In today’s episode, Miranda shares;
- The importance of saying “yes” BEFORE the opportunities and possibilities present themselves.
- How to know what it truly means, feels like and looks like to say “yes” to yourself with true commitment.
- Understanding the mindset shift required to take bigger and bigger risks. Playing big = big mindset shifts.
Miranda’s message is – don’t listen to anyone that tells you that massage therapy is just a side job. You can have it all! If you’re a practitioner, Miranda’s ultimate joy is to equip you with the skills and guidance to lead you to a full client schedule, getting booked weeks in advance with clients that respect your work, lights up your soul, pays you well and allows you the freedom you’ve been craving.
Hi, my name is Miranda Horvath, registered massage therapist for the last five years, and owner and brain birther of massage by mirror. It’s so wild that on December 13, 2020 here I am recording my podcast episode for The Great Canadian Woman podcast on the first official day of the second lockdown in Alberta. I mean, what a divine coincidence. And I just came off of working a six day work week in my clinic in order to treat as many clients as I could before I had to stop and I know many other massage therapists that did the same thing. And shout out to you guys, we all did so good this week during that last intense push.
So what I want to talk about with this episode is surprisingly really intimately related to the pandemic, although it might not seem like it at first. I want to talk about the mindset shift required to lean into taking risks within your business, to grow and scale your business up so you don’t have to be one of those business owners wearing the million hats like we all know, and my story of being a woman entrepreneur in this tough online business world. So you may think growing and expanding your business, scaling up your business to take on employees, assistance, spending more money, and making scary choices you’ve never made before, with potential dire financial consequences, is not something that fits within a pandemic, and obviously, not for some, but it does for me, and that’s where I come in.
So this story about taking risks for your business, and learning to take risks within your business with less fear and anxiety or despite fear and anxiety, all started for me with the first lockdown. So just so you know, I am an anxious person, I can be, and I’ve dealt with it for many, many years and acquired many many different tools to help myself with my anxiety. And so for the first lockdown I really did not want to close. I was heavily resisting it, negotiating with myself, I was in denial, I was frustrated, and I was frankly feeling sorry for myself. I was devastated and couldn’t get out of bed for at least a week or more. I would step outside to try to go for a walk and I would just kind of burst into tears and come back inside and go back to bed. I love being a massage therapist, I love my clients, I love going into work. and I know I’m so blessed to like what I do. I would try to go for walks around the block and you know, each day my walks would get just maybe a little bit longer, just a couple minutes longer, and then I would come back inside. Just taking deep breaths in the fresh air, looking at the sun, seeing what could be possible for me. I felt powerless. And see at this point, I did have an online business that I just launched about six months earlier and I had already just had a few clients and I was doing fairly well by decent standards. I had gone through the mindset shift it took to crush through that first barrier in hiring a business coach with money I didn’t have. That was really my first big risk that I took for my business and to help me launch it. I had a little email list setup, I had taken on and sold a few high ticket clients, and I was feeling that new business owner high of like running my own company, and it was slowly but steadily growing; it was kind of stagnant in those couple months leading up to the shutdown.
So after two weeks, I was looking at myself in the mirror and I thought you know, this is happening, whether I like it or not. My time is now! I thought if I don’t really try and just see what I can do and see the potential I can reach, if I don’t try to hit this new ceiling here, especially in a time where I don’t have a job and I have nothing else to do except clean my apartment, I knew that I would never forgive myself. I had to try, I had to honor this opportunity. So, on a side note, if you are not an entrepreneur with a small emergency savings, I’m realizing now how crucial this is, start saving now, even if it’s 25 bucks a month. So I got up, I dusted myself off, and I decided I was going to step up and show up for real with zero expectations and this is what happened. I was posting every day, doing lives every day, I was engaging with clients, messaging them in Facebook communities, dming people on Instagram, showing up for Facebook lives every day in my Facebook community, and just content and volume, just learning so much from this experience doing whatever I could to get my face out there. And I said yes to myself every single day for about 10 weeks, without really knowing if anyone would say yes, back to me. And then what happened is, I doubled my prices. I doubled my prices, and then made three of my biggest high ticket sales within a 10 day span after those 10 weeks of showing up every single day with zero expectations, zero belief if this would actually do anything or not, and even landed my first amazing client from the US, and I thought to myself, holy crap, I’m now serving an international market. And so this feeling of imposter syndrome started to shrink and this taught me to be 100% committed to my business and what that actually felt like. So when I started to tell people I’m a consultant, I actually started to feel like one.
Before the pandemic, I would agonize over even taking one or two days off because I thought to myself, I don’t want to lose the income; losing productivity, what a lacking energy. So now, I can see that after having to take three months off, taking a day off here and there really isn’t a big deal. And so this pandemic teaches me that risk taking really isn’t as hard as we think it is. We have so much fear that circles around us in this noxious cloud that we create about what’s going to happen to us if we just take a risk. And so I like to think of myself and a bird’s eye view about a year or two from this decision you try to make, and I like to think to myself, what are the worst possible consequences of this if I just went for it? Is the regret that I feel going to be more than the potential consequence of not doing the thing that you know you have to do? You know, and it really shrinks down your fear into a more negotiable size for yourself, knowing that you really deserve to honor yourself by trying. Nothing should get in your way of achieving your dreams, not even your own fear. And it’s not taking action despite fear, despite the fear of consequence, but knowing that it’s worth it regardless.
I really see entrepreneurship as my calling. I had a paper route when I was eight years old and my first entrepreneurship business was as a mobile piano teacher when I was 17 in my small town in Nanaimo BC. I would drive around with my piano and my books in the back, I made little flashcards, I would just post on Kijiji, I really had no system. Safety wasn’t really a thing for me that I thought about and I just went for it. And at that point, in my life, it was for necessity. I was on my own when I was 17 and I had to pay the bills and I had to make ends meet. And I thought, what is one skill that I have that I can charge a premium price for? And that was my piano; I was a piano player for about 15 years. And that’s kind of where that entrepreneurship seed started to grow and that growth really feels good. And the more you do it, the easier it gets and then you can handle more stresses and conflicts and confrontations and difficult situations with a way more of like a centered inner ease and confidence than you ever thought that you would be able to and trust me on this. People ask me how can you be on video? How can you do this or that? How can you be crushing it? And I just think I just kind of laugh at myself and think back to when I was younger, when I couldn’t even look face to face at the camera, I would twirl my hair and look down and off to the side, I was very awkward. I was so scared even to be a group fitness instructor because I was way too scared to be in front of a class of 20 women. And really, it was all worth it. And you will think so too, if you just try and you look back at yourself, and you think, you know, why didn’t I try that?
So this is me saying yes to myself, every single day over and over and over, I wake up and I say yes to my personal and business growth, even when I don’t want to. Because really, they tie really closely hand in hand, right? Being an entrepreneur means growing your business in a way so that you hopefully don’t have to wear all of the hats and do all of the things. Especially for me, I know there are things I really don’t care about being good at. And so it’s for those things that you learn to hire out, to spend your precious, empowering energy that you can on the vital decisions that matter the, most not wasting time like so many of us do on busy activities that keep you busy, but aren’t really the pivotal, and really structural actions that you should be taking to grow a strong business foundation. And really, I think it’s kind of funny because we make entrepreneurship look and sound so sexy. but really, being an entrepreneur is full of really unsexy actions. You’re maybe in your sweats with a messy bun, looking at your computer screen trying to figure out how to set up a payment plan for the first time, how to create your landing page, and learning how to get through all these bumps of really frustrating tech issues. And you’re looking outside in the sun when the sun shines, and your friend is maybe inviting you to go to the park or go to the picnic, or do something fun with your group of friends and you know, you have to stay inside and finish this task. And it really feels like a hard sacrifice at times, but I’m not all about being a workaholic and sacrificing over and over. But there are a lot of moments like that where people who are employees don’t, you know, maybe really have to take the time, they can check out after work and they don’t have to motivate themselves to miss out on things because they believe in a dream and they believe in themselves even when they have seen no tangible results or reward from that. It can be really hard. So I always say to people who have never owned a business and are thinking about it, think about what it’s like and how difficult you think it’ll be to run your business and start a business, and picture it being about 100 times more difficult than that. It’s really hard, but ultimately has been 1000 times more rewarding than I ever could have predicted because when your business grows, you grow. And you really learn to overcome a lot of these struggles that actually affect your personal life and your personal relationships. My relationship with my partner and my family members, and my friends and coworkers, and with myself has gotten all exponentially better, because of the growth that I’ve dedicated to my business. And that’s why I love doing it, because to me, they feel like one.
So now a tough endeavor here is that in the present time, is that I hired recently an ad agency. And this agency was among one of the second agencies that I tried to hire to go from organic growth, meaning reaching out to people on Instagram myself and paid growth, meaning paid ads and paying management fees for them to structure my ads in a way that has more impact. And, I’m about to choke a bit on this, but about $8,000 later, I learned some really powerful lessons about having any type of hole in your business structure. If you have any type of hole in your business marketing strategy or plan and you’re not aware of what that hole is, it will get exposed and you can’t throw money at any other part of your business to make the entire thing rise. Every single piece has to be correctly done, and have its place. And so I mean, that’s another great reason to hire a business coach, right? I’m out there testing the market, taking risks, wasting some of my own money to learn these lessons in order to come back, reinvest the information that I’ve learned back into my business, and climb that wall again to take those bigger and bigger risks each time. And each time you make a big mistake, and you reinvest back into your business, and you start learning new things, your mistakes get bigger, the money you spend gets bigger, and it gets scarier. But you also get better at handling the stress of these things, keeping your center and knowing that energy is currency. And that if you spend money and money is going out, then money has to come back. Because of one simple affirmation I really like to follow for myself. I am worth believing in. My business is worth believing in. The risks that I’ve taken, and the decisions I’ve made to grow my business is coming from passion, and that deserves to be honored. And so I really and truly believe that I owe it to myself, and to the potential clients out there that need me to do everything I can to honor this life by reaching the potential that I can with the opportunities that I have at my fingertips.
It really is a blessing even despite some scary things I’ve had to do for the first time like fire someone I had to fire a salesperson having to have really difficult conversations with maybe the ad agency or other companies I trusted to help me grow my business, knowing what questions to ask and how to know who to trust, dialing up and turning up your own personal intuition and learning how to listen to it and listen to that voice in your head that guides you in the right decision so you can learn from the mistakes that you’ve made. And I really truly believe that I owe it to my past lineage of women, and my eventual children, and for the women that come after me, to do what I can with the time that I have on this world- to reach the full potential that I can because that is how I decide to honour this life that I have. And I truly am proud and privileged to be a Canadian woman.
If you’re curious about how Miranda rocked her practice and how you can do it too, email her at [email protected], or head to www.massagebymirconsulting.com to book your free 45 minute vision call!
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