Denise Duffield...:            Hey, it's Denise here, and thank you for listening to Chill & Prosper. This week's episode, I've decided to do a random episode actually, because I get so many questions from the Bootcamp community, from the Lucky B community, from listeners like you. Some of them don't necessarily warrant a whole Chill & Prosper episode about it, so I thought I'll just go through my list of questions that have come up and give you some answers.

                                                Sometimes the answer is just like, "Do what you want." I think sometimes we just want someone just to say, "Yeah, it's fine. You can do whatever you want." One of the first questions was, "Is there a difference between what you do now as a multimillion-dollar business owner compared to what you did at the start of your business?"

                                                I think this is such a good question because I get asked a variation of this all the time about, "What's your routine and what do you do?" I think it's because sometimes people think that when you start making more money, it's like you graduate, and people give you a certificate and you're like, "Wow, now you're a completely different person. Congratulations."

                                                There isn't any moment where you step from one world to another because you're already in the journey. Whoever you are now, and whatever habits and things you do now, chances are, you'll take that along with you as you make more and more money. It's not like I've become more organized. I've not become a better person in any way. I'm just still me, and I've just made money because I just tell people about what I do, as me. You know what I mean?

                                                Yeah. Blah, blah. Whatever I was going to say, people are like, "What do you do for journaling? What do you do?" I'm like, "The same stuff. It's the same stuff over and over again." You have to tell people about what you do. That's it, just tell people. If you've read Chill and Prosper, my book about business, I share my million-dollar marketing strategy. It's, share what you know, as in tell people how you can help them and all your tips, and then make offers, as in just tell people how you can help them.

                                                That's the only thing that I've done. I'm not even that organized. I just like, "Hey, I've got a bootcamp. Come enjoy my bootcamp," or I like, "Hey, do you want some tips about pricing? Hey, you want to come join my bootcamp." That's it.

                                                I think those questions always come, of, "Oh, she must know something, or she must be different." I'm like, "However you are now, you can make money exactly how you are." Okay?

                                                All right. So next question was, "Tell me more about when you switched your business." I used to have a ... I've had a couple of different businesses, but when did I switch to talking about money and how did I decide to switch? That's such a great question because I actually felt a really strong calling to do it. I felt like I just wanted to talk about money, and I felt like this soul calling to talk about money, and I resisted it for a long time.

                                                I actually was just like ... I don't even want to say the F word because there's kids listening sometimes. I just was like, "No, I'm not talking about money. No. I'm not allowed to talk about money. You're only allowed to talk about money if you are a financial advisor or an accountant. Money is a taboo topic. I'm not qualified to talk about money."

                                                Yet my little soul whispering was just like, "Yeah, talk about money." I'm like, "No." I really, consciously remember that switch. I went, "Okay, universe. I will talk about money, but I will only talk about it on my terms, in my own silly way. I'm not going to be a financial advisor and I'm not going to go back to uni and get another certificate. I'm just going to talk about money, how I would talk about anything in life to my friends. Okay? Deal?"

                                                I was like, "You send me the clients and I'll show up and do the things." I do remember that switch of just going, "I'm bored with this topic." In a lot of my previous businesses, I would get bored about the six-month mark. I just want you to know, you have permission to follow those threads and go, "I actually, really want to talk about this." Sometimes you have to do inner work, like I did, to go, "I'm allowed to talk about money. It's safe for me to talk about money. My views are valid. My information has value. I'm allowed to talk about this."

                                                Yeah, think if there's anything for you, where you're just like, "I really want to talk about that," but really look at your excuses. "Everyone's done this already. There's no new ways to talk about it. I'm not qualified enough. I'm not skinny enough. I'm not pretty enough. I'm too old. I'm too young."

                                                They're the things you have to work on because in reality, you're allowed to talk about anything. You're allowed to switch and pivot whenever you like. Yeah. All right, so that's when I made the switch.

                                                Okay. A lot of people ask me about being a mum and being an entrepreneur, and there's variations of questions about, "How do you juggle it and what do you do?" So, I'm really honest about the fact that I'm not a particularly maternal person. I like my kids, they're great, they're lovely, but I've never been someone who's just been like, "Oh, I just want to be a mum, or I just want kids."

                                                For me, my interests is in personal freedom and wanting to my own creative projects and have my own business. I would never neglect my kids for the sake of business, but it's like, business is really important to me. I feel bad even saying it, because at the start, when I started having kids, I didn't have any business friends who were also mums. I was only surrounded by mums who were like, "Oh, this is my ... I love this so much." I was like, "It's fine, but I really want to write my book."

                                                I'm like, "Yeah, it's fine." I know you might even judge me even saying this. My philosophy in parenting is, I'm there to teach them to love themselves, create a safe environment for them, but I'm not there to be everything to them and sacrifice my dreams. It doesn't mean I'm neglecting my kids. I'm trying to justify it because I know it sounds bad.

                                                I don't feel like I have to be the perfect parent. I don't feel like I have to be the alpha mummy. I'm not competing to be the best parent. I'm just like, "I'm going to create a safe, loving environment for them, and teach them what I know," and they pick stuff up from me all the time. I don't even realize that they pick stuff up.

                                                I outsource everything as much as possible. I do not want to do laundry. I do not clean the house. I don't even cook because I just don't feel like ... For me, that's not how I want to validate myself as a parent, so I don't do it. It's not important to me, to be a good cook, so I don't do it. No judgment on anyone else who wants to do those things.

                                                As I've made more money, I've outsourced more and more. I've never felt guilty about that, because I don't feel like I need to do all the laundry for my kids to have a good upbringing with me as their mum. As I said, no judgment on anyone else. Yeah, I outsource a housekeeper, I've got a nanny, and I really see them as my village.

                                                You know, they're all really just beautiful people who love my kids as much as I do, who hold the space for me to discipline them and teach them things. My nanny teaches the kids so much about inclusivity, and she's obsessed with Harry Styles, so now my four-year-old is obsessed with Harry Styles. She teaches them about kindness and things like that.

                                                I've got that village around me and I've done that through outsourcing and paying for people to help me. Yeah. Anyway, I've written quite a bit about that, about what I outsource at home. If you're reading the show notes, we'll link to a few of those too.

                                                Okay. Oh, this is so much fun. I'll do a ... If you like these Q&As, let me know and I'll do some more in the future. Okay. "How to feel worthy and valuable when you're not working, and getting rid of productivity equaling worth?" This is such a great question. I have a feeling, it's coming from a fellow ruler in the Money Archetypes. The rulers want to work all the time, and that's how we get our value from productivity.

                                                The problem is, it's never enough. Never ever enough. There's always more to do. That's just how you're wired, and every archetype is wired in a different way. I can just say I'm a work in progress around this because I do feel guilty sometimes, if I'm not working. I just make sure that I put things that I can't get out of. I've just hired a yoga teacher to come twice a week. I used to do once a week, and then my yoga teacher went on maternity leave and I didn't do it for a year. I would rather work. I absolutely would, but she comes and I have to do an hour.

                                                It's not about waiting till you feel like, or going, "Oh, one day it'll be different." I just know I'm like that. Okay? So much of the work that I teach is acceptance of who you are. Then you find ways around that. Acceptance, "I'm always going to want to work more than anything else, so I have to hire someone to come so I have an hour of not working." That's the only way I can do it.

                                                Accountability, having a friend who comes to your house and says, "Let's go for a walk." Booking those regular massages. It is just who you are. I would say I don't necessarily have a good work-life balance I love working so much, and I have to make sure it doesn't get too self-sabotagey. Okay. This is on a similar one and then we'll do a little break.

                                                "How do you recognize when your health is asking you to chill out, because it can be so tempting to work, work, work while the motivation's there?" This is a great question because again, it's that feeling that you have to work hard to make money. If you know that you have health challenges, or energy challenges, or you have caring responsibilities, then make sure that you've got some passive income in your business, that you have built some ease into your business, that you embrace batching content, that you embrace automation. Then it doesn't all fall apart if you can't work, or you don't want to work, or you don't feel like working.

                                                My business is very consistent, not because I am consistent. It's because I've built those structures in place. Sometimes I don't want to do anything. I just want to go to the movies or sit and watch Kath & Kim on Netflix, but my business supports that. Okay? Sometimes if we ignore those feelings, ignore our health, it can get out of balance.

                                                Sometimes I've noticed that the universe sends something to just go, "Whoop, you've got to stop." That's when everything can fall apart. On that happy note, let's take a really quick break and we'll be back with some more questions to answer. All right. See you in a sec. Bye.

Zoe Kloss:                            Hi, Denise. Zoe Kloss here, again. The previous one was for Chill and Prosper. I pre-ordered because I absolutely loved, and it was a breakthrough, Chillpreneur. That was the first book that I read. In fact, I think I did read Get Rich, Lucky Bitch, but I'll just enter on the basis of Chillpreneur and Chill and Prosper.

                                                Talking about Chillpreneur, one of the many things that was amazing for me, was that I reached out, this February to somebody I'd spoken to sometime before and said, "Hey, I've been thinking of you. I just wanted to let you know that my prices are going up. I wanted to offer you work with me for the old price," and it worked like a charm.

                                                I got him as a customer, and he was just at the right stage to work with me. In fact, I hope that I will want to reach out to him again, and ask him if he's interested in working further, because he wants to start his own business, and he has a disability just like me. Thank you so much for your work, Denise.

Denise Duffield...:            Okay, friend. Welcome back. Today on Chill & Prosper, we're doing a Q&A where people have submitted questions. I'm sorry I'm not saying their names, but my team has just given me the questions, as they were hoping I would just do a podcast episode on it.

                                                Thank you if you've submitted questions, and I'm not saying your name because I don't know who it is. All right, so how do you know when you're ready to quit a business? I actually have a done a whole episode about this. Go and search my websites. When to know if you need to quit a failing business? I did it recently, and let me see if I can find the number for you. I think it is number 56. Number 56, When You Should Quit a Failing Business? I did a whole thing about that, so I won't answer that one.

                                                Next question is, "Dealing with a post-success slump." Not a lot of people talk about this, okay? I've experienced it myself, many times where I hand in something, or I have a launch, or I do something that should feel good and it actually feels horrible.

                                                This happened to me recently with my new book, Chill and Prosper. It's got a brand-new cover, new case studies, awesome. Go pre-order it if you're listening to this, or post-order. Get your bonuses at denisedt.com/prosper. It's awesome.

                                                When I handed it in, people are, "Oh, you must be so proud. You must be so excited. Oh, it got 2X on the list." I just went, "No." Well, I had to say, "Yeah, it feels great. Thanks," but I was really just like, "No, I actually feels like shit."

                                                It's that post-success hangover, I call it. This person's called it the post-success slump, where you just go, "It wasn't that good." It doesn't feel good.

                                                What do I do? First of all, when I know the dates of a launch, I'll often then book things in as part of the post-launch. It's just as important. That might mean, a massage, a lunch with friends, a little weekend away. Just something to make that feeling feel better, to either distract me, or not even to reward me because I don't feel like I need a reward necessarily, but it's just like, to go, "Ah, yeah." You don't even realize that your shoulders are so tense. Go and have a massage. Drinking lots of water. Just those kind of things.

                                                Where I've made the mistake is that I've often then booked a lot of maintenance things afterwards, as in I'm like, "Oh, now I can go to the dentist. Oh, now I can do the thing," and, "Oh, now I can get a pap smear." Then it feels like it's a punishment because then you're like, "Oh, I've just done this thing. Oh, now I've got to do all these crappy errands."

                                                Don't book all of those things straight after your launch. Book nice things because seriously, I did this with ... I had a whole big filming week, and I'd filmed amazing videos for my Sacred Money Archetypes course. I finished it, and the next week I was like, "Ah, post office, pelvic floor physio, blah, blah, blah, dentist."

                                                I was just like, "Oh." That didn't feel good, but it was all stuff I'd been putting off. I had to go to a blood test for check my iron levels. I was just like, "Oh, man." Yeah, be mindful of the fact that you will have a bit of a drop of ... What is, it's like the drop of adrenaline, a drop of dopamine. Then you're just like, "Blah." You just need to make sure you're doing things that are uplifting as opposed to things that you got to check off. That one's funny. Oh, makes me laugh. Okay. All right.

                                                Someone's asking about focusing on the money-making activities. "What does that actually mean? I don't always know what is working and what's not." Okay. I do say that often. I say to people, "Make sure you're doing money-generating activities or money-making activities."

                                                What's the difference? Sometimes in business, we can get very caught up in stuff that does not make us any money. It's a nice-to-have. I'm talking about things like procraster branding, fiddling with things that are already done, fiddling with your course instead of finding new people to do the course. Finding the right background color for your website, hyperfocusing on 50 different fonts, moving things, a pixel over.

                                                I think branding is important, don't get me wrong, but it's not the thing will necessarily make you the money if your current branding's fine. I often do things like that in my business too. I'll procrastinate. I'll work on projects that I'm not even going to launch, or things that I just go down rabbit holes and go, "Oh, that would be fun to do."

                                                Money-making activities is just like, "Are you marketing?" That depends on what you do, right? If you sell widgets, are you doing things that are contributing to, a sale to a widget? Are you telling people about what it is? Are you actively reaching out to people to say, "Hey, buy my widget"?

                                                Making-generating activity could be, telling people how they can book in with you, telling people about your launch. Putting together bonuses and telling people about how they can get your book, you know? It totally depends on what you do. Booking calls in for people. You might have a service, and people have a 15-minute call to see if it's the right fit.

                                                It's like reaching out to people and saying, "Here's my service and here's how you can book in with me." It's really anything that has a call to action on it. Social media stuff can be money-generating if you're doing a call to action. If you're just procrastinating and no one gets to see it, then I think that's procrastination. Okay?

                                                Yeah. Someone's saying, "I feel confused and stuck about it," and I get that, you know? It doesn't mean you have to be perfect. Sometimes it's just finding those little things of least resistance that feel okay, and then it generates a bit more.

                                                Okay. A couple of questions here about, "What if you've got a job or a part-time job and you're doing your business as a side gig? What do you do?" There's nothing wrong with that. Oh, my God. It's good to make sure that you've got money because it's easier to be creative when you know that you're going to be fed, especially if you've got kids or pets or caring responsibilities. It can put a lot of pressure, sometimes on a new business to make money straightaway. That can be paralyzing. Right?

                                                Totally fine if you've got a job. What I did is I had a very busy job in consulting, many, many years ago and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I realized that I didn't have any bandwidth. I didn't have any energy because that job was, it was busy. It was long hours, it was big deadlines. It was just, it took up a lot of bandwidth. Even my commute was long, right?

                                                I deliberately found a job that was a little bit less pressure, something I didn't have to stress about so much. I went from consulting to a non-profit. It was still five days a week, but it was only five minutes from my house. Suddenly I bought back two hours of time just in commuting time, and everyone left at 5:00 on the dot. I was like, "Oh," and it was just less pressure all around.

                                                I think I took a little bit of a pay cut. I wasn't very well-paid as a consultant anyway, but I did take a pay cut, but it was worth it. Suddenly I had bandwidth for my business. Then after a year of that, I went to part-time and I did three days a week. Again, it was just, as I was learning how to do my business.

                                                You don't have to do it. It's not all or nothing. It can be totally incremental. What I actually did, the very deliberate mindset shift I made in that last job, the three-day-a-week one is, I was like, "I'm not going to get involved in office drama. I didn't have lunch every day with coworkers. Sometimes I would go and journal or something like that, but I always felt like this is temporary. You know? I've got one foot out the door, and that's how I went into that job. It sounds bad, but I was just like, I just went in, just did my job and went home, and it was fun. You know?

                                                If you have a job, you can just say to yourself, "This is only temporary. This is only temporary." I listened to inspiring podcasts on my way to work. I printed out my dream board. I put it in my office drawer. I had my password on my office computer as one of my ... It was six-figure business or full-time business, something like that.

                                                It can just be incremental, but you need to remove stresses so you have time and energy for your business, especially at the start when you don't always know what you're going to do. You have to have some time to practice. Yeah, if you're listening to this in a job, I love you. I know it's only temporary. Your business dreams are valid. They really are.

                                                Okay. Couple of more questions, and if this has been fun for you and you like hearing this format of Q&A, let me know because I'm totally happy to do, not every week, but I'll do some every now and again. It's super fun, and because I like thinking on the fly. It's my favorite way of doing stuff. Not preparing, woo-hoo.

                                                Okay. One more question for this one. "Something I struggle with is saying no. I don't like turning down work. I don't like turning down red flag clients, but does that mean, I'm saying to the universe that I'm not open to receiving money?" This is such a great question. I love this so much.

                                                Okay. I'm a money mindset coach, right? So I love talking about abundance, but I want to let you know, not all money is good money. You're allowed to have discernment around anything in your business. If you're asking, "Oh, universe. Send me three new clients," and three really pain-in-the-butt people come up, that doesn't mean you have to take what you're given. That's a lesson to unlearn.

                                                You know, "You get what you get and you don't get upset," is what you learn in primary school, but you're a grownup now. You're allowed to choose. You're allowed to have discernment and you're allowed to send back non-ideal anything, non-ideal manifestations. You can just say, "Oh, I meant to say, 'Hey universe, please send me three ideal clients, who are lovely to work with, who all choose my top package.'"

                                                You don't just have to go, "Oh, well, I made my bed. Now I have to lie in it." You're allowed to have discernment. It doesn't mean that you're rejecting money. It's actually the next level of money mindset, of going, "I'm allowed to choose. It's safe for me to choose. I'm allowed to say no. Not all money is good money." It feels so good when you can get to that point, because you know what it's like. Sometimes if you ignore your gut, it costs you more in the long run, right? It really does.

                                                Okay. That's the last question we've got time for, today. As I said, let me know if you like this format, to hear a couple of episodes every now and again, of Q&A. Otherwise, yeah, make sure you're on my newsletter list because I've got some really cool things coming up soon. Just go to denisedt.com/newsletter. Make sure you're the first to find out.

                                                Don't go away though. I've got one more final thought right after this final message. See you in a sec.

Steph:                                   I am Steph. I'm from Bristol in the UK and I'm a Human and Veterinary Physiotherapist. I read the book. It was the first book I read, of Denise's, Lucky Bitch, and I loved it.

                                                It shows that someone who was normal, a normal person went on to being a millionaire. It showed how she did it and what happened. It was so inspiring. So inspiring that it's literally changed the way I think, the way I do things. I've read all of her other books and they get better and better each one I read. Thank you so much, Denise.

Kara:                                      Hi, I'm Kara, a business owner from Luxembourg. I just started reading Denise's new book recently, Chill and Prosper. From the very first page, I was hooked. I really need to stop the hustle. It just spoke to me from the very beginning.

                                                I'm so excited to keep reading, to get all the nuggets and to apply everything that she says so that I can slow down, chill, prosper, but not hustle.

Denise Duffield...:            Hey, welcome back and thanks for listening. My final thought for today is, it's allowed to be easy. I really was like, "Oh, it's cheating to do a whole episode just answering people's questions." I was like, "Oh, but it feels so much fun." Maybe that's a lesson for you that, it's allowed to be easy. You're allowed to do something in your business that feels good and easy for you.

                                                If there's something you're like, "I don't want to do it like that," don't. Find the easy path, and the easy path of least resistance because money loves ease. All right. Have a beautiful, easy week. Easy, chilled and abundant week, and I'll see you next week on Chill & Prosper. Take care. Bye.