94: Monday West on Moving from Chaotic to Calm in Her Small Business - Andrea Liebross
A Small Business Journey From Chaotic to Calm with Monday West

94: Monday West on Moving from Chaotic to Calm in Her Small Business

It’s Monday today! And I don’t mean the day of the week. Monday West is a mom, wife, and entrepreneur living in southern California who I’ve coached over the past year. She’s currently reorganizing her business to allow her the freedom to focus on a different aspect of it. 

In this episode, we discuss how she’s gotten a grip on herself and her business, transforming it from a chaotic organization to one that now brings her a sense of calm and ease.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 

3:51 – Does any of this describe you?

6:41 – Monday describes her small business

10:45 – How Monday found me and why she reached out for coaching

14:27 – The part about entrepreneurship that most people don’t understand

18:32 – Monday discusses the dysfunctional state of her business prior to coaching and how it’s different now

24:59 – A fear that every small business has and how I helped Monday manage it

29:41 – What future business plans does Monday have?

34:15 – Monday’s message for entrepreneurial moms and how she works without following a to-do list to the letter

38:12 – Why having a plan makes business (and life) more fun

40:05 – What Monday appreciates the most about investing in coaching for herself

Applications for Runway to Freedom for the fall 2022 cohort are due September 30th

Mentioned In A Small Business Journey From Chaotic to Calm with Monday West

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Runway to Freedom Mastermind

Green Light Chores & Allowance App for Kids

Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy:

93: Organizational Checklist to Help You Get a Grip On Your Business

Andrea Liebross: You're listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, business life coach, Andrea Liebross. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly, gain confidence, make your time productive, turn every obstacle into an opportunity, and finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's Time to Level Up. Let's do this.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Today as we lead up to the Get a Grip masterclass that starts on September 12th, if you haven't registered, then go do it. If you own a business, this is for you. Or if you rent an apartment, this is for you. The link to register is in the show notes or you can go right to your web browser at andrealiebross.com/getagrip2022.

As we lead up to that, and we lead up to the doors opening of the Runway to Freedom mastermind—again, totally for you, women-business owner, department leader—and you want to make sure that you are on the early-bird notification list so that you can get all of the early-bird bonuses, if you're not on that list, you can head over to your web browser andrealiebross.com/runway-to-freedom, or you can find the link in the show notes.

As we lead up to those two amazing offerings happening this month of September, I wanted to introduce you to Monday West. Yes, her name is Monday. She does live on the West Coast in Southern California. She is a mom, a wife, a business owner. She is amazing. She and I have worked together over the past year to literally get a grip on her business and herself along the way.

Then we work together to continue on to do somewhat of a revamp, reorg of her business so that she has some freedom in it and freedom of it, so that she can focus on what she wants to focus on, which is actually developing a different aspect of her business that can be some passive income.

She has become in the process, as her family would say, much calmer. She has gotten a lot clearer on how she wants to spend her days, whether that's working or out on her boat. She's someone who's gone through this process. If you see yourself in her at all, then this Get a Grip masterclass and Runway to Freedom mastermind are for you. If you don't see yourself in her, then I think you also are just in for a treat because she is hilarious. Sit back, buckle up, and listen to my conversation with Monday West.

Hey, one more thing before we get started, I just wanted to point out that there are a handful of things that Monday was experiencing before we started and just think about if any of these are you. I think she felt a little bit of lack of control. She didn't have control over her time, her business, or what was going on in her house. She kind of felt like things were controlling her instead of she controlling it.

I think another thing she felt was she's having issues with people, she was frustrated with some employees. She was frustrated with her partner sometimes. No one was listening, understanding, following directions, or following through on their actions. She just felt like everybody wasn't on the same page.

Another issue, profit, simply put there wasn't enough of it. I think one more thing is that she felt like how is she actually going to grow? Everything just seemed like it was a hamster wheel. No matter what she did, she couldn't seem to break through and get to that next level and felt a little bit overwhelmed and unsure.

Then I think the last piece was that nothing she tried seemed to work. She really believed that she was the one that ran the business. If she walked away from it, the whole business would collapse. I don't think that's the case anymore. As you listen, think about some of the issues you have, do you feel like you've got sometimes lack of control, people issues, or wish there was more profit, or has hit a ceiling or just, “Hey, nothing's working,” if that's you, more reason to listen.

Okay, hey, Time to Level Up listeners. Welcome back to the podcast. I already gave you a great little intro on Monday West. Yes, her name is Monday, not Tuesday or Wednesday. We've had lots of discussions about this. But tell us your story. Why are you named Monday? What is the story? You were born on Wednesday, right? Didn't you tell me that?

Monday West: The real story are the ones that I've made up over the years.

Andrea Liebross: That's Derby. Derby is going to join us on this podcast recording. We just debated if we should put Derby outside Monday's room or not. But I said this is real life and we're just going to leave Derby in there. Because I'm all about real life.

Monday West: This is part of being self employed. You have to deal with all the parts.

Andrea Liebross: Yes. Yes. Tell us about your self employment. In your own words, tell us what you're doing, who you are, how many hats you wear, prowess, all the things.

Monday West: I have a construction business, design build. We build swimming pools in Sunny, Southern California. I do all the designing and my husband does a lot of the supervision as far as building and we have a little crew and then my niece works for us. It's very much of a family-owned small business.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, she's making it sound very simple, and it's not. It's not a simple thing. There are so many pieces to it.

Monday West: It's true. Going into this, because I've been a designer for a really, really long time and became a contractor because I was so frustrated with other contractors that were building the jobs that I designed and I really thought like, “How hard can this be?” It's hard.

Andrea Liebross: What do you think makes it hard? What are three things that make it hard?

Monday West: Gosh. There are so many moving parts that you don't think about. Some of the hardest parts are also the most rewarding parts, which is interesting in a conundrum in and of itself. Customers, dealing with people and personalities is difficult but also one of my favorite parts. I am really a personable person and I take everything to heart. This is not just a job. It's like making people's lives better. That makes me happy. The difficulties that I deal with during a job are rewarding at the end when everybody's happy.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, like jumping off the diving board, or there's no diving boards in California, you told me that one.

Monday West: They can still do a cannonball.

Andrea Liebross: Okay. I think what's super interesting about this is number one, Derby is still panting. That's interesting. It's funny. Number two is that the design part is like not the hard part. Isn’t that interesting?

Monday West: For me.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, for you. But I think that's still true for a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners, the reason that they get into the business are their skill set, that's the easy part. The skill set or executing on their skill set is easy. But all the other stuff is the most rewarding. For me, the coaching, sometimes my mom will ask me, “Aren't you exhausted? Didn't you coach like 10 people today?” Yeah, but that's not really that tiring part. That's the part I love. It's all the other behind the scenes stuff that's the hard part.

Monday West: Right. The book work, the accounting, all that stuff I hate, is not fun at all, but it all has to go together.

Andrea Liebross: Right. Or else you don't have a business. I recently read, and I shared this with Monday earlier when we were talking earlier before we started recording, I recently read that just in and of itself, being an entrepreneur, you have this mindset that you should be able to figure anything out and do it all because you're inventive and creative and you are super creative in so many ways.

But that's not necessarily the case. We can't figure everything out because we're not good at everything like bookkeeping, accounting, or all of that stuff. I guess I could tell them how we started working together but you share with the audience when you originally reached out for coaching, what made you reach out? What was it? How did it happen? Because we've evolved.

Monday West: This is the absolute truth. I've been struggling for a long time with exactly what you're talking about. I know I'm super confident about the things that I'm good at. I know the things that I'm not good at. I'm very good at delegating those things and finding the people that are good at that. But there's not always money for all that.

I found myself one day just thinking, “How do I get what I want?” I literally went into Google and I Googled “How do I get what I want?” Those words, exact words. Pinterest came up and Andrea Liebross’ podcast came up. I don't even think that was a title of yours, but somehow that's what happened and I clicked on it.

I listened to the podcast about, and I don't know, you can tell me which number or tell the audience which number it is, but it was about changing your thoughts. I was like, “Oh my god, this is so logical.” I overthink everything. I always think way, way beyond what I need to think. You have taught me that most of the time, things are a lot more simple than you're making them. You have to narrow it down and take it from there because then it's just not so overwhelming.

Andrea Liebross: But I think we all experience this if we own our own businesses. It's like how do we get what we want? Because it doesn't seem like it should be this hard. If I'm so smart, why can't I figure this out? Number one. Then when you do start to try to figure it out, you find yourself, and let me include it, overcomplicating things and thinking about all of the, I like to say the tentacles of everything, and then you lose track of really what you were looking for in the beginning.

I think again, that's kind of a symptom of entrepreneurism. We've really worked on that. I mean, you even said today, you're like, “How come you're so logical but I don't find myself super logical when I'm trying to solve my own problems?” It really does help to have that other person.

Monday West: One of the things that I even wrote down when I was looking at the questions that you're going to talk to me about was that I'm a creative. My brain is in 17 different places. It's exhausting being me. I'm like a crow that sees something shiny and I have to get all over the place.

When you throw the simplest question out to me, I'm just like, “Oh my gosh, that makes so much sense.” My brain doesn't think that simply and when you ask me a simple question, it just helps me relax and it helps me focus.

Andrea Liebross: Because I think you realize that you got it. This isn't that hard.

Monday West: Yes, totally.

Andrea Liebross: Monday does have this Creative Atmospheres. Go Google it, Creative Atmospheres in Southern Sunny California if you need a pool, she's your girl. But you also have three lovely children, two dogs, one husband, what else? A boat. You have a boat, right?

Monday West: Yes, I do.

Andrea Liebross: Would it be fair to say that sometimes our conversations encompass parenting, they encompass real world things that are happening in our lives, but they also encompass business stuff? Fair? Would you say?

Monday West: 100% and that's actually the part of entrepreneurism that I think most people don't understand and that's intimidating to them because it never ends. It never ends. There’s no like you're off at five and then you become a mom. You're always a mom and you're always a business owner. You have to wear all the hats all at once. There's no different times.

Interestingly enough, the hour that you and I just had started off with you asking me something that we talked about two weeks ago that had to do with business, and then that only lasted 10 minutes and led into this whole family thing which was the same subject, we just changed the people.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah. I think that's kind of fun to think about it that way. I don't think we realize that until we start exploring that. All of these principles, things that we're learning about how to handle situations in our business, we can totally apply to our personal lives and vice versa. But we don't see it that way. It's like we've got fuzzy glasses on until someone lifts up the fuzziness, we can't see that. I find that happens a lot with my clients. It's like you're borrowing ideas from one aspect of your life into another. I find that powerful.

Monday West: It is. It actually just kind of simplifies things in my mind because there are so many moving parts. But a lot of those moving parts are doing exactly the same thing as they're doing. It helps not compartmentalize everything.

Andrea Liebross: Right. Earlier, the example we're talking about is Monday told one of her employees, “Listen, this is what I need you to do. I don't want to give you 62 million instructions around it. I want you to figure it out, and come back to me,” and he actually did and he came back and did everything she asked with shining stars and it was amazing.

Then 10 minutes later, I said to her, “How do you use that same type of tactic with your kids?” She’s like, “Really? I could just tell them what I want from them and not have to tell them exactly how to do it and they might possibly come back having done it?” She’s like, “Wow, I never thought of that.” But it's true, the same principle. You can use it both ways.

Monday West: For whatever reason, my brain doesn't think that way until you bring it up and then as soon as you bring it up, I go, “Oh my god. You're so right.” I can apply it to everything.

Andrea Liebross: I can. I like to say sometimes coaching is like just having this person help you apply different things that you already know to different parts of your life, and also with someone that can give you an outside perspective, because you're so in it. Monday is so into her Greenlight Chores app, go Google that one, we’re giving Greenlight Chores app a plug for anyone who has children. We decided to use it in a whole different way today related to her business. Now she's got her kids operating like her business, it's great.

Anyway, I digress. Give the listeners a little bit of perspective on when we started working on your business, so we did some life coaching and then we started working on your business, when we started working on your business in January, how would you describe it? What was the the state of the union of Creative Atmospheres?

Monday West: Like I said, it's a family-run business. It's relatively small. With that kind of a dynamic, we have always been able to operate unstructured I guess on the way with it, I guess. We're successful in what we do, and it's not a mess, but it doesn't feel grounded, I guess.

One of the things that we wanted to do was grow and become a little bit bigger, I don't want to be a giant company, but obviously we all want to make more money, start saving for retirement, or all those things, but I thought that in the state that we were in, that was not going to be possible because there were so many, again, back to this whole moving parts thing, there were so many moving parts.

Up to that point, there are four people in our business that are like, I would say, principle people, and that's me and my husband, my foreman and then my office manager. There's a lot of things that need to happen in this business and all four of us were kind of just doing everything, we're all like Jack of all trades.

Andrea Liebross: You’re all doing everything. Everybody had a hand on each piece.

Monday West: Yeah. Then somebody else was stepping on somebody else's toes. Sometimes things were getting done twice. Sometimes things weren't getting done at all because we're like, “Well, that guy was going to do it,” and then didn't do that. It was unorganized. We were functioning, but it wasn't running on its own.

Andrea Liebross: It didn’t feel good.

Monday West: It felt chaotic, yeah.

Andrea Liebross: Right. Sometimes we brush the stress aside like, “Well, this is how we've always done it. We're still making money. We're still serving our customers. So should I really pause and examine this or should I just keep going? Should I really take the time to look at this or should I just keep going?” I think through what we did together, I forced you take the time to look at it. That's hard to do on your own. You probably wouldn't have done it on your own. I don't do it on my own.

Monday West: Yeah, 100% I would not have.

Andrea Liebross: What's changed? What do you think's changed now that we've gone through a process? I'm going to describe the process and you tell me if I'm right. Monday and I worked together kind of intensely over a four-month period of time, and we really looked at every aspect of her business.

A lot of times I was just the question person and she would just give the answers. As she was giving the information, talking about it out loud, all of a sudden, you're like, “Well, that doesn't sound very good, or this isn't right, or I bet there's a better way to do this.” But it's not until we actually verbalize that that we noticed that. True?

Monday West: Absolutely, yeah. What you did was you broke everything down to the nth degree, which being a small business, one of the things that you feel like you never have is time and so taking the time to actually break down all the parts to every specific detail and saying who—another thing that you did was take all the people and say, “Who is capable of doing this and who's going to be best at doing this?” The people that we already have.

Then after we assigned things to all the people that we already have, there were leftover pieces. So then you said, “You need a person to handle these leftover pieces.” So we went through and then we figured out who we needed to hire for those leftover pieces. It kind of just made everything more clear and it made everything more simple even though it seems like it's more complicated because now all of a sudden, you have all these broken-down pieces, but it actually simplified things in my brain and made it easier.

Andrea Liebross: It creates a flow. Things weren't flowing before, which is I think why it felt chaotic. Now even though you may have more people involved, there's actually a process, a system, and a flow to the business. Because we broke your business down from the time someone reaches out to you and says, “I think I want to pool, but I don't know,” till the time that you know you put the last piece of sod in their backyard with a margarita. We broke it down, that whole process, and now it flows.

Monday West: Yeah, you even took it beyond that to the phone call that happens six months later saying, “How's everything going?”

Andrea Liebross: Right. Most of the small businesses, we all rely on repeat customers and referrals, so that's an important aspect.

Monday West: 90% of our business is word of mouth.

Andrea Liebross: That seems crazy. I guess that's a good point too, going through this process, it's not all about beefing up the marketing. We did talk about changing some marketing but your business is still coming word of mouth, there's more of it coming and you're able to handle it.

Monday West: Yes. Then the other thing that I want to really make a point of, and I feel like this might be a fear of every small business, is that in the beginning, and this applies to hiring you and it also applies to all the things that you and I figured out in this process, is that I'm always afraid there's not enough money. We can pay our mortgage and we live our lives, but I'm not banking all kinds of money all the time.

Being a contractor, it goes up and down and sideways, prices go up and the pandemic, I mean everything has changed. It's never consistent as far as money goes. What Andrea did was teach me that if I have to hire two more people to do X, then I need to make this much money in order to hire those people and I need to sell three pools a month in order to do that. She's like, “Can you sell three pools a month?” I'm like, “Yeah, I can.”

Andrea Liebross: Yeah. Now you're doing that. Now you're selling more than three pools a month.

Monday West: When I say that out loud, it seems logical, but somehow it's not, when you're just thinking of all these different things and you're a mom and all that.

Andrea Liebross: Because here's the thing, it's like with your business, and most businesses I work with, they're not necessarily transactional. They're more service based. You're working with your customer for a long period of time. It is not a one-hour experience. So you lose track of how you're taking in funds.

You lose track of what you really need, the cash flow in order to fund things. Until we kind of broke it down, I was like, “Well, that's three pools a month.” Because we also figured out how much it takes to run your business, how much it would take to grow the business. We did a lot of math, we did some math, and you don't love numbers as a matter of fact.

Monday West: I hate it. I’m awful at it.

Andrea Liebross: If I kind of wrote down my typical client, no one likes numbers. I love numbers now. I've learned to love numbers, but we got you to like them because now you're looking at them and you're like, “I can do that.”

Monday West: We like numbers when they're positive.

Andrea Liebross: We do. But I think that's a really good point. Things became less scary. Things became a lot less scary and a lot more X+Y=Z. That's kind of the way it goes.

Monday West: Also to that point, things have become more consistent, I guess. I can see a future. Before it was day-by-day, like, “Okay, we're going to make it through today and then we'll get tomorrow. I don't want to think about tomorrow because it might not be the same as today. So let's just stick with today and get through it.”

But now I can see what's happening down the line, plan for that, and make sure that I have enough resources to get me five years ahead, which is mind blowing. I've never thought of that in my whole life. That's almost embarrassing to say that I've never thought five years down the line, but now I do.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, and it's exciting.

Monday West: It is.

Andrea Liebross: It’s actually kind of fun.

Monday West: Well, it's fun. It's also calming. I don't know what the word is. I'm not scared of the future. I don't know if I'm scared but just stressful. The future was stressful before. I'm now like, “Okay, now I know what's going to happen.” It's like seeing into the future almost.

Andrea Liebross: Also, you're using what you want to happen in the future as a guide versus avoiding even thinking about it and living from the past. I think we do that too, like, “Well, in the past, I learned that if I can just make it month-to-month, then that's good.” You're over that thinking. Now, you're using what you want in the future to help you make decisions, which I think is a great part about that whole process. Tell us, what is in the future?

Monday West: I have a whole nother business that I'm trying to get off the ground, which is related to what I do now. But hopefully in the future it will be more like a passive income type thing. That's what I'm working on. It's very, very hopeful and at the same time, takes up tons of my time and is pretty stressful.

Andrea Liebross: But the thing about taking up tons of your time, one of the things that we're aiming for here is why don’t you tell us?

Monday West: Well, one of the things I'm aiming for is that it's passive income and so it won't be a huge amount of work once it's all going on its own. But that being said, it's probably going to take five years or something to get to that point. So what Andrea and I have been doing together is trying to make Creative Atmospheres run without me so that I can go over to this other thing.

Andrea Liebross: Did you guys all hear that? Her business run without her, imagine that. Everybody should be sitting down listening because you would have never in five million years have said that like nine months ago.

Monday West: No. Everybody knows that as an owner of a small business, you can't even get through one night's sleep without somebody…

Andrea Liebross: Talking about one night’s sleep. I mean, Monday, I'm just going to say, is an amazing mom. She may tell you otherwise depending on what the day is. We've kind of grown into all this whole mix. We all doubt our parenting abilities too.

Monday West: I always thought that I'm a way better business owner than a parent. What Andrea did was connect the dots for me and showed me that it's all connected. If I'm good at being a business owner, I'm also good at being a parent because you're just kind of managing people.

Andrea Liebross: It’s managing people. They're like your little employees.

Monday West: Which is awesome.

Andrea Liebross: They're not your little employees, but I think we beat ourselves up because we think it's one or the other. I think that's the thing. We're good at being good at one and we can't be good at the other but we figured out that you can be good at both and you are good at both. That's not you can be, but you are, you just don't see it all the time.

Monday West: Yes. The other thing that you gave me, which was like a gift, and you gave this to me on a by-monthly basis, is that “and it's okay.” Andrea taught me, and all the other people that she coaches, that you can say, “I didn't do this today, and that's okay.” Instead of me beating myself up constantly about not getting my 10-mile long list done, I'm allowed to say now, “I got the top three done and it's okay.”

Andrea Liebross: It's okay because we figured out what do we really need to get done? What do we really not need to get done? Beating ourselves up is not motivating, not motivating at all. If we think about this, your business has grown, you've hired new people, you're easily selling the number of pools you want to sell each month, you've started to expand a piece of your business to hopefully become some passive income, you're on your way out of being involved in the day-to-day of the current existing business, everybody's still alive, but your house including the dogs, you gotta raise because the boats paid off, I mean, all these amazing things have happened.

What would you tell the small-business owner female parents, what would you say to them, who's feeling like things are a little chaotic, if you were the coach?

Monday West: I would say that it's possible. I listen to podcasts a lot. I'm an info file, I'm always wanting to learn and gain information but I always thought all the people that I listened to were a bunch of liars. I heard these women and they're like, “Yes, I can be a mom and I can be a business owner and I can run two miles a day,” and I thought they were full of it but they're not. I realized that all of this is possible when you have a game plan.

Andrea Liebross: That's it. It's all possible when you have a game plan. We have a game plan. You've got a game plan. Now the plan doesn't always go exactly as planned, because we're human.

Monday West: Well, and the other thing that I was going to say, and this was another thing that I wanted to say and make sure that everybody listens to this part is I started out saying that I'm a creative and my brain is all over the place. I'm not going to lie and say that I look at this thing every single day and I wake up in the morning, stretch, and look at the list and blah-blah-blah. That's not true at all. I don't do that.

But what happens is it's almost a subliminal message that the things that you and I talk about are in my brain as things that need to happen. Everything I do in the day is focusing on the bigger picture. Rather than just willy nilly following my to-do list, all of the things that I do have a bigger function so all the little parts go and fit into the bigger parts, so I don't feel like I've wasted time doing things that were not necessary.

Again, all those things are kind of subliminal. When I get on the phone with you two weeks later, and you bring up the Vision/Traction Organizer, we start checking things off and I'm actually blown away. Like, “Oh my gosh, we did that. We did that and that and that? We did that.” It's so cool to be able to like it's a reward, to be able to see the things that you did and feel successful.

Andrea Liebross: You literally are accomplishing things and you feel successful and you are successful, and, I'm going to throw something else in, you can share it with other people and say, “See? We actually did this.” Do you remember we were crossing things off, you're like, “Wait, we both crossed off things in there. I want to show Billy.”

Monday West: Yes, instead of just deleting them because we did them, I want to see that line.

Andrea Liebross: I think really what you're saying is this like what you're doing on a daily basis aligns with bigger goals, bigger ambitions, personally and professionally. This is like who you want to be as a human, which includes who you want to be as a business owner, includes who you want to be as a parent, a spouse, a friend, an aunt, and an employer with all your guys. It all aligns and I think, too, sometimes people say, “Well, then is that going to come at the expense of having zero free time or no fun?” No, you're having fun. You're doing fun things.

Monday West: It actually makes it more acceptable when you’ve planned it out. When everything's running a little bit chaotically and you don't really know where everything's going or where anything's coming from, I have always taken vacations and been stressed the whole time. You're like, “Oh my gosh, what's going to happen when I get back? What are they doing without me?” Now, I know that everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. It's able to be running without me there and I can actually relax.

Andrea Liebross: Which is amazing. I remember two things. I remember when Sam, so Sam is her office manager, went away for like two weeks. Didn’t she go away for like two weeks or something? And you're like, “That's okay. I got it. We know everything that's going on. It's not a big deal.” That was a new feeling for you.

Then I remember another time, you messaged me and you said, “I know we're meeting tomorrow or two days from now, but we're going to Disneyland. I'm just picking it up and we're going to Disneyland.” I was like, “I'm so happy she's going,” because she feels like confident enough to just say, “I’m leaving for a day or two, and everything was going to still be okay.” That probably wasn't the case a while back.

Monday West: Right, for sure. I would double the work if anything came up like that when I got back. It made leaving or doing anything spontaneous not fun at all.

Andrea Liebross: See, and that's not how we want to live. We're too old for that. All right, so to wrap up, what do you think the best part of giving yourself this support has been? What's the best part of it?

Monday West: The best part for me is just the calm feeling I think. That’s the best word I can come up with is calm. Because I'm really good at spinning plates. I'm really good at running around. I get everything done no matter what. I'm a doer. I get it all done and I'm going to make sure everybody's happy and all the boxes are checked, but it’s not necessarily that it's never calm in my brain or my body when I act that way.

So, yes, it all gets done, but when I have a plan and something to follow, even if it's just a subliminal message that's in my head, then I can actually relax knowing that if I just get the top three done, and there are still three things left on the list, I can go to bed at night, I can sleep. I can actually say that I can do those things tomorrow or next week or not at all

Andrea Liebross: Right. Imagine that. Eliminating things. Why is that even on the list? It's so good. I think another great and humorous thing to me is that you just shared with me earlier today that one of the hidden benefits is that the spouse or partner in these situations also sees a difference in you. Would you agree with that?

Monday West: Absolutely. I would, and he's not necessarily the one that's going to come right out and say that but I can tell by his behavior and his actions, I think he feels calmer with me being more calm.

Andrea Liebross: Exactly. I was just going to make that point and then also he kind of can say, “Oh, you're going to tell me I need to change my thoughts, right?” and giggle about it versus get mad.

Monday West: It’s rubbing off on him a little bit.

Andrea Liebross: It’s rubbing off. This has been super fun. I know there are a lot of you listening out there that see yourself probably in Monday, at least in parts of it. Investing in coaching, there's no budget for it. People usually aren't like, “Oh, look,” but the rewards are, I believe and I think you've kind of share it, they're priceless, you can't put a price on it because the price, a lot of it is just how you feel internally.

Monday West: For sure. I'm not going to lie, I was super scared to spend this money. I was really nervous and worried about it. I had to talk my husband into it. But in the end, it's worth every penny because it just changes my outlook on everything and just makes me more calm.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah. That's worth a million dollars right there. All right, everybody. If you want to investigate coaching like Monday has experienced, please head over to the website and check out the Work With Me tab, and what we're really specifically talking about is the Runway to Freedom mastermind kind of coaching. That is the kind of coaching that she and I have done. I would love to have you as part of that as we move into fall. Let me know if you've got any questions. Remember, there's never a really great time. Now is the time. Now's the time for you and you're the one that's going to make it happen. All right, have a great week.

Wasn't that fun to listen to? She is a hoot. She's such a good businesswoman and a great mom and spouse. I think what really became apparent to me as I talked to her that afternoon was that my theory on how our lives are so intertwined, our personal lives and our professional lives are all wrapped up like a ball of yarn, that is so-so-so true.

She is someone who wears multiple hats, but over the past year, she's gotten clarity on what she wants wearing each of those hats to look like. She has made the time and the space to wear multiple hats well, which I think she would say she necessarily didn't feel that way when we started.

So if you saw yourself in Monday, if you kind of felt that lack of control that she did, if you felt that overwhelm, if you felt chaotic, if you can't turn your brain off just like she couldn't turn her brain off, then come join us in Get a Grip masterclass, come join us in the Runway to Freedom mastermind. Check the links out in the show notes to both of those.

Get a Grip starts next week if you're listening to this in real time. Mastermind, we've got till the end of September 2022 to register or get on the waitlist for the next one. But she lived this process and I think is so grateful for it. All right, my friends, that's all I have. Have a great week. Remember, it's your time right now to level up. No one's going to do it for you. See you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up Podcast with me, your host, Andrea Liebross. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay. Now, what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call. Right there on that call, we'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business, and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.

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I'm Andrea Liebross.

I am the big thinking expert for high-achieving women entrepreneurs. I help these bold, ambitious women make the shift from thinking small and feeling overwhelmed in business and life to getting the clarity, confidence and freedom they crave. I believe that the secret sauce to thinking big and creating big results (that you’re worthy and capable of) has just two ingredients – solid systems and the right (big) mindset. I am the author of best seller She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary and host of the Time to Level Up podcast.

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