George: Give me 30 seconds. Actually, I'm gonna put this cookie away.
Katie: Just eat the cookie. That's how it gets put away. How dare.
Camille: That's true.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it.
Camille: But mostly we're bringing practical solutions. So you and your business can thrive.
Camille: Welcome to, I don't know what episode this is gonna be, but I know that it's the first episode with a guest and I'm super excited about this guest. I don't know if she knows it, but she's kind of one of my favorite humans right now that I have met recently in the business world.
Camille: Welcome our guest, Dr. Michelle Mazur. She is a messaging expert and the author of the three word rebellion. And she's also host of her own podcast called the rebel uprising and the podcast and the book. Both of the ways that I came across Michelle, that's how I found you. Actually, I found you, somebody recommended your book and then I started listening to your podcast.
Camille: And then I said, I need to get this person's help because she clearly knows what she's talking about. So that is who our guest is today. Welcome Michelle.
Michelle: Thank you for having me.
Camille: Absolutely.
Camille: I was teasing her that I was like, will you please be my first guest on my podcast, which is maybe gonna have 10 listeners.
Camille: So it's a favor. I love that you were like, absolutely.
Camille: I'll be a guest on your podcast. That's just the kind of good human she is. So that's briefly how I came across Michelle. Like I said, somebody introduced me to her book, which I highly recommend we'll talk about later and then listening to her podcast and then started to do work with her.
Camille: But I would love for you to tell your origin story. I was thinking of this as like, how does Michelle go from getting her doctorate to becoming a small business owner? I don't know if that's a very common path. So will you tell us your.
Michelle: No. It's not a common path at all, because not gonna say no, I won't tell you my story.
Michelle: Yeah, no, that's what I thought too. Tell you my story. No, absolutely not. I'm done in of episode, honestly, like for me, it's a very uncommon path because I got my PhD with the full intention of being a communication professor. That's what I wanted to do. I love teaching. I love researching. I mean, I love the graduate student experience where you're kind of.
Michelle: All in this together and you're working on your degree and you're having these great and vibrant conversations. And then I did get the dream, the tenure track job. That's so hard to come by and being a professor was a different reality. It was more. Isolating there wasn't that camaraderie that you usually experience?
Michelle: I still love the teaching. I loved the research. I hated the politics and I was also a professor on the most isolated island chain in the world. So I was at the university of Hawaii and people think, oh my gosh, Hawaii, how awesome you got to live there. And I'm like, it's great to visit. I love Hawaii. And living there is really tough because you are, you're like five hours away from mainland us.
Michelle: You're seven hours away from Japan. Like literally there's nothing around you. And it's hard to make friends because it is a very transient culture. So people come and go, they go on there on vacation. They're like, I'm in move here. And then they move there and they're like, oh, this is expensive and isolating.
Michelle: And all of the things. So I got to the point where I was about ready to go up for tenure. And I had to make a decision like either I was going to commit to staying in this place or I needed to leave and I chose to leave. And it was the first time in my life where I ever got. To choose where I wanted to live, because being an academic, you go where the job is, or you go where you get into school.
Michelle: And so there's never that choice of like, well, where is it that I wanna land? So I ended up in Seattle and I didn't start a business. Because this was in a time when we really didn't have online business. There wasn't a lot of information about how to start a business. And in the back of my head, I was like, oh, this is what I'd really like to do, but I had no idea how to do it.
Michelle: So I got a job in market research. And which I'm grateful for, because it has really helped me with the work that I do and my client work and marketing my own business. But I also learned that I am psychologically unemployable. I don't like people telling me what to do when to do it, how to do it in which location to do that work.
Michelle: And I was always that employee who was very good, but also. Asked a lot of questions all the time. Like, why are we doing it this way? And this doesn't make any sense, which drives your boss nuts. I was always like, this is so much extra work if we just did it like this, well, this is the way we do it. No, no.
Michelle: So I started the business as a side hustle and it, I was doing a lot of work in public speaking, like public speaking, coaching, keynote speaking, keynote, speech creation. What I wanted to be doing. And eventually I just transitioned out of corporate and went full time in the business. And that kind of brings us today.
Michelle: And eventually I pivoted the public speaking business to work more on messaging because I saw my clients using the work that I was doing. In different ways. So they would take their keynote speech and all of a sudden it would be like, copy on their website or a three part launch series using my speech.
Michelle: And I'm like, wait, this work I'm doing has bigger implications. So why don't I do that? Because that's what lights me up. So that's a little bit of my untraditional path of getting to owning my own business.
Camille: That's an incredible path. And also incredible. Then you chose to live. Near me. I mean, I, you didn't choose to live near me, but you know what I mean?
Camille: Yeah. Will you explain messaging? What do you mean when you say messaging?
Michelle: Yes.
Michelle: Messaging is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in online business, and it is poorly defined because I've seen people define messaging as it's your elevator pitch. It's your one liner. I've seen them. Define it as your client language, I've seen it defined as it's your content strategy and what blog posts you're supposed to write.
Michelle: All of that is partially right. , they're partially on the right track because messaging. As a whole is how you speak about your business, whether you are marketing, whether you're on a podcast, whether you're in a sales conversation, it doesn't matter. You have to have a consistent message through every single touchpoint where a potential client can interact with you.
Michelle: It's a comprehensive system, it works across your business. And really the goal of it should. Taking people who don't know you at all, being able to get those people's attention and get them initially interested in order to start a conversation that leads them to your work. And to me, messaging is a big foundational piece that after you have your offer in place and you know how to sell it, and you know, you can get results.
Michelle: It's that next step you have to take to figure out how to effectively market and. To a wider audience, not just the people who know you.
George: How do you get people to across that boundary from a limited definition of messaging, to your more comprehensive definition?
Michelle: A lot of marketing and podcast episodes, even Camille asking me this question allows me to dispel this myth because I think one of the things people struggle with is it's easy to think about messaging as a one liner.
Michelle: That's very concrete and easy to grasp, but when all of a sudden they say, no, it's literally everything your business says. Every time you open your mouth to speak or write, copy, or do a blog post or a podcast. That's what your message is. So for me, it's about being able to kind of dispel that myth consistently over and over again, and also talk about why you want a comprehensive message across all of those different touch points, because I've seen it where somebody will talk about something on social media and then you go to their website and it's about something completely different.
Michelle: And you're like, What I was interested in this, but I go here and there's nothing about what you were talking about on social media. What's the deal. And then it creates this disconnect, which I think really hurts people's credibility in the long run.
Camille: And I think one of the things that I appreciated most about the way you approach.
Camille: Helping me at least understand answering George's question. Like how do you help people get to this understanding of this bigger picture was also the idea that for a lot of us. We're really good at what we do. And we're horrible at telling people about it. It kind starts with the idea of, I don't really know how to toot my own horn.
Camille: I'm just not good at that. And then it gets more complicated from there. Like, okay, well maybe I am okay. Treating my whole horn, but what am I saying? Am I even talking to the right people? And the way that I'm saying this, what do I wanna say? Sometimes you're. Overwhelmed and flooded with all the advice coming at you, all the things you're supposed to quote unquote, be doing, and you can't do all of it.
Camille: And it gets really, really hard and messy. And when you're starting a small business, you're looking at this is like, if I can't figure this out, I don't have a business. If I cannot figure out how to do good marketing and draw people to me, I don't have a business. And so it just becomes this essential, critical thing to figure out.
Camille: And I think your approach to. Recognizing for me, at least it was recognizing my expertise and letting it be okay for me to use my expert language to a certain degree and not have to feel like I was minimizing or oversimplifying everything. Just finding that sweet spot is really hard. And I appreciate how you do that?
Michelle: My work is really focused on helping. I call them the overlooked experts, those people who are exceedingly good at what they do. There's years of experience, they have a lot of practical experience, but they're literally hiding in plain sight. The people who need their work can't find. So they go with the web celebs, with the shiny marketing that are easy to find and promise, oh, you'll make six figures in six seconds.
Michelle: If you just follow my full proof formula. And my people always see their work with like so much nuance, they really care about their clients and their execution of it. And they're really in the weeds with their own expertise, because that's what they love doing. They love learning more about it, getting better at it.
Michelle: Thinking about how do I communicate this so that it matters to another human being never really crosses their mind. And I was listening to a podcast against the rules with Michael Lewis and this season is on experts and over and over again, it was experts. Have a PR problem. They suck at storytelling.
Michelle: They suck at promoting. Expertise. And so then it's really hard to find them. And for me, that's the problem I want to solve. I want the experts to be known. I want them to put the weblab out of business because the experts are the ones who are going to get people real results and not all of these courses and programs and one size fits all solutions.
Camille: I 100% agree with that. One of the other things that you. Helped me along, my whole journey of just getting to this place in my business was even just the acknowledgement. There was a point where I was like, am I crazy? Or is this really how this world of business works? This doesn't seem right. But then you get all this noise and messaging sent at you that I'm like I've been working in business in business performance for decades. It can't be this way and is small business that different? It's not. Business is business. And so being able to ground myself back in the idea of, I'm not crazy, there's just a lot of, let's just say shady shit going on.
Camille: And it's, it's not okay, but people can get away with it just because that's the world that we live in.
Camille: We are very prone to wanting to have those quick fixes. That's one of our belief shifts. We want more foundation over quick fixes. How do we get people to stop trying to do whatever the latest trend is in marketing as their way to grow their business and look at the foundations first, if you don't have your messaging down, what's the point?
Michelle: That's what breaks my heart. One of my clients recently told me she spent $60,000 on courses and programs before she decided to work with me. And she. A definite expert in what she does. And she already has clients, but she just couldn't figure out how to market herself. And so she was going with the options that were most visible that should help her promote her business and see that.
Michelle: So often is that these business owners are investing in all the wrong things that are promising you of the quick fix. A lot of it is marketing too. All of these marketing tactics that might work for you. But if you don't know what to say to make them work, it's always going to fall flat. So the online guru will be like, oh, well, here's my swipe file.
Michelle: But then those swipe files. Feel like you, they don't represent you. They might not align with like your values and how you wanna do business. So those also fall flat, because what I'm seeing is the big names. Don't wanna take a step back and be like, you need to do this deeper work of figuring out how to talk about your thing before you try to market it.
Camille: I have a theory about why that exists.
Camille: They think you tell me more. Thank you. And I have similar problems in that. Getting people to come and do that foundational work in their business. It's not an easy sell unless you've already been struggling with the quick fixes and you've seen the light and you're like, this is not helping me.
Camille: So I think what happens is that there's so desperate for something to happen today. They don't have the time and the patience. I mean, we see this a lot in just anything in life. I don't have time to read all of that. I don't have time to do all of that. I don't have the patience for all of this stuff underneath.
Camille: I think it's a combination of, I don't have time to do it that way. It must be quicker or I'm gonna lose my business. I think that the people that are teaching it know that it's easier to sell their solution than ours. They can clearly see, this is the surface solution problem that they're having and I can solve it right here done.
Camille: And so they do that because it's the easier way to go. I also think that they just don't even have the expertise to do it any differently. They just have the one trick pony and they just know
Camille: that one way. So there's all these different reasons why it happens, but it all sort of just adds up to we're all still trying to get the lap band surgery, right? Instead of going and doing like all of the work or, you know, we want that magic diet pill to actually work. It's the same in our business. It's the same mindset that kind of tricks us up in our business too.
Michelle: We don't realize that it's actually costing us more time, money, and energy to take the quick fix path in your business there's easy to have these dark night of the souls where things aren't going well, the customers aren't coming in the door and. You get hit with this marketing message that if you just follow my seven step full proof formula, you will have all the clients you'll ever need. And when you're like, yes, that's what I want.
Michelle: Not realizing that the person who's selling you, this those seven steps work. For their business, but they have a very specific kind of business and it's different from yours. They don't know how to adapt those seven steps to other kinds of businesses because they've just done it for themselves. And this is a message I've heard again and again, it's like, you just have to be one step ahead of your clients and that.
Michelle: Is not true. why not? Because when you're just one step ahead of your clients, if something isn't working, you don't know how to triage and fix it because you're not far enough ahead. You don't have enough experience doing what you're doing versus if you have like a framework that you're working with, people in, there's always.
Michelle: For me, there's like always different questions I can ask or different tools in my toolbox to get people to the result that I want to get them to. But that comes from these years of experience. And I'm not just like, this is a very rigid process and the thing they always say when the client isn't getting a result, well, it's your fault.
Michelle: You're not following this to a T it's something about your mindset when you don't have that. Ability to figure out how to work with different types of businesses that aren't exactly like yours. That's where all kinds of problems come in. And my people don't get results from a lot of the programs that they're in.
George: I see what you mean. Do you mind if I throw a thought both your ways for you to chew on . So Michelle, as I'm hearing you talk about a more holistic definition of messaging, I like it. When you say it's about everything that you say with your business, everything, and that you have to really sit and figure out what you're about.
George: Camille through episodes, you've talked about beginning to root causes or understanding foundational thinking. What occurs to me is both of those have an aspect of self-reflection. And I wonder that part of the problem with people's businesses. Besides being too busy is they just, haven't been taught to self reflect or taking the time to self reflect.
George: And my guess is that both of you spend time with your clients helping them learn how to reflect.
Michelle: Yeah. I know for my process, I give people open ended questions to free, right on. And sometimes it's literally the first time they've sat down to actually think about these questions and think about like, yeah, what am I rebelling against in my industry?
Michelle: What is the change that I want to create? What does break my heart of what I see in the world? And they haven't. Slowed down enough to think about those questions or even if they think about it, it's all in their head. And it's not actually documented on paper where you can do something with it in this .Quick fix culture. We're always rushing to the next thing. And I'm sure Camille will agree. We don't reflect on what's working or what do I really think about this? Or everybody's saying I should do this, but is that right for my business? My clients often tell me my work feels like therapy for them like therapy for their business, because I'm asking them to think deeply about it.
George: That makes sense. What about you Camille?
Camille: Yeah. I would agree with all of that approach. It makes sense in the way that I approach it too, this kind of relates back to, as you said, George, when we were talking about problem solving and how do you get into the deep root cause of problems in your business and what my clients will talk about when they present their problem to me is they're presenting the solution.
Camille: They're saying I need to hire more people, or I need to get more clients either way. That's a solution to some problem you're experiencing in your business. Probably not the only solution, but it's the only one, you know, cuz it's what you see people saying you should do. It's like, if you wanna scale your business, you gotta start hiring before you're ready.
Camille: That kind of quick fix solution thing. , it's like, are you sure? How do you know what is actually happening in your business? And what is the right path to that? I think you're right, George. I mean, you said that reflection. I was like, yeah, that's basically what it's all grounded in that kind of relates to that idea of what the hustle culture.
Camille: Tells you to do in small business is really don't reflect, just do stuff, right? Go do stuff as fast as you can. And as much as you can, and don't take a step back and reflect on your business in any real way, whether it's strategy, your messaging or whatever it is we're talking about. Yeah. I think you're spot on George.
Camille: I think that's essentially what business owners. Should try to do more often and it doesn't have to be time consuming. I think that's the other thing I don't have time. It's like actually not taking the time now is gonna cost you so much time later. I wish I. Put people like fast forward them into the future to see their future selves and what's gonna happen.
Camille: But that takes a bit of a leap of faith to believe that's true.
George: A lot of times people confuse time with effort. I know this from my own marriage. Sometimes I'll be talking to my wife when we'll be arguing about something. And I'll ask her, why'd you say that she's like, I don't have time to think about that.
George: It's has time for the. It doesn't have time or I don't have time to sit and think, why did I say that? It's the effort to sit back and think that.
Camille: Yes, absolutely. When people talk to me about time management, I don't really wanna talk about time cuz that's not your problem. Your problem is the way you're using that time.
Camille: It's the effort you're putting in. It's the stuff you're prioritizing in the moment. Mm-hmm, , it's your choice of how to use the time. You don't have trouble managing time. You have trouble managing a bunch of other stuff, like efforts, priorities, all of these other things. So, yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent, again, it's kind of very meta, like it's the easiest thing to grab onto like, it's I just don't have time.
Camille: Like, that's just become our standard thing to say now is an excuse for whatever thing is going wrong. So we use it everywhere and it's not even true.
Michelle: And it's funny for me. Like I will talk to people and I find out that they've been struggling with their message for two, three, sometimes five years before they decide to get it sorted.
Michelle: And I just think about all the time that they've spent trying to like write blog posts or do podcast or pitch themselves, or do social media. Where they weren't confident about what they're saying or that it could lead people to want to work with them. And that is a lot of wasted time and energy where it's like, Hey, come work with me.
Michelle: We'll get this handled in 90 days. Instead of multiple years, I feel like sometimes as business owners, we can be really shortsighted instead of thinking about how much time and effort and energy and money. This is going to save me later.
Camille: I can definitely say, and I would love to hear what you think about this, Katie, because you helped me so much with getting my message out into the world.
Camille: For me, since doing the work with you, Michelle, I have noticed I am so much more efficient and effective. If we just look at time, spent doing it so much more efficient, if you just only looked at that one measure, there's many benefits to having the messaging honed in that I do now. But if that was your only measure for why to work with Michelle, it's true.
Camille: It's just so much quicker. To your experience with that, Katie, as the person who has to take the message and make things that puts it out in the world for me.
Katie: Yeah. When you're helping get somebody else's message out there, it's really important to know. What is important to them and what is their message being very clear about that has helped me do that.
Katie: And then us working together and communicating what's working, and what's not also the stopping and reflecting part has also helped
George: I have a million questions I'm holding back here. Go I'm ready. But like
George: the first one I think we're gonna ask is about the belief shift itself, because this was a new term to me.
George: And when Camille told me, I thought that's such a great term. This is yours.
Michelle: I hear life coaches talk about this a lot, like belief shifts their clients need to have, but in persuasion when you're building an argument for your work, or you're just building an argument, let's say you're a politician and you're trying to shift somebody's attitudes and beliefs.
Michelle: You have to be clear on. How the conversation you're having is going to lead them to a belief shift, like give them some kind of aha and make them be like, ah, never thought about it that way before , especially when people first find your work as a business owner, they have a lot of misconceptions about the work you do.
Michelle: They make a lot of assumptions and sometimes they just don't know what they. No. So one of the major misconceptions my people have is they don't know what messaging is. Another one like for my people that is a belief shift is I should be able to do this myself. I'm the expert. I'm really good at what I do.
Michelle: It should be easy for me to communicate it. Or the little sister of this one is I do this for other people. And I'm struggling to do it for myself. So that's something I have to talk to and give them a belief shift around. So we all have these belief shifts that we need to identify in order to get people ready for our work.
Michelle: And I know like you and Camille. Talking about like eight fundamental belief shifts that people should have about business on an individual business level. There's always belief shifts that people need to be making in order to be ready to buy.
George: Three word rebellion. I had never heard this term before. It's intriguing. What's it all about?
Michelle: That's my term. I came up with that. So the three word rebellion came out of this notion. So essentially like a three word rebellion encapsulates the change you wanna create for your clients in just two to five words. And it's really patterned off of what I saw successful entrepreneurs and speakers and business owners do and social movements, because there are people like Simon Sinick and start with why Mel Robbins, the five second rule, Tim Ferris, the four hour week. They have these like really short, succinct, sticky messages that make you wanna know more. Even if you disagree with the idea before our work week, you're like, that's crap, but I'm gonna read about it to find out why. Yeah. And then I also noticed that social movements do the same thing. They're good at encapsulating that change like black lives matter.
Michelle: The Me Too movement make America great. Again, it's a very sticky message. Draws people in and other people can champion and talk about that message. And when I spotted that pattern, I was like, oh, Super interesting. And in my head, I was wondering, cuz back in grad school, I took a social movements class and I was like, I wonder if I took questions from social movements?
Michelle: Like what are we rebelling against? What's the change we want to create? Can I find that core message that people want to be known for? And I tried it out on a few willing clients and I realized. It worked, you could actually get there because it's really hard to distill what it is you do, and the impact your work has in just a few words, but this process actually works and it's kind of a fun way to find your message.
Michelle: And that's how the three word rebellion came about and talking about the, I should be able to do this by. Mentality. I wouldn't have come up with reword rebellion if it wasn't for a friend of mine named Jenny Nash, she's a book coach and she was in Seattle visiting. And I was thinking about updating a book I had already written.
Michelle: And then we started talking about this new idea I had about finding your message, this three word message. And she was just like, Michelle, this is so great. She's like, I think this can make a great book. She's like, what if you call it the three word speech? And I was. I like the three word part, but I wanna move away from public speaking.
Michelle: I was like, that is so close. Like I love the three word idea and then I sat with it for a while and I'm looking at my website, which is my business name is communication rebel. And I'm like, Oh, it's the three word rebellion. That's what this could be called, but if I never had that conversation with Jenny, I don't think I would've landed on my own three word rebellion.
George: Your reaction was you wanna move away from public speaking? What's that all about?
Michelle: I love public speaking. I will still help clients with their public speaking, but I realized that my work just had a much bigger impact and that I was bringing you public speaking, but the focus of the business. Yeah. The focus of the business.
Michelle: And one of my rebellions is I don't like how the speaking industries treat speakers. They don't want to pay speakers. There's a lot of supply of speakers and not much demand. So that drives down what people can charge and they want. Speak for free, even though you're an expert with a thousand years of experience, it doesn't matter.
Michelle: And part of me was just like either I have to change this industry to actually value speakers, or I need to think about doing something where this communication and messaging work can have a broader impact.
George: This is a whole dark underbelly that I was not aware of at all.
Michelle: If you're a speaker and you wanna be paid, you need that New York times bestselling book.
George: I don't have one of those.
Michelle: Yeah, neither do I. And that's okay. But even the national speakers association, it's the association for professional speakers. They don't pay the speakers that speak at their events. What kind of model does this set? Oh, we are the premier organization for professional speakers who get paid, but we don't pay you the speaker.
Michelle: You're doing this as an act of service. It's good exposure. And I'm like, No, there's something very wrong, very wrong about this.
Camille: This makes me think about how many business owners got into wanting their own business for this reason in some different way. So the reason being, I don't like how this place that I'm working in right now is working and can't fix this industry or this environment or this space I can't fix what's broken here.
Camille: So I'm gonna go over here and make my own. They're escaping from some crazy toxic pick your favorite word of what's going wrong in this environment they're working in and they're going to create their own. So there's something that I've been seeing. I wonder if you see this Michelle, that some small business owners are at risk of recreating that same environment for themselves, cuz they don't know any different for sure.
Michelle: I remember when I first transitioned from full time work into my own business. I, I felt so lost because I didn't have the structure that that workplace created. And for me, when I was working full time, I would get up early. I would work on the business for like two hours and then I would go to work and work my day job and come home.
Michelle: And that was how my days were structured. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, I don't have this day job. What do I do with my mornings? And then I found myself recreating that kind of eight to five structure and not realizing like, oh, you know, I can go out and take walks in the middle of the day. If I want, or I can run an errand, I can go to the grocery store.
Michelle: I actually have way more flexibility, but I was just replicating what I had been doing in that day job. Cause all of a sudden you're like, oh, I can do anything. Crap. I can do anything. How do I want this to work? You have to step back and actually reflect and figure out what works for you.
Camille: And there's that reflect word again?
George: When I think of my sister, she's one of the most organized, structured people I've ever met in my life since she was a girl. Camille, when you started your business, I don't imagine you ever having a problem, figuring out how you're gonna organize and spend your day, but maybe you did.
Camille: Having a plan for my days was never my problem. My problem showed up differently, but it's the same essential core thing we're talking about, which is what I brought with me into my business was. Hard work. If my business wasn't achieving the goals that I had set, I was not allowed to get up from my desk or away from my computer. I had to keep putting in more hours.
Camille: And so the structure turned into I'm gonna do all of this work. So I had to do a lot of work in my brain to unwind this belief that just working harder. Going to get me where I wanted to go. That was a culture that I had come from in the corporate world. If you weren't working all the time, you couldn't get promoted unless you were overworking yourself.
Camille: You had to prove your worth by always being available, always doing more work than you could actually do as a normal human in a job. That was what good performance looked like. And I still struggle with it. I still have to go, okay, am I choosing my work over something else? That's valuable in my life, which was the whole point of quitting that job.
Camille: So I could go do these other things that are more important to me. Like I'm gonna spend more time outside walking and taking care of my physical and mental health. I'm gonna spend more time with my family. So. I still struggle with that all the time. We'd much more aware and I have those choices now I could have made them in the past, but there was much more pressure not to.
Camille: Now. It's just my own pressure. I just pressure myself to do it. I don't know who I think I'm impressing. Cuz Zoe P doesn't care. She would rather, I didn't work all the time. She's actually a good reminder. She will come up when it's time to go for walkies and put a me and be like, it's. So she's actually a good check on my over workaholic attitude.
George: Hey, Michelle, two part question for you. Sure. First was, how long have you been working independently with your own business? 11 years. Part two. What would this Michelle tell that Michelle about starting your own business?
Michelle: Figure out your fastest way to cash. Seriously. figure out how to make sales and focus on getting really good at sales, especially in online business.
Michelle: There's so much BS that happens that. Doesn't actually generate revenue for your business. You're like, I need my social media strategy and I gotta get my Instagram bio and maybe I should start a YouTube channel. And maybe I'll create a course, even though I don't have an audience to sell this course too.
Michelle: And it's like, no, you have to be focused on that revenue generation. What is it that you're selling? What problem does it solve? And then. Unapologetic about offering it. I love sales now. I love having sales conversations. I love helping people decide is this the right next step for their business? But when I first started out, sales felt heavy and icky and there's a lot of.
Michelle: People who teach you sales that do really icky bro marketing type things, which make it feel even worse. So for me, I really wish I would've just focused on like what is going to generate revenue for my business as fast as possible. Instead of getting distracted in a hundred million different directions with stuff I didn't need.
George: How do you think that Michelle would've received this advice from this Michelle?
Michelle: She probably would've been like, no, I don't wanna do it and be like, no, trust me. If I could just tell her, you can actually do sales in a way that feels good. Everybody says sales is service, but if you really view yourself as I wanna help you make the best decision for your business, the versus I need to sell you on this thing.
Michelle: That is such a huge breakthrough. That makes spelling so much easier. So I would've also told her that it gets a lot easier. You'll actually come to love this part of your business.
George: That's cool.
Camille: I wish now Michelle told me five years ago. That same message. It was the same for me. Sales was icky. And I had to stop telling myself I'm just bad at sales. I was like, well, you can't have a business if you're gonna be bad at that. So I guess I better stop being bad at it and start being good at it.
Camille: Yeah. But then the challenge was the messaging that no sales should service and all that, you know, crap that you heard was always coupled with. A way to do it, but I was like, well, but this doesn't feel like service. It feels gross. And so much of the messaging around how to do it. It just wasn't good. It never felt good.
Camille: It took me a long time to find that place where I was like, oh, this is how it should be. Like you said, it actually does feel great now to have a sales conversation, but. In the beginning. It doesn't, because you're kind of just taught these very basic icky way to do it. And a lot of what is taught is the icky way.
Michelle: And I think there's also a lot of attachment to outcome when you're first starting out, because you do need clients in the door. So it's like, oh, I've got, I've got to make this sale. And that's the worst energy to bring into a sales conversation. So it leads you to some teaching moments, cuz you'll probably get some clients who aren't the best.
Michelle: For you, which is the way we learn that feeling of desperation and grasping doesn't sell well.
George: So reconcile that with what you said earlier about find your fastest path to catch. I just think some people will see, like, I don't know how to line those two up.
Michelle: I think the first thing finding the fastest path cash is understanding this is who I serve. This is the problem I solve, and this is the way I'm gonna go about it. Now I can offer that and then get people into the sales conversation with me and help them make the decision. That's what I mean. It's like the fastest path to cash. It has nothing to do with like these sleazy sales tactics.
Michelle: Your business really has one job. And that job is to bring in revenue. And the sooner you recognize that that's your business's job, your business's job is not to change the world, not to make you wealthy so that you can help other people. No, it's not like a vehicle for self-actualization it's job is to generate revenue, so help it do it's job so that then you can pay self well, and do the things that you wanna do and hire the people you wanna hire and help the people you want to help.
Michelle: But I think, especially in online business, there's this conflation of business as a vehicle of personal development and self actualization, instead of being like, no, the business is here to generate revenue.
Michelle: That is the job.
Camille: Yeah. I think of this as the. Getting clear on what your business needs versus what you need or want. That would've been my message. Focus on what your business needs to do, its job, which is to make money and just do those things. Would then rule out all the stuff you were talking about, Michelle, where you're like distracted by like, oh, maybe I need a YouTube channel.
Camille: Maybe I need this marketing thing, your business doesn't actually need those things to make money unless your business is built on. Just being a YouTube money maker. If that is your business strategy, then you go make a YouTube channel. But if that's not what your business is about back to the, who do I serve?
Camille: How do I do it? And, and what problem do I solve and how do I solve it? When you get down to just the core essence of that, then you start looking at, oh, that's how I make money. Then you make different decisions about what does the business need in order to be successful doing that. And I think that's in the early days and because you do that messaging, you were talking about that, make sure it's a business that you love.
Camille: And it's self-actualization all of this stuff. All of that business confuses people into the, oh my business, just here to do what I want. No, it's not it's. It is here to make money for you, which hopefully Lynn leads to you doing things you wanna do. Yes. If there is freedom in the money, there's a purpose to it.
Camille: You can have those things, but the business itself, this entity over here, it has no emotions or feelings about you and it just wants to make money and you better give it the things it needs to.
Michelle: And I think this is another thing about you have to separate yourself from the business. If you're on a sales conversation and somebody says no to you, they're saying no to the business.
Michelle: It's not a personal rejection. One of the things that makes me ranty about online business is I hear you are your message. Just tell your story. People will work with you because of your personality and that kind of messaging conflate. You as a human being and your inherent value as a human being with the business.
Michelle: So if you're buying into like, oh, it's my personality. When people say, no, I don't think this is the right fit for me. It feels like a personal rejection instead of just saying, no, this is not right for me. So it's no to the business that conflation of people identifying their business as who they are, or a part of themselves is just so dangerous.
George: Wow. That just opens so many avenues of conversation. We could go with. The first thought that comes to me is I just had a little argument with myself. Well, what about Instagram influencers? I mean, their business, the online is about them, but that's actually not true either. It's about this public persona.
George: That we're meant to believe is about them is not really them. So it's still true, right?
Michelle: Yeah. And I also feel like those influencers they're promoting other people's products and getting paid for that. So it's like, they're almost like actors and an advertisement. So it's not as personal if you don't buy versus like, if you're someone like me or Camille who has this steep expertise who really cares about people and it feels.
Michelle: Our business is a part of who we are. Then it feels like that personal rejection. I think the influencers, they have it, it's just different for them because it's not their products. How they present themselves online is definitely a product. And you hear all the stories like, oh, it takes them eight hours to take a picture of themselves and edit that picture.
Michelle: Yeah. But feel like they can also have some distance between influencer side and the real self. Hopefully.
George: You're making the point with that statement, if it takes eight hours to take a picture of yourself, it's not yourself taking a picture of yourself, take that picture. And that's you, they're spending eight hours to take a packaged picture of something that to be presented. Based on them. Yeah.
Camille: Yeah. The reference like they're actors, I think is the closest thing. I don't think of them as business owners like you and I, we're not in the same business, they're in a completely different business as an influencer. And it's much closer to entertainment actors, you know, so actors are they're about their personality and them as a person, like that's their, they are their product.
Camille: Are it. And their skills. And these guys the most simplified version of that, I guess.
George: I was just reading this article about Jim Carey. He became wildly famous as a short period of time. The breakthrough for him was the Truman showed. At that point. He started getting paparazzi at his home and people were camping out at his house all the time.
George: And he realized this is the price of being a celebrity. And then he changed how he thought about taking jobs or because he realized there's a lot of his personality that makes him charismatic or drawn to it. But even that wasn't him. I thought that was fascinating to see same thing, because I hear if you're gonna start your own business, do what you love.
George: But. I can see where that gets you to the trap. There's no use on the business that you hate, cuz then you're gonna be miserable with all these day hours being excellent. And there's no point in that, even if you're excellent at it, right?
Michelle: Yeah. Well, and Camille, are you the one with the story of the aunt who opened to McDonald's because she just wanted to make money.
George: Me too. Same aunt, same aunt.
Michelle: That's right. I keep forgetting. But yeah, that story has always stuck with me because she was very clear about what the business' role was. And she was looking for something that was going to be profitable that could build a nest egg for her. She had all of these goals. And so, so many of us, especially as like solo business owners, our micro businesses.
Michelle: Doing something that we've spent years developing the expertise around and that we really do love doing. And then it's like, oh wait. But the job of the business is to make me money. Yeah. I have to keep that in mind and realize that my value as a human, my expertise, my experience, all of that is separate the businesses, its own entity.
Michelle: It's separate from me.
George: Did Camille tell you what she had intended to do before she decided on McDonald's? What she really wanted to do as a business? No, for the longest time she wanted to build and run an import export business. She really wanted to do that because it really intrigued her and it fascinated her.
George: And then she did her analysis cuz she supremely rational and disciplined and she's like, no, I can't add a lifestyle. I'm used to running that. So then she started looking around and zoned in. McDonald's made exactly that choice. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember her telling me one time, I don't know if she told you this to Camille.
George: She said, you know, the thing about McDonald's is you don't have to be smart to make money. You have to be disciplined and hardworking. And I am that like, she's smart too. She's underselling herself, but I get her point. And you're right. McDonald's is not who she is.
Michelle: it was just very clear on her intention.
Michelle: And I think understanding the job, the intention of your business, or even like, I always think about like messaging has a specific job to do. Your marketing has specific jobs to do in your business. It just becomes easier to separate everything from the business. And then you as a human being.
George: Why communications is a field of study in the first place. How did you realize that's what you wanted to?
Michelle: That started in high school. What happened was in high school, they forced you to take a public speaking class. And I was very shy at the time. One of my teachers said that I was the student who knew all the answers, but would never raise my hand. So I took this public speaking class and the first speech was terrifying.
Michelle: My knees were knocking. I think I was spitting cuz I was like salivating so much. The boy I liked was in the class. It was just a nightmare. And I got the gentleman's C in the class, like. You got through good job, but there was something about it. There was this little voice in my head that was like, this is really important.
Michelle: This is a skill you should master. And I'm like, Okay, how do I master this? So I did what most people do when you suck at something. I decided to do it competitively and join the speech and debate team. And I got up at like 6:00 AM on Saturdays and would compete and lose again and again at all of these tournaments, but it really helped me find my voice.
Michelle: I did get progressively better at it. By the end of the year, I won an honorable mention ribbon and that like made my whole day , somebody's recognizing that I'm actually skilled at this, but I, I kind of love the naivete I had about like, this is important. I'll just do it competitively and get better at it.
Michelle: I don't think a lot of people would take that path, but then I was always just fascinated with. Communication and how to create these speeches that actually persuaded people or informed people about a topic. And when I got into college, I was originally a music major and being a music major was intense.
Michelle: You had to do a music theory at seven o'clock in the morning, and you could only take one class outside of the music department in your first year. And so I ended up taking intro to communication and I went to that class and I was. I'm home. I opened the textbook and I was like, I read every word of it.
Michelle: I aced every class. It was so easy. It was like breathing. Meanwhile, I'm struggling with music theory and I'm like, oh, I should do this. I love this. I'm interested. So I'm one of those people who really found their purpose, their calling early in life.
George: And so you get a bachelor's degree and you kept going and got your PhD.
George: Why was that?
Michelle: The master's degree was kind of funny, cuz I was not planning on continuing on. And I was on the speech and debate team my senior year in college and I was the star of the speech and debate team. And so I was always around the communication department. And one night after practice, I was sitting in the hallway and one of the professors, Dr.
Michelle: Pamela cobble was there and I've never had a class with her in my whole entire time. I was there and she was like, Hey Michelle, can I talk to you for a few minutes? Do you wanna come to my office? And I was like, sure. And I sat down and she's like, Have you thought about getting your master's degree? what she's like.
Michelle: I really think you should apply to get your master's degree. Like I see something in you. I think this is the right path for you. I just want to encourage you. I would love to be your mentor and she just like made this. Pitch. I'm like, well, maybe I'll do this. And really, she was the one who encouraged me and I loved graduate school.
Michelle: When I finally realized that they didn't want you to regurgitate facts and they actually wanted your opinion on things and see like how you would answer questions. I started really thriving. So that's how I got there. It was because of the speech and debate team. And then that one conversation with Pamela that just kind of was like, oh wait, I can do this.
George: I got more questions, but I have a comment I wanna make to both you and Camille at this point, if you don't mind, this is a cool story. One thing that really strikes me is you've listed two key points in your life where an outside observer has said something to you that they've observed about yourself.
George: And it struck you. You hadn't thought about it that way and it's changed your course. So I'll go back out and. This is the value of getting coaches or getting help and going out and getting somebody as much as you think, you know, or if you're aimless, if you find somebody who can listen to you and is thoughtful, like both of you are, they will be able to make observations about you.
George: That will help you change your path. And that in itself, I think is a huge help.
Michelle: Absolutely. I don't think I would've gotten a master's degree or here's a really funny offshoot of that story. When I was a freshman in college, my roommate and I went to a psychic fair and I had a psychic reading and this woman told me, this woman told me that I would get a PhD.
Michelle: And I was like, what does she know? I'm not doing that. That seems like a lot of like time in school and education and stuff. And I always think about that because then I have that conversation with Pamela and then I end up getting into a PhD program. That woman was spot on. . So, yeah, a psychic predicted my path.
George: So bringing this back to today and something you're talking about, being able to focus on fastest path of revenue and really being clear about what's business, about who you are. You clearly love communications. You have a business about communications. How are you able to touch your love for communications and talking about it from the business that you run?
Michelle: That was a lot of coaching
George: oh, I see. OK.
Michelle: Yeah, that was a lot of mindset work and a lot of coaching and years of taking things personally, and then finally arriving at that epiphany. That was definitely my. Work for the longest time. One of the stories I always tell there's this guy named Donald Miller. He has a messaging framework called store a brand, and he was kind of one of the first people to market.
Michelle: So everybody knows him. Everybody refers him. And in my head, I always had this. Thing like, oh, my business can never be as good as Donald Millers or I'm not as good as Donald Miller because I wasn't there first. I don't have a New York times bestselling book, blah, blah, blah. And I had to do so much work to realize that.
Michelle: Donald Miller can exist. And it is okay for me to be an expert and to promote my expertise, we can both exist in the same universe without actually even competing against each other, to separate yourself from your business. It is a lot of work. The other thing that really helped me, and this is gonna sound weird when I became an S Corp.
Michelle: So I was a sole proprietorship for a really long time. And then I hired an accountant and she was like, You should be an SCOR. And all of a sudden you're filing this formal paperwork that says this business is its own thing. It files its own taxes. And then for me, that felt like that identity shift too.
Michelle: It's like, oh, the business is over here and it does its thing. And then I'm here supporting the business. I need to be doing the right jobs to help the business do its job. But. Not me or thought like a visit to an accountant would help me kind of unfurl my identity, but it really did. I felt like that was a pivotal moment where I really saw the separation.
Michelle: Like it was that filing that formal paperwork that was like, this is an S Corp entity. and it has its own like ID number and everything.
Camille: This little phrase just popped in my head. As you said that, which is we start with beliefs, right? When we talk about beliefs that starts, you have to believe it and then it'll change what you do.
Camille: But when I was working on business performance improvement, it was based on lean performance improvement methodology. What was really happening is you act your way into a new way of thinking the way you actually change, how you think. And how you process and think about things is, is starts with taking action, which is the whole start doing something different.
Camille: That was a best action that you took to create that business entity change, how you thought about things, right? Yeah. It was, you needed the act to happen in order to get there. I mean, that's a very stark example, but there's a lot of different ways to think about that in business and how, if you start acting the way I need things to be, that's actually the path to shifting your beliefs and your thinking.
Michelle: Yes. Or just taking that action that shows you something different is possible.
George: Yeah.
Camille: Well, we've been talking for a very long time and we could probably go on and on and on, but I know Michelle has got other things that she's probably got on her schedule. I first just wanna say thank you. Thank you.
Camille: Thank you for being our first guest. This was so much fun. You can come back anytime. We'd have a bajillion more questions for you. Oh. But my last question to you is I think you have a little free mini workshop that people can take. Can you tell us a little bit about?
Michelle: The free mini workshop is around the three word rebellion.
Michelle: It walks you through the basics of creating your own three word rebellion, and it's really for you to figure out whether or not this is the right kind of messaging framework for you and for your business. It is for those. Expert business owners, whether they are service providers, coaches, or consultants who really want to be able to communicate their expertise in a way that gets people excited about it and gets people talking about it.
Michelle: So they can go sign up for that threewordrebellion.com.
Camille: Perfect. And we will put that link in the show notes too, so people can easily find that workshop. And having personally worked with Michelle, I just wanna plug that you should definitely do this free thing, cuz it will be awesome. And you should also get a book which is also really awesome and it's actually step by step walks you through her whole framework and it's amazing.
Camille: And a treats to be able to go through that with you in person. I did the book and I couldn't make it all sort of fit and match up, cuz I didn't have Michelle's level of expertise. Kind of back to what you were saying, George, like you do need this outside person's expertise, knowledge and perspective that you don't have in order to pull these answers out of you, which is all she was doing.
Camille: She wasn't making stuff up. She was just pulling it outta. Painfully sometimes, but it got me where I needed to get to. So it's totally worth doing so book podcast, what's the podcast called?
Michelle: It's called the Rebel Uprising Podcast.
Camille: Oh, that's right. Rebel Uprising Podcast.
George: Also a cool name.
Camille: I know.
Michelle: Thank you.
Camille: She's really good at this stuff. Yeah.
George: And a troublemaker sounds like.
Camille: And a little bit of a troublemaker definitely should follow her on Instagram and or at LinkedIn. She's got both at Dr. Michelle Mazuer on Instagram and LinkedIn. Well, thank you so much, Michelle. And we will put all those plugs down in the show notes.
Camille: Any last thoughts, Michelle?
Michelle: Just get clear on your message. Do it sooner than you think . That's what I would tell people.
Camille: Yes. Do it sooner than you think. Get ready as fast as you can get ready and do it. I agree.
George: Really nice to meet you.
Michelle: Nice to meet you too. This was so much fun. Thank you all for having me.
Michelle: I feel so honored to be your first guest.
Camille: Oh my gosh, my honor. Thanks.
