Fact Check Advice

The Inventive Journey
Episode #346
Fact Check Advice
w/ Linda Kneidinger

"Remember that everybody sees the world through their own lens. I was using the example of a telescope with somebody and we all have the view that we see and so as you're starting off in business, or even later on in business, everyone's gonna have that amazing piece of advice. So just really take everything in with a ton of gratitude that people in their heart desire to help you. But then recognize that everybody's wonderful piece of advice is from their very focused view, from their experience, and it's tinged with all of the the baggage they bring with them in life. So to listen to it but also always make sure that it rings true to your experience. If it feels right double check it. Ask other people if it's well meaning. But again we all have our own perspective and just recognize that everyone's advice is coming from their perspective."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

remember that everybody sees the world through their own lens i was using the example of a telescope with somebody and we all have the view that we see and so as you're starting off in business or even later on in business everyone's gonna have that amazing piece of advice and so just to really take everything in with a ton of gratitude that people in their heart their desire is to help you but then to also recognize that everybody's wonderful piece of advice is from their very focused view from their experience and it's tinged with all of the the baggage they bring with them in life and so to listen to it but to also always make sure that it rings true to your experience it feels right double check it ask other people it's well meaning but again we all have our own perspective and just recognize that everyone's advice is coming from their perspective [Music] everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller ip law we help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always here to help now today we've got another great guest on the podcast uh linda our neighbor as close as i'm going to get to getting it right but linda was during high school was a talented heist or athlete and played tennis and uh at least uh found that she was a good or within the realm that she played in and then as she started to uh play higher level uh or players and played more difficult and told her the coach told her she needed to think or think more while she was playing which she thought was counterintuitive but uh it was a bit impactful for later on in her career um tennis didn't work out didn't go pro but uh had a fun time doing it and then uh went into college um did he originally did pre-med um then but was at the same time doing an interdisciplinary major decided she didn't want to do pre-med but rather went into psychology started out doing school psychology and then took a break off to be a stay-at-home mom for a while and then she found that she was entering in the workforce and lost a bit of confidence um in go and re-entering the workforce also went through some marital relationship issues and took some time to uh took a course in women entrepreneurship um which uh set her in a different direction which then she decided to work with adults instead of kids and in psychology as well as doing a bit of coaching so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast linda thank you wow that's a journey uh when you hear it someone else say it absolutely so now i just took a journey then condense a much longer journey into the 30 or 45 second version so let's unpack that a bit and go back a bit back in time to where your journey started uh playing tennis in high school okay awesome devin it's interesting because you and i were chatting previously and you had said you know hey what's your what's your story starting back in high school and my interest in mindset and the brain really does have it's it's see this beginning in high school and it's i can so vividly remember that panicked feeling of being a high school athlete where i could shine easily on my own team and then facing these competitors from other schools that just had a different level of background in in tennis and really like i can feel that in my body as i say that i've really got a physical memory of that and what is wrong with me that i can win in one situation and not in another and then having that experience where my coach had said to me you're just not thinking enough you know what think more you're you know are you zoning out where are you you need to be thinking and i was in high school i didn't know anything about anything and this was the 80s when sport psychology was a mysterious thing that the russians used with their olympians but something about that i knew that wasn't right i knew that the more i thought the more i i tensed up i mean i guess i didn't know that but i knew that when i thought things that's when things went worse when i'm playing my own teammates i was relaxed and it was fun and there was nothing on the line and then a different person would show up in competition and that was sort of that seed of even through college i was as i was studying neuroscience and psychology and chemistry and psychiatry i always had that to reflect back on how does this relate to that experience i had where's the answer and i encountered some things as i was learning academically and i i found the experience of flow it was called it's called flow it's still called flow but it was a brand new idea back then that when you're doing something you love you get lost in it it is all joy you lose that sense of time and that was exactly was my issue i was in a flow state in practice i was a great practice player lots of great athletes don't make it to the next level because they're great practice players and they crush under the weight of competition your mind starts to get away from you and so i wasn't in flow thinking breaks up flow when you bring your your conscious mind starts to come through and think things whereas before that you're in this nice flow state so now you say okay you kind of figure that out and you're you know unfortunately your tennis career never quite took off didn't raise pros but had a great time doing it in high school now as you go now going off to college to say okay i'm going to at least initially start in pre-med and start to study that now how did your what made you kind of go veer off of pre-med and go more into psychology or kind of how did that come about you know honestly it was probably the thread of allowing that voice in my brain which i call anxious mouse i even have i brought him this time this is anxious mouse and he lives in everybody's brain i have a real thread in my life of allowing anxious mouse to talk me out of things and i was at an ivy league university i mean these are really smart i was in class with really smart people who had their sights on harvard med i did not have my sights on harvard med but i let myself talk myself out of the fact that i probably wasn't smart enough or talented enough i didn't belong in med school and that was the first thing that got me out of the pre-med but i love the brain and so that's what got me into psychology and i did study i have a master's in experimental psychology where i did study sports psychology but i also had a background working with children i had worked with children in lots of different settings and so i ended up working in school psychology where a lot of this nobody talks about these things with young children but these habits start as a young child where we start to think of ourselves as less than not capable of and so even though i wasn't intentionally focusing it was meaning to work on children with children on this but it's just always been there because i had that initial interest back in high school and so i did school psychology for a while and i've worked with children as young as preschool up through high school and then i took a break i felt like i was we were financially able for me to take a break and it just felt for me personally a little disingenuous to be working with other people's children and to not have any time with my own so i did spend a lot of time i spent 10 years as a stay-at-home mom and i knew i wanted to i mean i always wanted to work i love working i love sharing these things with people it really lights me up but i just hadn't been in that setting for a while and here here's anxious mouse again i really want to get back into the workforce i don't know where i belong do i even have a skill set anymore that's valuable you know stay at home mom how do i talk somebody into what i did for the last 10 years they talked about that gap having a gap in your resume that scared the heck out of me how do i explain a ten-year gap in some way that makes me relevant and and gives me meaning in the workforce and it was at that time that i had some personal issues and i'm just very fortunate that that i am interested in the brain and that i do have a lot of resources from my own upbringing that i was able to call on let me just okay one question before we get too far away from the journey because i did have one question so i definitely make sense so you come out of college you're saying okay gonna go into you know or child psychology you're going into the school system and helping out kids with psychology makes sense and then you're saying okay now as i'm they're becoming a mother having the kids i want to spend time with them gonna take a break off again makes perfect sense my wife is a stay-at-home mom she loves being with the kids and i absolutely commend her her job is much harder than mine and so with that is now as you're saying okay i assume but i'll put words in your mouth any clear quick for where i'm wrong what was the decision what was the trigger to come back into the workforce or was it kids going off to being full-time students or going off to college or i don't know or kind of what was the genesis for saying okay now i'm going to re-enter the work first which then triggered hey now i've got to deal with the a bit of i don't know anxiety or worry of you know resume gap and getting back in figuring things out and re-engaging kind of what was the trigger in the genesis for kind of coming back in the workforce after uh they're staying home with the kids for a while that's a great question i think i always had that debate debate's a kind word for argument in my head and it's it's the it's the arguments the debate that women have still stay at home or work and you can't do both can you do both should you do both which one's more valuable if you are an intelligent person are you throwing away your potential by staying at home it's it's a huge issue i my children now are i have one in college and one in a senior in high school and i meet women all the time at every la every stage of child their child's age constantly having this debate it's really hard and i i don't think i'd ever really come fully to terms with the fact that i had i was completely at home i did dabble here and there in some part-time work that was flexible i knew that a lot of people go back to work once their children are finished elementary school and as a school psychologist i knew that the period in development that is really most crucial are the middle school years that is when a lot of parents suddenly they had a lot of interest in uh interaction in their children's lives and then right at this moment where these children are starting to figure out or trying to trying to figure out who they are all of a sudden their parent is not as available as they used to be so it was meaningful to me to still be home in those middle school years but i was also really getting antsy and that argument in my head of am i am i letting my fears run the show here am i really authentically making this decision based on what i think is right for my family and myself there's a lot going on in your mind and at some point then the voice got louder that now i really want to be i want to figure out what i can do that i'm passionate about and i can still balance with my family life and in preparation for the fact that once my kids were in high school and if anybody's listening and you're and you're you have young children the biggest transition that happens is when your children get a driver's license and i i had no idea until somebody with children just a little bit older than mine told me that that's a huge difference you go from being so central in your children's life to not being them not needing you that much and i think i saw that coming and i really wanted to not be that woman who all of a sudden was lost and feeling like they were floating with no meaning in their life i didn't want to be that person i knew i had so much to give and i wanted to be working i just didn't know where and how to make it happen again so no and i think that definitely i think there's always that balance are those you know competing interests and it's always trying to find the the right balance and what makes sense uh for for each individual as far as how they or what journey they're going to take so now as you're saying okay decided i'm coming back into the workforce and you're balancing those you know those those competing interests as well as a fear and figuring out what that place will be what made you decide to you know kind of gravitate more towards you know adults and maybe you know in some of that aspect as opposed to going back to the school system or their children or those type of things what was that the motivating factor there honestly i feel like i was a little burnt out on the whole kid thing i'd lived it 24 7. i loved working as a school psychologist as a coach i still continue to have a lot of child clients youth clients because people know me from that part of my life and i have a lot of resources to bring and i can coach rather than doing counseling which is just a little different um but yeah so i i was just enjoying i was looking for more adult interaction and i was really loving talking about meeting with adults talking about these issues with adults and i already had this huge psychology piece which fits together so perfectly with coaching although not all coaches most coaches don't have it and you don't need it i mean coaching is a very nebulous thing and i i'm not going to judge anybody from any background you do have to be careful because there are so many coaches out there but all these pieces of my background i felt worked so perfectly once i really researched what is coaching again it's like that nebulous word everyone's a coach when i really figured out what it was i researched what it was i knew everything all the bells and whistles went off that going back to those experiences as far back as high school and all the things i've learned and all my background fit so perfectly because in my coaching i really bring in all that brain work it's so comforting to people when you realize that the things the self-defeating things that you do are a really natural outcome of the way our brains are meant to work to operate our brains just aren't built to operate in this modern world where we make up goals for ourselves and once you learn how to work with your brain things are so much easier and when i put these pieces together it was really the idea of being able to give this to people and have that be my job was very exciting it really lit me up it it was that you know when people are looking for their passion i knew i found my passion so i went and i became certified as a coach and i just put it out you know we certainly the business development part here i have you want to talk about fears you want to talk about anxious mouse chirping in your head my dad was a family physician my mom was a teacher i had worked in school systems like i did not have any resources i had no knowledge of how do you build a business that was all brand new to me which was also exciting but all brand new and so i dove into that part and i let it i had a i had to be a little vulnerable and put it out there to everyone in my network hey i've become a coach i'm taking all my personal experience and putting it towards coaching and i'm starting a business and that was really scary because then you don't know are people gonna is anyone gonna respond and it they did and that was the beginning of how i have built my business is just being vulnerably willing to put it out there all the time what i do how i help people and that i'm open for conversations to explore things with people now no i think that's definitely a very insightful part of your journey so now kind of catching us up a bit to where you're at today so you kind of journey back on your own decided you're going to focus a bit more on you know adults as clientele and even more so on coaching took the classes got the certifications got things going so where does that put you today so as a business you know you and you're doing the solo thing which i think is amicable or admirable i don't know and uh already you know you're building a business you're looking to bring people on and increase the coaching because you know i've seen coaching go both ways to where sometimes it makes sense you just want to do it on your own and you want to have your own coaching you know lifestyle and other people are saying no i'm going to build it to where it's i'm able to help more people so kind of give us an idea where's the business today so i am currently still a solopreneur and i do have a completely full practice because i am balancing it i am still doing the mom thing i have consciously made the choice and we all have those moments where we complain to ourselves in our head and so i'm coaching myself 24 7. i consciously made the decision to dive into some pretty big projects at my son's school because it's my my last chance and so i have a completely for one-on-one practice i do have an online course i don't promote it that often and i do have a lot of ideas for other online courses i'd like to develop so that i could reach more people at an easier entry level i understand that the idea of entering into one-on-one coaching can be a little intimidating and i also have a couple books floating around in my head so i'm at that very exciting place where i'm less than a year from being an empty nester and i will have more time and i will have to prioritize which of these things i will explore which direction i would like to go in terms of expanding the business part of my my business or my coaching awesome well it sounds like both plenty of things to keep you busy right now and plenty of things in the work that will continue to keep you busy so an exciting time and definitely excited to see where things go so well now we've uh reached kind of the where you're doing where you're currently at in your journey maybe looking a bit into the future as far as the things that you have on the horizon it's a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each journey um so the first question i'll always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made what'd you learn from it so as you've probably figured out from my journey i i love learning i love i i have the fear i have a lot of anxious mouths but i'm usually pretty good about diving in anyway you see the quote everywhere feel the fear and do it anyway so when i was diving into becoming an entrepreneur i was very i'm the kind of person who's very susceptible to want to learn it all and there is no end to companies marketing to businesses and i spent a lot of time going for every shiny new thing i'll take that free webinar i'll take i'll do the free software the free trial on this i'll try everything and to a certain extent that is important there's a lot to learn and you want to be able to function well as a business and there's a lot of technology out there you want to figure out which pieces are right for me at some point i had to catch myself and i do have two other coaches that i we have a mastermind together and so we support each other but we also coach each other and i recognized and called myself out that i needed to figure out i just stopped going being attracted to every shiny little thing and i had to figure out what is working for me right now what are the things that really make sense for me to put some effort into either investing in money and time and then i need to be able to let everything else go and i if you're on anybody watching if you're on linkedin i mean you know my inbox is just every day tens hundreds of messages with people with some wonderful thing that's going to explode my profitability and my number of clients and at the beginning it all sounds very interesting and promising and so it takes some self-control to be able to block out the noise stay the course figure out what's working for you what's the next thing to explore for growth purposes but understand that it's not all an opportunity for growth and i think that there you know that it is a hard balance in the you know the shiny object syndrome so to speak because on the one hand you know you're wanting to stay focused and on the other hand there's a lot of opportunities and it's hard to know is what i'm currently focusing on what i should be here is there a better opportunity over here especially the early stages where you're also trying to focus hey if i'm going to get a business it needs to make money and be able to be self-sustaining and support itself and so you're oftentimes even more gravitating towards assigning objects because out of necessity you're trying to figure out what works and what makes sense and so i definitely understand how that how that mistake is made and also how everybody has to find the balance and where the the idea ideal is as to where you're not chasing every idea but you're focusing on what what makes sense so definitely a great insight yeah you can be very busy doing things that are not in any way helping your your business your career at all absolutely yeah and i think it is one where you have to make it and on the other hand you can sometimes so narrowly focus your business that you are very focused but you're not making any money either because you're passing up the opportunities to where the opportunity really lies so i think it is that focus and making sure that you're focusing on the right things and finding that balance so with that the second question i always ask is if you're talking something that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the piece of advice you give them so this piece of advice is both life coaching and business coaching and that is to remember that everybody sees the world through their own lens i was using the example of a telescope with somebody and we all have the view that we see and so as you're starting off in business or even later on in business everyone's going to have that amazing piece of advice and so just to really take everything in with a ton of gratitude that people in their heart their desire is to help you but then to also recognize that everybody's wonderful piece of advice is from their very focused view from their experience and it's tinged with all of the the baggage they bring with them in life and so to listen to it but to also always make sure that it rings true to your experience it feels right double check it ask other people it's well-meaning but again we all have our own perspective and just recognize that everyone's advice is coming from their perspective yeah and i think that there's a lot in there in the sense that you know sometimes people i would agree most people are pretty well-meaning they're not trying to lead you straight they're trying to give you advice especially if you're asking them they're trying to help you out and yet not everybody's advice is created equal some people are giving it from a place of hey they're a bit jealous hey they're a bit wanting to do what you're doing some people are very pessimistic some people are optimistic some people don't want to hurt your feelings and you have to kind of sift through all that because they're all well-meaning and i don't think anybody is trying to do anything other than help you out but it doesn't mean all the advice is helpful or you should always take that into your business and so i think finding the balance or the balance of those people that can give you advice that are going to be helpful to your business that is going to be insightful and it's going to put you in the best direction is a great takeaway and a great insight well as we wrap up if people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an investor they want to be an employee they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you find out more i do have a website so my coaching business i call it ultimate you coaching my website is ultimateu dashcoaching.com and i do have a weekly newsletter the best way to get value from me or to just get to know me a bit better is get on my newsletter list every week i have a topic and i walk you through why is this important why do people have trouble with it and what are some strategies or tips to get you rolling to try to change your mindset or have a new insight in this area so it's a completely value packed newsletter and that's the best way to to get in touch with me and find out more about what i do and what i'm like all right well i definitely encourage people to connect up check out the newsletter check out the information and always have a learning mindset playing that's great well as we wrap up thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so feel free to go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat and we're always always here to help thank you again uh linda for coming on the podcast and what's the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you

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