Hello, and welcome to episode number 144 of the Shine Show. Today, we're going to explore the question, could your fear of tech be derailing your business? Stick around and let's see where this one goes. 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. Hello. I am so happy to be here with you today to talk about technology. I say it with a giant sigh like that because you won't believe what just happened to me. I recorded 20 minutes of this episode and then stopped briefly to check something, and I had been recording on the wrong mic.

Of course, an episode about technology is going to challenge my use of technology. Of course, an episode about the fear of technology is going to bring up a frustration around technology. And of course, an episode that says could your fear of tech be derailing your business, is going to come and try to derail my podcast, but I am stronger than that. And you know what? I've checked my microphone three times this round, and I know that it is sounding smooth.

So I hope you enjoy my smooth audio. And I hope you appreciate that I didn't subject you to the horrible sound that was coming out of my iPod headphone that I've got in my ear. Any other podcasters out there who can relate, send me a DM and tell me your funniest podcast tech story, I want to hear it. Okay. So today we are talking about, could your fear of tech be derailing your business, maybe not even derailing your business, but maybe halting your progress to get your business off the ground. Maybe it's slowing you down in your ability to build your email list.

Maybe it is holding you back from getting that webinar up. And one of the biggest places that a fear of tech shows up is with Facebook and Instagram ads. Now I will give you this. Facebook does not do a good job of making it easier. They do not do a good job of supporting you and they do not do a good job of creating user friendly interfaces. Let's just put that out there and assume that all of that is true. And I will be the first one to say, I agree with that. I agree with that, I do.

As the owner of this business of Shine and succeed and the CEO of all of this, I can honestly tell you that I cannot remember the last time I set up an ad myself, but I still record the demos for the training myself. And every single time I have to record a demo for how to do it. I'm like, "Where did my button go?" Or "What is this new thing?" Or, "Wow, when did they add this?", Or I go, "Why did they move this thing over here?" That doesn't make any sense.

So I want you to know that as somebody who has been running ads now since 2014, '15, I'm with you there, I'm with you there. But I also want you to know that I'm with you in facing the fear of take and overcoming your fear of take, because I can laugh at myself. I can laugh at myself. Mostly I laugh at myself when I use the Facebook ad interface, because I've learned. I've just learned to expect things are going to be different.

Maybe I have to laugh at myself when I'm using microphones, because that's not exactly my strong suit, but we're all in this boat together and it shows up differently for all of us. So what I'm hoping to achieve with this episode is first of all, I want to remove the stigma around Facebook and the ads manager being scary place to hang out for you.

And I want to encourage all of you who have been scared of doing Facebook ads because you didn't see the results you had or you had expected and you felt like you wasted money, I'm here today to encourage all of you to give it another go. And I'm here to tell you that I will support you all the way. So today we are going to walk away from this episode feeling really encouraged, also feeling like we can admit to each other that this thing is not easy. We don't have to pretend it's easy.

It's not always easy, but it's in us looking each other in the eye and saying, yeah, this is not easy. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I've been there and there's light at the end of the tunnel. And you have everything inside you that you need in order to sit down and figure this thing out and I'm going to be there to support you. So let's walk away from this episode, having looked each other in the eye and said, yeah, this thing can be a thing, but we are bigger than hard things.

I've all already told you many stories of how hard it is for me to cook. It's one of those things that I guess I should stop saying that. I can hear some mindset coaches on here going, "Yeah, stop telling yourself it's hard and then it'll stop being hard." But let me just share with you something that happened last night. I bought a recipe book by Donna Hay. Now Donna Hay is an Australian icon. She is almost, I want to say maybe, I don't know. Maybe you guys can help me out, those of you who know Donna Hay better than I do.

I think she is maybe the Australian version of Martha Stewart. Someone help me out here. I think she's about the Australian version of Martha Stewart, but with prettier photos. Not that I know much about Martha Stewart. Martha Stewart without the visit to jail. Am I allowed to say that? Okay. So I bought Simple Dinners, simple family dinners, and I will say it is fairly simple. My 10 year old is cooking from it and she's loving it.

So last night I'm making spicy beef enchiladas or something like that. And the instruction says, place the bread thingamajigs on a baking tray, and then you put the meat mix on top of the bread and then you put the last bread on top of the meat mix. So you kind of end up with a bit of a sandwich sort of thing. And then the instruction says, place a second baking tray on top of the first one. Now I'm looking at my baking tray with my four enchiladas on it, and I'm thinking the instruction says place a second baking tray on top of the first one.

So now I go, so do I use the second baking tray kind of as a lid? Does it go on so that it's kind of mirrors the same one at the bottom and thereby forming kind of a lid, which in my head now where, now I'm cooking it before I put it in the oven or am I supposed to turn the top baking tray so that it's the same shape as the bottom one and literally squashes on top of my enchiladas. I don't know. I still don't know.

And I was standing there for a minute thinking, these people should really send me these cookbooks to test because after I have tested it, they will know it is simple family dinners and anyone can use it. Because what do I do? To somebody who knows how to cook, place a second baking tray on top of the first one will be a fairly simple instruction, but to somebody who doesn't, how do I place this baking tray? Upside down, right side up.

If it's right side up, then it's squishing my enchiladas, is that what I want? If it's upside down, then it won't have that nice crisping effect, will it? I don't know. I don't think so. I feel like it's not going to get the grill bit, right? And I want them to be crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. I still don't know. So I ended up opting for, let's not do anything with tray number two and I just left it off. And I don't know what my enchiladas were meant to look like, but my kids said, this is the best dinner I've ever cooked. So epic success for me.

And the next time I do it, I will ask my husband what he thinks they think they I want to do with a second tray and he will know because he understands cooking. So he'll tell me what to do with that second baking tray. Maybe enchiladas will come out completely different, maybe they'll come out even better, and isn't that how we learn everything. We get a set of instructions, we try our best to follow them even if they don't make a lot of sense, we make decisions based on our best information at the time. We know that there is a risk that this is going to go badly, but it's still worth the risk.

And then whatever comes out of the oven, that's what the kids get for dinner. And we learn from our mistakes. We ask for feedback and we do it again next week. So next week I will report back to you on enchilada verse two, enchilada attempt number two and well, I can only go up from here if my kids already said it's the best thing I ever cooked. I think it's just because I put extra cheese on it, that's my strategy. That's how I fool my kids into thinking I can cook is I just add loads of cheese, works for everybody.

So take is a little bit like that. It can also be a little bit like learning to drive a car. I am very lucky that I learned to drive a car in a country where we all drive automatic cars, not automatic manual. In South Africa where I learned to drive a car everybody drives manual cars. And so I learned about first gear, second gear, third gear, fourth gear, fifth gear, and I know how to drive stick. I love that expression, drive stick. I know how to drive stick.

But then in Australia we all have automatic cars and so I've unlearned that skill a little bit. But whenever we go on holiday and I'm driving my mom's car, or a rented car, or my brother's car in South Africa, then I'm driving stick again and it just comes back to you so naturally. So when you started, when you learned to drive, I mean, it's one of those skills that you don't really need to know how to drive, right?

You could Uber everywhere you're going to go, but it's probably not going to be the best use of your money, it's probably not going to be the best use of your time and if an emergency pops up, it is so much easier to just jump in your car and go and solve the problem. Developing the tech skills, the basic tech skills to learn to succeed in an online business can feel frustrating, it can feel boring and it can feel like a waste of time, or it can feel like sometimes we resent that journey because we just want to get to a place where we can pay someone to do this.

Have you ever felt that way? Can I just get to a place where I can pay someone to do this for me. That's kind of how I felt about social media. So I want to remind you that we all have to start somewhere just like my enchiladas and just like when we drive the car. But with the right teachers and with the right guidance and support, you'll be surprised at how quickly something that seems really hard and daunting can become second nature. Just like driving a car and just like cooking enchiladas.

So I want to remind you today that the tech side of your business doesn't always have to be scary. And I'm going to do that by just raising a few questions for you, raising a few pondering points. Let's call them pondering points that you can go and ponder about as it relates to a fear of technology or a fear of figuring the take out for yourself. The number one is, if you want to learn to make friends with tech for the good of your business, then you will.

If you've already decided it's too hard, it's going to be too hard. I think the first time I heard this expression was from James Wedmore, but also I read it somewhere else after that. The expression is, what you resist persist. What you resist persists. And at first it didn't quite make sense to me, but as I learned to grow my business, and as I learned to develop a stronger mindset, and as I learned to lean into the hard things and not avoid them, I learned that when I can slow down my thinking process, when I realize that I'm resisting something, then I'm able to take responsibility for it.

And when I take responsibility for it, I move from that absolute feeling of disempowerment, absolute powerlessness feeling. I'm going to use the V word. I'm going to say that victim feeling, that feeling that you're not in control and that something else bigger than you calls the shots and you have no control over it. When you can just recognize the moment when you go there, then it becomes easier to just slow down your thinking, slow down your feeling, listen to yourself talk, hear the way you are talking to yourself and just take a moment and go, hold on, am I perhaps resisting something here?

Is there something here that is going to persist because of the thoughts and the feelings I have about it right now. When I was 23 I had just finished four years of musical theater, four and a half years. And I hadn't yet finished my degree that I was studying part-time while I was doing musical theater. So I decided to pack up my bags and go to London because I was like, "Well, I don't have any qualifications, what job am I going to do?" So if I'm going to do some crappy job, I'd rather do it for British pound than full South African rand.

And at the time that working holiday visa was amazing, I've told you about my working holiday adventures in London. But I really resisted doing the work to get the visa because it was a 17 page document. And every question that it answered required admin and chores and finding documents and getting things certified and getting things stamped and getting things, my worst nightmare. And until that point of my life, I had pretty much winged my way through most things, as I fully fledged ADHD banner bearer, I am not incredibly, I do not stay engaged with things I find boring.

And admin, most of the times are boring. And when I was 23 year old, had not yet learned about my fabulous ADHD brain that just wants to do the things that it finds entertaining and does not want to do any of the boring things. I looked at this visa application, I was like, "I'm not filling in all of these, I'm just going to go talk to the lady and I'll wing it when I get there." And so I thought "I'll wing it when I get there." I stood in line I got there and finally, when it was my turn, it's just at the British embassy in Pretoria, I got to the front of the queue and went into the cubicle and the lady looks at my forms and she says, "This form is incomplete."

And I go, "Yeah, I'll just give you the information you need." She looks at me and she says, "This form is incomplete." I said, "Okay, can we talk about it?" And she goes, "If I submit this form and you get rejected for a visa, you won't be able to apply for another visa. Do you want me to submit this form?"

"No." And then she says, "Go fill out the form and then come back." Oh snap, you tell this 23 year old get her shit together lady. She jolted me awake. She was like, that was the first time in my life where I went, "Okay, I am not going to wing my way through life anymore. I'm going to have to start checking the boxes that bureaucrats want me to check." So I went away and I had to take responsibility for the pain and the admin and I had to go to the bank and I had to go to the post office and I had to ask my parents for some things and it was a lot of schlep, but I got by visa.

And that's not the last time I would schlep for visas. I have schlep for many visas since then and citizenship and all the other things. Anybody who has immigrated who knows exactly the schlepping I'm talking about. The point of this story is that I thought I was going to get away with avoiding doing the thing that was really hard and painful. And had that lady not actually been very kind to me by not submitting my visa, I may never have had my London adventure.

So I want to challenge you to think about the mindset of that kind of, this is too hard. Just imagine yourself as me when I was 23 standing at the window of the lady at the British embassy and ask yourself, is it really maybe time to be kind to yourself and say, "Go back and finish the forms," Is that maybe the right thing that you have to say to yourself today? Yes. Visa it's fun. Visas is just about as much fun as Facebook ads. Okay. The second one is, what does a fear of tech look like in your life?

How does it show up for you in your mind, in your body, in your business, on your computer? What does it look like? So for some of you it might look like I'm just going to do some more Instagram reels. For some of you it might look like, there's this new thing called Clubhouse, I'm just going to go on Clubhouse. That's so much easier. I only have to press one button and everyone's saying, it's the hottest thing and everyone's saying it's working really, really, really well. So I'm just going to hang out on Clubhouse and see how far that gets me, or TikTok.

Let me just go and start a TikTok account and then start doing some TikToks because that's going to be easier. Or maybe Facebook groups. I'm just going to go hang out in a Facebook group. I don't know how that shows up for you. Maybe it shows up for you as, can I just hire a Facebook ads manager and not do any of this myself? Yeah. There's many different ways that fear of tech can show up for us. It can show up as avoidance or procrastination.

It can show up as some kind of rationalization that it's maybe not as important as we want to think it is, but I'll tell you no one who has a business that you want got away with it without running ads. So at some point you're going to have to face that responsibility and you won't believe me, but we often have clients in the agency with six and seven figure launches who still need to understand the ins and the outs of the tech. And so it is not one of those things you can turn a blind eye to and hope you can outsource it forever.

You can get by on a wing and a prayer, is that the expression. A wing and a prayer? I don't know. You can get by on that for a while, but eventually you're going to have to understand how it shows up for you and do something about it. The next thing I want you to think about as you embark on this journey to overcome a fear of tick is ask yourself, how can you not have to learn the same thing twice? How can you not have to learn the same thing twice?

And here's what I mean by that. We forget if you're anything as forgetful as I am, I do something now and if I don't do that same thing for two weeks, I have forgotten how to do it. So I want you, as you learn anything techy to record a screen recording of yourself doing it in the moment, you are going to be so glad you did that because if you are not going to do that same thing for 2, 3, 4 weeks, or maybe a few months, you're going to have to come back and learn that same thing from scratch again.

When I started the podcast, I had four people. We were four people in my team. This is December, 2019. Hannah and Caroline were working inside the agency with the clients and I was working with them on the clients. And then I had Ashley, fabulous Ashley who did just about every other thing in terms of marketing in my business. But Ashley didn't have time or bandwidth on her plate to also do all of the podcasting producing stuff. So guess who had to do it? I did.

So I started recording myself after the first few weeks of having to learn this whole process every time from scratch. So I would have to go, hang on, what did I do again? How did I get this on Libsyn again? I can't remember. And then I have to figure it out again. And then I'm like, "How did I create the show? No it's page on my website again. I can't remember, I have to figure that out again. How did I create the Instagram story with the WAV file on it?

Can't remember, have to figure it out again. And that went on for a few weeks until I decided this is just nonsense. Build a system, create a system, record what I'm doing, put it in a step by step, follow the step by step every single time, the same way and by week five or six, I had my system down pact. And a task that used to take me a whole day, took me a whole day just to publish an episode and I was doing it week by week, I wasn't even batching it, now turned into a one hour task.

So when you're learning tech I want you to ask yourself, what can I do from day one so that if I don't look at this again for seven days, I don't have to start from scratch again. I can just go back and watch the video I created of myself in fast forward, watch the video in fast forward, because you just need to remind your brain what was going on and then you will learn a lot faster.

And you know where I see this show up so much is students inside A-lister who run engagement ads and then they learn how to run list building ads. And then they don't run ads for a while because life happens and then they're back to running ads and then they set up a custom conversion and they come to the live Q&A call and they say, "My ads are not working, something's not working," and we go in and the first thing I see is the custom conversion wasn't set up correctly.

And it is such an easy mistake to make, if you have forgotten exactly how to set up a custom conversion. But if you reminded yourself the other day and you recorded a video of yourself doing it, you would've seen exactly how to do it, and you wouldn't have made a costly mistake. So I want to remind you that you have tech at your disposal that you can use to help you prevent yourself from having to learn the same tech twice.

That's a mouthful. All right. The next thing is learning one thing at a time. I don't want you to try to learn multiple things at a time. Don't try to learn Pinterest and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook ads at the same time. Pick one social platform that your business gravitates to because your ideal customer is on there, and then master every little step.

Don't jump from A to Z and then back again, and then into a whole nother set of alphabets and A to Z and back again and back again, it is a sure way to overwhelm yourself, and it is a sure way to create confusion. There is a reason you don't see me doing reels, or you don't see me hanging out in Clubhouse. It is because my bandwidth is already taken up by things that has real significant meaning, things that are helping me move my audience building forward.

Things like list building ads, things like engagement ads, things like the podcast, things like running ads to my lead magnets for my list builders. Okay. So focus on one thing. The next thing is I want you to think about free products that will help you make progress faster. Canva is such a good example of this. If you are feeling overwhelmed with Facebook and Instagram ads, but you're not feeling overwhelmed with Canva, then start with Canva and create a whole bunch of ad images.

And that's going to move you closer to getting ads up than anything else. So start with something easy, something that you can do. Maybe for you that's copywriting, maybe for you it's video. Maybe it is just opening up the ads manager and clicking around to see what's in there. I also want you to think about where are you already in a small group setting where other people are figuring out the same thing. Having support from peers or having support from people around you makes a huge difference.

I remember when back in the day, back in my hay day when we walked barefoot over the mountains. No, I'm just joking. I remember when I started learning to be a Facebook ad manager for other people inside Rick [Moore's 00:31:36] community, there were about 10 of us who had already been in his community for a while and who had already learned the skill of Facebook ads and all we wanted to learn that the next piece of this for us was to learn how to turn our skills into a business.

And so we formed a little small group and the 10 of us were really tight for a while because we were all in the same boat trying to find clients and figuring out, when you're in a platform like Facebook every day, all day, it helps to have someone else. It helps to have community around you who are doing the same thing because things come up like the other day I tried to create a custom conversion and it just wouldn't let me submit this thing.

It just wouldn't let me submit it. Wouldn't let me submit it. And I spent about three hours going, "What is going on here? Why is this not working?" And then I spent, I don't know how long I spent on chat with support to try to get it done. And eventually I saw a post in one of the Facebook groups that I'm in saying, currently the ads manager has a glitch, custom conversions aren't working the way we used to, you need to kind of wait until the blue highlighted URL comes out up and then you click on the blue highlighted URL and then you can create the custom conversion.

Oh my goodness, it was a three hour journey because of a glitch. And had I just gone into that community in the first place I would've seen that glitch. So having a small group around you and doing the things that are easy to do, do things first. The next thing I want to talk to you about is not being afraid to taste and fail. Okay. So let's talk about this one, because it's a big thing. In my deepest heart of hearts, I never ever, ever want anybody to waste money on ads. Zuckerberg is fine, he doesn't need my money.

He doesn't need your money. We don't want to give him our money unless he's going to give us something in return. But here's the thing. All the money that I have ever, ever paid on things that didn't work out, taught me what I needed to know for the next thing to work out. Sometimes it wasn't the very next thing. Sometimes it was way down the track. Sometimes I didn't notice that things are starting to work out, but when I look back at a year before, I could definitely see the progress.

So I want you to start knowing that sometimes when you put money on Facebook ads, you are not buying a result from the ad, you are buying wisdom, you're buying experience, you're buying the information you need in order to make better business decisions. So please, if you have spent a lot of money on Facebook and Instagram ads and you haven't seen it come back to you, sit down and explore forgiveness, sit down and explore moving forward, and if it helps you, it helps me tremendously.

To just think of that money you paid, it's money you paid in exchange for wisdom. One thing I wish I learned earlier is I wish I learned not to resent the journey. When I was in the early stages of building a business I was so resentful and angry and desperate because I just wanted it to work out. And I don't think every chance I wish I didn't think that every single chance I had would be the last chance, because now I know that there's no such thing as the last chance.

Now I know that it's all made up and I get to make it up any way I want. I wish with my whole heart I had slowed down in the first three years and gave one thing my full focus until I had mastered it. So don't be afraid to taste and fail, just know that it's giving you and everyone else, it's giving you the data you need in order to succeed. And then lastly, the last thing, I don't know, do you guys have Numberjacks? My kids used to watch Numberjacks.

It's very bizarre kid's story that my kids used to love Numberjacks. The numbers are characters and there's this bad guy who steals the number and then they have to go and look for the number. And sometimes the numbers are good and sometimes the numbers are bad and it is a very weird metaphor for being scared of number. Because numbers are just numbers, they're not Numberjacks and they cannot do any harm to us.

But because we don't understand what the numbers mean and people come at us and they're like, well, what was CPM? And what was your CTR? And what was your EPL? And what was your ROAS? And we're like, "I don't know. I don't know. Stop throwing these acronyms at me, I don't know what they are." Or they'll say, "Well, sure. Yeah, this doesn't look good because you click through right only 0.9%" and you go, "Well, what does that mean?" Or they say to you, "Well, what was your EPL? Because that's how we know if you made money, or your ROAS."

And I'm just like, "Dude, just stop throwing weird things at me." Okay. So if you are scared of numbers, this is one of the biggest thing that stop people only because they don't understand what they mean. And they end up putting it in the too hard baskets. So if you're going to be successful, then we really need to understand your data. And there's a point where it becomes nice to avoid the data because you suspect that the data's going to reveal where the problem is and that means that you're going to have to fix the problem.

And if you don't know how to fix a webinar that doesn't convert, that's an uncomfortable problem to have. And in our weird brains, sometimes the weirdness of our brains think, well it's easier just to not know what the problem is than to know what the problem is and not want to fix it, not know how to fix it, right? Yes, I can see you nodding. I can see you nodding you've been there, right? So if we're going to be successful, then we really need to understand our data.

If we don't have a head for numbers, we need to get help from someone who does. Now going back to driving a car. Driving is something most of us need to know in order to function in life if we in Western society. Same goes for tech. If you want to build an online courses business, this is one of those nitty gritty skills then will stay with you throughout the duration of your business. And taking the time to learn the basics will set you up for long term success.

Then once you're moving, you have to learn how to drive straight and how to stay in the road. And Facebook ads are exactly the same. You need to learn a set of skills before you can start gaining confidence. You need to learn how to operate the machinery before you learn the rules of the road. Fear can hold us back in so many ways. But thinking back to learning to drive a car, like what so many people in the development world have to go through to learn, why are we so keen to get our licenses as soon as we're old enough.

Why aren't we scared to jump behind the wheel of this chunk of steel that is capable of mass destruction? Maybe we are a little bit scared, but the reason we are scared and still keen is because we know that the end result will be life changing. We know that once we know how to drive this thing, we can go anywhere. The freedom that a new driver feels is amazing and you'll feel the same when you conquer the tech and soon enough with the right guidance and support, it will become second nature. And you'll almost do it on autopilot. You can do this.

You've got this inside you already. You just need to learn how and you need the support of a loving community who will teach you, support you, guide you and cheer you on. And if that is you and you're ready to move from tech confusion and overwhelm to looking like that dude in the metrics doing a back flip when you open the ads manager and you are ready to start finding your ideal people online and making your first sale to them, then I want to invite you to sign up for the waitlist for A-Lister.

We are opening enrollment at the end of March, and there are some goodies for those of you who are on the waitlist. And if you want to sign up, go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. It has been a pleasure hanging out with you like it is every single week. I'd love to hear how you are conquering your fear of tech and moving your business forward. Have a lovely week everyone. Bye.

If you are ready to start building a thriving audience and fill it with people who are ready to buy your online courses or your membership, and you want a supportive community to hold your hand every step of the way, I want to invite you to join me inside A-Lister when we open enrollment again at the end of March. A-Lister is the only program that shows you how to finally find your right people online and make your first sale using Facebook and Instagram ads.

There are also some juicy bonuses for those that are on the early bird waitlist. So make sure you go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist and sign up today. 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.