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I’ve decided to bring you a series of bonus podcast episodes designed to help you achieve your business goals. Whether you’re a photographer, hairdresser, network marketer, a coach, or any kind of entrepreneur whatsoever, I can’t wait to share the best tips and practices that will make your business a success.
In this first official episode of the Business Minded series, I’m directly addressing all of my Sisters. I find resources that speak directly to women entrepreneurs so powerful, and I’m taking it a step further in this episode and speak directly towards women who are members of the LDS Church, or any religion that values family and God because this is my area of expertise. So, if you have a business or are thinking about starting one, this episode is for you.
Tune in today as I offer you an insight into the work I’ve done on my own brain to get to the place I am today in terms of how I think about myself, my family, my religion, my business, and how they all fit together in my life. I’ve done this work with so many clients already, and I can’t wait to share it with all of you.
You don’t miss out on any of the exciting things I have coming that will help you achieve your business goals, so sign up for my Business Minded waitlist here!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why starting a business isn’t necessarily for everyone, and that’s totally okay.
- What I love about direct sales and network marketing for new entrepreneurs.
- How to know whether the entrepreneurial route is the right direction for you.
- Where women who are members of my faith generally have questions or concerns around starting a business.
- Why there is no right or wrong way for you to think about business, or anything else.
- How I think about my business today, in terms of my family, my spirituality, how I got my brain to that place, and how you can too.
Mentioned on the Show:
- When you’re ready to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10X level, then come check out Be Bold.
- If you’re a coach who is already certified through The Life Coach School, I want to help you take your coaching to the next level. Interested? Get on the waitlist here.
- Follow me on Instagram!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- 309. Business Minded
- President Nelson: A Plea to My Sisters
- M. Russell Ballard: The Essential Role of Women
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Business Minded Bonus 1, Sisterpreneur.
This is Business Minded, a series of bonus podcast episodes designed to help you achieve your business goals, whether you’re a photographer, you participate in a network marketing business, a coach or any other kind of entrepreneur. Join me where I will be sharing my best tips and practices to achieve what you want to in your business. Let’s go.
Hey there friends, how we doing? Welcome to the first official bonus episode of the Business Minded series. There was an unofficial episode that aired on – I don’t know what date, episode 309 of the podcast where I tell my story about my business. So if you missed that, you might want to go back and catch that after you listen to this one.
But today I want to talk to all my sisters in the church. It makes me feel really old to say that word, sister, when I’m not talking about my literal sister in my family. But for those of you that aren’t members of my church, you don’t need to tune out. This is still going to be very relevant to you. But in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints we call each other sister and brother because we believe we are all children of God and therefore we are all sisters and brothers.
And I love all the people that talk to women in business, women entrepreneurs. I mean I love anyone that teaches entrepreneurs in business. But it’s especially powerful to me when I hear somebody speaking to women in particular because of course I am a woman. And I want to take that a step further and speak to women who are either members of my church or who are religious in some way who value family, and have faith in God, and are maybe, especially have a Christian religion.
I want to speak to you today because again, being one of you I have some thoughts and ideas I want to offer to you that might help you if you either own a business or are considering starting a business. Now, I want to be clear that I don’t think that’s everyone by any means. I think it’s actually probably a pretty small percentage of the population that has that interest or desire. And so my hope in this episode is not to convince anybody who doesn’t have any interest in starting a business, that they should, it’s not what I’m saying at all.
I’m not here to say that women who pursue businesses are better in any way than someone who chooses to do whatever else you choose to do, whether you go work for someone else or you’re at home full-time raising kids. That’s not what this episode is about. Sometimes when I talk about business I get people saying, “I feel like you’re telling me that if I was really smart and ambitious and if I really wanted to grow then I would start a business.” Not at all what I’m saying.
So in order to really deliver the message I want to I’m going to imagine that I’m speaking to people who already at least have some kind of curiosity in the back of their minds about maybe wanting to start a business. So maybe you have a business already like I said, maybe you’re in some kind of direct sales business.
I’ve coached many, many women and some men, but majority of my work has been with women who are in direct sales or what we might call MLM type of businesses, women who work for or have an Arbonne business, or Isagenix, or Norwex, or LipSense or something like that. So I love these kinds of businesses, I love. In fact I have a little experience myself. I actually was a Norwex business owner for a little while. I love the idea that you can inherit, or purchase, or sign up for all of the tools necessary to run a successful business.
You can find a product that you love and you don’t have to figure out manufacturing. You don’t even have to figure out marketing and sales. Somebody else has done that probably ahead of you. And they’re going to teach you the way. And I love how most of those organizations provide amazing training.
And for me when I had my Norwex business I loved watching training videos and listening to audios, and trying out the strategies that other people who had gone ahead of me had tried out. It was a really awesome way to dip my toe in the waters of being a business owner. And I only say dip my toe because for me that’s all it was. I spent a little time there but not too long. I don’t mean that that’s all you can do there. You can have an amazing successful business in those types of areas.
Maybe you are a photographer, you have a photography business. Maybe you do hair. I feel bad for the people in my life, the people that do my hair and photographers and things because my brain tends towards business so quickly that I’m always like, “You know what you should do? We should scale this in this way.”
My stylist that does my hair, Whitney, I love her to death. She’s also one of my close friends. I’m always like, “You know what we should do? Open up your own salon and here’s how it would work. And eventually you’re going to work a lot less hours than you do now and make a lot more money.” And she just laughs at me. “I really don’t want to do that, Jody, but thanks anyway.”
So at any rate if you do and by the way your goal doesn’t have to be to grow your business but for many people it is. Photography, graphic design business, these are all businesses that I’ve sort of done some coaching or assisting around a little bit. Maybe you sell something on Etsy, maybe you have a product that you sell. Maybe you are an artist and you sell art through Instagram or something like that. Maybe you’re a coach of some sort. Obviously I’ve worked with a lot of coaches, health coaches, life coaches, all kinds of coaches.
So anyway whatever your business or potential business idea is, if you have that little voice of curiosity in the back of your head that’s like, you know what would be cool is to do this, to open up a soda truck where people could get a soda, or a cookie, or something like that. I know friends that have that ambition. Maybe you want to pursue, I don’t know, any other business idea that you have. And maybe you’re not even sure yet what it would look like.
But you just have, there’s something within you that’s like that might be kind of interesting to try. I kind of want to do what that person does. Or I’m kind of interested in maybe pursuing this one day. Then I’m talking to you.
So what I’m going to offer you today is a result of work that I’ve done on my own brain to get to the place I’m at now in terms of how I think about myself, my family, my religion and my business and how they all go together. And it’s also work that I’ve done in coaching with other clients. These same kind of questions or concerns tend to come up, especially women who are members of my faith.
And so I’m going to share with you the way I think about it today which is not to say that it’s the right way to think about it. It’s not to say that it’s the way that you should think about it. I simply am offering you a perspective. And I just think that you will be the one to know if any of it is right for you. I want you to access your own knowing. But sometimes when we’re fed certain messages over and over again we lose access to our own knowing because we can’t even consider any other options.
So I’m simply giving you options of ways to think about things. And again this is after work that I’ve done myself to decide what I want to think and what serves both me, my business, my family, my spirituality and all of it in the best possible way.
So the first question or concern that I get quite a bit is, well, our church teaches, this is what people tell me, our church teaches that as women we should be at home with our kids. We should be at home raising kids. We shouldn’t go to work or certainly shouldn’t go start a business unless we have to. Now, I don’t know about you but I certainly know where this is coming from. I was taught this as a young woman.
This is my recollection anyway, this is my thought, is that I remember growing up as a young girl being told the importance of getting an education. And I was taught that it’s important to have a college degree because you never know. Your husband could get into a terrible accident and even die, and then you would be responsible for supporting your family. So we should get a college degree just in case.
Now, I was also taught the importance of just learning in general and that the knowledge we gain in this Earth is something that we get to take with us in the next life. But I wasn’t really ever told, “Hey, you might have ambitions and desires to go pursue a job, or a business, or something one day, an education might be useful to do that.” Again, I’m not saying that people didn’t think that also, it’s just I don’t recall ever hearing that message.
I recall hearing the message, “Ideally you’re going to be at home with your kids but you never know, something could happen and then you might have to work.” Anybody else remember hearing that? Well, we’ve come a long way in the Mormon Church. We’ve come a long way in our knowledge and understanding. And if you think that that is the message that our church is sending you will be able to find it. I promise you. Because remember, the brain finds what we’re looking for. So you will be able to find that. I personally don’t believe that that’s the message.
I don’t think that was ever the intended message to be honest, certainly not from doctrine and gospel but even from imperfect people doing the best they could. I think that the intended message has come a long way. And we hear many examples.
I’ll cite just a couple that you can go look up if you want to, where our church leaders are encouraging women to show up in the world and to do good in the world. To use their skills, to use their interest, to use their education, to use their passions and desires, to contribute to the world in a meaningful way that is – I find it to be pretty exciting that that message is shifting. There is a talk from 2015 by President Nelson called A Plea to my Sisters, amazing talk.
There is another one from just recently, March 2021, The Essential Role of Women by M. Russell Ballard. You can find more but those are just a couple. If you want to find where our church leaders are encouraging women to show up and contribute in the world in the way that you feel called.
Sometimes I get people say, “Hey, there’s this thing called The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” It’s a document that our church put out back in 1995, that document came out. And it has some kind of specific language about husbands being primarily responsible for providing for the family and women being the nurturing caregivers. Again, you have to interpret that document in whatever way the spirit guides you to interpret it. But to me that is not meant to be a document that is a prescriptive formula for how we should manage our time in our families.
I coach a lot of women who are resentful of their husbands because their husbands are not providing, at least not in the way that they envisioned that they wanted them to. And they’ll use that document to justify their resentment. It says right here, husbands should primarily provide for the family. And then I equally hear women use that document to keep themselves stuck and small and prevent themselves from pursuing their desires and their righteous interests and goals by saying, “It says right here I’m not allowed to do that.”
And I just have a really hard time thinking that President Hinckley who was the prophet at the time and his councilors said, “Let’s write a document that will keep women small, that will keep them in the home. And that will give them reasons to resent their husbands, proof that their husbands are doing it wrong.” That was never their intention.
I love that it’s called The Family: A Proclamation to the World because it’s my guess that that document is meant in defense of the way that many members of our church were choosing at the time to live their lives. It’s sort of like hey world, here is why we choose to live the way we do. There’s a lot of language in there about the nuances of specific situations and circumstances, and that everyone has to choose for themselves what is the best way to manage your home and your family. But again you’ve got to decide for yourself how you’re going to interpret all of these things.
I want to just say that if you have a reason for pursuing a business and it’s a reason that you like then it’s just your brain trying to talk you out of it. Because it’s totally normal and natural for the brain to want to talk you out of something like building a business. Because building a business goes against so many things that your brain is designed to do, it goes against its ability to just rinse and repeat and save energy. The brain doesn’t want to do new things. It doesn’t want to do challenging things.
The brain doesn’t want to be exposed to risk. Risk might be financial risk. It might be the risk of putting yourself out there in the world and being vulnerable and being judged. It doesn’t want to expose you to the risk of potential failure of trying something and then it not working and then you having to experience the emotions you might create for yourself on the other side of that, the disappointment, the frustration. Your brain’s job is to protect you from all of that.
And so one of the ways that it may attempt to do that is by taking what you hear at church or what you read in a conference talk and saying, “See, we shouldn’t be doing this.” So again, there’s a difference between you aligning with the spirit with God and with your highest good and your highest most faith filled self and making a decision versus listening to just your brain. And the difference, you’ll know the difference by how you feel. You will feel empowered and inspired towards the right decision, whatever that decision is for you.
We talked about number one, our church teaches blah, blah, blah. Our church doesn’t teach really anything except the atonement of Jesus Christ. That’s really, like there’s only a couple pieces of core doctrine. It’s the atonement, it’s the first vision, and it’s the eternal nature, God’s plan. And then we have ordinances and things that support all of that. But most of what people are referencing when they say this, “Our church says women should be at home raising their kids.”
Our church doesn’t say that, very well meaning people sometimes say that or we interpret what they say in that regard. So just be careful about the way you’re interpreting things.
Alright, so the second thing that I personally had to do a lot of work around, I never really struggled with thinking the church was telling me I shouldn’t do this. But I did struggle with this one which is for a long time I just thought maybe there was something wrong with me because I had these kids, I had a couple of little kids way back when I started my business, I had a couple of kids. And I lived in a ward, almost every ward I’ve lived in I’ve been one of the only women that was working and certainly the only woman who was working because she wanted to.
So sometimes there would be women who were working because she ‘needed to’, which is subjective anyway but it was like, well, she’s probably working because she needs to support her family because for whatever reason her husband, or she’s not married or what have you. She’s got to work. But for me that wasn’t the case. When I started my business my husband was making great money, we could live off of it just fine. In fact my business didn’t make money for a while.
The main reason wasn’t because I need to support my family. Now, it’s okay if that is your reason but stay with me for just a minute. I sort of thought maybe something was wrong with me because so many other women I knew had zero desire, certainly zero desire to start a business, but zero desire to work at all. They loved being with their kids. And that’s still true to this day. Most of the women I know they love the flexibility of their time. I see them going for walks around the neighborhood, and going to the gym together, and going to lunch together.
And I love these women and I used to look to other women and then judge myself. What’s wrong with me? I should want to do that. I should be more content. If I loved my children more I would want to be able to go help out at the school or be with them more, or do these other things. What’s wrong with me? Well, obviously the answer to that question is there’s nothing wrong with any of us. And there’s a lot wrong with all of us. But you might be wired differently than some of the other women that you know. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your children.
We don’t need everyone to be wired the same. Think about how that would not serve our world if that were the case. We need people that have different strengths, different skills, different interests, different passions, different hobbies, different preferences for how they spend their time. So there’s nothing wrong with you if you find that you feel unfulfilled being at home, you feel dissatisfied, you feel that there’s something lacking, you feel this call to pursue something. Nothing wrong with you my friend.
In fact I believe that the Lord gives us those desires and interests. And He gives us all different ones. He gives us different preferences. This is a beautiful thing. Stop comparing yourself to people around you to try to determine what’s wrong. You’ll never end that game. There’s no good answer to it.
The third thing and this one I do lots of coaching around is, well, if I choose to go pursue this business will my kids suffer? Will my family suffer? Will I not be able to be there for them as much as I could be otherwise? And will they suffer as a result because you can’t do it all, right? Now, you probably think I’m going to tell you, you can do it all. And on the one hand that’s kind of true. But mostly what I want to say is no, you can’t do it all. It’s true, you can’t do it all.
You know what? If you choose to pursue a business your family might have to sacrifice. You might not be as available to your kids as you would be were you not growing a business. Your attention may not be there, even if it’s not your time, maybe it’s just your attention. Maybe you’re going to require some money. You’re going to want to put some money into growing that business. And that money might come from your family budget initially as you’re getting up and running.
And that means that your family has to go without something that they otherwise would be able to have. This is true. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, not necessarily anyway, for some of you it may. But for some of you it may not. This is what I decided. You know what? No matter what I choose to do, unless I sit in the living room in a Zen like position waiting for someone who needs me to answer their beck and call then my family is sometimes going to sacrifice for me, or for my business, just like I sacrifice for them and for their interests and their desires.
And that is a beautiful thing about families, our kids are not supposed to have this perfect entitled life that a primitive part of our brains believes they should have, they’re really not. There are things that I miss out on because I’m pursuing my business goals. And it’s not even always that my business really needs it or that we aren’t going to be able to pay our mortgage without it. Sometimes it’s just I just want to do this.
Just like last night we all went to my daughter’s preschool end of the year program and heard her sing. And some of my kids like my teenagers would have preferred not to spend their evening at the preschool listening to little kids sing/shout at them. But we do because we love our preschool daughter. We love her, so we go. We all sacrifice for her. And we all sacrifice for one another and sometimes that means they’re sacrificing for me, even if it’s just I’m not there to satisfy exactly what their desire is.
I find it fascinating that women have this concern about building a business, that they’re not going to be as available for their families. But not if they get called to be the primary president then they understand, yes, I’m going to have to attend some meetings. I’m going to be doing some things that are going to be a sacrifice for my family. But they never question whether or not that’s the right thing to do. It could be true for your business also that yes, your family may have to sacrifice and that might be okay.
I look at the work I’m doing in my business, at the lives that we’re impacting at the people that we’re helping. And I say we because I view it as an effort on the part of my entire family because like I said, even if they’re not actively involved in the business they’re sacrificing by allowing me to do what I do. So we are doing tremendous good in the world in this way. And that’s a beautiful thing. And I don’t believe that my kids are supposed to have their lives any easier than they do. That’s just my thought.
Okay, so will you be able to do it all? Will you have the time? Will you just be not very good at being a mom or a business owner? Maybe, if you don’t learn how to manage your brain. If you don’t pay attention, if you don’t know how to structure your time in a way that serves you and then follow your plan, then yeah, that could happen. But that’s a choice. It’s not just something that will happen to you. It will be dependent on choices that you will make. And you can make different choices any time you want to.
So be careful about sitting back. I hear this a lot when I’m coaching people saying, “Well, I’m just worried that if I pursue my business then I’m going to neglect my family.” As though that would just happen instead of recognizing that that would always be a choice. And I choose to never neglect my family. My business is never going to be more important than my family. But will my family sometimes have to make sacrifices? Yes, for sure. And I’m okay with that. Do you see what I’m saying?
The last thing I want to talk about in this episode here is that I’ve been talking a little bit about your reasons why. What is your reason why you want to pursue a business? Now, I think that’s a tricky question to answer. But let me try to give you some examples that might help frame it. Again when I put it in the context of my religion I like to ask myself is this reason coming from something that is good, that is aligned with my values as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and as a disciple of Christ? Does my reason align with who I’m trying to be?
I’m trying to be an example of living my life as close as I possibly can to Him and His teachings. Does my reason align with that? Or is my reason more fear based? Is it coming from the part of me that worries about whether or not I’m enough or whether or not I’m missing out on something? Those are reasons that I want to steer away from.
So for example, you might have a passion for what you do. You might be passionate about photography and you have skills and talents that the Lord’s given you and then you’ve nurtured and developed those skills and talents. And now you’re pretty darned good at taking photos. And you like capturing photos of whoever it is that you serve. You like capturing families and you see the power of families. Think about what an amazing good thing that is and how that aligns with the values that you might have as a Christian or as whatever religion you belong to, you like serving people in that way.
Or you sell LipSense because you like lipstick. By the way I had this thought the other day as masks are starting to go away, that it’s going to be a big year for lipstick. I’m excited to wear my lipstick to church again. So listen, it’s okay to just think that lipstick is fun and to notice how women feel more confident when they put on some lipstick some of us. And that providing a business opportunity for women is a pretty cool thing too.
And that that is just something that’s fun, that connects us, that we like spending money on, that helps us take care of ourselves and pamper ourselves a little bit, all good reasons. This is how I felt when I started selling Norwex. Norwex, for those of you that haven’t heard of it is green cleaning products basically for your home. So I learned about it from my sister actually who was like, “You’re never going to believe these cloths are so amazing. You can clean your entire bathroom with just water and a cloth. And it totally disinfects and gets everything clean.”
And I’m just really lazy and I hate cleaning bathrooms. And so the fact that I could get one cloth, maybe two, get them wet, clean my bathroom top to bottom, throw them in the wash and be done with it was pretty appealing to me. And so I did, I fell in love with because I couldn’t get over how well they worked, how simple it was. And then when I dove in and started learning about how to be a representative of Norwex, I fell in love with learning all the strategies and testing things out, and pushing myself to try things, and to see what worked and what didn’t.
And so I think that these are good reasons you guys. And like I said, you might be passionate about your project but not necessarily always for everyone a passion. It could just be a desire to learn, and grow, and contribute. It could be something to do. We all need something to do. Now, I know there’s very few of you sitting around watching Cartoon Network all day like my kids going, “I’m bored. I need something to do.” That’s not what I mean by something to do.
I mean something that challenges your brain, that causes you to learn, and grow, and develop in the way that we are here on Earth to do. That is a big reason why we are here, to learn, and grow, and develop. And if you don’t have something that meets those needs for you, you’re going to feel ‘bored’. You might still be exhausted because you might be busy folding laundry, and mopping floors, and driving kids around and all of that. But if you’re not challenged enough you will feel simultaneously exhausted and bored. Sometimes we call this feeling unfulfilled.
So that could be your reason because learning to build a business is not boring, it’s definitely not. It will challenge you. You will have to learn things. You will have to try things. You will grow as a result. That can be a great, great reason that aligns with our values.
The third reason might be to make money. Now, listen, I love making money. I want you to make money. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to make money. But I think if that’s your only reason then you probably shouldn’t start a business, only because there are so many much easier ways to make money. So you could go wait tables for example and make money faster than you’re going to make in a business.
You probably won’t make as much money in the long run but you’ll start having money coming in much sooner than if you go to build a business. It might take a little time to see that. So it’s totally fine for money to be one of your motivators. But if it’s your only motivator I would just question whether or not that’s going to get you through, unless your reason’s going to evolve, which can happen.
So for example when I started working years ago for the University of Phoenix, my main motivator was to make money. I was like, “I need a job. I need to be able to pay my bills. I need to be able to pay my rent and my car payment.” So I will get a job. Here’s a job, University of Phoenix. Let’s go work there. Now, over time my reason evolved because I saw the power of the work we were doing. I saw how awesome it was to help adults go back and finish a degree that they never finished, now that they have kids in a job and all the things and they’re not going to live in the dorm.
And we help them finish school in a reasonable amount of time, we help them get a good education, we help them improve their financial situations and be able to get the promotions and all the things they want. And I saw the power of what we were doing along with being part of a really awesome company that had a healthy culture and opportunities for learning and growth. So my reason started out making money, it became ultimately that I wanted the money but also the growth, the contribution, the learning, and also passion for the product or the service in that case.
So your reason can evolve but if your only reason is to make money, that’s probably not going to be sustainable when it comes to being an entrepreneur, I’ve yet to see someone who that was their sole motivation be really successful.
Alright, so what am I saying here? What I’m saying is listen, girl, we need you. I can’t think of a time in my lifetime when there were more needs that people had that were not being met than we have today. It’s true. And what I love about business is that it is the opportunity to fulfill and meet a need for someone in exchange for money. It’s a win all the way around. And if you have a passion, or just a curiosity, or an interest in starting and growing a business then you’re my kind of people, that is me. And by the way, I told this back in the podcast episode that I just did on this.
But I wasn’t one of these people that always had a desire in business. I just fell in love with it as I started studying it because I loved coaching. So if you have a product or a service that you feel passionate about getting out and you think maybe you could fall in love with business as well, then you’re my kind of people. Come with me, make sure you keep listening. Make sure you’re following the podcast. iTunes changed it from subscribing to following now. So I don’t know about other platforms what it’s called there. It might still be subscribe.
But make sure you’re following this podcast. If you have friends, other women especially, members of the church who you think might be interested in this message, send them this podcast and tell them to be tuned in all summer long because I’m going to give my best business strategy and advice. Alright, thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next time. Take care. Bye.
Thanks for joining me today. Don’t forget to sign up at jodymoore.com/business so you don’t miss out on any of the exciting things I have coming to help you achieve your business goals.
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