You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 174.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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 Hi, My Strong Friends. 

 

Wow, it has been a wild month. 

 

As you know, I was co-creating the Coaching Posse Networking Extravaganza. Wow, it was an amazing, amazing event. And part of what made it so amazing was that I seized an opportunity. 

 

Sometimes an opportunity presents itself to you. And you know, deep down in your soul that this is something that you need to do. You may not even be prepared for it. You may not have even seen it coming. 

 

But when you see it, you know, that's my opportunity. 

 

And you have that one defining moment. 

 

Are you going to seize that opportunity? Or are you gonna let it pass you on by ?

 

I TOOK A RISK AND IT WAS WORTH IT!

 

I am so grateful that I chose to seize the opportunity. In fact, I even removed a little bit of money from my 401k so that I could fund it in advance, because there were ticket sales, but you have to pay for everything in advance. And you never know if you're going to actually break even or make a profit. Either way, you have to pay for the things.

 

I knew that this was an amazing opportunity, and I wanted to create this for everybody. I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I want to talk to you today about you seizing opportunities. 

 

Have you ever had that where, the opportunity is there? 

 

You feel it, you sense it, you see it. 

 

That opportunity is staring you right in the eye. 

 

You know that moment? 

 

The energy is super high, you know that the demand for something is there. Are you gonna take it? You know that people will invest in something when the energy is high. But if you miss that moment, the energy is gone. And people might start to forget about it. 

 

Are you willing to seize that opportunity? Or are you going to hold yourself back because you believe that you have to do it perfect? Otherwise, it's just not going to work? What if holding yourself back to create the perfect thing is the exact reason that your endeavor doesn't work? 

 

If you ever thought about that, you're trying to make it perfect, so it will work. But instead it has the opposite effect, you miss your chance, the energy has already gone. Here's the thing about energy. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, kind of like an ocean wave. 

 

SURFING THE WAVE OF OPPORTUNITY

 

I was just watching some surfers out here at the coast a couple of weeks ago. And there were over 10 of them out in the water. And every once in a while one of them would catch one of the waves. And he would just surf right on in really long, really far; he would go the distance all the way to the shore. And I was just amazed. 

 

And all of the other surfers were back waiting for the next waves. And some of those surfers waited for more than an hour before some of them just swam back to shore. And others would catch a little wave here or there. But most of them had not even tried for the wave. There was just like one person at a time who might try for a wave. Many they just watched go straight on by I think opportunity is very similar to an ocean wave. 

 

There is the right moment when you can jump on that wave, and it can take you very very far. 

 

But are you willing to jump on that wave? 

 

Because we all know that the waves could cause you to tumble; you might not actually be successful. And I saw many of those surfers where they did try and it didn't work and they would get caught up in that wave. But you know what? All of them were okay. 

 

They had already developed a way that they would handle it anytime that they did not hit that wave just right. And they got caught up and they rolled in the waves and everybody survived and everybody had a great time and they couldn't wait to try the next one. 

 

PLANNING FOR FAILURE

 

Out in business, how often are you willing to tumble in the waves so that you have that chance to actually hit that one wave at just that peak spot and go all the way, for the long distance, have that huge payoff? 

 

I know that fear is always present whenever an opportunity is presented to you. But I've also learned that if you create a failure plan ahead of time that the fear dissipates. You already know what your process is going to be for if you hit that opportunity just right. And you have your plan B process for if it doesn't work out,

 

if you plan that ahead of time, then you know that you can always roll with it no matter what. In fact, you can do more than just roll with it. You can have a great, amazing time. Would you believe me? If I told you that there was even opportunity in the tumbling? 

 

Do you ever watch America's Got Talent? I love this show. There's so much inspiration that happens on it. So a few weeks ago, there was a group of three women, I think their sisters, and their strength acrobats. Like that's the best way I could describe this. They climb on each other and do some pretty amazing, different poses and stuff. phenomenal strength. 

 

Well, they fell, oh my gosh, it was so scary, because they're way up there and everything and they tumble. And you're just devastated for them. Because here they are on this gigantic stage. It's being televised. And they fell. Like how embarrassing is that? Right? Does that stop them? Apparently not. 

 

They decided to have a plan B, What would we do if we fell? And so what their plan was, was that they would just go right back up, and restart that part of the routine. And so they did, and everybody's cheering and really happy. And then they quiet down because of course it's scary again. 

 

Well guess what happens? They fall again. 

 

Oh my gosh. It's like that collective gasp. And I think they ended up falling three times during that performance. And they're auditioning, they want to get through to the next round. I'm sure that these three wonderful women are thinking there's no possible way. Because we just failed we tumbled three times, we didn't nail our audition. 

 

But you know what happened? It was because they fell, that they got put through to the next round. They had a standing ovation from everybody, all of the judges all of the audience, people were so proud of them, that they kept going. 

 

They became this huge inspiration about what to do when you fail. That you don't quit. You don't cry and go run off the stage, you get backed up and you just keep going. And so that ended up being their opportunity. It was because they fell that they got put through. 

 

In all honesty, these women were pretty amazing. So even if they had nailed their routine, they probably would have gone through. But the fact that they fell that many times and got put through because they fell fact that's what the judges were telling them. It was because of how they handled that failure that they wanted them to go through. 

 

What if that happened for you to what if you seized an opportunity? Even though you could tumble and fall? And maybe during that opportunity, you actually do tumble and fall. 

 

And that ends up being your big break that you get to go on to the next round, whatever that may be. Because you fell down and you got back up and you kept going. 

 

PERFECTION IS NOT THE GOAL

 

We focus way too much on perfection in business. In fact, when I was working at Biotech, we started going through the lean business transformation. And in lean, we get really scrappy, we want to go fast. We want to get innovative, we want to experiment and get going. 

 

And so what that means is that instead of having these professionally polished PowerPoint presentations and rehearsed speeches, we were instead throwing butcher paper up on the wall with blue tape and sticky notes. And then we are facilitating and brainstorming and crowdsourcing together to come up with new solutions quickly. We didn't care about how fancy it looked. We were just going at the very beginning. 

 

It was hard for many of the people in the facility to get used to that. Especially the ones that had been tasked with keeping the facility pristine and very professional looking for the longest time. Now they had to deal with places all over the building covered in this butcher paper with the blue tape and the sticky notes. And they were having a hard time at first and I just wanted to hug them and let them know it's okay. It's okay. But yeah, something that used to look beautiful and pristine, now it looked super messy. We were getting the job done, and we were coming up with phenomenal results super, super fast. 

 

So sometimes doing it messy, and even opening yourself up to mistakes, like, let's say, you're putting something out on sticky notes and you realize, no, that's not going to work. You just take down the sticky notes and you put something else up. You can cross things out on posters, you can cross things out on sticky notes, it's messy, it looks like a mistake, doesn't matter. 

 

All that matters is that you did that quick change, and you were able to figure out the solution. And everybody's rolling with it. It was great. 

 

In fact, it brought up the team engagement so much more, because now you had the team there brainstorming and contributing, instead of worrying about what was coming out of their mouth, instead of what they were wearing, instead of how they were presenting things or having to spend days on a PowerPoint presentation. 

 

You had every single person contributing, engagement goes up, solutions go up, results are bigger and faster. 

 

I think my favorite part about it is that it gives everybody that permission to be human. And there's so much magic in getting to just be human with each other. 

 

That was one of those core drivers behind The Coaching Posse Networking Extravaganza, we were bringing people together for four hours to be human with each other, to create connection, to explore collaboration to get to know each other. 

 

And we had to do a lot of rolling with it. And I just want to normalize what this looks like. Because maybe to someone on the outside, they might watch and think oh, wow, they had it all together. 

 

Although there was definitely one time where they would look and go, yeah, no, they don't have that part together. 

 

But I just want to share some of the things that didn't go exactly according to plan and how we rolled with it, where the event at the end was a smashing success, and everybody was raving about it. 

 

NOTICING AND SEIZING AN OPPORTUNITY

 

First, let me back up a little bit and talk about how I saw the opportunity and how I seized that opportunity. 

 

The Life Coach School has a mastermind in person once a year, on average, sometimes it's not exactly a year. And everybody gets to come together in person. And it's a phenomenal experience. Because we spend so much time either in similar Facebook groups, or maybe occasionally connection calls. But we don't actually get to spend time with each other in person. 

 

The Coaching Posse is the unofficial Alumni Association of The Life Coach School, we've got over 3000 people in there. And we're like a family. And we want to get together and spend time with each other. 

 

So this in-person event is just a fantastic time where we get to come together. But the mastermind experience, it involves keynote speakers that are incredibly inspiring, coming up on the stage and speaking to us. So we're in the audience. And we don't want to have a whole lot of time to interact with each other. 

 

Yeah, there's a lunch break. And of course, there's the before and the after for each of the days. But there's so many people that you're not quite sure, who do you strike up a conversation with? And how do you coordinate going and doing things? And so it can wind up with a lot of missed opportunities. 

 

Now, if you've been in the community for a while, you might already know a bunch of people. And so it's really easy to start up a conversation or go have lunch or dinner together. But if you're pretty new to the community, you might not know anybody. And it's quite possible that in the hub of everything that you can go home after two or three days, only having talked with two or three people. That is not the great experience. 

 

We want people to be able to create all of these relationships with everybody, because we know that not only is it good for your social well being, but it's also fantastic for your business. Because as people are finding other people in the world that are struggling with something, now they know the right coach to refer them to. So this works out great. It was a missing piece from the mastermind. 

 

So this year,I saw the opportunity. It's like well, that piece doesn't exist. People really want that piece. So what if we create it? And so that's what we did. 

 

And since we did this all in 30 days, that meant that we were going to have to roll with quite a bit of stuff. 

 

So let's get into normalizing that. 

 

THIS IS HOW WE ROLL

 

The first thing that didn't really go great, but we rolled with it, and it ended up working out fabulously was our location. 

 

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

 

Originally, I had reserved a space in the same hotel as the mastermind. And I asked for a room for two hundred people. They came back to me a couple weeks later with the layout for room for thirty people. That didn't work, I knew that we were trying to do an event for up to two hundred people. So a room for

thirty was not going to work.

 

We did a quick search of Google Maps, trying to find what are all of the other locations around so that we could have something that fit. And luckily, we found the Lit Kitchen and Lounge. It's just gorgeous, so much fun. 

 

THE EVENT IS TOMORROW! WHERE’S THE CONTRACT?

 

Then came the next thing that we had to roll with. And that was that, although we love the location, we love the staff and everything. They were incredibly busy. And so they couldn't actually get our contract to us in time. And so it's two days before the event, and I still don't have a signed contract securing the space. I had already sold tickets to the event. 

 

Needless to say, I was a little stressed. So I had to do a lot of managing my mind and trusting that the universe was going to have my back and that everything was going to be okay. And everything did work out. I ended up finally having that the night before. Like we're talking maybe 12 hours, 16 hours before the event, did I finally have it locked in and paid for. To say I had some relief that night was an understatement. 

 

I MISSED MY FLIGHT!

 

The next thing. I missed my flight. Now, I've never missed an airplane flight in my life. And I had three different things lined up. 

 

One was going to that restaurant to meet them and actually see the place with my own eyes for the first time. I was supposed to pick up some packages from FedEx before 6pm at the hotel, and I was supposed to host a table dinner reservation. 

 

I missed my flight and I ended up getting a later flight and not getting there until well after all three of those appointments were over. Oh my gosh. 

 

So needless to say you would think that I would stress out like crazy. I did for about 10 minutes. And then I said no, no, I want to put my mental health first. 

 

I rearranged another flight. And it was actually from my favorite airport. Instead of having to drive four hours away to an airport, I could just drive two hours. I had plenty of time. I went and I washed my car. I went clothing shopping and I got a new top that I absolutely loved, and I wore twice while I was there. And I was able to arrive at the airport with plenty of time and sit down and get a lot of my work done. 

 

So all of that worked out. And because I had collaborated with such amazing people Jillene was able to go to the restaurant for me and have any of the questions that I had answered. She had our back on all of it. This is what happens when you co-create an event. She's so amazing. 

 

Then my other teammate, Donna Jennings, she went to FedEx and she picked up my packages. I didn't even ask. I didn't even know she was doing it. She just sent me a picture of her suitcase with all of my things inside. I seriously had tears in my eyes. I couldn't believe what was happening. 

 

And Jesse Parker, I just interviewed them on my podcast a few weeks ago, was one of the people that was going to be at that dinner table with me. They stepped up and said, You know what, I'll take care of this, and arranging what would happen with all of the people that were at that table. 

 

It was like this huge trust fall, that because I had collaborated with such wonderful people. They took care of everything. When I tumbled through that wave. We rolled with it and everything was great. 

 

A ROUGH START THE DAY OF

 

Let's talk about the day of what was going on there. Little did we know that two of the restaurant work staff called in sick that day. So when you have one hundred forty people showing up for food, and you're down by two employees, that could be a bit of a problem. 

 

Luckily, we greeted everybody about fifteen minutes into the event. And we informed people that we were going to roll with it that day that their comfort was more important to us. We didn't want them to rush through eating their food. And so if we needed to make adjustments to the agenda that we would, and so we did and I'll get to more of those details in a moment. 

 

One of the other things that we needed to do was cut off registration. So we had not established a specific registration date and time due date, because we were trying to fill capacity. This was our first time doing a big event like this, we hadn't really considered all of it and like the timing of it. 

 

At eight o'clock in the morning of that day, we decided, okay, we're going to close registration because there are some things that were being created for games, as well as a randomized list for calling people out for prizes. And we needed to have time to be able to finish those things before the event started. 

 

We close down registration. And almost immediately Jillene starts getting messages from people saying, Wait, I wanted to register and I didn't have a chance. 

 

If you haven't met Jillene, she's an amazing person, huge heart. So she reaches out to me, she's like, okay, I can still fit in this one person, is there anything we can do? I gave her the link to the checkout page. 

 

The sales page was all closed down, all the buttons nonfunctional saying it's full, but the checkout page is still working. It's just no one can access it unless they have that specific link. So I shared the link with her. And that person was able to register and they were so happy. 

 

Then we started getting other requests pouring in. Some of it was coming in through Facebook Messenger, sometimes it was text messages, sometimes it was people just coming up to us, both of us and asking. We're in two different places, and we don't want them to miss out on all of these great activities. But also, we don't necessarily want them to miss out on the whole event, either. 

 

We talked about it and decided that we would just present it to them that they wouldn't get a name tag, they wouldn't get to participate in one of the games, and they probably wouldn't have their name pulled in any of the prize drawings. But if they wanted in, that would be okay. 

 

And you know what? They all said yes. Here we were thinking they needed to have the full experience, you know, that whole perfect thing, we wanted them to have it perfect. And they were okay to have less because it was more important for them to be there with everybody else experiencing all of the activities. 

 

TECHNOLOGY (& AUTOMATIONS) TO THE RESCUE

 

So I positioned myself at the door as people were coming in. And if they came up and they said that they hadn't registered, and Please, could we accommodate them? I was able to have them give me their cell phone number, and I texted them the link to that registration page. 

 

They were able to register on the spot and come on in. It was amazing. So going from, I don't have a ticket, to totally registered, and going in in less than two minutes.

 

I had several people saying I love this technology, setting up all of your pieces of your sales page and checkout, and thank you and all of that. It really does pay off. It makes things so much easier. Because people kept asking, Can I Venmo you or any of that? Nope, here's the process. It works really easy. 

 

LAST MINUTES ADJUSTMENTS TO THE AGENDA

 

Okay, so now as we're having more people come in, we're supposed to start the event at 40 minutes after the hour. That's how much time we planned for the food. And then notice that there are still people standing in line for food. Well, we're not going to start activities if people haven't even had their food yet. 

 

We had already built in that we had all of these different activities that we were doing, and we were having people rotate through one of our activity stations, and then we had speed networking with multiple rounds. 

 

We had already decided ahead of time that if for some reason, timing wise that we needed to make adjustments, all we'd have to do is just drop a rotation. And so that's exactly what we did. We had the first round of all of the activity stations, we had four of them, although one was a stationary one for anyone that didn't want a structured activity. We had three other ones, we ended up doing two rotations, and that was fine. Did people miss out on one of the activities? Yes, but they had enough of a good time from the other two, that it was perfectly fine. 

 

Then we were getting ready to transition to the next set. But then we found out that the dancing that we had planned at the end of the day where we were going to have two people lead everybody through choreographed dances; that one of those people needed to go catch a flight. 

 

Okay. So, all of a sudden we had this decision to throw in a couple of dances right in the middle of the event instead of waiting until the end. 

 

NOW TECHNOLOGY LETS US DOWN

 

Now this sounds like a really great plan, except I also knew that our DJ was really, really struggling. He had just had notification at ten o'clock the night before that his services were needed. Because I had arranged to have all of these different videos displayed on the screens throughout the whole facility.

 

I had seven different files, they have a system to upload those files, and then they can program when these things would play. This wonderful gentleman shows up the DJ, and I'm trying to explain to him about the videos. 

 

Well, when he uploads all the videos, all of the file names get taken off, and it's just there showing a thumbnail of each of the videos. And it didn't load it in the correct order. So now you have seven files, you don't know what is what, in what order you're supposed to play it. And he had never had a chance to meet me to learn about the agenda, nothing. 

 

We were already rolling with it, I had already spent some time with him, trying to help him make sense out of which video to play, when what video was it, what cues to listen for. And so after we have everything else set up, that was still pretty confusing. I had to keep coming back between sessions to have him queue up the next ones. Instead of giving him the whole four hours of details it was here's what you need to do in the next half an hour. And then I'll come back at the end of that and tell you what to do for the next thirty minutes. 

 

THE WAFFLE SONG???

 

Then all of a sudden, we have dancing thrown into the mix, this poor guy's face, I just wanted to go hug him. And we didn't already let them know what the songs were. We're coming up with it right there in the moment.

 

The first song works out fine. And the crowd is having a great time with a choreographed dance. So much fun was had. Then we want the second song. And so they shout to us what the song is going to be. I'm in the DJ booth with him, and they wanted the Wobble Song. 

 

Now that's wobble with a B, what he and I both heard was waffle with an F. So we're searching trying to find a waffle song not knowing what the heck this thing is. We ended up putting on random songs that are not it.

 

Here's this group of people that just finished dancing to the Cupid Shuffle and had a great time. And now, it doesn't make any sense. Songs are being put on that are slow and it does it at all. It took about three or four rounds of trying little pieces of songs. Until we finally got the right song. 

 

I was starting to feel a little bit embarrassed, but I'm like, roll with it. If I actually get stressed out, that's not going to help anybody. I need to stay calm and so find the humor in it, know that we will eventually figure this out. We've already let everybody know we're just rollin with this today. 

 

The Wobble song, the correct one gets played and everybody has a great time. And then we're able to go back on to our regular programming. 

 

CAN YOU HEAR ME IN THE BACK?

 

One of our other biggest things that didn't quite work out great was the sound. We had microphones, but even though we were putting it right up to our mouth, because we were told to eat the microphone, people still couldn't hear us. It was pretty loud with 140 people in there. 

 

We had to figure out how we would roll with this. And so luckily, we had amazing people in our crowd that helped us. They stood up, they whistled really loud, they got the crowd's attention to get everybody quieted down, we wanted to show our appreciation. So Jillene came up with this really great idea to give them a prize. 

 

We had well over sixty thousand dollars worth of prizes that we were giving out. And it was so exciting to be able to give people all of these prizes, and especially after they had helped us out so much. Now we get to help them out too, it was amazing. 

 

But we also found that the way that we were originally pulling prizes, so we had a randomized list of people's names and we'd have someone tell us a number from the crowd and we'd call up the name. Well, because we had people that had different flight times that day. Sometimes the person wasn't there. 

 

What we found was that just getting to the announcement as to who won the prize kind of dragged out for a while. That got switched up too, we rolled with it. And at the end, Jillene was saying, Alright, who wants a prize? And then people would get super excited. We tell them what the prize was. And then the people that really, really wanted that prize, they were there with their hands up and they were so excited. 

 

It really got the whole excitement of the whole crowd to build up. And we knew for sure that the people actually wanted that prize. Because one thing we knew was that all of the businesses were at a different phase for their business. Some people were at the beginning, some in the middle, some were scaling. 

 

Some of the prizes were appropriate for certain parts of your business, but not for others. This made sure that the people that needed it, got it. So it was so, so very exciting. 

 

A FEW MORE WAYS WE ROLLED WITH IT

 

Then, the last thing that I want to mention is that we had two packages that didn't even show up on time. One was for something to go into the goodie bag. So Nikisha King, she is another business coach, she is a phenomenal, most positive person that you're going to meet. 

 

She also owns the Nikisah King Design House. She had shipped a whole bunch of custom-made thank you cards to include into the goodie bags, for all of the participants to be able to share. It was blank, thank you cards that they could then use in their business. That package didn't get delivered. 

 

And we had this great activity for a mind mapping activity for all of us to contribute to. And we had dry erase sheets that were supposed to cling to the walls, those didn't show up either. So we just had to roll with it and just use brightly colored sticky notes up against this dark wall, it actually ended up even better than what we had originally planned, just rolling with it worked for us. 

 

And we ended up having to remove the very last rotation on speed networking so that we could complete everything on time, and so we did. And it was amazing. I couldn't believe that we actually finished the whole event. And we were done by five o'clock, which was exactly when we wanted to be done. And people loved it. 

 

WITH SO MANY THINGS THAT DIDN’T GO RIGHT, WAS IT STILL A SUCCESS?

 

How many things didn't go, right? I mean, that was, what it was like at least ten things that I just mentioned. We just rolled with it. And people have been raving about how much fun they had. 

 

So I hope that you are inspired by this. That you can seize an opportunity. And you can do it. 

 

Even knowing that you might tumble, you might fall, and it's still going to be a spectacular event. 

 

You don't have to wait for perfection. Seize those opportunities. It's right there. It's waiting for you. You got to go and take it. 

 

FINDING SUPPORT FOR OPPORTUNITIES YOU WANT TO SAY YES TO

 

And I am here to support you all the way through it in the Unshakable Business Co-Lab membership. 

 

I'm there with you twice a week helping you through all of it. If you're planning something, I'm there to help you with any of that planning, help you create all of those products and services, all the sales, funnel pieces, everything. 

 

And I help you to manage your emotions. One of the things that surprised me during my event, people kept coming up saying oh, my gosh, you must be so stressed out. And yet I wasn't. I was so calm, and I was having a great time. And that's because I had reprogrammed all of my triggers along the way beforehand, so that when they happened, I already knew how I was going to think about it so that it was fun. 

 

All of that is available to you too. I'm there to support you all the time. So if you're interested in having that kind of support, I invite you to come and join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. You can go to my website myfreedomgrove.com/join. I would love to have you in there. 

 

All right, my friends. Go out, find the opportunities and seize them. 

 

I'll talk with you soon. Bye. Bye. 

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!