101. March 2023 Celebrations & Stretches

  This week on The Em Makes Money Show, spring is here, and I can't believe it's already April and we're through 25% of the year. Spring is such a beautiful season where we start to see the signs of life and the new buds popping out on trees and grass poking out of the ground. And all of that is very true in our lives and businesses as well.  This episode digs into my celebrations and stretches for the month of March, including: Celebrating both kiddo's birthdays 🎂  Finding a great mortgage broker and realtor to keep our plans moving ahead on getting an income property 💵 Discovering that this podcast has 15,000 downloads 🎉 Taking Faye to see the Lion King Musical and a fancy dinner out (that was a bit of a trigger when it came with a $700 bill) 💸 An amazing time in Texas for spring break, where we saw Luke Combs in concert 🎸 Taking Grandma to Disneyland for the first time ever... and then working through the unexpected plot twist of Grandma getting COVID and ending up in the hospital. 🤧 One of my clients hit a $47,000 cash month with just two clients  🙌 And I delivered a TOTALLY NEW version of Fempire that I absolutely loved! ❤️   From a cash perspective, we collected $69,478 with the agency, $12,664 in my coaching business, for a total of $82,142. So looking at Q-1, I think it was around $279k or something like that. So I'm very grateful that we are on track for another million-dollar-plus cash year.   Now amongst these celebrations and stretches were some AMAZING lessons 100% worth sharing.   The first is around managing expectations.    March was so interesting because I had all of these ambitious things from a business perspective. But when I actually looked at my calendar and got real with myself, I had to do a bit of a reckoning.    Maybe that's happened to you before as well, where when you actually look at the hours available and you look at your to-do list, there is a mismatch.    I never used to do this! I would just load up my to-do list with no buffer and absolutely no checking in with reality. It would be tight enough that even if everything went perfectly according to plan, it would still be an ambitious list to get done. So inevitably, every week, I'd end up feeling a little disappointed in myself and feeling like I was carrying over tasks from the week before.    But I've realized that sometimes getting real and changing your expectations around time limitations and your capacity can be a gift to yourself!   When you get real with life and the way that life happens, aka building in buffer time, so you don't have to rely on everything going perfectly according to plan. You can look and be like, you know what? This week is already feeling really full. And give yourself the gift of changing your expectation around what else is going to get accomplished aside from what's already there.   Both of my kids' birthdays are in March, so extra special things were happening for each of them, and my mother-in-law came out for a visit. So when I really looked at it, it just wasn't realistic for me to think that I was going to get all of these big work projects done that I'm excited about and that I want to do.   Instead, March was more about family and making memories and really making it count with each of the kid's birthdays and spring break. Really focusing on making memories and doing something fun as a family felt really important.   So, March was full of family time and really prioritizing family in planned and unexpected ways.   Having my mother-in-law visit and taking her to Disneyland for the first time was so fun to experience. The kids loved it and would fight over who got to sit with her, and even she's expressed it was one of the most fun things she's done in her life and how grateful she is to have the memory of doing that and experiencing it with the kids.    It was great until she ended up coming down with what we initially thought was a cold, but after four or five days, we decided to take her to urgent care. It turned out she had COVID and low oxygen levels, and she was eventually admitted into the COVID unit, where she proceeded to spend five days in the hospital.    We could only visit her one at a time with an N-95 mask, a gown, gloves, and a face shield. It definitely was a plot twist.    Not only did it take what had been a really good visit that we had looked forward to and fit easily into our lives and schedules and totally flipped it on its head, but it also suddenly threw a wrench in other plans.    She was supposed to fly out a few days before we were going to fly to Texas for our spring break trip and for the concert that Faye chose for her birthday. And all of a sudden, all of those plans were up in the air.    It really was a practice of surrender and just taking it day by day and a reminder that when crappy things happen, it's okay to feel all the feels.    There was one day when Jeff was trying to go into solution mode, and I just wasn't there yet. All the solutions seemed crappy, and I just really felt bummed.    It's important for everyone to know how I model the work and put the tools into practice. A huge part of living an aligned life and being connected to your inner being is letting your feelings flow.    You don't have to immediately reframe everything.  You don't have to immediately reach for a better feeling.  You get to just be in the space of neutrality around how crappy you feel. You get to feel crappy and then not pile on and make yourself wrong for feeling crappy.    So I just had a day that was like a pity party day, and then the next day, I felt so much better and so much more willing to reach for solutions and so much more flexible around what those solutions might be.   And then, of course, new things presented themselves.    We still got to go on our trip. She got great care in the hospital. We got to practice some next-level receiving by having some friends step up to help and get her home and make sure that she was okay. And we're all back here, with her recovering and getting to visit with the kids and us extra. And it's all good.    And we've been really enjoying having some time where she's feeling healthier, and she's getting to visit with the kids and with us.   Lastly, discovering that this podcast has 15,000 downloads has just put me in a place of such gratitude. Thank you so much to all my loyal listeners. It really is such a gift to have the space and to share.    And honestly, it makes me even more excited to amplify the mission behind this work!   I don't talk enough about how the mission is to heal our money wounds in community. To talk transparently about money and change that taboo around money so we can all talk about it, rewrite our limiting beliefs around it, and more easily welcome in money, in turn helping everyone!    I really believe that this podcast is an important piece of that. And that's why I bring on so many guests, and I ask them questions about their money story.    I want you to know what's possible. But I also want you to take people off of pedestals. There are people that seem so successful, and then you hear how much they're making and about their struggles with money, what they thought and how they felt, and you can resonate.    It humanizes us all because it helps us realize it's not just this person that has some magical combination of things that we don't have. It helps us realize that so much of having a different relationship with money and having the ability to make a lot of it is a skill, a choice, and a decision to do the inner work and then actually follow through and do it.  And hopefully, very soon, I'll be saying that those 15,000 podcast downloads are now 30,000, and we'll have doubled our reach!    There really is so much good stuff happening behind the scenes and in the works, and I look forward to sharing even more with you.   If you're celebrating something exciting from March, please slide into my DMs, share it with me, share this episode, and then say what you were celebrating.  It is so important for us to acknowledge all of the things that happen in these 30 or 31-day periods. Otherwise, they just go by in a blink, and we don't even recognize the magic that they hold.