year.

What happened in your business? What opportunities are there that you've already created in your business for you to improve, for you to tweak, for you to serve better? There are always ways for you to tweak. Again, as I said in the very beginning, I really do believe that you are meant for more.

You can show up bigger. You have to be willing to be a little bit impractical, a little bit of a dreamer. And you have to be very practical, getting your head focused on what's happening in your business so that you can do the work of tweaking every step of the way, and you can serve your people better.

I'm just going to leave you with this one little phrase that I read more than a decade ago already. It was from Barbara Stanny. Now, she got married since I bought her book Secrets of Six-Figure Women. I read this for the first time in that book by Barbara Stanny Huson, “Are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose?”

People who are playing not to lose are going to keep themselves small, keep playing the role of victim. When you're playing to win, you see opportunities. You see somebody out there in the business world who can help you to scale up, collapse time, and make more money.

There are so many opportunities out there and you want to ask yourself, who do I need on my team? Who's going to help me? Because, my friend, it really does take a village to show up and serve your people. You don't have all of the skills.

Again, I'm going to just say you don't want to hire a copywriter in the beginning. You want to develop the skill of talking to your people and then maybe you'll hire a copywriter. I just did it this year for the first time.

I've never done it before, where I've hired somebody to write for me several emails. It has been a way that I was able to leverage my time, and have learned so many valuable things about writing emails, that for me it was such a great opportunity.

Yeah, the obstacle was that I had to be willing to let go of money. But when I'm willing to let go of money and invest it in my business, that is exactly how I grow. So, really be introspective and ask yourself what your business needs from you. What opportunities can you leverage so that you can keep on growing?

All right, my friends, thank you so much for being here. And if this is a topic that resonates with you, please send me an email to Debbie@debbiesassen.com and let me know which opportunities you are taking advantage of to grow and scale your business so that you can serve more people and make more money.

I'm going to remind you one last time one amazing opportunity that is available to you right now at a never-before-seen price. Do I sound like a used car dealer? Seriously, my Money Healing course is only $61. It is available at that price until August 7th, which is the third of the Hebrew month of Av.

That is my other birthday. I have two birthdays every single year. This year, the timeframe is two weeks from July 24th to August 7th. And you really have an opportunity to explore how you are showing up for money, where you need to clear limiting beliefs to dissolve resistance to making more money, and holding onto more money.

Making more money isn't enough. You have to be able to hold onto it and to invest for your future, and to gift more money to more people. So, go to my website DebbieSassen.com/money-healing, and use the coupon code “61” at checkout, to heal your relationship with money for just $61.

There are so many things that we buy in our life for $60, $70, $100, $150. You can leverage this investment to make thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in your business. It will be the gift that keeps on giving.

All right, my friends, thank you so much for tuning in, and I will see you next week. Bye, for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth.

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.