#054 Lessons Learned About Business in Quarantine
In this episode of Marketing in Midlife Sarah speaks about her experience of quarantining in Australia.
She shares:
– Her version of Wilson in Castaway
– A story about the neighbours and what it’s taught her about marketing
– How she created so much spaciousness from deleting apps on her phone
She also spoke a little about her women’s mentoring program that is currently open for enrolment & how you can get an incredible level of support for life* in Wholehearted Marketing.
Included are weekly coaching calls, an amazing course & a group where you can ask anything anytime. All for one low price (increasing by €500 next month).
See all the details at:
https://thesarahleather.com/wm/
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Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I’m going to be sharing with you some lessons learned in quarantine. I’m here in Australia after making the amazing journey. Last time I spoke with you I was in Melbourne in the Southeast coast of Australia and now I’m in Western Australia, about an hour and 15 minutes south of Perth. I’m in quarantine for another couple of days. All the quarantine is going to be finishing soon, but I got the tail end of it, which is an interesting thing. I’m seeing it really as quite a gift, a gift of seven days of time to myself. And there have been moments where I’ve kind of felt a little bit like Tom Hanks in Cast Away talking to Wilson the volleyball that he befriended. So, there’s an emu in the garden. I must go out and take a selfie with the emu. It’s not a real emu, the emu being a very large Australian native bird, the same kind of sizes as ostriches if you’re not familiar with EMU. And it’s made from used horses’ shoes. It is quite remarkable. And I have had many conversations with Esmerelda, her name is, or Esme for short, and I know I cannot compare myself to Tom Hanks talking to Wilson and I have the internet. I have a phone, I have electricity and running water and television and everything I could possibly need. I have a fabulous veranda and garden that I can walk around. And yes, there’s no hardship at all. I’ve got home deliveries from a local supermarket and neighbours next door who my sister told me before I came here, would happily get me anything.
But the funny thing is about the neighbours. And I’ll tell you what this has to do with business in a minute, I was told the neighbours there would very happily get me anything I need, if I need any books, any food or anything. And I have been out on the veranda quite a lot, which is right next to the neighbour’s garden and their fence, and have been sitting outside as the evenings, having my dinner. And for several days, I didn’t see any sight of the neighbours. I did see the male partner watering the garden a little bit in the distance, but I didn’t really see them to talk to. And the funny thing is that they sent my sister a message saying that if it wasn’t for them saying that the door was open, sometimes they would’ve thought I wasn’t here and that I must be some kind of a Phantom.
I think that’s really funny. Now this morning they were out in the garden. I went out and said, hello, we had a great conversation. So, they know I’m here, that I’m alive. I know that they’re there if I need anything.
So, I got thinking about this afterwards and thought like, so similar to business, under marketing, that we can be so conscious about what we are posting. We can be worried about what people think and because people really aren’t watching that much, I’ve been going out and walking around. I like to walk. I like to do around 10,000 steps a day, sometimes more, sometimes less just to keep a sort of baseline level of fitness there. So, I’ve been going out in the mornings and sometimes in the evenings, I’m walking around the veranda, walking around the perimeter fence and basically striding up and down, marching up and down, listening to a podcast or something at the same time and just basically marching around the garden. And the thought is coming to my mind more than once that people will think I’m nuts because these neighbours that I was speaking about do know that I’m in quarantine, but nobody else around here does. And there’s lots of houses around. And there’s a few times when cars have been coming and I’ve just, like sort of disappeared a bit or just walked in a direction so they can’t see me sort of pacing up and down. From this experience of the neighbours, not even seeing any sign of me, realizing that people don’t really notice that much. We can be so concerned about what other people will be thinking about our marketing, about what we’re posting, about what we’re sharing, but really, they don’t take that much notice. People aren’t watching you nearly as much as you think they are.
You need to show up quite a lot to get noticed and to be able to help people, you need to show up time and time and time again, so that they know you exist, so that they know that there’s something there. It’s not just a door open with nothing else, no other signs of life. Another really interesting thing that’s been happening is I decided to take a lot of apps off my phone. When I landed here, I thought it’s a really amazing opportunity to have some peace and quiet. So, I have to have my phone switched on with the volume up, which normally I have my phone on silent all the time. And I put it on airplane mode quite a lot. When I’m working, they can’t do that here in quarantine because I get these notifications from this app that is run by the government, the police department, that come at sort of random times. Some days it’s come once. Some days it’s come twice, one day, it came four times. It hasn’t come at all in the last 36 hours. So, when it happens, it’s like an alarm that goes off on my phone. I have to hold it up to my face. It takes a photo, and then it tracks my location to make sure I am in the place. I said I was going to be in quarantine. And so, I need to keep my phone on. I need to keep it fairly close to me. I’ve got five minutes to do this process. And then apparently if I don’t respond like I’m in the shower or something is going on, then five minutes later, another notification will come through. And if I don’t respond to that then the police may come and visit me. And I have been reminded many times that if I don’t behave myself in quarantine, then it could be a $50,000 fine, or 12 months in prison, quite a good deterrent. They have put people in prison here for not obeying the quarantine, so I’m behaving myself, keeping my phone turned on.
I decided to take loads of apps off, mostly social media apps, and I can access things on my computer if I want to, but I have really been noticing how often I go and pick up my phone to check something. And now I’m picking up my phone and there’s actually nothing to check. The only thing I’ve checked is my speedometer to see how many steps I’ve done. And I just noticed I’ve checked that several times a day. So, I’m thinking instead of checking the steps, I’ve just got to do a few more steps. And that’s been really interesting for me to notice my behaviours and my habits around just checking my phone, having a quick flick, wanting to do a quick post and instead having to actually plan it and go onto my computer and have my times when I check in with my groups or when I do some posting or when I’m doing some scroll and really being very, very conscious of that.
What I’m learning from that is how many habits I have that I was kind of a little bit unaware of and how I do not need to have all that stuff on my phone and how much more peace there is without it. And one thing I teach in signature program school is how to market outside of social media. It’s what I’ll be teaching all my clients. And there are lots of other ways, and I have people booking calls with me and I have things going on that are outside of social media. I grew my first business, my health-based fertility business to a very successful level without using social media at all. So that’s a really interesting thing too. And I’m following a few people that have moved right away from social media. So, I’m very curious about that.
I know that whatever our relationship with something is, like our relationship with social media totally comes down to our thoughts about it. And those thoughts are a choice. And I know I get to choose how I think and therefore how I feel about social media. So, I could have all the thoughts that social media is terrible, and I’m not going to use it anymore, or I could have all of the thoughts that social media is amazing, and I have quite a range of those thoughts, but at the moment, I’m just being aware of my inclination of the habit that I’ve created. And I’m also aware of how much more time I’ve got because of that because there is quite a bit of time during the day that can be used up just having a little bit of a scroll through social media. So it’s been very, very interesting.
It has helped to create what is my number one value, which is spaciousness and spaciousness is where we get to really evolve, I believe. And especially being in midlife, being a 56-year-old woman. I know I really need space in everything, space in my business, space in every area of my life, so that I can look after myself, that I can look after my clients so I can look after my family, so I can serve people, so that therefore my business serves me and that I have the relationships that I desire, which are my thoughts around those relationships. It’s been really such a gift having this time to just observe these kinds of things. And I really wanted to share those with you today. I’d love to hear your thoughts around it, your thoughts around where you could carve out some more space for yourself and your thoughts around who’s watching and who’s not watching and your thoughts around maybe having apps on your phone or not. It really is very interesting.
I have an invitation for you as well. I have opened the doors recently to my beautiful women’s mentoring program called Wholehearted Marketing. It really is an exquisite container of support for women who want to market in a wholehearted way, in a way that really suits them, in a way that serves them so they can serve more clients, so they can get fully booked in their work, and fully booked. It might be 3 people or 30 people, it may be 10 1:1 client’s, it may be eight people in a group program. It really doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you desire. And it is an amazing program where we do weekly coaching. I love, love, love the weekly coaching course, and we have a fabulous membership site with all the core replay and the actual course, the actual Wholehearted Marketing course where you learn things like visibility and sharing and connecting and showing up and all the things around marketing and sales. And we have some fabulous bonus courses in there as well, particularly course creation bootcamp, which is amazing. And we have a great Facebook group as well. You can basically come in and ask anything and get coached on anything at any time. And it is amazing. And there is lifetime access available right now, lifetime access to everything, not just to the course content, but to the weekly coaching calls, to the group, to everything. And that is quite remarkable really. By lifetime, I always put a caveat here that’s a minimum of 12 months, but it’s a lifetime of the program. It could be way, way longer. And it’s still at the special sort of launch price and the price is going to go up. It’s going to go up quite shortly by €500. So, at the moment, the price is crazily ridiculously great with a great payment plan.
I would love to invite you to join us. You can pop along to thesarahleather.com/wm, standing for Wholehearted Marketing. You can hop on in and join us. And we would love, love to welcome you. And if you want to have a quick chat with me about it, I’m more than happy to speak to you about it. There is a link on the page to book yourself a quick call with me, or if you are connected with me anywhere, just pop me a little message. And I will very happily have a little chat with you about it and see if it’s the right thing for you, where you are right now, so that it is absolutely the right thing for you. If you are just creating your business, if you’re starting one, but also if you have been in business for quite a while, quite a lot of our women in Wholehearted Marketing have been in business for many years and have varying degrees of success. Some are well on their way to have consistent sort of three to five K months. Others are having much higher monthly revenues, but it really doesn’t matter, what it is all about is just really a safe space to show up as yourself and being able to learn to really put yourself out there in a bigger way that is going to create more clients for you and create more clients and create more money. We’re doing a lot of money stuff in our Wholehearted Marketing now and in the future. We had a great money call last week, and we are going to do lots more stuff on money, because your money mindset is so important. It is your relationship with money. Your thoughts around money are incredibly important. We need to continually chip away at the thoughts, the beliefs that are not serving you.
I’m going to be talking about this on the podcast very soon about really letting go of the stuff that’s holding you down. The stuff that’s holding you back. I continually work on this stuff myself and just this morning I picked up one that I thought was dead and buried a long time ago. And I realized it was showing up in a fairly innocent way of a thought that I was having. And I explored it. I thought, wow, that’s amazing that one is still there, but it was showing up in a different way. And you know, it’s one of my superpowers that I’m onto women and their brains, where they are really holding themselves back in their business, in their mindset with their money. So, if this speaks to you, please do pop along and join us in Wholehearted Marketing. We would love to have you, and the link is in the show notes as well. So that’s what I have for you today. I’ll be back with you very, very soon and lots of love from warm sunny Western Australia. Bye for now.