Hey! Welcome to Lessons from a Quitter where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. Happy New Year. If you're joining me, kind of when this comes out, it's the beginning of 2024. I am so stoked for the new year and all of the things that we're gonna do in the Quitter Club, my membership this month. We are focusing all on goals and I love this time, I love taking time to think about what I want for the new year. And I also love taking time to look back at the past year. And I highly, highly encourage you to start doing this. I was talking to my husband about this when I was trying to do my year end review and he was doing the same thing. And we took a day, we went out to lunch and we went through like what we had gone through in 2023 and we'd gone through like the different months we went through, like where we traveled to the good, the bad things that happened.
And it was such an incredible hour because for so many of us we're so busy just go, go going, always looking forward, always onto the next thing. And for so many of us, I think that the years kind of blend together. At the end of the year, you hear a lot of these sentiments of, I can't believe, you know, we're in December, I can't believe it's 2024. I can't believe another year passed. And it has this feeling of like, I didn't really do enough, I didn't do much. Or where did that year go? What even was happening? It's like this, we're in this like whirl of our like, of our life and we see it kind of going by very quickly and we don't ever take the time to like sit back and really like look back and see what happened. And as we were doing this, we, it just created so much gratitude.
Like I think for when I got to the end of the year, I, I knew it had been a good year for us and a bad, lots of good and bad. But when we went through it, I was like in awe. I was like, I cannot believe we did that much. Holy moly, what an incredible year it's been. And I just think for so many of us, we don't ever take that time. We don't slow down, we don't look back, we don't like allow it to fill us with gratitude. And I think when you do that you create so much negative emotion thinking like, it's not enough. I didn't do enough. It doesn't feel great all the time. And it really requires you to be intentional and present for what you have gone through for, you know, the trials, the tribulations, the lessons, the celebrations, the vacations the good, the bad, all of it.
And so I really, this is my spiel to you to start doing this. You can start, you can do this at any time you can, it doesn't have to be January. Just think back to 2023. Go back through your calendar, look at all the things that you did do and didn't do small and big. And take some moments to be proud of yourself or making through it no matter how good or bad it was. Take some moments to be really intentional about what worked and what didn't work. I think for a lot of us, we can really focus on what didn't work, but look at what did work, look at what, how you did show up in your life the way that you wanted. Not only to be proud of that, but so you can carry that on intentionally into the new year.
So I do this with my husband in our personal life and I love doing these podcasts for this reason, not just for you guys. I think that it, I'm glad that it is helpful.
I like being really honest about the good and the bad. I like talking about everything that happened. So you don't think that it's just rainbows and butterflies over here. But I like doing it for me, I like doing this with respect to my business doing this year in review because it gives me the, it forces me to like sit down and look back at the year. And one thing I started doing, which you can start doing this year, is I started a document a Google doc that just says my year in review. And every month or every couple of months I go in and I just fill in some things that happened in those in that time so that I can remember at the end of the year.
'cause it's hard to remember everything. So my suggestion is you start something similar, but here is my year in review for 2023. This is sort of gonna be all a little bit jumping around because life isn't linear and it's not like this is the good and this is the bad. It's all kind of really, you know, munched up together. So I'm not really sure how to address this or how to like really tell you guys what happened, but I'll give you, I guess some highlights, some low lights and we'll just talk about the good and the bad. We'll just jump in. Okay.
What was interesting for me, and this wasn't like by design, but my year was very much delineated at the halfway mark. And what I mean by that is like the first half of the year was exactly the opposite of the second half of the year.
And I learned lessons in both. They were completely different. So maybe I'll talk about it in that way again, not, you know, black and white, good and bad, but there were definitely difference between the first half of the year for me and the second half. So in the first half it was unbelievably busy for me. I was go, go, go running at a million miles an hour. And that doesn't mean the number of hours I worked, like I didn't work that much more than I normally do. It was the energy with which I was working. It was this frantic, like, I can't keep my head above water. Now I will give you some backstory. So you know how I came into this year. I started my, the Quitter Club last in October of 2022. December of 2022 was the first time that I launched it as a monthly membership one time.
So when I went into January of 2023, it was the first time really like it had only been a month where I was learning how to sell a membership. And that is a completely different animal than anything I had sold before. And people had warned me about that. People told me that selling a lower ticket item is much harder than selling a higher ticket item. Now if you don't know that, if you're not in business, it is a, the absolute truth. It takes as much energy to sell something that's $200 versus something that's 2000. And so it obviously makes most business sense to maybe sell a higher ticket item, especially in the beginning of your business. But I wanted to do the membership for a lot of very, very personal reasons. That wasn't just the bottom line, it wasn't just money. And so I was willing to do this.
Now I, you know, I I had gone into it willingly kind of knowing it was gonna be hard. I don't think I realized how hard it was gonna be. And so I came into January like knowing like, hey, this is the year that I'm gonna learn how to sell this membership. And I don't think I had done enough thought work on my thoughts about the membership and cleaned up like some of my thoughts around that switch from a group program to a membership. And so it followed me into the new year and I really like came out guns blazing. Like I was going a million miles an hour. I launched I think every single month in that first six months. And my, and so I wasn't giving myself the time to prep, I wasn't giving myself the time to be intentional with those launches.
I just felt like I have to keep launching. So it was a lot of that energy. So I was working very, very hard. I was also traveling a lot, which was fun and amazing, but also exhausting because I then had to like prep things before I would leave. I would do launches and I'd be gone for a week. So I would have to, you know, get things done in three weeks outta the month. And so that caused even more of this like kind of running on a hamster wheel energy for me. I went to New York, I went to Miami Napa, I went to Bora Bora, I went to Kauai. It was fantastic. I, you know, some of the good things from that six months, it was the first time I took 10 whole days off from my business. Like usually before that I would do one call on my vacation because it was easy to justify for myself like, it's only one hour.
It's not that big of a deal. And it would stop me from having to do the work of like finding a guest coach and paying someone else and setting things up and all of that. And so I sort of justified it, but I didn't realize until I went on this vacation for 10 days with my family, like how it still kind of tethered my thoughts to the business and when I could really disconnect was the first time that I did. And it was amazing. So I did that.
But, and I was also like, I was in a coaching, I was in a mastermind that first six months I was getting one-on-one coaching. There was a lot happening. And those things again are good though. I'm glad I had those, that coaching during that time because it was a lot of self-doubt and a lot of running and not really knowing what I was sort of doing with the membership.
And that culminated in the end of June. I did a three day challenge where I did everything myself. And I didn't realize at the time that that's the equivalent of basically doing three webinars in a row. And I'd created them from scratch. I'd made all the slides. I was doing like three hours of trainings. I was doing all the emails. I really didn't have, I had had, I'd hired somebody in the beginning of January and she was fantastic, but she wasn't working that many hours for me. So I was doing a lot.
And at the end of June I hit a level of burnout that I have never experienced before. And it was a physical burnout that I couldn't just thought work kind of my way out of at that moment. Like I was in a very, substantial kind of free state with my nervous system.
It was really hard for me to get outta bed. It was really hard for me to even comprehend. Like, it was weird. I would be reading emails and be like, I, I can't comprehend what I'm reading. Like it felt as though my brain was offline. Like I had this fog that was very much like dimming everything in my brain. And so I gave myself like a week and a half to really deal with like the physical symptoms of it and try to get my nervous system to calm down a little bit and try to get it back online. And I did. And it was really fascinating. Just that whole experience was really fascinating. And so that really put things in like, it very quickly showed me that something I'm doing is not working and it cannot continue like this. And I realized lo and behold, that a lot of it had to do with my thoughts. I wasn't working physically like that many hours. It wasn't that I was burned out 'cause I was working a hundred hours a week, but what I realized was that everything I was doing underlying it was this thought that it's not working. So even though it was working again, funny how our thoughts are not true, and I know this and I was getting coached at the time and I still truly believed it's not working. Like I had expectations for the membership. I had compared myself to other people. I had ideas of where it should be. And every time I would do a launch, let's say I wanted to get 20 people in and I would get eight people in.
And when I would get eight people in my mind would go to, well, this didn't work, this launch didn't work. This type of launch didn't work. It's not working. People don't wanna be there. And I would ignore so much evidence of the fact that there was a hundred people in my membership and it was working and people loved it and people were telling me all the changes they were having. And I was ignoring all that. 'cause I was in this belief that like, it should be bigger, it should be something else, it should be something that it's not. And that, and I didn't even have enough time to really realize that I was doing this. I was just running so fast from thing to thing. I was constantly just doing, I was constantly onto the next thing. I thought I was just, you know, like in massive action and getting things done.
But the reality was I was really just grinding myself into the ground because underlying a lot of my actions had this belief of like, this isn't working. I have to work harder, I have to work faster. And it took that level of burnout for me to realize like, this is not working this like, not the membership, but the way that I'm thinking about it, the way that I'm approaching it. And so in July was when I sort of stopped everything. I was like, I'm not launching again. I have to rethink this whole thing. I have to rethink how I'm doing it. And I really spent like two months just working on my thoughts about my business and really trying to fall in love with my business again. And I really kept thinking like, what am I doing? And why am I doing this? And why am I ignoring the people that are here in my membership that really want the change and that are seeing the change?
Why am I not seeing that? Why am I not allowing myself to see that? And so I spent a good month and a half coaching myself on these thoughts, coaching myself on the business, really opening my eyes to the other half that I wasn't seeing to the half that like I had built.
I looked back at the six months and realized like it had been working and I had been, I had created a very steady income stream every month that, you know, I know so many people would love. Like it was, I was making six, $7,000 a month. Like, it's fascinating to say this and it's like, of course it was working, but in my brain I truly believed it wasn't. And so I created so many problems for myself thinking it's not working. And when I stopped that in July, I really refocused and was like, okay, how do I want to sell this?
What if it is working? What is the evidence for that? And the more I saw that, the more I truly fell in love with not just my business but the membership and the back end of it and helping people and seeing and truly letting myself see the beauty of it and the magic of it and how much people were being helped by it. And I started loving it again. And I started really like getting excited about how I could grow it. Not from a place of I have to prove that it works or I have to get to a certain number, but like, how many people can I impact? What if it was just these people that were in it? What if nobody else joined? How could I love it still? How could I really like love on those people so much to get them the results that they wanted?
And I decided to do a different launch at the end of September, October, beginning of October, I decided to sell it annually. 'cause I really started thinking about what is in service of the people that I am coaching. Like what is the best thing for them, not for me. And for me, like when I started really thinking about it, I know for people to get the results that they want, they have to be in the club for more than a month or two. Like it doesn't work in a way of like, I can just do it and drop off and be fine. Some people can get a lot of results very quickly, but for most people, this is work that requires you to repeat a lot, requires you to dig deep a lot and requires time. And so I really wanted to push a yearly commitment.
I wanted people that were gonna be in for an entire year and really do the work and do it slowly and not feel pressured to have to get everything done in a month and not get overwhelmed. And so I really focused on that launch and it was the most successful launch I had of the year. I did an episode on that. I made $93,000 that month with that launch and with a couple of other kind of payments coming in. And I really slowed down the last half of the year. I didn't travel, I didn't do any masterminds. I sort of really wanted to hear my own voice. I realized that a lot of what was happening was I was taking on what other people were telling me I should do or how I should do it. And I really wanted to come back to the fact that this is my business and I can do it however I want and it doesn't have to make sense.
And for me, the bottom line has never been really the most important thing.
Of course, I wanna make money and of course you have to make money in order to stay in business. And so I'm not at all saying that like it's not important. It is and it's important to me. But I realized like it's not the end all be all. The goal wasn't how do I make the most money every year? It was what do I want this business to feel like? What is the point of me doing this? What is the lifestyle I wanna create? And when I sort of realized that and I really slowed down, like I didn't travel, I didn't do any, the last half was so slow and I made the most money that I made in that second half, I made I think almost double maybe what I made in the first half.
And it's not to say, I'm not saying that that's the causation. I'm not saying that like slowing down is what caused me to make all that money. I do think it helped. But I think it was, for me it was a really good lesson of realizing that it's safe to slow down. That it's, that it doesn't mean that my business is gonna fall apart. In fact, it means that it likely will do better. And it gave me, gave me the space to really think intentionally about how I wanted to launch the club, how I wanna market the club. It took me outta that energy of needing to constantly do more and more and more. And I think that once I kind of got into that head space this last half of the year, so the first half was honestly one of the hardest halfs that I've had in business.
It was so many lessons that were painfully won. And the second half became one of the most eased filled years that I've had in business and one of the most, where I have been grounded in the pur purpose of this, in my impact in my coaching.

Like I think for so long I kept sort of running away from the thoughts of like, maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I'm not doing a good enough job. And I think when I really slowed down to look at the impact that I've had, I have never felt more grounded in the type of coach I am and the type of work that I'm creating. And so it's felt amazing. And if you saw at the last end of last month, I opened up a new program to help people start their online business. And that was really again, me going back to like, I just wanna do some things for fun just to be creative, just to try something new.
It doesn't necessarily have to be this solid business plan of like, this is how you work to scale. And I realized like, that's not what I want. Like I started this business to be able to help people and to do it in a way that I wanted to and to allow myself to be more creative and allow myself to do things that are new and exciting. And sometimes that doesn't necessarily fit with some grand plan of scaling, and that's okay. And so I wanted to try something that I might not do again, just because I wanted to try it. And I did it, you know, in a couple of weeks. I just threw up a Google doc. I didn't make a sales page, I didn't try to make it pretty. I just was like, this is something I wanna try. We're gonna try, it might fail, who cares?
Let's see what happens. And again, I'm, it's like so excited that in 2024 I get to help people create a business that I know can help them create the life that they want. And we'll see where that takes me. So I will say some like highlights of this year. I, with all this, like that's sort of how the year went. I made about 190,000 this year. I give or take, I think it might be a 1 92, something like that. I I haven't exactly done my te like my income report yet for this month. So I don't know. But around there, which is less than what I made in 2023, 2022 by the way. I think I made like two 20 last year. So it's a little bit less, but I don't really care. To be honest, I'm stoked that I made that doing a membership that's a lower ticket item like in 2022, I still had my group program.
So I am like super proud that I made, you know, almost $200,000 with this membership. And the thing is, is I worked a ton less. I know we, we talked about my burnout, but I took five weeks off with my family. I probably worked, I would say at least like 12 weeks of the year. I worked less than 20 hours. There was a lot of weeks like when I was going through burnout after my launch in October where I just took weeks off and like I would do the bare minimum. I would work 10 hours, 12 hours here and there, but I just took the rest of the time to read and to be with the kids and to just do nothing, which was glorious. I did an episode about how I've gotten into romance novels. Well, my goal, I didn't have a goal, but like I had put on my good reads that I was gonna try to read 36 books.
I read 90, which is wild because I've never read that much in my life. The previous year I read 26 to just give you an example and you know, there's a lot of things that I said I wanted to do that I didn't do. I wanted to take a dance class every, every other week. I took a one dance class in all of 2023, so you know, you wouldn't send me lose them. But I did feel, I do feel the most grounded now kind of coming out of 2023 going into 2024. Oh, I didn't even talk about my goal. So my goal for last year wasn't even about business. It was about my health. And I wanted to work out three days a week. That was my minimum of what I wanted to do for my health. Now there was other things that were like nice to-dos that I wanted to do.
When I came into 2023, I was probably in the worst health I've been in, in 2022. I had my gallbladder taken out and I was still dealing with a lot of like, stomach issues. I still wasn't feeling well. When I would eat a lot of the times and I had a lot of back pain and hip pain. I had not been working out at all. And so I decided to commit to working out three days a week, come hell or high water. And that was the goal. And it was really for me to build my self-trust with myself is it was for me to learn how to love my body in a different way and show my body that kind of love through movement. It was to hopefully get rid of some of the pain that I was having. And that has happened. And then some I feel the best I felt in a really long time. I don't have anymore back or hip pain. I don't have any of the weird, I used to have like my limbs would fall asleep all the time, like it would be tingly, which clearly wasn't a good thing. But I that doesn't happen anymore. I started going to like holistic doctors and I dealt with a lot of the
Remaining stomach issues I had. I did like certain cleanses. I started eating a lot more protein, which by the way helped me more than really anything else. I have so much more energy, I sleep better.
And the thing is, is that it's not a noticeable difference in the sense of like, I haven't lost weight. You wouldn't tell on the outside, but just how I feel, the amount of energy I feel, how strong I feel how much more awake I feel, how much less I feel like in a fog. Again, that was, I don't know whether that was the first six months because of how I was working or really just my physical health. But I'm so glad that I focused on my health. And what it really allowed me to do do was use it as a like, filter to prioritize my decisions. Like when I started realizing that I was not, you know, when the decision came to like work out or I have, you know, it was in a launch and so my brain wanted to believe like I don't have the time to workout it.
There was just no question. It was like, no, this is what we're doing for ourselves. Like my body is more important than this business and so I'm gonna stick to this goal. And it made things very clear. And now I have a habit. Like now it's just non-negotiable. I'll work out three days a week. I don't have to go harder. I didn't like try to trick myself into doing three days and then upping it to four or five. Like I really just stuck with, listen, I'm good enough with this and maybe I'll do some, you know, couple of the weeks. I would go for walks on other days or I would go to a dance class or I would try something else. But it, the focus was always all I have to do is the three days a week. And I'm so glad I did, I'm so glad I focused on my health.
And what was interesting is, you know, I did end up focusing a lot on my mental health the second half of the year as well. And it has paid off and it's amazing. 'cause now I can focus on something else. Like now I have that habit and this next year I'm gonna look at other goals and I'm gonna look into, like for me, my goal is for the next year, again, it has nothing to do with business. One of the things I've realized is my goals are not metrics. They're not gonna be just a to-do list. They're not just things that I have to hit in order to feel better. My goal is really in how do I become the most well-rounded, well-versed version of myself. What are skills that I wanna develop? What is the most rich life that I can have?
And a lot of that doesn't involve the business, it involves me outside of the business. And so my goal for this year is to relearn Spanish. I used to be conversational in Spanish like 15 years ago. I studied abroad in Spain and I sort of lost that. And it's a waste and I feel like it's such a good skill for me to have. I enjoy it, I want to learn it, but I never make the time for it. So this year is the year, not because I need it to feel better about myself, not because I need it, because it'll get me some money or some status or somebody's love, but simply because I just think it'll be cool in this lifetime to speak another language and to be able to travel and talk to people and
It'll set me up for things that I want to do in the future. So that's my goal for 2024. I'm super excited about it. The other thing that I, as I go into this year or that I really think about from this past year, what I've learned is really to kind of lean into like what it is that I want and not what everybody else wants for me. Whether that's in my personal life or in my business. Whether that's, you know, I should lose weight or I should eat more be, I mean I should eat less or whatever. Like that's not the point of doing a health goal. It was in order, it was just for me. It wasn't to prove anything to anyone else. With my business, business, it was the same thing. I think, you know, when you're in any business, but in the online space, it becomes really easy to get caught into this idea of scaling constantly and to constantly have more and more and more.
And as much as people wanna say like, yes, there's ways to like still work less. Like it changes the nature of your business. I did hire my first person this year and then I hired an agency. And what happens is, like you just get, you have to then get into delegation. You have to get into looking at other people's work unless yes, you can work less on some of the things that you don't wanna do, but then you create other things that you don't wanna do. And so there's no real coming outta that trap. And part of what I've been realizing, and I've seen so many online business owners who are quitting outright, who are shutting down all their products, who are getting burned out and leaving. And I realized a lot of it is because we've just been on this like train of like scaling for the sake of scaling.
And so I really think about that going forward. Not to say that I don't wanna make more money and part of it is not even the money. I really think about the impact. I would love to have more people in the club just so I can get them out of this. Like living in misery every day, like hating their lives, dreading work. Like I really think that these tools can help people love their life so much more. And I want to help as many people as possible, but at what cost? Like I really think about what my capacity is, how much I wanna work, how much I want to focus on business versus my personal life. And for me right now, the goal is not scaling. I, if I make more money, great, if I impact more people, that's what I wanna do. But it's not the end all be all of like, how can I make more every single year?
I make an incredible amount. I know I could make more if I worked 40 hours a week. Like I know I could have a bunch more one-on-one clients and I could, and I realize this is a very privileged place to be. Like obviously a lot of people would love to make more money and there's nothing wrong with that. I've just realized that that hamster wheel never runs out. There's never a time that you're like, you know what? I have enough now and I can kind of slow down. I think it just constantly the need for more and more and to prove yourself or to, you know, solve a bigger problem is always more and more until you kind of burn out. And I don't want that for myself. So I don't know what that means. Like I don't have a specific revenue goal that I have to hit this year.
Like I'm very focused on how I wanna scale and how I wanna launch and what I want the year to feel like and what are the things I wanna focus on. And I will focus on those things and the revenue will be what it will be. And I'm okay with that. I'm really more focused on enjoying the process of being really in community with the people that are in my programs with helping them get the results as much as I can and letting the chips fly where they may. So that is my goal. That is my year, that is my take on 2023 and kind of going into 2024, I hope that this was helpful for you. If you want help learning how to set your own goals and really like exploring the thoughts that might be keeping you unhappy or might be keeping you on that hamster wheel, join the club.
Let me help you with that. Come get coaching and learn how and learn how to dive into those thoughts for yourself and how to start changing them and how to fall in love with your career and your business and your life and your day to day so you don't have to change everything in order to think that you can feel happy that you can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and sign up for that wait list.
Oh, and if you are listening this week, the doors are still open to my beginner business bootcamp until we start on Thursday the 11th, so January 11th. So if you're listening in those two days and you are starting a online business and you wanna know how to start it kind of the right way and know how to clean up your thoughts around it so that you don't go through a lot of the pitfalls that I've gone through I can't wait to help the people that are in that group make 2024 the year that they do create a business in their own way and work them out that they want to and make the money that they want to.
So you can there is no website actually for it. So if you want to be in, shoot me an email, go to goli@lessonsfromaquitter.com and send me an email and I will let you in before we start on January 11th. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful for, for you and I will be back next week with another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working. Like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome… and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching, tools, and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the waitlist. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.