2475 - Aligning Faith, Mindset, and Strategy to Unlock Business Freedom with Bridge to Freedom's Bridget Hom

0:03Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created PodVerified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free PodVerified score, free PodVerified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit PodVerified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

1:21freedomcoaching.com. You also are the author of the book, Stuck on Ready, your website, stuckonready.com. And then we've got a couple of other ones here, thepropmethod.com and godismy employer.org. We may get to those as well. Lots to talk about. Bridget, thank you for joining us. Yes, thanks, Josh. I'm excited to inspire, empower, and educate, and equip your people today. All right. All right. Well, we'll start with your kind of personal kind of passion projects outside of work. I understand that you paint, you salsa dance, and then you said you're a worship leader as well? Yes, absolutely. I like to have an eclectic background and I saved a lot of lives flunking out of nursing school once upon a time.

2:07Oh no. Yes, I have a journalism background. I love the written word. I also worship lead.

2:17I'm I also have a recovery background. I've been in recovery for 20 years. So I have a - Recovery from substance or - Yes, yes. Alcoholics Anonymous actually. Oh my gosh, yeah. Yes. So, you know, God has blessed me with a very eclectic background where I serve a lot of people with solutions, but worship leading, I'm a part of a nonprofit for Christians at work, how to bring Jesus to work without being weird. And then I love salsa dancing. I actually met my first business partner for my first business, which is a placement agency, salsa dancing. So dancing brings people together. Yeah, it does.

2:51So how often do you get to dance? Well, I got Zoom divorced during COVID and I met my current husband in Zoom business networking. So I remarried someone who didn't know how to salsa. So the salsa dancing is kind of, we've done probably a couple lessons, a handful of lessons recently, but we also have three boys and travel soccer and all the things. So mom is very much still a part of my roles and goals every day. um so but i do i love to salsa tango cha-cha waltz you name it i can dance it pretty much yeah and these are learnable dances obviously at a very beginner level but that's one thing i i've heard is that you know listen you could show up at a class and yes there's you know if it's a beginner class uh i i've heard that you actually i mean you'll feel a lot of like wow i can do that I actually recommend dance lessons to any relationships having issues communication-wise.

3:49If anyone's having self-esteem issues, confidence issues, go for some dancing. You will literally have a romance with your own life again. Ah, love it. Okay. So your website is bridgetofreedomcoaching.com. Tell me what is the bridge to freedom? Oh, that's a great question. Well, first off, my first business partner said, Bridget O. Freedom Coaching. Bridge to Freedom Coaching. We could put you right in there. A lot of the bridges that I create for people and help people to create is the information to implementation, right? Getting your identity in making sure who you're being, when you're doing is in alignment for your business growth.

4:31It's really bridging the gap between mindset and strategy as well for business growth. So there's always a bridge, you know, sometimes it's the bridge for entrepreneurs between their message and their prospects. So building bridges constantly between a thought and an action. That is really the bottom line, the common denominator for what we do at Bridge to Freedom Coaching for CEOs, for entrepreneurs, for coaches, consultants. Making sure they can focus on implementation and aligned execution based on honoring their roles and their goals to monetize and have a romance with life, like I mentioned.

5:06All right. Well, that sounds like a lot of highfalutin talk. Let's get a little tactical, if we could, in what this looks like. And so if we think about someone that you've worked with, how do we bring this to something actionable? Absolutely. Well, the number one problem that most business owners have come to me about, they'd say, I don't know how to talk to my people. I can't find the people that I want to serve. Everything I say to them, it doesn't hit. I've worked with a couple of AI consultants recently who jumped ship from corporate. And they said to me, like, I'm talking to the people that I think I should be talking to, but they're not coming back to me to want to have a conversation.

5:49And so I teach relatability is your superpower. You know, the reason people didn't want to talk to me because they thought I was an expert. They talked to me because about salsa dancing. They talked to me about, you know, my husband almost getting eaten by a shark when I posted on LinkedIn. You know, they talked to me about me beaching the boat. So relatability is the superpower. And I teach, I pull that out of people. You know, I worked with an ER doctor turned entrepreneur and she actually went through my program and said she felt like she met herself for the first time and she successfully launched two businesses.

6:19I've had more than a couple of people who've hired lots of coaches, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they said, you made doing business simple. I didn't realize that having conversations with people and turning them into clients was actually a much simpler process. I was complicating everything. So getting people to be very, very intentional and clear with what they're saying, but what they're selling themselves. I always say you're your number one client. You buy everything you sell yourself every day. So making sure that the people that I'm working with are very clear on their direction, their decisions, and their destination, where they want to end up in their business growth.

7:01Yeah, let's come up with maybe a couple of things that our friend that's listening to our conversation right now, what are a couple of things that they could do if assuming that they're just not able to work with you personally, but they're hoping to get a lot of value from this conversation right now? What are maybe two things that they could do within their own business or that they could get maybe a little bit introspective that they could take from this conversation, go do and test it out? Absolutely. The best way to start figuring out what you want to accomplish in your business is to do a two-minute brain dump.

7:35Set a two-minute timer because the brain can only focus on one thing at a time and we're constantly living in a state of under-the-influence distraction. So set a two-minute timer and stream of consciousness right. Get a pen and paper out, write dear God or dear universe and write for two minutes without judgment and then ask yourself the question, what do I notice about myself? Now after you've gained some self-awareness, you're going to feel a sense of calm because now you were able to actually be focused and intentional with what you were doing versus living in the never-ending to-do list. I'm thinking about this.

8:10I'm thinking about the next thing. I'm thinking about the next thing. Pause with a purpose. So do a two-minute brain dump. Next, you want to write down the three top activities that will monetize your influence today. The three activities, because you want to know how to prioritize profit and people as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, if you don't know how to prioritize profit, then you're not going to be successful in your business growth. And you're not going to be able to teach your team, your employees how to do the same. So you need to be in the right mindset to prioritize profit. So write down the three top activities to monetize your influence every day.

8:44Lastly, write down the three activities to delegate today. And now if you're a solopreneur, you might say, I don't have anyone to delegate to, but I talk about deservability delegation. That's a fun way of saying it. You want to delegate to people, paper, and process. You want to think about delegation in terms of those three things, delegate to paper. When you're not focused on the one thing you're doing in front of you, where are you delegating those other thoughts, right? Process. If you keep running into the same problems every day, you need to create a new process. So you need to be able to think about the processes that you currently have, what's working, what's not.

9:23People. Is it time to hire? Do you have the right people in place? Do you need to delegate half of your to-do list to somebody else who could do it better or faster so that you can be in your zone of genius? So you could be doing what you're supposed to be doing in your role as CEO or in your role as the entrepreneur who's selling. So deservability delegation, delegate to people, paper, and process, write down the three top ways to monetize your influence, focus on those daily to prioritize profit, and do your brain dump first thing in the morning. And when you're needing a reset for your day, set a two minute timer, and then you'll have that reset.

10:00Those are three ways that I would say to get more introspective and more productive, proactive, and profitable for your day. Bridget, I love that. Very, I agree. And, you know, a lot of times I think as leaders, it may feel challenging to slow down and say, OK, it is time now for me to do a little bit of this kind of deep work here when we think that action is the antidote to our stress or what's ailing us. But really, it's about being very mindful about that action, much more strategic. Your book, Stuck on Ready, the subtitle here is Master the Successful Entrepreneur Mindset, Break Free from Self-Sabotage and Access Your Limitless Potential.

10:50I suspect some of what you just shared would be a part of this. What about the self-sabotage part? What are some ways that we might be getting in our own way? And this is not to make anyone feel bad because guess what? We all do it. We do. But how do you help someone identify where they might be getting in their own way? It's a very simple strategy, Josh. And I recommend it to leaders all over. First things first, you have to identify what you're feeling, what you're feeling, what you're thinking about, because we are all living with this subconscious program that's running our days. and so when you stop and create that disruption and do a two-minute brain dump say all right what's actually bothering me I do the five whys exercise why am I sabotaging myself with this and then you answer the question that first why and then you ask a second why to that answer for the first one and you repeat that five times I actually talk about that in my book the stuck on ready and the prop method so do the five whys exercise but there's another strategy that I actually give in my program that's called Hire and Fire the Right Mental Team.

11:59Because when you're self-sabotaging, you're typically sitting in your feelings. And feelings aren't your friends when it comes to leadership, when it comes from logically moving forward. I see a lot of people get in the doing trap, like you said, meetings, meetings, meetings, nothing's getting done. Because we're all living under the influence up here of the never-ending thoughts. We don't actually take the time to sit and say, is this thought moving me forward? Is this thought working for me? Is this thought beneficial to the end result of what I want to accomplish? So sitting and writing, give yourself the opportunity to write down what are the three ways I'm sabotaging myself right now?

12:39And then draw, simply draw an arrow and say, how can I shift into an affirmative action? Because it's typically when we hire and fire the right mental team, we're talking from moving to a feeling to an action. So you want to, let's say you want to fire sabotage. What would be the optimal action to hire? Maybe strategy, maybe delegation, but it enables you to start to think differently and shift your state to, in order to move forward out of that feeling of sabotage, which I say you'll pay sabotage out of your serenity account, your sanity account, and your real bank account at some point. You, Bridget, I know that you do a lot of work as well.

13:17you know, obviously, you know, your faith is important to you. And, you know, you flavor a lot of what you do. Faith flavors a lot of what you do. And you'd even mentioned that you, you know, help work with folks of faith that might be in their workplace or in leadership, like how to bring those principles in without, I think you said, without being weird. I want to say this, you know, even for, you know, folks that might be just incredibly in a secular space, which is great. You know, one thing that I've observed is that folks of faith do have one advantage if they are consistent with some form of prayer, meditation, sitting in silence, because I think it naturally evokes a lot of what you've been talking about, right?

14:11is, you know, that I know at some point I need to stop, be trying to push this boulder up this hill by myself nonstop, but instead kind of just tapping into higher source, my inner self, God, Jesus, whatever it might be. And, you know, and just sit in contemplation. And a lot of times it's, you know, kind of like, you know, when we get shower thoughts, it's not too dissimilar from that. This is a really, I believe, a really powerful exercise. I was hoping maybe you could comment on that. Absolutely. And even breaking it down from the faith base, because a lot of the people I work with are secular, but they still want certain components of the faith aspect, because it is good for everybody, right?

15:03If you focus on the prayer of St. Francis, that's really, really useful for anyone in the secular world to practice those principles. So Christian principles are typically valuable in any setting. But I really break it down to being the empowerment generator. And you make your number one goal to show up well and authentically in any situation. You make your number two goal to empower the person in front of you no matter what. And empowerment means giving someone the authority or power to do something. That's what empowerment means. And so going further and talking about what that looks like, when you practice meditation, you actually feel better.

15:38You're more intentional. You're more present with the people in front of you. You're no longer just sitting and having conversations with your mental team, so to speak, right? Because we're typically in relationships with our thoughts about people versus people themselves. And when you get more intentional, pause with a purpose, just set a two-minute timer and write. The four components that we really want everyone to practice within every corporation, every culture, and within our own personal lives, these are the four aspects. self-awareness, self-regulation, self-direction, and then ultimately self-actualization, where you're in alignment with yourself.

16:14All your decisions are simple because you know what's true for you. You know what the values that you live by are. There's no longer a question. You know, like Elon Musk's one of his girlfriends on a TikTok, one of his girlfriends on one of his TikTok said, you know, I love what Elon does because he makes his nose honor his yeses. He makes his no's honor his yes's because he ultimately knows what his ultimate yes is every day. And anything that doesn't align with your yes to monetize, to honor your roles and goals, to honor your company's growth, whatever that is, you say no to anything that doesn't honor that ultimate yes.

16:49But you have to know what that yes is. And many CEOs are lonely and they don't have, they have decision fatigue and they don't have a confident thought partner that can help them to move forward with that. All right. Your website, BridgetOFreedomCoaching.com. It's Bridge to Freedom, also happens to spell Bridge to FreedomCoaching.com. When our friend goes there, I don't know if you've got some resources you'd recommend if maybe they're not necessarily ready to grab a call or whatever. Where would you send them to? What would you recommend they take a peek at? I specifically have a Facebook community that's Bridge.

17:27Well, it's also Bridge to Freedom Coaching community for entrepreneurs and leaders. Feel free to be a part of that. I do free mini trainings. I'm constantly reminding you to monetize your influence, to delegate, to do your brain dumps. And then I'm giving trainings on prospecting, sales, branding, marketing, AI, content creation, all of the things that you need to move the needle forward and make sure you're being the best version of yourself while you're monetizing. Bridge to Freedom Coaching, Bridget Hum. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. It's been awesome.

18:00Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

18:37You can start for free with your Podverified score, along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.