1. The Secret Formula for Success

Hi. I am Deidrea Kiesling and welcome to The Success Minded Woman episode one.

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

In this first episode, I thought it would be a good idea to share a bit about myself and my entrepreneurial story and background and how I came to be a life and business coach. The reason I'm telling you this is because I want to help you define success in your own way, on your own terms. And I want to help you do it faster and easier than it took me. I am 56, a wife and mom to three teenagers and I feel like my life is just getting started.

Even though I have a lot of circumstances in my life I now have the tools and mindset to manage my life in a way that I can continue to create my life and business on my own terms. I first dreamed of being a life coach in my early 20s. I recently found some old journals and even back then I was writing about how I wanted to be a coach, author, and motivational speaker. I’m a third-generation entrepreneur. My dad took over my grandfather’s life insurance business when my grandfather passed away when I was six. I have been exposed to entrepreneurship my whole life.

Growing up my dad always had motivational and business training stuff around the house. I remember listening to Jim Rohn cassette tapes as a middle schooler and I still remember the first motivational book that my dad gave me The Greatest Salesmen in the World by Og Mandino. I wish I still had that original copy but I lost it and I bought a new one.

For my college graduation my dad gave me a coaching session with one of Zig Ziglar’s coaches and what looked like a suitcase full of motivational cassette tapes. I ate that stuff up. That dream of being a coach stayed with me but I put it on the back burner because I didn't know how to make it happen. And at the time I was sold on my belief in common sense and being practical. I was always somewhat of a dreamer though because I had the belief that I could do anything that I put my mind to but I couldn’t sustain the belief long enough to bring a dream into reality.

Now that I've been studying coaching and neuroscience and how the brain works I know how to create what I want and get over the doubt, overwhelm and confusion that always comes up when you're starting something new. My main mission in this podcast is to help women create the dream come true life that they have envisioned for themselves. I know most women don't achieve it because they let fear, overwhelm and confusion and uncertainty get in their way. So here we go the lessons learned from all my failed business attempts.

Business number one, real estate agent. That one was dead on arrival. Since there was no salary I didn't have any money to sustain myself. I went right back to get a regular job. This would continue to be a pattern for me for the next 30 years, having a big dream, taking bold action then getting scared and retreating and all the while justifying my retreat as a rational decision because I need to make money and support myself. That is the biggest dream killer in my opinion, the justification, rationalization and excuse-making that is used as an escape from the fear of leaving our comfort zone.

What I know for sure is that your dreams are not in your comfort zone. And in order to change to leave your comfort zone you have to change. You have to become the version of yourself that does the bold courageous thing. So after the real estate agent fail I bounced around from job to job and then decided to go back to school at night to get my MBA and master’s in information systems. This now became my next dream stealer habit, which was to get more education, more credentials. That was going to be my ticket to success.

I know now that's just another excuse. Of course, sometimes you really do need the education, course or training but I just know how that’s a habit for me. And I’m on to myself whenever I want to take a training to do something, instead of just doing it like this podcast, I'm on to myself. After getting my MBA my new dream was to be a management consultant at Andersen Consulting. I had this idea of myself being a high-powered businesswoman traveling the world, wearing suits and high heels and being very important.

It did work out to a certain extent. I did travel the world. I did that consulting for eight years, I did wear the suits. I did have the high heels, but I was burned out. I was working so hard. I was traveling so much. I was just exhausted. I would come back to my hotel room after a long day of meetings, presentation and creating lots of reports. And when I wasn't going out to a business dinner I would order room service with two glasses of wine, sometimes more, and just numb myself in front of the TV feeling sad, tired and stressed that my life was passing me by.

I knew I was meant for more and I knew that this was not it. I remember being in a performance review meeting with my manager when I was a consultant at KPMG, and he told me I was getting promoted. I was getting promoted to senior manager which at consulting companies at the time, I don't know if it’s still like this but when you got promoted to senior manager they basically told you or, well, they told me, “Okay, you’re on the partner track now.”

And I remember when I started my career in consulting after I got my MBA, that was the pinnacle of success in my opinion. I remember finding out that a partner at the consulting company made $600,000 and I remember thinking I can’t even imagine making that much money but that's for me. I'm going to be a partner at the consulting company. And now here I was in a performance review with my manager saying, “Yeah, that can happen, you're on track.” And all I could think about was that I can’t take this anymore. I can't do it.

The corporate grind had taken its toll on me and even though I was only in my early 30s I was completely burned out, depressed, and wanted to give up. The thought of staying in corporate until I retired was soul-sucking to me so I quit. I decided to take time off and figure out my next move. When I told my manager I was leaving he said I just needed some time off. He said, “Just take some time. Take a sabbatical and come back in three months.” Well, I did officially take that sabbatical.

I moved to the beach at South Padre Island, Texas, the beach I spent so much time at over the years during my childhood. It was wonderful. I was near my family, my mom and dad, my grandmother, my sister and brother-in-law and my nieces and nephew. It was the first time I'd lived near my family since I left home to follow my dreams to become a ballerina when I was 16. I loved that time I spent at the beach. I was in my happy place, resting, relaxing, taking in all that sun, and getting very tanned.

Each morning I would take my chair and my cute little beach bag and walk across the street to the beach and I would read and walk for miles and swim in the ocean and dream about my future. At night I would hang out with my very interesting neighbors. I was so intrigued with these people. Some would call them beach bums. They seemed so happy and easygoing. They really seemed like they were enjoying themselves and living their best life. It was so curious to me. They weren’t successful in the normal way that I define success and yet they were so happy.

It was during that time that a friend approached me with a business that she was thinking about starting, a retreat center in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. We ended up starting that business. I moved to San Miguel. I was the business operations person in the company. She and our other partner were the retreat leaders. The business is Life Path Retreats and 20 years later it still exists. However, the only person left is Beverley the woman who originally had the idea. You see, that retreat center was her dream and the rest of us were basically along for the ride.

She sold us on her dream and we were in it for a while but it really wasn't our dream so we left to pursue other things. The big lesson here for me is to focus on what I really want, what my dream is, not what I'm good at or what someone else wants for me. I ended up leaving that business when I had some health issues and never went back. I had to file for bankruptcy since I had spent my life savings on that business and coupled with all the medical bills I was broke. I retreated back to my comfort zone of consulting but I still had the dream of being an entrepreneur.

Business number three. Consulting company. After a year of recovering from my health issues, I was back at it in consulting. And again I was unhappy just like I was before when I was at KPMG. After the birth of my first child, everything started to change. I realized now is the time, I must start living my life. This is not a dress rehearsal. I kept telling myself that. I went back to work and quickly told them I was leaving to start my own consulting business. I was firm in my conviction, but they kept coming back offering me more money, a better position etc. etc.

And I went back, the real reason I went back is because I got scared. I justified going back because it was good money. Now even better money and it was too risky for me to start a business now because I had a new baby. Well, that's what I told myself. About two years later I decided to start a new business again. This time a software company based on the StrengthsFinder methodology.

It was such a good idea that when I told the CEO of the consulting company that I was leaving to start the software company he asked me about it, and I told him all about the vision of it and he thought it was such a good idea. He asked me to come back and stay in the business and he would fund it to incubate my business idea. I thought, oh my God, wow, this is such a great opportunity but even then I went back. I started working on that new business idea. I got sucked back into some consulting projects and there I was again, the dream died.

Once again I justified and rationalized why I was not following my dream. And listen to this, later on, a few years later I was Googling that, and you know what? Someone else created it. And that’s the thing about these dreams. I believe that if you have a dream and you keep going for it and you don't make it happen, the dream’s going to move on and someone else is going to create your dream.

In fact, there’s this Emerson quote that I love and I’ll have to say it on another podcast but something like, ‘If you don't follow your dream or say what you want to say you're going to have to take those words in from someone else like it was theirs instead of yours’. So that's not the exact quote. I’ll get back to you on that.

But basically what I've learned in all of this is after my training as a coach is that this conflict of wanting one thing but not being able to sustain the vision of that is called cognitive dissonance. It's where your brain can’t handle two conflicting thoughts at the same time. So it goes back to what is most comfortable, the comfort zone. But if you're aware of what's happening and that’s how coaching can help you, then you can keep going, bust through the dissonance and get to the other side.

That's called disintegration anxiety where you’re feeling the change, it’s uncomfortable. You're feeling the pull to go back. It’s causing you stress and anxiety and you probably want to vomit because it's so scary. That's where if you can keep going if you keep busting through, this is actually you leaving your comfort zone. I wish I'd understood that concept all these times that I was starting and stopping and getting scared.

So business number four. A new consulting company. So at this time, I'd been at SAP as an implementation consultant and project manager. I decided to leave and become an independent contractor and create a consulting business to sell and implement SAP systems. Well, same old pattern, you can probably guess by now that that consulting company I envisioned did not happen. It had some good starts.

I had a few projects that I sold and staffed with a few contractors that worked for me for a while but I could not sustain it because I was working full-time as a billable contractor and doing the business development on the side. Again I justified all of this because I needed the money and I couldn't stop working long enough in the business to grow the business that I had envisioned. And while that was happening I was also trying to start a real estate investing business but I wasn’t passionate about that and couldn’t get it going.

But I also found out about becoming a certified life coach. I knew that is what I really wanted to do. I got certified and I got some clients right away. If I was so good at it and I felt so good at it, I knew this is what was meant to be for me. And then what happened? Well, you guessed it, I let the coaching business go, while I focused on my consulting work. The dream didn’t die though, I kept it in. I knew I really wanted to get the coaching business. I just needed to take some time to focus on it.

So in July of 2020, I launched a group coaching program for women in real estate with a business partner. And even though I had the original idea for the business, it was really more of her dream and I ended up leaving that to focus on my family for a while. So now that's been four businesses. So I said in the intro that there were four businesses. Well, actually it was five times.

So business number five. The Dream Academy. I originally launched The Dream Academy business when I bought the URL, thedreamacademy.com. I will never forget it. It was Christmas Eve 2019, we were visiting my dad and it was the first Christmas without my mom. I was so inspired to not let another year go by without me doing what I really want with my life. I told my dad that day when I bought that URL that I just started my million-dollar business. And he said, “I know you can do it.”

Later that weekend we were sitting on the patio, and I was telling him all about what I was envisioning for the new coaching business and that I wanted to start a podcast and have him as my first guest so he could share all his wisdom and his very entertaining stories about golf, business, God and all his adventures in the Airforce. My dad had a sign on his desk that said, ‘I am creating abundance in my life and the lives of others’. And that is the way he lived his life.

My dad was the most optimistic person I have ever known. My whole life I witnessed him creating whatever he wanted. He just had a way with things and with people. Everyone loved him. I learned everything I know about business from him. Well, after Christmas I got home, and I got scared. I didn't launch the podcast. I didn't start the business. I got busy with another consulting project, and I didn't have time to focus on the podcast.

My dad passed away a year ago in January. I’m going to cry. So I will never be able to have him as a guest because I got scared and I didn’t follow my dream. I let excuses, justifications and the business of life get in my way. Well, no more. Here we are and I’m committed to showing up here once a week to share with you all the wisdom I’ve learned from my dad, from my mom, from all the businesses and coaching experiences that I’ve had.

I'm here to help you, to inspire you. Don't wait, start before you’re ready and don’t quit. That's it. That is the secret formula for success and I'm here to help you. You really can have anything you want when you put your mind to it, don’t wait. Start today. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next week.

To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to give away five $100 Amazon gift cards. That’s right, five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. It doesn’t have to be a five star review, but I do hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create the best show possible, that provides tons of value. Visit thedreamacademy.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in episode 10.

Thanks for joining me this week on The Success Minded Woman podcast. If you like what you heard on the podcast and you want to know more, then head on over to thedreamacademy.com where you can sign up for my weekly success and mindset tips to help you create your dream come true life. Talk to you all next week, bye.