072 Our One Wish For You in 2021 with The Hello Seven Coaches

Rachel: Welcome to the Hello Seven Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Rodgers, wife, mother of four children, a lover of Beyoncé, coffee drinker, and afro-wearer, and I just happen to be the CEO of a seven-figure business. I am on a mission to help every woman I meet become a millionaire. If you want to make more money, you are in the right place. Let's get it going.

Natalie: Hello, hello everyone. This is not Rachel Rodgers. This is Natalie Miller. I am a coach and director of programs at Hello Seven, and I am here with René Washington. Hi René.

René: Hello.

Natalie: René is a community coach at Hello Seven. And La Tondra Murray. Hi La Tondra.

La Tondra: Hello, hello.

Natalie: La Tondra is a resident coach with us here at Hello Seven. As you maybe have discovered if you are a regular listener of the podcast, every once in a while, the coaches come in and we take over this show because we have got something that we want to share with you dear listeners out there. Those of you who are interested in growing a business or maybe starting a business or thinking about making more money or being more of a badass. All of the things that we do over here at Hello Seven. So we were talking about ending 2020 and beginning 2021. We are ready for this. Am I right ladies?

La Tondra: So ready.

René: So ready.

La Tondra: Beyond ready.

René: Uber ready.

Natalie: Beyond. Yes. If 2020 has taught us anything, it has taught us that we really truly never know what is going to happen. Sometimes I'm just out running errands and I look around and I see socially distanced lines outside the grocery and everyone’s wearing masks. I think to myself if you took a picture of this and time traveled back and showed me a year ago, “Hey, this is what your everyday life is going to look like in a year.” I wouldn’t have believed it.

La Tondra: Right?

René: Oh my gosh, no.

La Tondra: Same, same.

Natalie: It’s funny. As we get to the end of a year and the turn of a year especially into a new one, so many people are interested in resolutions and planning and thinking about what do we want in the new year? What do we want it to look like? What do we want it to be? It’s such an interesting time to turn the page. Because I think everybody is like, “Well, we know what we don’t want.” We know what we’d like to move away from, but we also are maybe more aware than ever before of an essential but easily forgettable truth of life here on Earth. Which is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’re no in control of the bigger picture.

So to round out the year, the Hello Seven coaches, we thought what would we like to advise? What would we like to suggest to our dear clients and listeners and friends? What would be what we want them to have in 2021? What we came up with, listeners, is curiosity. We would love for you to be rich in curiosity in 2021. We’re excited to tell you why. So La Tondra, I'm curious. For you, what is your personal relationship with curiosity?

La Tondra: Oh, this is such a juicy question. So for me, curiosity it fuels me, but then it also frustrates me. Because I don’t like the unknown. I mean, let’s keep it real. Ambiguity is not really something that I tolerate in the best way, but it always opens up growth, insight, inspiration, encouragement, all of the things. It’s always a catalyst for me. I have to admit. I've been known to be resistant.

Natalie: Resistant to curiosity. Okay. Super interesting. How about you René?

René: So for me, yes. There is ambiguity in it for me also, but for me it’s more around what I'm curious about. So I love to know things and I'm interested in a lot of things. That can be a frustrating point for me because I want to know all the things and there's no time. On the other hand, as I have aged, you know I am 61. So now I don’t know if compartmentalize is the right word, but there are some things I just really don’t have to know about. I think that has come with that’s just not going to be worth my time. So no. I really don’t need to know. So I'm good about doing that, but that still leaves a whole lot of things I am curious about. And where is the time?

Natalie: You know what I love in your answers? So right before we started, I told you both. I was like hold on, hold on. I need to look at something. What I looked at – this was kind of an old habit of being an English major in graduate school. I needed to look at the etymology of the word curiosity. I’m like where does that word come from anyways?

The oldest definition of curiosity is that curiosity is related to being very attentive to details. It’s interesting because obviously the idea of curiosity has expanded, I think, and now sort of is maybe more associated with inquisitiveness, or like La Tondra was gesturing towards, like the unknown. What I don’t know about. What is new to me.

Then as René was answering, I heard a harkening back to that more maybe initial definition of curiosity, which is that it is also about learning. It’s about knowing. It’s about going into the details rather than zipping past them. I know that for me, curiosity is just so motivating. It helps me to feel more expansive in relation to the world. I think as I'm holding your answers and sort of my experience all together, I'm wondering like where does curiosity help us the most?

La Tondra: I think curiosity takes us into places that we otherwise wouldn’t explore. I think it opens doors, very necessary doors, that challenge us and allow us to synthesize what we know and where we come from, but also to think about what’s possible. That is, for me, the really motivational part of curiosity.

René: Absolutely, yes. What is possible. You know, we live in so many paradigms that when you examine them from a who said or is that really true perspective that that just opens up. To live expansively is to be curious, is to continue to explore and grow, right.

If you shut that valve off, you know the coaching term for that. Follow your nudge. Follow the nudge. If you are getting nudges or you are interested in something and you want to know more about it, but you tell yourself oh well I’ll get back to that. Or it’s probably really not that important, or there's no time for that. Whatever the thing it is that you say that kind of suppresses that nudging then you are suppressing the possibility of your life.

Natalie: There's something too about connecting to energy that I was just thinking about when you were talking René. That when you get that nudge, it’s kind of a pull in a direction. It makes me think about, have you two read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert? 

René: Yes. Yes. I love that book. Yeah.

Natalie: I love that book. So she tells a story in that book about how she’s—So for those of you who aren’t familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love, which I think still is like one of the most printed books of all time like on planet Earth. After Eat, Pray, Love of course the pressure for the next book is immense because it was such a huge book and such a huge best seller. She talks about how she’s trying to write this next book, and all she wants to do is plant a garden. Like she has this one idea and she’s kind of working on it, but actually all she really wants to do is have a garden in front of her new house.

So she talks about how when she follows that nudge and when she begins to go out and buy plants and learn about them, right. When she’s curious. So curious meaning expanding and exploring. Like a new direction, a new area. Also curious in like attending to the details. Like really going not just wide, but also deep. What happened is she started to get really interested in the history of kind of plant importation. Then that actually becomes key to the premise for her next novel. Was it The Signature of Things?

René: I think, yeah. The Signature of All Things, I think.

Natalie: The Signature of All Things. So basically what she sort of says is like by following the nudge, by letting herself be curious about something that has seemingly nothing to do with writing a best-selling book, she actually happens upon a super juicy interesting premise for dot, dot, dot a best-selling book. I love that story of how when we trust curiosity and we kind of let it bubble up, I think that’s the way she describes it. We let it bubble up and we kind of follow the effervescent and we follow the direction of it, it does actually take us to new places and new understanding.

La Tondra: I love that Natalie. I think that’s such a powerful reflection of why it’s important to think about curiosity and the role it can play within our lives. So I spoke earlier about this idea of resistance at times around curiosity. I think resistance is often a cue to places where we are making something meaningful for ourselves. We’re either invested in the outcome or we’re rushing to get to the outcome. We’re rushing to reach the destination and doing so at the expense of the journey. Doing so at the expense of the process.

So for me, personally, resistance has really been a sign that I do need to lean in and look at the details. I do need to be more present. I do need to slow down and to be receptive to what’s coming to me versus what I want to force to happen or what I want to white knuckle it and reach.

René: My mom, we would be riding around, and she’d see a road. She’d say, “Hmm, I wonder what’s down that road?” I’d say we don’t know what's down that road. So let’s just keep going the way we know. She’d say, “No, let’s just turn down there and see.” You just made me think about that La Tondra because that, to me, is a metaphor for curiosity. What could possibly be down this road, and why don’t we check it out?

We would go down the road and it would be sometimes nothing and then sometimes it’d be something like wow. Who knew this was back here? Who knew these beautiful trees, this lake, or whatever was back there? These homes. So yeah. Those undiscovered roads that we decide to not explore when we actually can.

I've been studying a little bit about neuroscience. One of the myths that we believe is that our brains just continue to lose brain cells. That we’re just continuously losing brain cells and our brains just eventually kind of pickle. That’s what we kind of think about our brains, which is not true. Our brain cells continuously regenerate. Particularly it connects to how healthy we are and all that. They just had a show on an episode on 60 Minutes this past weekend about this pot of people they're studying that are over the age of 90.

La Tondra: Yes, I saw that.

René: Did you see that?

La Tondra: Yes, I did.

René: It is amazing. I'm so excited about that. I kind of had this thing in my mind. You know, well maybe I’ll live to be healthy into my 70s. I'm like no. They were talking to a man. I think he was 104 or 114. One or the other.

La Tondra: Yes.

René: So yes. It just speaks to – Some of them were highly engaged in life. Highly still curious about life. So curiosity, to me, is life sustaining.

Natalie: I love that. I also love, I just have to say, I love that the daughter of the mama who is like, “I wonder what’s down that road,” decades later writes a book called Take the Trip.

René: Yeah.

La Tondra: Exactly. Exactly.

René: She won me over to exploring those unknown roads. So.

Natalie: Excellent. Take the trip. Yes, I love that. What I love that we’re all sort of pointing to is presence, being present. That’s what curiosity is. Curiosity is like what's in there? What's down that way? What's happening right now? This is a super interesting – we can link this article probably in the show notes, but I was reading a Harvard Business Review article about curiosity. One of the benefits of encouraging curiosity in your business or in your organization is that you're much less likely to succumb to confirmation bias, right?

So that if I'm adopting a curious stance and I'm present to the details and I'm wondering, I'm asking questions like why? How? What happens if? When I'm asking those kinds of questions, I'm not then looking for a reason to keep believing what I have believed. So how could this be applicable?

Like let’s think of it this way. Let’s say you want to raise your prices, and you have this fear that if you raise your prices people will turn you down. People will reject you, right. If you come to price raising with curiosity, you raise your prices and people don’t buy what you're selling. You ask yourself why? What's happening here? Of course as we know as business coaches, there are many, many, many, many variables to look at when we’re looking at a situation like that.

If I come believing well probably, I'm going to get rejected when I raise my price, but I’ll try it anyway. Then I raise my prices and people don’t buy, I'm like well. See? Told you. That’s what I knew was gonna happen. I lose out on an opportunity to learn and grow.

René: And you know, Natalie, even from that bigger vision perspective. So this is We Should All Be Millionaires, right. So many of us come to that with all the reasons why well, that may be true for that person, but that’s not really true for me. That’s not my history, my background, my experience.  I have not seen anybody that I know in the history of my life become a millionaire.

So the curiosity question to me would be well why can't that be true for me? Why can't that be true? To be able to really start? Because like you said, if I start moving in that direction and I suffer a setback. Oop see. I knew it. Millionaire status is not for me. Not for people like me. Is that really true though?

La Tondra: Yeah. I think there's a really seriously practical edge to all of this as well when we think about curiosity. So René to go back to your story about the road and your mother saying, “Oh, what's down this road,” right? I think that in many cases when curiosity or opportunities to be curious present themselves, we’re the person in the seat saying we don’t know what's down that road. Ain’t nobody trying to go down that road. What if this? What if that? What if we run out of gas? What if we get a flat tire? What if we run into somebody we didn’t intend to encounter? Our minds can manufacture all of the things that could go wrong.

To the pricing example, Natalie. I think it’s a very similar thing. So when all of the questions pop up, that’s an invitation to embrace curiosity. That’s an invitation to press forward in spite of the resistance to see what not only is down the road, but to also trust yourself and know if the road is a dead end, you’ll figure out how to turn around and come on out. If you try something with your pricing and it doesn’t resonate with your target audience, you’ll figure out how you can tweak it or what else you can try.

There is room in life and space beyond trying something. It’s not as black and white as go or stop. There's all sorts of nuance in between in the middle. So embracing that is an opportunity and knowing that nothing is final, nothing is permanent, nothing is forever. You're more resilient than you perhaps think you are. Trying is simply getting information. Curiosity simply leads to data.

René: Yep. Because what if you do run out of gas? What if you do run out of gas? Then you have information about yourself, right? Maybe this way that I'm working doesn’t get the best results for me. What can I tweak? What boundaries can I implement so that I don’t run out of gas?

Because really what is running out of gas? It’s not being aware, like Natalie mentioned earlier. It’s not being self-aware. You're not paying attention to that odometer. What is it? You're not paying attention to the odometer even when you run out of gas, right? Or maybe you see it, but you think I’ll just keep pushing on. I'm talking like this because I actually have ran out of gas a couple of times. Because I thought I can make it. I can make it.

La Tondra: Same. Yep.

Natalie: Yeah. Well, I mean what is interesting… Oh my gosh. I have like so many. First La Tondra, I love that you kind of pointed to that example of what happens when we step out of curiosity. Well, we step out of the present moment, and we go into all of the future worst-case scenarios that could happen. Right?

La Tondra: That’s right.

Natalie: So I'm not here anymore. I'm telling you oh, you know what's at the end of that road? It’s a haunted house with like a murderer in it. Wait, hold on. Actually, that’s not right in front of us yet. Right? So there's that piece, first of all, that’s it’s about being present. But then there's also this piece René that I think you're pointing to also is that when I'm curious and I come up against an obstacle or I come up against a failure, I get to be curious about that to. So it’s not like, “Oop and that’s the end of the line for me. I'm done. I'm done and dead, and it’s over.” Right?

Like we were getting ready to press record on this episode and talking about curiosity, and René said, “Let’s kill some cats!” That’s what the idiom is. Curiosity.

René: Don’t come for us cat people. Don’t come for us cat people.

Natalie: Yes, we didn’t mean it. But you know like that’s the idiom. Curiosity killed the cat. Like don’t get to curious. What we’re saying is that no, actually. Curiosity gets you to be up against that obstacle, and then say how did I get here? What do I want to do next? It lets us be there in that very present expansive yet grounded in the actual details place. That’s such an empowered place to be.

La Tondra you were saying that for people who are not into the idea of curiosity in all of it’s alure and energetic woo-ness. There's another way of thinking about it.

La Tondra: Yes. So it’s funny. So I describe myself as a squishy engineer. So very logically trained in terms of my schooling and that kind of thing, but absolutely emotive and connected as a coach and as a human as I've moved through the world. Yet still I think there’re times where people can struggle with this idea of curiosity and the magic of giving yourself over to curiosity. It can see mystical and ethereal and something that you can't quite grasp.

So one of the most interesting ways in my experience to invite yourself to embrace curiosity is to frame things as experiments. To add an empirical lens to the thing that you're doing in the world. So many of us remember experiments from school. You’ve got the beakers and you're pouring the solution and you're going to see what happens. You formulate a hypothesis. You say well, here’s what I think is going to happen. This is an empirical question. Either it will happen, or it won't. What will I learn from it? What will I change? What observations will I note?

Approaching things with a lens of experimentation still invites you into curiosity, but it frames it into a place where often you can release some of the personalization. You can let go of some of the judgment because after all this is an experiment. This isn’t an indictment of who I am as an individual or who you are as an individual. This is simply an experiment. We've got a set of conditions. We've got something that we believe will be true, but we’re going to follow through. We’re going to honor the process. We’re going to see it from step one to two to three. At the end, we’ll see where things stand.

So I just think that’s a novel way of entrenching yourself in curiosity but doing so in a way that releases the personalization, releases the preoccupation with the outcome, and really can hold you accountable to see things through.

René: Yeah. That goes throughout life. Taking that objective lens, there's really no cutoff for that. It really is the choice that you make to continue to engage in lifelong curiosity. As we get older, as we begin to experience and feel how time can impact us in different ways. We can still choose to be highly curious, highly engaged. You can google so many instances of people who over the age of 50, over the age of 60, over the age of 70. I just saw Sophia Loren on TV, and she’s in a new movie at 86.

La Tondra: Yes.

René: 86. Cicely Tyson is still acting at age 90. There are so many examples of people who have started businesses over the age of 50/60. We don’t have to check out of curiosity. We don’t have to check out of what if? I wonder what? I wonder if? We can stay in wonderment until we decide not to be.

Natalie: It’s so meaningful for our individual lives, and then it is also for the world that we’re creating together, right. Because what comes out of curiosity is innovation. Basically when we’re curious, when we say, “Why is this the way that it is?” It’s something actually that I highly recommend. If you invite someone new onto a team that you have, like tell them, “Hey, I'm relying on your new eyes and ears to ask why do we do it that way?” Right?

This is another thing in that Harvard Business Review article. When we are interested in curiosity as a way to interrogate – and interrogate has such a harsh tone to it, but to ask questions about processes, about procedures, about pricing, to ask questions about the way that we do things.

In this article, the author mentions that the Polaroid was invented because there was a photographer, or I don’t know. Someone in the camera photography industry who was taking pictures of his granddaughter. The granddaughter was like, “I want to see the picture now. Why can't I see it now?” He was like, “Huh. Yeah. Why can't you see it now? Could it be possible that there could be a picture that doesn’t take so long to develop?” It’s funny to say that now, of course. We take a picture and what do we do? We look at the pocket computer that we have immediately. Then we apply filters, and we edit it like professional photographers.

To think all of this innovation, like even when you said René you could Google. I'm like well 20 years ago you couldn’t Google, right? Like how can we Google now? How is our curiosity unleashed because someone heard a nudge at some point 30 years ago saying, “Why? Why can't we do this? What would happen if we tried this? Could this be possible?” So there's like the individual part, and then there's the collective part.

Of course, we’re always talking about that. About how that’s what we want to do together. Together we want to make things different and better. The status quo sucks for a lot of us. So we’re here to discover new ways of doing things and being in this world.

La Tondra: That’s right. Natalie, you made me think of a point that I just want to share because I think it’s so critically important. So not only do we as individuals and we collectively cocreate in more effective ways when we look at the world through the lens of curiosity. I think there's also value in being receptive to curiosity when you're on the other side of curiosity.

So there's a personal tendency to get defensive, to shut down, to raise up a hand, to why do you have so many questions? Well what’s your intention? Why are you asking me about X, Y, and Z? Well this is the way we do it, right? I think there's a human tendency to embrace the whole invented here. We’ve done this. This is the way we do it. This is how we get down. It’s very easy within teams, within your business, within your organizations to get caught up in that approach.

So if you find yourself getting defensive when you're on the other side of curiosity, take a beat and ask yourself what’s the opportunity for me to explain something to this person with fresh eyes? What's my opportunity to learn and grow from someone who hasn’t been here all this time or from the beginning of my business or from the launch of our very first product? How might we all collectively benefit? So there's also a call to embrace curiosity when we’re on the receiving end, not only when we’re putting out into the world.

René: Oh absolutely. That made me think of the language around how we address each other from a gender perspective. So I was in my book club meeting and we were talking about that. Some of the book club members were like, “That’s just too much for me to learn.” I was saying well, you know, this is why it’s important. This is how we acknowledge people. As Black people, we want to be acknowledged. What we’ve been called has been changed over the years. So that’s the way I think about it is that people have the right to say, “This is how I want to be addressed,” and we can respect that.

One of my friends said, “Well you’ve changed. I remember a year ago you were like oh, that’s just too much to learn.” I said yeah, you're right. Because we do grow, right, when we are open to understanding. Because that’s another component of curiosity is wanting to understand. So when you want to understand something that’s foreign to you or that you're not accustomed to or that you weren’t aware of, then yes. It calls for some curiosity to get information about it, the why behind it.

As we were saying, this is part of becoming the collective and understanding who we are. From a business perspective, that’s absolutely necessary to understand who you're talking to, who you're marketing to, how you want to be perceived as a businessperson.

Natalie: I mean yeah. I mean we are ultimately, hopefully, we are on an evolutionary track. We’re trying to get better. We’re trying to get better at being humans here on Earth. We’re trying to make things better. In order to make things better, they’ll need to change.

René: That’s right.

Natalie: In order to change, we’ve got to sometimes be uncomfortable and sometimes challenge our assumptions and to be willing to grow. Certainly, curiosity helps in all of that. It helps in all of that. So I think why curiosity in 2021? Well, again, times are challenging here on planet Earth in this moment. When we are facing challenge, when we are afraid, can definitely be a time – like you said La Tondra – where we throw our defenses up, right? Or like you said René where we dig in our heels and we say, “That’s too much. I won't do it.” So what a great moment to sort of say okay. I want to enter this new year curious.

So let’s just review what that means. So the first piece I think I would want to pull out is what René said about following the nudge, right? So when you're curious, it’s like what's that thing that you’ve been meaning to learn about? What's that thing that keeps coming up for you? It’s like tiny houses or investment strategies or counted cross stitch. Everybody, that’s what it is for me. Right now cross stitch keeps kind of coming and bubbling up.

So following the nudge and being present to that. There's some life here for me. There's something for me to tap into here. So that’s one piece. What would you ladies pull out?

René: Well, I would just tag onto that too because that following the nudge. One of the things that we can do to ourselves is this thing of sticking to something to death. So the nudge comes up, and you're like but I'm doing this thing and I have to stick with it. So you just made me think about that Natalie. Particularly when we’re talking about being in business. If you're someone who has been in a corporate environment or you worked for somebody and the thought of working for yourself has been nudging at you, but you tell yourself eh. I just need to stay with this safe thing.

So for me going into 2021 after coming out of four years. I've been hearing people say, “Oh, we just want to be bored. We just want things to be calm.” I get that. I do want some consistency, and I also want to explore what's going to open up now because we’re going to move out of so much chaos into a more positive possibility right. That there's going to be new opportunities opening up. Where am I in that? I am curious in that. How can I be a part of, instead of just bemoaning and groaning? Okay now I can be a part of this country opening up again and the world opening up again. What is my place in that?

La Tondra: I would say, for me, I think one of the most salient points that we’ve talked about today is this notion that when it comes down to it, curiosity ushers in growth and possibility and potential. Even if there is resistance at the onset, even if there's defensiveness, there's a way to embrace the change. We all have this opportunity to evolve and to elevate where we are. To grow and to embrace whatever comes out of our experimentation, as I referred to it.

Whatever comes out of our empirical approach, there's something that we can learn about ourselves or what we’ve done or what we’ve put out into the world. That’s about transformation. That’s ultimately what is required to elevate a business to make an impact on the world. It starts with the seed of that curiosity that enables that potential and that promise.

René: Yeah. How can we keep surprising ourselves? I like to surprise myself. How can I keep surprising myself?

Natalie: I think how can we also remember that this is a step-by-step. This is a step-by-step moment-to-moment endeavor. Sometimes when I think about that bigger, bigger picture about the evolution of society, which you all know I'm here for right. Like being a 97-year-old woman surprising herself. It can become overwhelming, but it’s really just about how does an experiment work? How does curiosity work? Step by step, moment by moment.

That it really is just me stepping into the next moment open, attentive to the details. What's really happening? Instead of deciding what it means or making up a story or deciding how it’s scary or it’s right or it’s wrong, what if I can just hold it and look at it with curiosity. Then also like both of you have gestured towards. To be open towards the bigness of it, to be open to the kind of miraculous mysterious unfolding that I bet even a chemist can get down with that description of it, right?

La Tondra: Yeah.

Natalie: There is magic in that unfolding. So when we get to be curious. If you get to be curious in 2021, I think my hope, my wish, for all of us is that as we are curious, what we can do is we can go with the unfolding. We can roll with it. We can move with it. Not that it’s going to be easy every step of the way, but that’s what’s happening right now.

Do we know what will happen? Nope. We don’t know. We don’t know what will happen. Do we want some steadiness like René was gesturing to? Probably. We want some steadiness, but we also want to create a steadiness that is good and that is sustainable and that is better than that broken shit that we had before.

René: Right. If we knew everything that was going to happen, the word curiosity would not exist, would it?

Natalie: Right.

La Tondra: True.

Natalie: True. So everyone, Happy New Year. May it be full of discovery and life and roads. Roads that you turn down and observe bit by bit. Happy New Year to you René and to you La Tondra.

René: Oh yes. Happy New Year. I'm so excited about our new year together. Yes.

La Tondra: Indeed. Indeed.

Natalie: It’s a blessing. All right everyone. Thank you so much. Here comes 2021.

Rachel:Have you scheduled a date with your money yet? I'm talking about your annual money review and it's something you need to do, if you want to make serious money moves in the year to come.

My team and I have created an annual money review workbook to help you do just that. You'll work through the great million-dollar decisions you made this year, and you'll work through the broke-ass decisions you may have made too. Plus you're going to make a plan to make more money and start living the life that you want next year. Grab your workbook for free right now at helloseven.co/review.