Making It – Episode 175
Why Fun Is the Real Business Strategy (Jeanna Gabellini)
Jeanna Gabellini: Hey, I’m Jeanna Gabellini and you’re listening to Making It. I run a business called Masterpiece Coaching, and we help entrepreneurs make as much money as they want, having as much fun as possible, easiest way possible.
Looking back to like what made me wanna do coaching, I realized, oh, there were many things in my childhood that led to this moment. I used to pretend I was on TV all the time and they were filming me, right? I would tell people, this is how you do it Now watch, and now would just be a teacher. I just thought, yeah, this is cool. I’m gonna teach people how to do things. Important things like riding roller skates.
My parents were hard worker bees for sure. They both were union people all the way. But there was a part of my mom who was entrepreneurial, she was shoving me over to the neighbor’s house at 11 and I was babysitting and my parents would pay me for all sorts of things. If you find the tomato worms in the garden, you’re gonna get a nickel. I. If you go pool for an hour, you’re gonna get a buck. I would do it around the neighborhood. I wanted money. I was all very into candy too, so I wanted to make money and go down to the corner store and buy some candy.
So, but what really got me into being an entrepreneur is at 20 years old. At the same time, the company that I was working for was shutting down. My mom chose to leave the company that she was working for, and she said, let’s go start a house cleaning business. She goes, we both like to clean houses. I said, I don’t wanna clean houses for the rest of my life, mom. She said, no, no, no. We’ll get it started and get other people working for us. So we did that and at the same time, she started a business with my brother. All of a sudden she was hit with the entrepreneurial bug, but she decided we were gonna go do a Christmas lighting business.
And I got jealous. My mom was doing this Christmas lighting business with my brother. I said, I wanna do it. My boyfriend and I took over and still today, that company is huge. They do entire cities. They do Napa wineries. It is huge.
I was coaching for a seminar company. And I loved it and I thought, wow, this is awesome. Except all the people I would coach at the seminar company were very resistant and they would say they wanted these goals and then I would try to help them get it and they were like, pushing back on me and thinking, what’s wrong with you people? You said you wanted these goals. And then a little while later, somebody told me about a coaching school and I went, it was awesome. And I learned why the people I was coaching were so resistant. I was coaching them all wrong. The very first class I took at that school, I was like, this is what I wanna do forever. And I still feel that way, but there’s been some really big bumps where I thought, no way I can continue.
I made a mistake. What am I thinking? Which was rare. It took me a long time to get to that point. There was an incident, something that didn’t go as well as I thought, or a program launched that bombed, and I thought, I’m never gonna get out of this. It sucks to not be able to walk my talk, like I know how to get out of this situation, but it’s not working for me. Until it did. And I think that all bumps, no matter how big or small they are, like at least what works for me and I’ve never seen it not work for anybody else, is being able to surrender to whatever it is.
Not make it this big, awful deal that you think it is. Okay. It’s okay to grieve the thing didn’t go how you wanted it and it sucked hard and you put all this work into it. But okay, so we’re here now. Now what? That same seminar company I used to work for, there was a, a facilitator that always used to say, so what? Now what? And I used to hate that. Like, so what, so what that thing happened. I’m like, but the thing is such a big deal. And it’s like, but now what? And I really love that because I think that’s about, all right, so this happened. It doesn’t define you. It doesn’t mean this is how your business is. It doesn’t mean anything bad about you.
It just means that there’s places for you to improve, there’s places to expand, and it always makes me think, well, what was my mindset going into this? I can always piece how the mindset led to the bump, and that’s easy to course correct. So there’s new places to go, and I was thinking that wasn’t working, but this bump showed me I got more work to do. No problem. I could do this. I’m in control of how I think. Well, sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like my thoughts are thinking me, but I’ve now embraced the bumps. I’ve really learned, probably only in the last five years. This is my 30th year in business, and I think. Oh, okay. Just things are gonna happen.
You always recover. It sucks, but you don’t need to make it a big deal. This situation right now is temporary. So now what? Not only how am I gonna fix this, but how am I gonna make this better than ever? What if this was the exact thing I needed to be even happier, easier, more fun? That’s how I’m embracing it these days. Shit happens, whatever. But I’m gonna feel really sad about this ’cause I put a lot of time and energy in this and this was not where I thought it would land. Let’s be here until I feel like doing something different. If you let it all out, you can move through it quickly. But if you fight it and you try to hurry up to get to the next spot, you prolong the agony, so you might as well just let it all out.
Now, I’m pretty dramatic. Not everybody’s grieving looks like that, so you gotta do whatever you gotta do. Now I realize, oh, I can have it easy. I can have overflow. I don’t need to be stressed on money and thinking that’s normal. That used to be definitely normal. Like, oh, I have just enough to make rent just on time. That sucked, but it was normal to me, so I didn’t think it was suffering back then. Now I understand, oh, I can have things be easy. I can have an overflow. I can have a ton of people supporting me. I don’t have to do it all by myself. I don’t have to do things I hate. I used to do things I hated all the time in the beginning.
I used to do all sorts of marketing I didn’t wanna do, because that’s what everybody else was doing. I used to be scrappy, but now I’m in the flow. I’m choosing things I like to do and those things work better than grinding out, doing all the things I didn’t like. That’s cool.
My only ever regret is all the times where I didn’t trust myself. It’s the thing that makes me the most mad in my business and in life. Then you do it anyway. And then you wanna get mad at somebody or something else, or the unfairness of it. And then there’s that little voice that says, Jeanna, you already knew that you were feeling that and went ahead anyway. That just happened to me the other day. We were doing this project at my cabin with my husband. And we were cleaning out the basement and I didn’t wanna do it in the first place, but then there was a party of me that knew, you know what, we’re gonna love the end result. We might as well do it now.
And then on the second day, we we’re kind of having to hurry up ’cause we’re leaving to go home. And he says, we’re gonna go out for a tour on a boat. And I knew our boat wasn’t in the water, so it’s the neighbors. He’s got a new boat and he’s like, we’re gonna go get lunch. And I said, that’s gonna be like four hours. That’s never gonna work. I didn’t say that to him, but in my head, that was the worst idea ever. And he goes, all right, you’re right. We’ll just take a tour. I thought I should not go. We gotta finish this basement.
It’s Mother’s Day. I don’t wanna go on the boats. It’s cold. We go on the boat. What happens on the boat? It’s not summertime. It looks like it’s gonna rain. We are up in no man’s land. There’s no gas stations open. The guy runs outta gas. We’re out there floating. I’m thinking, I knew this wasn’t a good idea. I did it anyway. That’s the stuff that makes me regretful, but only for a moment. And I laugh and I go, yeah, I just gotta get better at trusting the gut.
One time I hired a very, very expensive consultant and they had this idea and I thought, hmm, I don’t really believe this is gonna work. Like, and I just thought, well, maybe I’m thinking small, but I really don’t believe this is gonna work. This feels all sorts of wrong, but hey, this person is so smart, I’m just gonna follow through. That’s what you pay the big bucks for. And probably about six, nine months in, we tested it and it didn’t work, and I thought, I just spent all that money and all this to find out that I was right.
When you make yourself do things you’re not really on fire about, you can’t get the mojo to get the things started. You can’t get the mojo to see it through. You wanna do everything else, but that you don’t. You’re not at your most creative, you’re most confident ’cause you’re making yourself do things. And as soon as you force yourself to do something, now being scared because it’s new and uncomfortable, that’s different than actually, there’s not a bone in my body that wants to do this. Like I’ve done scary things. I remember I was so scared to do video in my business and have my face on camera. I was so scared.
I was so judgy of myself. I was mean, girl, you’re gonna go on and on and ramble even what you’re saying, you sound like a dork. So there’s that difference where there’s some part of you that actually wants to do the thing and you’re just scared because you got all this judgment and then there’s the, yeah. There’s no part of me that is inspired to do this. And I wanna make myself do it anyway.
That never works and it never has a happy ending. Sure, you might make money, the project might get done. You make a hire like you hire somebody for your team or whatever, but then it falls apart quick. So I think we cannot listen to what other people are saying unless we can find a way to have it bring us joy in the process. There’s an actual wanting.
One of the more challenging things to me is there’s not anything you need to do right now. It’s gonna work out. Like all you have to do is see the end outcome. Let this ride. I’m a doer. I wanna control things, fix things, take action forward the movement. These are values and there is a time to do that. But when your mindset is not the greatest, you should probably not take any action to fix that thing. It comes back to trust, right? I don’t need to manage this outcome. I can sit here. I don’t need to force things into place. And that’s some of the best advice from my friend who was a coach named Gregory.
It’s a challenge for me. I’m learning to trust it because it always works out. That’s the best advice, but also the most challenging. I feel. I have talked about this before, but I think a lot of people don’t like saying it out loud, which is I get really jealous of people I think are making it more than me. Still to this day, I think I got good stuff. That person’s crushing it. How come I don’t have all that? Where do people get the time to do these things? You see people on social media all the time doing these reels. I would love to do that. I’m like, who’s got time for that?
There’s a part of me that’s jealous. Like, how did they do it? And then I think clearly you don’t wanna do it that bad. If you did, you’d be doing it. You have time to be on podcasts. You have time to do big launches online. You have time to water ski all the time and snow ski. So clearly you wanna do those things more than you wouldn’t go be on social media, so let it go. I definitely think that being jealous or thinking other people have the key and you don’t. Like I don’t like being like that, but there’s also a sign of me that just says, eh, that’s okay.
It’s okay to be like that because then you can ask, what are you jealous about? And a lot of times I figure, ah, there’s nothing really to be jealous about. And it doesn’t really matter what they’re doing, if they’re have more success than you. Then they’re proof that you can do it too. Do you want that or are you just talking about it? If you want that, you can decide to have that. Let’s go.
I think making it is doing the thing that you love and doing it in a way where it’s sustainable. Making it at first from the head is about to me, making money or being able to say, I’m successful. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with money, but money is a part of it for most people ’cause most people just want to do the thing they love and be able to sustain it without going probes. There’s a part of making it that’s absolutely about money. Like I have prosperity and the best kinda making it is when you have overflow of money. But then the heart knows there’s a different definition of success, which is all about like the happiness and the, and the being in the flow. Like this is enjoyable.
This is an epic time. This is so got me on fire and lit up and that’s how I feel all the time. Like I love my kids and I love my family. I like doing things with them, but man, I’m so happy to come into my office and sit down and work. I’m like, all right, it’s creative time. And then the soul knows you’re always making it. You’re always like, you’re always on a roll, whether no matter what it looks like, soul’s like, you got this. Like, just get back to the feel good. You’re good. You’re good.
So, yeah, there are definitely different levels of making it, depending on your approach and what lens you’re looking through. Mindset is the only thing that allows you to make it. You could have something wonderful happen, but you won’t sustain it because luck and circumstances can only get you so far, and then you’ll do something to sabotage it, or the thing will go away or it’ll become hard. So I think mindset sets you up. For each win, mindset dictates the strategies, the decisions, and everything else you choose.
Mindset is the strategy, the way to make everything work. It’s the only way. If you don’t have mindset, it’s gonna be a long hard ride. I have tried to force things in place, but it takes so much longer and it’s so painful. It’s so painful. I think that fun is the only way to sustain anything. If it’s not fun and you can’t see the enjoyment along the way, you’re not gonna do the hard things that get you there. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately on doing hard things, which at first I was resistant to like, something doesn’t have to be hard.
Well, it’s like, well, the truth is things are hard, and the only way through hard is how can I make this easy? And often that question leads to some fun, twist, or new idea. Fun is the pathway to get the good ideas that will make things easier, or how to collaborate to make things easier. Fun and mindset. To me, those are the biggest way is to make it they go hand in hand.
I’m Jeanna Gabellini and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at masterpeacecoaching.com and peace is spelled P-E-A-C-E, like inner peace. Masterpeaceoaching.com. And you’ll find the link in the show notes. And if you want more clients, grab my More Clients Now Template. If you go to moreclientnowtemplate.com. And the link is in the show notes.
Danny Iny: Making It is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as To Lead Is Human and the Neuroscience of Coaching. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on making it, please follow us on Mirasee FMs YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.