From People Pleaser to Publisher

Transcript

Kim, it's so good to be here. I'm just going to dump right into something. And I know you're going to ask me a bunch of questions, but when you mentioned about the shift, knowing about the shift, something that came to mind. I'm going to share with you in a minute what it really is. But it was all about money, and it was changing my focus on money as well as changing my, I don't know, my energy related to money. And I'm going to share with your listeners how I went from charging one thousand dollars to fifteen thousand dollars in just a short six weeks. So stay tuned for that. Okay.

You're welcome. The teaser

Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, for sure, because I like to call myself the most unlikely publisher. I was never a reader, and I was never a writer. The only time I ever read was when I had to. Like, there was a, like, if I started a new job and they wanted me to read the manual or if I had to read a contract or something, that was the only time I ever read. Just not interested in it. You know, I'm like a movie watcher. I love watching movies. I love tv.

And so the book world is something that was introduced to me back in 2014 when I ended up hiring a life coach to help me with that first shift. Like, that first real shift in my life was when I hired a life coach. And as you mentioned a little bit earlier, is that in 2015, I broke through one fear every single day for a year. So again, another pivotal time in my life that created tremendous shift. I had no idea what was going to happen when I started that year and what it was going to be like by the end of the year. But, boy, am I glad I went through those fears that I broke through, because I had a lot of fears. And then the shift into book publishing, was it on accident or not? I like to say it was kind of on accident because during 2015, when I was breaking through those fears every day, I was introduced to the concept of writing a chapter in a collaboration book. My mentor, a gentleman who ended up becoming my mentor, Greg Reed, he was putting together a collaboration book, and he invited me to be in it.

It's called footsteps of the fearless. I was breaking through a fear every day that year. And so he said, it makes total sense for you to be in this book. So I went ahead and I paid to be in that book, and I was terrified to put my words on paper again, not a reader or writer. But that was the catalyst, right? There's things in life that we say yes to that oftentimes are the catalyst to change. That can be scary at the beginning, but then it becomes part of us. And that was what happened through that process. I was in that first book.

I ended up writing my own book the next year called the year of fears, because Greg told me, you need to write a book about your year affairs. And it took me a while to write it, but I wrote it, published it, and after that, I said to myself, I was in a book. I wrote a book. Like, what's my next natural state of progression? Because as I'm shifting myself in my own life, it's like a constant shift. And I'm loving. It's like the tectonic plates, you know, on the earthquakes. Like, I'm constantly, you know, having those earthquakes. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh, yes. Well, yeah. So I worked with a life coach. I had been in the corporate world for 36 years, and I had 49 jobs. My last job, I was working for a judge in the court of appeals. And I was driving to work that day. There was something that snapped in me and said, why am I here? Why am I on this planet? All I do is push papers around for a judge. This is so ridiculous.

I hate my life. I hate everything about this. Why is this planet here? And I just started asking the why, why, why, why? Questions, you know, like you ask when you're four years old. And then when I got to work that day, my answer came to me, and it was through the form of a life coach. This woman posted in a Facebook group, I'm a life coach. I took some time off. I'm getting back into it, and I'm looking for five women who want to change their lives. I didn't know what a life coach was, but I knew I wanted to change my life.

So I ended up working with her. And that was for five months in 2014 and until, like, the end of November, when I quit my job working for that judge. And then I became an entrepreneur. I'm like, I'm going to become a millionaire next year. Because those are the promises I had heard. Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh, my gosh, how many of us think that? But, you know, that hasn't happened yet, I say yet, you know, I'm working on the millions. But I ended up December of 2014.

I'm by myself, no longer have my life coach, and I'm not growing as fast, you know, because I noticed how fast things were shifting and changing working with her so January 1 of 2015, I woke up and I said to myself, I have so many fears. I got a breakthrough of fear every day this year. I'm just going to do it. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to break through all these fears. And so how it looked is, every morning when I woke up, the first thing I would do before I got out of bed is ask myself a simple question. And that was what scares me every day, 365 days in a row. Then my commitment was that I would wait until the answer, and then I would have to break through that fear that day, no matter what it was. And my thing was, I said, no matter what it was, no matter what it is, no matter where it is, and no matter how much it cost.

Like, I was going to have to figure all that out that day. So. And none of it was bungee jumping or jumping out of planes or eating bugs. It wasn't, like, fear factor. My fears were so deep rooted in one overarching fear, and that's the fear of judgment. I didn't discover that until about three months into it, but some of the fears were, and some of these fears are going to sound ridiculous to some of you listening right now, but these were my fears. Talking to a stranger. I'm going to go to Starbucks today, and I'm going to start a conversation with a stranger.

I'm going to go to a restaurant, and I'm going to say one in my party. I'm going to go to a movie theater by myself. I'm going to go shopping, you know, clothes shopping by myself. These were fears of mine. I had such tremendous fear of what people were going to be thinking about me, that they. That controlled my life. So that was breakout. Yeah, exactly.

That was my thought, and that was what I really thought. And then as I sat down and I was so nervous, I'm sitting at this seat all by myself, and I looked around and nobody was looking at me at all. And I was like, oh, my God, that fear over nothing. That fear over nothing. And the thing about it is, there's a saying, fear is false evidence appearing real. And I came up with my own acronym for that, and that's faith erases anxious reactions, because what I realized is that there's nothing false about my fears. They don't appear real. They are as real as real can be to me.

So that false evidence appearing real is a bunch of B's. But faith erases anxious reactions, because fear is nothing more than an anxiety. That's going on, that's a reaction of something. And then when our faith is strong, our fear is weak. So what this means is that when our fear is strong, our faith is weak. So. Exactly. Yeah.

You know, I'm going to share, like, one of the things I. One of the greatest things I learned during that year, I learned a lot of amazing things, but this one was the topper. That is that the fear of judgment is not really as much the fear of what they think of us. It's what we think of ourselves. And so one thing I realized is that when I was busy worrying about being judged, the reality is that I was judging myself. And not only that, the more fear I have over judgment of others of what they think means that I'm also judging others. And that was the big one for me because I was extremely judgmental. I grew up in a volatile, abusive, alcoholic household, and my sister is one of the most judgmental people I know.

And so I learned from her, you know, and I carried that around with me. And I remember I attended this one event, and I walked in the door, and I looked over, like, the other side of the room, and I saw this woman standing over there, and she was dressed impeccably. She looked amazing. There were people standing around talking to her. And I just had this strong sense, like, I need to walk over there to her and tell her how beautiful she is. That was my moment that I realized I was no longer judgmental, because in the past, I would have thought, who does she think she is? Like, why does she have to dress? That? I would just judge. I was one of those water cooler people. Exactly.

I was a mean girl. And it's awful, some of the things that I've said and done in my past that I'm appalled that I was ever that way, you know, admitting it out loud, but, you know, I'm not that person anymore. That person? Yep. Yeah. I specifically came to mind, as you were saying that I remember this moment in high school, and there were. I had a lot of friends that were guys. I was in the band. I played flute in the band and everything, and all of my friends were guys.

I had one girlfriend and all guy friends, and we were all standing outside, and they're all joking and joking and joking. And then I remember my feeling of, like, I'm going to joke about my own self before they can because they would make fun of me all the time. And so I was like, I'm going to be better at making fun of myself than they are, so they won't get that satisfaction. And I became really good about just dissing myself and saying all these negative things about myself. I got really good at that, and I kept doing that for decades. Decades, yeah. Yeah.

It.

That's awesome. I love that. And congratulations on. On listening, because that's one of the hardest things for me to do, was to start listening, because as a people pleaser, I spent my whole life wanting to please others. And if they wanted it, then I would make sure that I would make it happen. What did I do? I created a lot of stress for myself. And it's been a journey. I just say that it's been a huge journey since I decided to break through those fears every day for a year.

I was age 51, and that's when my life really started. Is that 51?

It.

Yeah. Decision is a great. I actually have an acronym for that that I'm going to share with you for decide, decide. And so the D and decide is to determine. Determine what you want to do, where you want to go, who you want to be, determine all of that. And then the next one is to educate yourself. So the e is to educate yourself on what you need to do in order to effect that change. Like, in order to be what you want to do, whatever that is, you have to educate yourself to know what are the steps I need to take in order to get there.

And then the next is to collaborate. You collaborate with others who can help you succeed. Just like you mentioned in Zig Zidler, you can get everything you want in your life if you help enough other people get what they want. This is all about collaboration. The next is to imagine. Imagine yourself achieving that success that you desire. Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? Imagine yourself there in that moment. And the next one is to D.

Devote yourself to it. Devote yourself to that mission. Get yourself focused so that you can achieve those results that you want to achieve. And then the last one, the e, is to empower yourself with the tools that you need in order to effect that change. And, you know, making a decision is awesome, but if you're not taking the action, nothing is going to happen. One thing I like to say is you can hope, dream, pray for desire, manifest anything you want in life. But if it's staring you in the face and you don't take action, nothing is going to happen.

It.

I love what you're doing there, and I'm going to share another idea as well, because I definitely am deadline driven the same as you there. Somebody years ago said something to me. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And I'm going to give this gift to you guys. Hopefully it helps somebody because it certainly did help me. First of all, we all have thousands of ideas every day. I can't remember the number, and they keep changing the numbers. It's like 30,000 ideas a day, something like that.

And we can't, it's impossible for us to implement them all. And so you know how you have an idea and you're like, oh, my God, this is an awesome idea. I'm so excited about it. I'm going to do it. And then you write it down, you're like, okay, I'm going to get to that right away. And then the next day comes, and the next day comes, and then you start maybe like, I had that idea and I want to do, and it's sitting on your brain. It's still sitting there because you're really inspired by it. So what I started doing is I created what I call an idea box.

And so I'll just jot my idea down and I really just a bullet point. I don't need to write everything down because it's top of mind. So I'll write that idea down and I'll put it in the box, and that gets it off of my brain. And at least it's sitting there for me for a later time. And then what I'll do is when I start to kind of slow down on things, I'll pull out my idea box and I'll look through the ideas and see which of these ideas is an idea that I can implement now. Instead of me worrying about it or thinking about it, what can I implement now? Oftentimes, here's what happens. I'm like, what was I thinking? That's most of the time, my ideas. And so I started realizing that I don't have to implement everything right today.

But here was the brilliant thing somebody said to me one day. She said, linda, you know, you don't have to keep all your ideas. You can gift them to other people. If you have a really good idea, you can give it away to somebody else. Here's the thing, though. The caveat is that once you gift it, you cannot be, you cannot worry about the end result. If they never do anything with it. You have to be okay with that.

And so I implemented that immediately. And there was this woman that was working on something. She was talking about it. I have an idea for you. She loved it. She took off with it. She made millions of dollars with that idea that I had, I was never going to do anything with it. Probably my idea wasn't for me, it was for her.

And so that was a great gift for me to do that. Isn't that fun? Yeah. I can tell a lot of my ideas just by looking at my Godaddy domain names, because almost every time I have an idea, let me go see if it's available on Godaddy, and I buy the domain name. You know, I have, like, 120. I have one that I bought about five years ago, and I keep renewing it because I know I'm going to do. It keeps popping up in my head. I know I'm going to do something with it when I have the right people in my circle and the right tools in order to do it. Yeah.

How fun would it be to do, like, maybe a monthly, um, live show where it's just about the ideas, you know, people just come and bring your ideas, you know, if you're not worried about sharing them. I'm not worried about sharing. There is abundance. You know, I've got plenty of ideas. So if somebody steals one of my ideas, I don't care. I don't. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

That's when I started publishing my own. So I said my next natural state of progression is to follow in my mentor's footsteps. He was doing collaboration books. I'm going to do a collaboration book. And so I had met some really cool people through this journey, and I reached out to them, you know, the founder of Ugg Boots, the inventor of the credit card magnetic strip, and the creator of the Make a Wish foundation. I met them all during this journey, and I reached out and I said, I'm thinking of putting together a book called momentum. Will you join me? And all three of them said yes. And what was interesting in that, Kim, is that I could have reached out to other people to be in the book, but I reached out to these three people that I knew that if they said yes, I had to do it.

They were holding me accountable, right? Because without them knowing it, they were holding me accountable. And so they all said yes. And I was like, okay, let's do it. So ended up putting together that book. I had so much fun, and I lost a lot of money because I paid a ghostwriter to write the entire book. And so he made more money than I did. But I learned so many things, and it's like, what did I learn? What did I learn? What did I learn? And I said, I'm going to do it again. So I did it with two more books.

Those two books hit number one international bestseller status in under 3 hours. And I looked at that and I said, oh, my God, this is awesome. I'm having a blast doing this. I love what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. I'm damn good at it. I can make money at it. This is my icky guy.

And I was like, I'm a book publisher. And you know, what I did is at that time, I had been running a women's mastermind called GSD mastermind for six years. I called all of our members, and I said, this Monday is our last session. I am now a book publisher. And I literally severed it. I reimbursed them any money I owed them, but I severed that tie. And this was a very important piece for me, because if I didn't sever that tie, I would have been holding onto that anchor. That would have been keeping me back from progressing forward.

The day I decided to sever that, and I'm a book publisher. Talk about focus. Everything came clear, as clear could be. Prior to that, I had been an entrepreneur for six and a half years. In six and a half years, I didn't make more than $30,000 in one year. And actually, my first year, I looked the other day, it was $2,000. That's how much money I made as an entrepreneur my first year, the year that I was supposed to become a millionaire. So, wait.

Yeah, there was no focus. There's a saying of focus is follow one course until successful. I was not following one course, and I was all over the place. But I had to do that in order to learn all the things that I learned along the journey and that I could say, I'm owning my success or I'm owning my failures. You know, I'm not a failure, but I had a lot of failures along the way that taught me a lot of lessons. And so I share with you this, because what happened that day that I made that, I severed those ties from my past, and I started moving forward. The next year, I made 120,000. So I four x'd my previous six years, and then the next year, 180,000.

My energy was different. Right. Yeah. The power of focus. Do you want me to share with you how I raised my prices from 1000 to 15,000? Okay. Because now is a great time to talk about that, because what happened was I was not accustomed to making sales. You know, I was in the corporate world. I never had to make a sale in my life.

And so I didn't know what that was like, becoming an entrepreneur. Washington, that was the hardest part, was asking for money, like, or making the offer or asking for the sale or whatever, always be closing, blah, blah. All these different sayings that we hear. And no matter what anybody said to me, my energy was wrong. I needed to learn how to raise my energy related to money, related to talking about money. So I had this epiphany one day. I was like, I'm not selling anything. Like, nothing is selling at all.

And this is, as a book publisher, nothing is selling at all. So I'm not going to drop my prices, because what's the first thing a lot of people do when they're not making sales? They discount. They drop their prices. I said, I'm going to do the opposite. I'm going to raise my prices until somebody buys. And what that did is that created a whole different energy related to money for me. My energy and vibration was raising. I started at, I think it was 1500, and then I went from 1500 to 2000.

And so as I would get on calls with people, if they didn't buy, the next person was going to be charged more. And so I went to 25 00, 50 00, 70 00, 510,000, 12,000, 515,004 people bought it. Yes. Right. Yeah. I love the saying. As you said, when people pay, they pay attention. And I've heard, like, when people pay more, they pay more attention.

Like, you got to pay more to pay more attention. Tony Robbins charges like a million dollars for coaching with him. And, you know, you better damn well expect those people to pay attention to them.

Yeah, definitely. I know a lot of times people will say, how much should I charge for this or that? And I always ask them, how much do you want to charge? Like, what's your feeling? Because if you're not feeling it, people recognize it. And that was one thing that I had to really come to grips with, is that the reason people weren't buying is because I didn't believe in the value of it myself. Like, I know of the value, but I didn't believe it. You know, that's the thing. Like, I know the value, but I didn't believe it. And, yeah.

Big time. Oh, my gosh. I was kind of chuckling as you were saying that because, like, thinking of all the limiting beliefs I've, you know, worked through and the ones I still have to come, you know, it's been a journey, that's for sure. You know, one thing I do want to do, want to share, make sure that this is shared is because, you know, breaking through a fear every day for a year, I learned a lot that year. I learned a lot about fear. And, you know, as I stated, like, my number one overarching fear was the fear of judgment. You know, people is like, they have the fear of success. It's not really the fear of success, it's the fear of judgment.

Because what will they think of me when I'm successful? Will I lose my family? Like, all these things, the fear of failure. What will they think of me when I fail? Right? That there's a saying that more people are scared of speaking on stage than they are of dying, and that's not true. The truth is that more people are scared of the judgment that they might receive while they're speaking on stage than they are of dying. And so it really goes back to that fear of judgment. So one thing I learned is that every time I broke through those fears, about 99.9% of them, the result on the other side of the fear was a good thing. I either learned something about myself, I met somebody I wouldn't have met. I was proud of myself. A door was open that I didn't even know was closed, and the results were amazing 99.9% of the time.

So if you think about it, when you break through fear, if the results are going to be amazing, why are you depriving yourself of that amazingness? So I wrote a book recently. It's called do it because you're scared. Do it because you're scared. You're like, oh, this is fear. I must do this because I'm scared. Because you don't know what's going to happen on the other side. Everything I'm doing today, every single thing I'm doing today, with the exception of my husband, because I've been married for 36 years, is a result of me breaking through those fears every day for a year. You don't have to break through them every day, just break through them as they come.

It's it. It's it.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting. The one thing I do like to say about myself is, like, I didn't know I was in the darkness until I was in the light. I grew up in a dark family, and I carried that darkness around with me until 51. And so once I was introduced to this world of positivity, of real, honest positivity, I used to think people who were positive, that were smiling and happy all the time were just lying because I didn't know that that was possible. So once I got introduced to this, it's like, you know, there you have a dark room and you have a pin light, and then there's just that little itty bit of light, but you know that there's light out there and you don't know how to get to it. And that's where I was on that journey of trying to find out how can I be in that light more often, you know? And then now it's shifted. You know, my complete transformation is going from a person who is in the dark all the time to a person who's in the light the vast majority of the time.

And it's been a shift, a huge shift that I had to make, but I had to make that first thing. What, that decision, like you mentioned, I had to make the decision to do it, and then I had to take the action behind the decision in order to effect that change for myself. And it's been a. I'm still journeying, I'm still growing, I'm still learning, and. And I will never stop because that's my happy place, you know, when I'm learning something new, like, I am energized, like, totally on fire when I'm learning something new, you know? And it's so exciting. I just. I have no idea where my next three years stand. You know, action takers publishing.

As of today's date that we're doing this recording, it's, you know, not even three years old yet. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the next three years hold, because now we're working with celebrities and working on getting their books published, and, like, I don't know, like, who is going to be. Who are we going to be publishing next? And last thing I wanted to share, because I did talk about the raising of the prices. That's not how much it costs to be in one of our collaboration books. Those are for. That's for our solo books, as, again, as the recording of this session today, because that can change. That can change and get higher. But this whole journey, Kim, it's been amazing.

I'm so glad that I said yes to that first life coach. I didn't know who she was. I said yes to something, and I had no idea what was going to come from it. And I'm so grateful to her, grateful to myself for saying yes to myself. Yeah. Mm hmm. Exactly. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. Fantastic. I'm on all the socials. Linda Sunshine west. It's Lynda, and I just joined a new app that, you know, I don't know when this is coming out, but. So it might be old by now, but it's called chatter. Have you heard of that one? Kim? Kim and I met on clubhouse and.

No, actually, do we meet. We met on clubhouse. Yeah. And chatter is kind of like a clubhouse, but better. So it's a. Anyway, I'm on all the socials as Linda Sunshine west and action takers publishing. That's our website. You can find us over there.

We've got a lot of different books, you know, different collaboration books that we're working on, looking for authors for. We'll always be doing those. I love it. It's. That's my. I just, like, so happy that I found this, you know, this is definitely me.

Yes, it is. Thank you so much. Nothing happens with that action.

From People Pleaser to Publisher

Lynda Sunshine West, Action Takers Publishing @actiontakerspublishing

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