Confidence Classic: Become RADICALLY Confident With Lisa Bilyeu Co-Founder Of Quest Nutrition & Impact Theory

0:00Without your mindset, without your health, without your belief system, without how you show up, what really matters. Do you have a dream, do you have a goal, and every day, are you act in the long term, for the long term. because for me, for a year, I couldn't have mental clarity at all. And so you want to talk about how I actually hindered my mission because I wasn't able to show up. So I want people to really think about that so they don't get into that overwhelm or that burnout because burnout is real, overwhelm is real. And I had to unwind it. Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

0:40I'm ready for my close-up. Did you know I recently celebrated having created 450 episodes of this podcast? And we are still going strong. Thank you for listening. That is a lot of topics and amazing guests. So I thought I would put together a few of my listener favorites for the month of September as bonuses on Thursdays to help you catch up on what you may have missed. So you can keep growing your confidence with these confidence classics. Let me know what you think.

1:16I cannot wait for you to meet my guest today. She went from unfulfilled housewife to groundbreaking entrepreneur. Lisa Bilyeu is the co-founder of Billion, with a B, dollar brand, Quest Nutrition, and now co-founder and president of Impact Theory Studios, a revolutionary digital first studio with inspirational content viewed over half a billion times. A prominent figure in the women's empowerment space, Lisa is respected for her energetic, no BS approach to mindset, health, wellness, and business, and has recently announced the release of her first book, Radical Confidence. Lisa, I'm so excited to have you here today.

1:57Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. So excited. Oh my gosh, you have the best energy from the word jump. It's like, you are so my people. I'm so happy you're here. All right, let's get into your backstory because people see you. And if you don't know Lisa yet, you're going to be so excited to get to meet her today. People see you as at the top of your game, billionaire, you know, she's made it. When you started out back when you were a kid, did you have this kind of big picture vision for your life? Yes and no. It's such a tricky question because I don't know if you remember when you're a kid and you have like these big, grand, audacious dreams and no one's squashed them yet.

2:36And when I say no one, I mean yourself too, right? Like how many times we squash our own dreams now as adults. But when you're a kid, there's just like this moment, at least for me, there was this moment of like dream big, dream audacious. And it was like, I want to be a movie director and I want to be the first woman to win an Academy Award. Like that was my dream. Now being, you know, let's say seven year old Greek girl from North London. And my grandmother found it her duty to tell me on a constant basis that basically my future was already already written for me by God. And that that meant that I was going to be a stay at home wife and a mother and that was going to be my future.

3:13and looking back now it was like such common subliminal messages I was getting from childhood from my grandmother telling me this literally I would fall on the floor scrape my knee she would pick me up and in her like sick Greek accent she'd be like oh you'll be okay by the time you get married like she actually meant to console me like literally no no you're gonna be okay don't worry by the time you get married you'll be fine and when you think about what that does to a little seven-year-old, right? Like the subliminal messaging that your life is predicated on being married, that the end goal is marriage.

3:47You start to kind of see where we all get our belief systems from and how we take that into adulthood. And so even though when you're saying, you know, like all these big things that I've done, it's like, I still have that insecure, negative voice in my head that I had when I was a kid that says, who do you think you are to go after it. You're supposed to be a wife and a mother and you're supposed to be staying at home with your kids and with your family and with your husband. And I ended up having to decide that that wasn't fulfilling for me, but that was after eight years of being stuck because I had the mindset that I was taught when I was a kid that I would end up being a stay at home wife.

4:27And so when I found myself in it, even though I had big, massive audacious dreams as a kid, we all end up falling into things and we say oh my god I blinked and all of a sudden but you never just blink when you really think about it it's little choices that you make day after day year after year that all stack up and so in hindsight it was a I blinked in eight years I'd been a stay at home wife supporting my husband but looking back I go it was little decisions that I made that even though I had dreams when I said well I'm just going to help out my husband for a year well I'm just going to support him for another six months well it's only until and the problem that we've I'm finding and so many people is we do some it's just going to be for this long I'm going to go after my dream when when I have the confidence when I have the resources when I have the time when I have the energy when my kids are older when my husband is happy and I did that for eight years and so now looking back in hindsight when I talk about dreams and I talk about how we end up where we are, it's our responsibility, but we end up giving up on them.

5:34And we assume who was I to dream so big. And when I was in those moments where I was a stay at home wife, and I had this loving husband, had a roof over my head, I literally had like the man of my dreams. I was telling myself each day as I was miserable, well, who am I to complain? Because I have a roof over my head. And you end up getting stuck because you tell yourself a narrative of, but I'm so lucky that I'm here. And what I realized is we all have the opportunity and the right to be head over heels on some part of our lives and absolutely utter miserable in others and want to ask for more and have the freaking right to ask for more.

6:17So kind of climb this full circle with your question is I was told as a kid that I would end up somewhere. And because of that belief system, even though I had the dreams, the belief system took me into a life that wasn't mine. And I ended up stuck there because I didn't feel like I had the right to ask for more. Wow. This is so powerful. And for everyone that's listening that already knows my story, I hope you're going to see this. Here's what I find super interesting, Lisa, is that for me, I had that moment when I was in corporate America, I was in the C-suite, you know, I was making big money, getting all the accolades and everyone's saying, you're so lucky.

6:52You're so blessed to have made it. So I would go home at night and think, why do I feel miserable? I don't feel happy in what I'm doing. Oh my gosh, I've got to stop it. I should be grateful. Focus on gratitude, Heather. Be grateful for where you are. You're healthy. You have an amazing job. You provide for your son. Things are going great. And I would block that noise out. That noise was my calling, by the way, right? I'd block that noise out because I thought I'm not being grateful. Here's what's different about you and I. I got fired, which that was my wake up call moment to push me out the window to say, kid, you got to go deal with what this calling is for you.

7:25And I'm always so interested to understand. I didn't have the courage or I didn't have the confidence to make that jump on my own. I had to get pushed. What was that catalyst for you that got you to stand up one day after eight years and say, today's the day I'm changing things? Oh, Heather, this is so my jam because you're so right. Because that's the thing. I didn't hit rock bottom. And girl, that is where people stay. Because you don't hit rock bottom, you end up what I call purgatory of the mundane. Your life is just mundane enough. It doesn't hit rock bottom. So it doesn't like jolt you into action like you, right?

8:01Where it's like, oh my God, well, where am I going to pay my next bill? Well, screw it. I might as well do this because I've got nothing to lose, right? So many people do that. I didn't have that almost. So for eight years, I was like, well, I can't ask for more. and that's where we get stuck. And I live in literal perpetual fear that people will stay there for the rest of their lives because they may not have a moment where they hit rock bottom, which is exactly why, by the way, COVID shook people awake because to most people, that was their rock bottom. They're like, oh my God, this is life.

8:32Let me make a change. But what about the people that don't? And there's so many of us, there's so many of us that don't have that. And so for me, my husband was miserable chasing money. So I was like, I'm just going to support him. We're going to try and make movies. So that was like, I convinced myself it was for the bigger dream, right? We're going to make movies. We're going to make movies. So my husband went out to work. I was like, I'm going to support everything else. So we're going to do the Steve Jobs effect. You're going to go out and I'm going to make all of the decisions for you. Cause Steve Jobs basically said the way he reason why he always wore those black turtlenecks was so that he only had to make a certain amount of decisions in a day.

9:10And why the hell would he waste it on clothes? So I said, let's do that, babe. You're going to go to work. I'm going to decide everything else. I'm going to cook for you. I'm going to put your clothes out. Literally, he would go to the gym. He'd come back. His clothes were waiting. He'd get in the shower. He'd come out of the shower. His towel was waiting. He'd head off to work. His clothes were waiting. His lunch was waiting. Like I took it seriously. And I'm like, I can do this. It's 12 months. But what ends up happening, 12 months led to three years, four years, five years. By the sixth year, it's like now you're like, well, I'm invested.

9:40I can't turn around now because like, does that mean those six years for a waste? So you almost like double down. And if you play, if you bet gambling, but it's like you double down because you're like, I don't want this six years to be a waste. So here I am on what I call this hamster wheel now where I'm just like supporting him, supporting him. And he became miserable. And in those moments at the eight year mark, I was like, I don't care about money. I don't care about making movies. All I care about is actually having my husband back. And so what does that look like? And so that started the idea of Quest Nutrition.

10:14So him and his business partners basically said, if we were to do something predicated on passion and a mission, what would that be? So my husband comes back home one day, all right, babe, you're right. I'm miserable. You're miserable. We're going to start a new company. It's going to be a protein bar company. Do you mind helping out? Helping out. Now, what I didn't expect is the company would grow at 57 ,000 % and go from me helping out shipping bars on my living room floor and walking to the post office on a daily basis to literally two years later, I had 40, four, zero employees underneath me.

10:48I had 10 ,000 square foot of just shipping department and we were shipping out millions and millions of dollars worth of product every day. Now, I had zero experience, zero. So at first it was the reason why I changed was if quest goes under, I lose my house. So it became very easy for me to face things that I didn't know what I was doing, to face the fear, to face all the insecurity that we all have that keep us stuck. I almost didn't have that. Thank God. And the reason why I say thank God is because it didn't stop me. Every time I hit a hurdle, I'm like, all right, Lisa, you can crumble right now and lose your house.

11:24or you can learn this, get back up, figure it out and keep going. And so in those moments where once upon a time, the insecure Lisa, the person that didn't feel good about herself, that wanted to protect her ego, wouldn't have taken action. I didn't have the privilege of doing that. So I just had to keep going. So all of my inadequacies that I found myself in every single day, I had to figure out. All the skill sets I didn't know, I had to build. All the insecurities I had, I had to face. And so in growing Quest, in my evolution, it was I had zero confidence, but I kept going. And that's where I realized the massive difference between having confidence and waiting for the confidence to get going, to reach your goal, or having the radical confidence, which means you feel the fear, you're totally inadequate, but you put in a plan and do it anyway.

12:17And that is what is radical confidence. And radical confidence is what got me from there to where I am now. It's not that I'm confident. So you even said, oh my God, you're so confident. I have a crippling voice in my head that wants to hold me back every step of the way, every step. I just don't let her dictate how I act. She's still there. I just don't listen to her. You brought up so many great points that I want to make sure everybody heard. Number one, you went through this eight-year period knowing you weren't living your best life, you weren't living your calling. And finally, one day you had that conversation with your husband.

12:51I made a decision. I just want you back. How does this look? I'm not sure how it looks, but I'm putting it out to you into the universe. I'm communicating something's not working. And that really started changing this whole process for you, which led to Quest, led to you working together, led to you stepping into your confidence. So again, you put it out there that something had to change, number one. Two, the other thing you mentioned that I find really interesting is sunk cost fallacy. And for anyone that doesn't really understand what that means, so often, whether it be in a relationship or in a business, we say, I've got 10 years in on this.

13:23I know I'm not happy. I can't walk away now because that's basically saying the last 10 years I was wrong or that it's a waste or there's got to be, I can't do that now. There's too much invested in this. And sunk cost fallacy so interesting to me. I've done it in relationships before, you know, I'm four years into this. I can't give up now. It makes absolutely no sense. Every time I've had that internal dialogue with myself. And of course, eventually something will happen or, you know, I'll have an epiphany that I do need to make that change. And after I do, I have this moment where I sit down and say, yet again, here I am again, because so many of us have patterns in our life.

13:59You know, I stayed too long. And so that's dialogue I'm constantly aware of now. I don't allow myself to say, just because I was in something for a year or two years, doesn't mean it was too long. You know what? If 10 years ago was the right time, now is the only time pull the trigger. Yeah, it's so true. I go to like, is it still moving you towards your goal? Yes or no? So actually there's two parts. Is it still moving you towards your goal? And is it still fulfilling? Because those things sometimes, right? It's like, well, no, we get, you know, especially in entrepreneurial world these days, it's like, you know, be on your grind, hustle, hustle, work hard, move forward.

14:32And so the question is yes. work hard but are you working smart and are you working in the right direction it's like think of you know I love analogies so just thinking about going in the car and it's like you want to drive to New York right but you actually take the wrong freeway and you keep going and you're just like but I'm on this freeway now I met I should it will eventually get me to New York but do you want it to take 10 times longer what if you now realize actually I don't want to go to New York anyway we're like having these assessments of am I still on the right path do I still want to go to New York, all these assessments, just because you're one year in doesn't mean that you shouldn't.

15:08In fact, that's when you should. I wish I did that in eight years. I didn't do that even once. Me and my husband, we play this game called no bullshit. What would it take? And so the no bullshit, what would it take to X, Y, and Z? So let's say your goal is to build a company and And you're like, okay, no bullshit. What would it take? It would take me seven years to make a hundred thousand dollars. And in that path, I will have to give up on spending Saturdays with my partner and I can no longer get my hair done. Like that's what no bullshit. What would it take mean to get to your goal? Actually refine.

15:48Where are you going? No bullshit. What is it going to take to get you there? And then are you willing to do it? Because that's the thing, right? Like for you with your C-suite, if you're just like, I want to run this company. Great. Now you've got the goal. You know what you want to do. How do you get that? Okay. Well, I need to fill this position. I need to work my way up the ladder. Okay, great. What skillsets are you going to build to work your way up the ladder? Now, when you're in the process each year, you need to assess, are you having fun? Is it a life you still want? You have to replay the no bullshit.

16:17What would it take? Because now your goal still may be, I want to be to the top, but you know what? I actually really want to have a partner. And I've given up ever, I've given up dating for four years. And the truth is, this may not be the life I want anymore. I want to date. I want to go out there. Okay. So now maybe you've assessed your goal of running the company may not align with your day to day. And now you better reassess, does your goal still match the life you want? And I think that to your point of how do you make sure you're not wasting your years is the reassessment of Is your goal still your goal?

16:54And are your acts on a day-to-day filling your heart? Because if it's not, do you actually want to get to your goal in the first place?

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20:39I like that idea of revisiting and constantly reevaluating what those goals are and accepting that what was working for you even two years ago just might not be working anymore. And that's okay. I remember just growing up that it was this one path and it was corporate America and that's all I ever thought of, right? So when I was in it, it was tunnel vision. I never thought, what is available to me outside? Is there anything available to me outside of this? And it's so important that we say, we don't have to check the box and go to college and go to corporate America and get this prize. We can actually instead pick our head up and say, what suits me now, just like that conversation that you had with your husband.

21:19And I so appreciate you sharing that. Now, a lot of people might not know, Lisa, that you've had personal struggles along this journey. Can you take us through what some of your health challenges were and how that impacted your confidence? It's one of these stories that when people hear, it's like one of the worst things that's ever happened to me. And I want people right now to think about what that thing is for them. Because here's the thing, I had moments where I'm like, this could potentially mess me up mentally for the rest of my life. And in the moments I knew that, like, I was like, my health got so bad that it could change fundamentally who I am as a person.

22:00And in real time, I remember thinking, these moments basically dictate who you are going to be. And do I sit there and think, why me? Why did this happen? Or can I say, how is this the best thing that's ever happened? And so I'm about to tell you a story where it's like, I could have been on my deathbed, almost rushed to hospital. And it's like, it's still the best thing that's ever happened to me. And that is a change in perspective. So I'd worked really hard. Me and my husband were building quests. Every time it's hard, you know what it's like building businesses, doing things on your own. It's just so difficult.

22:34You have a million reasons why you should quit. And in fact, you have a million and one reasons why you should quit. And to keep going, to make sure that I wasn't allowing my mindset, the who do you think you are, you know, quit now while you're ahead, Lisa, or no one believes you can do it. You should be, stay at home. Like all these things that I was battling, I need a motivation. I need that something that's going to keep me going. So me and my husband on days when quest got really freaking hard, we would take our little bang up car and we would just drive around Beverly Hills. And at the time we had a hole in our exhaust because we spent every penny into the company.

23:10So we didn't even put it into the car. So when you drove over 60 miles an hour, you had like the steering wheel was one of those ones that would rattle and like shake. So we would drive around Beverly Hills on these really exhausting days when we were just trying to stay motivated and we would choose which houses we love. And I would point out the Mediterranean houses and he would point out the ones because he comes from Tacoma, Washington. So his dream as well to live in Beverly Hills, we both had that dream. So this was our thing. And every couple of weeks to a month, we would drive around Beverly Hills and dream about the house that we would get eventually when Quest did well.

23:43Cut to Quest actually does well. And Quest actually goes from zero to a billion dollar company in five years. And we're announced as the second fastest growing company in North America. I mean, it's crazy. The dreams come true. And we're finally looking for a house. And we finally find one in Beverly Hills. It's the freaking dream come true. You're like, you can't write this shit. It's so amazing. We buy the house of our dreams. Like everyone, you can imagine that dream coming true. On the day of celebration, I'm a 90s girl. I love hip hop. So I'd always envision I'm going to get the bottle of champagne.

24:17I'm going to pour it down me under a waterfall. Like I'm just like, let's do this, baby. So we get the champagne. We've actually got a waterfall. It's the freaking dream come true. I take the champagne. I've got my sexy bikini on. I go to take a, you know, a gulp. And like that. it felt like my gut erupted. This was six years ago. And my life since that day has never been the same. For over a year since that day, for a year, I could barely eat anything. And I had lost, maybe I was probably 20 pounds lighter than I was. I mean, I was so malnutritioned. I couldn't stand up for longer than five minutes at a time.