Full Transcript

Sari
Maybe you like sitting around in confusion and overwhelm and doubt, but I sure don't. I want to skip the line experience. I want to get inside a community with an expert who knows how to help me and understands my problems, and gets me answers fast so that I can make decisions and keep moving forward. I also want someone to hold me accountable, and keep me focused on my business and moving it forward and limit the life distractions that happen for all of us. And I want to be surrounded by a community of other entrepreneurs who understand what it's like. It helps me to not feel so alone and so overwhelmed in what I need to do to put myself out there and possibly be judged or rejected or laughed at, and all the crazy stories that our brain makes up when we start to do something uncomfortable when we get out of our comfort zone. That is why I am for a limited time opening up the Fuel membership as a standalone product. So you can go and just get the Fuel membership. I have people ask me all the time, I've already have a business, I'm already launched. How can I work with you? How can I get information and feedback and community? Well, now is your chance. It starts at $57 a month and you can cancel at any time. So come and take a small risk that has potential for huge payouts to skip the line and get yourself into action and get yourself results so much faster than just spinning out on your own. I see the difference that it makes in entrepreneurs who come to the calls, who get coaching, who connect with community. We have members in there that are constantly reporting, I tried this, I did this, I got this advice, and I am increasing my sales. It is working. I'm going faster than I ever thought possible. And studies show that you are 95% more likely to actually achieve your goals when you get accountability and support. Don't put this off, go to foodbizsuccess.com/fuel and get inside. I look forward to meeting you in Fuel and we are going to add some rocket fuel to your business.

Sari
Welcome to your Food Business Success. This podcast is for early stage entrepreneurs in the packaged food industry ready to finally turn that delicious idea into reality. I'm your host Sari Kimbell, I have guided hundreds of food brand founders to success as an industry expert and business coach and it's got to be fun. In this podcast, I share with you mindset tools to become a true entrepreneur and run your business like a boss, interviews with industry experts to help you understand the business you are actually in and food founder journeys so you can learn what worked and didn't work and not feel so alone in your own journey. Now let's jump in!

Sari
Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. How are you? Are you enjoying fall? We are having the most beautiful fall right now in Colorado. It is, I think, the best season of the year, if you live here. So I hope you're enjoying your fall wherever you are at. And we are in it. We are fully in Q4. And I wanted to talk about a word that has been kind of popping into my mind a lot recently and I've been thinking a lot about it. In Master Your Business we've been talking about our 10x goals and we're working on defining those for the rest of the year, and for our three year plan as well as for 2024. And the word is hope. Now I'm sure you've heard the comment of like hope is not a strategy. And I completely agree with that. We can't build a business solely on hope, and hope I believe is the first layer of the foundation. As you think about becoming an entrepreneur or taking your business to the next level. It has to be built on hope. So I want to explore this just a little bit more and you can think of this as your cue for pep talk. The last few years I've done a pep talk getting you psyched up and really excited and engaged, optimistic and hopeful about what is possible for you in Q4. Many brands rely on this time of the year to really ramp up sales. And that may not be you for some brands, certainly ones around health, I find those tend to be more Q1. But in any case, you need to be getting ready for that. So this applies no matter where you are at in the year, whatever time you are listening, but consider this your cue for pep talk. Hope is absolutely essential for starting a business. Listen, if you did not have hope, you probably wouldn't even be here listening to this podcast. If you didn't have hope that you could be successful, you would never even think to try. Entrepreneurs by nature, I think just have to be high hope people. There's just no way that you would spend the amount of energy and resources to start a business if you weren't. I've been thinking about this in other places in your life, right? If you want to get healthy, you want to lose weight, or you want to find a relationship, or any number of things. If you don't have hope, that it's possible, you're not even going to try. It like completely shuts you down. Hope is not the same thing as wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is just kind of in La La Land where everything is perfect and everything is just working out with no challenges and no obstacles. And hope really only comes because of challenges. We have to have some tension, some force, some obstacle that creates hope. It is an emotion. It's also a state of mind. And we can actually build up the habit of hope. If you think about any circumstance, let's just say, launch a business or grow your business. That's the fact, like that's what you want to do. If your thought is like, I believe this could work, I have hope. And your feeling that you generate is hopefulness. Think about what that does to your action line. You're going to be much more inspired, motivated, optimistic, in taking the action. Versus if you were like, I don't think it's for me. I don't know what to do, I don't have what it takes, I don't think I can be successful. You're not going to have hope, you're probably going to be more pessimistic or discouraged or just shut down. And you're not going to take good action if you even take action at all. And so I love this idea of building the foundation of your business on hope. It's not a strategy, we can't just sit back and hope. We have to take action in there. I went through the model where we still have to take action to get results. But hope can really be fuel for the fire. And hope really embodies agency and willpower. It's like, I have the power to affect my circumstances. And even if that's just how I respond, you know, how I show up. And there's a sense of like, I'm going to have to go through challenges, this isn't going to be easy, but I am committed to seeing it through, to getting through on the other side. And there's a great book called Learned Hopefulness, which I love that title because there's a concept in psychology called learned helplessness. But I love this idea of like learned hopefulness that if you don't consider yourself a very hopeful person, you can actually change that. And we do know that high hope people do better in the world, they're going to create bigger things, they're going to go after their dreams and their goals. Because if you don't have hope that you can change your circumstances, you're not going to do anything. You're going to stay on the couch and you're going to watch Netflix and you're going to buffer and you're going to eat and drink and do various things to numb you out because you don't believe that it's possible for you. So we have to stretch ourselves, we have to think about what's possible. We have to get outside of our comfort zone and have hope that it's possible for us.

Sari
So learned hopefulness is a couple of things. It's seeing possibilities rather than remaining fixed and unchangeable. And this is why I love coaching. And I have another podcast called Reinvent and I call myself a reinvention coach, I've thought about calling myself a possibility coach as well. Because what I really do is help people see possibilities. We get so in this black and white thinking, fixed mindset, and we need to be looking at what are all the possibilities, and that you do have choices. And sometimes you just don't even know what's possible because you're so focused on what's right in front of you and a coach can really help you see that. Learned hopefulness is also characterized by noticing the beauty, blessings, and benefits rather than focusing on negatives. So gratitude, cultivating that, cultivating presence, and focusing on beauty and pleasure around you. Cultivating positive feelings rather than settling on habitual negativity. I was at dinner last night with a friend and we were talking about, he kind of noticed that he's like, I think I've kind of been painting myself like creating an identity. That's just become habit that's a little bit on the negative side. And we all do this. And notice, like how you present yourself to others? Is it like, you're always faced with a challenge, or you kind of joke and like put yourself down that like, I don't know, like you, you don't know exactly what you're doing, or you can't figure it out, or bad things are always happening to you. It's a habit. And we just have to become aware of it first, and say, do I really want to be using those words to describe myself? Like when somebody gives me a compliment, do I want to refuse that and not accept it? Or do I want to say thank you and receive it? And so cultivating positive feelings is a habit that you start with little things. And it doesn't mean you're Pollyanna, doesn't mean you see everything as amazing. It's so great. But can you shift? A lot of times it's in your words. It's like catching your thoughts and the words that come out of your mouth. And could you just shift it a little bit to like, when somebody says, how's it going, and you're like, oh, my gosh, it's so dramatic, and it's all these things to being like, actually, there's some really good things going on. There's some challenges, and there's some really good things, or maybe you just need to get to neutral and be like things are okay, I'm figuring it out. Another characteristic is focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses, creating goals that are challenging. We want goals that challenge us, we want goals that stretch us. And the key here and I say it over and over again, the key with goals is that we have to detach achieving the goal with our self worth. We have to detach those things. A goal is there to stretch you. I want you to come up with a 10x goal, which is what we do in Master Your Business, to say, I'm probably not going to get this, I'm probably not going to achieve it, and it's there to stretch me. You know, I challenged one of our Fuel members and she also did Master Your Business. She said my goal is 10 new wholesale accounts. And I said make that 100 because you might not get to 100, but you sure as heck are going to get to 10 if you set your goal at 100. If you set your goal to 10, it's likely you're not going to hit it, or you kind of put it off because you're like, yeah, I can get it any time. Set your goal at 100, now you have to start thinking differently, you have to be more creative, you have to see possibilities, you have to try new things, you have to be bold, you have to get out of your comfort zone. So creating 10x goals, creating challenging goals that stretch you. And we do not make it mean anything about us when, I say when because I want your goal to be that challenging, that it's unlikely you will achieve it. Finding purpose rather than a lack of meaning. And cherishing relationships rather than remaining isolated and self interested. So important you guys as entrepreneurs, that you foster relationships in many forms. That you find networks of people who you can talk to, who are peers, who are advisors, who are mentors. You need to get out of your little bubble and that's exactly why I created Fuel was the relationships with me, but also with each other and it's so fun. I love how engaged our Fuel community is with each other. We're posting wins, we're sharing. We're asking questions, we're supporting each other. This is one of the keys to feeling more hopeful that you're not just in your own world with your trash thoughts that are key be new stuck. And that you are actually learning hopefulness through connection, through relationships. Just for fun, I want you to see if you can call up hope in your body, doesn't have to be about your business, think about anything else that maybe has some, it has to have challenges and uncertainty and a little bit of negativity. Because that's why we create hope is that we can overcome it, right. So think about something that is a little bit challenging, that you still have hope for, you have hope about. And hope is not the same thing as faith. Hope is the belief that we have the power to change our lives, versus faith is a little bit more passive. I feel like hope has a little more activation to it. So when I am hopeful about something, when I think about being hopeful about affecting my health, right, and I've been lifting weights in the gym and changing my diet and feeling so good. And I have a lot of hope around being a strong, fit, healthy woman. And when I think about that, it feels very activating. It feels like a little bit gritty, for me at least in my stomach and my chest. And I'm like, yeah, it's got some charge to it. It's got some activation, it feels like I want to make progress. I want to take an action. And I want to celebrate that, right. And so it's not just sitting back and going I have faith that it's possible. I have faith in some bigger thing outside of myself. Yeah, of course I do. But hope is a little bit different. And so, see if you can call that up about something else. Because it can be really helpful to just notice, what does it feel like in your body? And what are the thoughts that you're thinking? And then see if you can apply that, if maybe you're not feeling so hopeful right now about your business. See if you can apply that. And maybe you just need to find one area. Maybe it's not the whole business. But it's one thing that you're like, yes, I'm hopeful that I can do this. I'm hopeful that this is possible. I'm hopeful that I can reach this goal in just this one area. And the reason I'm telling you all this, why I'm talking about hope is because the more you can purposefully cultivate hope that the better, the easier, the faster your business will go. And that goes for any area of your life. But just think about it like the action that you're going to take from a more positive emotion versus a negative emotion, right. And I want you, the whole point of what I do in the world, my mission is to help brands and founders and entrepreneurs to really get into positive action, and speeding things up and spending less time in suffering and negativity. And so when we can cultivate hope, we're going to increase our positivity, we're going to reduce negative thoughts, we're going to boost our energy and confidence. We're going to build up our self esteem, we're going to reduce our stress, we're going to take actions that actually bolster us up, right. If you don't have hope that you could change your body, lose weight, get healthier, whatever, then you're like, let me go eat that pint of ice cream and sit on the couch, right? Hopelessness versus I have hope. I'm going to make different decisions. And I want to leave you with some ideas from Viktor Frankl around hope. And Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, I highly recommend this book in so many ways and in other contexts as well. He was a prisoner of the Holocaust and he spent time I think in multiple camps, but mainly in Auschwitz. And it was a horrible circumstances, right? He was a psychologist going into this, so he was in the experience, but he was also paying attention to what was happening around him. Victor observed that those who survived the longest were not necessarily the most physically fit. The ones who survived were the ones who maintained a sense of hope and control in their environment. He believed that we could find hope in even the darkest of places, and that our motivation for life comes from meaning, and one of his great quotes and there's so many of them, but he says, everything can be taken from a man or a woman. Just insert that. But one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way and sometimes the only thing that you can control is your response, is your ability to hope. All right, so what I want you to do is start cultivating more hope. Find it in other places, see where you can apply it to your business, to the possibility of launching, to the next steps of creating a profitable business. I want you to really mind your mind. Watch your words, notice where you can make some negative thoughts and comments a little bit more neutral. They don't have to go too Pollyanna and overly positive, but just, you know, can we bump that up just a little bit. Can we notice where we're on autopilot and just creating a negative experience over and over again? And go find connection, come join me in Fuel, we still have our Bonus Mindset Call coming up at the end of October. We have multiple calls coming up this month. And this is where you can really start cultivating more hope where you have people cheering you on and you feel more connected. To join us you go to foodbizsuccess.com/fuel, and I would love to see you inside. Until next time, have an amazing hopeful week.

Sari
The smartest thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to invest in a who to help you with the how to speed up your journey and help you skip the line. When you are ready for more support and accountability to finally get this thing done. You can work with me in two ways. Get me all to yourself with one on one business coaching or join Food Business Success which includes membership inside Fuel, our community of food business founders that includes monthly live group coaching calls and so much more. It's one of my favorite places to hang out and I would love to see you there. Go to foodbizsuccess.com to start your journey towards your own Food Business Success.