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Referenced Links:
- Go For No! (book)
- Jamberry
- Upwork
- Picture on Instagram
- Success at School vs Success in Life (video)
Tweetables:
If having your own business what you want, why the need to check in with others? #vatip 
Gotta Tweet!
If you share with the wrong person, they may project their fears on you. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
Your virtual assistant business is the key to someone out there. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
In Words:
Hi, you’re listening to episode number 64. We are on episode 64. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode.
I want to talk to you today about who you’re surrounding yourself with. Who are you listening to? Who are you sharing with regarding your business?
This is so important. I’m sure by now you’ve experienced sharing something that you want to do in your business, or even your desire to get started in your business. You may have had someone project on you their fear. Shut it down. Tell you it’s a bad idea. How can you guarantee this, or guarantee that? Or maybe you lucked out and the person was like, yeah, go for it. That’s a great idea.
My question to you – why the need to check in? If this is what you want, why the need to check in? I’m just like you. Did the same thing, and instead of the, yeah, that’s a great idea, sometimes I get strange looks, or questions like how would that work?
The first time I didn’t learn not to share everything because of just being so excited. Excited about the first client. Excited about the first paid invoice. Excited about the next opportunity. Excited about leaving my job. Then sadly coming to the place where I realized I didn’t have enough people around me who’d been where I was trying to go, and so I had to change up who I surrounded myself with.
For a long time, I thought that meant it had to be someone that I actually knew. Then I learned when they talk about see the average of the five people that you’re around and that most likely the lives are similar, you know, how much you make, what you do in life. Are you reaching your goals? Different things like that, and when I learned that it didn’t have to be actual people that I could pick up the phone and call, ooh, what a relief. It was like the limits had been taken off.
The people that you surround yourself with, that could be in books. It could be through podcast. It could be through information that you get. You could have a mentor and that person may not even know that they’re your mentor. But because of their books, because of their blog or articles or different things they write or interviews or wherever they are, you’re able to pull and draw information that you need to do what you need to do in your life.
If you are fortunate enough to have a wonderful support system around you, your top five friends are on it, they’re on top of it, then you are blessed.
Many people are not fortunate in that way. For those who aren’t, draw from other places to surround yourself with the types of people, the types of support, and the types of mentors that you need to get to where you want to go.
There’s so many people standing on the sidelines of their goals and dreams watching everyone else jump in, watching everyone else take a chance, but never taking a chance because fear has them held back, because they talked to the wrong person who projected their fears on them and now they won’t move. You have nothing to lose.
In your business, you’re not doing brain surgery. It’s not life or death. You can’t make a mistake that’s going to kill somebody. It’s not life or death. I say go for it. If just me saying go for it is not enough, know this: I have been turned down. You send proposals. I’ve been turned down on proposals. I’ve been told my rate’s too high. I turned down proposals. I’ve not always been the right person for clients, or clients weren’t always the right person for me.
But guess what? I’ve been working my VA business full-time since 2008 and I’m not looking back. That doesn’t mean that everything is always high, high, high, high, high, so wonderful. Because you know in life we need our highs as much as we need our lows, but you learn how to handle the lows just how you learn how to handle the highs.
I want to recommend a book for you, especially if you’re stuck, like you’re just afraid that it might not work. You’re afraid that you don’t have what it takes. You’re afraid someone’s going to turn you down. All of that’s going to happen. Somebody is going to turn you down. Somebody is going to say no. Somebody is going to say your rate is too high. So what. You move on.
But if you’re not in that place. You’re not quite where you could say so what, well, it would personally affect you if you had an interview with a client, they have you on the phone – and when I say interview I’m meaning they’re interviewing you; you’re interviewing them, but you would be crushed if you didn’t get it.
I want you to get the book Go For No! It’s by Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz. You know I’ll have the link for you in the show notes so you can just click it and go right to Amazon and order this book. It is a short book. Let’s see, it’s got 74 pages, and that includes, I think, the intro.
I first got this book on Kindle. What’s funny is I learned about this book years ago, but for some reason I didn’t grab it or read the whole thing. Maybe I got a sample and stopped. I don’t know what happened. You know, sometimes things come at you and it has to, you know, the right time. Anyway, I got the Kindle of this book. I got the sample, couldn’t stop reading it, and I had to purchase the Kindle version.
This is how I buy books now. I get the sample for two reasons. To see if the book is good and also, if it is good, as a reminder to myself to buy the book. I read the Kindle version. I could not put it down. I had to finish the book before I went to sleep. Then it was so good I wanted to hold the book in my hand. I wanted to have it in my hand and be able to read it in my hand, like to be able to flip the page. That’s how good this book is.
The whole name of the book: Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There.
We always talk about, well, how many projects did you get? How many clients do you have? We don’t talk about how many no’s we got. This book turns the response no on its head. I was sharing this book with my mom and she was like, man, that is, I mean, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever heard, unlike anything you’ve ever been taught about no’s.
This book teaches you how to make no the goal. Ha! What a concept. This totally changed everything. It changed me being able to talk to strangers, you know, people that I don’t know, like walk up to someone in person and ask them a question and share with them that way. It’s totally changed. Totally changed how I feel about that.
I can remember – you may have seen my pictures on Facebook with my friend Stacey and we’re going to the mall. We’re Jamberry Independent Consultants, so we’re going to the mall and talking to people about their nails and asking different questions. She has her way of asking. I have my way. We split up, but we know each other’s somewhere in the building as support.
But it was so funny to me the first time someone said no and my response was, “Thank you so much for your time.” I didn’t feel bad about no. In fact, I was excited and I put a little tick mark on my paper to represent that no’s. I didn’t have to tick the yes’s because I had their name and information. But for the no’s, I made a little tick so I could keep track, because my goal when I went out was the no’s and not the yes’s. It was all about the no’s.
As a virtual assistant, if your concern is about the client telling you no, get this book.
If you have other things that you do besides your VA business, like me, and you’re getting out from behind your computer, you do things in person, get this book. This book is for everyone. We’re all promoting something. We’re all selling something. It doesn’t matter whether it’s profit, nonprofit. Everybody should have this book in their library. Everybody.
The way it’s written, it’s written in story form, which I love. I love that it’s not like a how-to book. It’s not written like a typical non-fiction. It is written like a fiction but with the lessons of non-fiction.
The concept of how this guy came to writing this book was he came up with the idea like what if the successful version of myself met the previous version of myself. You know, because he was thinking the lesson came ten years earlier but he didn’t grasp it. It wasn’t full. He didn’t get the whole message so to speak until ten years later. So he’s thinking, well, what if I had gotten it ten years ago? In other words, you know, current self meeting the negative self. So your positive self meeting your negative self. I hope I explained that well.
But anyway, get the book. Read the book. It’s a short one. It is good. Oh my gosh, it’s good. Now I’m not hesitate to talk to people because I’ve got ‘no’ goals and I need to talk to some people to get my ‘no’ goals.
When you’re doing your proposals, if you’ve decided to make Upwork a part of your marketing plan, add some ‘no’ goals to that and you’ll keep pushing. You’ll keep pushing. Get the book to understand why. I won’t go into any more detail because I want you to get this book. It is a game changer. Oh my goodness. It’s a game changer.
The other day I was on Instagram and saw this picture. I’m going to describe the picture for you. It’s so funny how we want to give up so quickly on things. We want to give up when it doesn’t work out the way we think it should work out. That’s crazy because as kids we never did that. How many tries did it take you to learn how to ride your bike, to skate? I’m sure you got skinned knees and all kinds of stuff from trying again and again and again until you finally got it.
Now, this picture on Instagram, you see the little feet, little kid’s feet, and it looks like a parent behind the child’s feet. It says, “When a child learns to walk and falls down 50 times, he never thinks to himself ‘maybe this isn’t for me?'” Doesn’t that make you like, ah, that’s so true. It’s like why do I do that? Why do I do that? We get to one try and fail and think, oh, this isn’t for us. It didn’t work. Okay, well, how many times did you try? Oh, once. It didn’t work out. It’s crazy. It’s crazy.
I don’t want this episode to be a rah-rah thing. I’ll tell you, I’m motivated out. In other words, I don’t want to hear another motivational speech, and this book, Go for No is not about a motivational speech. It’s about helping you put things into action and understanding the responses that you get.
Be careful about who you are sharing things with. Even sharing this Go for No book, you’ve got to share it with the right people because you could share it with someone and they’re like not ready to handle it. Then you get frustrated because you just want to shake them and be like, uh, you don’t get it. Don’t you understand? Don’t you have goals in life? Don’t you want to do things?
Y’all, I get frustrated when people have all these ideas and dreams but aren’t doing anything to get towards them. It frustrates me. In my mind I’m thinking why are you even talking about this again? You haven’t taken a step. You’ve got to take a step. You’re talking about this and you have not moved. You have not taken a step forward.
If you believe what you have to offer someone is valuable to them, that it will change their life, why hold back?
Don’t you know your virtual assistant business is the key to someone out there? Someone is struggling with organization, administrative tasks. They’re struggling with social media. They’re struggling with organizing their office. They’re struggling with the tech stuff. All of that is hindering them to fulfilling their own business goals.
You have the key. I hope you’re not holding back the key from someone who needs it. Your clients need you. You are valuable to them. I could tell you all day, but you have to know for yourself. You have to know for yourself.
Race to the website and go to the show notes to get the link for the Go for No book. I’m also going to link the picture. I want you to see the picture. I read it to you and described it, but I want you to see it.
Then there’s one other thing I want to share with you – a video that I saw and it’s called Success at School vs Success in Life. It’s about three minutes once the ad finishes. But it’s describing what we learn in school versus how we come off in life. The idea is that a lot of successful people who were successful in school are struggling in life and this is why.
What I want you to see is it’s around I would say the two and a half minute mark maybe, but watch the whole thing. My point in sharing it with you is around the two and a half point mark all the way to the end, and what it suggests we do when we have to be in certain situations.
Obviously, all of us went through high school. At least at a certain point, some of you may have went to college, and you and I both know that everything that we learned there – a good majority of it we’re not necessarily using in our lives every single day. There’s no way around this. But this video is cute. It just gives an illustration of what to do with that.
It also may help you in breaking you out of doing everything so right according to someone else’s standard. Especially having your own business because now you’re in charge. You’re the leader. You’re in charge. You set the tone for your whole thing. If you’ve never had to do that, you’ve never had to make decisions, that may be holding you back as well in addition to the fear of somebody turning you down.
I’m going to link up to that video to show you that and really encourage you to continue to go for what you’re doing in your business right now.
If you’re just getting started, take a leap. Take a leap. Take a leap. If you’re an experienced VA business owner and maybe you’re experiencing a shift, maybe it’s time to refine your skills – not your skills, but your services. Maybe you’re at the point where you’re trying to refine those services. You may be nervous about that. You may be hesitant. It may time for you to increase your rates and you’re nervous about that. Don’t be nervous about it. You know the value that you bring to your customers.
Remember, you are the key for someone. If it’s one, then there’s more than one out there that needs you. You are the key for someone.
Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what you heard, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Tell me what’s going on with you. Come on over the Facebook page: facebook.com/tiffanyparsonbiz, or if you prefer a little shorter message, come on over to Twitter: @tiffanydparson.
See you next time!
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