The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 118: 2020 Business & Life Lessons

In today’s episode I am going to go over how we can reflect back on life and business lessons in 2020. From lots of pivoting, lots of changing, lots of adjusting, adapting and really just being here for one another.

2020 Business & Life Lessons

By: Melissa Lin

What a year it has been. 2020 definitely surprised most of us. I don’t want to speak for you, but I’m going to say 2020, definitely surprised a lot of us. It has just been such a crazy wild year. Lots of pivoting, lots of changing, lots of adjusting, adapting, and really just being here for one another.

I am actually one to reflect and look back. Every quarter we do this in the business, do it in life, every quarter minimum, we do this. Where we really just reflect on what's happened, what we've learned, and then what the opportunity really is. We always want to grow from whatever has happened and what we've gone through. I’m so excited to be sharing with you all about my business lessons, my life lessons, and maybe you can relate to some of it.

Again, it's been such a big year. A big transformational year for the world, and we all really went through it together. So I'm just going to dive right into the big lessons that I've learned. I have a feeling, a lot of these are going to roll right into 2021. Many of these lessons are because of COVID. There's definitely other things that happened of course throughout the year but I think COVID is a big one for most of us that we can all really relate to.

The Importance of Community

The big first lesson that I really want to dive into is just the importance that community really was for myself, my business, my team members, and my clients this year. I really want to just emphasize how important it is to build a community. I've talked about this in podcast episodes in the past. I've also talked about it in my captions and all over my content and my feeds. Creating a community is just so, so important. Especially because in 2020, we all went through something pretty big together, quarantining, being stuck at home for quite a while isolating. As entrepreneurs it's already such a lonely experience sometimes, especially if there's not a ton of people in your life or your family, or friends who really get it in the beginning. I know when I first started my entrepreneurship journey, a lot of people in my life just didn't get what I was doing. Completely didn't get it. They thought I was going through a midlife crisis, or I guess back then it would have been a quarter life crisis. They just didn't get it. They thought I was crazy. So it really can feel lonely. Then, we all just went through this pandemic together. We're still going through it. It's December 2020, and there's probably going to be a little bit left before anything really kind of gets back to our new normal. So building a community has been so important to really be there.

I have a free Facebook group community. It's called The Fierce Business Babes Facebook group. If you're not in it, I definitely recommend hopping in. I go live every single week and it's a very safe space for people to share, ask questions, talk about their offers, and really just connect with each other. Building a community is very important, especially within your own business and with your clients, with your team members. I do everything that I can to create, and always be improving customer experiences and just the community feel, especially inside of my group programs. A lot of people join group programs because they want to be part of a community. So if you have a membership or anything like that, I would definitely recommend spending some time focusing on how you can improve the experience inside of the community. That's something we're always working towards. We're lucky to hire someone to also come in and look at our offers, look at our communities, and see how we can continue to improve, because it's a really big part of what I want to do. I want to create such an incredible experience inside of my communities, whether it's my free communities, my paid communities to my clients, my communities inside of my team, all of that. Really building the community. Life is going to continue going on and big things are going to continue to happen and we're going to need each other. Creating that community is so, so, so important. I definitely leaned into the communities I was in throughout the year. So that was definitely a big lesson, just the importance of community. It definitely was so, so, so fun hopping on so many virtual community calls and things like that.

Creating Connections

Now the second big lesson, both in business and in life, kind of relates a bit to community by just creating connections. Whether it's with clients or with family, check in with your people. Again, 2020 was such a big wild year for so many. We had to really reach out to those that we truly care about, people in our audience too, to see how people are doing. Be that person to go reach out, check in with them. We're all human and we were already lacking human connection prior to COVID, prior to everything else in 2020.

Creating connection was definitely a big, big lesson and something that we are always working towards improving of course. Something I'm going to challenge you to do today is go and connect with five people you haven't connected with recently, whether it's a girlfriend you haven't talked to in a few months, a family member, somebody in your audience who you haven't talked to in a while, maybe they popped up in your feed. Go send a hello. “Hey, how are you doing? Was thinking about you, saw you pop up in my feed”, go and create connection. Connection is everything, especially in the online space. We can't exactly go in person and connect right now in this moment. Live events were such a big, big part, especially in my life, not necessarily growing up but, the past two or three years as an entrepreneur, live events were so, so, so big. So we can still create a connection with people in other ways; virtual retreats, virtual zoom calls, virtual wine nights, a phone call. Go and connect, create that connection. That was a big, big 2020 business and life lesson.

Creating Boundaries

The next thing I want to dive into, and this may make you cringe potentially, It's something that I definitely spent my first few years in my business really struggling with, and it was creating boundaries and that we can't have too many boundaries. I've truly learned and what I believe to be true is we can not have enough boundaries. Now, in 2020, a lot of us were pushed to work remotely. I was already working from home, so it really wasn't too much of a shift for me, but my boyfriend started to work from home too. Most of the world started to work from home. So, we were stuck at home. Couldn't really go to the gym, couldn’t really go out to eat at restaurants, basically quarantining for quite a few months at home. What starts to happen is things start to blend together. Your life, your business, everything kind of becomes one. There's no line. There's no straight black and white line of, this is business time and this is life time. Things start to just kind of mesh together. I know this happened, I was talking to clients about this throughout the year, friends, with family, because it wasn't just the entrepreneur space. It was also people in a nine to five. So this is a big thing. A lot of us went through trying to create those boundaries so that we could still feel some type of slim normalcy when it came to work, business, life, and just creating those boundaries.

Something that I've done, because it's so easy to get, I don't want to say sucked into business, but sucked into your business because it's your passion. I absolutely love my business. And if I wanted to, I could literally spend 24 hours a day in my business. There's always more to do, however, that’s not very healthy for me as a human, for me as a business owner to be in my business 24 hours a day. I know that my business can grow without me needing to be in it 24 hours a day. So creating boundaries. Me, I am fortunate enough, I have my own office in the house. I can shut the door when it's work time, and then I can leave the office and have the life space, when I have that separation. So creating boundaries. Stick to your workdays, your work time. If you want your workday to be ending around 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM, stick to it, stick to those boundaries that you've got in your business and that you've got in your life. If you used to go to happy hour, once a week with some friends, push it to a virtual happy hour, we get to create those boundaries, stick to those boundaries. If prior to all of this, you were sticking to your boundary of not responding to clients on the weekends, but you started to see yourself responding to clients more and more because Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all started to blend together. That blurriness that I was talking about just a few minutes ago. Get back to that boundary that you had initially. Get back to that so that you're a little more clear on what is life and what is business. I do everything that I can to really separate the two. All of my emails or my laptop, all of my work stuff, business things are on my laptop. I don't have that stuff coming to my phone. Right. I want to have some type of separation with my business and my life just so that I don't always get... I'm going to say the word sucked back in because it's really easy to. Especially right now with everyone staying home in quarantine, it's really, really easy to do so. So that was another big lesson.

Being Open to Pivoting and Adapting

Then the next big lesson was really being open to pivoting and really being open to adapting. Because of my past experience in engineering, something that I did a lot, was pivoting and adapting. It's something that I've always been really good at, being able to pivot and adapt. That's something I've definitely helped my clients with over this past year as well, because you, as a business owner, as a CEO, you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know the future, can't predict it. So you get to be open to pivoting and adapting when we need to.

For example, we typically have our entire year planned out. Literally the entire sales calendar year planned out, but we know that if we want to, or if we need to, we can pivot. We know we can make some changes to our launch calendar or sales calendar if we need to. As something that's going on in the world, hello COVID, evaluate, ask yourself if anything needs to pivot. Does your messaging need to pivot? I know for us, our messaging did pivot quite a bit once COVID kind of came into light and we realized it wasn't going away anytime soon. Our messaging pivoted a little bit. Be open to adapting, be open to that pivoting. Whether it's what you're going to launch in a few months, if it's a program you're planning to create, and it just doesn't make sense anymore because of something else going on. Just really be open to pivoting and know that there is no right or wrong. You can always pivot. If something just isn't feeling aligned. If something isn't exciting you, as much as it used to, you're allowed to pivot. I have pivoted quite a bit in my business over the past, what is it now, six years, almost seven years that I've been in the entrepreneurial space. And you're allowed to, you're most definitely allowed to.

Collaborating

I definitely want to dive into other big lessons that I've learned over the years. They weren't necessarily 2020 lessons, but they're big lessons that I always want to bring up because I don't want you to forget about them. Collaboration has been very, very big over these past few years and we can't necessarily get in person to collaborate anymore. We can still collaborate virtually. And so collaboration, the big, big, big thing that I highly recommend you continue to do as we go into 2021. And of course, 2022, 2023. Oh my goodness. It's so weird saying those numbers, they feel like so far away yet they're so close. But collaborate, hire mentors. Have as much fun and play into your business and your life as you can.

Add More Play, Celebrate and Reflect

I wrote a new post for Instagram. So I wrote a post yesterday to go out next week, all about adding more play. Something that I believe to be true is the more fun I have in life, the more fun I have in business, the more money I make. Right now we're not exactly able to do everything we would like to when it comes to play and fun. I know date night and going out to arcades and going to the mountain to ski and just different things like that were a big part of my play. Travel was a huge part of my play over the past few years, and we're not really able to do that right now with everything going on, but we can still add play in other ways. So get creative, get creative when it comes to adding different things into your life and your business. Like the last thing I want is for your business to take over your life because you are more than your business.

Please add some play in, whether it's a new hobby, whether it's a new TV show, a new book, a massage maybe that you book, or a spa day getaway, going to the hot tub, having a staycation. Something that you can fill your cup, add play in. Please, please, please. Because in order to create this impact in the world that you're here to create, you get to fill your cup. So play more, have fun. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate, celebrate every single week. Inside of all of my programs, we're celebrating wins, big wins, small wins, life wins, business wins because we get to celebrate more. A big thing that I didn't do my first few years in entrepreneurship was I didn't celebrate enough. I did not celebrate enough. I highly recommend it. Celebrate more. Everything that you can celebrate, celebrate, celebrate, even the little ones, because we tend to overlook those things and we get to celebrate. You've come so far. You were here, you're creating such an incredible impact. You are reading this right now, let's celebrate that together. I'm writing this at 10 in the morning right now, Pacific time, so I'm not going to cheers you, but I do have a cup of tea. So I'll cheers you a cup of tea and celebrate you even for being here, which means you are taking the initiative to work on yourself, to work on your business. That is a huge win and we get to celebrate even things like that. So celebrate and also reflect. I have learned so much just by reflecting on different launches and why things went in certain ways. Different activities, my business, different pivots, my business.

We love to reflect every single quarter on, here were our goals, and this is what actually happens. You know, what do we think happened? Why did this happen? We're looking at all the data, all the numbers. We're looking to see how our audience is feeling. And what opportunities there are. There's always opportunities for more for growth. There's always more, that's something I truly believe, there's always more. So reflect, and ask yourself, what is it that I want more of, what I want to create more of, and let's put an action plan together. You can create it. We get to also reflect to see where the gap potentially could be, because there's always opportunity to get more of what you want.

So those are some of my 2020 business and life reflections. Just the importance of community, the importance of connection, the importance of boundaries, and really just being open to pivoting and to adapting and know that you get to collaborate, you get to ask for help. You get to hire mentors. You get to have fun. You have to play. You get to celebrate and also reflect. I'm so excited for you to be now stepping into 2021 because 2021 can be your best year yet. There's always more, there's always more we get to create. And there are so many exciting things coming at you in 2021. I cannot wait for you and the incredible things that you are about to create in this world.

Thank you for hanging out with me today. I'm always going to be your biggest cheerleader. So you taking time out of your day to hang with me truly means the world to me. I would love to know about any business or life lessons you’ve learned throughout this year. Tag me on Instagram @TheMelissaLin and I'll see you next time!

Topics we cover include:

The Importance of Community
Creating connections
Creating Boundaries
Being open to pivoting and adapting
Add in more play,celebrate and reflect

And so much more!

Times to check out:

(7:19) The Importance of Community

(10:26) Creating connections

(12:24) Creating Boundaries

(16:22) Being open to pivoting and adapting

(19:15) Add in more play,celebrate and reflect

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