 You are here. Here you are. Welcome to WordCAP. I'm so excited to be here. Now the question I have for you today is, do you feel like you are where you should be or where you want to be right now? A lot of times when we think about success, and I consider myself to be a fairly ambitious woman, we tend to think of success as being kind of somewhere over there and not exactly where we are right now. And a lot of times when we think about success, we see it as going from point A where we are right now to point B where we want to go. And raise your hand if you feel like you've ever had this goal or this big dream of yours. Maybe it was in business or building a new website on WordPress, and you said, okay, I'm just gonna do this. It's gonna be straightforward, one, two steps, and there you were. Raise your hand if it was that easy. Okay, so we're all in agreement here that sometimes getting to where we want to go is not the most straightforward path. But at the same time, I feel like there is so much learning that happens along the way, and that's what I'm here to talk about today. When I was growing up, we were in a two-story home, and we had this spiral staircase, and at the time, you know, I was just a little kid learning how to crawl and climb, and I was climbing around this spiral staircase, and my mom was a little bit worried because the way this was set up, it wasn't like a straightforward staircase where you have a banister and you have a wall, and there's no way to fall down the stairs on the sides. This spiral staircase actually had a space where you could fall over at every single step. So as you can imagine, my mom was a little bit worried when I was learning how to climb those stairs, but I would just look up at the staircase and see the top, and I just loved kind of climbing those stairs. Now at the time, that didn't really, you know, mean much in my life, but now looking back, I know that that staircase and the analogy that it has in my life in my business was going to be everything. So I first started making websites when I was 12 years old. I still remember getting our first computer that was hooked up to the Internet, and I was so pumped. I didn't even realize I could make my own websites, but as soon as I did, I was on it. The first few websites I built were all about cartoons, and it was awesome, because I could connect with other young teenagers just like myself who were also interested in cartoons. So back then, it was all HTML coding and notepad. There was no WordPress at the time, and there was a lot of learning involved. Now fast forward a couple more years. I'm in high school and one of my teachers asks me if I would design him a business card for his side business. Sure, I said I was so excited. I just love being creative, and I'm like, okay, I'm all in, let's do it. So that weekend, I worked extra hard on this business card design, and I would send it to him for feedback, and he would reply by email, and it was like, wow, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And so on Monday morning, I was so excited to go into my class and hand in the final business card and see what would happen and how much he liked it. Well, this is interesting. My teacher was not really interested in paying me for my work. So at this point, I didn't quite know what to do, and because he was my chemistry teacher, and chemistry was not my very favorite subject, I didn't want to put up a big fight about it or make any big fuss, so no problem. I just stayed quiet, and university applications were coming up. I figured, okay, maybe this will pay off in some other way, who knows. So I just kept quiet, but a couple of weeks later, that teacher had gone on to speak to our principal and some of the other members of my school committee, and they asked me and another student to design our school's website. In fact, we got written up all over the town and on our school newsletter as being these website wizards where we designed the school's website. And to be perfectly honest, this was not an easy job because it had a ton of pages. Again, there was no WordPress yet, so we did a lot of hand coding and a lot of hand designing for that project, and it took us months to make it happen. So after it was all said and done, we finally got paid for the project, which felt amazing. But again, the teachers were like, oh, you know, you're still students, we're not going to pay you full rate. So again, I was kind of like, huh, all right, this is not the best experience ever. And to be perfectly honest, they kept the website up way too long after I graduated. But fast forward a couple more years, and now I'm going to university and I'm studying software engineering. This is the very hardcore, low-level programming stuff that I never had to touch when I was doing websites. So this is a whole different ballgame. I was studying with 100 men and 10 women, and there's a lot of programming going on. Luckily, though, we had some great internship opportunities, and I got to go work on Wall Street as an intern in Silicon Valley at some startups. And I got to learn a ton about development, software design, specifications, testing, and all kinds of really deep and interesting stuff. Now, when it came time to graduate, I was really lucky because I had a job offer to go work on Wall Street. And everything in my life up to this point was leading to that direction. And I remember being on Wall Street and having worked there and having seen everybody's lifestyle. It was very busy, very hectic, a lot of stress. And there was just a part of me that was saying, Natalie, if you go down this path, you will wake up in 40 or 50 years and look back and wonder what happened to your life. So everybody in my life at this point was so excited. They were like, Natalie, you have this great opportunity. My parents were like, you've been working so hard your whole life to get to this point, such an awesome opportunity. They're going to move you to New York. And by the way, I'm from a really small town in Canada, so that was a huge deal. And all of my peers were going off to their jobs at Google and Facebook and on Wall Street. And I was like, okay, you know, everybody's on this kind of treadmill path, but I'm not feeling called. So I took a step back and I said, okay, I'm going to listen to that deep voice inside that's saying that's not for me. And I'm going to start my first business. So that's exactly what I did. I turned down that big, fancy job offer on Wall Street and I started my business right out of college. And as you'll see, there's a bit of a recurring theme here because I was still interested in cartoons. But this time, the way I did it was following my passion. So at that point, I had been reading a lot of WordPress blogs about business and following your passion. And I definitely feel like that had planted the seed for me around what I wanted to do with my business. So this time I kind of felt like, okay, you know, I didn't have such a great experience in the tech space. Maybe I should just throw that all away and follow my passion, which was all about healthy eating and nutrition. So I did that and I started my blog. I built my own website on WordPress. I designed everything and things started to pick up speed. It was also a bit of a training ground because I didn't know anything about business. So I learned how to market myself, how to actually, you know, sell things online and how to actually run a business. And what ended up happening is that people kept coming up to me and saying, Natalie, who built your website? And how are you making money and how are you marketing yourself and how is this actually a business? So for a really long time, I actually resisted all of those people who were coming up to me and I was like, no, I don't do tech stuff. I'm sorry, I am purely in the nutrition space. Even though I was all self-taught in nutrition and I had a ton of training in the tech space. So eventually I decided, you know, if people kept coming up to me and maybe there is something here and I should pay attention. So I opened up my shingle and as soon as I said, okay, I'll design websites for people on WordPress, that quickly turned into a six-figure business. And I was like, okay, clearly there's something here. Maybe I should keep going in this way. So that's exactly what I did. And this time I had traveled back onto this spiral staircase and I kind of felt like I was back to square one. Because when I had done websites in high school, obviously I didn't have as much experience as I did now because this time I had run my own business. I could see things from a different perspective and I had a lot more experience charging for what I was doing and that was made all the difference. So if ever you felt in your life where you've gone back to square one or like this isn't exactly where you thought you would be, the good thing about the spiral staircase analogy is that you will revisit things in your life, but the good thing is that every time you do, you're coming at it from a different perspective higher up on the spiral. So you're bringing all these awesome experiences in your life that you can use and implement to do even better, even if it feels like it's the same old thing. So at this point, I knew that I was on to the next level of my spiral staircase. Now things started to pick up very quickly in my web design business. In fact, I had to hire other developers and collaborate with other designers and I just couldn't really handle things on my own anymore. And at this point, I had so many clients that I had basically become a full-time project manager. Has anybody been here before? Yeah, a couple of people raising their hands. Yeah, so I realized, okay, I started this business, I have a lot going for me, things are picking up speed, but it's not exactly what I wanted to build. So I took another step back and I said, okay, what can I do differently and what is there that I could offer that's maybe a little bit less project management intensive? And that's around the same time people started coming to me and asking for consulting services and asking for my advice on their websites and their projects and their digital strategy. So one of the first clients I took on as a consultant client was Andrea Nakayama. She's a holistic nutritionist coach and she's mostly in the functional nutrition space. And at the time, her business was growing, it was kind of ramping up steam as well. And what we did is we put together a launch for a new program called Holistic Nutrition Lab. She made $139,000, and it not only made her a ton of money in her business, but it also helped position her as the expert that she was in her field, and it doubled her email list. So after I realized, wow, okay, I have a lot that I can offer here, maybe there's actually some value in consulting too. So I kind of phased out of the web design and I started taking on more consulting clients. So at this point, again, things were starting to change and shift gear and every single time I felt like I was taking a step around the spiral staircase and I was adding more expertise and all kinds of good stuff to my business skills. Now the reason I was able to have such a great effect on my consulting clients is because I had been behind the scenes on so many of my web clients' businesses. So I never could have gotten to those consulting gigs without having been through the web design phase. And that's what I really love about the spiral staircase is that every single step that you take is going to help you go forward and do even more amazing things. Now there's a couple of things that I've learned on the spiral staircase and it's really easy to look back to your spiral staircase and find the patterns. It's a lot harder looking forward to see exactly how things are going to come together in the big vision of your place you want to go to, but there are some things I want to share about what I've learned along my path that will hopefully help you today. So there are three things that I've found that we all do when we're traveling across the spiral staircase. So the first one is tuning in, the second one is teaming up, and the third one is taking off. All right, so let's talk about tuning in. So just like when I was faced with this decision point to decide whether I went the Wall Street path or started my own business, there was a point where I had to stop listening to all the outside voices and start trusting what was deep inside of me. And I think it's really hard, especially in our hyper-connected digital world, to quiet all the outside noise and really listen to what's going on inside. Especially with all the amazing blogs, all the amazing content, videos, you know, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, there's all kinds of stuff coming at us all the time. So to me, being able to tune in is not only a great skill to have, it's necessary. Otherwise what will end up happening is you'll be going up your spiral staircase and find yourself somewhere that you didn't want to be. And I think that's pretty much happened to all of us at one point or another, where we feel like success has to look a specific way or we're building our lives around somebody else's version of success and, you know, goodness in life. So it really starts with trusting that inner knowing that you have inside of you. And even though it feels uncomfortable, so if you felt like, okay, I've had this inkling, how do I know if it's fear or how do I know if it's something telling me to do this? Because a lot of times you will have times where it's really uncomfortable to make that tough decision to say no to something or to say yes to something else. So I'm going to share with you some of the ways that I've used to really know what's right and what's just kind of a distraction. Now, who here considers themselves to be a bit of an introvert? Just raise your hand. All right, so my people. I love it. Great. So I think that all of us as introverts, and if you're not an introvert, that's okay. But I feel like we all have a very rich inner world. We have these amazing imaginations. We have tons of ideas. And we basically kind of live by ourselves in our own little worlds. And what I want you to have today and leave with is the ability to tap into that creativity and those ideas and all of that good stuff inside of you and bring it out into the world. Because I really feel like that's what people are missing. So there's a time in my business a couple of years ago where I realized I had kind of a month off where I didn't have any big projects. I didn't have a ton of client work. And I said, okay, what could I do to move my business forward right now? And without necessarily focusing on making more money. So what I thought was, okay, I know that if I wanted to build my list more, that would actually help build my business faster. So I decided to set aside a whole month where all I would do is focus on building my email list in my audience. So what I put together was called the 30-day list building challenge. And it was a totally free challenge. It was really just a challenge to myself originally to go from 15,000 people on my email list to 30,000 in a month. So it was being pretty ambitious there. But I decided, okay, I'm going to issue this challenge. And if other people want to join me, they're welcome to do so. And what I did is I sent out some emails, I recorded some videos, and I really shared my journey of building my list during those 30 days. Now the interesting thing was, you know, I did not double my list in 30 days. That was pretty ambitious. But what I did do is connect with people to build their list faster. And what they told me was they loved the idea, but they wanted more. They wanted me to do a daily video and a daily email. I said, okay, no problem, I can do that. So we re-ramped the program up. And again, this was totally free. And we put it together. And it was a 30-day challenge, one video a day, with all the steps that I used to build my list faster. And that literally took off by itself. And since then, we've more than tripled our email list. And I can definitely account much of that success to the 30-day challenge. And all of that came from listening to that little voice deep inside of me that was saying, you know what, if you don't have to worry about making money, maybe you should focus on building your list and connecting with more people. And then also balancing that with what other people wanted as well. So a lot of times, you know, you could say, okay, I want to become a basket weaver. But if nobody's buying baskets, it doesn't really matter, right? And so it's the same when it comes to business. And, you know, anything that you're doing on WordPress, you need to really figure out what's coming from deep inside of you, but also make sure that there's a market for it and there's people who want what you've got. So this is kind of where it comes into being able to have your own volition, your own ideas, and your own creativity, but also make sure that it's not going to be met by crickets. All right, so now I want you to ask yourself, how can you carve out time each and every week to tune into what's most important to you? Now when I say that, I don't mean that you have to start meditating or journaling or any of that stuff. In fact, it might be putting on some tunes in your office in the middle of the day and just rocking it out and just kind of moving your body. It could be going for a jog, taking a yoga class, whatever it is for you. Moving your body and really connecting to your body, in my opinion, is one of the best ways you can really tune into what's important and what's meaningful in your life. And one of the things that I found is that without meaning, it's really hard to keep going, no matter what it is that you're doing, and you'll probably not end up at your A to B position that you want to get in terms of success. And I have to tell you that in terms of meaning, I did not find a whole lot of it on Wall Street, but I have found a lot of it in my business working with incredible clients, and that's exactly what I want for you too. All right, let's talk about teaming up. So this is a picture of my husband and I, Robin Lee, on our wedding day, and we're frolicking in the fields. And so the reason I'm bringing up Robin is because recently, just about a year and a half ago, he was working really hard. We lived in New York City, and my business was starting to ramp up again and again. It was continuously growing, and he was burning out. He was working as a management consultant, and he was working crazy hours. I would barely see him. So finally, I sat him down and I said, Robin, honey, I'm making a lot more money than you are, and you're working crazy hours. So why don't you quit your job and join my company? Now, I don't know about you, but I can tell by the chuckles that that is a really tough thing for a man to hear, because a lot of guys, and I don't know if it's necessarily the case anymore today, but there's this feeling that you have to be the breadwinner. There's this feeling that you have to be the person that provides for the family, and Robin definitely had that conditioning and that connection, and I said, we can make it, we can change this paradigm, we can change the way the culture thinks of these things. Why don't you join me and let's create something together? So he did that, and at first we decided to work on a WordPress plugin together, and by the way, so he was doing management consultant, but we met in university, and we were both coders at the time, so that background was there already. So he said, okay, cool, I've done some programming before, I've never done any WordPress stuff, I haven't done it before. So I taught him everything I knew about the website of things, and he decided to work on an internal project, which we know we kind of just used ourselves and we weren't going to show it to the public, because we didn't know how it would turn out. So we started off with building a new membership site plugin for ourselves that we used to house our training programs. So that's what we did, and it worked pretty well, and I'll get back to the story in a quick minute. But what I want you to know is that you don't have to do it alone. Teaming up is huge, and I really recommend that you find allies in your life, and they don't have to be your spouse or your husband or anything like that, but having allies is huge, and I have to say that nothing that is of huge value in this world was ever done by just one single person. If you think of Stonehenge, for example, I can pretty much guarantee, even though I was not there, that it was not just one guy or one gal who put it all up together, right? So I like to say the same for anything that you're doing in your life or in your business or whether it's a web project, having allies and having other people on your team, whether it's literally a team or it's just collaborators, partners, peers, coaches, mentors, clients, all of those are people who are your allies and who are going to team up with you and help you make it even more awesome than it would have been just by yourself. So when it comes to teaming up and having allies, one of the things that I found to be really helpful is to think about this. None of us have got here by ourselves. I didn't get here by myself. There was the pilot on the plane, there was the flight attendants, all the people who made all the airline stuff happen, my Uber driver, and obviously I'm being very funny here, but at the same time, really all the people on my team and my business, all the mentors I've worked with, all of my clients, supporting me and cheering me on, even you guys, we're here because of you and I really feel like that's one of the things we forget, especially as introverts because we don't necessarily like to hang out too much with other people most of the time, even though it is such a big game changer and that's why I'm making such a big point about it here. So I wanted to kind of continue the story of my husband joining our company. So we decided to call our new company Ambition Ally because we're allies both in our life and marriage and also in business in the way that we like to be pretty competitive and ambitious together too. So we started off this company together and we were like, okay, let's kind of go down this plug-in path, we love WordPress, it's what we use for all of our websites and I've got more ideas than we have time to build stuff, so let's just get going. So he finally decided to join the company and we worked on that first internal plug-in together. Things were going great and things really started to pick up speed and I really realized how much we have of this amazing kind of co-creation process. So I tend to have tons of ideas of what we should do, how to market it, who it's for, what features to have and Robin is incredible when it comes to implementation and also support, which is huge, is anybody knows here. So one of the things I realized is that as I was going through my spiral staircase, he had his own spiral staircase too. So thinking about it as a bit of a double helix or DNA, we're both going through our own spiral staircases but they're kind of hooked up together now and I think it's true whether you're talking about your spouse or your family members or anybody else, they're on their path on their spiral staircase just as much as you are and sometimes it's the spiral staircase of a mentor where you're kind of following behind their steps or it's somebody on your team and they have their goals and their dreams of what they want to build in their life so thinking about that is really huge in my opinion because it helps you make better decisions for yourself and to really partner with somebody knowing that they're on their own journey and they're going to continuously improve as well. So I want to go back to how Robin and I met. So we met in college and we had a date where we had bubble tea, I don't know if you guys know that and it was really interesting because he was studying business and math and I was studying software engineering and on our very first date he asked me what do you want to do after you graduate and I just, you know, by then I kind of had already decided that I wanted to start a business so I said well I want to start a business and when I asked him what he wanted to do he was like, you know, I wish I had taken the software engineering program and I was like, well this is very interesting and his first answer or his first recommendation for me to start a business was to go to business school and I said thanks but I think I'll just start it without going to business school and it worked out great and in fact I think that's why we're still happily together and that building a business together has not affected our sex life too much which is great. So we've been able to really kind of use both sides of our skills and our strengths and that's been really helpful as our business continues to grow. That's on Twitter now. That's on Twitter now, perfect. He hates when I do that. I've done that before too. So I just wanted to briefly talk about what we ended up doing is we had that internal project that we had built for ourselves that we had been using behind the scenes on our website and we realized this is kind of too big of a project to launch as our first big thing. So we had had a lot of people over the years ask us how we built those gorgeous opt-ins on our website and what kind of pop-up plug-ins we used and a lot of times my recommendation for these people was going to be to go learn how to program and it's going to take you, you know, a while. If you want it to look really nice it's going to take some finicky, programming in CSS and PHP and all kinds of stuff. So I decided, okay, what if we could take that step out? What if we could have people who are not developers but maybe who have a design eye build their own beautiful gorgeous opt-ins and that's when we came up with Pop-Up Ally and by the way you can say it Ambitionally Pop-Up Ally is supposed to be flexible. So we decided to launch Pop-Up Ally and it had a free version and now we also have a premium version and it's all about the polite pop-up. So for those of you who really hate those annoying pop-ups on websites I'm totally there with you and that's actually why we built this one is because we wanted to have a more polite way to collect email opt-ins without really annoying your existing fans or even, you know, when you want to show it you don't have to show it. So that's the first project that we got and we've got over 10,000 downloads of our free version and tons of incredibly happy full premium versions users as well. Now the next thing we did is we finally packaged up our internal project and we made it available to the web and it's called Access Ally and it's all about making elegant WordPress websites available with membership and with learning and kind of progress and gamification and making all of that really, really fun for online learners. All right, so all that being said I want you to start thinking about where can you partner up and find allies in your life and business and they don't have to be, like I said, you know, somebody that you already know it might be somebody that you meet this weekend it might be somebody that you meant to follow up with but you haven't followed up with yet so just start thinking about that. All right, now we are on to taking off. So I love using the analogy of a roller coaster because taking off can get your heart beat racing it can get your palms all sweaty and it's not always the most comfortable thing in the world but it's really fun. So when your business takes off things start to accelerate and there's a lot more that you have to deal with than when it's just kind of going so-so in your business. So in my opinion, taking off is all about doing those scary things that you might be worrying about doing they're a little bit outside of your comfort zone but they make the biggest difference in your business and in your life. So these are the kinds of things that make everything come together. So for you, it could be making a crazy phone call that you're like, I'm so nervous I'm not sure how they're going to take this it could be writing a scary email it could be following up with somebody it could be asking to be a guest on a podcast asking to be a guest speaker it could be, you know, doing something crazy you've never done on a website before whatever it is for you. Now for me, that big thing came in my life just a couple of years ago and I decided to organize a conference. Now I had been wanting to organize a conference for many years and I kept putting it off just because the logistics are kind of complicated and there's a lot that goes into putting on a really big conference so there's a lot of fear and anticipation going on too but finally I said, okay, I'm going to set the date because once you set the date and you tell everybody it's happening you're still going back, right? You've got people showing up and even if you only have three people in the room you're still doing that event so that's exactly what I did and I set that date three months out from the time that I was starting to organize which I would never recommend by the way it did not give me a ton of time to get everything ready but it was really amazing we had 80 people show up in that room and they were so incredible the whole experience was amazing the event is called off the charts and we had, I think it was 78 women and two men so that was awesome so we put together this event and it really again changed the course of my business I was able to set myself apart in my market I was able to market completely differently and I also connected with these incredible speakers that I had as guest speakers at my event so again that was something that was so scary to me but once I set the date there was no turning back I had to market it, I had to find the space I had to get a videographer and a photographer and all those things that come together and I really think that setting the date is one of those things that works deadlines work for so many things so not just conferences if you're planning something so what I want you to think about right now is when you're going through your spiral staircase is there something that has been stopping you or that's kind of in the back of your mind as something that you should be doing but that you're just kind of not sure now's the right time or maybe when things calm down or you're a little bit less busy you would get around to doing because those are the kinds of things that can be game changers in your career and in your life and in your business and there will never be the perfect time to do them and that's the thing that I found to be so true just like with having kids or any major big project like that you have to make it happen you have to set the deadline announce it to the world and like I said it doesn't have to be a conference it could be reaching out to somebody and saying hey I would love to work with you or you should hire me I've actually had people do that and I did hire them or whatever it is for you it could just be making that sales call and asking for the sale those are the kinds of things that change the course of your life and in your business and by the way it does get easier just putting that out there so I want you to think to yourself right now what have you been avoiding because if there's something that is kind of in the back of your mind or it's kind of like niggling and you're like I really don't want to think about that right now Natalie don't bring it up and then I want you to write it down and think about it because that's probably the one thing that will change the course of your life and your business right now and like I said it's not like you're going to be completely done with everything this is a spiral staircase you're going to keep revisiting things and it doesn't have to be perfect the first time so with my off the charts conference last year we had 150 people and this year we're on track for about 200 or 250 so every year it gets easier things get better you gain some momentum and doing that first time is the hardest and yes your palms will be sweaty that's okay so now I want you to start thinking about your spiral staircase I've shared with you some of the things that I've had in my life and in my business but I want you to start looking back at some of the things that maybe you feel like are disjointed or it didn't really make sense in your life or in your business and kind of how they got you to where you are today because a lot of times we think you know I did this random thing maybe a college class that you took that didn't make sense or maybe it's an online class that you took that you're like man I never finished that and I don't know why sometimes those are the kinds of things that come back full circle and you don't quite know how they'll all fit in but they'll be exactly what you need for what you're doing next now I would love because we have such incredible WordPress savvy people here to link up and become allies with you so go and join us at www.meditationally.com and you can check out all of our WordPress plugins and stuff but that's not the point I really just want to connect with you there okay so as we're wrapping up here and looking off into the distance into the future this is my dog Millie by the way at the beach yes she has a fabulous life she really does so I want you to think about your life so far and I also want you to think about how you're going to get off into the future and I also want to make sure that you know that whatever it is that you're heading towards make sure that it's exactly what you want to be building and exactly what you're excited about because what you don't want to happen is to get there and realize oh wait I was on the staircase and stuff just like Natalie said but you know the staircase was the wrong one right so that's really huge and what I like to think about now is now that I have the software business now that I'm kind of where I am today I like to think about that younger me that was making that decision and think about it it would have been so much more natural for me to start a software business right out of college because that was my training but I never would have been to where I am today or nearly as successful as quickly because I wouldn't have known first of all what software to build who to sell it to, who wanted it how to price it, how to market it or any of that stuff so this whole spiral staircase was that business and this thing goes for Robin he had those inclinations around software from an early age and he went through his own spiral staircase and learned a ton about business so now that was able to kind of come back and partner in a brand new way so I hope that this was really helpful for you and I want to leave you with this everything that you have done in your life this far has led you to where you are today and is going to take you to where you're going thank you so much and please stay in touch with us