I’m sitting down with special guest, Yara de la Torre, to discuss changes and transitions in life and business.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve done this in my career. From black box-dyed clients wanting to go platinum to fine-haired clients showing me a picture with thick hair…

Maybe you’ve taken some classes. Or you’ve downloaded the apps or the spreadsheets that have promised to make money and finances work for you and yet, they still don’t.

I’ll be honest with you, when I first started out, I thought that 6-figures was only reserved for the NYC hairstylist. Not the small-town ones like me.

And before you start making the excuse that “times are different now”, I want to recognize that that’s completely true. And that’s actually why I want you to quit social media, because times are different.

I was so nervous. I’m pretty sure my hand was shaking, with a vice grip on my “business cards”. They weren’t personalized cards or anything, just an appointment reminder card from the salon with my name penned in.

For Morgan, the biggest thing that helped her business and social media take off is when she decided that she was going to be 100% authentic online.

When she decided to stop caring about her double chin or if she made herself look like an idiot, that’s when people started watching her.

For a really long time, I struggled with being labeled “lazy” and thinking I wasn’t doing or being enough. Don’t even get me started on how I felt when social media hit the scene!

I want you to know that laziness isn’t a bad thing and in fact, it can actually be your superpower.

One of my deep-seated insecurities and fears is wanting people to like me.

I used to take it very personally when someone didn’t like their hair, didn’t like my salon, or didn’t like the way I ran my business.

When I was 21, I moved to London and got a job in a salon where I had to build a clientele. I remember during my interview process they told me to go out on the street and get a client in for a haircut. It was a little intimidating! Being in a new country and being told to go talk to strangers felt daunting.

We’re constantly being bombarded with contradicting messages from different places. We’re told to “be scared” and “do this” and we see so many people saying one thing and others doing it a completely different way.

I want to give you permission right now that the best thing you can do to prepare for a recession is not to stress out. It’s important to keep yourself calm.

There’s no denying it, making mistakes is a messy, uncomfortable experience. No one likes to make mistakes. But there’s also no one who can ever avoid making mistakes. If someone tells you they’ve never made a mistake, they’re probably lying.

Money is one of those touchy subjects that most people simply avoid talking about. More often than not we grew up in certain environments that affected our relationship with money.

We may not even be aware that we have unconscious beliefs about money. This can severely impact and affect the relationship we have with money if we leave it unchecked.

There’s no denying that confidence is important. Not only in our day-to-day lives, but also in our businesses.

While knowing that is important, actually HAVING confidence is a completely different story.

Maybe you’ve found the confidence to implement something new in your business once or twice, but you can’t seem to stick with it or stay accountable to yourself

Let’s be honest, investing in yourself is really nerve-wracking. Jodie isn’t shy to admit that she was a little anxious to invest in herself.

Before Rock Your Business, she had only invested in marketing education. She had taken a few Instagram courses, and some marketing theory classes, but had never invested in anything to help her put structure in her business.

The thing is, I didn’t really understand finances. Although I knew I was putting money aside to pay for my taxes as a self-employed business owner, I didn’t really know much about it at all.

It was just like all of a sudden I got this MASSIVE tax bill for $20,000 and I didn’t have that money.

Let’s be honest, money can sometimes feel dirty (and I don’t mean literally, although that’s definitely true…). How often have we been taught that “money is the root of all evil”?

And part of that sleazy feeling around money has to do with the fact that nobody talks about it. And when nobody talks about it, it makes us think we’re entirely alone in it.

I want you to remember that you never want to stop attracting ideal clients and that your ideal client will change as your career grows and changes too.

Your ideal client isn’t necessarily going to be the same person that it was at the very beginning of your career. This is the main reason why you need to look at your career as a cyclical process and not a linear one.

Meg believes that beauty professionals have a tendency to use their anxiety to get stuff done and view it as a “super-power” that enables them to multitask and do all the things that need to be done.

On the flip side, it can also be extremely detrimental to a business. As Meg discovered when her concept salon failed miserably.

I spent too much time in my life trying to be someone I wasn’t. Trying to “hustle” to the top, only deeming myself worthy if I was “working myself to the bone”. I was so busy and my ego loved it.

But it wasn’t sustainable. By pushing myself to the extreme I landed myself in a hospital bed with a stress-induced panic attack.

We’ve been told lies for a very long time about what it means to be successful and I’m here to tell you that none of it is true.

It’s frustrating to look back at the times I’ve fallen victim to these completely false narratives I was taught about my career.

Let’s be honest, sometimes we just wish someone else would make the decision for us, am I right? That’s why I’m bringing you this very special post all about decisiveness.

You just need to get comfortable stating the facts and practice is a great way to get there.

Remember, having a policy is not going to magically make people never late-cancel or no-show, the policy is in place to protect the revenue of your business.

Enforcing your policies is part of the process and the only way to get more comfortable is just to get started.

It will never be TOTALLY easy. I’ll admit there are still moments in my business where I get nervous, but I grow each and every time I do it.

But every time, it gets a little less scary and I get stronger and I gain tools to deal with it better each time.

We know this is a fundamental step of building a building, but why don’t we realize it about our businesses?

You’ve got the talent and skill, absolutely, but what’s holding you up when a storm comes in? Have you laid down a solid foundation that you’re building upon? Or are you trying to make a skyscraper on a bed of sand?

I just got increasingly more and more frustrated with my clients as time went on.

I started to add up the amount of money the no-shows and late-cancellations were costing me, which helped to fuel my frustration, but still didn’t motivate me to actually do anything about it.

It can be so easy to get distracted by someone else’s path to their goals. Especially with social media so readily available. And let’s be honest, it can be boring trekking down your own path so when you see someone else’s new and shiny journey, it can be easy to want to stray from your own.

We often find that ourselves and our businesses are very intertwined. It wasn’t until I started thinking of my business as a separate entity that I was able to shift my mentality. It helped to put up a barrier to not take things personally.