Welcome to episode number 74. In this episode, I'm going to share with you three questions that will unlock instant growth in your business. But before we jump in, I want to say welcome to a whole lot of new listeners here on the show. In case, you haven't heard yours truly was on Amy Porterfield's podcast last week. And I have seen a whole lot of new people come through my Instagram, to Facebook and download episodes here on the podcast. So if you are one of those people who are brand new here, I want to say you are so welcome. And I can't wait to get to know you. And if you've been here for a while, then you're also so welcome. And I love you so much. Thank you for being here. I would love it, if you would say hi to me on Instagram, even if you've been here a while, or if you're brand new, my Instagram is salome.schillack, which I know is a hard to spell.

So just search for Salome, and you're likely to find me, that's S-A-L-O-M-E or Schillack, which is like the nail polish, except it's not an E it's an I. And you're also likely to find me because there's only one Salome Schillack in the whole wide world. And I have my husband's German blood to thank for that weird surname. So anyway, if you're new here, I want to say thank you so much. I am very excited to get to know you, please say hello to me. And without any further ado, let's hop into three questions that will unlock instant growth in your business.

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're 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.

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. I had a very bright idea. And when I shared my idea with my team, they loved it. And so we implemented it straight away and it worked like gangbusters. And in that moment, I thought I was so clever to have this bright spark of an idea. And then I paged through my journal a few days later and realized that I had had that exact idea written down in my journal in multiple places over the past six months, the idea was already in my head and I had already written it down multiple times, but I never acted on it. It's like I didn't believe myself that I should do the idea. And that made me wonder what other great ideas am I sitting on, that I don't take action on because I'm so busy that I don't stop, slow down, and listen to what my amazing brain that already knows what to do is trying to tell me, if I will just sit still and listen for long enough.

I think our brains is a little bit like a dog. At least I feel like my brain is a little bit like a dog sometimes that keeps chasing its own tail, and the thought patterns that keeps going around in loops around and around like a dog chasing its tail. It's like the expression, we don't see the forest for the trees. So Tony Robbins says, the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask. Quality of your life is determined by the quality of questions you ask yourself. And what I realized was my brain was presenting me with an answer to a question I was clearly on a subconscious level asking all the time, but in my busy-ness/hustles/overwhelm/get stuff done, I didn't pause long enough to listen to what my brain was saying, to listen to the answer my brain was giving me and I didn't ask any good questions.

I just allowed that dog to keep running in circles the whole time. So I wondered what would some great questions be that I could have asked myself? And I thought about some really clever questions I have been asked by previous coaches or mentors that I've had, that have made a big impact on my ability to reflect on what has been, what has happened in the past, and on my ability to think about what is coming and what I actively want to create in my life and in my business. And that's a timely thing we're now in quarter four of 2020, possibly the shittiest year for the majority of humans alive in a very long time. So I wanted to start reflecting on what I did this year and how I can build from here forward for 2021.

So today I want to share with you these three questions that I came up with, that's helping me reflect and helping me listen to my very, very, very smart and creative brain that already has all of the answers in sight, if I can just be still long enough to hear the whisper. The question number one is, here it is. So maybe you want to grab your journal and write this down. Question number one is, what are you tolerating? What are you tolerating? Was the very clever Kris Plachy who asked me that, what are you tolerating? Overwhelm is a funny thing. We feel overwhelmed when we have too much to do or when there's too much noise in our heads. And the funny thing about overwhelm is that it's often not even related to what's exactly happening or what's actually happening in our real worlds. Instead, it's just a feeling of helplessness that we hold on to because we think we have more on our plates than what we can actually handle.

And because we feel that way, it perpetuates the helplessness. And then we don't spend the time to take a hard look at what we actually have on our plates versus what we think we have on our plates. Think about it. How often do you look back at your week and you don't know what you did? But man, you were busy so busy, it happens to me all the time. That is overwhelm in its purest form, keeping you over-performing, to trick your brain into believing that you're making progress. When in fact you're just responding to other people's agendas and being busy so that you can get the short term dopamine hit from checking things off of a to-do list.

When we're in this overwhelm state, we start tolerating things because it seems too much work or it feels like it's too hard, too hard of a problem to fix the thing that we're tolerating. And often that thing can be quite easily fixed. And if we do fix it, it'll save us time, save us money and probably move us forward in our businesses a lot faster. But the perception that it's harder to fix than to tolerate keeps us stuck. And in my business, this has shown up in many different ways. It's shown up in the form of a draining client that is always late with giving us what we ask for them. Then results in my team, having to work over time to deliver quality work that would have been even better, had the client given us what we needed on time. It also shows up as, I didn't want to bring any guests onto the podcast sooner, because I thought I'd have to have all the systems in place before they would want to be a guest on my podcast.

It showed up for me that I put off running list-building ads for years and only really got my act together on that about a year ago, because I didn't have a clear plan for how I would add value to that list on a weekly basis. And I knew that I'd have to have something in place to add value on a weekly basis, which made it really convenient to procrastinate on building that list. As long as I haven't launched the podcast, I promise you launching your podcast was on my to-do list for more than a year. It's shown up in my business in the way that I have held on to a team member who was lovely, but unable to fulfill a role that they were placed in. In every one of these examples, I put off making a hard decision for far too long because I felt that it's just better, if it goes into the too hard basket and I just tolerate how hard it is.

And in every one of these examples, none of the things ended up being as hard to fix as I thought they would be. With the client, I just needed to send an email about how we would now be applying late fees, if our deadlines aren't met next time. One email is all it took, but I had to get out of the overwhelm and that victim mentality, where we feel sorry for ourselves and judge ourselves and indulging the drama, and I had to really get to a point where I took responsibility and stepped up and fixed it. And once I managed the feeling, I took responsibility, I took action and it turned out to be quite a quick fix. I put off bringing guests on the podcast because I felt that if I don't have the perfect system to make them feel taken care of, they may think that we're not serious or that we're even unprofessional.

And it's very important for me, that clients and students and podcast guests that they feel taken care of. But of course, this is a classic fear of failure. And in hindsight, I can totally see that I was waiting for things to be perfect before I opened myself up to possibly being judged by others. And you know, the funny thing about judgment and about fear of other people judging you is that no one was actually judging me except me. I'm the one in whom the judgment lives and that's why I felt self-conscious about being judged in the same way I was judging myself. Once I let go of the need to be perfect, I was able to welcome some incredible people onto the show. And those interviews have been some of our most popular shows, putting off building my own list was the same thing.

So I knew I just had to do it and make it up as I go and then perfect it later. And I'm so glad that I did, because it has been the best thing for my business to have a healthy email list of people who want to sign up for A-Lister and for the Launch Lounge. And with the team member, it was a bit more painful and it was a much harder decision to make as it should be when team members and people's livelihoods are concerned. But the reality is that when a business grows very fast, the way that my business did after the agency took off, it often happens that the business outgrow some of its team members skills, business starts to require specialists in specific things, instead of generalists who can pick up anywhere, any time. Sometimes you have to get painfully honest about what you hope someone can do and what they really can do.

And when it will be to the detriment of the business to have that person stay in the role, it can be much better for both parties to part ways. This was a hard lesson for me, and it required a lot of looking at things and being really, really painfully honest about how they were not, how I wanted them to be. Truth was I was tolerating and avoiding facing the facts. And once I asked myself, if this is something I should continue to tolerate, I realized that I was no longer doing her or the business any favors by keeping her on. It's never ever a nice thing to let someone else go on your team. So get honest about things you tolerate with your team early on, and you won't have to deal with big fallouts later. I'm glad to say that we were able to part on good terms and we are still good friends, but if I never have to do that again, I would be very, very happy.

So ask yourself, what are you tolerating in your business? That if you keep on tolerating it, it will continue to grow and cause bigger problems down the road. And how can you step in take responsibility and clean it up before the end of 2020? So that you can start 2021 on a clean slate. It's going to be a new year and it's going to be an awesome year. So that's question number one, what are you tolerating? Question number two is, what can be simplified and automated? And I don't remember where I heard this question, but I think it was from James Wedmore. And this second question is really about creating more ease for yourself about working less, but getting better results. Back when I was doing still running ads for our clients, when I was still the one in the grind before I had the absolute epic team that I have now with Caroline and Hannah at the head of running ads for our clients, I used to reinvent the wheel all the time.

Every time a new client came on board, I had to remember what exactly I had to send them again, to help them get onboarded. Every time I would start a new launch with a client, I'd sit down and make a list of everything I need, landing pages, ad copy, images, videos, custom audiences, custom conversion, the budget, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes I would leave something out or do something in the wrong order, and invariably end up sitting behind my computer on a Friday night until 9:00 p.m setting up ads. Then when I hired Caroline, who is a rock star that currently manages all of our client accounts, we sat down and started making some epic lists of everything that had to happen and the order in which they should happen. We started seeing that every client had the same needs. Every launch was similar ads we were running and we were collecting the same data after every launch, and bit by bit, we started building out our systems inside our project management tool.

We use monday.com, but it can be Asana or Trello, whatever works for you. Now we get compliments from our clients about how well we communicate, what we need from them all the time. Clients tell me how organized my team is and how much they're able to hold their hand and make it easy for them to know what they need and what we need and when we need it by. So they really appreciate that we can tell them beforehand what's going to be expected. And that was simply because we sat down and asked ourselves what can be simplified and automated? It started with chaos, then we wrote it down. Then we put it in chronological order, then we plugged it into a project management system. And later we added checklists and standard operating procedures to those as well. And today at the agency runs like a very well-oiled machine.

When I launched the podcast, I knew better than to operate in chaos for long. From the first episode we published, I started writing down exactly what I was doing and how I was doing it. And this time I used a tool called workflowy.com, which is a tool that lets you essentially create bulleted lists, so you create a category and then you can put all the tasks in that category and the tasks that goes in those tasks and the ones that goes in those. Just a beautiful bulleted lists, and I love me a good bullet. I personally only went through the process a few times when I was able to hire someone to do it for me. And all I had to do was give her access to WorkFlowy, where she could reference the steps and watch the videos and she was off to the races.

So what are you currently doing in your business that can be simplified? Simply by writing down what you do while you do it or creating a Loom video of what you do when you do it. Then you can automate it and you can use tools like Monday, or you can hand it off to another person to do, but slowly you start handing things off and making things easier. So question number two, ask yourself, what can you simplify and automate right now? And imagine 2021, when you have simplified and automated a large part of what you're doing now, and you're paying someone else to do some of those tasks that you just don't want to do anymore. A beautiful, beautiful thing when this machine starts working like that. Question number three is, what works well that you can double down on? And this was a question that Stu McLaren asked me last week when I was at my Mastermind, I've joined Stu's Mastermind for membership owners, and I'm super excited about it.

I love being part of a Mastermind and it is just an incredible group of entrepreneurs that I get to hang out with. And last week I want to say we went to Canada, but we didn't actually go to Canada. We had our virtual event, I had to get up at four o'clock in the morning. And a lot of the people in the UK stayed up until four o'clock in the morning. And the guys over in North America was very accommodating for all of us in different time zones. But it was in this Mastermind meeting that Stu said, what works well that you can double down on? And this last question is for all you type A's out there, who wants everything to be perfect and keep fiddling with things and keep things tucked away because they're not perfect yet. If you made money with it, once you can make money with it again, what works well in your business?

And what can you double down on? Maybe you have a small offer that you offered your audience when you were just getting started and it worked, but it's not a big fancy office. So you thought you'd be better off tucking it away somewhere in a Google Drive folder or somewhere in a corner of a Kajabi account. And you haven't launched it again, bring it out, launch it again. You never know, may be you just need a few emails to send to your list and you can make some money over Christmas. You never know how many people in your audience will take you up on a smaller offer. Maybe you've created so many lead magnets that you're not using anymore, just because you keep creating new ones. Which one worked really well that you can use again, or which ones compliment each other, that you can turn into a little mini course or a little mini library that you can sell. Share these with your audience, add even more value to them, use what already exists in your business.

What about email sequences? Perhaps you have a sales sequence tucked away that you never used because you weren't ready to launch that course. Could you repurpose those emails and with some small tweaks, add them to your lead magnet series to make you some sales. What about social media? Is there a platform where your audience is absolutely on fire? And if you double down on that platform, that would get you a thousand times further and keeping on wasting your time on a platform that is just not gaining any traction. For me, this is A-Lister, my course that shows new online course creators and anyone new to building an audience, how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to build an audience of raving fans who actually wants to buy from you. I am doubling down on that course over the next few months because it simply works.

It works so well for the students and they love it. And it works for my business because it gives me a platform to serve more students and help more people get started without wasting money on ads that don't work. So question number three is what is the one thing that you can double down on for the rest of 2020 as we move into 2021? That will be the small lever that swings the big door for you. I told you at the beginning of this episode, that Tony Robbins says, that the quality of our lives are determined by the quality of the questions we ask ourselves. And I really hope that these three questions will help you create some white space in your head, that allows you to see clearly where your and your business strengths are. And how you can use those strengths to create bigger impact, get more money and more profit in your business and grow the impact that you're making in other people's lives.

So take some time and sit with your journal and write out these three questions. I'll repeat them for you. Number one is what am I tolerating? Number two, what can be simplified and automated? And number three is what works well that I can double down on? Spend a bit of time reflecting on these questions. And I hope this helps you get your mind clear and ready to start planning 2021. I don't know about you, but I'm about ready for 2021. If you love this episode, I would appreciate it so much, if you would rate and review us on iTunes, it means the world to me.

And I just love reading all of your wonderful reviews from all over the world. I have reviews from Canada, and from Europe, and from the UK and Australia, and New Zealand and South Africa. And it just warms my heart so much to know someone is sitting somewhere on the other end of the earth, and they're listening to me share my little message. So thank you very much for being here with me. I appreciate you go and rate and review the show and I will be reading out some of those reviews on upcoming episodes. Have a lovely week bye.

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