Empowering Entrepreneurship: Mindset, Alignment, and Sustainable Growth with Melissa Froehlich

Catharine O'Leary: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to kickstart the conversation. I am your host, Catharine O'Leary. And I want to welcome Melissa to today's episode, and Melissa is a strategic consultant and mentor celebrated for innovative approaches in business alignment. Melissa is a seasoned strategist, which I love certified mindset coach, which I also love, and empowers women entrepreneurs to scale their ventures and redefine success using holistic strategies based on Colby and human design principles. So buckle up folks and get ready for insights on becoming a confident and fulfilled business leader. Let's dive in. Melissa, welcome to kickstart the conversation. Thank

you for having me, I am really excited to be here and just share anything that I can to help your audience be able to create something that feels even more empowering for them as individuals. Yeah,

Catharine O'Leary: and we were talking just a bit before we we kind of hit record here on how, you know, as people move out of corporate or move out of jobs, and you know, start their own businesses how it can be so easy to end up creating a job for yourself, that you don't necessarily love. Because this is just a, it's a very different mindset, it's a very different process that you have to put together. It's it's not just walk out of the, you know, in my case, the Pepsi, you know, front doors, and into, you know, the ideal client Academy like that good took a little while to get there. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you help people to, you know, get into that mindset of being a business owner and a, you know, an investor, as opposed to, you know, somebody that just works for a job, and you just happen to be the boss. Totally.

So I am really passionate about this, because I did it the wrong way to start out, I left corporate, like many of you and started over in the online space, my husband is active duty US military. And so that's why I gave up corporate. And I knew I had it in me to be an entrepreneur and create something great. But what I didn't realize was how important the components of mindset and self awareness and emotional intelligence were in the process, I tried to take all the skills that I had in corporate and plug those into what I was doing in and I was successful. out of the gate I really was however, it depends on how you measure success, right? I was successful in terms of the number of clients that I was getting, and my visibility and my marketing efforts, but I was burning out at rapid speeds. And it wasn't until I really like stopped for a moment and truly let myself pause and said What am I missing? What are other people doing that I aspire to have businesses like or lifestyles like what are they doing that I'm not. And I really realized that the common denominator was the mindset and self awareness piece of things. And I also realized that even though they may be selling programs that said, do business this way, they were doing business their own way. And so for far too long, I was trying to plug myself into everybody else's way of doing business. And I was leaving the very, very important component of trusting myself to know what was best for me. And kind of cherry pick all the things I was learning along the way to create my own version of of my business model. And that is when things really started to shift. And I leaned into understanding what mindset even meant, because if I'm being totally honest, like I remember thinking, like, everybody's talking about mindset work, but what the heck does that even mean, right? We didn't do that in corporate, nobody was like carving out time to work on their version of their CO selves, the CEO was the CEO of the company, right and, and so there was a whole bunch of things that were really, really different. And I also realized that what I was doing was waiting until I was bigger, or I had been in business longer, or I had made more money and I I had to make a lot of shifts very quickly to kind of transition into this new pathway to start to experience business where I wasn't going to burn out where I wasn't going to want to fire myself, like we were talking about before we hit record. And so that's what I want to talk about today is like what that looks like and what you can start doing right now to make those shifts for yourself. And that alone is going to change what's possible for you in terms of the joy factor and the happiness factor. And when that shifts that's going to change the sustainability factor. And that's what we want to care about and business like growth is great, but if it's not sustainable, what's it all for? And Catharine's nodding your head like crazy because we the longer you're in business, the more you appreciate that metric I felt like,

Catharine O'Leary: well, and it's it is that sustainability. And everyone's like everyone that that is starting up or is in that growth phase is striving for that growth, like, I can't have too many clients, that's not possible. I don't even know what that means. And when you get there, like, that's when you start burning out, because you're like, holy crap, I can't do all the things that I've actually promised that, you know, that I'd be do. And now you start doubting yourself, you start doubting the model, you start burning out, and, and you, you kind of get to a point where you got to start from scratch almost. And that's what we're trying to, to have people avoid, because we're growing really fast. Is is okay, for some, but it's usually not the best situation. Because I know for myself, and for other people that I've talked to, like, there's a lot of bubble gum and duct tape in the back room. And there's a lot of leaks, and there's a lot, there's a lot that needs to be fixed. Because the foundation wasn't, you know, wasn't as, you know, built as strongly as it could have been. So going back is a little harder, it can be done, but like, I'm not trying to force seven figures down this funnel, because I know it'll break. Right? Like it, it will absolutely shatter if I tried to do that, because there's just, there's not enough, you know, mindset work, and an actual, like, physical process work that's been put in place yet. Totally. And

I think the mindset piece, I mean, it's, we never stopped, you mentioned mindset work is daily. And it's true. I mean, I work on it daily, and I still catch myself, you know, falling into limiting belief patterns, but it's the thing that's different is I have a toolbox now that I can catch myself and reach into and get myself back on track faster, instead of, you know, falling into the pit of imposter syndrome, or, you know, having these limiting beliefs take me in a different direction than I really should be going. And but but you have to commit to doing the work. But first and foremost, understanding who you are and how you're meant to operate and what you're meant to do. And that's, that's part of really where my work is evolved to because I am a natural strategist, I can walk into anyone's business, and it's just like seeps out of my pores in terms of helping find solutions that are sustainable, and also strategic. But there's a reason why. And so I thought that for a long time, I told myself that I didn't have enough experience in the online space yet to call myself a strategist, or I wasn't making enough money yet and all of these things, but when I really, really started to realize that was what my clients were asking me to do. And oh, by the way, I remember the first time I took the Colby, which we're going to talk about a little bit which measures are cognitive strengths. It legitimately says, I am a strategist and I, I started looking at the data and realizing like, why am I resisting? Who I am and how I met to do business instead of owning it, right. And so hopefully, like, there's some little piece of something that's resonating with some of you, and so you're going to start to get curious of what if I looked at data to decide how I should design my business or design my offers or how fast I can sustain growth, right, because then we get into the human design piece of things, which I'm also really passionate about two very different awareness tools, I want to be really clear, these are awareness tools to help you understand how you're designed to operate, but they're not meant to tell you you are this or not that okay, so I want to be clear about that. You know what this looks and feels like, it doesn't matter what type of assessment you do, don't let it define you. And if it doesn't fit, then that's okay. But use this to strengthen your awareness of who you are and how you're meant to operate, but also how you're not meant to operate because that's where the mindset work is going to really come in, have been okay of saying I'm not meant to be responsible for all the things, leaders asked for help leaders delegate. And I had a lot of just I don't know if it was shame, or just stubbornness, or what it was when I first started. But I convinced myself I should know how to do everything in my business. And I wish that I had a true accurate collection of all the hours that I will never get back trying to do things like design a logo, or get my tech stack right in the back of my business like things I should never touch, right? Because I didn't really truly understand my actual skill set. I was stuck in the place of I can figure out anything. And I can and so can you but that's not the point. We want to leverage our strengths, right? That is really, really empowering. And my gosh, it allows you to exhale and say, That's not my strength. That's not my wheelhouse. Who can I delegate that to or who can I eventually delegate that to so I don't care If this is your first week in entrepreneurship, or if you've been at this for a year, and you haven't, you know, hit your revenue goal yet of where you want to be, and you're not comfortable investing, or maybe you already have a team, you're always, you should always be in this place of planning for what else can I delegate who else can do things better and faster than I can? Right? That's really what starts to happen. When we dig into the self work and the mindset work of how am I meant to operate? And how am I not meant to operate? And who can support that piece holistically?

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, I think that's really super important around really understanding your strengths. And and, you know, letting go and finding the, the WHO not the how, finding the role you need to be working with. And that could be a VA, that could be like, you don't have to necessarily hire a massive team. There's not what we're saying is it's more of and there's 100 ways to do this. It's not always about money, either. Bartering, there's, you know, trading services, there's lots and lots of ways to get the help that you need. As entrepreneurs, we're really, really good at being creative, and coming up with, with ways to do this, because there's not only one way so so I love this, this idea of really deep like, you know, getting deeper with your strengths, but have you use like things like the the assessments to help people kind of dig into that, because like, I kind of know what my strengths are, like, I know what I like to do. But I don't necessarily know where the boundaries are, where it's like, oh, no, like that is, you know, that's not something that like, I can do that. And I really shouldn't be doing it. And I do it anyways, because I know.

Yeah, so that's super important, we can do anything, right? I said that before. And I want to make sure that that's clear. Because it's not meant to say that you can't, it's what you should be doing or what is going to get you the biggest ROI in terms of your energy and your joy in all of all of those components. So when we look at the human mind, there are three faculties of the mind. So that's really where these assessments will start to make sense for you. So we have the cognitive part of the mind, which is, you know, our skill set and our IQ and what we can learn to do, right, so your cognition continued, can, can continue to grow based on, you know, investing in learning, or just experience over time. And then we have the affective part of the mind, which is our feeling part. And so that's really where our values are rooted. Or if you've taken an assessment like the Enneagram, for instance, that will pull a lot of an effective parts and actually StrengthsFinder will pull in some aspect of pieces Strengths Finder is kind of a blend of the affective and the cognitive pieces. And then we have the cognitive part of the mind. And that's the one that is probably talked about the very least, and this is about our striving strengths. And this doesn't change this is from the when we are born, how are we going to exert energy when we're creating something when we're doing a task when we're bringing a project to life, when free to be ourselves when we're not influenced by how we should do it? Or how we've been trained to do it, or buy the culture of the company, right? When we are going to set our mind to something? How are we going to do? And so when we start to really look at those different pieces of mind, we start to get this very holistic picture of who we are as individuals. And so the Colby assessment, which was created by Kathy Colby, it is the only way to actually measure the cognitive part of the mind. And so that's why I really love that assessment. And I love all assessments like many of you, like take them all, but just understand what they're telling you what they are showing you. So the Kolbe is super important because it's going to help us understand when we are working on something, how are we going to do it, and then we're going to have awareness of, okay, I happened to be an 8353 The Colby will give you four numbers, which is your modus operandi. And that's going to show you where you fall in terms of on the spectrum and different action modes, the first action mode being your factfinder so my eight factfinder says, I'm going to research the heck out of something right now have Catharine and I are like brainstorming after this and we're like hey, why don't we do this like masterclass together. I'm gonna go research about it. I can't help myself. That's what I'm going to do. Now, if Catharine says, I've already done all the research, you can't research, you have to go and build the sales funnel. I can go do that. But I'd rather die because that is not what I actually want to do. Nor is that where my strengths lie, right. So that's one just little tiny example. So we start to look at Winfrey to be ourselves how We're going to do things. But what this also then sheds light on is how other people may do it differently. And where there's a potential for frustration, so that we can have communication and build better systems, in order to have more cohesive teams with greater synergy, or how to our clients, like information, just because I like a lot of information, doesn't mean that my husband likes a lot of information, or that one of my clients, right, so we start to, we start with ourselves, we start to understand how we're meant to do. And then that is going to shape how we build our own systems, how we communicate differently. So that's the Colby piece falling into the cognitive piece of the mind. And then I mentioned Human Design earlier, and that is really kind of touching on all those things. Human Design looks at our energetic blueprint. And it's based on a whole bunch of different wisdom that already existed that kind of came together. It's called it they call it a synthesis. And it shed light on how we're energetically meant to do life and business. And so you mentioned earlier that some people can't sustain super fast growth. Well, that's absolutely true. If somebody is a generator versus somebody is a projector, there are five types in human design, I just named two of them, the generator can sustain much faster growth over a long period of time than a projector is designed to sustain, they're likely going to burn out much faster if they're trying to do business, like a generator, for instance. So I love to use those two different assessments to really look at. Okay, Catharine, how are you designed to actually do work and do projects in your business? And then how can we look at like, energetically? What is your what is your strategy? And how can you trust yourself more, because we can then look at the inner authority, and this new confident version of your CEO self just starts to sprout right away, because you have evidence and data to say, this is how I meant to do it. And then you get to go back to that that kind of illustration that I painted earlier in your mind about cherry picking the different parts and pieces of everybody else's wonderful models that work to build your own unique way of doing business to build your own unique approach to operations, right, instead of trying to plug yourself into something else, we're going to build what works for you. And that's ultimately then how I build strategy. It's not just like this is going to work, I might be able to walk into your business and say, you absolutely need to do this thing. But if you aren't energetically designed to sustain that thing, I wouldn't be in integrity, for me to tell you that this is a strategy for you. I need to take that strategy and tailor it depending on who you are as an individual.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, I often tell people or not tell, but suggest to people that the you know, a visibility strategy, for example, there's a million different ways to market your business, like 100 million. I mean, there's many stars in the sky, that you can market your business. What lights you up? Well, how do you like to talk about your business? How do you like like, you know, if you love social media, great, not my gig, it's not my thing. I love to network, I love doing podcasts, and I talk to people, that's where I shine. So that's where I want to be consistent. So that's where I want to stay. So I love this idea of figuring out exactly what your strengths are, and so on when you start putting together things like high ticket offers, like what, what is going to keep you energized as you deliver these, you know, fulfill these, these offers and so on. And what do you need to outsource? And what do you need to maybe bring in a JV partner for to help, you know, round things out? Or what do you need to stay away from? I can help you with that just because you could do it.

Absolutely. And then keeping people away from just going towards the shiniest thing or the the end of the funnel, right? Meaning, okay, we're, we're strategizing with someone and we come up with this brilliant new offer, but I'm not gonna even let you go build the new offer until you are truly confident. And I know that you are lit up about the offer. And just because I said it's a good idea. And you agree, do you really feel like that? How are you going to feel in three months, right? And this is also where then we bring in the mindset piece, when you already have that thing? What's going to be different? What does that look like? What does that feel like? And a lot of times what happens with my clients and this just happened yesterday with one of my my private clients. My strategy is to do nothing. I will tell somebody you need to take a break you need to go out and one of my clients I literally said, What's a recipe that you haven't cooked? Since you were a kid that you remember your grandma cooking for you? And she kind of looked at me for a second but I know she loves to cook and I know she's very returned to her family. And she's like, Oh, I was just thinking about a couple the other day, I said, That's what I want you to do today or tomorrow, I don't want you to work on this new offer, I want you to go back to focusing on like grounding and coming into your body and reinvigorating some joy and those becomes really powerful strategies, but not because they're fluffy or not, because they're woowoo, or whatever it is, it's because I know that this person is experiencing a lot of self doubt. And until we anchor into that, and she starts to feel lit up again, all of the effort that's going to go into her offer is going to be diluted, right? So how do we come back to taking care of the human behind the business, and when we can look at something like your energetic blueprint from human design, or we go back to your Colby and say, No wonder you're burnt out doing X, Y, and Z, you're not getting to be in your strengths or working against them. And so it gives us kind of this compass to keep coming back to and looking at and saying, like, where are you out of alignment, right. And that's why I call myself a business alignment strategist, because it's all about coming back to alignment. And as we grow, and as we get new opportunities, and we learn new things, alignment is going to shift and change. And so we're not looking for balance, we're looking for harmony with that alignment, so that we can continue to incorporate the growth that we're experiencing as we dive into becoming better versions of ourselves that self leadership, and keep that going in the direction of what success looks like to us individually.

Catharine O'Leary: That is so powerful, because I think what corporate teaches us is the opposite, where it's all about the strategy or not the strategy, the tactics and the you know, like it's it's exactly the opposite, as opposed to the human, as opposed to taking care of the human like the entity is actually the brand that has been taken care of and not the people within and for entrepreneurs, we've got to, to, to take care of ourselves. And the way to grow your business is to grow yourself. And to do that through. Yes, through the mindset the all of what you were just talking about staying in your zone of genius is effectively. Perfect. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for coming on. To kick start the conversation enjoyed our conversation here. How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about you know how to get into that business alignment?

Totally. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and Instagram these days, Melissa Froehlich underscored biz is my handle on Instagram. You're welcome to send me a DM I'm sure that this will be linked in the show notes because my last name is awful to spell. So I wanted to be a Smith but instead I got Froehlich so truly um it's it's me behind the messages. So if anything, you know is interesting to you. Or if you just have a question, I'm happy to share resources and send you in the right direction because this really will change how business feels for you. Yes,

Catharine O'Leary: I completely agree. So everything will be in the shownotes. Folks. Melissa, thank you again for joining us. I enjoyed our conversation. And for all of you out there listening, keep asking questions and keep the conversation going. Talk to you next time.

Thank you