Jim: The queen came down and said, resistance is futile. And I said, resistance is the point. And then the little micro assimilation bots came into me and now I am a planner.
Jim: All things are planned.
Camille: He's also a treky George. So who knows where you guys will go. We've already talked about triples in one podcast.
Jim: We can totally make this all about Star Trek .
George: And you can't say resistance is the point, then you have to say resistance futile.
Jim: It depends what side of the galaxy you live on, come on. There are other perspectives.
Camille: He lives in his own galaxy.
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 and bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: Welcome to episode something or other. Actually, I think we're episode nine where Jim Barker, aka James Divine, is our guest today.
Camille: Jim is one of my good friends and we have worked on various things in various ways together. I would say you are my number one superstar client. So I want you to be able to tell stories about your business, and I just think your business journey is unique and interesting and fascinating and that everybody should hear it because partly it is one of those small business stories that is kind of an every business story.
Camille: Like all small businesses, you're going through the real work of what it takes to stand up a small business, but you're also doing a bit of a unique type of business. And so I think it's interesting to look at the perspective of how you take something that's not really a traditional business and turn that into a business.
Camille: And we will, of course, because our theme this month has been planning. We will talk to Jim a little bit about planning. So that is who our guest is today. So Jim, do you first want to tell us a little bit about yourself, give us your little bit of story, and then I know George already has like a zillion questions mostly about whats going on behind you, but yes, we're definitely gonna get into it.
Camille: So go ahead and, and tell us your story real quick.
Jim: There's lots going on behind me and yes, all the questions. I love what you said yesterday or the other day. I don't know how it's said. I am doing a very traditional business, but with a non-traditional,
Camille: there's a traditional business model with a non-traditional topic.
Jim: That's right. A traditional business model, but a non-traditional topic or a non-traditional business. A lot of people are distracted by the fact that I'm a professional palm reader, a professional psychic, intuitive reader and spiritual counseling coach type of person.
Jim: And that's a distraction from what's underneath that is I'm building a business like every other person who is doing any other thing. If they're selling anything that is out there, any service or product, it all has to be built on a very similar, if you wanna engage in the same capitalist system that everyone else engages in, in North America, you have to play by certain systems or within, or, or in spite of certain systems that we live in, in this society.
Jim: And so I have found ways to manage around, in and through those in clever and maybe not so clever ways, and really adopted my learning mindset and my thinking cap along with your help Camille, to figure out ways to saunter on through that. And doing something that is unique, but underneath it, the nuts and bolts of how a business is being run is not so different from if I was selling canned goods, jams and jellies at the state fair or anything else.
Jim: That's I think what's really cool.
Camille: Agreed.
Camille: I think that's what's fascinating about your type of business, is you don't fit the traditional mode of a lot of the businesses that I work with. And so it's always fascinating to me to see how you take something that's a little different and unique and also you've made it your own.
Camille: So give us a little bit of the story of how you got into, or wherever you wanna start with your journey. Because you're not just I would say a typical palm reader, the way anybody might think of it, right? Yeah. So explain that.
Jim: Little bit of my background. I have very much the right brain, left brain, if you will, type of person.
Jim: So I have education in the hard sciences. I was premed. I have my degree in social sciences, anthropology, sociology. I have a real love for that kind of empirical approach to things. My father is a rocket scientist. My mom always identified me as someone who is very scientifically minded, very curious, always learning.
Jim: She always said, You should be an engineer . And I always aced my sciences, my heart, my STEM courses were always things that I got straight A's in growing up. So this is the background on little Jimmy as he's growing up.
Jim: And at the same time, I always had a deep interest in spirituality.
Jim: I was raised Catholic and had a deep relationship with my Catholic faith. And then as I came out of the closet as being gay and also had a epiphany that my Catholicism couldn't contain the expansiveness of my belief system, I had a loss of faith and a regaining of a broader sense of the universe and there's so much more out there.
Jim: And sci-fi really entered my ethos and I found that there was a lot of interest in the imagination that sci-fi brought in and that anything is possible. And there was also a lot of quantum spirituality and those like woo woo types of new age movement and the metaphysical things.
Jim: And when I was 11, read a pamphlet in my grandparents' attic. This is the more secular side. My dad's side of the family, as opposed to my mom's side was very Catholic. And I read a pamphlet in my grandparents' attic that said, Your future's in your hands. It was like from the fifties. And I read my little brother's palm and my mother, my Italian Catholic mother snap pointed.
Jim: And so when she snap points, it's like a crack of lightning. Don't do that. It's devil worship.
Jim: I never read another palm until I was 16 and started to rebel and started doing that for tips in my hometown and then have been doing it ever since.
Jim: And it just became something that I did on the side. And then more and more as I was dissatisfied with my day job, although I had a really fun day job and continued to explore, Camille gave me an amazing opportunity to learn a methodology of business efficiency and expansion and all the really cool opportunity, even that couldn't hold my interest.
Jim: And I found myself wanting something more fulfilling and I found a way to make being a palm reader of all things of a lucrative full-time job. And so that's where I am today. So there's a lot of gaps and a lot of bridges that you have questions about. So that's basically from here to.
George: Go back to the very beginning. Where were you born and raised?
Jim: Oh, Tucson, Arizona is where I was born and raised. Now I live in Seattle, Washington. I left when I was 21 years old. I'd come out of the closet and my friend in college said, I'm moving to Seattle. You can be gay there and no one cares.
Jim: And I said, What? You can? And he's like, Yeah, they hang pride flags from the city streetlights. And I said, no way, I don't believe you. Sure enough, we got here and it was like Dorothy returned to Oz. And for sure there's like rainbow flags hanging from the city streetlights. Then I couldn't believe it.
Jim: So I've stayed here ever since and it's really a cool place.
George: So you said that your mom would tell you you needed to be an engineer.
George: How did that sit with you? Was she right?
Jim: My mom is an enlightened human being. Both of my parents are amazing, unconditionally loving, enlightened human beings. They're amazing people. So she saw something in me. She saw my curious mind. She saw my learning mindset.
Jim: She then applied it to, Oh, you should be an engineer. What she could have said, I can't wait to see how you apply that. Yeah. But in her words, she immediately thought, oh, apply it to something that I know, which is do what your dad is doing, be an engineer of some kind.
Jim: She could have said something like, and she has said, I love how you're applying your amazing mind. And she's always been very supportive. But that was her way of saying gosh, I see how your mind works and you think of things that I don't think of.
George: I'm really curious to hear about how much of that mindset applies to your business now? How much of that do you bring to it?
Jim: So there's two sides to a business. There is the art of what you're providing to the customer and to the client.
Jim: And then there is the art of you running the business. These things show up on both sides. Let's say you're an artist. Yeah. Everyone loves to paint the painting. That's why you're in business. Oh, I'm a painter.
Jim: I love painting the paintings. Great. How are you with creating the marketing materials to sell your paintings, paying the rent on your studio, managing your business license, doing all your taxes , all the nuts and bolts of the machine of the business that's behind the art gallery, or the selling of your beautiful paintings that really you wish you could just sit there and paint all day rather than manage like all the other machinery behind it.
Jim: So the scientific side is working that puzzle of, okay, A, what is the science and the art of creating what I create for my clients and my customers, and what is the art and science of operating my business and operating the machinery behind it. I hope that I bring both of those to both.
Jim: I hope that I can operate a joyful business mechanics on the back end and provide joyful services and products to my customers and clients.
Jim: Yeah, I see what you mean. I don't know where I got this term. It's a previous job, but we talked about what you're saying by the two halves of the business, front office, back office. Front office is what our customers see and why we say we're in business.
Jim: The back office is the core skills we need to run it successfully and get what you're saying.
Camille: This particular concept that you just got into, it's also kind of the crux of why I think Jim's story is so interesting because we talked about how your business is in this woo space, as we call it. That's the part where I say this not really traditional. He's not being a consultant or a coach or a photographer or even a painter. He's doing something that a lot of people would look at and say how could that possibly be a business? And that's weird and whatever. So there's a lot of people that work in this space whether it's tarot card readings, or palm readings or all these kinds of things.
Camille: One of the things that Jim and I talk about is that there's a lot of people who are working in this space who are in that space for a reason and there's not a lot of traditional businesses that allow space for that kind of work.
Camille: Jim couldn't go just be a palm reader and a regular corporate job somewhere. So he creates his own business to do it. But because of...
George: I love that thought though.
Jim: I'm IBM's corporate palm reader.
George: Yeah. That's awesome.
Camille: Corporate tarot card readings. Like when they bring massage therapists in, there's also tarot cards. Yeah. And Palm readers.
Jim: Let's see how that quarterly business report is gonna go. Let me just look at everyone's palm real quick.
Camille: Let me just do your astrological chart and see how that's gonna show up.
Jim: Yeah. Maybe you should wait to do that stock buy back until after Mercury's done being retrograde.
George: Oh Cah-ching that's an arrest for you.
Jim: That's not insider trading. That's astrological trading.
Camille: So my point is because he can't do that and we're creating this business and all these people are creating these businesses it's like the only choice they feel like they have if they wanna be able to honor this thing that they care about. Yeah. So they don't necessarily go into it with the business mindset, like the technical sciencey side of it.
Camille: They're going into it with the woo mindset, and they just wanna own that and do that and be that and have it be all of what they do. So one of the things you and I talk about, Jim, is how so many of them struggle because they actually resist doing the business side of the business really well because it's built into the approach that you take because you've already adopted such a non-traditional thing.
Camille: They're built to resist anything traditional. Like you said, when you build this business, you do have to play by the rules of the capitalist system we work in if you want it to work and actually make money for you.
Jim: There is something to that. Yes, and obviously not everyone, but a vast majority of people who are in the metaphysical space or the new age type of space, do have a idea of transcendence or transcending the mundane. And so, I have found many meta physically minded folks who resist inadvertently and for good reason resist the idea of the mundane of business.
Jim: Or they're in this like abundance mentality. I just really wanna follow my abundance mentality and I really believe in the law of attraction and it'll all work out. And I'm like, Okay. And do you have a plan? Oh no, the plan is written. I just cast my tarot cards and that's my business plan. There's something to be said for following intuition and you have a certain intuition that will guide you. That does work.
Jim: Also, I say yes and cuz I'm a big proponent of the yes and. Yes. Follow your intuition. Also planning. Those can go together. So this is me bringing practical and intuitive together.
George: There's an enterprise version of what you're talking about too. Very simple. People who say, no meetings, I don't like meetings.
George: So talk about issuing the mundane. There's people who say, I want to reduce the number of meetings I have. And there's a good way and there's a bad way to do that. The bad way is just like, I don't find meetings interesting, so I'm not gonna do it. It's like, well, you gotta meet with people for something.
George: Now, people who don't do it because they find meetings unproductive and agendaless and all these problems, sure. Go to the next level of detail and talk about how to fix that.
Jim: I think there's something to be said for defining, so to your meeting example. Instead of saying, I'm just not gonna do meetings, understand why are meetings ineffective? Yeah. What bothers you about meetings? If meetings bother you because it's a sense of control over your time and you as a vice president of whatever the heck, and feel that you're above those meetings. Well, that's just that person being an a-hole. If it's, I don't want meetings because I'm in there and I don't know why I'm here. You all have the remit to make the decisions.
Jim: Why am I here? I'm here because I obviously haven't empowered my people to feel like they're safe to make the decisions. Cuz they keep looking to me for me to be like, sounds good. Yes, you can do that. I need to work on making sure that my people actually know that they're allowed to make these decisions or there's something missing.
Jim: So you can start to look at and examine what is a meeting? How does a meeting work? How does the meeting effective? How does my admin or me or anyone know what meetings I need to be invited to that are actually where I need to be effective? You could do that with everything. You could do that with your strategy. You could do that with your projects. You could do that with everything.
Jim: What is really effective and how do I identify it? These are things I think about.
George: Yeah, completely agree. As Camille was talking about nontraditional business in the woo space. If you're a palm reader, are you not just a different form of Coach?
Jim: So this is a great, great question.
George: Thanks.
Jim: No. No, I'm not.
George: Why not?
Jim: So let me explain. I just wrote about this and I made a distinction. I do provide coaching. I provide spiritual life coaching. Very different from what Camille does, but I just made this live on my website and one of my FAQs is how is coaching different from palm or tarot reading? A reading is a lot of me telling. I'm accessing intuitive or psychic information and downloading that information to you. I'm recording the session because I'm just accessing my intuition by looking at the cards or looking at your palm and I'm telling you a whole lot of information.
Jim: That's what you get to then sift through after in the recording and make connections and be amazed and surprised and kind of flabbergasted in the fact that I know all this stuff about you, just by looking at the gesture, the shape and the lines that are on your hand.
Jim: A coaching session is a lot of me asking.
Jim: A coaching session is where you have the answers in you and I'm asking you provocative questions, just the right question to get you to pull out some of the answers that are already in you. So coaching is not me telling you the answers, it's me asking you questions and hopefully, and I work on this all the time, I'm asking you questions cuz I'm genuinely curious.
Jim: I'm not asking you questions because I already know the answer and I'm just trying to get you to come to my answer. But I struggle with that like we all do.
Jim: That's the difference between a psychic reading where I'm looking at, oh, I see your palm George. This means this and that means that here's what this is and this is what that is. And you're like, Holy cow. How does Jim know that about me?
Jim: Versus a coaching session, which is tell me what you want, where you're headed. Tell me about that decision you made. How did that feel? What did you hear from other people? What are three other things you might've done in that situation. Those are more coaching questions.
George: I'm gonna map that to something mundane. I realize there's this danger that maybe people are listening to this, Hi mom. Might think I'm trying to take the wonder out of your profession. That's not my case, but I'm just trying to relate it to other things I understand.
George: What you just told me sounds like when you doing a reading, this is the telemetry. If I take an M B T I test or Tilt 360 test or something like that, what you're doing is giving me the report. That's the data. Here's the observation of the things.
George: But then the coaching part is what you end up doing with that. The interaction, helping the client reflect and all that stuff.
Jim: Yes. I love that analogy. I think it's really apt analogy. If you take an MBTI, which in case people don't know what that is, that's the Myers Briggs or a personality profile test or the many other personality profile tests that are out there. You could look at a palm reading very much like a personality profile.
Jim: And when I do palmistry, it doesn't have to be super mystical. Your hands are an expression of your body language. The musculoskeletal development of your hands as you're gripping the steering wheel, as you drive to work, as you're holding the pen. The micro movements of your hands that you're not aware of is an expression of your social psychology.
Jim: So of course, your hands are going to express your body language. And the epithelial of the skin on your hands is going to show a record of what you've been up to. You start playing the guitar, you're gonna have callouses on your hands and muscles develop on your hands that are gonna indicate that you are playing the guitar.
Jim: You go from an IT job to a bricklaying job. Your hands are gonna change in the way that they are muscular and the way that the skin callouses over. So these things are really like dramatic examples of how the hand changes and how it transmits what's going on.
Jim: The other interesting thing about the hands is the gesture. The gesture is a unconscious expression of your motivations, of your unconscious. We are programmed to imprint onto people's faces. We have mirror and neurons in our brain. Yeah. That connect with people's faces and with our general body language. But they do not monitor the expression of the hands.
George: Really?
Jim: We don't look at the hands consciously, and we...
George: Wait. So when I'm flipping off that other driver, that's doing me no good?
Jim: When you overtly do it, they will notice. But your unconscious gesture is largely unseen consciously. It might be seen unconsciously. We're still studying that. But if you pay attention to a celebrity who's waving and you take a free shot of that.
Jim: You can notice their hand gesture and you immediately know what their unconscious thoughts and motivations are, and you can analyze that gesture based on the social psychology of hand gesture. And it is remarkably accurate.
Jim: When I reflect this back to people in a coaching session when I'm saying, okay, here's what your hand gesture is doing, I had a woman who wanted to move to Ireland with her family. Her husband's American, her kids are born here, but she's from Ireland and she's like, I want my kids to be global citizens.
Jim: I'm sick of what's going on in this country. I wanna move everyone back to Ireland, but I'm just not sure. She's not a person who would normally get a palm reading, by the way. And I looked at her hands and she was making a very particular pose with her hands, the teacher posed, and I said, you're making the teacher pose every time you talk about it.
Jim: I think you want to teach your kids something, and that's really your motivation. It was mind blowing to her. She says, you are right Jim. This is really what this is about is teaching my kids something. And it gave her clarity that no one else was able to give her because I was able to reflect back her body language.
Jim: So, you're right, George. Taking the mysticism out of it doesn't take the mysticism out of it because this is a reflection of who you are. It's your hands, it's your body. It's a somatic reflection of your personality.
Jim: Is there a psychic and an intuitive aspect to it? There is. I've developed my psychic skills over time and my intuition over time.
Jim: So if that happens, I will share that with a client. But the palm reading is very much like an M B T I or any other. What color is your parachute? I mean, remember that one. But any of those type of personality things. And I have a very specific system in rubric and that I'm writing a book about on how to do it, and it's teachable and anyone can do it.
George: Awesome.
Jim: So this is the foundation for my business. For me, my business is both teaching my method and providing a service of readings. And so this is the foundation of understanding. So when Camille and I we're talking, one of the things is could I make The Divine Hand Palmistry a viable business?
Jim: It was always something that I did on the side. And there was this moment, this watershed moment sitting in Camille's newly remodeled dining room, and we're going through a book at the time, and I'm like, well, one of the steps was actually do the numbers.
Jim: I think it was just this moment where we're like, what would it take to actually leave my day job? What would I, what would this business need to do? How many readings is it? Like, actually do the math! And we did it and it wasn't as big of a leap from what I was currently doing as I thought.
George: Huh.
Jim: And I already had some savings. And then this other opportunity dropped in my lap where I could do some consulting with my day job that would suddenly drop my hours down to like a quarter of the hours I was currently working. And the warp fields lined up and boom, I could just hit engage.
Jim: And it was amazing how the ship took off.
George: Let's say we're meeting at the Rotary Club or something, and say, hey, tell me what you do. Tell me about your business.
Jim: Oh, sure. I'm Jim. I go by James Divine on the internet. I am a palm reader, a mystic and a bringer of joy. That's what my business card says.
Jim: And so, Palm Reader is, I developed The Divine Hand Method of palmistry. I teach palmistry around the country. I'm working on my book on palmistry. I'm a palmistry scholar and educator. I provide palm reading sessions for people on the internet and in person.
Jim: I also am a mystic, so I teach topics on how to manage your energy, how to work with esoteric and metaphysical topics of all kinds.
Jim: And I'm a bringer of joy because I'm just a happy, awesome person who loves to laugh and make people smile all the time.
George: Okay, so you just told me some things that you do and there were at least three different things that I heard. One is palmistry to individuals.
George: It sounds like it's very important for you to teach the practice to others.
Jim: Yes.
George: And then third mysticism. So maybe I ask you this question coming at it from a different way.
George: Do you have a mission, a mission statement?
Jim: The mission of the Divine Hand is to transform the way that palmistry is practiced and perceived in the world. Right now, palmistry is very often seen as an occult spooky practice, and as often actually practiced as a way to con people.
Jim: When you look up palmistry in the news, it's often associated with people who have taken advantage of people as a grift. A way to steal money from people. It is often seen as a nefarious practice.
Jim: If I'm hired for a holiday party and I'm walking around and I say, hi, I'm the palm reader, would you like your palms read? People might say, Oh no, I don't wanna know when I'm gonna die. So people think that it's something that will predict something terrible in their life.
Jim: Palmistry has this bad reputation for good reason because all of these antique books that are on this shelf behind me have these predictions written in them .That if you have this line on your hand, this is a terrible thing and this is a terrible thing. So my mission is to transform that in the world by teaching professional readers and others how to read palms in a whole new way.
Jim: I want to be the person that transforms that.
George: Why is that your mission? How did you decide that you wanted to take that on?
Jim: When I was a kid, I was reading palms for tips at age 16, and I saw someone with something called a simian line. The simian line on the hand is also known as the suicide line.
Jim: And when I saw this on this person, they seemed to be emotionally vulnerable. And I realized that I had an enormous power. In that moment I realized, what if I told them they had a suicide line? Would that tip them over the edge and make that true?
Jim: Would I potentially be responsible or partly responsible for being the straws that would break that camels back? What's my responsibility? People believe what psychics tell them. Even if what I'm saying is totally bs, what does that mean for me to operate with immense love and care for my fellow human beings?
George: Indeed.
Jim: And I started realizing that I had an enormous responsibility to really understand. That your hand is created. And I realized this hand of yours is created by a unconditionally loving creator. It's not possible for that hand to have anything inherently bad in it. Whoever said that's a suicide line is a liar or a grifter or a con artist.
Jim: And so I realize in that moment that this line is a joining of your head and your heart. And in that instant, I realized they're struggling because they have incredible integrity between their head and their heart.
Jim: And the world, I don't know if you've noticed, have you noticed that the world lacks integrity sometimes? Yeah. And so here's a person with incredible integrity to a fault in a world that doesn't have integrity, a world that isn't built for them, a world of modern society that is built for people to separate their head and their heart.
Jim: Here's someone who has that integrated. And so as I talked about that this person just their face relaxed and they saw themselves and it was just a beautiful moment. And I realized I need to change the way these books are written. I need to change this because I have the power to help people and see themselves and accept themselves.
Jim: Modern science has said, Wow, dyslexic astronomers actually see more stars and discover more things in the sky. Wow. ADHD people are gifted. Wow. People on the spectrum actually have a super power. Instead of being dis something, they're actually super something.
Jim: This is what I started to realize when I was 16 back in 1986 or whatever it was. From there, my methodology grew.
George: Really like all this, you just said 16 years old when this came to you? That is amazing. I mean, that is amazing precedent and grounded, it's beautiful. That's really beautiful.
George: Okay, I see. So if that's how you were thinking back then and hits you that there's something fundamentally wrong about how there are other people in practicing. That's really what has driven you to try to change how people think about it now. Yep. And I could see not only clients, but you'd want teachers, practitioners, to rethink.
George: Say more about that. How did that become part of your mission?
Jim: We have a negativity bias in our culture, of course, because if that pretty red berry on that plant that we ate made everyone in my village sick, in my tribe sick, we are going to be hardwired to remember, do not eat that pretty red berry cuz it'll make you have the runs for a week, right?
Jim: And so we are hardwired in our reptilian brain to remember the bad thing. Pretty red berry is the bad thing. So we will look for the slightly pink salmonberry and be like, Oh no, that one's a good thing. But the pretty red berry bad thing. So we have this hardwired into our reptilian brain.
Jim: When it comes to bad things at work in the corporate world, bad things in relationships, bad things all around, we are hardwired to remember the bad things more often than remembering the good things.
Jim: So it is in metaphysical and intuitive readings. When we spread out the cards and we have all of this really wonderful card of love. And we have another wonderful card of success and a really fabulous card about prosperity.
Jim: And then another card about speed. And then we have the one card, which is about like difficulty.
Jim: Well, of course we're gonna remember that card about difficulty. It was the last card we pulled. It was about difficulty, and we're gonna forget all those other cards that preceded it. But I remember that card about difficulty, but there was that one card about difficulty and I'm like, Oh my God, lady, come on.
Jim: Only one fifth of your reading had a difficulty card and it wasn't even the death card, it was the difficulty card. Maybe that's weightlifting. Maybe that's difficulty because you have all this like success and it's a heavy burden to bear.
Jim: So people will totally focus on the one little nitpick in something because we're programmed to do that.
Jim: This negativity bias is everywhere. We see it in business, we see it in our plans, we see it in everywhere. So this is something that I'm working on. What do we do to mitigate our negativity bias? How do we take this out of reading? So readings are often focused on negativity. Look out for this, look out for that. It's our negative self-talk times 10 in a metaphysical reading.
Jim: But what this does is create like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I might hit by a car today. I gotta watch out for losing all my money in the stock market. I gotta watch out for this Mercury retrograde.
Jim: You can use these things for your benefit too. It's a wave going out. You can still surf a wave no matter which direction it's going. So these things are all things that we can learn to use to our benefit.
Jim: It's the same with business.
Jim: When you're planning and something doesn't go right, you can use it for your benefit. For the first, how many months, Camille? How many years? The first two years of my business, how many of my goals did I meet?
Jim: Zero, zero. I met none of the goals.
Camille: You would think that I was a horrible, horrible coach.
Jim: I didn't meet any of my goals and I was more successful. I have doubled my revenue every year that I've been in business. And I've met zero of the goals that I had planned.
George: Where are you going with this?
Jim: The idea is we have a negativity bias. If I only focused on the negative, I would totally screw myself by just saying, I'm a failure. I can't do anything. But that's not what it's about.
George: No.
Camille: When we focused on those goals for Jim, it was more important that we focused on the process of pursuing the goal than on the goal itself.
Camille: It doesn't mean he didn't get really close to some of those goals. But it was either he was getting close cuz that goal was a stretch goal, but he didn't quite hit it. But he made a ton of progress. Or sometimes it was, he set a goal and as he started to pursue it, he was like, wait, wait, wait. I don't think this is the right goal.
Camille: We'd be like, that's right. Cuz sometimes you're making a shot in the dark. Like, I think this is the thing I should do next. And then we would stop as he started to pursue the goal and realize this isn't the right next step. That goal actually should come later. There's a different goal I should pursue now. So that's when Jim's talking about he would set goals and miss them and yet his bigger objective for his business, he kept making progress toward it was because of that. It was because he was either having near misses on his goal because he set nice stretchy goals or we would realize in the process, this isn't actually the right next move. I need to make a different move.
Camille: But he didn't know that until he started down that path. And so all of these adjustments that he made and all of this work to pursue these goals actually made all the progress he needed to make and continues to today. Right? Make the progress that you need to make on your business.
Jim: I could've never done that had I been stuck in a negativity bias. I could have never done that if I wouldn't have embraced planning as a learning tool, as a hypothesis, as a way to say, Okay, this is a scientific experiment. We're gonna see how do we use planning to learn?
George: I think I understand your front office, your mission. What you're describing you're trying to do is truly beautiful and inspiring. It's super cool. Thank you. Good luck.
Jim: I'm so glad. Yay.
George: So now let's talk about back office. When you decided, okay, this is what I'm gonna do, make money, how did it go at the beginning?
Jim: I was already in business and making, $10,000 a year just as a side hustle. So I already had an established for 15 years, had my website and I was already searching number one on Google for Seattle Palm Reader. But I was not at a place where I could pay the mortgage, or contribute, to the household with that.
Jim: So I felt locked into my day job at that point where, Gosh, I want to be free of my day job. And the fantasy started of like, if only I was a full-time palm reader, then I would not have any problems. Life would be so easy.
Jim: When you start to have those fantasies pro tip for everyone, get a coach. Because it's very helpful to stay in the dreamy space of what could be, but also be ready for the realities to show up of like, oh yeah, you actually have to do work all the time. But it's work of joy and is work that you're doing for you rather than for the man, if you will.
George: Here's what I'm hearing so far. While you had your day job, you had already building up some clientele enough to make $10,000 a year, not enough to be your primary business.
George: And at some point sounds like you decided to try to make it your primary business. What made that leap and what was it like that first period of time? Tell me the sequence of events.
Jim: Oh yeah. So I was working for Camille, and Camille was the director of the project management office. And I guess I had a preconceived notion that project management, I don't know what it was, it's hard for me to think back. But I just always knew that project management required a lot of follow up. Required you to really be on it all the time. And I'm just too much of a creative. I am a free creative person. And checking all those boxes and being accountable to like 16 different stakeholders and all those executives and everyone is on your butt all the time. Everyone's mad at you. And all those Excel spreadsheets, you gotta pivot and like, ugh. No, yuck.
Jim: I just couldn't, ugh. It just sounds awful to be like stuck there. I just looked at the project managers. Some of 'em were really cool people and especially Camille was like the coolest person.
Camille: I was gonna say, my goodness, you only knew the coolest of project managers. Come on.
Jim: I did the coolest project managers, and I'm like, their brain works in amazing ways and I respect them. I worship the ground they walk on. Event managers I was always like, I don't know how your brain works, but I just can't. I'm not interested.
Jim: Meanwhile, I'm working away. And I think Camille kind of saw maybe how my brain works similar to maybe how my mom saw my brain works. She saw something in me that I was refusing to see in myself. I imagine that Camille was like, ha ha, I'm going to make Jim into a planner. Cause I was very insistent that I am an artist. I will not plan!
Jim: What was one of the things I said, I'm like, I'm not a planner. I hate project management. I think I said that right with my mouth, even out loud to my boss who was the head of project management.
Camille: Well, and it was at the time, I hired you because you had a gift with people and with bringing joy into the work. You had something that I needed in my department because it wasn't project management, it was the continuous performance improvement work where we were trying to bring people into this new culture and new way of working.
Camille: So I needed that part of Jim, where you just have a way of connecting with people that is so beautiful and unique, as what we're listening to.
Camille: Like that's now what your primary job is, right? How you connect with people. It's your great way of doing that. But also, you had this great gift of teaching and I was trying to put that together.
Camille: But in order to develop good programs around teaching, we need a plan. Like that just can't be pulled outta the air, right?
Camille: And so I thought, oh, if I can just put this beautiful package together of a bit of planning and structure around all of this gift of being able to teach and connect with people, cuz teaching requires this connection, right? It's not just delivering material. You are bringing people along into this new idea.
Camille: And so I wanted to put all of that stuff together. And Jim was like, no, I'm gonna go do all this stuff. And I was like, yeah, but I can just give you a little bit of it, it's gonna make a big difference. And that's where we were coming.
Jim: So I started to get introduced to really cool and fun planning things like art on the wall. You could make it visible and you could have these really pretty charts up on the wall with colors and they could be creative. And she secretly put puree spinach into my chocolate chip cookies, so to speak. And so it was these really pretty ways to do planning she slipped it in as like art projects and craft projects up on the wall.
Jim: And I was like, What? You made me do planning with colorful sticky notes and little unicorns oh.
Camille: The other thing I remember made a big difference and an impact on you was when you had the aha of how the plan isn't just about you, it's about everybody around you that gets impacted by the work and how you make it easier for them. Yes. And you care about other people so much that when it became about others, like take yourself out of this for a minute, Jim, and imagine how your plan is gonna help everyone else who has to participate in this training, who has to help you build this training, .
Camille: I remember this transformation in your face of, oh, this has real purpose now. Yeah. This isn't just some task that my boss wants me to do. This actually serves a purpose that matters to me.
Jim: Stop being a jerk Jim and be nice to people and be of service. And then it did matter.
Jim: Also it's crafting. So those two things. I am an artist and I care about people. That's planning.
Jim: It has stuck with me. And I also struggle from time to time with sticking with it now that it's just me and learning, Oh, I can be kind to myself, not just to other people. But that's been my journey with planning.
Jim: To go back to what you said before, the big thing in making the leap from my corporate job to my own business, that moment was really to believe I could do it. And that aha moment was seeing that it was a viable business. I think that because we live in a society where I was still influenced by this idea that palmistry wasn't a real business. I would still introduce myself to people in a business setting as a consultant or as a Lean Six Sigma professional, or I would hide the fact that I was a palm reader in social settings a lot of times because it has more cred or more mainstream...
George: Acceptance.
Jim: Value. Acceptance. Thank you. And that was a process of also owning who am I and how does it show up? And coming into that had to happen for myself and be able to say, no, I'm gonna own this. I am a prominent practitioner in the world and I am writing a book on this topic.
Jim: I'm going to be a mainstream published author on this topic. There is this future and it's a niche for sure, and it's totally valid and a viable business. And I can't wait. I am already up making as much as I was making at my last job. Wow. In a rather high end management role.
Jim: And that is so much fun to just blow people's minds that a palm reader can do that. I kind of love being that person that says if someone who's a palm reader can create a six plus figure business.
Jim: Doing palmistry and teaching palmistry, what else is possible? It isn't what you do. I think it's how you do it.
George: I wanna go back and make an observation about artists and planning. What I find ironic about it is if you think of some of the most notable artists we can think of over time, I'll just name three examples: daVinci, Beethoven, Houdini. I mean, if you think about their art and if you look at their background or you look at how they created that stuff, it is all about planning and experimentation and little exercise. They didn't just create, they didn't just think of things and they didn't like magicians, especially, right?
George: They are nothing but planners. They have to be right. And it's interesting that we don't see that view as just normal citizenry. I don't know why. Maybe we remove the Magic Force. I don't think it would, I don't think it remove the wonder of the art that's created, but we don't see that.
Camille: so can I ask quick question only because I, I have my own answer this, but I'm curious what Jim's answer would be to this.
Camille: When you did start your business, what do you think were your innate skills, abilities, gifts that served you well in starting your business?
Jim: Hmm. That's a great question. I think I had a lot of passion for what my business is and for what I wanted to do. That is something that kept me sustained in wanting to continue to do it and have the business feel like play. Not play. I guess it's closest to play, but have it feel like something that I wanna continue to be engaged in even after these two and a half, three years.
Jim: I think the passion is created by the commitment that I have. I'm never bored of palmistry. I'm never bored of the metaphysical field. So it's something that I'm truly interested in and that I continue to research and study and explore and just have a natural fascination with.
Jim: I think another aspect is that logical thinking that I have that. That I appreciate thinking about something in a rational way. And I know that right brain, left brain thing is a myth, but I love bringing those two ideas together, the rational, logical engineering mindset type of skill with that creative woo woo type of irrational side.
Jim: And I love bringing those together and watching that sulfur in water pop happen. And looking at the transformation and the really vibrant edge that that creates and how the logical creates a rubric and a framework for the vine to grow wild on.
Jim: What it looks like in reality is giving myself space to be creative. More space to be creative and think creatively than most people give themselves. Giving myself structures in place and systems in place that are set and that I do regularly. My meditation and my journaling, my board. People walk into my office and they're like, Oh my gosh, what is that?
Jim: They're fascinated with my visual management board, distractedly so. And I'm like, it's not about the board, it's about if I'm using it.
Jim: How would you answer it, Camille?
Camille: Yeah, I was just gonna say I 100% agree with everything you said, and I would add as a business coach looking at what I think has served you well.
Camille: There's two other things that I think play into this. One is I think you have a high level of confidence in what you do. That serves you really well, that you're confident, you speak clearly about it. And I think that comes from connected to the idea that you love what you do, and so you're constantly researching and learning and teaching yourself.
Camille: The second thing I think serves you well is that you are amazing at building relationships. Your network and how you have built out your network and connected with people to build your audience for your business is fantastic. That's a gift that you have, that you've used. We've talked about that from day one.
Camille: Like that's the, the core place for you to focus, to build this business is do more of that. And you have done a great job coming up with better ways, more ways to actually do that and been really creative about it. And I think that has also just served you really, really well.
Jim: Yeah, that's true. Those are two things that I think are natural for me. And it is funny how it could be a drunk frat guy who is a total skeptic of palmistry, it doesn't matter. I'm happy to read their palm and blow their mind. Yeah. And yeah, making the connections.
Jim: I love meeting new people and making connections and forming partnerships that is always so much fun for me.
Camille: And do it in a way that's very much of this outreach of wanting to help other people. Right. And I think that's what makes a difference. You don't network the icky way we think about networking.
Camille: You reach out and you connect and you help lift people up and I think that matters and is why you're so good at.
Jim: I find that I'm genuinely curious to get to know the other person. Yes. And genuinely to wonder about who they are.
Jim: And if I think they're cool, I'll share something that they're doing or promote what they're doing just because I think they're amazing. It doesn't matter to me. I have enough money. My business is fine. And if that turns into a business partnership, that's great. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter.
Jim: The relationship is more important than the dollars or the business, whatever. I care more about that relationship than I do about anything else. That is what's key.
George: I've got these kind of three categories of thoughts in mind.
George: One is the passion for what you wanna do. On the opposite end there's skills you need to build in order to run a business. Planning, financial management, things like that. And then this Camille, to me, seems like somewhere in the middle. It's a non-skilled and emotional or value based trait that is gonna help us stick with it.
George: I got a quick question for you. Where are you on your journey?
Jim: Well, I am continuing to build my business. I am in the throes of writing my book, of launching my larger teaching program and getting into a regular cadence of a course that I would be able to repeat over and over. So I'm in the throes of building more of a stable product engine.
Jim: And my book writing is in there in the background. I really wanna write the book because I think that will be a great way to continue to carry my mission out there. And in the meantime, there's a lot of really fun things that are out there that are sometimes distractions or that might be in line with my strategy. And sometimes it's hard to tell which, like conferences that invite me to speak and fun events and other things. So there's no end of amazing things that are offered to me all the time. So a lot of discernment is needed right now in this time when people are like James, James, James, you're amazing. I want you here. I want you here. I want you here. And me being like, Oh, okay everybody, let's figure out what's really in line with what I need to do to go forward.
Jim: I'm in a fabulous place. I'm having a blast.
George: Sounds like it.
Jim: And it's also hard work. There's a lot of operating the machinery in the back. It's a lot of learning and it's great cuz it's my machine that I get to build and change and improve and not someone else's. So I love it.
Jim: That's awesome.
Camille: Yeah. As you we're talking about that Jim, I was realizing you've reached the stage in your business where the problems you're having are the problems every business wants to have. Which is, there's high demand, I have lots of options and opportunity, but these still pose problems for you to solve, right?
Camille: You still have to put those up against, should I say yes? I can't say yes to everything cuz I'm only one person. Am I saying yes to the right things? Is this going in the right direction? And that's you being able to put that up against a direction and a strategy and a plan for the business is how you make those decisions.
Camille: It still doesn't make them easy, right? I see you grappling all the time, like, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, and then you're like, Oh no, where am I gonna fit this other thing in? Because I just said I was gonna do these other things.
Camille: You have to find a balance, right? We're always talking about that balance of what does the business need you to do versus what does Jim really want to do, or any business owner really want to do, and how do I find this nice overlap of a little bit of both so that everything goes well. I love that you're in that space and that you're working that.
Camille: I have two last questions that I really wanna ask you business owner to business owner. So you're speaking to the other business owners out there. So my first question is, what have you really struggled with the most and how have you worked to overcome it?
Camille: You're probably always working to overcome it. But what is that and what do you do about it?
Jim: I struggle with keeping myself motivated, keeping my mindset and my head in the game. I often think about, gosh, if I worked for a company, there's built in leadership and camaraderie and other people. There's other issues that I still remember about working in the company.
Jim: But if I worked for George for instance, George would be my boss. There would be other team members. I'd be accountable for the other people to have these things ready on this time and this date. And there would be Outlook meetings, there'd be meetings, remember at the referencing the beginning of this podcast?
Jim: And George doesn't wanna be in any of those damn meetings. So we would have to do them all, right? So there would be all these things that would be structures in place that would keep me going.
Jim: Well, I'm a band of one. There are no meetings. If I don't launch that program, I'm just delaying getting paid.
Jim: I'm not that motivated by money, surprisingly. My husband is, but he doesn't find out about that until next week. So, I can just scroll on the internet for another hour and then that turns into four hour. So that's the thing that is my biggest struggle, is keeping myself motivated.
Jim: That's why a coach and other support around me, groups and other people who get it is really key. And the right people. Just because they're my best friend doesn't mean they're the right person to go: jimbo, I believe in you. They aren't always that person.
Jim: So this is one of the things that I always am struggling with, and what I do about it is, A, my coach and B the right kind of group and systems that support me in the work that I'm doing.
Camille: Yeah, it makes me think of we say it takes a village and , especially, so I think if you're a solopreneur going it on your own, like you are, you need a community somehow of support because it's really hard to just stick with it all the time.
Camille: We underestimate the value of being part of a company that provides structure that keeps us moving. And when you're on your own and you are the only structure you have, boy it gets really hard. And so having those touch points, I love that you said that. Again, that's something you're very good at is knowing where you need support, how to get it from the right place. It can take a little bit of a trial and error to figure that out too, and what works for you.
Camille: Okay. So last question. You ready? Yeah.
Camille: So business owners that are at the stage that you're at, lots of demand lots of opportunity. So they're not necessarily scrambling for the next dollar, but the pipeline of people coming to you feels pretty good.
Camille: And yet there's still challenges. What advice would you give another business owner who's experiencing the same thing you're experiencing at this stage in your business? What would be your one big piece of advice for them?
Jim: Get ready.
Camille: What does that mean? Get ready?
Jim: You don't gotta get ready if you're already ready. Like there's this idea of, how do you meet your capacity? How do you have capacity for an uptick in demand? How do you do that if you're not ready?
Jim: I think what's happening is a signal that I'm going to get busier, that I'm going to have more revenue coming in. This is the precognition of success, that's what I realize this is. It's the storm warning. Are my gutters clear? Are the sum pumps working? Am I flood ready for the incoming surge of success?
George: The category five hurricane of success?
Jim: Yeah. Am I ready for that category four or five Hurricane of success?
Jim: Am I? No! Because how do I handle the demand and how do I check for that? I have seen other business owners, you and I have both seen other business owners that weren't ready for the onslaught of success because their systems weren't ready for that.
Jim: So how is my scheduling software? Is it up to snuff? Can it handle it? Do I have a system, a process, even if it's on paper, whatever it is, do I have a process ready for managing. The revenue that's coming in. Is my accounting system ready?
Jim: All those things that need to be ready. That's what I'm really thinking about now. What I realized yesterday and actually last week was, oh, this is precog of success because I'm having demand, I don't yet have revenue. But that's what happens first, is demand. The revenue is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. The leading indicator is demand. We need to remember what is the actual leading indicator of success?
Jim: So start to notice what are the things that are pulling on you and is this an indicator of, are you ready for that? What does it mean? Look at your process, look at your revenue, look at all those things.
Camille: So two things about that. One, I love this because yes, we need to have the systems to be ready for growth in our business. Which means when you were talking about you need to get ready before you need to be ready. And can you see those? Do you have some leading indicators telling you what's coming so that you can be prepared for what's coming down the pipeline? That's really hard for business owners to do, but you gotta do it.
Camille: The other thing I was thinking was we don't have the right analogy cuz this isn't a storm that's coming and then disappearing in two. What you're actually preparing for is a higher water level forever. Yes. And it's gonna be here forever. So how am I now preparing for that next level?
Camille: That's really what we're talking about. So I don't know what a better analogy is, but it's a permanent step up in your business. Yes. And it's gonna strain all the current systems if you don't have them ready. If they're not scalable, and if they're not prepared to take that on. And I think that's a great way to think about it.
Jim: The saying is, if you are already ready, you don't need to get ready. And what that means is don't have to get ready in the midst of success. That sucks. It sucks to have to fix something while you're in the midst of gaining a success. Yeah. So that is what I mean. Get ready before when you see the thing coming.
Camille: Yes, 100%. Being able to gauge the before and what getting ready means is a bit of a challenge. But I love that mindset and that focus. I totally agree with that.
Jim: This
Camille: has been so much fun, Jim. I actually learned so much just listening and letting George ask you questions, which is what I hoped would happen, even though I know so much about you and I got to just hear all these great perspectives on your business.
Camille: And I think at the end of the day, your story is just so inspiring because the type of business and why you do it, why you're driven by it, your ability to balance the artful, creative side of yourself with the more structured and engineering brain of yourself. I think that's in essence what business owners really have to sort out is we always have strengths in one of those spaces or another, and we're constantly working on developing both.
Camille: One of them is easier to develop than others, right? For me, it's easier to develop the businessy side of my thinking and my brain cuz that's what I come from. And the place that I have developed my skills. But for most business owners, it's the other, it's the thing they're doing.
Camille: And I think that's what I want everybody to think about is I do have to kind of build up my business chops. I have to focus on these systems and do these things. I have to do them well enough that my business can be really sustainable and can withstand the storm or whatever analogy we wanna use, that it's ready for that. So, yeah. I love that you have a really great way of talking about that.
Camille: So thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing your story and all your fabulous stuff. And thank you, George, for asking all those amazing questions so I could learn even more about my good friend Jim and all that he does.
Jim: I just wish I could hang out for another hour with both of you. Oh my gosh. I just want George to ask me more questions about every single thing in his head.
Jim: Well, hopefully I'll see you again and I can't wait to meet you in Seattle sometimes when you're visiting George.
Jim: Yeah. Sounds great. We'll definitely have you back on the pod too, Jim.
Jim: Thank you so much. All right.
Jim: See you all.
George: All right. .
George:
