67: What is Your Vision?

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 67.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of underearning and undersaving, sabotage the growth of your business, and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so delighted that you are here with me today. Today is a very special day. As I am recording this, my husband and I are celebrating 33 years of marriage. It is our anniversary today.

Now, if you follow my schedule of recording my podcasts and airing my podcasts, there’s usually a week between when that happens. If you are one of my diehard listeners, first of all, I thank you very, very much. You get the notification, the podcast drops, and straightaway you’re listening. Thank you, I love you.

And if you’re not a diehard listener, and you listen to it the second day, or a week or two months after it drops, I love you also. But for those of you who know my recording schedule, you might actually look at the calendar and work backwards, and note that today is February 14.

So, my husband and I actually got married on February 18. We celebrate our anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar, and today is the 23rd of the Hebrew month of Shabbat. So, that is our anniversary. And it’s just a lovely thing that it fell out today, on a day when so many people in the world are celebrating a day of love.

But anyway, this podcast will drop at the end of February. We also get to continue celebrating with each other because 33 years is a beautiful, long time. I’m going to connect our length of marriage, 33 years, together with the main topic of what we’re going to talk about today, which is, “What is Your Vision?”

But before we dive into today’s episode, I want to remind you that on March 13th, and 14th and 15th, I will be offering Money School 2.0. You want to make sure that you’re registered. It’s going to be new, upleveled, upgraded, since I ran Money School back in November. And I think you’re going to want to be there.

I imagine that you have grown your business, as I have grown mine in the last six months. And there’s always new things and new ideas and new information and new skills. I really want you to be there because we are in business to make money.

And when we really polish up and hone and refine the way we’re thinking about money, the way we process money, and our emotions in our body, and the way we manage the mechanics of money, then things can really change and take off in your business.

This year, 2023, I’m going to be talking more about leadership, and being a leader of your business. And some of my recent podcast episodes have been focusing on really how to be productive in your business and taking action and you leading yourself. We’re going to lead ourselves. We’re going to be guides for our clients. And we’re also going to be leaders and guides for our money so that we can really show up more, ask for more, receive more money. So, that we have money for our financial future.

And also, when we have more, we can be more generous and share money with the world and make a bigger impact. So, go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/newsletter Make sure that you are on my email list so that you will be the first to know when registration opens for Money School 2.0.

You will also want to know when I am opening enrollment for Wired for Wealth. That is my nine-month group coaching program. I’m going to open enrollment during Money School, and we’re going to begin Wired for Wealth, the next cohort, on May 1. So, make sure that is something on your bucket list this year. That you are all signed up to my newsletter and you will be informed and ready to join me.

So, let’s dive into today’s topic, “What is Your Vision?” I wanted to bring a bird’s-eye view of how you look at your business because we show up every day, and we do the work and we keep our heads down, we meet with clients, we do our marketing and our sales, we manage our billing, our bookkeeping, all the things in our businesses.

We’ve talked about the day-to-day in recent podcasts about being productive, and reasons why you might not be taking action. Today, I want to have a zoomed-out view of your vision for your business. And I think it’s important that we talk about this, because sometimes let’s be honest, business can be a grind.

You might wake up in the morning, and be like, “Oh, I really don’t want to go to work today. I’d really rather just go to the beach. I might just want to watch some Netflix. I’m going to read a book. I’m going to just hang out. I have a lot of things that I’m supposed to be doing, but they just don’t feel comfortable right now.”

We can do a lot of mind management, and that’s really important when you’re in business. But sometimes we also can approach our business from a different point of view. And that’s, what is the long-term vision that you have for your business?

This is where I’m going to bring in my husband and me being married for 33 years. Now, when you get married to someone, if you are married or if you have been married, it’s very beautiful and loving, and there’s so much excitement. We have dreams and plans for the future when we get married. And then reality hits; you’re tired, and you don’t feel good. And then, you might have a baby, and the baby stays up all night and cries.

All those beautiful sunlight and stars and dreamy things that you were thinking about your marriage, which are all true by the way, they just kind of come in waves between the kids and the diapers and the school and the homework and the shopping and the laundry, right?

We have to keep reminding ourselves sometimes why we decided to get married with this person in the first place. Sometimes, I will admit it, we have been married for a long time. If you’re new to my world, then you should know we have eight children and we have 14 grandchildren. Thank God, really. I’m so, so blessed. Maybe by the time you listen to this podcast, we might be up to 15 grandchildren, God willing. Everything at the right time.

There is work to be done when you are raising a large family. Even if you have one child or two children, that’s also work. And sometimes that excitement and dreaminess of your marriage and wedding and everything that you’re going to build together, you don’t remember it because you’re just in the day-to-day, keeping your head down, getting stuff done.

Your business can look and feel the same way. It’s that you’re just going through the motions, doing the same things. You’re showing up. You’re putting your offers out there. You’re telling people what you’re doing. You’re recording your podcast. You’re putting your blogs out there, showing up on LinkedIn and Instagram.

It can feel like hard work. And it can feel like sometimes it’s a drag. You don’t want to do it. You’d just rather go out to a restaurant for lunch, or breakfast with your girlfriends. And I totally get that. That is why I want to invite you to have a bigger vision for you and your business and your purpose here in the world.

I do believe that many women and some men as well, we do have a calling. We feel that there is a vision that is bigger than us. That we have work to do here in the world. And sometimes we forget. If you could write down what your manifesto is.

Because on those days when you’re not feeling like showing up to work, or even those days when you are really excited and motivated, you want to be able to look at your mission, your vision, your manifesto for your business, your north star. That’s going to keep you connected to what you are here in the world to do.

I’m going to read to you my vision; it’s on LinkedIn. I’ve been talking about this with people and connecting it. And I might even read some of the visions and missions that other people have written on the thread in my LinkedIn profile. But here’s what I wrote:

The vision for my business is to accelerate financial empowerment for women through entrepreneurship. To ensure that women who want to thrive in the world as business owners thrive, instead of just survive. And that they can create personal income that reflects and respects the impact of their service.

It took me a while to come up with this. Financial empowerment, especially for women, has always been important to me. It is the reason why I left the banking world and transitioned into financial planning. It’s the reason why I wrote my book, The $1K Investor: Simple, Smart Steps to Start Investing with $1K or Less.

And I am really a strong advocate of women who work really hard. We are taking care of families. There is still a leisure gap, even in 2023. Meaning that even in families where both the husband and the wife work outside of the home or have businesses, two thirds of the home care is still being managed and taken care of by the wife, by the woman in the in the partnership.

We do the carpools, and we do a lot of the laundry. In my house, I do the laundry, my husband does the shopping. The way it breaks down in your home might be different. But we really want to be thriving in our business, and making sure that we are making money. More than a living wage, when you look at the numbers and really break them down. And you want to be having personal income.

That’s why this is so important for me. That is really reflecting how you’re showing up in the service that you are giving to the world. And that you are earning enough. That you are putting money away for your retirement; women have longer life expectancy than men.

And because we’re the ones who birth all of the babies in the world. We’re half the population, and we birth the entire world. Many of us take time out of our careers, out of our businesses, out of our working years, and therefore we’re earning less sometimes, and we have less money to put into our retirements.

So, it’s really important that if you’re in business for yourself, and depending on how you organize your business, when you do or don’t take time off from maternity leave, it’s really important that you put money away for the future in a retirement plan. There are no guarantees of tomorrow.

God willing, we should all be healthy, we’re going to get up tomorrow, we’re going to show up in our businesses. And you’re not going to have any accidents or anything else that impact your ability to show up and earn money. But you know what? There are no guarantees, and you want to make sure that you have a nest egg, just in case you can’t work until 100.

You might want to stop at 90 or 80 or 70 or 60. If you have money set aside that’s invested, you have yourself a financial cushion. So, it’s very important to me that women take care of themselves financially. Both in the present when they’re earning money in their businesses, and that they’re using the resources to take care of their financial future.

Now, you can think about what is important to you and why you are showing up. What is the reason why you’re going to really sit down in front of your computer or in front of your mic or on your Instagrams doing reels or however you show up and share value with your people?

I’m just going to read to you a few more of the statements that people wrote on my LinkedIn feed. One person wrote that she wants to promote well-being. That well-being takes priority over workload, and that was specifically for lawyers.

A couple other people are in the financial industry. And they had versions that were something, more or less, to what I was saying. Another woman wrote that she wants to help high-achieving women feel more successful inside and not just on paper. I love the way that that came out. Because so many of us women, we look at all the externals and the trappings and how much money we’re making, to be what is saying that we’re a success.

But we want to feel that deeply in our bones and in our nervous systems. And if you are a visionary business owner, and I really do believe that you are. I believe that we entrepreneurs, we are wired differently from people that have jobs and have salaries.

Some people really want the protection that they believe a salary gives them. Now, in 2023, there have been a tremendous amount of layoffs. We’re somewhere in the middle of a recession. So, a corporate job or salary job is not as secure as people think when economies are growing.

But anyway, there are those of us who are okay taking risks. We understand that entrepreneurship comes with a lot of failures, and usually less successes and failures. But we are here for all of it. We are all in on our business, all in on our people, all in on the potential to make money

And of course, some of us just have ideas and we’re dreamers. And we could never sit in a 9-5 job. I was one of those people that could sit in a 9-5 job, and I was able to thrive in that experience. But at some point in my life, I just wanted something different, and I wanted something more.

As we’ve talked about in the past, I knew that I was under-earning in my corporate job. And some people just need to show up to work every day the way they are. Now, my work is usually, I’m not wearing shoes, right? I get to show up just as I am. I don’t have to put on airs for other people, just for my clients. I do like to look a little bit professional.

But some people will show up messy, and that’s okay for them. Some women, and I love this, I think it’s something that changed during Corona, there are women showing up on Zoom with their babies, or nursing. Some of them are even showing up in bed in the coaching world, because they are just tired, or they’re with their kids. And they can still be very, very effective, but not sitting upright in front of a computer.

That, I think, is a fabulous development for women and financial empowerment for women. It’s beautiful, in 2023, that we can create business on our terms. That we don’t have to follow anybody else’s rules. We can figure it out and do it our way.

Now, let’s go back to the 33 years that my husband and I have been married. In the beginning, we got married, and we sort of had a vision that we were going to have a family. Now, I did think after my oldest daughter was born nearly 32 years ago, I said, kind of weepy to my husband… I guess it’s that time when your hormones change in your body.

I was like, “She’s just going to grow up and get married and leave me.” And indeed, thank God, that is what she did. And now, I have three beautiful grandchildren, from her growing up, getting married, and leaving me. And guess what? She came back with her husband and with the beautiful grandchildren. That was not part of the vision that I could see for my life when my husband and I first got married.

Your vision can expand over time. The vision for your business can grow, it can pivot. My vision was once in financial planning and helping women with their investments. And then I pivoted, still financial empowerment, but I took it to entrepreneurship, where I just saw so much potential for growth and income earning for my people and for my audience.

So, you can also allow your vision, not to be a static thing. It can grow and expand. And it can weave kind of maybe like a river, it can change and be malleable over time. Whatever it is today, it doesn’t have to be your 33-year vision, or your 53-year vision. But it is something that is going to guide you when you get up in the morning.

Especially on those days where you’d just rather not show up. Or, if you had some failures, you’re feeling disappointed or discouraged. And you might call it your ‘why’, but I think it’s just more empowering for me to call it my vision.

This is what I am creating in the world. And the last point that I want to add, is that with your vision, and me with my vision, we are part of a bigger conversation. We’re not the only ones who are doing what we’re doing. There are many women and men who are talking about financial empowerment for women. I get to be one piece of that conversation. I don’t have to monopolize or be the entire conversation. But other people can do it their way, I get to do it my way.

I always believe that my clients are divinely contracted to work with me. There is some spiritual connection and contract that God has created, that is sending people to me, and I’m showing up to serve them. And even the exchange of money between me and them has been divinely ordained.

That also keeps me in my enoughness, and me in my sufficiency, that I am being taken care of. And then, the only thing, I know it sounds small “the only thing” but really, it’s a big thing. But the only thing, is I just have to show up and keep showing up in service of my people.

You and your vision, you are a piece of the global conversation that is happening in your area, in the work that you do. And I invite you to keep showing up and doing your work and serving your people and making money and having it. Receiving it, having it. Just enjoying the having of it and then investing it for your future and sharing it and making a bigger impact in the world.

All right, my friends. That is what I have for you today. I’m going to remind you again to sign up for Money School 2.0 I will let you know when registration is open. Just for today, go to my website DebbieSassen.com/newsletter Sign up and you will be the first to know. Have a beautiful day. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast, visit MasteringMoneyInMidlife.com.