Amazing Benefits: Genuine Gratitude in Your Life & Marketing

[00:00:00] Jen: Hello and welcome to the Women Conquer Business Show. I'm Jen McFarland, joined by Shelley Carney. We're your go to small business marketing show. Covering Breaking marketing news that affects you. Cool apps we found, and a how to deep dive into a marketing topic with a side of motivation and inspiration.

[00:00:24] We'll also talk a little about our own entrepreneurial journeys as well. Are you ready? Let's get started.

[00:00:35] Yay. Hey, hello and welcome to Women Conquer Business. Today we're going to be, this is pre-recorded on for Thanksgiving Day, and so this is like Jen and Shelley talking about future Jen and Shelley . Today we're gonna be talking about infusing genuine gratitude into your marketing, and I would like to say that one of the things that's really important to.

[00:01:03] When we're talking about something like genuine and gratitude and marketing, that this is from a wholehearted place that you have to really mean it. So there's no faking it when we talk about infusing genuine gratitude into your marketing. So today we're going to talk about gratitude and how you can talk about gratitude throughout the year, why you should, how it helps your business person.

[00:01:30] And then how you can share it in your marketing from a space of, as I said, authenticity. And I know that people often talk about authenticity to the place, to the point where it's become almost fake and people roll their eyes at that. That's not where we're coming at for this at all. I've given five day workshops about gratitude and leadership.

[00:01:55] That's where some of this content is coming from. And then you infuse those genuine [00:02:00] feelings into how you talk about your business, how you talk about your colleagues, your clients, everybody. And that's what we're talking about today. We know that many of you are out spending time with your families today.

[00:02:12] Many of you are resting. Hopefully you're not working, and so we're really excited to share this special edition. Slightly different, less scripted show with you today. So welcome and hey future Shelley. How are you? ?

[00:02:32] Shelley: Well, I'm future Jen. Or are we in the past? I don't know. I know very well. Yeah, I am spending the whole week promoting the content creator stack, so I'm very focused on that right now.

[00:02:45] I built a big implementation program course, online course over the summer. It took me several months to put it together, and I included that in the info stack. So I'm promoting that and hoping that people find it really, really valuable because normally it's $299, but for the info stack you get.

[00:03:10] All of these products from all of these creators, especially made for creators, and they're only $49 for the whole thing. So Amazing, amazing, amazing. I can't wait. Oh, I'm doing

[00:03:22] Jen: a long link

[00:03:22] Shelley: about that. Yeah. Can't put it in the chat because future me and past me are not talking to each other, . Right?

[00:03:28] Jen: You don't know the link yet because we're pre-recording this. So when we know the link and when we have all the information, you do have the link to your live stream that will go out today. That's right. That will share

[00:03:40] Shelley: it. The description, I just can't sharing that on the screen like we can comments right now.

[00:03:45] But this livecast lifestyle success, the secret to fund fulfilling and consistent content creation, I will be in a livestream talking about that, talking about the content creator stack. I'm really excited about it and I think it's gonna be super cool. That's been [00:04:00] my focus for the entire week.

[00:04:02] Jen: That's amazing. Congratulations. I just think that all of this is so awesome. I'm just so excited for you and . I don't, what are you laughing about? I was trying

[00:04:13] Shelley: to do a, and I didn't change my board and, and I'm like, no, not that

[00:04:19] Jen: great. Good. That's funny. So Shelley's trying to play sounds again. Don't worry, Shelley.

[00:04:26] We'll, just all.

[00:04:34] Okay. No, I think that that's really awesome. I'll do what I can. I don't know what I'll be doing at 4:00 PM Mountain Time for me, that's 3:00 PM in Pacific Time. Oh. On this day in the future that I can't, I don't know the date. That's so funny. I was gonna say on November 19th, but no, that's today when we're recording this show.

[00:04:54] Shelley: Yeah, it'll be on Thanksgiving Day. In fact, the 24th.

[00:04:57] Jen: So the 24th. So on November 24th, that's today. Make sure that you listen or watch. I guess it's on YouTube, but a lot of people I know actually post, put the YouTube link up and then listen. They don't necessarily watch everything. Yeah, we can do that.

[00:05:13] So be sure that you do that. Be sure that you give that a shot. As for me and what I've been working on at the tail end of last week, that was on November 18th, we had the Strategic Marketing Membership community social hour. It was great. It was marketing, laser coaching. So people would come and just say, I'm struggling with this.

[00:05:31] And and I love that where people just come and ask me questions and we workshop it. I believe that for the Strategic Marketing Membership, that's what I'm working on. We're working on what's the future holds for that community and we are going to infuse it with more opportunities like that. People come and they get some laser coaching.

[00:05:51] I think we're gonna do that twice a week or twice a month. And then some infuse some trainings into that. So it's a very exciting time at the Strategic Marketing Membership. We've been [00:06:00] in beta, I think just about long enough, and now we're going to make it into something bigger and more expensive. , if you wanna get in on the Strategic Marketing Membership and join at a lower.

[00:06:12] Cost. I would suggest going to wcb.community and signing up for your free trial so that you can get in before we raise the rates.

[00:06:19] Shelley: Do we have any news,

[00:06:23] Jen: so marketing breaking news. We don't usually share bad news. We've been really good. I think about saying this is what's going on. Most of the time it's not bad, but I will say that when I saw this headline, I was really deeply irritated, , because Facebook meta irritates me sometimes, and I think it's important to share it.

[00:06:46] There had been a rash among people in my business community. And in my marketing groups on Facebook saying, is this valid? Is this real? Just of all these accounts that just seem to have been their business pages, different accounts seeming like they had been hijacked. The truth is, they had been . So meta has disciplined or fired dozens of employees for taking over user accounts, hijacking them compromising accounts in some cases.

[00:07:15] Employees and contractors were accepting bribes to take over accounts. And it was all done. I think this is kind of hilarious. The hijacking was reportedly done through an internal tool known as, oops. So this was a tool that when people were getting locked out of their accounts or they were having issues, that it was part of how they would fix accounts and people were abusing that to take over accounts.

[00:07:36] So all of which is to say, Probably people were being locked out of their accounts due to these nefarious actions. And we were always, I was always telling people, don't pay attention to that. Just ignore it. I received it too and I just ignored it. But you never know. That's why it's so dangerous.

[00:07:54] And I think in this environment where we're seeing Facebook's in decline, who the heck knows what's going on with [00:08:00] Twitter? I think they had another 1200 people resign after. This ultimatum of are you willing to go hardcore? Yeah. By Alon Musk that they're down, they're, they had 7,500 employees and I think they're down to under 2000 at this point.

[00:08:16] That's not a safe environment for managing servers, protecting your information. It's all making like a really big case for don't put all of your information on social media. Don't put all of your eggs in the social media basket , have a good. For your business, have a place where all of your information is owned by you and it will serve you well in these shifting, changing times.

[00:08:41] And Shelley and I were talking about before the show, it's really hard to, navigate this environment right now. Shelley's saying that she's, still on board with YouTube. I tend to agree. It's hard to imagine Google and YouTube going anywhere at this point. I think that right now, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft.

[00:09:01] It's hard to think that that's gonna go anywhere. We don't know. We just don't know. And I think that, even though we feel comfortable with these platforms right now, being YouTube and LinkedIn, that could change too. We don't know. So it's important, as I said, to have spaces that you have more control over because as we're finding this, this volatility is, is very real and.

[00:09:25] Employees taking these actions. It's scary, I think, for business owners. Yeah.

[00:09:31] Shelley: Yeah. Where's the security? Where's the trust? There is none. They've just again and again, meta, and specifically the Facebook product from Meta is constantly having these issues where they're spreading lies and disinformation and, It's a place for people to get hooked into these hate groups.

[00:09:54] And it was never intended for that, but they didn't have the guardrails in place to keep it from [00:10:00] going there. And now we've got the, their own employees are behind Their own downfall. So it's pretty sad. And I don't know what they're gonna do. They need to do something or it's just going to go the way of MySpace.

[00:10:15] Jen: It's already on that trajectory, as we've talked about on previous shows. And the same thing is happening at Twitter, where it was bought out by man, child, billionaire, Alon Musk, who wants to make it more un moderat. Yeah. That's dangerous. Yeah. That's not looking good.

[00:10:32] I don't know what's going on with that. Nobody knows. It's become crazy. A lot of people are leaving to go to Macon. I would say blockchain, social media is just not there yet. I have an account on Macon, it's fine, but it's really hard to find other people. It's just not, it's not what people are used to.

[00:10:51] It's the whole thing. Crypto blockchain is just not easy for people. And until things are easy for people, they don't tend to go mainstream. Yeah. And don't get me started on crypto. We won't talk about it, but ftx, it's just I'm feeling more and more validated about my feelings about crypto every day because that's one of the biggest scandals and I'm reading about scandals almost every day in Wired about it. Some of these things aren't really ready for primetime. As much as I love Mastodon, it is if you wanna go to a social platform that is just pure positive, there's no doom scrolling, , go to Mastodon.

[00:11:27] It's just not. Really a place for business at this point

[00:11:33] Shelley: because it's different. So yeah, business people definitely stick with YouTube and LinkedIn right now because they're very solid. And they do listen to you if there's any issues. If you say, this is happening to me and it's not right they will definitely look into it and try to fix it and work with you.

[00:11:49] Their customer services isn't that bad for as big as they. Yeah. Yeah. And

[00:11:55] Jen: I will say if your people are on TikTok, Instagram, all of these [00:12:00] things, Twitter, I still haven't let go of my Twitter cuz I just love it too much. I don't really use it for business, but I just until it becomes a complete.

[00:12:08] Like the security is gone and it's unmoderated. I just can't let go of it Personally, you could still use these platforms. Just be aware that there's so many moving parts that it, it may not be there tomorrow. That's what they're saying about Twitter. I think it's very real. It went down about a week ago.

[00:12:26] It went down and all these trending, I think it was the day before last week's show, it went down and there were all. Hashtags trending of, r i p, Twitter, all of it. It's very real, and sad. So just be careful out there.

[00:12:41] Shelley: Yep, yep. Absolutely. And don't believe everything on social media because you never know.

[00:12:47] Somebody could jack that

[00:12:48] Jen: account. Don't click on those links that don't, that are not verified. Do that blue

[00:12:52] Shelley: check Mark. Who knows? ,

[00:12:54] Jen: right? Oh, that blue check mark stuff is pretty priceless. . So priceless.

[00:13:00] Shelley: Oh boy. Crazy people. All right. What else? Anything else on that? Don't have anything else on. All right. Are we ready for our presentation?

[00:13:12] Sure. power

[00:13:16] Jen: up. We're gonna power up. So today we're gonna talk about gratitude. And so if you go onto the women conquer biz.com website and you do click on the search icon, you'll find a series of articles about gratitude and leadership. I, I wanna share where that comes from. So I think I've mentioned before, I have a master's degree in leadership and management, but the gratitude part didn't come along until I left my job at the City of Portland.

[00:13:50] And I, when I did my reflection on leaving and starting a new business and what was missing [00:14:00] from my experience at the City of Portland, a lot of it came down. Gratitude. There, it was not a environment where I worked and the city of Portland is large, so this is not a statement about the whole place.

[00:14:17] It's where there are like thousands of people. I'm talking about where I specifically worked. It was not a place of genuine, heartfelt gratitude for people's hard work. If you made a mistake, there were a lot of people who. Pulverized for making errors not necessarily talking about myself. Just things that I had witnessed, things like that.

[00:14:39] And when I did a lot of reflection around what leadership means to me and what makes a good leader part of that, a large part of that is gratitude. And I think we're seeing it play out. We mentioned Twitter a few minutes ago. We're seeing. Lack of empathy, that lack of gratitude. Playing out with Alon Musk right now.

[00:15:05] He came in, there were thousands of people working at Twitter, and he said, prove to me that you're worth staying. He laid off immediately without even knowing who they were, what they did. He laid off like half of the staff, and then he had this moment where he was like, Wait a minute, , I need some of you people.

[00:15:27] And he tried to invite him back and they were like, no, , I'm not coming back. Why would I come back? It's a lack of acknowledgement, a lack of empathy. Somebody who only wants loyalty is as in the case of Lon Musk. Can't handle any criticism at all. It was a hostile takeover. People are going to have opinions about that.

[00:15:53] A true leader needs to be resilient to the criticism and still willing to [00:16:00] share gratitude and even have gratitude when things fail. And when I've led workshops about leadership and gratitude, oftentimes what I'll say is you need to have. Gratitude or acknowledge something good that happened on your worst day, you have to find something good.

[00:16:25] What happened on that, on the worst day that you can think of that you can share, even just a little bit of gratitude for it, and that's why a lot of times I think of gratitude as a year long celebration. It infuriates me, that where there's this holiday and a lot of people just reserve that for. You're one time that you talk about what you're grateful about.

[00:16:48] To me, it's something that needs to happen all the time. As business owners, as people in your family, as among friends and colleagues and everybody, there have to be these times where you share grace

[00:17:04] Shelley: and love

[00:17:09] and don't wait. Because you never know, some of those people that were at your Thanksgiving table last year might not be there this year, so don't wait.

[00:17:22] Jen: Do you have ways that you infuse gratitude into your daily life, Shelley?

[00:17:26] Shelley: I try . I would say I, I try and sometimes. Don't do a very good job of it, but the really wonderful thing for me is my business partner, Toby, is so, so good at. This he will see some homeless person and he will say a little prayer, and he's not a religious person, but he'll say a little prayer, thank you, God for what I have.

[00:17:49] Everything seems to remind him and he says it out loud to be thankful, to be grateful. And to uplift others. He does this a lot and it teaches me to do [00:18:00] it, and it reminds me I need to be doing that too. And I'm grateful too now when I'm doing my journaling. Yeah. I'm very focused on what am I thankful for?

[00:18:08] What's going right in my life? What are the happy high points in my life? And I'm writing about them. But then throughout the day when things are happening, I don't always remember to say, I'm sure there, I'm sure there's something in here to be grateful for, but I do try to think, how is this happening for me?

[00:18:27] Rather than to me, when something happens I try to find the good in it. Where, where's the good? And sometimes, like you talked about, what's your worst day? When my brother called me on the phone to tell me that my mom had had a stroke, what could I be grateful for about that? My brother and I got to be very close this year.

[00:18:45] We talked on a phone quite a lot. We shared feelings with each other that we hadn't shared. And since, we were little kids or whatever, Or if ever so there are things that we can pull out to be grateful for in our lives. Now when it comes to our. Our business. I'm just, I love it so much.

[00:19:04] I love what I do. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for all of the equipment that I have for, I'm grateful for all the applications that I have that make my life easier. There's easy, it's easy to be grateful for things like that especially when they're working. Well,

[00:19:22] working.

[00:19:23] Jen: Yeah. I.

[00:19:27] A lot of my gratitude, I would say maybe the foundations of these ideas around leadership and gratitude, it, part of it started in Peace Corps, right? When you go somewhere and everything is stripped away. I lived in Kazakhstan for two years. I didn't live in an embassy, , where they always had, they had internet.

[00:19:49] They had a house with probably central Heat. I lived someplace where all of those creature comforts were stripped away, and it was a [00:20:00] difficult life. And I had the man I love more than anybody with me and my husband and I met wonderful, fabulous people. The reason I'm on Facebook at all is.

[00:20:14] Many of the people I know from Kazakhstan, that's where they are. Mm-hmm. . So if I leave that, then I can't talk to UF Malik or in, or, and I still hold out hope for other people to be on there from that time. I feel like Tabari and Rehan, all these people could eventually show up there. Like of all the places It.

[00:20:35] It starts there. And I will say that like still to this day, and I've been back now for several years, that I stand in the shower with the hot water and I think this is awesome . I say like a little gratitude about that. When you think about being someplace that, we didn't even have running water.

[00:20:56] It was like one an hour a day or something like that. We had running water, it kind of changes. It shifts some of your perspective, but you don't have to have an experience like that to have those shifts. Gratitude is something that you can do every day. For a while here, we played a game where every morning we had to say three things we were grateful for.

[00:21:20] That could not be the same. Three things. It had to be different. So you couldn't just be like my house, my wife and my dog, which is what John was doing. And I was like, no, , you need to come up with something different. And what we've found is that leadership and gratitude put together, meaning when things go wrong, you still find the good in that.

[00:21:45] Or when things go good, you share that gratitude with others That improves. Attitude. Attitude of gratitude. Attitude of gratitude, . But I see that in you, Shelley. You've had a lot going [00:22:00] on in your life and you seem to really be very resilient to it. And I was wondering if that was because you have a.

[00:22:07] Gratitude in your life.

[00:22:09] Shelley: Yeah, and again, that's part of my journaling process is to really, focus on what do I have control over, what do I still have, what's good in my life, and not focus on the things that are going wrong. The things I have no control over. There's no reason to focus on that because I can't do anything about it anyway, so I let it.

[00:22:28] Yeah. And I know we talk about surrender, and I think that's part of that surrender attitude is I don't have control over that, so I'm not going to dwell on it. Dwelling on things that are Sad or upsetting is a, an addictive behavior. So I don't allow myself to do that because that's just wallowing and , you can get stuck in that.

[00:22:50] So I, I try very hard not to do that. Not to wallow, not to be addicted to, anger attainment or sadness or, for sure grateful. You have time. I have more. I have time and a wake up call at the same time, at a wake up call this year with my mom and my husband and our client and, different people that it was just such a year of wake up.

[00:23:12] Life is short. Yeah. Deal with stuff now. Yeah. Yeah. Now maybe that's not a gratitude thing. , I'm getting off course with it, but I think while we're gathering together for Thanksgiving, it's a good time to think about that as well. Life is short. Stop arguing with people and start finding what you have in common and start coming together with them because that's what makes life wonderful.

[00:23:36] Yeah.

[00:23:37] Jen: Yeah. I will say that I had an increased, I still have a sense of urgency around things ever since losing my dad. Yeah. You feel a lot more gratitude for what you do have and where you're going, and also urgency about where you wanna be when you're faced with tragedy or death, or you see how precious what we have is and how [00:24:00] quickly it can be gone.

[00:24:02] Yeah. And I think that it's in those fleeting moments of seeing grace, of witnessing the beauty of what somebody else brings. Those are also things that you can be sharing with your community. Those are things that you can be sharing from a marketing perspective. I don't think it's icky if you say, Shelley was really awesome today,

[00:24:28] I really appreciate her. And you put that on social media and tag her. If it comes from a place of real, genuine belief, like it's not an attention grabbing, icky feeling to just say thank you, like to be grateful, and to share that with your community and to talk about. How cool you think somebody else is.

[00:24:51] During last week's show, I talked about my attorney and how much I love him , cuz I think he's great. That came from a place of wholehearted joy and I'm sharing it because it's, I think that maybe he doesn't know how much I appreciate him and I think that that. Is when we talk about sharing gratitude and gratitude being a part of your marketing, what you're really doing is you're sharing like basically a testimonial Instead of making the business owners share it like you've said it to them, one of the ways that you can incorporate gratitude into your marketing is to share these truly great things that you have experienced and witnesses witnessed that somebody else has done for you.

[00:25:40] Or with you or for you,

[00:25:43] Shelley: Yeah. I think in this day and age of short attention spans and shortcuts, we tend to let niceties go too often. We forget to thank people send them, I was on a podcast interview Wednesday and I didn't send a thank you note, and I'm like, I, I probably should have done that , [00:26:00] and it hasn't been released yet.

[00:26:02] It doesn't matter. I should have sent him an thank you note saying Thank you for having me on your podcast, and I had a great time. It's just that easy. Just thinking about they did something for me. How can I thank them? They go together, not just, they did something for me. Moving on . Yeah.

[00:26:24] Jen: Yeah. And that's the thing it means also having this openness to the idea that someone is doing something for you.

[00:26:32] And a lot of times when people are guests on shows, you know this cuz and we've both had shows where we have guests. Yes. There are some guests who come on who think that. It's not something that's being done for them and you, they never share it. They never thank you for the being on the show and anything.

[00:26:56] Like they just have this expectation. It's that this is something that's owed to them. And I think that what we have to do is slow down and remember . It takes a lot of time and effort to promote somebody else on a show and do that. And you're remembering. Because you know how hard it is, but I think that there are a lot of times where people are, when you're working with a contractor and you're thinking, oh, it's just so easy for them and it's not.

[00:27:22] And you can thank people for the good work that they do. I think that makes

[00:27:26] Shelley: you stand out because so few people do it. If you send a thank you to your clients or to some prospect or to, this can happen in your marketing if you are just sending out individual thank you very customized individual to each person who did whatever you stand out because so few people do that.

[00:27:50] Jen: Yeah, I had a prospecting call and my prospecting, when I talked to potential clients, I'm very candid because my view is I want to [00:28:00] help them, whether they hire me or not. Mm-hmm. , like that's how it goes, and afterwards, I sent them a thank you and I said, whether you work with me or not, here are some things that I would recommend for you.

[00:28:11] And one of the people is a former client. I know that she was like, thank you, . I think she was just like, oh, Jen B and Jen, cause this is just how I do it, but the other person didn't know me and really appreciated that level of candor. Mm-hmm. . And it's because, and I feel that because part of my mission is to make sure that people are doing well and doing better whether you're paying me or not, and, and that's part of what this show is about, but not everybody. Operates on that level. That's right. And I'm not saying, oh, be like me cuz I'm far very far from perfect . I'm just saying slow down sometimes and take stock of what you have around you. And then there are op opportunities to share that with your audience, to share that with your people so that they know who you're working with, what's working for you.

[00:29:07] Who you are appreciative of. Mm-hmm.

[00:29:11] Shelley: and why. Yeah. And if I was to go to somebody's social media and see that they were constantly promoting and showing gratitude for others, what would I think of them? I would think that's an awesome person to work with because they are so giving. I wanna be a part of their world.

[00:29:35] So what a wonderful way to boost your reputation just by, by thanking people, by promoting others who are doing good work, giving voice. If you have a podcast to people who you know are unseen and unheard and unknown, but you feel really should be known because they're doing such good work these are the types of things that lift you up [00:30:00] even though you're not promoting yourself.

[00:30:02] It is in a way promotion for you because people look at you and go, wow, what a great person.

[00:30:11] Jen: Wow. Who knew that being nice. And that's the thing, we live in this world where being nice is, is unique . It is, it's true. You right. At least in social media world. Mm-hmm. , which as we all know, is not reality.

[00:30:24] At least I hope it's not most of the time. So it's, yeah. I, I do, I do. This is, again, I'm gonna say it only works if it's from a place of authenticity. And not just Jen says, I have to be thankful I'm gonna share stuff like that. Doesn't, that's not what we're talking about, . That's not the same thing.

[00:30:42] No, no.

[00:30:43] Shelley: I was on LinkedIn today and I saw a friend of mine who was promoting himself and. He tries so hard. He works so hard. So I was like, I'm gonna give him a little, I'm gonna repost with my thoughts and just add on my 2 cents to his promotion so that more people see it because I appreciate him.

[00:31:03] He's my friend. I wanna help him out. And it took what a minute of my time to do that. So those little helpful things that, that. You're people that, you're friends you're being a friend. Yeah. That's what friends do. . Yeah.

[00:31:20] Jen: And that's, and that has a big part in your business. This is something you can be doing year round.

[00:31:25] This is not a only do this in November. , if you have s . Yeah. . If you have a. and of people who are, contractors or people working for you or with you and things go wrong. This is where things, this is where it gets really tough to be gracious and share gratitude when things go wrong. You still have to share gratitude for the things that went right, and you have to do it in a way that helps to build capacity [00:32:00] among the people around you.

[00:32:01] And this is what. Can be a real struggle or a real challenge for a small business owner who doesn't have a lot of resources. There's just too many things going on. It makes it very difficult. But I encourage you before you go, ah, everything went wrong. Like before that , take a minute and think about the things that went right.

[00:32:23] This is what, you wanna do a reflection of some kind so that you can parse out like what actually went wrong. And one of the ways that you find out, whether it's yourself or like I said, you have a team and vendors. One of the ways that you're gonna find out what actually happened is with sugar and honey, not with anger.

[00:32:44] That's, so you can share appreciation. For all of the things that happened that were good and it will help you get to the bottom of when sideways, what went wrong.

[00:32:56] Shelley: Yeah. And it's unexpected. You take people by surprise and and you get their attention when you do things like that.

[00:33:02] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:07] Jen: I don't think I have. Do you have other things you wanna share about gratitude?

[00:33:10] Shelley: Maybe we'll get to it in the inspiration, but that's all I have for marketing part of it. .

[00:33:16] Jen: Awesome. So I will share some links in the show notes to a couple of blog posts. I did an early episode, I don't know it was two or three years ago, about surrender.

[00:33:27] I'll include that in the show notes as. If Shelley has some inspiration or gratitude, we'll put those in as well so that you can get some access to some other times that we've talked about these things. So thank you for indulging in us doing this. It's a little bit different. Because we can't teach you how to do gratitude.

[00:33:47] I told Shelley that before the show. There's no how to do gratitude in your marketing. That's not really a thing .

[00:33:54] Shelley: But if you have ideas of how you know you've done things, if you've, used [00:34:00] gratitude in your business, in your marketing to reach out to increase business in any way put that in the comments cuz we would love to know about that.

[00:34:08] Jen: One of the things I did for a while is if somebody sent me a client, a potential, whether I had them or not, I would send Starbucks gift cards to people, thank you, notes, all kinds of things. So tell us what it is that you're doing that can really help you. Yeah. And help

[00:34:24] Shelley: everybody. Yeah. Share the

[00:34:28] Jen: love.

[00:34:28] That's right. . That was right. So that's the end of presentations. That's

[00:34:35] right. ,

[00:34:37] Shelley: and again, look for those links in the description books for those blog posts that Jen's offering you and podcast episodes as well. I'm sure I have something because I, I've got a big catalog of personal development stuff, so you're a

[00:34:55] Jen: life coach.

[00:34:56] Come on. Come on .

[00:34:58] Shelley: Yeah.

[00:35:00] Jen: So I'm teasing you.

[00:35:02] Shelley: Are you ready to move into

[00:35:03] Jen: tweaks? I am.

[00:35:07] Shelley: All right. I found a new tweak this week. In fact, this morning I found something called volley.app. Cool. I'm gonna share that with you. Here we go. This is just with this screen. There isn't a whole lot there but there are groups that you can join such as this is the Vol for Video Creators, and this is Volley for Coaches, and they encourage, , you'd be able to do stuff like that.

[00:35:35] And so

[00:35:36] Jen: what's vo What does it do?

[00:35:38] Shelley: VO is is a, it's a video. You can make a video. Mm-hmm. , And send it to somebody, and then they can answer that in a video and send that to you so that you don't have to be in the same place at the same time. Like on a Zoom call for instance, if you have coaching clients or clients in a membership and they want specific I wanna ask you a specific [00:36:00] question and something very tailored to them.

[00:36:02] Rather than putting it out in a forum, they could send you a question in a video and then you could answer their question in a video that just goes to them. So it's a question and answer back and forth, which is why it's called Volley back and forth. And. They also have a way that you can start a group in there so that people are voling back and forth to each other as well as to the leader of the group.

[00:36:25] So if you have peer to peer people talking to each other, just sending videos back and forth. And again, it's nice, especially if you have people in other countries and other time zones, and yeah, you can be together at the same time, you can. Make a very short, quick video, blah, blah, blah.

[00:36:42] And then they get it, they see it and they make a video back to you so that you get to see each other's faces, hear each other's voices. You don't have to do a lot of typing and it's a very cool little app. It's free. To use. Okay. Until you start charging people. So then they take 5% off of whatever you're charging people.

[00:37:02] So if you say, I'm charging a thousand dollars a month for coaching they take 5% of that every month.

[00:37:08] Jen: Not cool they're taking it, but I get it like that. It's cool that you can charge, but

[00:37:12] Shelley: yeah. Is what I meant. It's a, it's something that you can use for things like that or you can use it for free and not charge people.

[00:37:18] That's your choice. Awesome.

[00:37:20] Jen: That's cool. And that's at vol.app? Yes.

[00:37:23] Shelley: Okay, awesome. Yeah, I'm sure I don't have a tweak of all kinds of ways to use it. As you start, get into it.

[00:37:32] Jen: Yeah. I don't have a tweak of the week. I started using script. So last week we started, we talked about script. I shared with Shelley before the show some of my frustrations cause like they moved everything.

[00:37:44] Mm-hmm. , I hate it when they do that. And then Shelley was saying that they changed some of the shortcuts and shortcuts that makes it difficult. , but the functionality is it's definitely improved. I think I was using beta too and just didn't know it. Mm-hmm. , because when Shelley was describing it, I was like, [00:38:00] wait, that's been part of it forever.

[00:38:01] And then then it wasn't , I realized it wasn't. But it's it's definitely way better. I think they've even tightened up some of the, when you take out filler words, it sounds better now they smoothed it out a little bit. and I think it's great. But yeah it's hard to relearn when they change and move everything.

[00:38:21] And that's the pain I'm in right now. So that's my tweak the week. .

[00:38:25] Shelley: Yeah. Yeah. But you can always go down in the time timeline, if you're like a little bit lost, like I put something in there and now I don't know where it went, you can open up the timeline and go oh, here it is. And you can move it or stretch it or whatever you need to do.

[00:38:37] So there's two different ways to to edit with it. You can just do the do the stuff with. Text in the script. Yeah. Or you can go down in the timeline and shift things around if you need to. Very cool. So it gives you that extra ability there. I like, well, ,

[00:38:54] Jen: I know it is a little, like it.

[00:38:55] They move stuff around, but I think that it's a way better, it's better.

[00:38:59] Shelley: Yeah. I think the studio sound has improved as well, because when we first started using Studio sound, it was like, it would take out the.

[00:39:07] Jen: Like if was not

[00:39:09] Shelley: good music underneath your voice, it would take it out completely. And it's like, wait, no, that's not what I wanted.

[00:39:16] you have to make adjustments. Yeah,

[00:39:19] Jen: yeah. But, and I always turned it off cuz I usually do the sound in garage band. I need to still research and see if I can move my plugins into script and then I would just keep it and just use that instead of this little mini garage band step that I take. So it's.

[00:39:35] But it's cool. They've really, really improved it. I'm a huge ambassador of the script, so will continue to Yeah. Recommend it to people.

[00:39:44] Shelley: It's one of the few subscriptions we hang onto for sure. .

[00:39:48] Yeah.

[00:39:48] Jen: Yeah. I'm not getting rid of that at any time, yeah.

[00:39:50] Shelley: Yeah. Awesome. Let's talk about inspiration.

[00:39:56] I pull up my, we have a couple of quotes for you that we [00:40:00] both liked. This one, it is not joy that makes us grateful. It is gratitude that makes us joyful. That was David Spindel rest and Brene Brown said, I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and.

[00:40:23] So a lot about joy and how to inspire joy, and we all want that in our lives. We want more joy, we want more. Happy feelings, . And one of the ways to get one of the those happy feelings is like Jen had talked about where you come up with three things I'm grateful for, and you share that with people and, play a little game out of it or write it in your journal.

[00:40:48] What am I grateful for today? And then try to, Do different things every day because there are so many things to be grateful for, that when you force yourself, to be a little bit creative about it. Oh, I'm grateful for my family and I'm grateful for food, and I'm grateful for my house.

[00:41:05] Great. You can't use those again this month. Oh, no. now what? You get down to Mar, November 30th, and you're like I like coffee.

[00:41:18] Jen: Actually, coffee would come up for me well before the end of the month, before I, I, I think that, gratitude begets gratitude. So you begin to see, Is around you and what is it that they say? You see what you wanna see. Mm. So if you start seeing the good, you'll see more of the good. Mm-hmm. . But if you're focused on the bad, that's all you're gonna see around you.

[00:41:44] And I think that I know when we focus on the good things, more good things happen and we feel more joyful, we feel more rested, more grateful. You're gonna bring that Turkey [00:42:00] graphic out again, aren't you? Is that why you turned the trailer off ?

[00:42:02] Shelley: Now that you mentioned it, , there's our Turkey to say Happy Thanksgiving to everybody.

[00:42:08] We hope you have a wonderful, wonderful holiday and you get to spend time with family and friends and enjoy good meal as well.

[00:42:21] Jen: Killing small. So for people who are listening, there's this Turkey pulling a cornucopia cart, but Shelley keeps popping pilgrim hat

[00:42:36] Shelley: and we had to have that for little holiday Joy

[00:42:42] All right. Do we have anything else to say? All right. You guys have a wonderful weekend and we will see you next time. That's right. Thank you for joining the Women Conquer Business Podcast, hosted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland. Please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem.

[00:43:06] Then share this podcast with family and friends so they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the. Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.