Confidence Classic: How to LET GO and LEVEL UP Your Life with Heather!

0:00Heather Monahan:It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Whether you need help covering payroll, managing cash flow, or investing in growth, you deserve better. That's why I recommend the small business marketplace Fundera, powered by NerdWallet. It's free, easy-to-use platform that lets you compare real financing offers from trusted lenders all in one place. Go to nerdwallet.com slash confidence to find the funding you deserve. Refresh your spring wardrobe with Quince.

0:43Heather Monahan:Go to quince.com slash confidence for free shipping and 365 day returns. Go to quince.com slash confidence for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash confidence. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. You go live, show off products and turn what you love into real income. Visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. You don't know what miracle could be waiting for you this afternoon. You need to start expecting miracles in your life and putting that vibe out there. You don't know who you're going to meet this afternoon at the grocery store. How can you sit there and tell yourself that you know you're going to be depressed for the next couple of months?

1:28That's not fact. That's a belief you're holding. There's no factual basis for that. You have to go through that uncomfortable, unknown period of letting go of mediocre to give yourself that chance to grab great. And when you do, you might find out great's waiting for you at the grocery store this afternoon. You don't know. But until you take that leap, you never will know. I'm 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. I'm ready for my close-up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week.

2:08Heather Monahan:We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me today. Okay, so today, as always, I'm always trying to do something different, as you know. And this week, I had the opportunity Ben Newman put on an event called the Mental Toughness Forum. It's at mental toughness forum.com and an incredible lineup of speakers. I was grateful to be one of the speakers, John Gordon, Ben Newman. There was at my let so many professional athletes.

2:49It was crazy, really incredible group of speakers, an amazing event. And we've gotten, it's so cool when you do these events online because people tweet out certain quotes that you have and they share them and you get to see what resonates with people. And so I'll actually read you a quote that I saw just people kept reposting and reposting and it made me so excited. Where's the one that I liked? No, that's not the one. Wait, I'm looking for it. Hang with me. Well, you're going to hear it in a second anyways, because I'm going to play the actual speech for you. It's 18 minutes long. See what you think.

3:24But it says how we show up for our kids and the people we care about in our life is how they in turn will show up in theirs. Heather Monahan. So it's funny because I don't even know what I'm saying half the time when I'm talking because I give so many speeches that I sort of have a rhythm. It's like, you know, Nike, just do it, right? You tie your shoes, you're not thinking about it. So sometimes when I see people sharing quotes that I've said, it's such a cool, surreal feeling because I say, oh my gosh, I don't even remember what story I was telling or what I was trying to impart when I shared that, but okay, I like that too.

3:58I'll keep it. Yes. So I'm going to play this talk for you. And again, it's mental toughness forum challenge.com. I'm going to put the link in the show notes so you can check it out. If you want to check into it and see the other speakers and whatnot, obviously, please do really incredible event. I did post about it during the week so that you would be able to see it. But I know it's so hard. Sometimes you might share something on one platform and somebody doesn't catch it, but hopefully you'll catch it here. Would love to hear what you think. If you like more content of my talks, happy to provide more of those for you.

4:33Always need your feedback, of course. Oh, and just P.S. It's your girl's birthday, August 14th. I am turning 48 years old. So if you want to give me a birthday gift, I would love it if you would share the show and leave me a review. It would mean the world to me. Seriously, it would mean so much. It helps so much as I'm kicking off a new year and super excited about this year with my son and I moving and so many exciting things ahead like live events. I just got back from a live. I was giving a sales kickoff keynote in San Diego, California, and it was so fun to be back in person with people still doing a mix of hybrid events and then, you know, some in person.

5:15But I definitely love the in person. And I'm hoping you're getting in person with people, too. It is so exciting. And it was so interesting. Also, one thing I wanted to note, as you know, I live in Miami. And in Miami, people don't wear masks and haven't for a while. We have total freedom here. When I was in San Diego, it was so surprising to see so many people had masks on. And they were talking about potential mask mandates. So, again, wherever you are, just, you know, to reflect on how grateful we can be for what we do have. you know, our health, that we're in a better situation than we were during the pandemic.

5:52Because getting a glimpse of that in San Diego was, wow, that really took me back and made me feel so grateful. So challenging you today, what can you be grateful for? And I actually just had this conversation. I got a phone call from my nephew this morning, upset that he had just broken up his relationship. And he was feeling really down. And I said to him, I said, listen, here's the thing. Number one, this is temporary. And I speak with a lot of experience, you know, now almost 48 years old. I'm telling you, I've had lots of breakups, whether they be at work or, you know, social relationships or my actual personal relationships.

6:31It's temporary, no matter how you feel, it will change in time. And just reminding yourself of that, right? Like in the moment, it can feel, ah, this is a roller coaster and I can't take it. But that's where we have to pump the brakes, give ourselves some grace, right? And say, you know what? I have been through hard times before. I did get through those tough times. I didn't know what was ahead. That's a big part of it, right? You don't know what miracle could be waiting for you this afternoon. You need to start expecting miracles in your life and putting that vibe out there, right? And this is what exactly what I was saying to my nephew today is you don't know who you're going to meet this afternoon at the grocery store.

7:11How can you sit there and tell yourself that you know you're going to be depressed for the next couple of months? That's not fact. That's a belief you're holding. There's no factual basis for that. And I just liken it to when I got fired five years ago. You know, I sat for one day on the couch feeling so bad for myself under a weighted blanket, you know, just crying my eyes out and just feeling so victimized. And I remember after 24 hours, I said, okay, pity party is over. It's fine to feel the sadness for sure. It's good to do that, but you don't want to wallow in it. Right. And if you're going to allow yourself to do that, you'll stay there.

7:49So that's when I jumped up and I posted, I've just been fired. If I've ever helped you in any way, I need to hear from you now. Right. You got to jump up and take action and like put yourself out there. And that's what I was trying to convince my nephew to do today. I said, first things first, sit down and write down three things you're grateful for. Start focusing on the good things in your life, not this one, what you feel is a negative thing. But the next thing I said was, was the relationship that great? And he said, no. Okay, then you just freed yourself from something so that you're never going to grab great if you're hanging on to mediocre.

8:23So you have to go through that uncomfortable, unknown period of letting go of mediocre to give yourself that chance to grab great. And when you do, you might find out greats waiting for you at the grocery store this afternoon, you don't know. But until you take that leap, you never will know. So if you are going through a tough time, start with gratitude, start with being grateful for your health, for our freedom, for the ability to listen to this podcast, shout out, you know, whatever it is that you're grateful for today, right? Like, write those things down, focus on the good in your life. So you bring more good into it instead of getting so caught up and focusing on the negative.

9:02And believe me, I've had many a days in my life where I focused on the negative. It doesn't pay dividends. It never does. At some point, you have to pump the brakes and say, okay, enough is enough. I'm going to shift this narrative. And for me, one of the things that I've been doing a lot lately, encourage you to do it, is instead of when I drive, I drive a ton in Miami. As you know, that's why I'm moving. one of the reasons why I'm moving. But, you know, being in the car, I had a friend say to me, stop listening to music and start listening to audio books, start listening to something that's going to help elevate you.

9:38And I need to read a lot of books for to prep for the show when I interview people. So I started using that time to grow, right, to start accessing new information. And anytime we do that, we're going to be better for it, right? So check into some books that people recommend Overcome Your Villains and Confidence Creator clearly are two hits, which I'd love for you to check out if you haven't yet. And yes, I narrate them both. But there are so many great books out there in the world. And I just listened to John Gordon's book, The Garden, recently on Audible. It was amazing. And it was a super quick listen and really powerful and got me thinking about, right, just it's a way to get to start opening your mind to different ideas, to expanding your thought to growth.

10:21So I challenge you to do that. Even try it just for a month when you're driving in the car, just choose a couple of different audio books and give them a listen and see how much better you feel and what you start learning and how it helps you get in a positive mindset because we know this, challenges will come every day, right? They're going to be out there, but it's about how we approach them and how quickly we can bounce back from them. And don't forget, But you never know how the dots are going to connect until you look back on this moment in time. So when you're in the thick of it, it's hard because you don't know what's to come next.

10:56Give yourself that grace and have that faith that the dots will connect. You just don't know how yet. And they're probably going to be so much better than you ever could imagine. Okay, now we're going to go to the Mental Toughness Forum. Again, the website is mentaltoughnessforum.com. Check it out. You can check out all the speakers there, not just your girl. There's videos and audios on both, but I think you're really going to like it. Let me know what you think. And if you like the episode, tag me, share it. I will always repost, reshare, and so appreciate you. All right, here we go. On to the Mental Toughness Forum.

11:32Meet a different guest each week. I'm on the team. Confidence creator.

11:38Heather Monahan:Scaling a business takes the right expertise at the right time. Upwork helps growing teams quickly bring in specialized freelancers so you can move faster and take the business to the next level. Hiring help shouldn't be a headache or a drain on your budget. Upwork makes it easy to hire specialized freelancers quickly so you can get the expertise you need now without weeks of recruiting or a full-time hire. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories.

12:17Heather Monahan:So you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. Upwork also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place so you can spend more time running the business. Thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire flexible, high-quality freelance talent for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support.

12:55Heather Monahan:It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, Upwork dot com. You've seen the buzz, but let me give you the inside scoop. Live shopping on Whatnot is exploding right now. I've watched the shows firsthand. I've seen Whatnot climb to the top of the app store, and I've looked at the seller earnings. Small, medium, and multi-million dollar businesses are seeing real growth. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, full-time, or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge.

13:37Heather Monahan:you're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. WhatNot flips that. On WhatNot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and they keep coming back. WhatNot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, or even cookies. Sellers are building real, thriving businesses. WhatNot buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. They're not just browsing, their bidding, buying, and coming back. You go live, show off products in real time, and turn what you love into real income.

14:15Heather Monahan:People selling on WhatNot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. And for a limited time, WhatNot will match your first$150 sold in the first month. Visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell.

14:50Hi, thank you, Ben Newman, so much for having me here today. Thank you for including me. and hi to you. Welcome to the Mental Toughness Forum. I hope you are enjoying it so far. Okay, I am Heather Monaghan. Yeah, that's me right there. We'll get to that in a minute. And I'll give you a little bit of background on me. I'm a former C-suite executive who made it to the top, smashed the glass ceiling, and was fired literally overnight after being named one of the most influential women in radio. Complete gut punch. That opportunity allowed me to reinvent myself as a bestselling author times two, a top 50 keynote speaker in 2022, and a lot of other things.

15:33So I'm here today to share three strategies that you could implement in your life that I hope will add some major value to you in your mental toughness challenge. Okay, so Ben asked us, what role has mental toughness played in your life and your career? And it has been huge, but I definitely didn't think about it as mental toughness. I don't know if you're with me. You know, you look back at those hard times. You don't necessarily remember thinking you're tough, especially in the moment, right? So my first one that I want to share with you, I'm going to take it back old school to my first love, my first boyfriend in my 20s that I lived with, that I thought I was going to marry because I learned this incredible lesson from that time that sticks with me to this day and it's been really helpful in my perspective, which is really helpful when you need to be mentally tough.

16:26So I was living with my boyfriend, living my best life, or so I thought. Who feels me on this one? And if you know a girl in her early 20s in love, you understand how big this is. I thought we were getting married until one day I came home and found out he had just cheated on me. Mic drop moment. Well, I was an ad executive in radio sales and I went to work the next day looking horrible. No makeup on, flip-flops, falling apart at the edges. Yes, I wear my heart on my sleeve. My boss says to me, what happened to you? He said, well, the love of my life cheated on me. I had to move out. I can't live like this.

17:10I don't ever want to see him again. It's devastating. I was living in Worcester, Massachusetts at this point in time, I'm truly not living my best life, but thinking I was. So he says to me, okay, Heather, you've been doing an amazing job here for the last year. I can tell you're ready for a move. Would you be willing to board a plane with me and move somewhere for the biggest financial opportunity and business opportunity of your life? I looked him straight in the eyes and I said, yes. The only reason I said yes was because that man had cheated on me and I wanted to do whatever it takes to escape that painful feeling and not wanting to run into him again.

17:53I boarded that plane. He dropped me off in Saginaw, Michigan. That was a tough one. Definitely not a destination location, but for me, it was. We bought a$25 million company and in under three years, I escalated revenues, I upgraded my team, and we sold that company for$55 million in under three years, netting us a 30 million gain. That put my name on the map in business and in the media business where I was working at the time. And that opened doors I would have never had opened for me before and led me to a publicly traded company, to a much bigger job, much bigger platform. Cut to a couple of years ago, I was at a wedding with a bunch of people I grew up with.

18:42And the guy that cheated on me was there. And I'm here to tell you today, it was an incredible moment to see that person was never meant for me. It was so different years later with all its perspective. And I finally understood, you might not be able to connect the dots looking forward. But when you look back, those hardest moments, the moments that you think are the hardest are actually the biggest gifts. And that rejection is only redirection to something so much bigger if you allow it. And that set me on a completely different trajectory and course in my life. And I'm so grateful for that moment.

19:25It's a come full circle. I'll never forget when my son was in elementary school and had a little girl that was his girlfriend. They would chat on, you know, social media together and on text. And one day he came home crying and said, mom, she's dating my friend now. Will I ever find another girl? And I shared that story with him. And I explained to him, you can't understand what's happening in this moment because you can't see those dots connecting. But years later, you will. And cut to today. He sees this girl all the time. They become great friends. And I'm just asking you this to remind yourself the next time you're going through it, and we all do, remember, you can't see where those dots will connect, but you will in the future have faith.

20:12That's a fact. Okay. The next one I want to share with you is a three-step process. So I'm giving you a little bit more, but this is a three-step process that I wrote about in Overcome Your Villains. It's my back process. It works every time, anytime, and all the time you have a challenge in front of you. I'm going to use the example of getting fired, right? I explained that I had made it to the top. I was named one of the most influential women in radio in 2017. And unexpectedly, three weeks later, I was fired. The CEO I had worked for, for 14 years, who had elevated me three different times and supported me so much in that journey, he became ill and he decided to elevate his daughter to replace him.

20:56She was my arch nemesis and she fired me immediately with a big smile on her face. Now I'm going to break the back process down for you using this low moment, low moment, ended up being a big redirection, not a rejection. But at the time when you take that gut punch, it sucks, right? Let's say what it really is. It feels like a rejection and you can't see the dots connecting yet so you don't know where to go. Well, for me, I got fired. I was a single mother at the time, providing for my son, living a lifestyle that I had created off of making a lot of money. And suddenly I didn't know where my next paycheck was going to come from.

21:37I had an 18 month non-compete and I couldn't work in the industry that I had expertise in. I was going to have to start over somewhere as a beginner. And starting over as a beginner, as you know, can be really humbling and really scary. And I was full of fear. So here's where my back process comes from. The day that I got fired, I walked out of that woman's office and I started saying, I've lost everything. I have nothing. I've lost everything. Okay. This is the moment that we need to pump the brakes and we need to take a look at and dismantle whatever belief you're holding, right? So write this down.

22:19Belief is number one. When you're in it, when you're in that moment where you need your mental toughness, take a look at that belief and distill it down to whatever most simplistic shred of fact you can find. And I'll tell you, oftentimes there is none. So for me, I sat down and said, okay, what fact is here? Did I lose everything? Well, no, I didn't lose my network. I didn't lose my expertise. I didn't lose my business acumen. I didn't lose my personality, my character. I didn't lose my values. I didn't lose my friends and family. I didn't lose anything. I lost a paycheck. And once I broke that belief that I had lost everything down to the most simplistic fact I could find, which was I did lose a paycheck.

23:10It reminded me years before I had worked for other companies. I had had other paychecks. I had worked in high school. I'd worked in college. I'd worked in my twenties. I had worked for so many other companies and had found ways to drive revenue. I just didn't know where it would come from this time. I could choose to see that as an opportunity. And to be so real with you, I still wasn't seeing it as an opportunity, but I was reminding myself, this is a choice. I can choose how I'm going to look at this. All right. So number one, beliefs, distill it down to the most simplistic shred of fact possible.

23:42Big one. Number two, immediately take action. And a lot of people get hung up on this one. It's so important to know messy action is fantastic, right? There is no such thing as perfect. It doesn't need to be perfectly planned out. It needs to be done. Done will always be better than perfect. And that is a truth you can own. So my action step was I'm going to post on social media. And I posted, Heather Monahan was just fired. That's me. I've just been fired. And if I've ever done anything for you, I need to hear from you now. That post went viral and it landed me on the Elvis Duran show. Okay. So here's the thing.

24:26I didn't know what was going to happen. I knew people were going to think I was crazy for putting this post up, right? How many of you have haters out there? I got a lot of them, right? So the haters are going to come for you. You're going to take action and put yourself out there. However you see fit, whatever your intuition speaks into you is what you need to do. Take that action. People called me and they said, Heather, you look crazy. You look pathetic. You got fired. No, no, no. Take that down. Delete that. And I checked in with the one voice and opinion that matters. And that's your own.

25:01And something inside of me said, leave that post up. It's my truth. I didn't do anything wrong. I don't feel full of shame that I got fired. In fact, I'm going to flip the script on the shame. And when you start doing that, you start extinguishing the shame in your life and showing up as a more powerful and real version of you. Flip it now. So I put it to work for me. I left that post up. That post went by. All right. That was number two. Take action. Take messy action. Done will be better than perfect. It landed me on the Elvis Duran show in front of someone who's light years ahead of me, right?

25:37This man has millions of listeners tuning into him every single day and is incredibly successful. He's found his way. He knows what he's doing. Unlike me at the time, I had no idea what to do next. I sat in front of him halfway through that interview. He says to me, well, Heather, obviously you're writing a book, but I wasn't writing a book. How many of you grew up with a sibling that was a smart one? Anyone out there? Oh yeah. You're my people, right? My sister was the smart one. Perfect score in her SATs. I was a social one. Well, in these moments, another lesson I learned is you've got to drop the labels and drop the stories you've been hanging on to since you were a kid.