What’s In Your Toolbox?

Bye bye. All right. Boom. We're jumping on our livestream right after something else exciting. And isn't that just the most beautiful way to jump into what we want to chat about today? That's right, it's Tuesday. Hi, everyone. Tuesday. Tuesday. I'd say toasty Tuesday because we're in Arizona, but right now it's raining not men either. It's not raining men. It's not raining cats and dogs. Which, funny story, raining cats and dogs. Does anybody happen to know where that saying comes from? I have an elderly friend.

He is 79 years old, and he likes to come into any conversation with pretty much anybody with fun facts. And he was telling me that houses built way back in God knows when, the roofs were made of, like, hay and things that could obviously easily catch on fire. But when it rained, birds nests were in the roof of the house. And when it rained, things would come through the roof. So it was literally raining cats and dogs. Birds, cats, dogs, mouse meeses, mices. All the time. Oh, my. Oh my. Lions, tigers and bears.

Oh, my. So tangent there. Take that. You know, it's kind of like a good, I don't know who's really good at trivia, but when you this one. So she'll, like, randomly tell me things. I'm like, how do you find that stuff? It's so interesting. So take that information. Take that useless information, and I guarantee you it's gonna come up in a conversation later this week. It was about 50 fun facts. It was like, throw the baby out with the bath water. Raining out come dogs. I don't have a pot to, you know, p*** in.

It was all of these super, like, fun sayings, and he gave me context as to why people said them. Red scent. He actually brought me in a red scent. Like, I don't have a red scent. That's funny. They were little. Like, you would cut pennies in half. And it was, yeah, wild. Anyways, this is not what we're talking about today, so happy Tuesday. Hi, Katie. Hi, Lou. Hi, you guys. What we want to talk about today was something that was written in the community feed a few weeks ago, and it was about our why.

I don't know where I heard this. I'm not sure where we talked about it. But the last couple weeks we've talked about kind of having a rough go at things, having bad days, feelings not being facts. And today I want to just give you the overall context and then we can dive into it a little bit and it's your why or your purpose needs to be written in pen, and the how needs to be written in pencil. And the reason for that is because as humans, we can be so stuck in this control state of wanting to control how things happen, but we don't.

Logically, we don't have control of anything other than what? What do you say, Jill? Our attitude and our effort. We have no control over anything other than our attitude and our effort. So we've got this big why. We said we wanted to do something. We ventured out. We laugh because we've built our business. So if you don't know us, we're girls mentorship. This is Mary. This is Jill. We teach life and personal development skills to teen and tween girls. We've done it for two and a half years now.

So we've built this business, and we've got a website and an email list and a social media following. And we, on days we're not feeling great or we're feeling overwhelmed, we look at each other and we're like, who did this? Who did this to us? Or we're like, what's a job that is secure that we can just quit and go and do that job? And we're like, nursing. Nursing. We used to giggle that we would just. We did that. Give up everything. You're gonna. We're gonna be nurses. But, you know. But that's not the why.

That's not our purpose. The purpose for us was to equip girls and how it's turned out, obviously, now humans. Cause everyone needs the skills that we teach, and the skills that we teach are social, emotional learning. It's your emotional intelligence. It's understanding how you show up that impacts other people. It's understanding your why. So, back to the original point, the why being written pen and the how. Being written in pencil is really, really integral to not only business owners everywhere, but people.

Because, for instance, we're. I mean, the phone call we just got off of, we're hosting a summer camp. We're hosting 15 days worth of a summer camp in June and July, and we're being faced with issues or complications or problems that we haven't come up with as business owners yet. We hosted a summer camp last year, and the venue we were at didn't require what we're supposed to have at this venue this year. So we're having to jump through different hoops, ones that we couldn't have foreseen happening.

That can be challenging and difficult and frustrating. And if our whole track is written in pen, we can't deviate from that 100% well. And what's interesting, especially in the position that we've been in over the last couple of days, we've reached out to people who are smarter than us and who have gone before us to ask for help. So then we get a list of people, hey, here's people you can reach out to and ask your questions, and they're gonna help guide you around. Finding event insurance. That's what we've been seeking.

So we called the first guy and then the second gal, so on and so forth. And the first person that called us back literally scared the living bejesus out of us. I just feel stupid. I cannot believe you've been operating without insurance. And, oh, boy, I don't think anyone's gonna cover you because you're working with kids. And it was just this very. There was a fear undertone to what he was sharing with us as opposed to giving us options. So I get off the phone and I tell Mare, I'm like, whoa, we are doing this whole thing wrong.

And what I love about her is she questions everything, which is a good skill and quality to have, because if I were to have taken his advice, his path, that was written in pen, in pen as our path, it would have totally stopped us. So she was like, but you know what? I think there's another way. There's always another way. Which then allowed us to erase that, write it in pencil and keep calling and seeking and asking for help. And that conversation that we just got off the phone with totally different.

So easeful and night and day difference, literally, it was a recommendation from two different people. So we got on the website, actually didn't work, so we had to make a phone call, which can also deter people from doing things nowadays anymore. But it was such an easy conversation, so it wasn't written in pen. We didn't have a blueprint in terms of how we were gonna go about doing it. And that's what made it possible for us to put the conversation with. We'll just call him John aside, because he did make it feel so scary.

And, yes. Can life and situations feel scary? They absolutely can. They should. They will be. But that's why it's important to have the how written in pencil, because you're gonna come up against brick walls, you're gonna drive over speed bumps. You're gonna be detoured from the route that you thought you were supposed to take, and it's going to beep, beep, beep, reroute, reroute. It's going to have to reroute. Google Maps is going to come on and reroute you well. And the beautiful thing about this conversation is not sitting down on yourself.

Really, at the end of the day, your how should be written in pencil. And it should be like, you want to feel like life is full of ups and downs because it's going to lead you to the next opportunity. But when those opportunities are hard, like, really hard, and you receive hard news, or you don't get the promotion or parenting, just you're at your wits end with your children, it makes you want to quit. So the best thing that we always. That we practice, that we support one another in, is not quitting on a bad day.

So when times are hard and you're like, you're constantly having a race, I go, I need a new eraser. My kids have those, like, big pink erasers, which I'm like, man, those were so great. And they're still around, the ones you used to drill holes in with your pencil. Why did we all do that? And you flip it around. Yeah, yeah. Those days where you're like, I'm at my wit's end and I can't do it anymore, that's when you phone a friend. That's when you have to also remind yourself of all the reasons of the why, of the why and not quit on a bad day.

And that's. That's, that's. That. That's what we have coming at you for our Tuesday talk, our toolbox talk. Um, I guess that's grit. I guess that's perseverance. I guess that's being able to really differentiate facts from feelings. Because feelings, when I'm feeling some type of way, I do want to quit. When something is hard, I do want to give up. That's human nature. That's our monkey mind. Right? We were cavemen. We're supposed to be in this box of comfort, but we know that nothing grows inside the comfort zone.

And in order to get out of that comfort zone, we have to be able to be willing to ebb and to flow and to change and to reroute and to pivot. And that's really the overarching theme here, is how are you responding when something comes in the way of your perfectly curated plan? Right. Because nothing is actually perfectly curated. I agree. And at the end of the day, whatever it is, just remember that you can't take all this stuff when you leave. Meaning, like, when we leave this big, beautiful earth, the thing that we get to leave with people is how we made them feel and the impact that we had with them.

Our legacy. Our legacy. And that's in your. Why? Your legacy, 100% legacy, is directly tied to your purpose. That thing that you wrote down in pen. So keep that in mind. Totally. We see you. We see you having bad days. We're experiencing them right alongside you. But I promise you, if you continue to work hard, you're gonna get past it. You're gonna get through it, not around it. And we're cheering you on every step of the way. So. So until next time, you guys let us know how this was for you. Comment community feed.

We're here. We are here. And we'll see you next week in five, four. What? Three, two.