Katie McManus
00:00:18
Tim Ferriss won't help you build your business.
Katie McManus
00:00:20
Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach.
Katie McManus
00:00:24
And welcome to the weeniecast.
Katie McManus
00:00:27
Hopes and dreams die following the advice of privileged white men.
Katie McManus
00:00:32
And if you're a privileged white man listening to this podcast, know that I'm not disparaging your accomplishments, but I am calling out that the things that you were able to do to reach success are not available to most other people.
Katie McManus
00:00:47
Like many business owners, I have a bookshelf that is full of books written by Napoleon Hill, Tim Ferriss, biographies of people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, which I haven't read.
Katie McManus
00:01:00
To be fair, I bought them thinking they'd be interesting.
Katie McManus
00:01:02
And then I got like a chapter and I was like, this is not relevant to me because their experience is not my experience.
Katie McManus
00:01:08
I don't know that I can blame these books for.
Katie McManus
00:01:10
For making my business take longer to build.
Katie McManus
00:01:13
Maybe reading these books was actually a delay tactic on the part of my subconscious who was afraid of starting a business.
Katie McManus
00:01:20
But what I do know is that the vast majority of the advice given in these books were not possible for me.
Katie McManus
00:01:31
There's this one story in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill where he talks about a man whose sole goal in life was to become a business partner of Edison.
Katie McManus
00:01:42
And so this man, this white man who had not a penny to his name, stowed away on a train and made it to wherever Edison was.
Katie McManus
00:01:51
I forget the geography of the time.
Katie McManus
00:01:52
And showed up and basically, you know, said to Edison, I would like to be your partner.
Katie McManus
00:01:57
What can I do?
Katie McManus
00:01:58
And he just started working for Edison.
Katie McManus
00:02:01
He took any job that was available, and over time, he learned the business and he saw an opportunity to sell something that Edison was developing, and he did really well, and he became a business partner of Edison.
Katie McManus
00:02:15
And that story sounds so motivating.
Katie McManus
00:02:18
It sounds so inspirational, right?
Katie McManus
00:02:20
Like you can go from absolute nothing to being a business partner of one of the most renowned inventors of that age, someone who we still know and talk about to this day.
Katie McManus
00:02:33
But what if he were a single parent?
Katie McManus
00:02:36
What if he had an ailing father that he had to take care of?
Katie McManus
00:02:39
What if he'd been black?
Katie McManus
00:02:40
Would he have gotten that meeting with Edison?
Katie McManus
00:02:43
And even if he had gotten that meeting with Edison, when he identified the opportunity to become the business partner of Edison, do you think he would have been given it?
Katie McManus
00:02:51
Unfortunately.
Katie McManus
00:02:52
I mean, I can't say for sure, but unfortunately, knowing the history of the United States and the history of racism in the United States.
Katie McManus
00:03:00
I'd hazard a guess, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, that the answer is no.
Katie McManus
00:03:04
I saw a post on the social medias the other day that the whole belief system around making good choices assumes that everyone has good choices to make, that they have good options to choose from.
Katie McManus
00:03:25
The creator of the Diary of a CEO Part podcast, Stephen Bartlett, he actually had a baby.
Katie McManus
00:03:31
Well, he didn't personally.
Katie McManus
00:03:32
His girlfriend had a baby when they were teenagers and he went on to be massively successful.
Katie McManus
00:03:37
But in his story he talks about moving to New York and living in an apartment with a ridiculous amount of other people and doing things that were absolutely impossible if he were the primary caregiver of a child.
Katie McManus
00:03:52
This man had the privilege of having the mother of his child who did the vast majority of the child rearing and who could not have done what he did.
Katie McManus
00:04:04
Because what would society say of a woman, even if they're still a child, who abandoned their baby to go work in New York City and share an apartment with a ridiculous amount of people and to work an insane amount of hours and pursue your dreams?
Katie McManus
00:04:21
There's a double standard and the difference in opinion that she would have gotten about her lifestyle, about her choices, would have limited the choices that she was offered.
Katie McManus
00:04:33
If a man abandons his responsibilities as a father to go and pursue his business dreams, it's seen as admirable, it's seen as a sacrifice.
Katie McManus
00:04:44
If a woman does that, it's seen as neglectful, selfish, like she's lacking in morals.
Katie McManus
00:04:51
And people who are lacking in morals do not get offered the same opportunities as men.
Katie McManus
00:04:55
And people who are seen to be lacking morals do not get the same type of opportunities offered to them.
Katie McManus
00:05:01
Everyone loves to talk about how Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his parents garage, which of course, like that sounds like such a rough and tumble kind of way to start out.
Katie McManus
00:05:11
But what if your parents don't own a house?
Katie McManus
00:05:14
What if your parents don't have a garage or even a spare corner of their kitchen for you to set up shop and start your business?
Katie McManus
00:05:22
The mere fact that he had access to a garage to use for free to start Amazon is a massive privilege.
Katie McManus
00:05:30
Not to mention that I believe his parents lent him $300,000 to start Amazon along with a bunch of their rich friends.
Katie McManus
00:05:37
It's an incredible privilege to have access to people who have that kind of capital to invest in you.
Katie McManus
00:05:44
Most people do not have that.
Katie McManus
00:05:46
I could go on and on with more examples of this, but you're going to get bored.
Katie McManus
00:05:50
I'm going to get Bored talking about it.
Katie McManus
00:05:51
But really we have to talk about.
Katie McManus
00:05:53
The root of the problem here is that we're listening to people who don't give us the full fucking story.
Katie McManus
00:06:53
They want to be seen as someone who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, who are scrappy and intelligent and blessed with that little thing called luck, when really what we need to listen to is what they're not saying.
Katie McManus
00:07:08
They're not talking about who's picking up the kids from school.
Katie McManus
00:07:12
They're not talking about who is doing the laundry in the house.
Katie McManus
00:07:16
They're not talking about needing to work so that they can still have health insurance, so that they can afford their very expensive medication for their chronic illness.
Katie McManus
00:07:26
Because oftentimes the folks who write these books don't have any of that going on.
Katie McManus
00:07:31
And yet they want you, who might have children, who might need to take care of elderly relatives, who has housework to do, who has a job that you need to keep to keep health insurance, who has a myriad of other things going on in your life that you cannot neglect to go after your dream.
Katie McManus
00:07:49
They want you to believe that you just need to follow exactly what they did and you'll be successful just like them.
Katie McManus
00:07:57
And if you're not, the insinuation is that there's something wrong with you, there's something about you that's just not quite up to snuff, which in turn supports the mythology of them.
Katie McManus
00:08:08
There must be something preternaturally good or blessed or whatever about them in their life that allowed for them to be this successful.
Katie McManus
00:08:17
What we need more of is we need to hear the success stories, the real nitty gritty.
Katie McManus
00:08:23
Here's what I had to deal with in my life, and here are the sacrifices I had to make.
Katie McManus
00:08:28
And here's how I leaned into help in a gazillion different ways.
Katie McManus
00:08:33
And here's how I had to work towards my goal little by little, because I couldn't go for the big juicy dream like these guys.
Katie McManus
00:08:40
We need these kinds of stories for from women.
Katie McManus
00:08:42
We need them from people of color.
Katie McManus
00:08:44
We need them from folks with disabilities.
Katie McManus
00:08:47
We need them from folks who might have a different sexual orientation or who are not the generic cisgendered folks.
Katie McManus
00:08:54
Because the hopes and dreams of thousands, if not millions, die every single day trying to follow the advice of these privileged white guys.
Katie McManus
00:09:05
So instead of listening to them, people need to start listening to you.
Katie McManus
00:09:10
They need realistic advice.
Katie McManus
00:09:12
A great example of this is if you listen to any of Stacey Abrams books.
Katie McManus
00:09:17
She's real about the shitty options she had growing up about the debt she had to dig herself into in order to give herself a leg up about the family challenges that she had to deal with and about the prejudice she faced.
Katie McManus
00:09:33
We need more thought leaders like her.
Katie McManus
00:09:36
And if you're just starting out, if you have a hope or a dream or a goal that you're just not reaching because you're following the advice of these privileged white guys and it's not helping you, here's your permission to do things differently.
Katie McManus
00:09:50
Here's your permission to let go of the expectation that you should be able to follow their advice and get the same results.
Katie McManus
00:09:56
Because we all know that it's not true.
Katie McManus
00:10:02
When I work with my clients, sometimes I get the advice that I should be turning byob, my build your own business group program into kind of a business in a box program.
Katie McManus
00:10:11
It's like 10 step plan to build the the business of your dreams.
Katie McManus
00:10:15
If you just follow my step by step program, my step by step process, I did it and you can too.
Katie McManus
00:10:22
I'm sure that's probably going to be easier for me to market and easier for me to sell.
Katie McManus
00:10:27
I don't want to do it because I know it's not going to be as effective as how it is right now.
Katie McManus
00:10:33
One of the things that I love about that program, because I create the time and the space, is my ability to customize each plan, each strategy for each client based on who they are, their circumstances, the business type that they want to grow, and of course, the limitations and challenges that they are facing naturally in their day to day.
Katie McManus
00:10:52
And I'm only able to do this by keeping the program relatively small.
Katie McManus
00:10:57
I'm only able to do this by not making a business in a box kind of thing.
Katie McManus
00:11:03
Because here's the truth of it.
Katie McManus
00:11:05
Very few people would be able to grow their business and be successful doing exactly what I did.
Katie McManus
00:11:11
I had an immense amount of privilege in my safety net to fail.
Katie McManus
00:11:16
I mean, to be fair, I don't have children to this day, but when I started, I didn't have kids.
Katie McManus
00:11:21
I have a lot of clients who either have young children, they have kids who are about to go off to college, or they have infants, all of which require a different thing from them.
Katie McManus
00:11:32
A different amount of mental and emotional labor, a different level of presence, a different amount of financial support.
Katie McManus
00:11:39
I didn't have any of that when I started.
Katie McManus
00:11:42
And I hate saying this because it was an awful time for so many people and a lot of people didn't make it.
Katie McManus
00:11:47
But I also had the privilege of growing my business during a pandemic when literally there was nothing outside the house that required anything of me.
Katie McManus
00:11:56
I was responsible for doing my laundry, for feeding myself, for checking in on friends and family.
Katie McManus
00:12:02
But I was able to give 8, 10, 12 hours a day to my business.
Katie McManus
00:12:07
And because we were in a global lockdown, I was able to reach people online to a degree that is not possible today because everyone was cut off from their normal social lives, from the normal demands of day to day life, commuting, volunteer projects.
Katie McManus
00:12:24
So if I were to turn to my clients and tell them, well, you should be spending two hours a day on LinkedIn, it's not necessarily realistic for them.
Katie McManus
00:12:31
As you start working on your business and setting your goals and really looking for the right people to support you, be it a business strategist, a business coach, an online business manager, whatever your needs are, one of the questions you absolutely should be asking is how were you successful and in what ways is that success attributed to your privilege?
Katie McManus
00:12:57
And if they cannot answer that question, they can't tell you all the ways in which their life circumstances made it easier for them to be successful.
Katie McManus
00:13:07
If they can't own it, they're not the right coach or strategist for you because they're not going to be concerned about customizing your plan to you, to your limitations in your life because they won't be able to see the limitations if they don't have the ability to introspect about their own privilege.
Katie McManus
00:13:26
And it doesn't have to be big.
Katie McManus
00:13:27
One of the most damaging relationships that I've had in supporting my business was a public speaking coach who was big on here's how I did it, do it the exact, exact same way.
Katie McManus
00:13:39
And it sounds silly, but one of the things that she assigned to me as homework was that every day for an hour, I'd have to reach out to different organizations and events to propose myself as a speaker.
Katie McManus
00:13:50
And if you've listened to the Weeniecast at all and listened to the journey we've been on and know about how I work, doing things for an hour a day is not doable for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:01
I can sit down for five hours and bang through a ton of work and get into flow and get it all done.
Katie McManus
00:14:07
Carving out an hour a day, having to change gears into something that I only have an hour for and that I have to change gears out of, that's a lot more mental work for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:19
And so when I brought this up to her and I was explaining, you know, I understand that that works for you, but unfortunately, like that way of doing Work just does not work for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:28
Instead of getting any empathy or understanding or flexibility in me doing this thing in my own way, I got shamed for not being able to do it her way.
Katie McManus
00:14:41
I got berated.
Katie McManus
00:14:43
And it was implied that I was just being lazy about it.
Katie McManus
00:14:46
Which, of course, if you've ever built a business or done something that's outside your comfort zone, you know that those three things do not help you make greater progress.
Katie McManus
00:14:55
And in reading books by privileged folks who don't own their privilege, who don't talk about the different challenges that they're able to farm out to other people because of how they live their lives, we end up shaming ourselves.
Katie McManus
00:15:09
We end up gaslighting ourselves that like, well, if they're able to do it, I should be able to do it too.
Katie McManus
00:15:13
And that shame will not help you build your dream.
Katie McManus
00:15:16
It will not help you build a business.
Katie McManus
00:15:17
It will not help you build something that matters to you.
Katie McManus
00:15:20
What it'll do is it'll send you to the pantry in your house where you'll sit on the ground and eat a shit ton of chocolate to make yourself feel better because you're depressed.
Katie McManus
00:15:57
My challenge for you this year is to become more discerning in who you're listening to.
Katie McManus
00:16:03
Absolutely.
Katie McManus
00:16:04
If you want to read Tim Ferriss the Four Hour Work Week and take what you can from it, the things that are realistic for your life right now, then go for it.
Katie McManus
00:16:14
But don't take it as gospel.
Katie McManus
00:16:16
Don't take everything that he says okay, and say, okay, well, now I have to rework my whole life to be exactly like Tim's.
Katie McManus
00:16:23
That's just not realistic.
Katie McManus
00:16:24
One of the things that Tim does great is he explains step by step how he did things.
Katie McManus
00:16:29
One of the things he kind of sucks at is explaining how he was already set up to be successful in that way.
Katie McManus
00:16:37
I mean, the guy went to Princeton.
Katie McManus
00:16:39
He dropped out for a year for his mental health, and then he was able to go back.
Katie McManus
00:16:43
I don't know about you, but I didn't go to Princeton.
Katie McManus
00:16:46
And even if I had, if I had dropped out, I probably would not have had the resources or the ability to go back after a year.
Katie McManus
00:16:53
And where you can seek out influencers and business owners and thought leaders who have either struggled in similar ways as you or in worse ways than you, or who at least own their privilege here, who own, kind of like I did, that they weren't wrapped up in childcare during the beginning stages of their business, who own that they had some support from mom and dad and don't try to make it sound like they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps where with absolutely nothing.
Katie McManus
00:17:29
When you invest time in listening to someone listen for the parts that they're not talking about.
Katie McManus
00:17:36
If you know that they have children and yet there's no acknowledgement to who took care of the kids while they were working 12 hour days, take note of that.
Katie McManus
00:17:45
Notice that they're not mentioning health struggles or difficulties with their mental health.
Katie McManus
00:17:51
And notice the ease of which they got into the rooms with the people who gave them their biggest opportunities.
Katie McManus
00:18:00
Did they have to fight and claw and argue for a seat at the table?
Katie McManus
00:18:05
Or did they have a buddy on the board who invited them to that happy hour where they met their first investor?
Katie McManus
00:18:20
One of the most common fears that my clients have when they start working with me is that they don't naturally have this network of their ideal clients built into their life.
Katie McManus
00:18:30
They don't know the people that they're going to sell to.
Katie McManus
00:18:32
Which makes sense, you know, if you're a top sales executive and you want to be a sales coach for folks who are just starting out in their first closing role.
Katie McManus
00:18:41
Like your social group is not going to be people early on in their career because you're not early on in your career as you started out 10 years ago.
Katie McManus
00:18:49
Yeah, your group of friends were all folks who were just starting out as well.
Katie McManus
00:18:54
But as you got each promotion as you got older, it's not like you cycled through friends as they became more successful.
Katie McManus
00:19:00
You're like, okay, peace out.
Katie McManus
00:19:02
I'm going to stay friends with the people who are just starting out now.
Katie McManus
00:19:05
I'm going to make new friends with this next wave.
Katie McManus
00:19:08
Absolutely not.
Katie McManus
00:19:08
That's not how humans work.
Katie McManus
00:19:10
You all grew together, you all changed jobs together.
Katie McManus
00:19:15
You know, when we listen to these guys and we hear them talk about, well, I just went to my friend and got an investment.
Katie McManus
00:19:20
We think, well, it should be that easy, right?
Katie McManus
00:19:23
We should have people in our friend groups who have the money or are our ideal clients.
Katie McManus
00:19:29
But that's not naturally how it goes.
Katie McManus
00:19:32
And just to let you know, you don't need to have a network full of your ideal clients before you start your business to be successful.
Katie McManus
00:19:39
It's one of the things that I train all of my clients on in the build your own business group program and in my one on one how to establish a network in the group of people that you want to sell to.
Katie McManus
00:19:51
You know, when I work with clients on their relationship with money, one of the things that we work on is their Money, hygiene.
Katie McManus
00:19:57
And I don't mean exfoliating yourself with dollar bills while you're in the shower.
Katie McManus
00:20:01
I mean, what is the type of information that you're allowing to enter your subconscious?
Katie McManus
00:20:07
What are the TV shows that you're watching that glorify being broke?
Katie McManus
00:20:12
What news channels are you watching that catastrophize the state of the economy?
Katie McManus
00:20:17
What friends and family members are you talking about on a regular basis?
Katie McManus
00:20:21
And how much do they bitch about the cost of things?
Katie McManus
00:20:24
Much like I have my clients get intentional about their money hygiene and cleaning out the things that are bad influences you, my friend, I want you to get super intentional about your thought leader hygiene.
Katie McManus
00:20:39
Who are the voices that you're listening to and are they actually helpful in you going after your dreams?
Katie McManus
00:20:47
Or do they blanket you in shame and gaslight you to think that this should be easier, that there's something wrong with you, that this is this hard.
Katie McManus
00:20:56
And I apologize if I just ruined your favorite book or your go to podcast, but I promise you it's for the better.
Katie McManus
00:21:04
And if you're in the midst of starting your business and you've been trying to follow all the advice, the ten step system to build your business just like that successful person did and it's not working for you, let yourself off the hook.
Katie McManus
00:21:20
And if you want help that is customized to you, to your limitations, to how you work, to your strengths and your weaknesses, and to the big juicy goal that you have at the end of this, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy.
Katie McManus
00:21:37
Call with me and we will sit down and talk about that big dream and look at all the areas in which you're facing obstacles and if it makes sense and we can talk about the different ways we can work, work together or I can point you in the direction of some resources that'll help you get there on your own.
Katie McManus
00:21:54
And if you want to book that call, go to weenacast.com strategycall and hopefully soon you will be that person.
Katie McManus
00:22:04
Hopefully soon you'll have the driver and the personal chef and the nanny if you have children.
Katie McManus
00:22:09
Or maybe you could have a nanny for your pets.
Katie McManus
00:22:11
Who knows?
Katie McManus
00:22:12
It would probably make more sense to have a nanny for a dog than say, a goldfish.
Katie McManus
00:22:16
I mean, unless.
Katie McManus
00:22:18
Unless you really, really care about the goldfish and think it needs a lot of attention.
00:00:18
Tim Ferriss won't help you build your business.
Katie McManus
00:00:20
Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach.
Katie McManus
00:00:24
And welcome to the weeniecast.
Katie McManus
00:00:27
Hopes and dreams die following the advice of privileged white men.
Katie McManus
00:00:32
And if you're a privileged white man listening to this podcast, know that I'm not disparaging your accomplishments, but I am calling out that the things that you were able to do to reach success are not available to most other people.
Katie McManus
00:00:47
Like many business owners, I have a bookshelf that is full of books written by Napoleon Hill, Tim Ferriss, biographies of people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, which I haven't read.
Katie McManus
00:01:00
To be fair, I bought them thinking they'd be interesting.
Katie McManus
00:01:02
And then I got like a chapter and I was like, this is not relevant to me because their experience is not my experience.
Katie McManus
00:01:08
I don't know that I can blame these books for.
Katie McManus
00:01:10
For making my business take longer to build.
Katie McManus
00:01:13
Maybe reading these books was actually a delay tactic on the part of my subconscious who was afraid of starting a business.
Katie McManus
00:01:20
But what I do know is that the vast majority of the advice given in these books were not possible for me.
Katie McManus
00:01:31
There's this one story in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill where he talks about a man whose sole goal in life was to become a business partner of Edison.
Katie McManus
00:01:42
And so this man, this white man who had not a penny to his name, stowed away on a train and made it to wherever Edison was.
Katie McManus
00:01:51
I forget the geography of the time.
Katie McManus
00:01:52
And showed up and basically, you know, said to Edison, I would like to be your partner.
Katie McManus
00:01:57
What can I do?
Katie McManus
00:01:58
And he just started working for Edison.
Katie McManus
00:02:01
He took any job that was available, and over time, he learned the business and he saw an opportunity to sell something that Edison was developing, and he did really well, and he became a business partner of Edison.
Katie McManus
00:02:15
And that story sounds so motivating.
Katie McManus
00:02:18
It sounds so inspirational, right?
Katie McManus
00:02:20
Like you can go from absolute nothing to being a business partner of one of the most renowned inventors of that age, someone who we still know and talk about to this day.
Katie McManus
00:02:33
But what if he were a single parent?
Katie McManus
00:02:36
What if he had an ailing father that he had to take care of?
Katie McManus
00:02:39
What if he'd been black?
Katie McManus
00:02:40
Would he have gotten that meeting with Edison?
Katie McManus
00:02:43
And even if he had gotten that meeting with Edison, when he identified the opportunity to become the business partner of Edison, do you think he would have been given it?
Katie McManus
00:02:51
Unfortunately.
Katie McManus
00:02:52
I mean, I can't say for sure, but unfortunately, knowing the history of the United States and the history of racism in the United States.
Katie McManus
00:03:00
I'd hazard a guess, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, that the answer is no.
Katie McManus
00:03:04
I saw a post on the social medias the other day that the whole belief system around making good choices assumes that everyone has good choices to make, that they have good options to choose from.
Katie McManus
00:03:25
The creator of the Diary of a CEO Part podcast, Stephen Bartlett, he actually had a baby.
Katie McManus
00:03:31
Well, he didn't personally.
Katie McManus
00:03:32
His girlfriend had a baby when they were teenagers and he went on to be massively successful.
Katie McManus
00:03:37
But in his story he talks about moving to New York and living in an apartment with a ridiculous amount of other people and doing things that were absolutely impossible if he were the primary caregiver of a child.
Katie McManus
00:03:52
This man had the privilege of having the mother of his child who did the vast majority of the child rearing and who could not have done what he did.
Katie McManus
00:04:04
Because what would society say of a woman, even if they're still a child, who abandoned their baby to go work in New York City and share an apartment with a ridiculous amount of people and to work an insane amount of hours and pursue your dreams?
Katie McManus
00:04:21
There's a double standard and the difference in opinion that she would have gotten about her lifestyle, about her choices, would have limited the choices that she was offered.
Katie McManus
00:04:33
If a man abandons his responsibilities as a father to go and pursue his business dreams, it's seen as admirable, it's seen as a sacrifice.
Katie McManus
00:04:44
If a woman does that, it's seen as neglectful, selfish, like she's lacking in morals.
Katie McManus
00:04:51
And people who are lacking in morals do not get offered the same opportunities as men.
Katie McManus
00:04:55
And people who are seen to be lacking morals do not get the same type of opportunities offered to them.
Katie McManus
00:05:01
Everyone loves to talk about how Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his parents garage, which of course, like that sounds like such a rough and tumble kind of way to start out.
Katie McManus
00:05:11
But what if your parents don't own a house?
Katie McManus
00:05:14
What if your parents don't have a garage or even a spare corner of their kitchen for you to set up shop and start your business?
Katie McManus
00:05:22
The mere fact that he had access to a garage to use for free to start Amazon is a massive privilege.
Katie McManus
00:05:30
Not to mention that I believe his parents lent him $300,000 to start Amazon along with a bunch of their rich friends.
Katie McManus
00:05:37
It's an incredible privilege to have access to people who have that kind of capital to invest in you.
Katie McManus
00:05:44
Most people do not have that.
Katie McManus
00:05:46
I could go on and on with more examples of this, but you're going to get bored.
Katie McManus
00:05:50
I'm going to get Bored talking about it.
Katie McManus
00:05:51
But really we have to talk about.
Katie McManus
00:05:53
The root of the problem here is that we're listening to people who don't give us the full fucking story.
Katie McManus
00:06:53
They want to be seen as someone who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, who are scrappy and intelligent and blessed with that little thing called luck, when really what we need to listen to is what they're not saying.
Katie McManus
00:07:08
They're not talking about who's picking up the kids from school.
Katie McManus
00:07:12
They're not talking about who is doing the laundry in the house.
Katie McManus
00:07:16
They're not talking about needing to work so that they can still have health insurance, so that they can afford their very expensive medication for their chronic illness.
Katie McManus
00:07:26
Because oftentimes the folks who write these books don't have any of that going on.
Katie McManus
00:07:31
And yet they want you, who might have children, who might need to take care of elderly relatives, who has housework to do, who has a job that you need to keep to keep health insurance, who has a myriad of other things going on in your life that you cannot neglect to go after your dream.
Katie McManus
00:07:49
They want you to believe that you just need to follow exactly what they did and you'll be successful just like them.
Katie McManus
00:07:57
And if you're not, the insinuation is that there's something wrong with you, there's something about you that's just not quite up to snuff, which in turn supports the mythology of them.
Katie McManus
00:08:08
There must be something preternaturally good or blessed or whatever about them in their life that allowed for them to be this successful.
Katie McManus
00:08:17
What we need more of is we need to hear the success stories, the real nitty gritty.
Katie McManus
00:08:23
Here's what I had to deal with in my life, and here are the sacrifices I had to make.
Katie McManus
00:08:28
And here's how I leaned into help in a gazillion different ways.
Katie McManus
00:08:33
And here's how I had to work towards my goal little by little, because I couldn't go for the big juicy dream like these guys.
Katie McManus
00:08:40
We need these kinds of stories for from women.
Katie McManus
00:08:42
We need them from people of color.
Katie McManus
00:08:44
We need them from folks with disabilities.
Katie McManus
00:08:47
We need them from folks who might have a different sexual orientation or who are not the generic cisgendered folks.
Katie McManus
00:08:54
Because the hopes and dreams of thousands, if not millions, die every single day trying to follow the advice of these privileged white guys.
Katie McManus
00:09:05
So instead of listening to them, people need to start listening to you.
Katie McManus
00:09:10
They need realistic advice.
Katie McManus
00:09:12
A great example of this is if you listen to any of Stacey Abrams books.
Katie McManus
00:09:17
She's real about the shitty options she had growing up about the debt she had to dig herself into in order to give herself a leg up about the family challenges that she had to deal with and about the prejudice she faced.
Katie McManus
00:09:33
We need more thought leaders like her.
Katie McManus
00:09:36
And if you're just starting out, if you have a hope or a dream or a goal that you're just not reaching because you're following the advice of these privileged white guys and it's not helping you, here's your permission to do things differently.
Katie McManus
00:09:50
Here's your permission to let go of the expectation that you should be able to follow their advice and get the same results.
Katie McManus
00:09:56
Because we all know that it's not true.
Katie McManus
00:10:02
When I work with my clients, sometimes I get the advice that I should be turning byob, my build your own business group program into kind of a business in a box program.
Katie McManus
00:10:11
It's like 10 step plan to build the the business of your dreams.
Katie McManus
00:10:15
If you just follow my step by step program, my step by step process, I did it and you can too.
Katie McManus
00:10:22
I'm sure that's probably going to be easier for me to market and easier for me to sell.
Katie McManus
00:10:27
I don't want to do it because I know it's not going to be as effective as how it is right now.
Katie McManus
00:10:33
One of the things that I love about that program, because I create the time and the space, is my ability to customize each plan, each strategy for each client based on who they are, their circumstances, the business type that they want to grow, and of course, the limitations and challenges that they are facing naturally in their day to day.
Katie McManus
00:10:52
And I'm only able to do this by keeping the program relatively small.
Katie McManus
00:10:57
I'm only able to do this by not making a business in a box kind of thing.
Katie McManus
00:11:03
Because here's the truth of it.
Katie McManus
00:11:05
Very few people would be able to grow their business and be successful doing exactly what I did.
Katie McManus
00:11:11
I had an immense amount of privilege in my safety net to fail.
Katie McManus
00:11:16
I mean, to be fair, I don't have children to this day, but when I started, I didn't have kids.
Katie McManus
00:11:21
I have a lot of clients who either have young children, they have kids who are about to go off to college, or they have infants, all of which require a different thing from them.
Katie McManus
00:11:32
A different amount of mental and emotional labor, a different level of presence, a different amount of financial support.
Katie McManus
00:11:39
I didn't have any of that when I started.
Katie McManus
00:11:42
And I hate saying this because it was an awful time for so many people and a lot of people didn't make it.
Katie McManus
00:11:47
But I also had the privilege of growing my business during a pandemic when literally there was nothing outside the house that required anything of me.
Katie McManus
00:11:56
I was responsible for doing my laundry, for feeding myself, for checking in on friends and family.
Katie McManus
00:12:02
But I was able to give 8, 10, 12 hours a day to my business.
Katie McManus
00:12:07
And because we were in a global lockdown, I was able to reach people online to a degree that is not possible today because everyone was cut off from their normal social lives, from the normal demands of day to day life, commuting, volunteer projects.
Katie McManus
00:12:24
So if I were to turn to my clients and tell them, well, you should be spending two hours a day on LinkedIn, it's not necessarily realistic for them.
Katie McManus
00:12:31
As you start working on your business and setting your goals and really looking for the right people to support you, be it a business strategist, a business coach, an online business manager, whatever your needs are, one of the questions you absolutely should be asking is how were you successful and in what ways is that success attributed to your privilege?
Katie McManus
00:12:57
And if they cannot answer that question, they can't tell you all the ways in which their life circumstances made it easier for them to be successful.
Katie McManus
00:13:07
If they can't own it, they're not the right coach or strategist for you because they're not going to be concerned about customizing your plan to you, to your limitations in your life because they won't be able to see the limitations if they don't have the ability to introspect about their own privilege.
Katie McManus
00:13:26
And it doesn't have to be big.
Katie McManus
00:13:27
One of the most damaging relationships that I've had in supporting my business was a public speaking coach who was big on here's how I did it, do it the exact, exact same way.
Katie McManus
00:13:39
And it sounds silly, but one of the things that she assigned to me as homework was that every day for an hour, I'd have to reach out to different organizations and events to propose myself as a speaker.
Katie McManus
00:13:50
And if you've listened to the Weeniecast at all and listened to the journey we've been on and know about how I work, doing things for an hour a day is not doable for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:01
I can sit down for five hours and bang through a ton of work and get into flow and get it all done.
Katie McManus
00:14:07
Carving out an hour a day, having to change gears into something that I only have an hour for and that I have to change gears out of, that's a lot more mental work for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:19
And so when I brought this up to her and I was explaining, you know, I understand that that works for you, but unfortunately, like that way of doing Work just does not work for me.
Katie McManus
00:14:28
Instead of getting any empathy or understanding or flexibility in me doing this thing in my own way, I got shamed for not being able to do it her way.
Katie McManus
00:14:41
I got berated.
Katie McManus
00:14:43
And it was implied that I was just being lazy about it.
Katie McManus
00:14:46
Which, of course, if you've ever built a business or done something that's outside your comfort zone, you know that those three things do not help you make greater progress.
Katie McManus
00:14:55
And in reading books by privileged folks who don't own their privilege, who don't talk about the different challenges that they're able to farm out to other people because of how they live their lives, we end up shaming ourselves.
Katie McManus
00:15:09
We end up gaslighting ourselves that like, well, if they're able to do it, I should be able to do it too.
Katie McManus
00:15:13
And that shame will not help you build your dream.
Katie McManus
00:15:16
It will not help you build a business.
Katie McManus
00:15:17
It will not help you build something that matters to you.
Katie McManus
00:15:20
What it'll do is it'll send you to the pantry in your house where you'll sit on the ground and eat a shit ton of chocolate to make yourself feel better because you're depressed.
Katie McManus
00:15:57
My challenge for you this year is to become more discerning in who you're listening to.
Katie McManus
00:16:03
Absolutely.
Katie McManus
00:16:04
If you want to read Tim Ferriss the Four Hour Work Week and take what you can from it, the things that are realistic for your life right now, then go for it.
Katie McManus
00:16:14
But don't take it as gospel.
Katie McManus
00:16:16
Don't take everything that he says okay, and say, okay, well, now I have to rework my whole life to be exactly like Tim's.
Katie McManus
00:16:23
That's just not realistic.
Katie McManus
00:16:24
One of the things that Tim does great is he explains step by step how he did things.
Katie McManus
00:16:29
One of the things he kind of sucks at is explaining how he was already set up to be successful in that way.
Katie McManus
00:16:37
I mean, the guy went to Princeton.
Katie McManus
00:16:39
He dropped out for a year for his mental health, and then he was able to go back.
Katie McManus
00:16:43
I don't know about you, but I didn't go to Princeton.
Katie McManus
00:16:46
And even if I had, if I had dropped out, I probably would not have had the resources or the ability to go back after a year.
Katie McManus
00:16:53
And where you can seek out influencers and business owners and thought leaders who have either struggled in similar ways as you or in worse ways than you, or who at least own their privilege here, who own, kind of like I did, that they weren't wrapped up in childcare during the beginning stages of their business, who own that they had some support from mom and dad and don't try to make it sound like they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps where with absolutely nothing.
Katie McManus
00:17:29
When you invest time in listening to someone listen for the parts that they're not talking about.
Katie McManus
00:17:36
If you know that they have children and yet there's no acknowledgement to who took care of the kids while they were working 12 hour days, take note of that.
Katie McManus
00:17:45
Notice that they're not mentioning health struggles or difficulties with their mental health.
Katie McManus
00:17:51
And notice the ease of which they got into the rooms with the people who gave them their biggest opportunities.
Katie McManus
00:18:00
Did they have to fight and claw and argue for a seat at the table?
Katie McManus
00:18:05
Or did they have a buddy on the board who invited them to that happy hour where they met their first investor?
Katie McManus
00:18:20
One of the most common fears that my clients have when they start working with me is that they don't naturally have this network of their ideal clients built into their life.
Katie McManus
00:18:30
They don't know the people that they're going to sell to.
Katie McManus
00:18:32
Which makes sense, you know, if you're a top sales executive and you want to be a sales coach for folks who are just starting out in their first closing role.
Katie McManus
00:18:41
Like your social group is not going to be people early on in their career because you're not early on in your career as you started out 10 years ago.
Katie McManus
00:18:49
Yeah, your group of friends were all folks who were just starting out as well.
Katie McManus
00:18:54
But as you got each promotion as you got older, it's not like you cycled through friends as they became more successful.
Katie McManus
00:19:00
You're like, okay, peace out.
Katie McManus
00:19:02
I'm going to stay friends with the people who are just starting out now.
Katie McManus
00:19:05
I'm going to make new friends with this next wave.
Katie McManus
00:19:08
Absolutely not.
Katie McManus
00:19:08
That's not how humans work.
Katie McManus
00:19:10
You all grew together, you all changed jobs together.
Katie McManus
00:19:15
You know, when we listen to these guys and we hear them talk about, well, I just went to my friend and got an investment.
Katie McManus
00:19:20
We think, well, it should be that easy, right?
Katie McManus
00:19:23
We should have people in our friend groups who have the money or are our ideal clients.
Katie McManus
00:19:29
But that's not naturally how it goes.
Katie McManus
00:19:32
And just to let you know, you don't need to have a network full of your ideal clients before you start your business to be successful.
Katie McManus
00:19:39
It's one of the things that I train all of my clients on in the build your own business group program and in my one on one how to establish a network in the group of people that you want to sell to.
Katie McManus
00:19:51
You know, when I work with clients on their relationship with money, one of the things that we work on is their Money, hygiene.
Katie McManus
00:19:57
And I don't mean exfoliating yourself with dollar bills while you're in the shower.
Katie McManus
00:20:01
I mean, what is the type of information that you're allowing to enter your subconscious?
Katie McManus
00:20:07
What are the TV shows that you're watching that glorify being broke?
Katie McManus
00:20:12
What news channels are you watching that catastrophize the state of the economy?
Katie McManus
00:20:17
What friends and family members are you talking about on a regular basis?
Katie McManus
00:20:21
And how much do they bitch about the cost of things?
Katie McManus
00:20:24
Much like I have my clients get intentional about their money hygiene and cleaning out the things that are bad influences you, my friend, I want you to get super intentional about your thought leader hygiene.
Katie McManus
00:20:39
Who are the voices that you're listening to and are they actually helpful in you going after your dreams?
Katie McManus
00:20:47
Or do they blanket you in shame and gaslight you to think that this should be easier, that there's something wrong with you, that this is this hard.
Katie McManus
00:20:56
And I apologize if I just ruined your favorite book or your go to podcast, but I promise you it's for the better.
Katie McManus
00:21:04
And if you're in the midst of starting your business and you've been trying to follow all the advice, the ten step system to build your business just like that successful person did and it's not working for you, let yourself off the hook.
Katie McManus
00:21:20
And if you want help that is customized to you, to your limitations, to how you work, to your strengths and your weaknesses, and to the big juicy goal that you have at the end of this, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy.
Katie McManus
00:21:37
Call with me and we will sit down and talk about that big dream and look at all the areas in which you're facing obstacles and if it makes sense and we can talk about the different ways we can work, work together or I can point you in the direction of some resources that'll help you get there on your own.
Katie McManus
00:21:54
And if you want to book that call, go to weenacast.com strategycall and hopefully soon you will be that person.
Katie McManus
00:22:04
Hopefully soon you'll have the driver and the personal chef and the nanny if you have children.
Katie McManus
00:22:09
Or maybe you could have a nanny for your pets.
Katie McManus
00:22:11
Who knows?
Katie McManus
00:22:12
It would probably make more sense to have a nanny for a dog than say, a goldfish.
Katie McManus
00:22:16
I mean, unless.
Katie McManus
00:22:18
Unless you really, really care about the goldfish and think it needs a lot of attention.
