← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
908: The Make-or-Break Question to Know if You’ll Succeed with Digital Products
00:37:12
This question will determine whether you’ll successfully transition to a full-time living with digital products without sacrificing your life along the way
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Abigail Pumphrey
Your burnout is your body telling you no. It's your brain's way of protecting you from unsustainable patterns that you're developing. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee what if I told you that success in business does not have to cost you absolutely everything you value? Too many people believe sacrifice is the only path to success. And that belief might be exactly what's holding you back. Today I'm unpacking the one question that will determine whether you'll successfully transition to a full time living with digital products without sacrificing your life along the way. Now we're jumping straight into it. I'm going to start with the question. I'm not going to wait 25 minutes to ask you the question. We're going to begin here because it really is just the beginning. It's going to open a can of worms for you and it's going to be something we have to unpack. So we're going to unpack it together. This is the one question that you have to sit with and I want to know what is your immediate gut reaction? I don't want you to adjust to say what you think I need to hear. I don't want you to adjust to what you think society requires of you. I do not want you to adjust to what you think is going to make your life simpler. I simply want to know the answer that rises to the surface first. Whether you like the answer or not, the question what are you willing to sacrifice now? It's deeper than you think. I assume most people will immediately jump to some version of either. I'm willing to sacrifice all of these things to get here, wherever here is. Or they'll say, I'll sacrifice X, Y, Z, but not a, b, c. Nine times out of 10, that's one of the answers. But I want to challenge that thought altogether. And it's something I still have to challenge myself. I wouldn't say I'm fully on the other side of this. I often get caught in this trap myself. Most entrepreneurs unconsciously associate success with sacrifice. They think they have to give up their time or their health or their relationships or those precious moments to get to where they want to go. And for most entrepreneurs, success is a form of currency. For them, it's usually beyond just money. They want to get to some sort of objective or reach some sort of goal or hit some sort of milestone because it's directly tied to their ego, their self worth, how they want to show up in the world, it is so important. And because it's so important, they often feel like it will require all of them to get there. Now, when I realized what was going on, I was able to really start to become aware of something that was seriously slowing me down and holding me back. Because even if you're not fully on the other side of this question and really able to wrap your head around it, and I'm going to get into where I want you to go, it's going to take time to get there. And there's going to be seasons where you don't fully believe it, but you're gonna need to, otherwise it's gonna come back and bite you. If you are going to get to where you want to go and stay there, keyword and stay there, you have to believe that it doesn't require sacrifice. It is simply available to you. You do not have to give up what's important to you to get there. You don't have to sacrifice your sleep. You don't have to sacrifice hours of your day. Not that it won't take time, not that it won't take work, but you don't have to sacrifice your marriage or your relationship with your children or those phone calls with your mom. You do not have to give up who you are, what you believe in, what you value to get to where you want to go. Now, massive asterisk here. Can you sacrifice those things to leapfrog forward and get to where you want to go faster? Probably. And I have. So many entrepreneurs have, but it won't stick. It will not stick. And before you say, well, then I'll just do it the first time and then I'll Figure out this belief and then I'll stay there. No, you won't. You will absolutely fumble the ball before you can fully, fully believe that it does not require sacrifice. You are whole. You are enough. You have the skills necessary or the resources available to you to figure it out. If you believe success requires sacrifice, either your body or your mind will eventually decide for you and make you stop. Hard stop. I have absolutely been on the receiving end of what this looked like. And more often than not, it wasn't necessarily that I was taking time away from people I loved or sacrificing my marriage or any of those other things. More often than not, it was self sacrifice. I would get to the point where I was wearing myself down. You know, whether it was by sleeping less or just letting my mind be consumed by what my business was and where it was going to the point that my body would break. I've struggled with chronic illness and several pretty significant health challenges in my life, and by no means have all of them been because I was holding onto this belief and thus overdoing it and thus breaking my body down to the point that my body was going to force me to rest. It wasn't always because of this, but this was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely a contributing factor. Because here's the thing. When you fully wrap your head around the idea that it does not require you to sacrifice at all to get what you want, you will understand that you can adjust how you show up when you need more bandwidth so that you can prioritize your health, because that is always more important. I think so often, especially female entrepreneurs. But I've seen it on both sides that burnout is not a lack of willpower. You have convinced yourself that you just don't have the interest anymore, or the desire, or that you fell out of a habit, or that you know you just need to be reinspired. Your burnout is your body telling you no. It's your brain's way of protecting you from unsustainable patterns that you're developing. You know, the brain's kind of a bitch. It has developed over thousands of years to keep humans alive, and it's done a pretty dang good job. Look at how much longer people live today than even just two generations ago. Our mind has compensated, which is an incredible part of human evolution. But it is also keeping you from getting to your full potential. If you lean into this belief that you have to keep doing more, that you have to keep trying harder, that you have to keep adding on new strategies, that you have to keep spending More time that you have to keep showing up and adding new things to your plate. No, you don't. No, you don't. I really want to challenge this belief of hostile culture. And I'm actually. I'm actually so glad that people had this opportunity to reflect. Covid was horrible. So many people lost their lives. So many families were torn apart, whether from loss or from lack of communication or lack of closeness. So many things. However, something that Covid did for our world was give people an opportunity to reflect on what was truly important to them. And I saw businesses, for the first time ever on the backside of COVID Not to say Covid is gone forever, but you know what I'm saying, really start to see how leaning into more of a lifestyle business could ultimately really be more closely aligned with their values. If anything, it was as if people were challenged to readdress their values, readdress their priorities, and really decide where they were going to spend their time. Like, more than ever, I saw people make edits, but, like, the further we get away from that moment, like, we're going into 2025. Covid started in the US in March of 2020. Not that it wasn't here before, you know what I'm saying? The world shut down in March of 2020. It's been nearly five years. We've all been changed from this. But I think there's this element of people trying to return to who they were before. And more often than not, the who they were before was stretching themselves too thin, was giving too much of themselves away. Society glorifies overworking society. Suggest that sacrifice is the price of success. But that mindset is going to lead you to burnout. It's going to lead to failed and closed businesses. I've seen more businesses close in the last 24 months than I have in the entire 10 years I've been in business. I don't want you to miss important moments in your life. I want you to get to where you want to go with your priorities and your values completely locked in. And I can hear some of you saying, I feel you. I get it. I understand it. I don't know how to get there. And I have so been there. I have so been there. You're like, every ounce of my being wants to believe that it doesn't require this, but I keep coming back to, if I don't do this, I'm not going to get there. If I don't add this, if I don't do more. It's like a voice in the back of Your head. That's just like chanting at you. I think sometimes it helps to have, like, a touch of outside motivation. And for me, this is sometimes the thing I have to come back to. And not that it's about money, it's not. Because building a business that respects your lifestyle is worth it regardless. It's worth it regardless. But you should know, and I know you know, but I just want to remind you that there are people who are making more money than you simply because they've rewired their beliefs around work and success. They believe it could be easy, and so it is. They believe that it doesn't require every ounce of who they are. And so it doesn't. I know there were so many moments in my life where I felt like I was giving too much of myself away. And I remember kind of like facing this head on. And my solution at the time was to, like, give up all these outside obligations, outside of my work so that I could just focus more on work, which was sort of the antithesis of the actual point. The irony was, because I let these outside things go, the business did grow at my own expense. I was the cost at that point. I was the cost. My health was the cost. My happiness was the cost. Who cares if your business is XYZ size if you're miserable? I don't want you to be miserable. I want you to enjoy your life. I want you to be grateful for what it provides for you. And I want you to be overwhelmed with gratitude for the sustainability it's setting your future up to be. That is such a beautiful place to land. But I had to let go of so much. I had to unpack all of these thoughts. So let's talk about that shift, because I think you may be on board with this idea, but, like, how do you shift your mindset around sacrifice to one of sustainability? One where you believe wholeheartedly that you can build a business that aligns with your values, that aligns with how you want to show up in this world that allows you to prioritize your family and your health. I know you want it. You wouldn't be listening to the show if you didn't. But how do we make that shift? I keep seeing it happen. You're caught in a loop, waiting for that perfect moment, overthinking every decision and comparing your progress to the curated realities of others online. I've been there too. And I made a shift that changed absolutely everything. It simplified my approach and allowed me to start trusting my intuition again. Truly, everything changed. My business doubled then doubled again. I rocked $300,000 launches, enrolled over 10,000 students in a single course, and finally started showing up in a way that felt effortless and aligned. Now I'm sharing those exact tools and strategies in my new three part workshop series Mindset Reboot. Right now you can grab it for just $11. Hurry. Visit creative templateshop.commindset to find out more. Hiring with Indeed, your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire when we've hired in the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed, the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.comstrategy hour, just go to indeed.comstrategy hour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need Indeed. I do think part of it is understanding and identifying your limiting beliefs. Not to say that limiting beliefs are all bad, because that's not true. But what do you think is the ceiling and is the reason you think that's the ceiling because you have to do something, or because you think it has to be hard, or because you think it has to be consuming? I want you to worry less about what the ceiling is and more about what's underneath it. What do you think it will take? What do you think it will require? It's the same as any fear. Truly. You can be scared of visibility, for example. Oh, I don't know. I don't know about putting myself out there. The problem is not that you're scared, the problem is why you're scared. What's the why? What are you so afraid of? It's not visibility, it's the thing underneath it. And so the same thing is true for these limiting beliefs. You can say, oh, this is a limiting belief, but the belief is not the problem. Why do you have that belief? Sometimes for me, I have to have an example. Like my brain cannot believe it's true without an example. And sometimes that has caused strife because I haven't been able to find an example of someone doing it the way I wanted to do it or living out the lifestyle I wanted to have, I didn't see it. And so in the beginning, I do think it was helpful to be like, oh, I don't know if I can get here. But then, like, find people who are there or further along, and all of a sudden your brain's like, oh, I can get there. Okay. Okay. I can wrap my head around that. The further along you get, the more successful you become. There will be less examples, less people to show you that it's possible, less proof that it's possible. So it does require an element of you believing it's possible, which I know is a lot and takes some time, but write it down. Put it in your journal. I am a notes app, girly. Everything is in my notes app. I live and breathe by my notes app. So, like, write down what you're thinking. What are the things that come up for you? What is the thing you keep coming back to? Or, like, what is the one area of business that you're like, I can't get past here. Why? Why? What do you think will happen? I need you to truly visualize what's possible without sacrifice. And I think one of the best ways to do this is to, like, put yourself in a storyline, like a day in the life of you, imagining yourself in the business that's thriving and successful and bringing in the income you want while you're prioritizing your health, while you're prioritizing your family, while you're prioritizing your joy. So, for example, this is kind of a scenario that I have come up with multiple times, and it's one that keeps me grounded and inspires me that I can do this now, that I don't have to wait. So in my ideal kind of day in the life, I wake up slowly, without an alarm. I roll over and chat with my spouse about our day and what we have coming up. I put on some workout clothes, some comfy joggers, and a jacket, and I'm out the door on a walk, listening to a podcast. Some days those podcasts are about business and things that inspire me and things that. That fuel my ideas. And other days, it's about laughing and enjoying and entertaining myself and having fun. And I go on that walk for as long as I want, for as far as I want, and I come home, and by that time, I'm going to be hungry for breakfast, but there's no urgency to get to work. Work can wait I'm going to sit down after I make myself a protein rich meal and I even visualize myself making it. I don't need a five star chef making me every meal to be happy. I'm making my own meal, I'm sitting down, I'm eating it, I go take a shower, I freshen up, I, you know, put on some clothes, I do my hair. And it may be 10:30 or 11:00am before I actually sit down to work. And that's okay because the person I am on the backside of all of that is someone who's ready to show up, someone who's ready to be there for her clients. And then I can walk out the door, my closet door, out of my clothes or, or my office, whatever. I can walk out into my home. I can spend some time alone, just decompressing and transitioning because I still need that. I can catch up with my spouse, talk about our evening, talk about what we want to do leisurely, make dinner, spend time together, spend time with friends, get out in my community, try a new restaurant. Like I can do all of those things. And the life I want isn't different from the life I have. It's simply about showing up differently in the life I'm living. And you'll start to notice it's not necessarily these massive shifts. Now I totally get for some of you, it's going to require more income to make some of those things true, or it's going to require that you move to a different home, or it's going to require more help. Like maybe you need more help at home or in the business, all of those things can be true. But if you see a world where it's happening, if you can imagine that world and write out that scenario, all of a sudden your body is like, that's not scary. That's actually so pleasant. And I love that for us. And when your mind and your body speak together that way, I can just tell you that like, things open up doors. Now this only sticks if you start adopting strategies that specifically align with your values. I've seen people be excellent in so many of these areas, but then they start selling in a way that feels weird for them, or showing up online in a way that makes them uncomfortable or puts them in a vulnerable position, whatever that thing may be, something about it is making their value kind of barometer, shake a little and go, I don't know about this, I don't know about this. And if you go down that road, you will eventually stop. You can do it for a time period. But it will all fall apart. You have to build a business in alignment with who you are and what you believe in. I value inclusivity, I value affordability, I value accessibility, I value time and the ability for people to consume things on their own timeline. All of those things feed into how I show up and the kinds of products I build and what my business looks like. Sustainable systems come from you aligning how you work with your values. When you believe success doesn't require sacrifice, your brain stops resisting and starts creating opportunities. It took me a long time to fully believe that I could have a digital product business where I teach, where I educate, where I reach people around the world without sacrifice. But it is such an ideal solution to creating sustainability. Digital products are scalable. You can sell to a thousand times, ten thousand times more people than you can work with one on one. It requires less of your ongoing time and energy than more traditional services. You can automate so many pieces of the puzzle from onboarding to having people go through the product, to the sales process. Like there's so many pieces that you can put the work in once and it will keep working for you. And it's not to say that you won't have to maintain it, that you won't have to go back, but when your focus is more on building traffic into something that is consistently making you sales, all of a sudden you're very happy to be focused on sending traffic down that road. I think running a service based business is a beautiful thing. I did it for many years. I think it has an ability to touch people's lives in a way that a lot of other things can't. But for me, it wasn't a lifestyle that was sustainable long term. I needed more flexibility than an agency allowed me and I'm so grateful that I took the time to invest in what would be required to transition and have that ultimately bring in a full time income, not for just me, but for my entire team and their families. Inside the co op, I teach the exact strategies I've used to build a thriving digital product business without sacrificing my life. And inside of that program, you start with the accelerator. I walk you through what it looks like to build an offer ecosystem that supports the life and lifestyle that you want to have. You can go to creative templateshop.com membership to find out more about what that looks like. But I promise you, if this is the goal, the end game, the co op is going to save you so much time because I'm giving you the tools that I have built to catapult my business forward and I'm just giving you access so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Because this is not an area that needs to be reinvented. This is a business that's become an entire industry. And the amazing part is it can touch so many more industries than it has. You can reach so many more people with your expertise, with your background, with what you are brilliant at, and you can keep doing what you're doing for now. And when you're ready and comfortable financially, this will be here to support you. Working less, hustling less, doing less does not lead to failure. It's going to lead to a more rested you, a more thankful you, a more kind you that helps you create more sustainability. Because you will ultimately be working less. Working smarter, not harder. We all know the phrase working smarter, not harder. But are you actually applying it to your life? It's going to require consistency. Consistency combined with strategy will trump overworking every single time. Every single time. That momentum that you build is far better than you forcing yourself to be at your desk until you finish this very oddly specific thing that you've decided for yourself. No one has told you you need to do, but you did. You can only fail if you stop trying. But the only way you will keep going is if you create a business model that works with your life, not against it. Success doesn't have to equal sacrifice. Rewiring your mindset is the first step to building a thriving and sustainable business. You having that self awareness about what's going on, leaning in to the fears underneath all of that, identifying what you really think it's going to cost, finding proof that that is not necessary. You will see a future that is so bright. Digital products are scalable systems that are powerful tools to help you build that sustainable income to achieve your goals without burning out. I want this for you. You don't have to sacrifice your life for your business. I want to help you build a thriving, sustainable business that supports not just the life you have today, but the life that you want and helps you bring in repeatable, profitable income for the rest of your life. The co op is definitely the community that is going to support you through all of this. Let's do it together. You can find out more@creative templateshop.com membership. I'd love to see you inside. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it, and post on social you can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me iGaleseays and ossproject so we can share it. Okay? Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love the show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.