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Kathi Burns  0:04  
Hi there, I'm board certified professional organizer Kathy burns. I'm really glad you're here. This podcast is designed for busy entrepreneurs just like you who want to take better control of your business and move forward with less stress and more success. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The Organized Energized podcast is produced for your enjoyment and show notes are found at ThePodcast@OrganizedandEnergized.com. Come back often and feel free to add this podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow me on Twitter at organized energy and Facebook. All links are in the show notes. Now let's get into the show. Hi, everyone, I am back and I'm with my girl pal Diann Wingert. And we're here to talk about business getting down to business, how to get business done from a psychotherapist perspective. So welcome, Diann.

Diann Wingert  1:00  
Well, don't be scared. And I will say that I am a former therapist now business mindset coach. But it really does come in handy because wherever you go, there you are. And most of us are still dealing with stuff that we learned in childhood, in our lives and in our business.

Kathi Burns  1:23  
Tell us about your story. How did you become this business mindset coach? And why did you shift over to the dark side of online coaching?

Diann Wingert  1:33  
Oh, it's so funny that you use that term because I think a lot of my former therapist colleagues really felt like I'd sold my soul to the devil when I started calling myself a coach. So I just joke about that. Now to tell you the truth, I had a previous career in medical sales. And then I had an early midlife crisis, went back to grad school at UCLA and became a clinical social worker, I did that for a long time. I loved it, I was good at it. But as I crawled up the food chain, I eventually was the clinical director of a large nonprofit agency and found myself in the harassment situation because the CEO I reported to was incompetent and unethical. I am an outspoken, smart female. So that was a little bit problematic and I decided at that point in time, I needed to work for myself, I opened a therapy practice. After about seven years, Kathi, I realized I am much more interested in talking about possibilities than problems. I think I've like done my time as a therapist, therapy is wonderful if you're dealing with abuse, trauma, loss, addiction. But if what you really need is someone to help you reach your goals, you're much better suited to a coach and that really suits the person I've become over time.

Kathi Burns  1:36  
I totally agree. Don't talk about what doesn't work. Let's talk about what can work and what are the possibilities are I'm with you on that.  Big time. Yeah, talk therapy, I've had a couple of clients whose parents have sent them to me that came out to talk therapy and just went into just organizing and that makes a big difference making moving forward right, instead of rehashing the past, I think is a good thing. So  that's a leap in a way. I mean, it makes total sense and I'm sure you were really clear about it. Talk about the first client that you got whenever you decided to make that shift out and go into actual coaching of possibilities for your clients.

Diann Wingert  3:32  
You know, I really underestimated what a big change it was to be quite frank, I thought, you know, I have all this education, all this training, all these years of experience helping people deal with problems. I just literally think I'm going to change my title, and change my pricing structure and go from face to face and a beautiful office to online and I'm just going to keep right on. I was very wrong about that because with therapy, you go one session at a time. It's usually not goal oriented. It's usually insight and process oriented. So in order to become a successful coach, I really needed to think differently about this is where the person is this is where they want to be, what are the steps and pivots and landmarks along the way that we need to reach and to be focusing on deliverables and not just insight. So I really was not prepared for that very first client, who had already worked with the previous coach. I wouldn't say it was like an epic fail or anything but what it really helped me understand. Now this is a total transformation of my professional identity and way of helping this is not just a pivot, so I actually went and invested in a lot of Coach Training and Certification after that, because helping a person one hour at a time is very different than recognizing where they want to get how long it's going to take to get there. And all the things you need to accomplish and the deliverables that you need to create that each step along the way. It's it's much more of like a curriculum, then a journey. And that was a big change for me. And it took a little bit of getting used to.

Kathi Burns  5:24  
Yeah, I can see that totally. So if you had to do it over again, would you still go through the processes that you went through through all of your career iterations? Would you have skipped one? Would you have jumped right into something else? Or how do you feel about the journey of your progression?

Diann Wingert  5:41  
It's a really good question. I don't think anyone's ever asked me that in an interview before. I have just made it a promise to myself at this stage of my life to have no regrets and to consider nothing a mistake. Everything that I have done has served me in some way. I think if I were to change anything, if you offered me a magic wand and say, based on where you are now, and what you've learned along the way, is there anything you would have skipped or done differently? I think I would have done all the same things, I would have done them for less time. There was a very important transformation inside of me that needed to take place. And it's one of the things I help my clients with now is, by the time you realize that something you're doing doesn't fit the person you are becoming, you owe it to yourself, to become complete with that thing and release it. Whether it's a relationship, a career, a business, a hobby, a friendship, a lifestyle, whatever, it is a hobby, it could be anything, but when it no longer is aligned with the person you are becoming, it's going to hold you back.  I was not so good about giving myself permission to let something go and to move on. Because frankly, I got pushback from people who told me that was selfish. Who were you to think that you deserve something different, something better, something more. Now, I fully honor that I am a person who is on a path of continuous personal evolution, and that I actually owe it to myself, my loved ones, and the people I hope to serve to honor that. But it took some getting used to and I ultimately had to empower myself with that belief. It wasn't like anyone else was gonna give me permission to to go there.

Kathi Burns  7:42  
No, you just get the naysayers but I always say letting go is a muscle. And for most of us letting go muscle is atrophied and letting letting go is scary. But the more verse and the more experienced you are letting go, the easier it is to let things fall off that no longer serve you. That's why I actually I just start on the surface level of clutter, because that's the easy thing to let go of, basically compared to other things. Letting go is something that's a hugely important thing. Why I think so too, is because it's change, we're all going to change anyhow. So why not let go and move into the change that's come into your direction? All the time against the wind?

Diann Wingert  8:25  
Kathi, it's so much easier. As a matter of fact, I started doing this once I realized, oh, it's not that you didn't know you were ready to move on. It's that you weren't giving yourself permission to let go. It was like I was waiting for other people to acknowledge that it was okay. They can't they can't do that.

Kathi Burns  8:46  
So it's okay for you, it's okay.

Diann Wingert  8:50  
They don't know it's okay for them in most cases. So I needed to understand. So now if someone were to say, so you've been married before, it didn't work out. You have a failed marriage and I say no. My previous marriage was complete and I moved on. 10 years later, I married someone else. I no longer think of divorce as a fail. I no longer think of a business that I have closed as a fail. I never think of anything that I've done and I no longer do as a fail. What I think is a fail, is when we hold on to things that are no longer in alignment and no longer serve us and we actually resent and we don't give ourselves permission to release them because we think it means something bad about us that we want to that's what I've let go of that belief.

Kathi Burns  9:41  
Amen. And Hallelujah to that. Yeah, that is the fail. I agree things change and move and change all the time and there's nothing failure. So we shift and right now I mean, look at look at the great majority of us, especially as women have shifted completely out of what we were doing into something completely new because guess what, we had the space and time to do it. If life happens, and you've got this unexpected space, or a time that you never had before, that's the time to shut off all that other stuff.

Diann Wingert  10:12  
You and I are absolutely like minded. I think it's I'm very grateful that I let go of my previous career, that I gave myself permission to leave Los Angeles that had been my home all of my life and move three years ago to a city where neither my husband or I knew anyone. Now we're about to move again. If I had not cultivated this muscle of letting go, which became the muscle of resiliency, I wouldn't be able to do this with grace and ease. Oh, it's inconvenient. I hate packing and turning off the utilities and all that as much as anybody. But it's so much easier on me because I have cultivated this letting go-ness in other areas of my life.

Kathi Burns  10:13  
To be able to let go with ease it makes you excited about what you what's to come. Right? It feels that excitement because it's no longer a dread or a fear thing. It's like, Oh, I wonder what's gonna what that's going to be like, what's the next chapter gonna look like?

Diann Wingert  11:16  
Right? Yeah, that's where I'm coming from. I'm not I'm not afraid. I'm not worried. People are like, well, it didn't work out in Portland. Aren't you worriedi t's not going to work out where you're going. I said, to be honest with you that never crossed my mind. Yeah, it did work out.

Kathi Burns  11:32  
You just realized that it when you want it. Thank goodness, you found that out instead of 20 years later, when you did have friends. and they were like, nah, I wasn't really liking it the whole entire time. But, you know, I stuck to it.

Diann Wingert  11:46  
Not for me.

Kathi Burns  11:46  
No, not at all. Okay, so what do you think is the best piece of advice that anybody's ever given you can be business or persona?

Diann Wingert  11:55  
The best piece and this actually goes really in line with everything that we're talking about, Kathi. The best piece of advice I have ever been given is to change my relationship with failure. Because even though I'm speaking in a very impassioned way about my resiliency, and my willingness to let things go, and how everything's an adventure, and I refuse to see anything as a fail, and I have no regrets. All of that is a very intentionally cultivated mindset that has taken me a number of years, the previous Diann, Diann 1.0 would stick with things much too long, would actually only attempt something that she knew she would be good at. Because if I, I thought I was so delusional, or I was just fooling myself, I just was not on to myself. Previously, in my life, I thought, well, I'm going to do things that I already know I'm good at, because that's the fast track to being successful. I mean, why not go with your gifts? Right? But and that was true up to a point. But the sort of the subtle side of it was, I was also skillfully avoiding whole entire areas of living and learning that I might have come to enjoy that would have developed different aspects of myself. I avoided them I steered real clear of them, because I wasn't going to be good at them, at least not right away.  I interpreted that in the past as meaning that I had weaknesses or limitations that it meant I was like, no good at something and that was intolerable. So I just avoided those things. Well, as you can imagine, that kept my range of developed skills and abilities pretty narrow. I have swapped that for this belief that, okay, change your relationship with failure. What does that mean? Instead of thinking if I do something, and I don't stick with it, it's not a fail. It was an experiment, it was an adventure. So instead of going headfirst into whatever my new obsession was spending a ton of money a ton of time an alienating everybody else, because it was all I talked about obsessively. Now I do six week experiments. I will sign up for six weeks of cello lessons, six weeks of fencing lessons, I'll take six weeks of improv or six weeks of whatever, instead of doing the deep dive and then burning out on it and later going, awkward. Now I consider everything I do an experiment in it's a renewable six weeks, so if I like it for six weeks, I'll sign up for another six weeks. If I don't, I'm complete with it and then I go try something else. That allowed me to not have to limit myself to only doing things that I would be good at automatically because you really aren't going to get good at anything in six weeks. But you could at least get a feel offer whether you'd like to stick with it long enough to get good at it.

Kathi Burns  15:04  
I love that six week idea. That's very cool.

Diann Wingert  15:07  
 I might have to make it into a program.

Kathi Burns  15:10  
That's like my next program is six weeks. Perfect. We're gonna Get It Gone in six weeks, kids, you have an announcement coming up?

Diann Wingert  15:18  
Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Kathi Burns  15:21  
But that's funny. I think I liked that idea, though. I'll take painting for six weeks, I'll take fencing for two, six weeks. I love that I'm gonna carry that one through. Yeah.

Diann Wingert  15:29  
It's not just it's not just clever, Kathi, there's also solid neuroscience behind it. Because you know, and I know that it takes the brain about six weeks to actually start to form the neural pathways of new habits, whether you're getting rid of one or starting a new one. So six weeks, you've given yourself a shot at something and you're not being grossly unrealistic. Either way.

Kathi Burns  15:56  
Thanks for validating that. Well, the time is four to six weeks to change your wildly ways. I'm always saying that you're not going to change your ways for what they think even four weeks, and that's even cutting it pretty close. You know, six weeks is a thing and Oh, yeah. Okay, thank you.

Diann Wingert  16:11  
Yes, love a little science. Love a  little science.

Kathi Burns  16:14  
It's just science. Okay. Tell me about the valuable free resource, you have something that you're going to offer the listeners here that they're going to grab onto quickly and benefit from?

Diann Wingert  16:26  
Absolutely. Well, if you like the sound of my voice, and what I have to say that you should absolutely come follow the driven woman podcast and listen to me over there. But the free resource I have to share right now is I just put together an updated version of my quiz called What's holding you back. There are six common behavior traits among female entrepreneurs, that there's usually one of them, that is the key culprit. And if they address that one, the others start to fall into place. So I'll give you a link to the quiz. What's holding you back. They get identified which of the six is them and then they'll get a short series of four emails that give resources, tips and strategies for how to get ahead of it, so they can start moving forward.

Kathi Burns  17:12  
That's awesome. That's completely customizable for everybody. So I'm gonna jump into that too. I think everybody needs to, because we all have something that's holding us back. So we might as well do everybody bottom of it, baby. Everybody. Yeah, everybody. And that's because we are growing, expanding. So if we were not growing and expanding, there'd be a whole nother set of things. But for us female entrepreneurs who out there rock in the world it's really good to pinpoint what the potential kind of like road bump, not roadblock, but what's the bump in the road?

Diann Wingert  17:45  
You know what I think I, you and I both like using analogies and metaphors. So I'll tell you mine, when you have one of these things holding you back, it's not like you're not going places because you are. It's more it's not like your car is like at a gas and you're broken down by the side of the road and you don't have AAA and oh, woe is me. It's more like you have a pebble in your shoe. You will still get places but it'll be more painful than it needs to be. Get the pain out. Yeah get that get that rock out of your shoe.

Kathi Burns  18:20  
I love that. Okay, that's great. We have to talk about an organizing hack. So I'm sure there's something that you use that you absolutely love, that would be your favorite app for staying organized.

Diann Wingert  18:33  
You know what I have so many. So it's really unfair to pick one. But I'm going to tell you about one that maybe not everybody already knows about. And that is an app called unroll.me. Unroll.me is a really nice hack for getting on top of your email inbox, it puts your subscriptions in to a digest, where you get one a day instead of every single thing that you subscribe to coming individually. So instead of having like 150 emails, you have one digest, you can also unsubscribe from any of those right in the app. And you can choose to put any of them that are really important and singular back in your inbox. It saves me so much time and it's free.

Kathi Burns  19:24  
Love it, love it. unroll.me We will definitely put that in the show notes below gang so you can just clickety click and make it make it part of your routine. I like that. That's awesome. Okay, so what else should we talk about? Anything that I've missed asking you that we should be discussing on this brilliant podcast? Because I love our conversations. I mean, we can sit and talk forever, but what shall we talk about?

Diann Wingert  19:49  
I'd say something that that I have definitely changed Kathi in the last year is I was always just looking at the dirt under my feet, meaning I was winging it. I'm very passionate. I'm very energetic, I have lots of ideas. And I always just felt like I could just make things up literally one day at a time. It took me a long time to realize that's not the best strategy, when you have big goals, big dreams and big plans. I mean, for example, I just released the 100th episode of my podcast, I would never, thank you, I would never have been able to do that if I hadn't start thinking, bigger picture and more organized. So even though this is probably not necessarily new to you, or maybe your listeners, I only work in to two ways now either looking at an entire year to plan out the big picture and then I look at 90 day sprints. I used to just look at like, what are we going to do today? I didn't even look at the whole week, the whole week, at a glance that was too much for me, it was just my to do list and my daily calendar, I was always running late and missing the boat. So I trained myself over time to do 90 day sprints, and to train myself to actually look at the entire year at a glance. Because the big things that the programs we want to launch the book we want to write the conferences we want to go to you 30 days ahead of time isn't enough. You want to get the best, most affordable flights, the best price for the conference, registration, all that you really do need to train your time horizon to be further in the future. And I have ADHD. So my time horizon was just like today. But I've learned that you can stretch it by having visual aids like a year calendar on the wall that you go and look at every day just to look, okay, here's where I am. And here's where I'm going. And then my plan is 90 days at a time. I'm not I did not invent this. I didn't create it. There's lots of people way smarter than me who teach this in detail. But I don't think I realized until just a couple of years ago how important and transformational it really is to look at your life and a bigger chunk of time.

Kathi Burns  22:23  
Absolutely, yeah. And and a year is definitely the minimum that you would forecast out. Really looking okay, what's the what's that year going to lead me to what's going to happen on the next year, but that's really good. A lot of people love the visual with the with the board on this side actually just has everything. It's very, very helpful for people to have that visual cognition on a daily basis to see what's up.

Diann Wingert  22:49  
And if it's a whole year, it's kind of hard to ignore, because it takes up a lot of wall space.

Kathi Burns  22:54  
Exactly. It's a giant sharpie, right on my whiteboard. Well, I think that's really good advice. For all of you women out there who are struggling or just saying,why are things not working, just use a few of the tips that we've talked about today, there's just even the basic unroll.me. I mean, whatever you're going to do just implement something. And as my very smart, savvy guest says, keep at it of for six weeks before you ditch it. Make sure that it's something that does or does not work. If it does not work, feel free to flip it out the door. But if you don't try it for six weeks, you won't really know.

Diann Wingert  23:32  
Six weeks is magic, don't over commit, and then feel embarrassed because you spent too much money too much time and you ignored the rest of your life. Commit for six weeks and then reassess. It's a game changer.

Kathi Burns  23:47  
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been eye opening as usual.  I really appreciate you being on the show. Everybody check out Diann's podcast as well. It is called...

Diann Wingert  23:59  
The driven woman and you will soon be a guest so they listen to you over there.

Kathi Burns  24:04  
That driven woman because I am driven as we are all of us listening. You wouldn't be listening to this if you weren't also driven love and so check out that podcast as well. Anyhow, signing off for now. Love you all. Thank you, Diann. Love you too. We will see you next week.

Diann Wingert  24:22  
Bye for now.

Kathi Burns  24:23  
Bye for now.

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you want to hear more, feel free to subscribe on the platform of your choice. Also, if you feel so inclined, I would truly appreciate a good rating from you to me have a stellar day.