^{This transcription was automatically generated. Please excuse grammatical errors.}

Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach, who replaced my college professor salary in just five months back in 2020, after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives, so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in. 

Hello y'all. It is an exciting day on Your Virtual Assistant Coach because we have our very first guest joining us who is not my five-year-old daughter, and this guest is a total fan favorite.

Laura Nicole: 0:48

Jess is a mindset and growth coach who has this way. I don't know how she does it, but she has this way of putting things into perspective, offering powerful mindset shifts and providing actionable advice to propel your personal growth forward. She is my personal mindset mentor. She is also one of my very best friends and she is also the in-house mindset master for the Superstar Assistant Academy. So if you are a member of SAA, then you will absolutely recognize her from various workshops that she has held for us, including the Building Belief and Mastering your Mindset workshop that I made you watch before anything else when you decided to enroll and join us in SAA. Women constantly rave about how she speaks fire into them, that they feel seen and validated by her teaching and, lucky for y'all, you get her here in your ears right now. So I want to welcome Jess, I am so freaking happy to have you on the podcast.

Jess: 1:51

I'm so freaking excited to be here. I feel like this has been, like, obviously the next step. I've been involved in so much of this business with you, mentoring your clients, and I'm just really excited to be able to be on this platform and deliver some goods today, because we all know that SAA women are my favorite and I rave about them and I get so excited anytime I get to come here and talk to women about this opportunity and how you can leverage it and really help it, work on your own growth and build an incredible income for yourself, so, I'm excited.

Laura Nicole: 2:23

Yes, this has been a long time coming. And y'all when I tell you that me as a coach and the Superstar Assistant Academy honestly might not exist if it weren't for Jess, because she has helped me with my own mindset and my belief. Like when I wanted to start coaching, I had this massive limiting belief and imposter syndrome that like who am I to coach these women right? And that negative thought process and that self-sabotage might have won out if it weren't for having Jess in my corner, breathing belief into me, helping me work through those things. And now here we are, three years later and over a thousand people helped through the program and we definitely owe some of that to you, jess. And now here we are, three years later and over a thousand people helped through the program and we definitely owe some of that to you, jess.

Jess: 3:10

Oh, thank you. But listen, when you are in my life, you don't really get a choice. Like you already know, you don't get a choice when we're talking to be in that mindset or have that belief I have. I don't have the ability to really pull myself back from mentoring even my friends and the people in my life. That's how I knew what I wanted to do with my life, or knew the direction to take, because I'm like I already do this on a day-to-day basis.

Jess: 3:33

And so what I heard of this idea because I've known about it since before it was an actual business I was like this is going to be huge. This is going to be so fucking huge and it's going to be huge, this is going to be so fucking huge and it's going to help so many women's lives and you better build this. And I have just been a cheerleader along the way and luckily, I do something that I'm able to then come and bring to to these women and and you know, I feel like I am a part of, of this business I do have like I have this little piece of it that I get to be a part of and feed into these women. So I love it. I love it all.

Laura Nicole: 4:08

I love it. We get the best of both worlds, the work and the woo when you are a superstar. Okay, so can you give the listeners just a quick background, because we do have a lot of listeners who are not Superstar Assistant Academy members yet anyway, right, so can we share with the listeners just a little background, like why mindset for you, like what was your path, what got you to this point and why are you so passionate about personal growth?

Jess: 4:36

Let's see if I could make it really short. This is going to be the challenge. I'm a yapper and I think that this story is really, really, really important because you need to know who you're learning from and why you're learning from them and why they have credibility. And so a little bit of a backstory. I grew up in a trailer park, a low income family, everybody around me, survival mode. Nobody had a college degree, nobody was making a lot of money and nobody had any dreams. Yet there was a little old me that was like I want a big life, I want, I want all of my dreams, I want abundance, I want to thrive, I want to have joy, I want to have all of these things, and none of it made sense for my current circumstances.

Jess: 5:13

So, fast forward to 19, I got pregnant and I was thrown into that same exact cycle that I swore I would not do. I fell into the survival. We were working at McDonald's, making $7 an hour you guys, $7 an hour. I was begging people to watch my baby because I didn't have anybody. I was doing adulthood and motherhood at the same exact time and I looked just like everybody else in my life as a kid. And then you know, when I got to 24, we had two kids, we were making things work, but it was still penny to penny. And I remember having my first I like to call it my first midlife crisis, even though that doesn't make sense and I totally understand. But I had a breakdown and I was like this is not it. I swore to myself I wouldn't live this life. I've got to change. Something has got to give. I had no college degree. Okay, I was working at home, doing medical billing and just trying to get by.

Jess: 6:11

And I found out, I don't remember how, but I had stumbled across personal growth and I learned, which I did not know you know, that you have the power to change your mindset, to change your belief system, to not follow in the footsteps of those before you, to do things differently. And you can only do those things differently by changing yourself. Well, I wanted this big, giant, beautiful life at the time, in that moment, I had no avenue to get me there. The only thing that I could do was work on myself, and obviously that was the way that it was supposed to play out, and so I dove headfirst into just learning how do you change your mindset, how do you work on yourself, learning about myself, finding out that the way that I acted wasn't inherently who I was. It was just behaviors that I had picked up on, ways that I had survived my life, all of these incredible things. And it really took this pressure off of me of like I am not a people pleaser, I act as a people pleaser. I am not, you know all of these things. I just behave as them. And so, like even my biggest flaws, it was the most empowering thing because I'm like I can change that. And so then I went on and in 2020, I got my first. I found network marketing. I didn't find it, but I knew I'd known about it and this opportunity had found me essentially, and I remember thinking I am absolutely never going to be in fucking network marketing.

Jess: 7:26

I'm never going to be that girl. I'm not at no, I was terrified of what people would think of me. I was still, you know, only six years into working on myself and I had been doing it all by myself at that time, and so I was like I'm still terrified, but I knew I had this vision. I had a vision that was so clear to me and I was like this is going to be it. And so I went. I jumped, you know, right into that and it opened up doors to my life that I could never have imagined.

Jess: 7:53

Working on an online, in the online industry, building your own business, can literally create financial freedom, time freedom, anything that you could imagine. I remember going to my husband like holy shit, this is it, this is how we do it, this is how we create this life, this is my avenue to success. And once I got into that world, I realized just how important personal growth was. And I heard people saying it and I'm like, oh my God, I've already. I've already been doing this for six years, I am like I'm so good at this. I can, I can definitely do more and I used it, because what happens when you go on an entrepreneurial journey? It highlights every single flaw, every single unhealed wound, every single negative thought you've ever had about yourself, it's like a giant spotlight happens. And so, um, that's when I, like I just went even more into personal growth and I mentored women in it.

Jess: 8:45

And so now I'm not in network marketing anymore, and so I basically coach online business owners, women in business, and I help them go beyond strategy. I help them shift into identity work, embodiment work, mindset, belief, self-sabotage, really just their growth journey. And I tell my clients I'm going to help grow you, your bank account and your business, because they're all connected and it starts with you, not the next action that you need to do. And I have now 11 years of experience in personal growth. I have invested a lot of time, money, and energy into myself, and I have five years experience in mentoring women, building a business and public speaking, so, that's how I got here. It is what I love to do. When I left network marketing, I knew I'm going to serve women in business, because they're the most badass that there is out there, especially on the online business world, because it can eat you alive, and so, yeah, that's what I do.

Laura Nicole: 9:44

Yeah, it literally can. And it's interesting to hear the way you explain it, because I think that it's something a lot of women don't anticipate coming up for them, right? I definitely didn't anticipate it coming up for me the way that it has. And in coaching, right, I've had a thousand women go through my program and all of them struggle with mindset blocks and mental things that pop up and self-sabotage and imposter syndrome, and a lot of them are kind of like, taken aback by it and they're like why is this happening? Like why is this a thing? But it's so you're really out there like putting your all in yourself and, like you said, like there's a spotlight on you. But I think our brains, especially for people like me who are like very, I don't know, does this make me left-brained or right-brained? I'm very, like logical right? and like I want a strategy and I want a plan and I want instructions and what to execute. And so in my brain I think, okay, business equals strategy, it equals to-do lists, it equals taking action, and I never realized until I was in it just how much the mindset and the energy and the belief behind doing the action actually matters. And now I've seen it in myself. I've seen it in women that I've coached. You have to have your mindset in the right spot. You have to be working on that half of things in order for your strategy and your actions to even work. They could be great on their own, but if they're not backed by the right mindset and the right energy, then they're not going to go anywhere and I think a lot of women just don't realize that connection.

Jess: 11:28

Absolutely. That's the key right there. It's like you don't, we're not leaving strategy and action and saying we don't need to do that, we just need to fully work on ourselves, absolutely not. We need to do them both, we need to marry them, we need it to be. I do this, and. But what we have to understand is - the you part is the first part, because while we, you know, we have to have a strategy in place, right, but this needs to be what you do. You needs to be what you do daily, first and foremost, to then filter into those actions because energy speaks volumes who you are when you show up to do those actions and just understanding that it goes hand in hand.

Jess: 12:06

And I think that's the missing key for most entrepreneurs, especially when they come into this business or this industry to build a business. And, like you, when they're just taken aback, like holy shit, wait what? They take it as a stop sign, right, they're like okay, stop and no, this is too hard. Or they say this sentence that drives me up a wall. But I totally understand it where they say this just isn't for me and I'm like it is, it so is, it's not for the old you, it's not for the you that wants to stay stuck, you're absolutely right, but that's not where you want to stay, babe. So it is for you, but it's for the future you so like let's get to her because it can work for you. You're just allowing it to be too hard, and that's a normal human response, so yeah.

Laura Nicole: 12:50

Yeah, it's easy to shift into that overwhelm and then just let kind of the fear take over and shut down. But, I'm really curious to hear from you, especially because you do function as a growth coach who specializes in working with women who are earning income online. So I'm curious to hear what is the number one thing that you see through conversation, through your coaching, through your mentorship, that holds women back from taking advantage of this opportunity to really earn flexible income online.

Jess: 13:23

Okay. So here's the thing when we're talking about being, I say, entrepreneur a lot or CEO a lot, and there's a difference in you being an entrepreneur of a brick and mortar or a CEO of a brick and mortar there's a lot more people involved in that process. When you are an online business owner and creating something in the online space, I feel as though it's really just you, right, it's just you building that business, and so it's easier and that's not taking away from a brick and mortar startup, because they deal with it too, but it's just easier for the thoughts to get louder. And so something that I see in almost every single woman that I've ever worked with or coached or spoken to, and especially in the, we did a live coaching with some SSA girls and a lot that came up for them was like I've quit everything that I've ever done, so like why is this going to be any different? It's belief, right. Like they don't believe, because of their past experiences, that this can be any different, and I'm gonna tell you this comes up for everyone. I've seen it time and time and time again.

Jess: 14:27

Everybody feels as though like they're a chronic quitter. They have so many failures that they've done, and so the way that I coach them and what I tell them is for one, we've got to give them a perspective. I need to help them understand why this is coming up and how normal and human it is. You live your entire life with a front row seat to every single failure you've ever had or anything you've deemed a failure, any mistake you've ever made, anytime you've ever said something that you didn't like, all of your biggest flaws, and anytime that you've stopped doing something. And in this day and age, when we stop doing something, we love to label it ourselves or others as quitters. Right, the whole world likes to label you oh, you just quit. You quit that or you didn't push through, and even if it's hard, you didn't push through, and even if it was out of alignment for you, you still didn't push through, and that makes it mean something about who you are, and so we have this huge giant tally of all of these things that we've ever done. So, of course, we have this fear going into a new, you know, opportunity, that we're just going to fall apart and we're going to quit it, like we always do, and we're actually not good, and so our brain and our ego like to pop off. It likes to start telling us all of the reasons. Hey, remember when you quit this. Hey, remember when you did that.

Jess: 15:47

And what's happening here is important to understand so that you can start to separate yourself from this. One, it's normal not to have belief in yourself, and that's something that we have to build up. Two, all of our egos operate the same way. They want us to be safe. That is what they were made for. It's a way to protect ourselves from the outside world, from embarrassment, from looking stupid, from any negative judgment, all of those things. It's a way to protect ourselves and it's a survival instinct to just stay small.

Jess: 16:22

So your ego is immediately gonna feed you all of this evidence, of all of these things, because it wants you to understand that staying in this bubble and not going after this is safer, because to you it is. It's safer to stay, even if you hate where you're at right now, how stagnant you are. It's safer to stay in that spot than the uncertainty of what actually would happen If you built a successful business, if you actually had the success, if you actually had the money, if you had to actually give up. The story of I quit everything, or this is just too hard or that's not for me, and we just naturally fall to the fault line of just like that's just too hard and that's okay and it helps keep us so stagnant and in a box, and so your brain constantly wants to default to this is too hard and unattainable. It's easier to choose the bad, sad, hard feelings than it is to choose the excitement and joy. And the last thing that I would tell you and want you to understand is that you cannot base what you're going to do off of who you used to be or who you are right now that you don't fully align with.

Jess: 17:38

We all have this desire to become the woman that makes us the most proud. I don't care who you are or where you're at. No, you cannot look at me in the eye and tell me that you don't want to be the best version of yourself, the version that you can look at and say I'm so fucking proud of her. I feel excited to be her every day. I love being in her head and in her body and just being able to express myself in that way. I'm, you know, the, you know that certain energy of yourself, that confidence, that belief we all want, wanna be her and so understand that this opportunity can help you build her and can help you start becoming her.

Jess: 18:16

So basing it off of who you've been or who you have been is like invalid data. It doesn't work because we're not gonna be her and we've done work or we're in the process of doing work. So this is going to be different and it's really talking to your brain first and saying those actual things, I teach this to my clients all the time, like you have to actually say that. You have to actually stop the thought process and say no, this time is different, because your brain works off of evidence, your mindset works off of evidence. You just have to feed it the right stuff and not let the others kind of like take root. So the number one thing that I see in the biggest, you know, barrier for women to get over is I've quit everything in my life and it's just really helping them understand a different perspective and saying that doesn't have to be that way.

Jess: 19:05

If you want to cling on to that story, you're just going to remain stagnant because nothing changes. If nothing changes, in, no time is going to be different unless you make it different and you have the ability by doing it differently, and that's by focusing on yourself in overcoming those barriers while you build the business and kind of allowing the business to be a guide, a guide to all of the spots. If you look at it like I'm going to let this opportunity guide me to all of the areas that I need to heal or work on it starts to feel different. It starts to feel less daunting and scary and more of something that's helpful and motivating and inspiring to you, and it gives you a leverage that you didn't have before. Now you're using it to become a better version of yourself and build a business rather than just another thing. You're trying because you want to make money.

Laura Nicole: 20:02

Yeah, I love that. It's so good and nothing changes if nothing changes. It's like one of my favorite mottos. I like to say that to the women I coach all the time too right? Like you're going to stay in the same spot if you keep doing the same thing.

Jess: 20:11

How do you, how are you ever going to get to the vision that you have for your life, or what you actually deeply desire, if you don't ever change the next step, if you just keep allowing the next step to be the same thing? Of course you're going to keep, you know, quitting or failing or giving up. It's in the building belief and building that confidence and doing those things so that you can get to that vision. But you have to take a different next step. It has to be different this time and you can make it different. And once you make it different, you're going to start thinking differently.

Laura Nicole: 20:45

Yeah, 100%, and it makes me think back to, it makes me tap into my communication professor days. We would teach about the self-fulfilling prophecy, right, like if we're telling our brain if you join, even if you don't join, SAA, if you just make a choice on your own, I'm going to become a virtual assistant. Right, I'm going to do this, I'm going to create extra income, I'm going to help support my family, all the things you make that choice. But you're also subconsciously telling yourself but this probably won't actually work.

Laura Nicole: 21:21

then it's not going to work, like it just is not going to work because you're putting the prophecy out there already, and then your subconscious is going to take action to make that result come to fruition, even though it's not the result that you actually want. Your brain is hearing that story.

Jess: 21:42

Yeah, it's it when you have that programming running in the background. That's why I'm like we can't bypass shit, like you can not just ignore that voice or that thought or that belief, like that is the root and if you don't nip it in the butt now and work on it now, it's going to come up later, regardless of what you do. And when you have that programming going on, it does affect. It affects every single action, and it does it in such a minimal way that you don't even realize it's happening. And you're so good at it, because you've been doing it your whole life, that you're an actual pro. And so another thing that I coach people on in that instance is get curious about your behaviors when those things start to come up. Get curious, not judgment, not being “oh my god I just can't get it together, I keep doing this” we're none of that needs to live here. We're already mean girl enough to ourselves.

Jess: 22:35

So say you know I, I'm just going to get curious of myself. Why do I keep saying that? Why do I keep doing that? What do I do next when that happens?

Jess: 22:42

And pay attention to the small ways that you start to self-sabotage and it looks like you know, “oh my God, this always happens to me” or “of course, this is going to go on” because I'm trying to do better and this is exactly why we find all these reasons when really it's just life happening, and that never stops happening. You never stop being busy, it never stops being hard, it never stops throwing you a curve ball, it never stops doing all these things. But when we're in a heightened state to try and do something, it's like those things become magnified and are the only thing that we see. And we're like see, told you, told you, I can't do it, and so just paying attention and being curious when that stuff starts to come up and see and catch your patterns. That's how we stop them is by catching them and the self-sabotage that's how it works.

Jess: 23:28

Is that under that programming in your subconscious, that's not just, that's not woo woo, people, okay, that's actual time. There's really a subconscious and a conscious mind that is real and people like to chalk it up to like, oh, that's so, like woo woo. No, it's really, it's, it's an actual thing. And we act out in our subconscious mind like I think, like 86 I'm this is just me throwing out there, but it's like 86 percent of your day is done subconsciously on autopilot. And like we just ran out of muscle memory and like we don't even produce that many new thoughts in a day that we think we do. It's a lot of the same repetitive stuff, and so understanding that is going to be key to any new growth.

Laura Nicole: 24:09

Yeah, that's funny, you guys, it's almost like you're getting, I could have just played you the voice note that Jess sent me the other day in our private one-on-one mentorship, because she just said all the same shit that she was saying to me, I think, last week. I literally was like I feel like I've been doing so good and then the universe throws this in my face and throws this in my face, and she was like “Laura, check that shit”. No.

Jess: 24:30

You're the only one, though. I have one of my friends. I was just watching her Instagram and have one of my friends. I was just watching her Instagram and she said you know, of course this would happen. I literally messaged. She said not, of course. She said busted. And I'm like, yeah, that language boo. That's just solidifying your beliefs. This is just a fun little one-off that you can take today.

Jess: 24:51

Listen to the way you speak, listen to how you solidify the beliefs over and over and over again, and you eat, eat that shit up, and you're like, of course, it's another red light. Every time I come down this road, it's a red light, and then the next one's gonna be red. And of course, this guy pulls out in front of me and goes so slow, nobody wants me to get to where I want to go, and the universe is over here like, okay, that's what you love, we're gonna give you some more of it, great. And then we're gonna help you be so frustrated and flustered by things you cannot control that your next actions that you take are not going to be in the way of enlightenment or alignment or anything good, and so then it's just going to be this domino effect and you're going to have all of these things go wrong. And then that way tonight when you lay in bed you can say see, it didn't work. And boom, you just created your whole fucking reality off of somebody stopping at a red light or going too slow in front of you or whatever, just being mindful of the words that you use.

Jess: 25:43

Language is powerful. It is claiming, it is setting a declaration. Every time you speak it, I tell my kids and my husband no, we can't use, of course, in a negative way. We can only use it in of course, I got paid today. Of course, I got a compliment today. We can only use it in of course, I got paid today. Of course, I got a compliment today. We only can use, we're only allowed to use it in a positive way. I better not hear them saying just my luck, of course, or anything that pertains to something negative, because we share our lives and I don't want that shit in my life. So.

Laura Nicole: 26:12

Not around here. We are not condoning that in this area. Thank you, yeah, I didn't. I mean, I say that a lot too. I get like, oh, of course it turned out this way or of course that happened or whatever, and it 99% of the time is a negative. But I think, at least for me, I do it as a place of again protecting myself, like it's not my fault it went bad or it's not my fault it didn't work out, because then that's my ego again protecting me and keeping me safe that it wasn't my fault. It was X, Y and Z factor outside of me.

Laura Nicole: 26:45

Okay, superstars, we're going to pause here. This conversation is so freaking good. There are already so many tangible tips that you can go implement to start building up your belief right now, and there is still more to come from Jess. But I want to honor the structure of this podcast and keep the episodes on the shorter side for you. So if you are all in on working on your mindset and you want to hear Jess talk about how you can build your very own ladder of believability, pop over and listen to part two of this interview in the next episode and we will see you there. 

Laura Nicole: 27:25

Thanks for hanging out with me today on your Virtual Assistant Coach. If you loved this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister or even your favorite coworker, who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.