Hello, and welcome to episode number 136 of the Shine Show. Today's episode is called nine and a half things I'm grateful for in 2021. And I'm excited to reveal to you why we didn't call this 10 things I'm grateful for.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you are ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in, because you are ready to shine. And this is the Shine Show.

It's coming to the end of the year, and it is that time of year when we all just want to go on holidays. I don't know about you if you live in the US, but anyone who lives in Australia or South Africa, or pretty much in anywhere in the Southern hemisphere, for us it is summer holidays over Christmas. So summer holidays for us means we're on the beach, we're playing cricket, it's hot. We're in the pool. We are just everywhere where the sun shines. And the fact that our summer holiday, which is just this absolute celebration of life and celebration of everything we achieved this year coincides with Christmas, which to me is the biggest celebration of the year, I love Christmas, maybe for all the wrong reasons, because I love shopping and I love getting gifts, but this time of year is a very, very special time of year for us here in the Southern hemisphere, or at least it is for me.

And it makes me a little bit sentimental, not just because the year wraps up and it ends in this big climax, which is Christmas, but also because we're all going on holiday, we're all resting, we're all recovering, all the overwhelm, and all of the craziness gets put aside. And when you get to switch off for a while and everyone else around you switches off as well, something magical happens to your brain because suddenly the clutter just gets cleared out. And I for one am looking forward to spending two weeks in beautiful Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef with my family. And by the time you listen to this, I'll already to be back from that holiday, but I'm recording it, today is the 3rd of December, I'm recording this episode so that I can go away and enjoy my holiday. So I wanted to record an episode where I share with you a few things that I am grateful for, that I can really honestly say in my heart of hearts, I feel incredibly grateful for these things. And one thing that I'm honestly working really hard at trying to be grateful for.

And I'd love to hear your thoughts when I get to this one thing, because maybe just like me, you are struggling to find a reason to be grateful for this, or maybe it's something else that you deep in your heart know that you have to be grateful for because then that thing will lose its power over you, but you're just not there yet. So let me share my nine things I'm really grateful for and one thing I'm working on with you. Number 10 in my top 10 things that I'm grateful for is Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Yes, I'm going to put it out there. I am incredibly grateful to Mr. Zuckerberg, however flawed human he is. He's also a genius.

He is also, I believe, in my heart I do believe that he believes that what he's doing is making the world better. And even though we are all still figuring out how social media will impact the world, how are we meant to know what we're going to know 20, 50, a 100, 200 years from now? Let's hope we're still on the earth. Let's hope the earth hasn't kicked us off in 200 years from now. And that we can all look back and say, ah, we can see that what Mark was doing was a good thing, and we can see that the good social media did outweigh the bad that it does. I genuinely believe that he is trying to do something good, and I choose to see the good that happens as a result of Facebook, and as a result of this company that he's built, and as a result of this technology that him and other guys in, and guys and girls, let me be clear, there are a lot of women also building incredible social media platforms, and I wish more than just Bumblebee would become really successful for women.

But I really honestly believe that being at the forefront of this very new thing, of course, social media, of course, this new thing, marketing on social media, of course, advertising on social media. Of course, it's going to get a lot of flack. Of course, it's going to make a lot of mistakes and just like anything new, we have to give some grace and some kindness to it and approach it with humility and respect, and always try to make sure that whatever fingerprints we leave on it, they are ethical fingerprints, there are fingerprints that leaves the world better than what we found it. That's number 10, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Number nine. Number nine is a weird one. I am going to say number nine is, I am grateful that at least in my life in 2021, there was no other big trauma. The reason I say that, and I know how incredibly privileged I am and how incredibly lucky I am that I get to say that I am privileged and lucky and grateful that there wasn't any big trauma, is because 2020 was quite traumatic, quite traumatic for so many people, so many people. And I get that there were people who had far greater trauma than what I experienced in my cushiness here in my home in Queensland, in Australia. But despite the fact that I have all this privilege and I know that I am incredibly grateful and lucky. It was still a very traumatic year for me.

And so I want to say that in 2021, I shared with one of my team members, I said to her at one point, what is it about 2021 that feels so incredibly hard? And she said, it's because 2020 was traumatic, 2021 is post-traumatic stress disorder, it's PTSD, because we all thought it was going to be better and then it was just more of the same, more of the same. And I think I look back at 2021 and I am grateful that there was no more added trauma. It was just this continuation of the same thing. And if you did experience severe trauma in 2021 because of what's happening in the world, or because of anything else, then I want to tell you that my heart goes out to you. I wish I could hold you and nurture you and heal you and help you and lift you up. And I send all of my warmest wishes and hugs to you, and I hope that 2022 is better for you. So number nine is no new trauma for me in my life.

Number eight, number eight is swimming. I am grateful for swimming. Three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 6:15, you will find me in the swimming pool chasing up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down. Sometimes as many as 75 laps of 25 meters. Now the guys on the other side of the pool, the guys and gals on the other side of the pool, who are triathletes, they do sometimes about double that. But I will tell you if I look at the last year, the thing that I am very proud of is my consistency even through winter, I showed up every single morning. I maybe I missed a week or so when I had a cold. But other than that, I was there every, all three of those mornings every week. And I think we underestimate the incredible value of regular exercise.

And I'm trying to rearrange my schedule next year so that I have even more time for exercise. And if you told me even three years ago, two years ago, I'd be getting up out of bed to go and exercise, I'd have told you're crazy, but with age comes wisdom, and swimming is something I'm really grateful for. And I have a wonderful community and my best friend swims with me and I just love it. And it keeps me healthy and it brings balance to my life. So number eight is swimming.

Number seven. Number seven is my incredible, amazing community. You know when you just start your online business and you dream about the day when you have whole rooms full of students who get results and who are supportive of each other, and who creates their own culture inside your community, and who starts to build up their own vernacular and inside jokes, and who just loves being there because of who else is there? That was a dream I had many, many, many years ago, many years when I started working online. And it took me so long to get there. If I knew back in 2015 when I started, 2014, actually I started the very first business I started on the 1st of July 2014. And it wasn't until 2018 that I started making any money and it wasn't until 2020 that I launched a successful online course again, but way back in 2015, I dreamed about having a community like the one that I have now.

And I just absolutely love my community, both the A-lister community, the launch lounge community and the community of team shine and all of the coaches, and all of the consultants and everybody who helps and who works together to create this beautiful, I'm going to call it a beautiful beast, because it is this beast that is, because it's not something that is of me anymore. It is taking on its own personality and I just love it. So number seven is my communities.

Number six, number six is iOS, man iOS. Okay. I said it, I am grateful for iOS. I'm grateful for iOS because it reminded me that I should not put all my eggs in one basket. It reminded me that the things that stand the taste of time are not the tactics, it's not the fly by night things, it's not the one hit wonders, it is the consistent doing of the hard thing, which is building your email list, which is launching a podcast episode every single week. It is emailing your list every week. It is the unsexy things, it is having diversity in your stream of traffic, YouTube and your podcast, or your blog, and Facebook and Instagram, and something else. It is the diversity of it. iOS reminded me that the people whose funnels survive things like iOS are the people who have good marketing principles and good marketing practices in place already. So number seven is iOS, and I am grateful for, oh, that's number six. Oh, I've messed my numbers up. Was that six or seven? Anyway, it's iOS.

Number next, whichever one that is, number five. Number five is, I am grateful for the tough time I had getting started back in 2014, in 2015. I hear so many students share with me their journey right now. And I can almost viscerally sometimes feel the frustration and the disappointment and the heartache and the impatience and the pain. And I will never, ever, ever tell you that it doesn't hurt, that there is no disappointment. I will never tell you that it wasn't hard to lose the money, or to pour in so much energy to not see the results you wanted, because I've been there. I understand that incredibly deep pain, that incredibly deep longing to create the freedom, the time freedom, the financial freedom, to have this thing work. I understand it at a very, very deep level because I was there.

And like all things, hindsight is 2020. And I can look back now and say, goodness me, I am incredibly grateful for that period in my life, because it made me who I am today. And I will tell you, I know very few people who are as resilient as I am. I know very few people who has the problem solving skills I have, I know very few people who are as flexible and who can pivot as fast as I can, and who can build systems the way that I can. And it is all because of everything I learned and everything I had to go through to learn about myself, that I am able to do this today. So I am incredibly grateful for the tough time I had getting started in 2014, in 2015. So, that's number five.

Number four, number four is I'm going to share with you a little something I had around September, October this year, I had a bit of a anxiety attack, I think, that's what I would call it. The doctor called it a panic attack. It was the end of a very, very stressful four months, five months, as a result of changes in the business. It was a result of some decisions that I made that I thought were the best decisions at the time, and in hindsight were good decisions for the time, but it came at my own expense. I thought I could run at a certain pace, and I thought that pace was going to have to be maintained for a month or two, and four months into working 70 hours a week to get a few things up and going that I was hoping I could get up and going with hustle energy, it didn't happen.

And I found myself increasingly becoming more and more anxious. And I think everything that everyone's gone through in the last two years with COVID and just so many social change in our environment, I think my brain probably just like the most people's brains, I think our environment also is more anxious today than it was, but my brain just couldn't cope with it anymore. And I want to share with you a little bit of the symptoms that I noticed in the months leading up to that before I had the actual panic attack, because if you see it in yourself, I want you to notice it. The first thing I noticed is just that tightening in your stomach where you have to do this deep breath in order for your tummy muscles to relax. That was one of the symptoms.

The other one was I became incredibly auditory sensitive to the point where I couldn't stand any noise. So any sports that was on the TV, in the background, I couldn't be in the room. My kids were too noisy, music, even music, my 10 year old loves playing all the top 100 songs and most of the top 100 songs drive me absolutely nuts, because I'm old school girl. So the music, it was just, I was so irritated the whole time and auditory sensitive. I just wanted to be alone and be in quiet. Those were some of the symptoms that I had. And then also having that adrenaline feeling where you can literally feel the blood rushing to your brain and then rushing back to your feet, that started happening to me quite often, I would get an email from a client and immediately the adrenaline would go to my brain and then back to my feet. And you know that feeling, the blood rushing around in your body.

Those were all things that happened to me one Sunday morning, I was just, and also, I would say also I noticed that I started, things that triggered even just a little bit of stress would make my hands shake, my hands started shaking. I was not paying attention to any of these things, because I thought it is just playing the result of being tired and having worked a lot. But in hindsight, I should have paid attention to those signs, because those signs were my body telling me that it's not coping and that I need to slow down. And I was literally exerting so much effort every weekend trying to relax that I end up not relaxing because I try so hard to relax. I was literally incapable of making the voices in my head stop. They were just constantly chattering.

And when people say they have voices in their head, you think, yeah, sure, you're a little bit crazy, but I literally feel like I had voices talking to me in my head about work the whole time and I was just unable to make it stop. I was absolutely unable to make it stop. So one Sunday morning I was lying on the couch trying to relax. I was watching Mare of Easttown on my iPad, and I thought about an email that I got from someone that misunderstood me and then ran with something completely the opposite to what I had meant from the exchange that we had. And this person was just, it was just nasty and mean, and I just thought about the email. I'd already received that email in the week leading up to the event. But that Sunday morning while I was watching TV, I thought about the email and just in the moment I thought about the email, I absolutely had my heart started beating, my hands started shaking. I felt like I was going to vomit.

I was seeing stars, literally seeing stars. And I said to my husband, something is not right. And he said, you need to go to the doctor right now. And when I went to the doctor, she said, yep, that is pretty common. That is what we call a nervous breakdown or a panic attack. And I'm just lucky because I know some other people since that has happened to me have told me that they had such bad experiences that they end up in hospital. So I'm sharing this with you in hindsight, because it was interesting. My doctor has put me on medication. So I am currently on medication for, I have anti-anxiety medication and it's been miraculous. It has really quieted the voices down. And it has just enable me to now build in structures to be more balanced in the business.

I am not working more than 35 hours a week at this stage per week, yeah, and next year I'll work 30 hours a week. So literally just the times when my kids are in school. And I have made some big changes to the team structure as well, which has relieved a lot of this tension, but I don't think I would have had the power to make those changes had I not gone on the medication, which has really helped me just center myself again so that I can make decisions to support my life. So number four, I am very grateful for my little mental health breakdown that I had.

Number three, number three is I am grateful for money. I'm grateful for money. I have read all the money mindset books there are to read. I have done all the money reframing there is to reframe, and for some reason, none of it has ever really stuck, some of it I like, some of it I don't like, some of it I feel like when I hear it, it's just like, more of the same. But recently I have really started thinking of money in terms of a value exchange. And I know this is nothing new either, but just like we live in our physical bodies and we also are spiritual beings, we have flesh and blood, but then if we were only flesh and blood that would not encapsulate who we are at all. So we are spirit, but we are also body.

I can see that money is just a, it's just another form, it is a form that was invented by humans to exchange value, to represent a value exchange. And I think sometimes we give money so much power that we forget that it is almost like how our bodies are a body and a spirit, it's like money is just the body and all the meaning we give it is the spirit behind it. And the value exchange that happens when we give someone else our knowledge is worth paying for, and the incredible blessing opportunity that we have to bless other people with our money when they add value to our lives is an opportunity. And I feel like something shifted for me when I started thinking about money this way.

And now I just want everyone to get back in touch to build this intimate relationship with the value creation, even my team, I said to them, what you do here is value creation. And as long as what you do adds value to the vision of the business, you can create as much or as little value you as you want. And if you create more value and I can see that it creates more value for our students and it creates more value for our clients, and because of the value you add, we can make more money, we can charge more, we can add more value to them. I'm very happy for my team to build their own jobs within my business. And it's just, I'm just suddenly, there's a giant shift for me in the relationship with money because I'm approaching it from this value perspective, instead of just looking at it as money as a fleshly thing. So number three is money and value, and what that enables us to do.

Number two. Number two is my team. Number two is my team. I am incredibly grateful for my team. My team is everything. A year ago, there were four of us, and one of the four was on her way out. She was finishing up after Christmas and she was about to get married. And so the three that were left was me and Hannah and Caroline. And we're the original OGs. Hannah and Caroline have worked for me for almost three years and two years, three years and more maybe, yeah, three years and two and a half years. Hannah and Caroline and I pretty much built up everything inside the agency. And this year I've expanded my team to 11 people.

And so now there's this little posse, we are becoming a posse, and my team is just so much fun. You know what they just did? We organized a Zoom Christmas party and they all dressed up as me. And apparently you can have a Salome uniform. Apparently the Salome uniform is big blonde hair, bright lips, a giant pair of earrings and a strappy top with boobs hanging out. That's what my team thinks. That's my team said is my uniform. Now I'm going to have my boobs hang out a little bit less, but I do love my little strappy tops, and I do love my team, my team are just, they are the smartest, most dynamic, most organized, loving, kindest, creative, just brilliant people that I know. And 20 years ago, I was the girl who just hang out with the boys, because the boys made me feel safe, and the boys didn't judge me, and the boys didn't, I felt safe with the boys. And now I'm a girl's girl.

I find myself hanging out and being attracted to strong women and just wanting to spend more and more time with these incredibly strong women that I have in my community and I can just, I celebrate every single one of them. We're so different and we are so talented and smart, and we can do anything. So number two is my team.

Number one is the thing that I'm working on being grateful for. And that is, Ugh, it's COVID. Okay. So I cognitively understand the importance of finding something to be grateful for in something that sucks. And I cognitively understand that unless I can switch my own attitude and my feelings from resentment to appreciation, whatever the thing is, is going to continue to torture me. And I wish I can say there is something about COVID that I'm grateful for, but I'm just not. And I mentioned this to my students and I mentioned it to my team, and I know that I can be grateful for, business has grown and it's brought us all together. And so many things that I can name with my brain that I can say, yeah, sure, I can reframe it and pretend I'm grateful that this thing is a result of COVID, but really wouldn't it have happened anyway? I am working very actively on trying to be grateful for COVID and I'm not there yet.

And I wanted to say that if you are not there yet, that's okay too, maybe I'll never get there. I don't know if, are the people who are grateful for things like World War II, do you end up just being grateful for what came out of it and never really actually being grateful for the thing? Maybe that's where I am, I am very grateful. I've just listed nine things that came out of COVID that I am really grateful for. So maybe I don't have to be grateful for COVID, but I wanted to put this up here because when I created this list of things that I'm grateful for, something prompted me to put COVID on the list. But when I started digging, I was like, yeah, I'm not grateful for COVID. I'm not there yet. So I hope that if you are feeling the same, that even just me saying it out loud helps you also just be able to say it out loud and be honest about it.

We don't have to pretend, we don't have to stick bandaids on things that are much bigger than a bandaid. So I'm not there yet. And I will let you know when I get there, but I'm not there yet. So, that is my ten things. Well, let's say nine and a half things that I'm grateful for, for 2021. And I will leave you with that. I just hope 2022 is a year of grace, a year of abundance and a year of freedom and healing for all of us. I love all of you so much. I hope you have a fabulous 2022. Bye.

Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed the show. I hope that you can also find at least nine and a half things you feel grateful for, for 2021. And I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful, safe new year's celebration. And I will see you on the other side of 2021. I'll see you next year. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.