You can have a lot of external success, but if you are overworking yourself, you won’t have the drive to continue. You need to have the perfect mindset, or what Julia Pimsleur would call the Go Big Mindset. Julia is the Founder and CEO of Million Dollar Women. She is also the author of several books including, Go Big Now. Join Julia and your host, Kim Sutton, to discover how to have the right values and mindsets. Learn the secret to achieving the Go Big Mindset and how it can keep you in a positive state. Also, find some key mindset practices that will lead you to true success and fulfillment.
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The Go Big Mindset: Learn How To Stay Positive In Life With Julia Pimsleur
Readers, I am so happy that you are back for another episode. If you have been around and have realized how the show has been reformatted, the theme has been winning routines and habits. If you go back and read some of the previous episodes, you are going to know I’m talking about the goods, bad, uglies, the challenges that I’ve experienced in my business and a lot of the big wins. You’ve known I talk about mindset time and time again. I’ve been actively working on it for several years. I wished that it was something that had been introduced to me as far as improving my mindset even as a child. You’ve heard me talking about how I want my kids to learn how to have a better mindset. Our guest, Julia Pimsleur is the author of Go Big Now: 8 Essential Mindset Practices to Overcome Any Obstacle and Reach Your Goals as well as Million Dollar Women.
I am so excited about our conversation, Julia. As I said, mindset was not something that I grew up with. I thought that how life was going to be, deal with it. If there was a dark cloud over my head, it was going to stay that way. I didn’t realize until I was 29 that I had the ability to change my frame of mind. It took another six years for me to get a grasp on that. There’s no way I can say that the learning ended then, it’s a constant state of learning for me in evolution and improvement, and some days are better than others. How did you get introduced to mindset practices and start implementing them in your life?
You still need to work on your mindset. It is not a one-and-done thing.
I love that you shared how you’re still working on it because mindset is not a once-and-done kind of thing. You can learn how to do a lot of things within your business to grow, “Now I know how to do that.” With mindset, even the top teachers are still learning it every day. I’m still implementing so many of the things I’m learning and grow in there too. My mindset journey started because of my business. I had built a business that was called Little Pim. It was a language teaching business for young children. I grew up bilingual in French and English and thought that was the best gift my parents ever gave me.
I wanted my son to learn French when he was born but there was nothing on the market for little kids to learn a foreign language. I created the first method for little kids to get conversational in French, Spanish, or Chinese. We had twelve languages. I grew that for about four years and I was having a blast. I was also working myself into the ground, which the few people reading might relate to where I would get up, get the kids to school, go to work, come home, give them dinner and bath, get back on the computer, fixing the broken links on the website, answering customer service emails, get up at 5:00 AM the next day and start all over again.
I was exhausted. I got to the place where even I was getting featured in some news stories and Angelina Jolie’s started using our program to teach her kids French. I’m having a lot of external success, but starting to feel like, “I don’t even want to do this anymore. I’m so tired.” I got to a place where I almost sold my business or shut it down. Happily, my lawyer introduced me to an entrepreneur’s program here in New York City that helps you learn business skills to take your business big. The first thing I had to learn how to change was my mindset.
I realized that I had been raised with this idea that if you want to get ahead, you work harder, grit is the most important thing, and everything can be solved through hard work. I don’t know if that resonates but that is not. I am now anti-grit because I think that we’ve been sold a bill of goods as women. My community, Million Dollar Women, is about 25% women of color and even more so. It’s all about hard work. We all got that message from our parents. When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s about getting into what I call the Go Big mindset which is, what’s the big vision I have? How am I going to get there? What are the resources I need? That was the game-changer for me learning how to shift my mindset. It started years of interest in this, including going and getting trained as a mindset coach in NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
In 2016, right before I launched the show, I went through a major depressive state where I nearly ended everything. I’ll leave it at that. I’m sorry to the reader who I may have triggered. I know what it feels like. I want to put it like that. I thought that the more I did or the more I worked on, the more I would make. There was a period of eighteen months where I was working 20 to 22-hour days. I was so sleep-deprived at the end that I couldn’t think straight. I am married to a man that I absolutely love. I have five great children. I loved my business, but I was so sleep-deprived that I was out of my mind. That’s the best way I can say it.
I don’t think that’s an inappropriate way but that’s the best way I could come up with the right then. Immediately, one of my dearest friends started introducing me to different authors. I always thought that high performance and peak performance meant doing more. I started listening. I want to highlight you so I won’t name anybody else right now. I started realizing that saying no was not a bad thing because I had been guilty of saying yes for four years that my business had been around. I felt if I ever said no, I would immediately lose that client. I would lose their respect, and I would be without money so I said yes to everything.
It is a scarcity fear-based approach. That’s a mindset thing. I’m so glad you’re sharing that so we can show people what this looks like of working on your mindset until you get into the right mindset, you’re going to attract all kinds of things you don’t want and think, “That’s life. Life is giving me these things I don’t want.” When in fact, they’re all coming from you. When we don’t have our mindset in the right place, we attract the wrong people and the wrong clients. We say yes to things we shouldn’t say yes to, we become sleep deprived. All kinds of things like that can happen. The problem is mindset isn’t taught. It’s a buzzword right now especially coming out of the pandemic, “You should have a resilient mindset, growth mindset, powerful mindset.” What does that mean and how do you get one?
That’s why I wrote the book. I’ve been lucky enough to spend years with one foot in the business world and one foot in the personal development world, learning from some of the top teachers, using it in my coaching practice over a couple of years with thousands of entrepreneurs. I realized there are essential mindset practices that all successful people are using. My goal with Go Big Now was to make those accessible and easy to learn for everybody so that we can all have a powerful mindset or what I call a Go Big mindset.
I’m curious. You’re a mom. You have two teenagers. How do you bring your training and your expertise and mindset into your role as a mother?
Every single day. Part of it is keeping myself in a positive high-energy state so that I can show up for my children in that way. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making or how many great things you’re doing professionally, when you’re with your children, you’re cranky, you’re distracted, and you’re not prioritizing them. That’s my first thing. I do mindset-wise. I keep myself in a positive state even though everything isn’t always going great in my business like for people reading. You do have control once you’ve done mindset training over how you show up with the people you love. That’s the first thing.
Go Big Mindset: When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s about getting into the Go Big mindset. You need to ask yourself, what’s your big vision? How are you going to get there? What are your resources?
The second thing is sharing some of these tools and best practices with them, not in a preachy way. My kids are teenagers, so if I try to tell them to do anything, they’ll do the opposite. I have a whole chapter on this in the book. My final chapter is how you can share these eight-essential mindset best practices I teach with your loved ones and with your children. A few ways that I’ve found are to one, point them out in popular culture. There are a lot of movies and TV shows where people have mindset shifts or mindset challenges. You can point that out like when we watched The Matrix. That movie is so much about mindset. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Keanu Reeves classic film. Did you ever see The Matrix?
Yes. I’m going to be rewatching that now because I’d never looked at it from that perspective before.
He wakes up and he has to choose between the red pill and the blue pill. He chooses the one where he would be conscious and awake, which means he has new choices to make about who he wants to be in the world. That is a choice that we all have to make. Do you want to go forward blindly and be at the whim of what happens to you, or do you want to do some mindset training, take control of your life, and realize I am at the source of everything that happens to me? This is not in conflict with being someone who is spiritual or religious. You can believe in God and believe that you have agency in your life, but I wish this was taught in school.
The three things I do. One, I pointed out in popular culture so we can have that conversation. I’ll share more popular culture reference which is a book and a movie called The Hate U Give. That was about some young people growing up. I believe it was in LA. They were all black. Different characters made different choices that led them to different faiths and it was made into a movie. My thirteen-year-old is reading it. I read it too but I saw the whole thing through a mindset lens and we were able to have an amazing conversation about what happens when you make these choices. Are you the result of where you were born and the schools you’re sent to or are you able to get yourself into a different state and make different things happen in your life? That’s a mindset question.
The third thing we can do is talk about what has worked for us. That’s something that works with adults too. I’m a big believer in what we call in my Million Dollar Women community, “No shooting,” which means no shooting on people. “You should try this mindset practice. You should read this book.” That never works, but if you say, “I read this book and it taught me that I can create a little space between what happens to me and the meaning I make of it. It’s called mind gap,” which is the first mindset practice I teach in the book. If you say that to someone, they might be like, “How does that work?” You can explain it and talk about what good things that did for you.
The next thing you know, they might be trying to use it. I’m sure as a mom, sometimes you tell your kids things, they roll their eyes, and you think that went right over their heads. Two weeks later, you hear them telling the exact same thing to their little brother. We want to always be modeling for our children like, “Here’s what I’m doing to try to solve my problems.” Even if they roll their eyes or seem like they’re not listening, they are listening. Maybe a couple of weeks later, they’re going to remember, “When mom was upset that day, she did this practice called ‘find the gratitude.’ I could try that.” My kids are very good at shifting their mindsets because they watch me do it over again.
A couple of years ago, my oldest, who graduated from high school, his attitude was sucky like, “I know everything. I don’t need to listen to you. I can snap back.” I’m sure there’s some puberty and hormones in there, too because now I’m going through the same with my kid number two. I grounded him and I said, “You will be ungrounded after you read this book.” I’m going to share the book.
I share a lot of books in my book. My book is also a gateway to a lot of the top books I read.
My faith is important to me. The book was Think Better, Live Better by Joel Osteen. He sat in my office, reading the book over the course of one day. He wanted to be ungrounded. He wanted to prove that he had read it. The whole time he was reading, he was like, “If I think better, I’ll live better?” Fast forward to the spring, he was getting his college acceptances and looking at what they were offering as far as financial incentives to go to the different schools. He had the one school that he was waiting for. He knew he was getting some awards, but when he logged onto the website one day, everything had disappeared. It was showing him that he had zero coming. He’s eighteen now, I’ll share his name. I was like, “Jake, remember, think better, live better. It could be a glitch. You don’t know.”
That day I had to take him over to his dad’s house. He picked up the mail on the way out of my house and there was a letter in there from the school. He opens it while we’re in the car and he starts crying. This is a big strong kid who I never see cry. He’s like, “Mom, I’ve got a full ride.” I’m not saying that we can always expect a full ride with a better mindset at all. I said, “Jake, let that serve as a lesson to you. Keep your spirits up. Keep looking forward. Keep your chin up because you don’t know what’s going to happen in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, in 2 months, in 10 years, you don’t know.”
That’s incredible. The truth is that advice would’ve worked even if he hadn’t got the full ride because he could still go into the process with a positive attitude, find a different college, or make a decision based around that. To realize that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% attitude. I’ve been saying that to my kids since day one.
I’ve had to learn that. Taking my own medicine or whatever it is, that expression goes. When I feel scared saying no to a client, I have to keep my spirits up knowing that there is something awesome coming. At the end of 2019, I let my sole client go because it was not working out for me anymore. I was so scared. That client was providing 100% of my income. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.
I hope you’d already done a little mindset work before you did that?
A lot. I had been looking at my values and my integrity as well. I’ve never said the client’s name. I will never say it, but I realized there was a big discrepancy there. I need to stay true to myself. I let the client go and within a couple of months, I got my biggest client ever because it created a space for it.
If you fail, keep your spirits up and keep looking forward. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.
Let’s break this down for the readers. If anybody is thinking, “That was just luck or coincidence.” Not really in the sense that we do attract what we make room for and what we believe we cannot attract as well. Because when we’re in that place of scarcity and fear, we shrink. We almost physically shrink. If I asked somebody, show me what your body looks when you’re depressed. We all know what that looks like. Head down and shoulders slumped. Show me what it looks like when you’re energized and excited. Your shoulders are back, you’re smiling, and your head up. It’s the same with the energy in your life. If you’re shutting doors and closing down possibilities, it looks different to the outside world. You’re not going to attract the kinds of great things that you want to attract in your life.
Many years ago, I was in my first marriage. I was pretty estranged from my father. My sister told me to call him, explain what was going on with my marriage, and see what dad had to think. Believe me, that was never part of my practice. I call dad and see what he thinks but I explained what was going on. I’m going to be totally transparent here. I was planning on sticking it out another year to be eligible for his social security and pension someday when that day came. My dad said to me, “Kim, is it worth another year of unhappiness to possibly get those ‘rewards’ in 40 more years. Is that something you want to wait for?” I was like, “No, it’s not.”
How many people do that every day? Make choices to sabotage their happiness because they think I need to or I have to. We’re all living out scripts that have been written in our unconscious. This is a lot of what mindset work teaches you. You can change that story, but what it takes is shining a flashlight on the unconscious that we’d all have these programs we’re running. We don’t see them, but they’re running our lives. Some of them we can see. We know that we’re good at tennis, so you’re running a program that says, “I can hit that tennis ball.” There are programs we’re running we can’t see like, “I’ll never make a lot of money. I wasn’t meant to be happy. I’m not the smart one in the family.” We have all of these programs running. Some of them got us to where we are. Maybe it made you hardworking, it made you hustle, and you’re able to build a business that’s making $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you want to get to that next level, some of those programs have got to go because they’re going to keep you small.
That’s what Go Big Now talks about. How can you shine that flashlight and look at your disempowering beliefs? We call them limiting beliefs and uproot and replace them with empowering beliefs. There are two types of beliefs. Empowering and limiting beliefs. If you look around your life at the amount of money, love, the relationships you have, all the things you like and are happy with are the result of empowering beliefs. Everywhere that there’s a lack, there’s a limiting belief. I’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and I’ve never once had a client where they have a lack in an area, and there isn’t a limiting belief behind it. If you want something and you don’t have it yet, there’s a limiting belief, or else you’d already had it. It’s as simple as that.
Can you share an example of limiting beliefs that you had and have got in the past?
Go Big Mindset: When we don’t have our mindset in the right place, we attract the wrong people and the wrong clients.
The big one I talked about in Million Dollar Women was my limiting belief that because I was a creative person, I couldn’t possibly run a multi-million-dollar company. I studied film in undergrad and women’s studies as minor. I went to film school for grad school. I knew I was good at making movies. I did that. That was my first career, but then when I started my second business, which is the language teaching business, I had a lot of limiting beliefs. I didn’t go to business school, I didn’t have a finance background, I was afraid of the numbers, and I had a whole story going that I’m good at the creative part, but I couldn’t possibly figure out the business side.
No big surprise, we got stuck at this revenue level that for some people might already be a success which was $400,000 a year, but for me, it was not a success because one, it was a product company. We had to create a lot of inventory. Not much of that $400,000 that was making it into my pocket. I was at a vision that I’d run this successful company creatively, but I didn’t believe I could do the business part. Until I tackled that limiting belief, we never could have gone big. In fact, we would’ve shut down. If you have a limiting belief that you can’t do something, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because you don’t usually go after the skills that would help you to change that belief because it’s so ingrained in you that you can’t do it.
Sometimes, I wish I had a bell on my desk for the show.
Where did the bell go off in that Kim?
Many places. When I started in the business in 2012, it was because my husband was going to school to pursue his dream and we needed some extra money. I’m very creative like you. I went to art school and I got my degree in Interior Architecture. I started my career in Manhattan but I’m in Ohio now. I lost my job in the recession hit in 2008. I found work after that. My first divorce followed and I got remarried. I was working through a placement agency as an administrative assistant. Far different from where I started out. I looked into bringing in some more income by starting my business as a virtual assistant. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew I had skills, I had ten years of experience in offices, I knew a lot of different software, but I didn’t know the value of a virtual assistant. I’m looking around and I see that overseas VA’s are charging $3 an hour.
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% attitude.
I knew that the gas station down the street had offered me $8. I was like, “I can either go to the gas station and work for $8 an hour or I can stay at home and make $8 an hour.” I was making $12 an hour as an administrative assistant. I’m like, “I’m going to charge $8 an hour because I have to compete with the overseas people and be affordable.” It didn’t matter that I was smart. I knew a lot. Fast forward, I did raise my rate a couple of times after my first year.
The problem was I felt the need to say yes to everything because I was undercharging so much. We were hardly making it. I ended up getting so much work at that rate that I quit my job not thinking about the fact that I’m going to have to work 80 hours a week to cover the expenses now. Fast forward a couple of years, I went to Arizona and got my certification in Infusionsoft. All these people there are talking about how they live in California and New York City and they’re going to be charging $250, $300 an hour. The first thought that went through my mind was definitely a limiting belief and a mindset issue.
I don’t live in California or New York City. My cost of living is lower and I don’t need to charge that much. I charged $50 an hour. The same thing happened again. $50 an hour is amazing, but when I started going to the freelance sites and putting my putting proposals out, everybody is saying, “We want that.” When you get the proposal, you can accept or decline, but I felt I needed it and realized, “I can’t do all this work myself. I need to get help.” I started hiring people who were not certified to support me who were charging me more than I was charging the client.
Go Big Mindset: If you’re shutting doors and closing down possibilities, you’ll lose energy in your life. You’re not going to attract the kinds of great things that you want to attract.
That’s a wake-up call. It’s also a reminder of how we can be our biggest saboteurs. No one said to you, “You can’t charge more than $50.” You decided that. I hope people reading will ask themselves, “Where am I doing that?” Wherever something is not working in your life or wherever you’re feeling stuck, there’s a limiting belief behind it. That’s not the only mindset practice you could use to get unstuck in your life, but it is a very powerful one. People often ask me like, “What are the key mindset practices that everyone should learn?” I have eight in the book. The key ones are, mind the gap, which is learn how to create a little space between what happens and the meaning you make of it. Exactly what happened with Jake, he could have a fit that, “All the scholarships are gone,” or stop and pause like, “What different meaning can I make it fit? Maybe there’s a glitch in the system,” and not have that reaction.
The second most important mindset practice you can learn is How To Bust Limiting Beliefs, which is chapter five in my book. We also have a whole free workbook on my website that people download when they get the book so that they can do this work in a deep way. It’s like having a mindset coach on your nightstand. That’s how I conceive my book. The third one can be a game-changer for people is Be, Do, Have. Ninety-nine percent of the plan that is living with have, do, be. That’s how they approach their life.
That sounds like this, “Here’s the amount of money, education, or training I have, therefore here’s what I can do and here’s what I can be.” That’s 99% of the planet. That’s how they’re living their life. That can be a showstopper when you have a big dream you want to pursue because if your first thought is, “I didn’t go to an Ivy League. I don’t have the education for that.” In my case, with my language teaching business, I don’t have financial training. I couldn’t possibly raise money. I didn’t tell the end of that story. I went on to raise $6 million for my business and grew a multimillion-dollar business once I got over that limiting belief. Why can’t you be a creative who also runs a big successful business? I was convinced I couldn’t be until I busted that belief.
Million Dollar Women: The Essential Guide For Female Entrepreneurs Who Want To Go Big
Let me teach the opposite, which is what mindset practice eight in my book, Be, Do, Have. When you live life according to Be, Do, Have, it sounds like this. Who do I want to be? Do I want to be a highly paid professional? Do I want to be the head of my department? Do I want to be someone who speaks and writes on this topic I’m passionate about? Do I want to be someone who’s making a big impact on my clients, customers, or the people I serve? You look at, “if I were already there, what would I be doing? What would that person be doing?” You started doing those things.
They’re baby steps at first. If you want to be a public speaker and give a TED Talk, at first you raise your hand to give a talk at your child’s high school class or you say, “I’ll give the toast at the wedding.” You started taking every opportunity to do public speaking. If you take all these steps and do all these things that person would be doing, you will have the things that person would have. This is a great way to fast-track success when you’re trying to pursue a big ambitious goal which is my specialty in my coaching and in the book Go Big Now.
That was a lesson that I learned. I was reading a book I don’t even remember which one right now, but it was talking about how we are human beings, not human havings or human doings. Thank you for that huge reminder. I want to invite you back for part two because I feel like we have begun to start scratching the surface. I know that there are so many more insights that you can offer the audience. Would you be open to that?
My pleasure. I love talking about mindset. I wrote the book so that more people can have access to these teachings. Let’s do it.
In the meantime, until we get to part two, where can readers learn more about you, get ahold of your books, connect with you on social, and all that great stuff?
I’m very active on social media. Please follow me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter at @JuliaPimsleur. My website, JuliaPimsleur.com. It has a free mindset assessment, so you can see where am I on this journey of having to Go Big mindset. It is a set of beliefs that allows you to stay positive, overcome any obstacle, and reach your goals. If that’s something you think could help you get to your goals faster, please come check out the mindset assessment, follow me, and listen up for part two when Kim invites me back. Thanks, Kim. This was so much fun.
It was a blast. Readers, I usually ask for a golden nugget. You’re going to have to come back for part two to know Julia’s golden nugget. Julia, I am so excited about this conversation, the impact that it’s going to have on the readers’ lives, and part two, which will come in hopefully the very near future.
Thank you. I am too. To be continued. I look forward to it.
See you next time, readers.
Important Links:
- Go Big Now: 8 Essential Mindset Practices to Overcome Any Obstacle and Reach Your Goals
- Million Dollar Women
- The Hate U Give
- Think Better, Live Better
- Facebook – Julia Pimsleur
- Instagram – Julia Pimsleur
- @JuliaPimsleur – Twitter
- JuliaPimsleur.com
About Julia Pimsleur
JULIA PIMSLEUR is the author of Go Big Now and the bestselling Million Dollar Women. She is a master practitioner and coach of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and the founder of the Million Dollar Women social venture. Pimsleur also built the #1 language teaching company for kids, Little Pim, into a multimillion-dollar business. An avid scuba diver, she lives with her sons in New York City.
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