You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 113.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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 Hi, my strong friends! Hey, do you realize that you could create your legacy? You can create a whole company with employees and everything. A company that can be around for generations to come. I know it sounds pretty big. Right? You might be just an individual thinking, oh my gosh, I just want to not have to be somebody's employee anymore. I wanna create my own business. And you're thinking well, solopreneurship that could work.

Maybe you're a coach or healer or an educator. And you're like, I just wanna create this one thing. And I don't know if people will wanna buy this from me. But here's the thing. You may start off small. You might start with just you as your only employee, but it doesn't mean that that's where it stops. Of course, it's always your choice. If you wanna be a solopreneur, you can be a solopreneur.

There are so many examples of people being able to create an income for themselves that's completely sustainable and they have a great life. And there are also examples of people out in the world that started off that way, and then they started to realize that they could use a little help because they had a lot of people interested in what it was they were offering to the world. Then they start adding in an employee here or there.

And then eventually they start paying attention to their clients and they're like, oh, they could use this other thing. So then they create a little bit more to offer in their business. And they realize that there's even more demand. And so then they have to go and hire a few more employees. After a while, it starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, how do you manage something like that without getting completely overwhelmed?

Well, that is all about metrics and metrics is just, you know, a short word for talking about all of the measuring systems that you would use so that you could measure how things in your business are going, how customers are flowing in and out, and even how your employees are performing and getting their jobs done.

Now, not everybody loves metrics. I happen to be a metrics junkie. I love metrics. I've been doing metrics for, oh my gosh, almost two decades now. As a scientist, when you're creating things in the world, you have to have metrics because you're doing all of the experiments to try to see is this the right solution or not? So, when I started off as a microbiologist and creating products, microbiology products, you have to have metrics to help, you know, did you find that right solution or not?

And then over time, as I developed into software development and then onto business coaching, in order to run these multi-billion dollar companies, you have to know if you have your right solutions and if everything is working or not. So that's where metrics come in really handy. Especially when there's so much going on, how do you know what thing you should work on? What deserves your effort and what doesn't?

Well, your metrics work is like a heat-seeking missile. That's what I always like to call it. It can pinpoint exactly what task it is that you need to work on so that you can get the results in your business that you.

Starting from Scratch

So why I decided to talk to you today about metrics is because I was so inspired by going to the Life Coach School's mastermind event in Texas a couple weeks ago. One of the most inspiring things is the award show component of this mastermind event.

Now, Brooke Castillo started this company as just a solopreneur. She was a life coach. In fact, she did this way back in the day before people were really aware of what life coaches were before it was mainstream. And I love that she shared in some of her early podcasts and early courses about how she started off as a solopreneur. She was coaching people over the phone, right? I don't even know if Zoom existed back then, I don't even think Skype existed back then. So she would share that she would be at home just in regular clothes, like jeans and a t-shirt and a baseball hat. And that cracks me up thinking about Brooke Castillo in a baseball cap.

If you've ever seen Brooke Castillo, if you've ever Googled her name out on the internet, you see that she dresses pretty classy. I mean, these are some very expensive clothing. It's high class all the way. And in fact, at the master my event, she showed up wearing this beautiful ostrich jacket. So it's like these fluffy ostrich feathers, all white and diamonds and just amazing looking. And I'm thinking she started off coaching people over the phone, wearing a baseball hat and jeans and a t-shirt. Maybe even sweats sometimes. I don't know if she talked about sweats, but, and now here she is.

She has this huge company with 100 employees and she has this mastermind event of her students that have gone through and certified as life coaches through her. We're all working on creating our own businesses, creating them into companies or growing them into companies and having our own employees. There are 1500 people in the room. That doesn't even capture everybody that has gone through and started this process with her. This is just 1500 that came to the event.

During the award show, she had 23 people come up on stage that had earned $1 million in their business within the last 12 months. That is just mind-blowing to me. These are all people that started off in some other career, and now they've taken all of that skillset that they built up from those careers, combined it with life coaching. And now they offer this as a different contribution out to the world.

All 23 of these people on this stage have created companies. They started off doing one-on-one services, and then over time they grew this up into something larger. And now they have employees. These are all people that started from scratch. Brooke started from scratch. These people started from scratch.

In addition to the 23, people at had made a million dollars in their companies. She also had 175 people come up on stage to get awards for making between $100,000 and $999,000 in their business within one year.

That's amazing.

Just, as an employee, it took years and years for me to get up to a six-figure salary. So to see 175 people up on stage that had started businesses from scratch and they were able to create that kind of revenue in their businesses. And many of them have employees. So they've created companies. We've created jobs out in the world, helping people. That's the whole purpose behind all 1500 people in this room is to help people in this world.

And not only have they helped people, but they've provided an income for themselves. They've created companies and jobs for other people. They're supporting multiple families. There's nothing but good that's happening in this room. That's why I wanted to talk with you about metrics because I work with a lot of startup entrepreneurs and metrics is not their favorite thing. Measuring stuff can be scary.

Numbers can be triggering to people. Financial numbers, business numbers, any numbers can be triggering and cause all sorts of anxiety and stress. And yet numbers really are just a neutral thing. But when we look at them, especially when we're starting up something new and we're feeling insecure, when we look at these numbers we might immediately look at it and think I'm a failure.

There were people in that room that they were even talking about how they'd look at their numbers. And maybe they had made over a hundred thousand, maybe even two or 300,000 in their business. And they still looked at their numbers and thought they were a failure. I know! How is that possible? That is an amazing amount of revenue. And yet somebody can look at that number and still think of themselves as a failure.

So if that's the case and you're a startup entrepreneur, and you're looking at your bank account and you see that your revenue isn't anywhere close to that, maybe you're still even trying to make your first thousand dollars as an entrepreneur. Having that thought I'm a failure. It's something that happens to a lot of people. It's a common thought, but it doesn't mean that it's real, right?

Would you look at the person who is looking at their number and it's 300,000 and they're having that thought I'm a failure. Would you think that that thought is real? No, of course not.

Either is looking at having less than a thousand dollars in your bank account. A number is just a number. It doesn't mean anything until we attach a thought to it and you can attach any thought that you want to. But I can promise you if you keep attaching the thought I'm a failure, you're going to become a failure. You're going to give up. You're going stop being inspired by yourself and you'll stop taking action. If you stop taking action, then of course your business isn't going to move forward.

Three Feet From Gold

These neutral numbers can be used more as your navigation system. A gentleman got up on this stage at the mastermind event and he shared an inspirational speech and it was called Three Feet from Gold. And he's talking about someone back in the gold mining ages that's there digging a hole, trying to find gold. And he gets so tired because he's been digging for so long. The hole's getting really deep and he is like this isn't worth it. This is a lot of effort. I could be doing something else and I'm not gonna find gold anyway. So he leaves.

Then somebody else comes along and they're like, Hey, here's this hole. I'm gonna keep digging because maybe I'm close to the gold. And so within three feet, that person hits gold. Well, that first-person, they had to just go on faith alone. They weren't using any kind of a measuring system to know how close they were to gold.

Now with modern-day technology, we'd actually be able to scan that and measure it and know how long it takes. Well, metrics in your business can do the same thing. There are many different metrics that you can use for all of the different parts of your business, to help you to know how close you are to the gold.

It also made me think about going and gambling in a casino. You know how there's the lot machines and you keep putting money in hoping that it's gonna spin and you're gonna hit the jackpot. And so you might start getting little payoffs here and there and you feel really good, but then you're like, oh, but it was just a little payoff. But if I put a little bit more in, then eventually I'll hit the jackpot.

And then after a while, you start to get discouraged because you're not getting any payoff or the payoff you're getting is really small. So you get up and leave.

And then the next person comes and sits down. They put in their money and boom hit the jackpot immediately.

Have you ever had that happen to you? I used to go to Reno a lot. When I was in college, it was just an hour and a half drive away. It was a fun place to go where you could just invest a little bit like in penny and nickel slots, and maybe you'd make some big money. But I actually saw this happen. In fact, I've had this happen to me. Now, it might not have been the huge jackpot, but they got the jackpot. And I didn't.

The problem is that just like with the minor digging for dirt, he had no way of measuring how close he was to the gold. With your slot machines these days, they're computerized. There are algorithms out there that know when it's gonna hit.

But as the human sitting there in front of the machine, we don't have access to see those measurements to know when you're gonna hit gold. And it's pretty frustrating.

Well, in your business, you have the option of treating your business like a slot machine, where you're just gonna put in your time and your effort, and your money. And you don't know when the payoff's gonna be. It's gonna be just a little bit here or there, or times where there's no payoff at all. You could even treat it like the gold miner is that you get really excited and you have a lot of faith and you just keep digging and digging and digging and digging and digging, until you wear yourself out and you get so defeated that you haven't hit any gold at all that you just give up.

Well, that doesn't have to be the case. You can actually use your numbers to help you figure out how close you are to hitting gold.

The one thing in common that all of those millionaires on the stage at the mastermind event had was that they all use metrics. They've all created some type of a sales funnel for their business. They have different products and services, sometimes multiple products and services within their business. They've lined it all up in their business model so that they can see the flow of how customers come in. They can even evaluate how good their product and service is. They're all using metrics.

When you can see all of the pieces and you have numbers for each of those pieces, you can see where things are working and where they're not. It's helping you to not only find the gold, but to improve the parts that aren't working.

Connecting Your Sales Funnel

Because oftentimes we'll focus so much just on the one metric, the revenue, right? Looking in the bank account and going, ah, that's not the number I want. You have so many more points in your business where you can measure how well it's doing.

If you think about a garden hose, okay, I know that we've all used garden hoses at some point in our life. We hook it up to some water faucet somewhere and we turn it on. And have you ever had that experience where no water actually came out the other end? You know that the faucets on you can hear it and yet there's no water. And then you look at your hose and it's a big jumbled up pile of a mess with all sorts of kinks in it. Well, you know that if there's a kink in the hose that the water can't flow through. Well, that's the same thing with your sales funnels in your business.

If you don't even know all of the pieces on your hose, your hose is gonna be disconnected pieces that aren't even connected to each other. There's no possible way clients can flow through it. Or if you do have things that are connected, but you have all of these kinks in it and parts where things aren't working, then of course clients can't flow through it and get into your products and services.

So just like with your garden hose, you start looking because you're dedicated to getting the water to come out your hose. You start going and making those little adjustments. And so you adjust one kink out and all of a sudden you get some water flowing through. Yay. Right? Some of the gold is there now, but maybe not all of it, you know that it could be more.

Then you go start looking and you find another kink and you unkink that part. And then all of a sudden more water is flowing through. And that's feeling pretty good. And then there's all, always those little kinks that you don't realize are kinks, but you're looking at your outflow of the water. And you're like, okay, it's definitely not coming out. And you're getting really frustrated. And you're thinking, I might just throw out this whole hose. Right? Because sometimes it's just so subtle. You don't know where to fix it, or you find that spot and you keep trying to adjust that hose. And yet it keeps collapsing on itself. And you get so frustrated and you're like, okay, that's it. I'm just gonna throw out this whole hose and I'm gonna go and get a brand new hose because then I'll have no kinks. Right?

And I've seen people do that with their businesses too. They will have spent a lot of time working on their business, figuring out all of the pieces, trying to connect it together. And then the water doesn't come out the hose. And they're like, okay, I'm just gonna scrap this whole thing and start over and build a whole new business.

Well, it could have just been that there really was one little section that wasn't working. Now, if you had metrics on your business and you learned how to feel neutral about those metrics, then you can see it as, okay. That's just letting me know what the kink is in my hose. And I'm gonna do this one experiment to see if I can get that kink out of the hose and get the water flowing. Right? Get all your clients flowing in your business.

And so you'll do one experiment. Well, if all of a sudden water's not coming out the hose still, you might get so frustrated that you're like, okay, that's it. I'm gonna scrap the whole hose. But here's the thing. You can go to the store and buy a new hose. You can build a new business all from scratch all over again, and it's still gonna have kinks. Have you ever experienced that? That you went, you bought a new hose at the store and then you hooked it up to the faucet and there are still problems with it. It's a brand new hose. Like, come on. What's the problem?

Well, that's the deal is that there's always gonna be something, but if you can learn how to manage your emotions around those numbers, those kinks in the hose and keep doing experiments. Eventually, you are going to figure out how to get that hose to work perfectly well. You'll do enough experiments. You'll finally get the right solution. It might not be what you expected it to be.

Have you ever had a hose that you had to prop up with like a little garden hose holder so that it can keep that kink from, from happening again, keeps it nice and smooth?

It's like, okay, well that's not exactly how you wanted it to be, but that's the solution that worked. And if what you're trying to do is create a business that actually works. Then you gotta be a little creative. Sometimes you gotta make those little adjustments. And then all of a sudden, everybody's flowing into your business and you're getting all of that revenue that you always hope for. And then you can even hire on more people to help you.

Using Your Mindset Model When Reviewing Metrics

That's where metrics and mindset go really well together. If you're looking at a number and it's causing you an emotional to trigger, that's where you bust out your mindset model. Remember your circumstance, your thoughts, your feelings, your action, your result.

Your circumstance is just the number. And then whatever thought that you attach to it is optional. If you want to create really good results in your business, you gotta find a thought that makes you feel very good.

A high-frequency type of a feeling that's very positive. And then it will naturally flow into actions that actually support your business. And you get the result that you want, but you have to get really creative with that thought. And it'll be really hard at first to break out of your pattern of thinking, oh, I'm a failure. The sky is falling. But the first thing to do is to at least acknowledge that you're having those thought about that number.

What are they? Write out all of those thoughts, look at them and then see which one is causing the distressing feeling. Because you wanna get rid of that one disprove that thought. There's lots of evidence to disprove it, but take the time to disprove that thought. Then think of how you really wanna feel about that number. You can feel any way that you want to.

I know that those millionaires up there on the stage were looking at those numbers with curiosity, because that's just the indicator of did they find the right solution or not? And then they'll go and they'll experiment a little bit more and they'll look at their number to see, okay, how about that solution did that one work? And the number is just letting them know. They might even be grateful that their numbers are helping them to know, are they close enough to the gold? Did they get there yet?

How many times have you experimented and tried over and no over and over again and you don't really know, is it working? Well when you have a number, a number can help you to know if the thing is working or not. If you find that final solution that you actually want.

When you see that number, you can have a thought that my metrics are so helpful. You could look at your metric and have a thought. I'm so grateful that my metric is letting me know if I'm on the right track or not. Or you can look at it and think, oh, thank goodness. I didn't wanna do that solution anyway. It was really, really hard. Now I know for my metrics, that's not the solution. And I should go for something else.

I like to use metrics in a different way. Metrics for me are inspiring. Like this is where I want to go. And how can I use that metric to uncover all of the obstacles, getting in the way of where I wanna be.

Even when I worked in corporate, I would have them intentionally set the metric higher than what they thought was ever achievable. Now it took a while to work through all of their red metric aversion because they're so conditioned to all of your metrics have to be green. Otherwise you'll get in trouble or you won't get your bonus or you know, something like that.

But once I got them to realize that, no, no, no, no. You set your metrics intentionally high, intentionally set red metrics for yourself to help you uncover all of the obstacles that are getting in the way. Because if you don't know that those obstacles are there, it could be in your processes, you don't realize that your processes aren't working. How will you ever achieve greatness?

We're setting really bold goals just so that we can find the obstacles that are getting in the way. And so once you have all of those obstacles, then you can experiment through the obstacles and try to resolve them. And then you go back and look at your metrics, like, all right, are there any other obstacles that are in the way?

So at that point, it's almost like your obstacles are helping you to find the gold, right? The obstacles can be your gold. That's what you're working through. And, in fact, a lot of times those are the lessons that you can turn around and teach other people. You can make educational products out of your ex your successful experiments.

It becomes gold in lots of ways, but it starts off by having these really bold metrics of this is what would be amazing. Help me figure out what obstacles are in the way.

Use Metrics To Evolve Into The Person You Want To Be

Metrics can also help you to become the person that you want be. All of these people that were up on this stage, whether they were the 100 K earners or the ones that had gone on to make over a million and a couple have even made over 10 million in their businesses, they've had to evolve as a person.

They're not the same people that they were when they first started out in business. So if you think about where you are, you might be having a lot of insecurities. Imagine being a person that doesn't have insecurities anymore. That might seem pretty far out there. And, you'll still have some like that was one of the eye-openers from the people on the stage. They still shared what some of their insecurities are. They're just different insecurities than what they started with. They might have started with a hundred insecurities and now they're down to just like two or three insecurities.

But in working through those insecurity obstacles, they have evolved into a different person. As you know, mental health is incredibly important to me. I actually put that as a higher metric, then all of my business revenue. Business revenue is still important. All of my business performance is super important, but my mental health, I put first.

I put that as a metric. So I'll measure how many good days, how many bad days I'm having. I might even get specific as to the number of hours or the severity of my mental health challenge. I think I've told you that sometimes when I stress out really bad, it goes straight to my stomach. I wanna live a life where I always have a calm stomach.

Now, that's an aspirational goal. I'm not there yet. But when I worked corporate, the amount of bad days, it was almost every day during the month. And the intensity was definitely a seven to a 10. And the length of the duration of those stomach problems were hours sometimes even days. And that's not what my life is like anymore. I'm evolving into a different person where number of good days is like 27 out of a month instead of zero.

And the length of any of these stomach issues is much shorter. And the intensity is a lot less. I'm evolving into a different person. There are a lot of different aspects of that. Some of it is to stop people-pleasing. Some of it is to allow others to be how they are. Some of it is around boundaries and being comfortable with boundaries and how to find my calm when somebody else is reacting from a to calm state.

All of us have those kinds of challenges. At the beginning of my journey, I was a different person. I could tell because my stomach would tell me I was a different person. All of those things that I had to evolve through, I was at the very beginning, those were some serious struggles for me. And now I'm a person that doesn't get shaken by other people. So again, your metrics, you can use those to evolve into the person that you wanna be.

It can help you to see your progress. How far have you come in doing all of that inner work on yourself so that you can be the person that you wanna be? If you do have any kind of challenges that manifest as a physical pain or a mental pain, you can measure that too, to see what your progress is. And you can set aspirational goals for yourself of living a month of all good days, imagine what that would be like?

And that helps you to uncover what are all of the obstacles? There could be a whole lot of triggers that you're having on a daily basis. What are all of those events that are causing an emotional trigger in you? And then you can work through mindset so that you can have those things not be a trigger or anymore. Sometimes it might be other things in the environment like food.

I definitely have a thing with sandwich bread, or if I eat a sandwich bread, like from a deli, it zaps my energy and it actually causes some depression feelings in me. And it's like, I have to scoop myself up off of the ground. Well, that's something that I could easily choose to remove out of my life.

As I'm evolving and becoming the person that I wanna be, I'm paying attention to all of those things. What are all of those obstacles so that I can resolve it, and be that person that I wanna be.

Using The Clarity Steps

The clarity steps helps me with all of that with my business and the person that I wanna be. It has that creating a vision of what I want my business to look like or what I want myself to look like. When I work with my clients for business, us using the clarity steps, we get very visual.

We map out those sales processes. We look at the whole business model. We look at that garden hose, so to speak and we attach different measurements to it. And when they're starting to feel triggered by the numbers, I help them with mindset models so that numbers become neutral. Or numbers might even become a good thing.

The more we're scared, the more we're gonna not look, and we're not gonna be able to hit the gold. It's so close. All of it is possible for you. If all of these other people in that room, we're able to get that far in their businesses. You can too. I know that you can. And when you use something like the clarity step system, to help you to get there and to use your metrics and to look at your obstacles and do your experiments, you're absolutely going to get there.

You, my friend, could be three feet from gold.

It might be that next turn of your slot machine that helps you to hit gold, but let's stop taking a chance on things. Stop doing everything in the dark. Let's start looking at what you actually have and measuring it and knowing what your next right move should be.

It would be my honor to help you on your journey because I know this is scary to do on your own, but when you have someone with you that is a number geek like me, that loves numbers. That's been doing this for almost two decades. Not just on myself, but with multibillion dollar corporations, I had a time or two around the block with helping people with feeling calm about numbers. And for getting excited about numbers and being able to make some really, really big moves in their business to be in business for the long haul.

If you would like some extra support, then I encourage you to reach to me, go to my website MyFreedomGrove.com, go to the work with me page. I offer one-on-one business sessions so that we can work through all of your stuff so that we can make sure that your business is gonna be around for the long haul and that you get to be the person that you want to be.

I believe in you. I know you can do this and I'm right there with you every step of the way. My friends, I hope you have a great week and I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast.  I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The Unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my freedom grove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.