Make Quantum Leaps By Getting Out Of Your Own Way With Amira Alvarez

Episode 423: Make Quantum Leaps By Getting Out Of Your Own Way With Amira Alvarez

 

Sometimes the only thing holding you back from living your best life is yourself. It’s a fine art to learn how to get out of your own way and let yourself progress to the next level. The first thing you got to do is to recognize this self-sabotaging behavior. Joining Mitch Stephen on the podcast today is Amira Alvarez, the Founder and CEO of The Unstoppable Woman®, a global coaching company helping thousands of driven women, entrepreneurs, and self-employed professionals achieve their financial breakthrough. Don’t miss this conversation with Amira and Mitch as they give the lowdown on how you can make quantum leaps by getting out of your own way.

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I’m here with Amira Alvarez and she’s over in North Carolina. I’m over here in San Antonio, Texas and we’re going to talk about how to get out of your own way. I love this topic because I’ve been tripping over myself for years. It’s a fine art to learn how to get out of your own way and let yourself progress to the next level. The first thing you’ve got to do is to recognize that you’re in your way so you may be in the right spot now. How are you doing, Amira?  

I’m doing fantastically. How are you doing, Mitch?

I’m doing good. I’m ready to roll. I have to pay homage, though, to my sponsor so give me a second to pay the bills. This episode is brought to you by TaxFreeFuture.com. If you don’t have a self-directed IRA, a 401(k), health savings account, educational account, or someplace you can grow your finances without the burden of those pesky little taxes, then you are missing a huge tool that you could have in your tool belt. Please go to that website, check out the 37 little video vignettes there, and see how you take little pieces of money and make it into big pieces of money in a relatively short period of time, completely tax-free or tax-deferred. Check it out because you will not believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. What are we going to do now, Amira?  

Let’s talk about making an income breakthrough.

You had a business where you were coaching women and you were making $130,000 plus or minus.  

It is $138,000. I had crossed that six-figure mark. I was proud of myself for having done that. That was the first big barrier to move through.

How long did you revel at that thing? Sometimes, if people get happy with something, they stay there. How long did you stay there?  

Not me. I am the opposite side of the coin there. I’m the person that needs to work on celebrating her successes and revel, enjoying it because I’m ambitious and driven. I’m always looking at the next level end goal. I learned this the hard way. I think it’s a good idea to have your next level goal set even before you’ve achieved your first level goal because it keeps you moving forward and you do have to revel in the pride and having accomplished it. I’ve never been an athlete and I set this goal for myself. I used a methodology for going from $138,000 to $700,000 a year. That’s the big “how did you do that” story. I figured out the methodology to that and I started using it all over in my life. When I went to do this for my physical health, I decided I’m going to run a marathon, not being a runner.

You went from zero to I’m going to run a marathon.  

I picked a marathon that was seven months away, which turns out it is not enough time to train. I was like, “I’m going to do this big goal. Let’s go.” I had to figure out how to do this. It did cause me to figure out how to do this. I finished that marathon. I ran walked it. I did not run the entire time, truth and transparency, but I finished the marathon and that was outstanding. I didn’t use my methodology on this at the end. I didn’t pick my next level goal. After I finished running that marathon, I stopped running after three weeks.

 

Amira, maybe you didn’t like it.  

I loved it. It was good. I was proud of myself. I was getting in great shape. It was energizing, but I didn’t have my next level goal. The way human beings work is we set these GPSs or go to points that are either conscious or unconscious. They could be subconscious and not where you want to go. If you set a conscious goal, you were telling me when we were chitchatting that you have goals. You have metrics that you’re going for in terms of how many houses you’re buying and selling and what you’re doing. That gives you a direction point. If you don’t have that, you are directionless or rudderless. You don’t know which way to go. You end up going in a lot of different circles. The big thing for me when I made that huge leap in income was I set a big ass goal for myself.

In income breakthroughs, people struggle with money. We seem to make it hard. When you start making money, you wonder, “Why was this hard?” It’s a revelation for a lot of people. I know a lot of people out there, it is hard for them. We’re stuck in our boxes. We’ve stuck in what we’ve been told all the time. We’re stuck in what people’s perception of us is like, “Mitch does this. Mitch does that. Mitch will never be that or anything else than that.” That’s all bullshit.

Making money is easy. I will tell you that when I was getting going, it was not easy. It was one of the hardest things in the world. I struggled quite a bit. I was banging my head against the wall. I was doing things like trading time for dollars and all sorts of things. I didn’t know how to leverage it. I didn’t know all the things that we need to do but making money is fundamentally a math equation. You have to figure out where you want to go and where you are now. You have to figure out how you’re going to get there. There are three ways to make more money. I don’t care if you’re Beyonce, Richard Branson, or Mitch Stephen, there are only three ways. You either sell more of what you’re already selling. It’s quantity. You raise your prices on what you’re selling, so that increases your income. You add a new channel of revenue, a business, either adjacent to what you’re already doing or something outside of it.

If you’re in corporate or have a job, you can do this. The new channel of income is your side hustle until it becomes your main hustle. It’s figuring out how to get yourself a raise and a bonus and become more for that position and receive more of a salary. There is no limit to that, except what’s inside your mind of what’s possible. I’ve helped women within jobs ten times their income and that’s outstanding. It makes a huge difference in your life. It creates opportunity, freedom, and the ability to have an agency for yourself.

This makes me curious because I’m a complete outsider to what you’re talking about as far as coaching is. Do you have people who go out and interview at other jobs and pit themselves against an opportunity against, “If I don’t get a raise, I’m moving?” Is that one of the strategies?

That’s a strategy. I don’t usually talk about it in pitting and competition. The first thing that you need to do is to claim what you want. I was talking about GPS. You have to know what you want. Vague desires and goals will give you vague results. You have to get clear about what you want. Fundamentally, if we’re talking income, revenue, and straight-up money, tell me what you want to be making. Do you believe that you’re worth that? That’s where we have to start. Once I know what that is, we know where you’re starting, we do the inner work and the tactical outer work to figure out how you close that gap.

If you’re telling me you’re making $60,000 and you want to be making $100,000 and you own it, then we’re going to the act of claiming that and saying, “I’m going to do this.” We’ll put a time period on it so that gives you some urgency because otherwise, people will put it off for years like, “I’m going to do that in the next month or the next year.” The ways and the means for how to do that start dropping in. Sometimes someone would go, “I want to work with Mitch. I want to buy a bunch of houses. This is the way I want to go.” Sometimes people are going to say, “I want to move up in this organization because I love this company. I also want this thing on the side, that’s going to light me up.” There’s no one size fits all of how to do this, but it’s absolutely a big possibility to get a new job. That’s a great way to quantum leap your income. It’s one of the fastest ways.

Go market yourself and find out who wants to pay more. Not that you’re necessarily out for the highest bidder because there are other things to consider like travel time, quality, and reputation of that company and all that other stuff. You’ve got to start somewhere. Sometimes, you have to bluff a little too.  

This is important. There are two philosophies on it. There’s the act as if philosophy and there’s the fake it until you make it philosophy. Fundamentally on some level, they mean the same thing, acting as if it’s like, “I’m going to act as if I’m already good enough to do this next level job or close this deal.” There’s real truth in doing this because before you have done something, you don’t have the actual experience to point to and say, “I’ve done this.” You have to take a leap of faith, trust yourself, have confidence and self-esteem in order to do it. You have to act as if you already have done it and you already can do it. That’s different than faking it. Faking it is saying, “That’s not me. I have to be someone else.”

I’ve done it before. I don’t know if I can do it and no one’s going to pay me to do it because I don’t have any track record of doing it. I am like, “Here, let me make a run at you for free. This is what I want to do. I’m not charging anything.” I had to prove to myself and to the other person that I can do it without an egg on my face. It is fair to me. If I’m not sure I can do it and it’s important, then, “Let me try to do it for you for free. If I mess up, it didn’t cost you anything. You can hire someone else.”

Vague desires and goals will give you vague results. You have to get clear about what you want. Click To Tweet

That’s a great way forward. It’s hard for people. There have been a lot of studies on this that women will read a job description and they’ll say, “I can do 3 out of 7 of those things that they want in this job. I won’t apply for it because I’m not yet there.” A man will look at those ten things in the job description and say, “I can do three. I’m going to apply.”

Every time I post a job opening up, they can’t do any of it and they apply. Have you done that before?  

There’s this imposter syndrome and where you hold yourself back in. I encourage people to step forward and own what you can and can’t do but put it forward to people like, “I’m great at this. This is how I would go about learning the skillset and how I would knock it out of the park.” You have to let people know how you’re going to give them more life and a lot more than what they already have in anything. I don’t care if we’re talking sales, houses, or jobs. Everyone in life wants more life. This is what human beings want. We want to grow, expand, have more, be more, do more, love more, whatever it is.

We have a problem that’s stopping us from expanding. When you’re in business or when you’re working for someone else, your job is to solve their problem. If you can solve their problem, they will be able to have more life and they will pay you for solving that problem. If you are looking to expand within the corporate world or your job, how can you help the company or the new company have more and create more? How can you solve problems? That’s what you’re going to get paid more for. You’re doing that in the housing world. You’re solving people’s problems and you’re getting paid well to do that.

I imagine you have to track that too so you can say, “I made this difference. Don’t you think I deserve a bit bigger piece of the pie?”

Metrics are important.

You’ve got to add up the numbers. You’ve got to know what you’re doing for these people.

I call it making love to the numbers. Don’t be afraid of the numbers. Track your numbers. Many people want to go ostrich, like put their heads in the sand. It’s like, “I don’t want to look at the numbers.” What were your goals for your company? What did you do? How did you do that? What was the time period? You’d be surprised how much you get done and then you might have an over-inflated sense of self and be surprised about how little you got done. You have to look at those numbers with a neutral perspective, without guilt or shame, without emotionalizing it, without telling yourself stories about whether that’s great or bad. The numbers are just the numbers. How are you going to improve that?

I had a coach one time. I was thinking about hiring a coach of $40,000 and I thought, “That’s a lot of money. “He says, “Compared to what?” I said, “Compared to what I have.” He says, “Why don’t you compare it to what you could make, then it won’t look big? Let me show you how this is going to work.” He showed me where like, “If you do a 1, 2, 3, you end up making $400,000 that you’re not making now because you don’t know what you don’t know and I know what you don’t know. I know where this is headed.” Even if you fall drastically short of that, $40,000 doesn’t look that big anymore because it is inconsequential. It doesn’t matter. Where do we get bamboozled in our brains about the value of education?  

There are a couple of things to talk about here. We think of education as a school, public or private school.

 

No wonder we don’t want to pay $40,000.  

I’m a big proponent of the thing school-school. I was the smarty pants in school. I was also a rebel child. I believe in education. It taught me lots of great things, including how to think about certain aspects of life. Fundamentally, it teaches you how to study for a test like, “Here’s the quiz and exam. Can you get your stuff together to perform on these tests and exams?” It doesn’t teach you how to think in a bigger level and how to make money. It teaches you how to perform for someone else and this is what you need to do in a job. You have a boss and you need to perform for someone else, which means that they’re setting the metrics and the goals. They are giving you that accountability and you are trained to be habituated to doing things for other people.

When you set off on your own, or you’re trying to run like do the housing, flipping, buying, and selling, you have to be self-motivated. You can’t rely on someone else to simply tell you what to do, when to do it, and hold you accountable. That’s a fear-driven style of motivation. It’s like, “If you don’t get this done by then, you’re going to lose your job.” That’s the underlying fear and then we lose money. We don’t know how to make money on our own and we’re scared. Instead, you have to learn, and this is what I do and master level coaches do. They teach you how to show up for yourself so that whatever goal you have whether it’s housing, starting your own business in a different way, or running that marathon, you know how to execute on it. You know how to show up for yourself.

You’re not just working for the test, showing up for other people, but it requires that you want what you want. You claim your big desire and say, “I want that.” Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck in an old pattern of belief that says, “Working for the test type of education that should be free is how I’m going to get ahead, when in fact there are lots of people that have great educations who were making good, solid, middle-class incomes.” There is nothing to knock there, but they don’t have financial freedom. They haven’t set themselves free. They need to realize that they have to invest in their training, in their lives, to learn a different way of thinking in order to show up differently.

If you’re not making $1 million a year, then you need to hang around a guy or a woman that does and figure out how he’s thinking and to say, “What are the differences of the way that we think?” There’s a huge difference in the way that they think. You won’t see multimillionaires, for the most part, mowing their lawn, taking out the trash, or doing a lot of things, even unbelievable amounts of things they won’t do because it’s a different priority.

Their time is valuable.

My wife wants to ask me if I could stop by and get the cleaners. I said, “I’m worth about $800 an hour. Can we get someone else to do that?” It didn’t work out well. The marriage didn’t work out well at all.  

That’s excellent. Whether it’s in my business or my personal life, I am firing myself up. I’m like, “That’s no longer my job. I need to do something. This is my genius work. This is what I’ve been put on this earth for. This is where I make my money. I can hire that out.” You have to start thinking that way. When I first started, that was the hardest thing in the world. It was hard for me to hire my first assistant. I was like, “What is she going to think about me making more money? Can I delegate? Do I have to apologize for asking her to do something?” Now I think about that. I can’t believe I thought that way, but that was real. I felt guilty about hiring someone, even though that person wanted a job. That person was grateful.

I felt guilty because my self-image wasn’t the self-image of a millionaire. My self-image wasn’t the image of someone who even made $200,000. My self-image was that of someone who had to struggle to make ends meet. I kept finding myself in a thought pattern that kept me recreating that self-image. I had to do some deep work. I worked with mentors to change how I thought about myself because you will never change what you are able to achieve until you change how you see yourself. That’s going to raise the value that you place on yourself, and that’s going to cause you to take different actions.

Hiring a personal assistant is a monumental step for most people. I remember when I first got my personal assistant. It scared me at first because there was overhead, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that this person was taking so much off my plate, that I was able to make way more than she was costing me. It was ridiculous that I waited so long to do it. I almost shamed myself into like, “That wasn’t cool. You could have been doing this a few years ago.” Those adjustments go faster if you hire or make up your mind to get through them. There’s a lot of free stuff. We can watch a lot of stuff. The personal attention, I’m going to guess because judging your personality, you get involved in people’s lives. You take it seriously. You listen to them. You’re sizing them up, figuring out where some of the weak spots are, what they’re strong at, and help people get through it. Describe a conversation with someone who’s fearful of the next step. How do you talk to them?  

I’m looking for the blind spot in their thinking. The blind spot is, by definition, something that you are blind to. You can’t see it. You’re in the weeds. You’re in the forest for the trees. You cannot see this yourself. I can see this tactical thing that we’re talking about you doing is not that complicated. Even the person might say, “I know what to do, but I’m not doing it. I can’t seem to execute on it.” Sometimes they don’t know what to do. That’s also an issue, but I will then start inquiring as to why that would be. My first question is, “What do you want?” I need to hear an emotional resonance in terms of what they want. Often, someone will tell me that they’re not doing something because the thing that they need to be that they’re telling me they’re not doing and not motivated on, isn’t the thing that’s going to get them what they want. It’s going to get them what’s reasonable. It’s going to get them what their uncle told them that they should be doing. What their wife or partner told them that they should be doing. It’s a practical reasonable thing, but it’s not what they truly want to be doing in their lives. We’re conditioned to make compromises instead of owning our real desires. It could be a financial desire, an income desire, impact desire, a passion-purpose desire. There are all kinds of desires, zero judgment on whether it’s like, “Here’s my financial goal. I want to get there. I don’t care how.”

Step forward and own what you can and can't do. Click To Tweet

They morph. Once you get them and when you go to another one. For me, first is money, but then you figure out like, “I’ve got enough money. There’s nothing else I can do. If I’m going to keep doing this, there’s got to be a higher reason. I don’t need any more money. I’d like to have more, but I don’t need it.” It is not going to change my life. If I make an extra million dollars tomorrow, it’s not going to change where I live. It’s not going to change the way I drive and who I hang out with.

When I was making that big leap, $138,000 to $700,000, my goal was $1 million. I ended up getting there, but not that year. I ended up surpassing it. My goal was, “I want to make $1 million in 2020.” It was financial. I didn’t want to be a horrible person. I didn’t want to lose my sense of ethics or integrity, but I didn’t have a spiritual purpose that I was following. Having gone through that, now I know what my purpose is. It’s clear.

What is that purpose?

It’s helping people get out of their own way in this process. Let me elaborate on that. When I got out of my way and started to do the things that were scary to me because they went against what was in my subconscious sense of self, identity, image, and my belief structures that weren’t logical. I can’t say no to someone would be a simplistic version of that. You’re constantly doing things for other people instead of growing your business. Once I started moving forward like this, I was on a journey. I had to keep growing. When I grew and became the person who could have the million-dollar business, I had to grow to become the person who had the million-dollar business. I had to learn certain things so that I could do that.

In that process, I found my personal freedom, emotional freedom, mental freedom so I’m no longer driven by fear, feeling trapped, or feeling like the world or circumstances are happening to me. The big deal now with COVID, a lot of people feeling stuff is happening to them. There’s a methodology to this and I know exactly how and what to do to show up powerfully in this world and to create what I want. I’m no longer mentally and emotionally trapped, but I had to go through the process. That process started by taking the actions that were required to grow the business. That was the container in which I learned all those lessons.

I got 2 or 3 questions in a row. Who fails with you? Who shows up for you when it doesn’t work? Who is that person?  

It depends on what level they’re coming in at, people who don’t take action. The people who win with me are the people who are action takers, but they aren’t putting their effort in the right direction, on the right things because they have this blind spot that’s keeping them from showing up. The people who fail are the ones who are only about tactics and are not willing to look at their inner game, the level of truth and honesty that they have to get about, what beliefs they’re holding about the way the world works and life works. They work with other people. They’re committed to doing things their way that they won’t change. They don’t have a willingness to change.

It is the same here. People have something way deep down inside that they feel guilty to make money. You answer the second one, who succeeds with you?

The people who are willing to go deep and to look at their psychology, that subconscious programming, that’s keeping them stuck playing at the same level, looking at their lives and being like, “If this keeps going for another 1, 2, 5 or 10 years, I’m going to die with regrets. This is not okay.” They have to be willing to change and to do deep personal work.

It’s scary. They have to come with hat in hand to be vulnerable and be able to look at themselves realistically or honestly, and say, “Maybe I do have that problem.” They then go to work on it. It’s not fun. Sometimes, I’m fixing to do some things. I told them at this mastermind, they sent me this bio and I read it. I watched this little video clip of it and I said, “This scares the hell out of me,” which means I’ve got to go there. I learned a long time you’ve got to go right to your fear. I did this piece on fear one time. If you’ll get nose to nose with the dragons that scare you, they shrink in size almost immediately. Over time, you think, “How and why in the world was I ever scared of that?”

 

I call it moving towards the resistance. It’s scary. All the thinking up until the time you take the action, but once you take the action, it’s done. You did it. You look back and you’re like, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

I find fear as conquered by action. I get busy attacking it that you don’t have time to be afraid of it. I’m planning the next move. I’m busy attacking my fears that I don’t have time to be afraid.  

Action is a bomb.

Give us a success story or two. What stands out? Some of the people that have shown up to say, “I want to meet this unstoppable woman and I want to become one of them.”

I would like to give a variety of success stories. I’ve had clients that go from making $188 to $1.2 million in a year. That’s an enormous success story. She did it fundamentally by claiming her desires. I helped her move through the blocks that were keeping her from doing what she wanted to do, then everything started to happen. Were there tactical things that had to go along with that? Absolutely. That’s a high-level success story. She was already making significant money.

What had to change? What was the difference? Can you go into a little bit more?  

Here’s the inner game piece. She was trapped by living where she was living in Northern Wisconsin and feeling like she wanted to live in Florida. She wanted to snowbird, but she was trapped by, “What do I do with the kids? What would my parents think? Everyone’s going to think I’m all that and more. They’re going to judge me.” It was complete fear. I had her book. The first step that I had her take was getting off this call. “I don’t want you to do anything between now and then. Book a condo or a house for a month and we pick a date and you’re doing it. You’re going to figure out how to handle this kid’s school and how to handle your parents and everything next.” She did that. She didn’t die. Your subconscious thinks you’re going to die.

She had a damn good time in her business and she felt good about herself. I know it seems tangential, but she felt good about herself. She was doing more in her business and taking the action instead of feeling small and she couldn’t be out there doing her thing. She had conquered a little bit of that “I have to live for other people” mentality. Let me give you another example. Another example is a client who had a landscaping business and her average contract is around $34,000. Now, her average contract is around $1 million. That shifted not overnight, but in a matter of three years. We were fundamentally back to the idea of hiring people and everything.

We had to work on the concept of not being responsible for other people because she had manipulative team members, emotionally-manipulative, toxic that she loved but were holding her back and keeping her trapped. She had a hard time seeing that. Once she saw that I was able to let them go, she was then able to scale her business step by step to the point where she’s buying other businesses. She’s got this great team that she loves with highly responsible people that have the same positive attitude, work hard, be good people attitude, and aren’t sucking her down. There are people who are like, “I’m starting my business. I’ve saved $10,000 to move from my job to start my business. What do I do?” We get them off the ground. We get them making incremental sales so that they can start making money. Often, I see people leave a job, save a bunch of money and be in complete paralysis because they don’t know how to step forward in self-actualization around their business.

Business becomes fun when it becomes a monopoly of money. I teach a thing called the moat theory where you get enough coming in to pay for your overhead, not your dreams or anything. You’ve got a moat and you put a castle in the middle and you’ve got your horses, chickens, garden, and the whole thing. You’ve got enough coming in over the moat to pay for it all and then anything you make over that, it’s R&D money. You can go out there and you make $10,000 extra and you want to try something and it fails, you come back because you haven’t collapsed.

In order for you to do more in your life, you have to grow and change. Click To Tweet

You still go inside here, pull up the drawbridge, and you’re still good inside this moat. You’ve got to start looking at money, not life and death. You can’t gamble everything and you don’t do well, then you lose your wife and you lose your house. It can get stressful to start off from damn near homeless. That’s a tough gig. I wrote a book called Failing Forward to Financial Freedom, which I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but I was trying to set myself up so I could fail without going under because I knew that we’d have to fail to get where we were going. I didn’t want to go under, to drown under. How often in your encounters with people is there this need to separate or move away from other people?

I don’t know what you found, Mitch, but it’s big. Here’s the hard truth that people fear and don’t want to hear. In order for you to do more in your life, you have to grow and change. When you grow and change, the people around you are forced to change by default because you’ve changed and they have not consciously chosen that. They have two choices. They can either grow with you or be pissed off about you growing and cause many sorts of havoc, sabotage, conflict and frustration. That’s one of the people’s biggest fears. “If I grow, I’m going to lose everyone around me.”

I can testify because I quit drinking and smoking after 40 years on August 1, 2019. My biggest fear was they’re not going to invite me to the party and people are going to leave me. They’re not going to want to be around me. It’s the stupidest fear in the world because I’m killing myself with these two vices for decades. It’s amazing how strong that fear is. The other thing is I don’t know who I am without that. That’s scary too because I know exactly who I am. I’m the life of the party. When you get out of there, you don’t know who you are. It turns out the ones that don’t invite me to the party anymore, I don’t even care. The ones that cared about me, they invite me to the party.

Luckily for me, I’m not triggered by being around it. I’ll be the bartender. I’ll serve the thing and I don’t care. You can smoke your cigarettes and I don’t care. I don’t want to do it anymore. Apparently, I’ve had enough. By the way, I went from 217 to 170. I lost about 55 pounds in 2019. Change is hard, but the rewards of major change, I’m talking about a health change, but any change, there have been more benefits than I ever imagined. I had this idea of why I wanted to stop, but the benefits that I got out of that change are changing my entire life. They’re changing everything. There were benefits inside of benefits that I did not calculate. It’s funny how the tiniest change can take your life in a completely different direction in that one term. If you miss that one appointment one day and instead of doing X, you did Y, you could end up in a whole different place in your life, a whole different country, a whole different planet. Change is fun. One thing cool about the change is you can probably go back 90% of the time.

People are afraid of that opportunity missed. I’m going to make that wrong decision. Yet, as your book Fail Forward, you have to take the risk. You have to choose A or B. With the best information that you have, take the risk, it might not work out exactly perfectly. It might, but it might not. You then course correct and you take the next step. You have to keep going forward, which I think is what you were implying in the title of your book.

Have you ever gotten to a place where you say, “I don’t know what to do next, but this isn’t working. I’m going to do the next thing that comes up, even if it’s way out of character?” I said, “I’ve got to scramble the board. I have to change the pieces and move. I don’t like how it is.” Have you ever done that?  

I have quite significantly.

Do you want to talk to us about it?

I had a great marriage, not a bad marriage, but it wasn’t great in some key factors. I was like, “Do I work to make this work, or do I change things up?” That’s a tough conversation to have with your spouse and partner. We ended up having a conscious conversation. I know that sounds like you’re rusting on it.

This is interesting though because you can hardly separate this personal as parts of life from the business parts of life. I tell people that all the time, “Can I talk to you about this?” I said, “We can talk about anything you want to talk about because there’s no separating your life or even your personal life from what’s going on in this business.” They almost collide every day.

We put some coaching calls on our show with permission from these particular clients. They’ve allowed us to do a series called Coaching Uncut, where people can listen in to the kinds of topics that are coming up. You can see this intersection between personal life and professional life. Before you enter into the coaching world, you think that coaching is all going to be about business or that business and personal life are separate and they’re not. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. If you’re stuck over here, you’re going to be stuck over here. You might not be seeing the connections, but I see the connections in, you mentioned, you see the connections. We have to solve those problems. For me, I was at a juncture where like, “Am I going to grow with this person that had been my dream my whole marriage, or is the growth here not happening and we’ve given it enough of an effort?” We had a conscious conversation where I wasn’t showing up in the marriage the way he needed me to show up. I’ll be transparent. I’m probably oversharing, but we didn’t have a great sex life.

 

That’s what’s great about this conversation. I want to thank you for being transparent like that because that’s the kind of talk that we need to hear. When you’re one-on-one with a coach, they will open up about their personal life and what they’ve been through too so they can relate to you. It gets to be a professional but intimate relationship between two people. That’s important. If it’s important to you and it’s not happening, no matter what it is, then you can’t expect to go on and be happy. You have to do something.

In this case, he wasn’t happy around it. We’d been working on that for a while and I thought it was me. There are a lot of women who think it’s them that’s somehow dysfunctional around this. I got divorced, dating someone else, and having the best sex of my life. This came up because as you said, has there been a time where you had to change things up and this isn’t working? I’ve been trying this for a while. I’ve been trying to solve this problem. I had put good effort into this, but I haven’t solved that problem. I think I need to change this up. I know that’s going to trigger some people like you’re being too flip about your marriage and divorce and all of that.

I don’t think so. If this wasn’t for them, maybe the next episode will do better for you, but there are all kinds of people that read this blog or any blog for that matter. Sometimes we hit on topics for a certain number of people and that’s what they need and what they have to hear. I see it all the time. The people like that one episode you were talking right to me, I didn’t know who they were, but I’m glad that we were there. On a scale from 1 to 10, how scary was that?  

I’m good at making decisions. The honest truth, it wasn’t scary to make that decision. I know that sounds odd. I think I moved quickly on it. It was amicable. It was good. There were shifts that happened a year or two later that dropped in. I was like, “Look at that. I hadn’t thought about that. You’re on your own.” That became a little scarier for me, but I don’t tend to be a worrier. I don’t tend to overthink the future.

They can’t eat you. You’re not going to die. What’s the worst that can happen to me? I want everyone to go to 1000Houses.com/amira. There are a lot of resources over there to help people start their business growth. Also, there will be all the information that leads to Amira and you can get with her. If it sounds interesting, do you do a free consult or when people are interested, do they go to a website? What do they do to learn more or to find out if they’re a good fit for you?  

What we gave to you, Mitch, was our free resource page where we have a ton of free resources. They can download things and interact with us. We have a podcast where you can listen to our teaching and training on how to get your mindset right so that you can take the tactical actions to scale either your business or your career. I recommend that people start in those two places. On both of those pages, there’s a consult button. You can have a conversation with me or someone on my team, and we’ll lead you to the right place. Sometimes the right place is coming to our virtual event that’s coming up, our summit. We have something called The Unstoppable Woman Summit. It’s a three-day training. It is hugely impactful. Sometimes it will lead you to business bootcamp or private coaching. There are all sorts of places where you can get resources, join our mastermind, and things like that. We want to make sure that what we’re giving an individual is what they need in their life and business and is exactly spot on. I encourage people to start with the free stuff and see if it’s a good fit. If they like what they’re hearing, then book a consult.

There’s no one size fits all. That’s important because everybody’s different. Every situation is different. People are good and bad at things. People are ready to conquer certain things and don’t think they’re ready to conquer other things. I like that you’re taking the individual approach to everybody because that’s the only way any coaching works. There are 44 players on a football team. Every one of those guys you’ve probably got to talk to a little bit different. The coach knows that guy. He knows that kid. He knows what motivates him. I’d love to have you back sometime. You’ve got some people out there that are struggling in this department and need to make more money. What’s maybe a final parting word to them?

Believe you can. Faith and trust in yourself is a big part of this. Own your desire. Choose your goal. Believe that you can and start taking action immediately. Don’t worry about it being the perfect right action. Start getting into momentum and experiencing the results and iterate on that. Keep going. Don’t stop.

I appreciate that. I’d like to thank everybody for stopping by to get you some Amira Alvarez and The Unstoppable Woman. If you’re a woman out there and need a coach or need to make some changes and you want someone in your corner, check it out, 1000Houses.com/amira. Thank you for being a guest. You’ve been wonderful.  

Thanks for having me, Mitch. I would love to come on again.

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/amira
• 1000Houses.com/moat
• 1000Houses.com/tff
• 1000Houses.com/100
• 1000Houses.com/101
• Coaching Uncut
• The Unstoppable Woman Summit

 

About Amira Alvarez

I’ve got big dreams, big things I want to accomplish. (I bet you do too.)

As I was building my businesses, to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I threw my energy (almost all of it) into my businesses. That was my pattern. Throw everything at it. Heart, soul, and effort… lots of effort. I was driven and ambitious, traits that have both served me well and have their shadow side.

The shadow side to the power of action and effort is struggling.

It’s the “hard” that comes from a confusion, overwhelm, and fear.

It’s that feeling of panic inside when you know you’ve completely lost your way but think your only option is to work harder. Or the sinking feeling of knowing you’re not doing what you need to be doing, yet not knowing how to get out of your own way…so you best keep moving.

I’d be seduced by the momentary sense of accomplishment when I’d finished a project or land a sale. I’d get my “feel-good accomplishment hit” and it was enough to keep me going.

But ultimately I ended up in the same place, on the same hamster wheel of never enough… which is a terrible place to be, yet is where many us find ourselves, over and over again, in our pursuit of significant growth in our business.

I realized something had to change. I realized that I was sacrificing my inner peace in little and big ways, for the hope of a big payoff or ease later.

I lived out the same patterns over and over again. I was addicted to hard, to the idea that to get ahead and make significant money, it had to be a struggle. (This is what I grew up thinking. This is what I knew.)

I knew consciously that that wasn’t the case BUT my reality showed something different.

My reality showed a lot of really good things AND a lot of struggle. If I’m honest, there was not nearly enough of that heart pumping happiness in my life yet I had no idea what I was missing.

I didn’t want to work that way anymore. I wanted to have a fuller life, with more connection, more of what was important to me. I made a decision to change.

I went on a journey to discover how to create an easier business, one that lit me up instead of sucking me dry. I sought out business advice and followed it and in lots of ways, this worked. The techniques and strategies helped tremendously.

Yet there was still something off. Things still felt hard.

That is until… I was able to master the inner game of entrepreneurship. That was the TIPPING POINT for me.

Only when I figured out how to EFFECTIVELY and CONSISTENTLY manage my mindset (beliefs, fears, and anxiety) was I able to truly put into play the business tactics and strategies required to grow my business with so much more ease. This was a revelation and a revolution.

It has allowed me creative license, freedom, money, delight, extraordinary relationships, and a business I love. Everyday.

 

• Here’s How »

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