Gold Nuggets
- “You don’t have to be a millionaire to be wealthy.” Entrepreneurs need to find the balance between income and impact.
- “Learn and help learn.”
Rebecca went through the learning process herself, learnt from it, and experienced it, and she is now helping others go through that transformation as well. - Many entrepreneurs are in a fixed mindset where they compare themselves to others, are afraid of losing money and customers, and give themselves labels.
“You know you’ve made serious growth when you’re able to teach people what you have done, and use your story as a launchpad.” - “I look at success not as the size of my bank account, or how many clients I have. Success is: did I make a contribution today?”
- Rebecca shares a valuable lesson with entrepreneurs about consistency and how the compound effect of that effort will guarantee results.
- Many entrepreneurs have misconceptions about hiring business coaches, and have the mindset that they need to work harder for longer hours to get where they want to go.
“The most successful people know how to do one thing exceptionally well: they ask.” - “If your belief system is counter to what you’re trying to achieve, you cannot move ahead.”
“Beliefs are thoughts thought often enough.” If we become used to thinking negatively about ourselves, we create habits that reinforce the feeling of failure. - The one message that cannot be said enough is “you’re enough.”
- “There’s no such thing as an entrepreneurial deficiency. There is only entrepreneurial learning and training that needs to happen, and it cannot be done alone.”
- “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” – Wayne Dyer
Meet Rebecca Mountain
Our guest is Rebecca Mountain, digital marketing consultant, certified high performance coach, and best-selling author of Think Again. Rebecca’s goal is to help as many people as possible live happier, wealthier, and more fulfilled lives.
Smart Man, Smarter Woman References
We talk about a lot in each episode; however, we don’t want you to miss a thing! Here are some key items were mentioned if you want to take a closer look.
Website Recommendations:
https://rebeccamountain.ca
Book Recommendation:
Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
Think Again: My Seven Stage Journey from Self-Sabotage to Success by Rebecca Mountain
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
Stay Connected:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bexmountain/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RebeccaMountainInc/
LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/bexmountain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bexmountain
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RebeccaMountain
Podcast: The Rebecca Mountain Show
Learn more about our Cloud Accounting Services here
Transcript
Steve Loates (00:00):
Hi everyone, and welcome to our podcast. Smart Man, Smarter Woman, a podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And thank you for joining us today. I am Steve Loates.
Juliet Aurora (00:14):
And I am Juliet Aurora.
Steve Loates (00:16):
And we are your co-hosts. But before I introduce today’s guests, let’s hear just a few words from my wonderful co-host, that smarter woman, herself, Juliet. How are you doing today Juliet?
Juliet Aurora (00:28):
I am excellent. Thank you. And you know, you’re going to actually build this up where you keep introducing me as the smarter woman herself, that it’s going to be tough for me to keep living up to that legacy that you’re creating.
Steve Loates (00:42):
I see. And I’m not sure I agree because smarter is a relative thing. I am saying smarter relative to me, and I don’t think you will ever have a problem living up to that. And that’s why this works, right? We’re not being arrogant. It’s all a relative thing when we say smart men, smarter woman.
Juliet Aurora (01:02):
Okay, [crosstalk 00:01:03].
Steve Loates (01:04):
Okay. I’m smarter than a rock and you’re smarter than me.
Juliet Aurora (01:08):
Perfect.
Steve Loates (01:08):
It’s good.
Juliet Aurora (01:08):
So I get to be smarter than a rock. I love it. Okay. I can handle that.
Steve Loates (01:14):
Absolutely. So anyway, as you all know with every episode, we try to provide you with some entertainment hopefully, but most importantly, some value, some insights, some gold nuggets, as we call them to help you on your own entrepreneurial journey, wherever you may be on that journey. And today we have a great show for you and with a very special guest, Rebecca Mountain. Rebecca is a certified high performance coach, a social marketing strategist and her mission, which is a huge mission, I got to admit, and we got to jump into this as we get into the podcast. Her mission is to help as many people as possible live happy, rich and fulfilled lives. So, wow. So let’s bring our guests into the show, Rebecca Mountain. Welcome Rebecca. And thank you for joining us all the way from the thriving metropolis of Burlington, Ontario.
Juliet Aurora (02:16):
A local. Awesome.
Rebecca Mountain (02:16):
I’m a logo [inaudible 00:02:19]. Thank you. It’s great to be here, guys. I love chatting with you guys. I always have over the years, so thank you for having me on your podcast today.
Steve Loates (02:26):
Oh, our pleasure. Glad you could join us. We know you’re very busy. I won’t ask you to repeat how busy you are.
Juliet Aurora (02:32):
No, you have to get her to repeat how busy she was.
Steve Loates (02:38):
Okay.
Juliet Aurora (02:38):
[crosstalk 00:02:38]. So Rebecca, how busy are you?Rebecca Mountain (02:40):
I am busier as I’ve mentioned before, busier than a one armed monkey and a bag of bananas. So yes, it sets a very poignant metaphor.
Juliet Aurora (02:49):
I love her [inaudible 00:02:50].
Steve Loates (02:50):
I do. That’s great. And I’m really looking forward to our conversation today. A full disclosure, we have known Rebecca for a few years, as she mentioned, we are based in Burlington for those of you that didn’t know that. We’ve actually used Rebecca services and work with her in the past. But the reason we invited her here today is to share her amazing story because she has lots, but she also, I know, is going to have lots of great insights that will benefit those of you listening. So I really I’m excited to have her join us here today. So maybe do a kick things off, perhaps Rebecca, if you could take a few minutes and just share a little of your story and your own entrepreneurial journey that sort of got me to where you are right now.
Rebecca Mountain (03:38):
Sure. Well, the journey is rather meandering. So I hope you’re in for a bit of a whirlwind ride, in the [inaudible 00:03:44] coles notes version. For any Americans listening, this would be the CliffNotes version. I reminded myself many times, [inaudible 00:03:51] I have no idea what Cole’s note means. So yeah, so my entrepreneurial journey started in 2010 and it started because I got fired from my corporate job for the third time. So not the same job, different jobs. So I considered myself the world’s worst employee and decided that the only person who could not fire me was me. So off I went with two small kids and no idea what I was going to do, actually I really didn’t know. And so back in 2010, social media was still new and I went around and I just inquired of rather different businesses, like what is your biggest problem?
Rebecca Mountain (04:27):
This is one thing, just sort of like I’m going to filter in a few little tidbits of what I learned along the way. One of the things I learned was understand the problem you’re serving. So I learned this just by random chance because I was trying not to starve to death. And I found out that social media was really difficult for people. So fun fact, I built an entire social media agency, which over the years grew to about a million in sales, having never used Facebook before. So I taught myself and all I needed to be was one step ahead of everybody else. And as long as I could maintain that and continue to learn and just strive to improve my programs, I would be okay. So I started off as a consultant, teaching real estate agents actually how to do social media.
Rebecca Mountain (05:13):
I just happened to know them. I went after three industries. So this again, for anyone trying to figure out their niche, I went after wineries because I’m more close to the winery district. I went after construction because I had some experience there and I went after realtors. So what I learned was wineries, bless their souls, have two seasons, no money and no time. I would have absolutely starved to death if I’d gone after construction because they take a glacial pace to making decisions. These are the ones I went after, but real estate agents were like contractors. They made their own decisions. And basically on a one to one basis, they could choose to work with me. So I just really kind of hit it up there and then that became my niche. So I’m not a realtor, but I worked with them for the past 10 years certified at Toronto Real Estate Board.
Rebecca Mountain (05:59):
I’ve taught internationally to various real estate brokerages and associations. So I took that consulting job and I just expanded it into speaking, training, teaching. And then my path started to divert. I decided to hire a series of coaches. And what I quickly realized was that didn’t work. So that just for a whole bunch of reasons, that model was not suited for me. I like to do the coaching myself, managing a team of coaches is very, very different. So whenever an entrepreneur says, “Okay, I want to scale,” make sure that your scaling model is within your strength wheelhouse or if it’s not, again, one of the lessons I learned was get someone for whom it is and have that person manage that portion of the organization. But I was young and learning and failing forward, so I moved that to the side, mostly because I got frustrated that the people who I was coaching weren’t taking my advice, which for most coaches is super frustrating.
Rebecca Mountain (06:58):
So I decided to build a marketing agency and do it for people. And that’s where we’ve worked together a number of years ago, scale that up to over a million bucks a year and yet I was miserable. I worked 90 hours a week. I had a team of 14, great team, but it was not something that was really fulfilling me. So even though everything else in my life was great, I felt like there was something missing. It’s like a weight that weighted me down. And so what I discovered was that I had screwed up a very important equation and this is one that most entrepreneurs screw up. And that is the balance between income and impact. I have been chasing the almighty dollar and I got that almighty dollar. And yet the work that I did, I did not feel, again, this is just for me. I did not feel that it was really solving problems for people.
Rebecca Mountain (07:50):
So I can run an amazing ads and great emails and generate thousands of leads for people. But what I soon realized is that even though I could drive all this stuff into their funnels, their systems and their mindsets were all messed up and so they couldn’t close them. They couldn’t turn them into sales. So it became a revolving door. They’d come in. I generate leads, they become overwhelmed and they would leave. So two years ago I went on a search as to how can I resolve this issue? And I came across high performance coaching and I loved it so much because I went through it and it completely altered my way of looking at the world. And that’s where I came up with that phrase you mentioned at the beginning to help people live happier, wealthier, more fulfilled lives because I missed all three of those things.
Rebecca Mountain (08:35):
I was determined to not only create that for myself, but in the spirit of learning, help learn to push that out into the world. So now as a high performance coach, I do one on one coaching. I do group coaching. I have membership programs and courses all designed around helping people to overcome whatever is blocking them from really not only achieving their goals. You don’t have to be a millionaire to be wealthy. You may feel that you just want to be able to pay your bills and go on vacation without worrying. You may want to have richer, more meaningful connections with people. That’s what I strive for now. And so the journey that I was on, I took that equation, that for probably eight years I had in the wrong order of income versus impact flipped it on its head.
Rebecca Mountain (09:19):
And I decided that I would do something that would have such incredible impact that the income would simply follow. I no longer chase money. I don’t chase success. I don’t chase clients. I do what I need to do, that would push out what I know into the world that attracts the right people for whom that message resonates and who are ready for change. And I engage them in whichever aspect of the business works not only for the results they want, but also for their pocket book.
Steve Loates (09:48):
Great.
Juliet Aurora (09:48):
I love that statement, learn and help learn, that you said where you actually went through the process yourself, learnt it, experienced it and are now helping others go through that similar transformation that you went through. I love that statement.
Rebecca Mountain (10:05):
Thanks. Yeah, I totally stole it from a book, fun fact or full disclosure. It’s from the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. She’s actually mentioned in a book that I wrote called Think Again, which was in My Seven Stage Journey from Self-Sabotage to Success. So it incorporates that journey about plus I grew up in a cultures kind of religion. So I had to break out of that kind of stuff. So the learn help learn is actually under what to Carol calls the growth mindset and the fixed mindset, which is where we all have both but we strive to limit the fixed mindset stuff. The way that you phrase that is judge and be judged. And so for entrepreneurs, many of us can stay in that fixed mindset, if we compare ourselves to others. We are afraid of falling behind. We’re afraid of losing customers.
Rebecca Mountain (10:48):
We’re afraid of running out of money, afraid, afraid, afraid, and we leave ourselves labels and stuff that we use to say, “Well, this is who I am and I cannot be different,” when really it’s, you’re simply untrained. And if you take on say, “Okay, well I’m going to move from judge and be judged to learn and help learn you say, okay, what is it that I’m trying to move away from? What trauma big T, small T have I experienced, bad things I’ve gone through to say, “How do I take that? Learn something from it, apply it and then teach it.” And that’s where you really know you’ve made serious growth is when you’re able to actually teach people what you have done and use your story as a launchpad, not only for yourself to remind you where you’ve been, but also where you’re going, but then to inspire others to do the same.
Steve Loates (11:36):
That’s great.
Juliet Aurora (11:37):
So one thing I’d like to ask you about your story. So you built your agency, which is where we worked with you.
Rebecca Mountain (11:44):
That’s right.
Juliet Aurora (11:45):
We had a team of 14 and you pivoted and changed completely. That must have been terrifying.
Rebecca Mountain (11:52):
Yes.
Juliet Aurora (11:54):
Because you had something that worked and that was successful in terms of societal definition of success. For you to say, “Well, I’m not being fulfilled. It’s not filling what I need. I’m going to change it.” And you had no idea whether this new thing that you wanted to do was going to get you anywhere, was going to be able to pay your bills and look after your kids and look after your family.
Rebecca Mountain (12:18):
No idea.
Juliet Aurora (12:19):
Kind of walk us through why you made that decision because it was obviously a really difficult decision to make.
Rebecca Mountain (12:26):
I made the decision because I woke up every day hating what I did. I didn’t want to get out of bed. My phone was lava. I was frustrated with the work. I was frustrated with the revolving door of clients. Frustrated I couldn’t fix that and could not foresee having that same business running in perpetuity and me not wanting to like jump off a cliff. I grew up in a very restricted life. So just to give you a series of what my life was like, if you’ve ever watched the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, where she comes out of a bunker and then experiences life, I’m Kimmy minus the bunker. So when I grew up, we had no TV, no radio. I’m a classically trained pianist because I wasn’t really encouraged to play other stuff. There was no prom, no sleepovers, no friends at school, no makeup, no jewelry, no parties of any kind. I’m trying to make sure I’ve covered everything here.
Rebecca Mountain (13:25):
I was a grotter, of course, no alcohol and really, we’re not encouraged to even communicate with people outside of the religion. So it was very, very insular. We have the right idea, everyone else has [inaudible 00:13:36] cooked. So stay inside and don’t question by all means. Don’t question if you do, you’re going to die of cancer or a car crash. That was her [inaudible 00:13:43] favorite. And so when I did actually roll my car on the QEW six lane highway at 6:30 in the morning, skidding at 70 kilometers an hour with my car crushed above me, all against my steering wheel with a payment and ins from my eyeballs. And I got out of it completely unscathed, and I realized they were wrong. They were wrong about everything. So from that moment on, I’ve just blew up my life and we’ve already heard my journey. So because I had lived a restricted life, a life where I was unhappy, where I looked in the mirror and I barely recognized who I was seeing because of how gray that I felt.
Rebecca Mountain (14:20):
I wasn’t doing the things I loved and I was just really feeling that you just want to run away from your life. And I was getting to that again. I was getting back to that. So here I am free as a bird, remarried to the most beautiful man in the world, four amazing kids, everything that I could have ever wanted. And yet I’m feeling that restriction, that level of unhappiness and of not knowing what to do about it. So it was to such a degree that I recognize no matter how painful that this was going to be, that it was going to be worth it in the end. And I had believed in myself enough to that point and I can believe in myself again. I’m a creator. I am a doer and I love to help people. If I could have gone back to myself 20 years ago, I would have given myself so much advice to avoid the pain that I went through.
Rebecca Mountain (15:13):
So it was a throat grabbing throttling feeling of saying impact over income. And I would sit at my desk and I’m like impact over income, Rebecca, you’ve got this. Impact over income. Don’t worry about the money, worry about the work that you do and the change that it brings and it will come. I am blessed to have a husband who supported me through this. So as my income went to zero, we’d had some savings and he was just, “You’ve got this. I believe that you’re going to move this.” So having that support was critical. And I feel for people who don’t have that, and as a coach, I try to step in and that way, and to let them know that they have a support and then I teach them how to support themselves. So sometimes it starts external before we can internalize because we put up walls. So I break those down.
Rebecca Mountain (15:59):
So that path, that decision I made that enough is enough and I refuse to be miserable for the rest of my life and I choose happiness. I choose fulfillment and I choose to be successful every day and to look at success, not as a size of my bank account or how many clients. Success is, did I make a contribution today? So every day I go into the day and I end my day with the one question, did I do work that mattered? Did I make someone happier, wealthier, or more fulfilled today? And it has to hit one of those three things. And I don’t go to bed until I have. I do not put my head on the pillow until I have done something. And it can be something as small as sending a text of appreciation. It could be something as big as closing a million dollar client. So no matter how great or small did I do something, did I do work that mattered to me? Did I do work that makes a difference for someone else?
Rebecca Mountain (16:51):
What I consider the hockey stick. So Darren Hardy’s book, Compound Effect is one that is a very short book, but a very impactful book. You do the things, you know that if you do them consistently, will bring the business. And there’s a delay, so you have to start doing those things. So for me, it’s training. So every week starting in January, I’m like, “Okay, 2020 is going to be my year.” You may notice there’s been a pandemic. That was interesting. But in January, I didn’t know this pandemic was coming. I should have, we should have figured that out. But I said, if I do a training every week, then that is what’s going to bring the clients and the clients will bring the money. So I’m not going to chase the money. I’m going to chase the actions that I can control that will produce those results.
Rebecca Mountain (17:34):
So, again, so as a lesson for entrepreneurs, you can be scattered doing so many different things. But what I try to get people to do is what comes naturally to you. What if you could do it consistently, whether it’s every day or every week, whatever frequency it needs to happen for you to grow your business at the speed you want to grow it, you do that thing and you do it over and over. You run that webinar even if one person is there. You do that workshop even if two people show up, you do all this stuff because you know that the compound effect of all your efforts. Well, again, hockey stick the results at the end, and that’s exactly what happened.
Rebecca Mountain (18:13):
So I’ve gone from zero to, oh, heck I need another team because now I’ve got too many clients. I’ve got too much work. I’m brokering a million dollar deal in the US for exclusive training because they know that makes a difference. I have no competition for that, so I know I’m going to get it. Just pandemic tend to drag things on a little bit, but that’s okay, I can be patient because I know what I need to do in order to continue my business at such a level that I can make as much money as I want.
Juliet Aurora (18:42):
Lots of great advice in that series of sentences there. I’m not even sure what [inaudible 00:18:48].
Steve Loates (18:47):
Yeah. That was terrific. Well, I mean, first of all, I would like to congratulate you on your courage, the courage it took to take that first step. And that takes courage, I don’t care what anybody says to be able to do that. So congratulations. I’d like to come back to the coaching and I’d like to come back to it from this perspective. Juliet and I are huge fans of coaching. We believe it should be mandatory for every entrepreneur, if not a coach then a mentor, a mastermind group, something to help you. Now, if I go back 10 years, maybe 12 years, I didn’t feel that way. At that point in my life I had had what I thought was a successful business for a number of years, successful in terms of making money in the material toys. But like you, I reached a point where I certainly wasn’t happy doing it. So a lot of things happened, Juliet and I decided we wanted to try to take her business, which she had started on her own way back in the year 2000 and build it into a business. And so we did that. We started hiring people and literally, I won’t say we fell on our face, but it was close.
Juliet Aurora (20:18):
We fell on our face.
Steve Loates (20:20):
We did. Yeah. And so around 2011, I guess now we reached a point where we started talking about closing the business and what were we going to do if we did that? And what was our life going to look like and were we going to be okay with it? And because of our personalities, no, we weren’t going to be okay with it. So we decided after much discussion and bottles of wine that we were going to look into hiring a coach. This was very, very hard for my ego, that why would I possibly need a coach when I’d had this business, which I later on found out wasn’t a business, it was simply a job I created for myself but that’s a whole other story.
Steve Loates (21:09):
Anyway, I will get to my question eventually. My question is this, what would you say to those entrepreneurs out there who are really struggling and yet the thought of a coach, they’re not at that point. They’re not at the point where yes, the coach is the answer. The answer is, I just need to work harder. I need to work longer hours. I just need more clients. What would you say to them to help them reach the decision it took me 20 years to reach, that they don’t have to go through that 20 years.
Rebecca Mountain (21:51):
Yeah. So I was there very much. If I work harder, I will get to where I want to go. So my answer to that is sort of twofold. So in the first case, the most successful people know how to do one thing exceptionally well. They ask. They ask for help. They ask for what they want. They are relentless in what Ray Dalio calls, candid open-mindedness, which means they take their ideas to people who they know maybe have different perspectives. And they conversationally argue about not because [inaudible 00:22:29], fight about it, but you test and challenge for the purpose of saying like, “Am I really right? Really, really right.” So I also stalled getting a coach for five years, started in 2010. I can do this myself. I’m a smart girl. I know how to do this. I can learn, I can make money.
Rebecca Mountain (22:47):
I can grow and be successful. But what you failed to understand is that we you’re an Island. You are one person with one group of thoughts with one group of ideas. When you add another person who is as excited about life and business as you are, but has a completely different perspective, it’s one plus one equals five. So back in, well I think it was six or seven years ago now, I got my first coach and I realized something very important. I could go at my own pace and let’s say, it’s like a one, two, three. If I get a coach, it’s 1, 5, 10, because they bring in different perspective. They challenge you in new ways. They’ve opened up your mind to new thoughts that no matter what you can’t have on your own, you don’t know everything. Asking for help is the sign of a succeeder, not of a failure.
Rebecca Mountain (23:44):
Not of, I don’t know enough so I’m stupid. And that’s what the problem is with a lot of people, when it comes to coaching, “I have failed, I am deficient and that’s why I need a coach.” You should get a coach when you’re already, you’re kind of turning up the dial and you’re like, “I can do more,” but you need to know how to do more better. Like don’t reinvent the wheel. That’s the stupidest thing in the world. And there are so many experts out there now that we have access to even more than when I was going and starting my business 10 years ago. So if I can go to someone and say, okay, I want to do say a webinar. I want to do a whole webinar funnel. I’ll do the webinar, but I want you to do all the automation and the emails and because you know what? You just know how to do it better.
Rebecca Mountain (24:30):
Sure. I could do it, but I don’t want to. Nor should I, because they’ll do it better than me, which means I go from zero to the results I’m looking for at Mach two speed, as opposed to a little turtle. So that’s one perspective on coaching. The other perspective on coaching and why it’s so important and why the note to the grindstone hustle, hustle, hustle does nothing but burn people out and overwhelm them is because of the way that we go about acting. So when we see a goal, entrepreneurs that haven’t gone through the process of understanding how actions relate to what we believe in ourselves, we’ll just work really, really hard, but it’s like, you’re stuck in the mud and your wheels are spinning. And the wheels are spinning because you can say, my goal is to make 100,000 a year or a million a year, or to get so many clients or do whatever, whatever the goal is, monetary or otherwise.
Rebecca Mountain (25:19):
If however, you do not truly believe that you can get there. Do not believe that you deserve that. Cannot picture yourself in that position. You cannot act counter to what you believe in and it acts like basically an anchor to a wall. You can work as hard as you want, but if your belief system is counter to what you were striving to achieve, you cannot move ahead. So part of what I teach and part of what my book was all about is back that train up two stations. Your belief system is made up of thoughts, thought often enough. So if you think I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough. I’m worse than my peers or whatever the thoughts are that you say about yourself or that you compare yourself, all those assumptions you make, you need to turn those around. Instead of saying, I’m not good enough, I’m more than enough, right?
Rebecca Mountain (26:12):
Even if you don’t believe it at first, because you won’t because neurologically you got to build new paths. It’s neuroscience, it’s not woowoo stuff. It’s literally your brain and how different neural pathways are created. So you got carve new pathways and that takes time and repetition. So that’s why mantras are important. I take sticky notes and I put them all over the place for what I’m trying to achieve. Because as I think those things through reticular activation system in your brain, your brain is like, “Oh, you want me to show you proof that you’re smart? See, because you can just kept telling yourself that you’re stupid, so I was just showing you that you’re stupid. Now you want to switch gears and you want me to show you proof in the world that you’re smart, well, let me do that.” Because our brain can’t focus on everything, so focuses on what we feed into it.
Rebecca Mountain (26:56):
So you do that often enough, carves new neural pathway, builds a new belief system. And then what happens is you work half as much and get twice as far. So you don’t start with working yourself to death. You start with, what do I really believe in? Is there anything in there that can hold me back? And if there is back that train up one station to the thoughts, what thoughts am I thinking every day? And how do I replace those? How do I remind myself? How do I… You put something on your phone, you put a sticky on your mirror as you’re brushing your teeth and you read that over and over again. I had a sticky online that said I wanted to be on stage with Brendon Burchard and Dean Graziosi.
Rebecca Mountain (27:33):
Two people that, books I’ve read that I thought were absolutely fantastic, started me on this journey. And I didn’t know how that was going to happen. I didn’t know what that was going to look like, but I put that up there. And every day I fed my brain that information. Within six months, I was on stage with Brendan having graduated from his certification program. And we had a little chat about the program and so that kind of a thing. That was what onstage with Brendon Burchard looked like, but he knew who I was. And I was now going to be able to launch a whole new career for myself that was going to change my life. For Dean Graziosi, he and Tony Robbins came up with the knowledge business blueprint and I got wind of it early.
Rebecca Mountain (28:14):
So I used it, I loved it. And I was part of their $30 million launch because they had me do a video that they showed during their live telecast to raise $30 million for that knowledge business blueprint. So technically that was my stage. And when you feed your brain things like that you think how on earth is that going to happen? It doesn’t matter how it happens, it matters that you believe it will and then you let that go.
Juliet Aurora (28:43):
Yeah, we’re both speechless.
Steve Loates (28:45):
Lots there.
Juliet Aurora (28:48):
[inaudible 00:28:48] speechless which never happens, right? Usually one or the other of us. So you talked about so many different things in there about how it’s our brain and our mindset and what we tell ourselves that’s going to dictate where we go and what direction we go. Can you touch on a couple of things. You touched on one there about getting yourself unstuck as a business owner to move to the next level. Is there anything else that you see over and over and over again as to how business owners are holding themselves back? Or is it primarily just their belief system and what they’re thinking?Rebecca Mountain (29:26):
Most often it’s a belief system. They are smart. They are capable. In most cases, they know what they should be doing, but they get into these self sabotage cycles. So for instance, I’ll give you an example. Client of mine, brilliant woman, been in her industry for 20 years and every morning she wakes up a failure and she wakes up a failure because for, I think it was like 20 years or something like that, she’s been trying to get up at seven o’clock, but she always blows past it. And she’s usually up at like 7:45 or whatever but every morning when she wakes up, she starts her day feeling like she has already failed. So that’s self-sabotage. That’s someone who has gotten so used to feeling bad about themselves is they create these habits that reinforce that feeling of failure. So you can imagine the easiest flip in the world, you know what I told her to do? Say, you’re going to get up at 8:00 and every day you win because you’re up at 7:45.
Rebecca Mountain (30:28):
So you’re actually early and she’s like, I can totally do that. And I’m like okay. So listen [crosstalk 00:30:37] self sabotage it is but until you bring awareness that these kinds of patterns are happening, it’s really difficult to break them. That’s why coaching or mentors or masterminds or whatever are so important because they… like, I listen for patterns, I listen for the things that they say or they do that are recurring. My clients today. They know what they need to do. And they basically do what I call smooshing through the day. It’s like, they kind of do bits and pieces of this, but at the end of the day, they’ve wasted time and they’re wondering what they’ve done with their lives. So very simply I’ve got a planner that I send all my clients and I’m like, let me introduce you to time blocking.
Rebecca Mountain (31:25):
So you’re going to take all the things you know, you need to do instead of just sort of like off the top of your head, trying to get it done. You’re going to say from 9:00 to 10:00, I’m going to do this. Then I’m going to have scatter thoughts for half an hour and maybe from 11:00 to 12:00, I’ll do another thing. So you become more intentional with your time and that stops the sort of wasting time, not really focusing, shiny penny syndrome, that a lot of people suffer from. So most often, to answer your question, very directly, it’s self sabotage that stop people. And that can be habits, mindsets, your support network or lack thereof or toxic people.
Rebecca Mountain (32:04):
It could be you’ve picked the wrong model, but you’re trying to shoehorn it to work when you really shouldn’t because it’s like me and my agency, it was the wrong model for what I really, really wanted to do. Like the work I can do now I’ll work till I’m 90, I don’t care. Love that stuff. Whereas the agency, I was like, tick tock, tick tock, how much longer do I have to do this? When you get into that kind of a thought like you know you need to do something, it’s just, sometimes it’s not always clear what that should be. That’s kind of hard to unravel by yourself.
Juliet Aurora (32:36):
I think just the example that you gave of the client of yours, who always woke up at 7:45, but thought she was supposed to get up or felt like she should be getting up at 7:00 and feeling like a failure as soon as she got out of bed. I’m not even sure that consciously, she thought that she was feeling like a failure, but absolutely you would because the first thing you wanted to do today, and you’re already behind the eight ball.
Rebecca Mountain (33:00):
And then that takes you through the whole day. And so you’re already behind. You’re already behind. If you do that consistently, you feel like you never catch up, because the other thing that often people will do entrepreneurs in particular, they’ll say like, I want to make $100,000 a year and they will purposely not hit that and that sounds so strange. But when you think about it, a lot of them fear getting there and then not staying there. What if I don’t make it? What if I go to 95 the year after that? What if I just go up and then I come right back down again. And so to avoid that feeling of failure, they don’t try. Because if I don’t try, I can just say what could have been? And that is fixed mindset thinking. I could have been great. I could have done this. I could have done that. But they sit in their cute little label of could haves and should haves but it’s not failure because they didn’t actually fail.
Rebecca Mountain (33:56):
They didn’t try. So it’s not failure, but it’s really not anything. And it becomes very unsettling and that’s some people live there all their lives in that very unsettling feeling of never really gone, never really done anything, never really pushed themselves hard enough. And then there’s other people they’ll sit in that for awhile and go, “I don’t like this anymore. I want out.” And that’s, if they can, if I have a coach or they learn somehow to say, “What am I going to learn from my situation and how I’m going to get the heck out of Dodge?” Then they can learn their way out of it and train themselves into the life that they want. It’s just training. It’s nothing to do with how smart you are, where you are education level, woman, man, what color your skin is, what country you’re from, when you were born, where you… like it does none of those correlate to high performance.
Rebecca Mountain (34:49):
And this is like a statistically proven study that was done on what habits lead to longterm income growth, happiness, confidence, success, how you perceive yourself and your peers. Like there’s really high standard deviations of like positive correlations with these habits that I teach and generating those longterm results because a lot of coaches can be flash in the pan or they try to create a dependency. Those are not the coaches you want. You want coaches that teach you that even it’s a matter of 90 days long. So my whole thing is, if after 90 days you want to keep going because like we’re having a great time sweet, but my goal is after the 90 days, you don’t need me anymore. You only need yourself because there’s no one else in the world that can motivate and create the results that you and you’re enough. That one message you’re enough cannot be said enough, [inaudible 00:35:44] so many people struggle with that not enough mentality.
Juliet Aurora (35:49):
That is so different from what most coaching programs are. They’re not designed… they want you to work with them over and over and over, month after month, year after year. So very different. So I know Steve has a bunch of questions and I keep cutting him off. Can you tell everyone in our audience the name of your book again, is it out? Are they able to buy it and where would they be able to buy it?
Rebecca Mountain (36:11):
Sure. So it’s called Think Again, My Seven Stage Journey from Self-Sabotage to Success. You can get it at thinkagainbook.com or if you prefer Amazon, you can get it there too. So it actually hit number one in six countries in eight personal development and success categories after it launched. So it’s been a really awesome journey. It’s a self help book in a way to identify areas of self sabotage, but then the latter part of the book is, and now what do you do with it? Now, that you’ve had that clarity, where are you going from here? So there are strategies. There are business models that you can apply to your business. There are support network strategies on how you surround yourself with people are going to take you there. So that’s where the book has been a labor of love. And that book was once upon a time, it was a sticky and it just said book.
Steve Loates (37:03):
Absolutely. That’s great. I really do hate to start drawing this to an end. It’s been great if you will have us, we’ll love to have you back on the show again sometime because I think-
Rebecca Mountain (37:14):
Sure.
Steve Loates (37:15):
… Juliet was right. I have a list of questions here that we didn’t even get to, but out of respect [crosstalk 00:37:20].
Rebecca Mountain (37:19):
Sorry.
Steve Loates (37:21):
No, no, it’s been awesome. Out of respect for your time and for our audience, I am going to start winding it down. And that brings us to our Smart Men, Smarter Woman version of James Lipton’s Q and A from Actor’s Studio where we ask our list of questions. We ask every guest the same questions. And if you are ready, I would like to begin.
Rebecca Mountain (37:45):
Set, go.
Steve Loates (37:46):
Awesome. What one word best defines an entrepreneur.
Rebecca Mountain (37:52):
Freedom.
Steve Loates (37:54):
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Rebecca Mountain (38:02):
Other than my own. So are we talking like if nothing was in [inaudible 00:38:06] an object?
Steve Loates (38:07):
It’s wide open.
Rebecca Mountain (38:08):
I love like storm chasing, that stuff’s fun.
Steve Loates (38:15):
We have not had anyone give that answer before. What profession would you like never to attempt?
Rebecca Mountain (38:25):
Coder, my ADD would go nuts.
Steve Loates (38:31):
Okay. What sound or noise do you love?
Rebecca Mountain (38:36):
My husband’s voice.
Steve Loates (38:38):
Okay. What book would you recommend every entrepreneur must read?
Rebecca Mountain (38:46):
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
Juliet Aurora (38:51):
Interesting. A guest that we had on either one week ago or two weeks ago gave the same book and I’d never heard of it and now I’ve heard it twice in the same year.
Rebecca Mountain (39:02):
Phenomenal, phenomenal game changer changed my life. It started me down the path of like being able to handle those big, massive mindset problems I have coming out of my cult. It was a one thing that helped me, that started my healing process, far away.
Steve Loates (39:19):
Awesome. So obviously we need to read that book Juliet. The universe is speaking us.
Juliet Aurora (39:24):
It is.
Rebecca Mountain (39:25):
[inaudible 00:39:25]. It sounds [crosstalk 00:39:25].Steve Loates (39:25):
When your own entrepreneurial journey is completed, what do you hope your legacy is?
Rebecca Mountain (39:35):
That I have helped as many people live happier, wealthier, more fulfilled lives.
Steve Loates (39:40):
Awesome. And would you like, I guess the first thing, anyone in our audience who wants to connect with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Rebecca Mountain (39:51):
My website, which is Rebeccamountain.ca.
Steve Loates (39:54):
Okay. And I will spell that because Rebecca can be spelled several ways. It is, R-E-B-E-C-C-A, and mountain is a mountain.
Rebecca Mountain (40:07):
The hill, snow, bears.
Steve Loates (40:09):
There you go. Do you have any final words to conclude our episode that you would like to share with our audience of entrepreneurs, Rebecca?
Rebecca Mountain (40:20):
There’s no such thing as an entrepreneurial deficiency, there is only entrepreneurial learning and training that needs to happen and that it cannot be done alone. And that’s not just because I’m a coach. I get my own coaches. I mean, I’ve paid upward of $60,000 US for my coaches for just one year but that 60,000 I turned into 500,000. So as long as you do something with the coaching you have, then it’s been a good experience.
Steve Loates (40:53):
Awesome. And what about you Juliet? Do you have any final words you would like to say before we close out?
Juliet Aurora (40:59):
No, I’m going to go and get Rebecca’s book because I’ve not read it. Because she was talking to me and could hear, it was like she was sitting there and kind of sitting on the sidelines of my life. So definitely.
Steve Loates (41:12):
Awesome. And that brings us to our words of wisdom from me, the quote nerd, I love quotes. So for this episode I chose peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather as you think it should be, Wayne Dyer.
Rebecca Mountain (41:37):
Love that guy.
Steve Loates (41:38):
Yep. Great quote. And thank you again, Rebecca, as I knew you would be, you were awesome, that was very, very good, lots of stuff there for our audience. And thank you again to my awesome cohost, couldn’t do this without you. Most importantly, thank you to you, our audience for tuning in and giving us a listen. We sincerely hope you found some value here today and I’m sure you did. If you like, we would love it if you would subscribe to the podcast. We’re in all the usual places, iTunes, Spotify, Google, or you can visit the website, smartmensmarterwoman.com. Give us a listen. So thank you [inaudible 00:42:21] until next time. Take good care of yourself and those that you love. Bye for now.
Song by Adam Vitovsky / CC BY 3.0
