Episode 393: Aligning Business with True Purpose

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:49 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m your host, Brynne Tillman, and I am so excited to introduce Alaina Schwartz. An international speaker, bestselling author, and elite performance coach. Alaina is passionate about helping high achievers to triple their income and impact while working 20 to 30 hours less. That’s crazy. With over 25 years of experience, she uses innovative tools to facilitate profound personal and professional transformations, enabling her clients to align their actions with their true purpose.

0:01:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Today, Alaina will share her insights on how to achieve sustainable seven-plus-figure success without the overwhelm. Alaina, welcome to the program.

0:01:36 – (Alaina Schwartz): So delighted to be here with you, Brynne.

0:01:38 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, so excited. There’s a little selfishness in this because I’m excited to learn a lot of what you talk about. But before we jump into your genius, we ask all of our guests the same first question, which is, What does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:01:55 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah, you know, it’s a really interesting thing. Sales social means to me, like so many people, I use LinkedIn as my primary social media platform. And when you deal with a lot of people on LinkedIn, as I do, so many people are very transactional. Right. So the idea of sales social to me means relational rather than transactional. So I am interested in creating genuine relationships with people, not, not pitching or selling what ends up coming.

0:02:26 – (Alaina Schwartz): Sales that come from. That comes from a level of trust in me being authentic and in that social space with people. And because of that, I have people like. I cannot tell you how many people a week say to me, I never get on a call with anybody from LinkedIn, but I got on a call with you, and it’s because of my approach to being relational first.

0:02:49 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that, and I’m sure that’s going to come out through a lot of our conversation today. One of the things that really drew me in when I was kind of learning a little bit more about you before. Today’s call is about you talking a lot about working smarter instead of harder. Can you share some practical strategies that your clients have found most effective in achieving that?

0:03:11 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah. One of the things I will say is that I only work with high achievers. They’re at six figures, 10k a month to 300k a month is where my clients are at. Right. And in the process of that, what they tend to experience is a mental paradigm, a mindset paradigm that says for me to create the success I want, I have to work harder. Right.

0:03:36 – (Brynne Tillman): So there’s the whole hustle.

0:03:39 – (Alaina Schwartz): Hustle, the whole hustle and grind mentality. Right. That’s the only way to break through to the next level: income is by working harder. And most of my clients are out of hours, and they’re out of bandwidth besides. Right. So the first paradigm shift is that understanding that it is not the hustling more, it is not the time management tools, it’s not the productivity hacks that are actually going to get you to that place. Because if you implement them, you can delegate, you can hire more team members.

0:04:09 – (Alaina Schwartz): I’m not saying that those things can’t be effective, but typically what happens is you free up a bunch of time only to fill it with other busyness again. Right. And so, yes, you have to get to the root of the problem first. And the root of the problem is the mindset shift around hard work and what’s possible with fewer hours. And once people remove those self-sabotaging patterns out of the way, they’re able to cut up to half, literally half of their work week, without losing a dime and in fact making a lot more money.

0:04:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow. Wow. Now, you know, I read somewhere that the shifts that you make are at the DNA level, like that core level. Talk a little bit about these shifts and how they contribute to their success.

0:05:05 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah, I’ll talk specifically about a client named Tim that I have. So, Tim is a wealth manager. Right. And when he started working with me, he was making 25k a month. Let’s say he was working about 55 hours a week. And he was in the hustle and grind mentality. And when we took a deeper dive into the patterns that were running him, he came from a very blue-collar, hard-working family, and he had a lot of intergenerational patterns at a DNA level around what it meant to like where his value came. Right. His value came through the hard work.

0:05:41 – (Alaina Schwartz): That’s the thing that his parents and his aunt, you know, like extended family, that’s all they were about, is you gotta work really hard. His worth came from working really hard. So we cleared a lot of those patterns at an intergenerational level, which is at a DNA level. Right. And in the process, by month three, he went from 55 hours to 30 hours, and he was making 50. That month was a 50k month once, 4, 5, and 6, 100k months, but he didn’t add any additional hours. And he actually even said that he took his very first vacation ever because he was very high up in corporate before he, you know, went into his own business.

0:06:21 – (Alaina Schwartz): He took his very first vacation without his laptop. Like, that’s huge. Right. Like the ability to actually untether from your business for a hot minute and actually have it see it grow exponentially because of it.

0:06:35 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s a very impactful, you know. And how much of this is recognizing that core, limiting belief or whatever, that is, to actually implementing what you’re teaching?

0:06:49 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah. So the recognition is the first step. I love that question, because recognition, awareness are always the first step. But awareness alone doesn’t make change. Right. So what makes like information is a dime a dozen, and you can get any information you want on the Internet, anywhere. The difference between trans transformation is application. Right. And so to be able to create transformation, it means you have to understand how certain principles apply to you, because what ends up happening? Like this client that I mentioned, Tim, what ends up happening is that he knew then, once we helped clear all the stuff out of the way, he knew the exact right strategies to use. He knew the exact right offerings to implement in his business because he no longer had the resistance that was keeping him from like an exponential leap.

0:07:39 – (Alaina Schwartz): And so that’s what I experience a lot with the clients I work with, is they know exactly what to do now because all the stuff that was creating static for them is no longer creating static. And they have like unbelievable clarity and then the confidence to go with it.

0:07:55 – (Brynne Tillman): So with Tim, how did you identify? Because, well, you talked about aligning business with purpose. Right. Or you talk a lot about that. So, how do you identify? I’m a wealth manager, I came out of corporate. Now I’m, you know, I, I’m. I like doing what I’m doing. But how do you align that with true purpose? And then how does that influence the productivity versus the hustle?

0:08:25 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah, everybody has a purpose in life. Everybody has. Our purposes don’t change, but the way in which we express our purpose may change. Right. So I’ll call it a life purpose expression. So the way we express that purpose may change. So we have the ability to access, let’s call it our intuition, that all-knowing sort of part of us, we have the ability to access that on demand and use it as a GPS guidance system in our businesses. And that’s really what I teach my clients to do is how to access that GPS guidance system. So they’re always knowing what to do.

0:09:00 – (Alaina Schwartz): Right. So we’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall, spending money on marketing that doesn’t actually align with our businesses, etc. Right. That we’re in alignment. Everything that we’re doing is moving forward in alignment. And what that does is it creates a level of ease and flow. And when you start having ease and flow internally, as within, so without. So as you start having ease within internally, it creates a level of ease externally in everything that we’re doing.

0:09:28 – (Alaina Schwartz): And so it no longer requires that we’re constantly pushing the boulder up the hill or swimming upstream to create what we want. We get to flow downstream, ride the momentum downhill. That’s.

0:09:41 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. You know, it’s interesting because if you ask me, like, what is my purpose, I have a personal purpose and a professional purpose that are very, very, very different. Right. But all of it kind of comes to making an impact. So it seems, you know, when you talk about high achievers, I guess, you know, how much of that is having this personal impact. Or could it be I just want to get rich, or I just want to grow a business that sells, you?

0:10:17 – (Alaina Schwartz): Know, I don’t tend to work with the types of clients who are only interested in getting rich. Like, I work with purpose-driven people.

0:10:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, Fair.

0:10:26 – (Alaina Schwartz): They’re here to change the world in some way. And no matter whether they’re into like recruiting or you know, marketing or whatever, or wealth management, it doesn’t matter. They’re here to change the world in some way. Right. That’s what they’re here to make that impact. Like if I talked about my purpose, which is on both a personal and professional level, it’s really about helping people remember who they are. Like, I’m an elite performance coach. I help people perform at much higher levels. Right. High, high performance.

0:10:55 – (Alaina Schwartz): That’s because they remember who they are and they’re not chasing their worth through their accomplishments. Right. They disconnect the idea that, oh, I need to achieve more because it makes me more. I need to achieve more because it’s naturally who I am, and this is my purpose in life to fulfill. Does that make sense?

0:11:16 – (Brynne Tillman): It does. How much of this is checking ego?

0:11:19 – (Alaina Schwartz): Oh, it’s all about checking ego. Yeah. Because when our egos lead, what ends up happening is that there’s always a sacrifice of something for success. We’re sacrificing our relationships, our health, or our time. Right. So there’s always some sacrifice that comes when we’re doing it for an ego purpose, when we’re doing it for what’s in alignment with us. There’s never a sacrifice. That’s why I can help people save so much time. Like, literally cut up to half their work week because they’re no longer chasing the things that ego’s telling them to do, and they’re driven by something completely different.

0:11:53 – (Alaina Schwartz): Wow.

0:11:54 – (Brynne Tillman): All right. I’m gonna be vulnerable for a second because this is so cool. And I just, like, hit, like, I’m going, okay, so what’s the. The broken DNA strand for me? Right? Like, what is it? And I’m dyslexic. I read very late, like, third grade, and I was the dumb kid, and my mother was always confused about why I was so dumb. She’s like, it doesn’t seem dumb, but she’s so dumb. So the vulnerability. The thing is, when I’ in the world, I want everybody to think I’m smart.

0:12:28 – (Alaina Schwartz): Exactly. Exactly.

0:12:30 – (Brynne Tillman): So I. So it’s like I’m kind of putting words around. That is so interesting. Right? So how. So, like, how do you break down that DNA? Or how do you fix that broken DNA?

0:12:46 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah.

0:12:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

0:12:47 – (Alaina Schwartz): That’s a really awesome question. And I can say I really understand what you’re experiencing, because my son is now 17, almost 18, and he’s dyslexic.

0:12:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Hard.

0:12:56 – (Alaina Schwartz): It was up until fifth grade, actually. It was really. It started really in fifth grade, where he started to feel so stupid and not even being able to read a menu in a restaurant when all his friends could, you know, the shame that he felt from that is incredible. And they actually say. And I don’t want to get too off topic, but they actually say just with dyslexics, that it’s almost the equivalent of incest in terms of the amount of shame that they experience.

0:13:21 – (Alaina Schwartz): Right. So because you have all of that shame and feeling stupid, and people telling you basically, you know, if you just applied yourself a little more, you didn’t work hard enough. Right. So now you set yourself up. The. The paradigm that you see life through is now I have to prove how smart I am all the time. And it’s clear how smart you are. I can have a conversation with you. Right. But the thing is, everything you do now has the backstory of driving you towards success to prove how smart you are.

0:13:52 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s true. It’s not even about how much money I make or how.

0:13:55 – (Alaina Schwartz): Right. It’s how smart people think I’m smart.

0:13:58 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s funny. Right.

0:13:59 – (Alaina Schwartz): And. And so money is a milestone that shows how smart you are.

0:14:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Yes.

0:14:03 – (Alaina Schwartz): It’s not for the money itself. It’s a milestone that says, Oh my God, look how smart Brynne is. Because look how much she’s accomplished. So she has to be.

0:14:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Some people couldn’t make that money.

0:14:12 – (Alaina Schwartz): Exactly, exactly. So, so essentially, what I teach people to do is to go into their. So I can do it for them, but I like to teach them how to do it so they’re not dependent on me. Right. Teach them how to fish. Do not just give them the fish. It’s both ends. But ultimately, you can go into your own subconscious mind and clear that pattern so that it doesn’t keep showing up everywhere for you, so that you’re actually achieving because of the feeling of expansion and growth, which is our natural tendency on this planet; everything’s moving towards expansion and growth.

0:14:45 – (Alaina Schwartz): So you’re moving in natural harmony with you rather than the ego driving your success for a particular reason to prove yourself.

0:14:54 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow, that’s amazing. So you’re working with highly high-achieving executives. Entrepreneurs, small business owners. Small business owners. Oh, not just. Okay, great.

0:15:05 – (Alaina Schwartz): I don’t work with executives, just small business owners.

0:15:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that boy. I’ve got. We’ll have to talk. I have so, so many of them. Right. Like, but. And so many that are hustlers. Right. That are people out there working really hard. And you know, again, this is kind of across the board. Business development is harder now than it has ever been. Right?

0:15:32 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yes.

0:15:33 – (Brynne Tillman): The uncertainty, the change in AI, the change in accessibility to insights, where buyers don’t have to talk to sellers all the time. Like they can do so much of that research on their own, and the more they can do on their own, the later in the sales process we’re coming in. And by that point, they may have been influenced by other people that had better content out there. Like it’s shifted and it’s hard.

0:16:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So the one across the board, what I’m hearing from the high-achieving small business owners is I used to get a ton of inbound business that strided up, I used to like that. Those are the things that I’m hearing. How much of that can be changed with a shift in mindset, and how much is? This is just the way it is right now.

0:16:28 – (Alaina Schwartz): Okay. I don’t believe anything. Just the way it is. I don’t believe that any economy, any president, any, you know, global pandemic. Like, there are always people prospering no matter what the climate is. Right. There are always people prospering and sometimes prospering more because they’re able to pivot their businesses in the face of that uncertainty. So what I believe is that most people believe that’s an issue.

0:16:54 – (Alaina Schwartz): Like I used to hear all the time, January is one of the hardest months to make sales because everybody spent on, I’m a high-ticket coach. Like nobody wants to spend money in January after December, and they spent all that money on the holidays. Right. Januarys have always been one of my biggest months. Months. So like. Right. So I don’t, I don’t believe that anything anybody says about what’s going on now. Yes. I’m not saying that what you said about business and people being more savvy and being overpitched and sold to and whatever, where they come in, in the cycle, that that may not be an issue. Of course, that may be an issue.

0:17:28 – (Alaina Schwartz): But I feel like the mindset about it is the far bigger issue because my clients are all prospering regardless of the climate.

0:17:35 – (Brynne Tillman): I love hearing that.

0:17:37 – (Alaina Schwartz): Yeah. Yes. They’re having their best months ever, regardless of the climate.

0:17:44 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s awesome. So, so if you could give one tip to the business owners listening right now, going, you know, I made three years ago, I made half a million dollars. Two years ago, I made 250,000. Last year I made 125. And I’m really nervous about this year because I’m hearing that, right? Like people who made half a million dollars a year are down, you know, to 20%, 30% of what they were doing a few years back.

0:18:12 – (Brynne Tillman): So what is the one thing that you would say would get them started in readjusting the way that they’re thinking?

0:18:20 – (Alaina Schwartz): I would say, first of all, get help. Right. Okay, now past that, here’s the thing that happens. I was saying this to a client on Monday, as a matter of fact, in my group program, in my group call, one of my clients was saying that about one month ago, her last month was a relatively low month for her. And she said for the first time ever that she wasn’t thinking there’s something wrong with me because my numbers were lower.

0:18:46 – (Alaina Schwartz): And I was talking about the identification of what starts to happen. We start to pay attention to the evidence, and we think that’s the truth. Right. So the evidence says the market is harder. The evidence is saying I’m having lower income months. And now the doubt creeps in. Right. The fear creeps in because of that. And what we’re giving more attention and energy to is the doubt and the fear, rather than the truth.

0:19:11 – (Alaina Schwartz): And when we give attention to the truth and focus on what’s really true, which is that I have a desire for it. If I have a desire, the law of polarity, like it’s a universal law that basically says if you have a question, the answer is already here. If you have an up, there’s a down. If you have a left, there’s a right. Right. It says it’s already here. So if we have a desire for something, we can’t have the desire for it unless the way to make it happen is already here.

0:19:35 – (Alaina Schwartz): That means if you have a desire for a million-dollar business, if you have a desire for a $500,000 business, the way to make it happen is already here. You’re just not aligned with it yet. You just don’t have awareness of it yet.

0:19:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh gosh, that’s awesome.

0:19:49 – (Alaina Schwartz): So when you start, I like to liken. Have you, have you heard the term like frequency, like our frequency, the energy? So, frequency doesn’t exist on a scale of 1 to 10. But if it did, and you could describe it as a 10-story building, when you walk into the ground floor and you look out the windows, you see a certain level of possibility and opportunity. When you take an elevator to the 10th floor, you see vaster levels of opportunity. Expansive. Right.

0:20:16 – (Alaina Schwartz): It was there all along. You just didn’t have the awareness to see it. Because what are we doing? We’re looking narrow minded at what the evidence is telling us. The evidence says it’s not working. Clients aren’t coming in, things are slower. Where is it, where is it, where is it? The minute on the 10th floor. The 10th or the minute we’re asking, where is it? Where are they? Where are the clients?

0:20:39 – (Alaina Schwartz): We’re basically saying, I don’t believe they’re here. And we’re repelling them away from us to begin with.

0:20:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. We do create what we fear the most. That is something that, you know, I see. Yeah, right, right. Whatever. Wherever we’re putting the energy is where we’re, what we’re going to get.

0:20:55 – (Alaina Schwartz): Exactly. Exactly.

0:20:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So this is great. I could talk to you all day. I really love this. But before we wrap up, you know, is there a question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

0:21:09 – (Alaina Schwartz): I feel like the questions you asked were fabulous. The Only thing I might ask is, is it really true? Because this is the belief leap that I hear. Is it really true that I could cut my hours and still make more money?

0:21:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, so is it really true?

0:21:25 – (Alaina Schwartz): It’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. Like literally. I have a client, she’s an executive coach, and when she first started, she was charging $25,000 a year for her services, working with mid-level and C-suite. She then went to. Within three months, we helped her go to $75,000 a year. She got seven new clients at that rate and then kept going. She’s now charging $120,000 a year for her services. Services. And only works with the C suite of multinationals.

0:21:53 – (Alaina Schwartz): When she first started working with me, because she works in all time zones, she was working 100 hours a week. Like, no lie, 16-hour days during the week, 10 hours every day on the weekend. And I kept saying to her, When you’re tired enough, that will shift when you’re tired enough. And she didn’t believe me. She now works 60 hours. She’s the only client that I have who works more than 40 hours a week. But that’s like a hot lap of.

0:22:15 – (Brynne Tillman): What she was working on.

0:22:16 – (Alaina Schwartz): Right? Right. So for her it’s not like that big. For me, it’s still a big deal. I’m like, I want to keep going. And she’s like, no, I can deal with 60 hours. I was like, why would anybody ever want to work 60 hours? I don’t understand it. But she still has the belief that she has to work that hard to be able to keep up with the level of clients that she has. Right. But even still, 40 hours a week, you know, that’s like incredible what she was able to cut and make five times more money.

0:22:42 – (Brynne Tillman): Absolutely. That’s. That is fantastic. I love that.

0:22:46 – (Alaina Schwartz): So, yes.

0:22:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Glad I didn’t ask you that question. That’s a great one. I love that. My goodness. This was absolutely fabulous. And I am sure that we have listeners at the edge of their seats saying, okay, how do I get in touch with Alaina?

0:23:03 – (Alaina Schwartz): So the best way to get in touch with me is actually that I don’t handle my own social media. So, contacting me on social media means you’ll talk to my team, not me. If you really want to get hold of me, then I suggest you grab my freebie. I have a free PDF guide that’s three ways to cut your work week in half while making the same or more money. Right. And that’s at www.alainashwarz.com time, right? And when you grab that and then respond to those messages, you’ll get me directly, like I’m the only person who responds to my email. So you will get me directly so I can then communicate with you.

0:23:43 – (Alaina Schwartz): And then if you want to book a call from there and it feels like we might be a match to see if you know how we’d continue to chat, happy to do that too.

0:23:52 – (Brynne Tillman): This was fantastic. I really had a lot of fun, and I am so thankful for the things I learned today. I know that you’ve delighted Brynne and many folks. And so when everyone is listening out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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