Last Saturday was my late grandma’s birthday.

My cousin sent me an adorable picture of her daughter putting flowers on her grave. ❤️

And it reminded me of a story that someone shared with me after she passed away.

She used to live right next to the church she attended every Sunday.

Because of where her house was, sometimes people mistook it for the parish.

One day, someone rang my grandma’s doorbell and said they needed money to get back on their feet. They wondered if the church could help.

Instead of sending them next door, she retrieved her checkbook and asked how much they needed.

They didn’t find out until later that they went to the wrong place.

She never said a word. She just offered the help they needed.

So I didn’t think it was a coincidence that as I drove around to different furniture stores on Saturday, I kept hearing the song Standing Room Only by Tim McGraw on the radio.

Even when I didn’t catch the whole song, my ears always managed to tune into this lyric: 

🎶“Live a life so when I die there’s standing room only. Stop judging my life by my possessions. Start thinking ’bout how many headlights will be in my procession.” 🎶

It’s a song about living your life in a way that moves people so deeply that you have standing room only at your funeral.

I think it’s fair to say most of us aspire to live like this. We want lives filled with love, connection, and purpose.

It’s one of the reasons I love working with holistic health practitioners.

Most of you got into this work because of a deep desire to love and support other people.

But sometimes the urgency of business and the hardship of life starts to cloud that pure intention.

I’ve been there before in my early days of being an entrepreneur.

#1. I wanted an expert to give me a step-by-step system.

I’ve fallen prey to those IG coaches who tout that they made 6 figures in 90 days. I wanted them to tell me what to do, to give me a system. But once I got the “secret” I realized two things…

• This wasn’t how I wanted to do business
• The system wasn’t sustainable for me

(This is not a word against getting a coach or support, but it is a note against giving away your agency)

#2. I wanted it all, like, yesterday.

I’ve heard that there’s no real overnight success story, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want it for myself. I wanted to skip looking like beginner, learning through failure, and all of the hard parts of entrepreneurship.

Ha! The harder you try to skip that phase, the more it comes back to bite you in the booty.

#3. I thought sales and marketing had to feel hard and pushy in order to work.

Despite having formal (and expensive) corporate sales and marketing training that told me otherwise, I fell into this trap.

At one point, I used a word-for-word sales script from a business coach on sales calls that felt SO icky. I kept telling myself it was because new things are hard, and I was resistant to doing hard things.

But it only took a few failed sales conversations to realize it felt as icky for the other person as it did for me.

If you’ve been here before, please don’t be too hard on yourself.

You’re trying to build something in a system that will always say, “the pressure is on.”

Quarterly earnings, highlight reels, and shortening media cycles are enough to make you feel like you’re –

• always behind
• never enough
• need to do more.

But the problem is that short-term thinking only creates short-term solutions.

So let’s circle back to death.

Death, albeit morbid, is the long-term perspective shift that often slaps you back to reality.

Because your brand, and your reputation, are the things country star legends like Tim McGraw write hit songs about.

If you’re early on in your business, don’t forget you always have a choice. Even if the choice feels really hard. 

Think about how you want people to feel when they reflect on their experience with you:

• Did you make them feel like an extra buck? Or did you meet them human for human?
• Did they feel like you cut corners? Or were they so blown away they couldn’t stop telling people about you?
• Were they confused by the new offering you created? Or did they feel like they were a part of the creation process – like you built it FOR them?

When people think about me, I don’t want them to say, “Oh, I worked with her once. She was good.”

I want them to say, “Her emails made me smile. She made me feel like I had permission to be more ME in my marketing.”

What do you want your legacy to be?