207: Making Pitching Personal: The Magic of Story Telling For Growth

Lisa: 0:00

I feel like maybe for almost every service-based business, getting good at pitching alongside getting good at whatever you're offering is essential.

Camille: 0:19

So you want to make an impact. You're thinking about starting a business, sharing your voice. How do women do it that handle motherhood, family and still chase after those dreams? We'll listen each week as we dive into the stories of women who know this is Call Me CEO. Welcome everyone to Call Me CEO.

Camille: 0:40

This is your host, Camille Walker, and here we celebrate women building businesses through all the different seasons of motherhood, which in many cases, if not all, means that we go through the phases of becoming a mother and shifting from one direction of who and what we are and what we're doing into a phase of motherhood and all of the questions that comes with that of who are we now, now that we have this baby and this wonderful new journey?

Camille: 1:05

But that can come with a lot of doubt and fear and misgiving of being that perfect mom which none of us are. It's not about perfect and we know that, but sometimes we can get really on ourselves. So today we're talking with Lisa Fernandez, who owns a marketing agency and specializes in storytelling, and she's going to share with us her story about how she worked through those pivots and those changes and those questions and postpartum. And we already got started on the pre-interview call and I'm like, wait, we have to pause this because this is all so good and so relatable, and I hope there are mothers listening right now who feel buoyed up and encouraged and knowing that, even if you feel stuck or maybe you need a pivot or open that new door, that you have what it takes to get there. So, lisa, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Lisa: 1:55

Thank you, camille, I'm so happy to be here.

Camille: 1:57

Yeah, so we were just chatting and you said that you're a fan of the show and you actually watch the videos on YouTube, which, yay, that's so awesome.

Lisa: 2:08

Yeah, I love YouTube, especially YouTube shorts. I feel like it's it's such a great way. Well, first of all, from a marketing perspective, I think people underestimate how much YouTube shorts can help you grow, similar to like TikTok, the way it's like we don't care if you have no subscribers. Yeah, you're a brand new user. If you start making shorts, we'll push you out there. So the algo is very rewarding to YouTube shorts and I always feel like talking about that because I'm not on TikTok as much and yeah, so I love seeing those clips.

Camille: 2:46

That is a good point. It's interesting because if you're making this short video once and I actually just hired a new assistant that helped me get out of my head and listen. You guys, I coach entrepreneurs all of the time and I help new moms build virtual assistant businesses. That's what I do, and sometimes we can get stuck in our own heads about how perfect it needs to be, and so for me, recently I just went through this myself.

Camille: 3:11

I found a new assistant who I can send my short videos to, and I get very emotionally unconnected from that pushing post of like oh no, what are people going to think of me? Or how will this come across? Or what if it's not perfect? Get someone in your corner who is not emotionally tied to it and they can post it and create around content you're already creating, Whether it's a podcast, long form video, short video, the tiny little clips that can be turned into really quality content. Remove yourself from that emotional connection and get someone else involved so that you can tag, team the creation and the posting, Because I don't know about you, but I get really wrapped up in that press play moment where I'm like oh no what if I only get five likes or 200 views?

Camille: 4:01

Oh well, that's 200 people that didn't know you or see you before, and that's a positive. So anyway, off of our soapbox with that. Lisa. Please introduce who you are and all about your backstory.

Lisa: 4:13

Yeah, so my name is Lisa Fernandez. I have a background in storytelling that goes back a long ways. I majored in English in college. I took a lot of writing courses. Then I won my first award for writing when I was a first grader. I wrote a poem for my teacher. So I've always had a love of storytelling.

Lisa: 4:38

And when I was living in New York years ago we were making my husband and I made a lot of short films together and after I had my baby a couple of years ago, I started really thinking about how I could use the skills that I've honed throughout the years. It felt like and I know this is going to be relatable to people, so I'm really happy to talk about it but I felt like I had so many different threads of lives that I had lived and skills that I had cultivated and it felt like just a miscellaneous mess and I had regret over not specializing and I felt like I was a jack of all trades and a master of none. And I remember this moment postpartum, when it was very like dramatic moment Um, so I live just outside of new Orleans, uh, like basically on a farm. Um, we, we don't take. We, it's like our friends, animals and stuff. So it's not super functional farm but for all intents and purposes you know alligators, horses, cows. So I was in the barn and the writing was on the wall that I was losing my job at the time, which was working as an assistant at this company that I really enjoyed working at, and my dad had always encouraged me to go to law school and I bucked that my entire life.

Lisa: 6:07

He's a lawyer. My oldest brother is a lawyer and he from an early age could tell that I had a gift for writing and speaking and thought that the law was the best way to go with that. And I started crying to him and telling him how lost I felt, with a looming layoff and having moved cross-country and being in a role that, if I were to look for a similar position locally here around New Orleans, would at best pay me 50% of what I was earning in New York, of what I was earning in New York, and also, you know, unemployment benefits aren't as cushy as they are in New York, like on and on. So I had a moment of realizing that I had unwittingly painted myself into a corner with being so dependent on this job. And I was freshly postpartum, maybe just two or three months.

Lisa: 7:07

At that point my baby was very young and so I broke down talking to my dad about it and I was like, you know, maybe you were right, maybe I should have gone to law school. And he was like, oh Lee, that ship has sailed. And I know he meant well, and I think kind of what he was saying is like, you know, investing that much money and time in, you know, going to law school at this point, especially if he could detect that I had no real interest in it, I just thought that it was the safe route, the safe way to sort of save my family. And so, the more I thought about it and I researched a lot of options, I felt like I had two main choices.

Lisa: 7:59

One road was going back to school, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the other route was trying to start a business for myself. So, like I was saying, I was a very reluctant entrepreneur at first. I didn't want a lot of the responsibility that comes with that, which is a lot of independent thought, a lot of independent action, a lot of maverick skills and approaches, and I just kind of I really wanted you know, I was even looking at becoming a dental hygienist, which is not my skill set at all, but I was like they always need dental hygienist.

Camille: 8:51

Right, you're kind of going through the logical.

Lisa: 8:53

Yeah, yeah yeah, and it was a couple of days after that conversation. I had been on a mailing list for years for this copywriting course. I had been on a mailing list for years for this copywriting course but it never really made sense to me that that was a viable route for me or anybody. It felt like magic internet money and that's not real. I didn't have a paradigm in my head for it and this almost sounds like a psychotic break. I promise it isn't.

Lisa: 9:25

Maybe it was, I don't know. I literally heard a whisper say copywriting Cause. I was at this point where I was like, just give me a sign, whatever it is, I'll be open, I'll pay attention to it, I'll follow it Like just very, very humbled and scared. My husband actually never graduated even from high school. His mom left him when he was 14 and he was homeless, and so and he's got you know this tremendous backstory of overcoming all the odds and taught himself to do everything he got into medicine, he was a medical tech and eventually started managing an urgent care.

Lisa: 10:13

But the requirements in Louisiana are different than New York, so it kind of felt like, looking at everything we had a lot of, it was going to be on me to figure out what the next steps were. So when I heard that message or whatever it was, I followed it and I didn't listen to the voices that were like, oh, but you're not that good of a writer, or who do you even write for? I was just like all right, I'm signing up for this course, I'm going to follow it to letter. I don't know how much longer I have at this job, but I know that time is not on my side in the sense that I can't wait too much longer to figure it out. So let's go full tilt, as if I'm getting laid off in the sense that I can't wait too much longer to figure it out. So let's go full tilt, as if I'm getting laid off in the next two weeks.

Lisa: 11:10

Yeah, and that's what I did, and I would end up getting laid off a year later. So it was a lot longer than I thought I had. But in that week I was telling you about when I cried to my dad in the barn, our air condition broke, our dishwasher broke and it was like record level heat wave and I just got a communication from the owner of the company that made it clear to me that my days were numbered. So it was just like Bing, bam, boom, like all right universe and I'm, you know, and it's already like screaming newborn. She doesn't want to latch, like blah, blah, blah.

Camille: 11:54

All these, like you know which is enough to be just totally put you into insanity. That alone.

Lisa: 12:02

Yeah, Um, yeah. So I hit the pavement, like you know, our livelihoods depended on it because they really did and I felt like having my daughter gave me a level of clarity and focus I've never experienced before and that's coming from someone who was an artist living in New York where you have to be so driven, so focused to just survive baseline, yeah, but this was unparalleled. It was like, oh well, of course I'll do all these things I hate doing and not give it a second thought, because you know she needs this, she needs you know we need to, she needs to go to a good school, we need to get our first house. So it was a non-negotiable for me, which made it pretty simple and easy in that respect.

Camille: 13:00

Wow. So with you starting this copywriting, is it something that you were able to build in that last year where you kind of built up the business before officially losing your job?

Lisa: 13:26

now I do agree that I think we're going more and more in that direction in this new digital economy, these ideas about everyone's kind of their own digital island, their own brand, and building up your presence on whatever social media platforms as best as you can, as regularly as you can, thinking about everything you put out there as a rep right, and every rep makes you better known, more established, more credible, so. But then I also feel there's this like very aggressive rhetoric out there. That's like I've heard sometimes, where it's like burn all the bridges, make no excuses, go all in. And I want to be clear, like I for sure went all in, like I was saying there was no equivocation with me about like am I, am I gonna devote myself to this or not, but I did it in a very smart, strategic, deliberate way, and I feel like that's what mothers are so good at. Like I feel like there we are so good at really going all in but being so intentional about it and not confusing hustle and burnout with getting results.

Camille: 14:42

Yeah, Okay, I'm going to challenge you there, because I think some people do struggle with that of, maybe to the point of not taking care of their own needs as a woman and as a person. So I would love to hear, as you were building, working which I assume is full-time or part-time Was it full-time or part-time? Full-time Was it full-time or part-time? Full-time yeah, okay. So you're working full-time, you have this new little baby and you're building a business. I mean, that is a heavy plate. So can you tell me what you did to help you do it in a way that you didn't lose your mind and you kept that balance without the burnout?

Lisa: 15:23

Yeah. So the first thing I did was I gave myself the room every morning when I clocked in. I knew my schedule at that point enough to know the peaks and valleys of when people would be reaching out to me requesting things, and earlier in the morning it was consistently a quieter time in the morning it was consistently a quieter time. So I took that first 30 minutes and this is where I feel like I was really truly blessed, because I was teaching myself this new business while I was earning money with my old job. So if you can anybody out there can borrow this please do so.

Lisa: 16:04

That first 30 minutes I just let myself learn every day.

Lisa: 16:10

My baby was at this point about four months so, and we had sleep trained, which, for everyone, everyone's mental health got better, everybody was happier, everybody was sleeping better, so that really helped too. So, but for the first 30 minutes I would just learn. And then, luckily, this course and I think any good course or mentor gives you action steps coinciding with the knowledge, because this perfectionistic idea of like, learn all this stuff, get amazing and then put this perfect product out there, like we definitely learned. But filmmaking like you're, like you've got to make that first bad film, like it's unavoidable, and I met so many like brilliant, talented artists in New York that were consciously or unconsciously trying to skip that step of making that terrible first effort, and years would go by and their efforts would be abandoned, half-baked or, you know, not even attempted, and meanwhile their peers are attempting, failing publicly, you know, getting getting up like, dusting themselves off and moving on and in a lot of ways I feel like that's the way that life works, that's the way that love works.

Lisa: 17:39

That's the way that you know, building a business works. So I was able to, I started sending out cold emails right away. And another thing I'd like to say is, if you're starting a business, getting very, very good at pitching in a very specific way to very specific people particularly and it doesn't have to be copywriting particularly, you know, and it doesn't have to be copywriting Like. I knew this girl who's so talented at social media marketing but she learned from the course that like, oh, that's a lower skill, it doesn't pay as much or whatever, and meanwhile she's brilliant on Canva and she already has this massive following on Instagram. And I'm kind of like, dude, you just like, use the assets you have and, like a compounding asset, add to it, grow it, like you were saying, with your assistant putting, putting out those videos like video after video after video, it's a wrap.

Lisa: 18:43

Yeah, so I sent some horribly terrible cold pitches to companies where it's like, especially when I first started, I was mainly focusing on the parenting and children's niche and the way that I was taught is like look, you know, go after clients that you know they have the payroll to pay you really well, and stuff like, just as a contractor, but they have the payroll to pay you really well and stuff, just as a contractor.

Lisa: 19:10

So I'm pitching these huge companies who already have multiple people in their marketing departments and I don't even know what I'm pitching them on. I'm like I write blogs, I like to write emails Do you need any help? Which, of course, I got no response. The only response I got with that round of outreach, which was probably about a hundred emails, was I wrote to a toy company that my daughter has a little unicorn from it and the toy company named it pedals and we call her toy pedals and it's like her favorite lovey and every night when I'm saying good night to her I say like, uh, sweet dreams, say hello to pedals for me. And I put that in the email and the guy wrote back and that has been definitely a pattern in getting people to get back to me is that level of authenticity and specificity is very difficult to ignore.

Camille: 20:19

That is so true. Oh, I love that so much because, with what I have done in the last 14 years of having an online business and I'm not a big toy company, but I notice when I get my son made fun of me because I have like 45,000 emails in my inbox, gloss over something immediately, even from the subheading, where you're like, oh, this is, this is spam, or this is someone trying to get me to do X, y, z, or I've got this, this email a thousand times. If you can, if someone makes something personal to me or I know that they've listened to my podcast or read my blog, or you know, they know who I am personally I immediately pay attention. So of course, that makes sense at from the reverse.

Lisa: 21:10

Yeah.

Camille: 21:11

Yeah.

Lisa: 21:12

And even till now, like a year later, of doing that kind of outreach. That's been consistently the case is making very specific offers of what you would like to help someone with. Um you know, within their marketing whether it's a lot of times I'm going after emails and I also preach this from the mountaintop that, especially creators who are scared of platform changes, algorithm fluctuations the most single empowering thing that you can do is start an email list, capture those contacts, nurture them, and I think the dirty little secret that a lot of people don't like to talk about in marketing is that a lot of nurture timelines are longer than we would like them to be than we would like them to be, but the silver lining in that is, if you have their email, you have a direct line to them.

Lisa: 22:19

And me personally, I don't get on every social media platform every day. I get on YouTube nearly every day, but certainly not Facebook, instagram, and I think it's different for everybody what your favorite preferred platforms are, but for sure, I check my email every single day, and so that's what I like to tell my creator clients is, as soon as you can, it's going to be so empowering for you to set up an email list, to start sending those emails out and then look at your metrics, because a lot of people can feel shy about that and think that people don't want to hear from them, and then they'll get you know. 77% open rates, which is a really high.

Camille: 22:57

That's amazingly high, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: 22:59

Yeah, so yeah.

Camille: 23:03

Okay, so I'm loving where this is going. So we're waking up 30 minutes early, you're doing the learning, you're sending out these cold reach. What else were you doing as you built?

Lisa: 23:15

I was also building my website. There were a lot of the action elements of owning a business that I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to have people to encourage me to do early on, and that's another one of those don't be perfectionistic things.

Lisa: 23:31

And there's different schools of thought about it. Some people feel like you don't necessarily need a website. If you're, you know you could have just like a really good social media account that you can share with people. That might be impressive enough based on your followers and your content, but for me personally, I wanted to cultivate a really nice portfolio and presentation of my website and again, my website's changed like two or three times since I've started this business.

Lisa: 23:58

It used to be like when I was doing parenting and the children's niche.

Lisa: 24:02

It was all about like childhood magic and helping brands tell stories that solidify in the parents' minds, especially because we have such a vested interest in providing that magical experience for our children and children are so naturally magical themselves. And then when I started pivoting and my client tells started changing, I had to open that up more, to be a little bit more about story-driven copywriting and videos and all of that. Yeah. So I got to cold outreach and website really early on. And again with your website you feel confident to display your work, that people have a storefront for you to go to and be like. Oh yeah, this is legit.

Lisa: 24:54

I can get a sense of how she writes, what her work looks like. And even if you're just writing articles for like medium or on your LinkedIn blogs for your own website, all of it adds up to the impression that people get and a lot of marketing is just making the unfamiliar familiar. And the more content you have, the more windows into who you are and the services you offer, the lower the objections when you finally hopefully do get on a call with them.

Camille: 25:29

Oh, I like that. With the media changing, I mean, it's always. If you're in any kind of online space, you know that things change quite often. You have to be willing to pivot and change and even in these few years you've done it. You're like I already changed a few times. What are some ways or some helpful things that you would say for people right now to get their voice or their message or their brand out there if they're starting something new?

Lisa: 26:00

Yeah, so kind of similar to the 30 minutes every morning if you can break it down into bite-sized pieces or baby steps of you know whatever the vision is like. Say, for instance, um, you know my friend who's really good at social media marketing, um, I would maybe spend 30 minutes a day, even if it's all you have total and you need to split it up into 15 minutes of educating yourself on. I mean, honestly, I feel like maybe for almost every service-based business, getting good at pitching alongside getting good at whatever you're offering is essential. And it's like it's not fun, right, or it wasn't fun for me, I think for some people, like, if you gamify it, that's helped me. Or you know, just like I like visualizing it in terms of reps every rep, every outreach, like makes you stronger, makes you better, and it's like a cumulative effect, it's like compounding interest. Thinking about it in that way and detaching from the results, which I guess acting and stuff helped me get good at.

Lisa: 27:16

You know, going into a room auditioning for people, like laying it all out there and then leaving the room and wiping it from your memory. It almost didn't happen. But yeah, I would say, cultivating very early on your value proposition and pitching alongside whatever you're offering. So maybe it's three parts and having some kind of product that you continually add to, whether it's your social media platform, your website, or you know some people have beautiful portfolios on medium, like beautiful blogs that they write all the time, submitting that to other websites. Yeah, so whatever your craft is cold pitching and or you know whatever kind of pitching if you're lucky enough to get referrals. And I can't remember the third.

Camille: 28:13

So it's honing your skill and continuingly to put it out there, pitching and educating yourself, like continuingly to learn. So I'm curious do you remember when you, when things started to turn for you, where you were getting yeses? Do you remember what they were and what was that like for you? Like realizing this was going to work, transitioning from your full-time to being your own boss.

Lisa: 28:36

Yeah. So I love this question too, because, going back to what I was talking about in terms of, like having so much in the miscellaneous bucket and feeling like you didn't have enough whatever like assets accumulated from, like your years of working in the world as an adult, once I started looking at my own personal network as like maybe not necessarily they need marketing, but a friend of theirs or a company that they work for, or, um, a friend of mine, it the light bulb went on for her when I said, oh yeah, I'm serving a lot more nonprofit clients these days, and then she was like, oh, there's this meditation center that I work with and they so. Again, I think it goes back to that specificity and it can be it's so vulnerable to let people that you know, that you care about, know that you're doing this new thing and it's in its infancy, but people are so busy and they have so much stuff going on. That again just like the cold pitching.

Lisa: 29:42

Making it very specific what you're offering, who you hope to work with, and if you're just starting out and you don't know what that is, that's totally fine, but making it as specific as you can, because when I first started I was targeting children's companies doing blogs. I was targeting children's companies doing blogs and these days I'm more doing. I do a lot of Google ads for nonprofits, setting up their grants and into their welcome email sequence and then handling their email lists and like small businesses and sometimes creators. So but again, you got to start with that like first imperfect or your best guess, first thing and whatever that is, whatever niche, whatever offering, and then you'll, you'll just iterate and get better over time.

Camille: 30:32

Yeah, this is something that I coach my students with that go through my 60 days to VA program. All of the time is they say, well, who do I ask and who do I talk to and what do I say. And one of the very is they say, well, who do I ask and who do I talk to and what do I say. And one of the very first practices that we figure and we work through ideations of this it doesn't mean it's perfect the first time, but it's to be able to have that elevator pitch of I am and this is who I help and because, or my why, and that it's very clear of who you are and the problem that you fix and who it's for, and if you can figure out that, that is half the battle.

Camille: 31:11

And then the other side is opening your mouth and putting yourself in a position where you're networking yourself and you're even just talking to friends, family, people that you see at the local grocery store, even at a bus stop if you're walking your kids there or whatever it is. Because I think that a lot of times we assume either that someone's going to judge us or they won't think that we're good enough, or that no one needs what we have to offer, which, if we really stop and evaluate that, that's not true, because you've already made the decision of like no, I have this skillset and I have evidence of having helped people, so it's really putting yourself in that mindset of no, this is valuable. I just need to be willing to put myself out there, and I love that you brought it to the fact of auditioning and getting the rejection and being able to move on from that, because I think so many times we get so precious about rejection and what that can mean for us.

Camille: 32:07

And so it really has to be more of a gamification of what is the number of outputs to get a percentage of input, like really. It has to be something where we're so willing to just understand what. I was actually coaching someone on this just last week. She has a business where she does essential oils and she was doing a session at a retreat that we had and she came for free, which I think was brilliant, because she came into a group of women that she knew none of us but she knew that it was women that were willing to invest in themselves, so it was the right pool of people to be in front of and she did a session where she did. It was called. It was like a Reiki session, but she also incorporated essential oils and so she had you like pick out an essential oil and then she would tell you the properties of that just randomly and then say, okay, now we're going to go into this, this Reiki session, and we'll use some of this essential oil. It was something I had never quite done before and it was so interesting and so valuable and I really gained a lot from it.

Camille: 33:10

And she reached out to me later and said you know, I'm working with this. I want to get better. And I told her the same thing. I said you were doing the right thing. You put yourself in front of the right pool of people. It was women who wanted to invest in themselves, their mental wellbeing or their, their wellness in general.

Camille: 33:30

And then you offer, but when I met with her, she didn't tell me what her rates were or, ooh, could I reach out to you again? And here's my email. I said to her let's connect on social media. And then we connected again, but just with that little piece of putting yourself out there and making it almost like an audition I love how you said that, because really our lives I think actors and actresses really have to get comfortable with rejection or they don't make it. You know what I mean? It's rejection in a package, no matter what, even if you're the very best. And so I love that you put it into that perspective is that it really is auditioning, but putting ourselves out there and putting the reps out there and being vulnerable enough to get the no so you can get to the yes.

Lisa: 34:15

Yeah, yeah. And luckily, unlike acting, I think there is more room for people hopefully to like separate themselves from what they're offering. And I had a really good coach tell me they're not saying no to you, they're saying no to your offer at this moment. So creating that little bit of buffer space in there. So it's not so personal, it's not so you know, wholehearted rejection of you and your being, which how could they possibly do that? They don't know you and your totality. Even our closest loved ones probably don't always know us in our full totality. So yeah, imperfect action over everything wins all the time.

Lisa: 35:02

And the blessing in the entrepreneurial path, regardless of where that takes you, what you're offering is kind of what I was describing before, where I was like I didn't want to be the maverick, I didn't want to have to figure it out myself, but the difference between working inside of someone else's company versus forging your own path is, I think you find your zone of genius more often and more organically. So when you were talking about the lady at the retreat like and you're like it's Reiki, but it's also essential oils, she found her own organic way to that and to me that's such a clear sign that these are gifts that she has that she's meant to share on this journey that she's on. And it's just the same in being an entrepreneur, where you're testing, you're like getting the data back, being like, okay, well, that didn't work out so great. Or you know what I thought I was going to love this. I love this aspect of it. Better you pivot, you try something else, and I believe each attempt brings you closer and closer and closer to probably the thing that makes you the happiest, and usually that coincides with like, makes you the most money, makes you the most satisfied.

Lisa: 36:24

Um, because there did come a point in my journey, even just over the past year, of where I was like, okay, I hit those monetary milestones that you know were trophies to me, that I didn't think I would hit so early on. But the mountain moved and it became more about I want to work with people that I really look up to, brands that you know. One of them is a retreat, a meditation retreat that I've been going to for about seven years and when I first started, I didn't let myself reach out to clients like that because I was like, oh, I need some more experience. What do I have to offer them. They're so amazing, all these stories of limitation, and when I started getting feedback from my cold pitches that the more specific and the more authentic I was to really resonating with that person, that brand, the better the feedback.

Lisa: 37:22

I was like, oh man, I really need to reach out to them, cause I am not pretending at all when I'm like I love your brand, I love what you do, I would love to contribute. Um, yeah, and they got back to me and we started talking about what that could look like and it completely changed the paradigm for me in terms of what I was chasing and it just felt like it. It opened up the game in such an exciting way and it was so empowering that I think that was the moment where I was like this is why I had to go on this journey. This is why you know it's a journey of moving to yourself that you're stronger, more capable, more resourceful than you ever thought you could be.

Camille: 38:15

I love that so much. I'm like grinning like, yes, the thing that I love so much about this and even just learned watching this arc that you've taken me through when we first started this call, you were telling me about a really dark period that you went through with postpartum, and I know that that was part of the message that you wanted to share with this is that you probably went through a lot of self doubt and darkness in that time. So, having had such growth to where you are in believing in yourself and really niching in and I can say, just as a side note, caveat to that is that when you connect with someone who really resonates with who you are, magic happens and relationships build businesses Like that's just. We know this.

Camille: 39:00

So, I love that you brought it back to that very personal place of who you are and the things that you love and the brands you connect with. And they can be small. It can be a retreat, or it can be someone who owns a business that you know in your neighborhood. You know it doesn't have to be a big toy company, for example. Yeah, but I would love if you would like to share a bit about your postpartum part of this, because I was able to hear that but we didn't quite share that with the audience yet.

Lisa: 39:27

Yeah, yeah. So what I was sharing before is I my pregnancy was already very difficult mentally and emotionally. I was blessed to have a very physically uncomplicated pregnancy, but the stress of going to the doctor and so often and being advanced maternal age and getting all these extra tests and stuff too where I just it just felt like I think for some moms it can make them feel comforted that their babies are being checked out and everything's good For me it just added to my anxiety and I'm like, oh, like another. It felt like my entire pregnancy was just kind of dreading. The next appointment or test. And my doctor had a very frank conversation with me in my last trimester where he was, like you know, based on the experience you've had so far, you're at an increased risk for postpartum depression and I already had a therapist but he connected me with a psychiatrist to make sure that I had the support that I needed if I needed it.

Camille: 40:33

Amazing. First of all, good job, doctor. That makes me so happy to hear that that is awesome.

Lisa: 40:39

Yeah, dr Dutral if anybody in the new Orleans area is looking for an epithetic brilliant, just, I mean, the best doctor I've ever been to, and I I was so, so honored that he delivered my baby and the whole experience I had with him was amazing. And, yeah, he definitely got me through a very, very difficult journey with that. So I already had some resources in place in case I needed them. But with delivering my baby and you know, I had such a smooth, wonderful labor and delivery and I was just on cloud nine when we got home from the hospital.

Lisa: 41:26

I remember her sleeping and looking at her and just being like she was so perfect and beautiful. I was like I hope she likes me. It felt like. It felt like you know, a cool girl in high school or something and being like, oh my God, I want to be friends with her. Such a weird it's so funny like that postpartum roller coaster. So I was really good and happy for the first like two months, I think, because I think it truly and this is the case with so many people, I think, who experience postpartum depression it's that sleep deprivation catching up to you and everything got dark. Yeah, and my like my ability to control or team those negative thoughts. I just lost that ability.

Lisa: 42:18

So a friend of mine who's a mama three said to me like your mind is like a bad neighborhood right now and you need to be very, very careful, and a lot of my anxiety was around providing I like kind of what I was alluding to at some point, where it was like you know, if you're this sleep deprived, that you can't even put a sentence together, how are you going to be able to function at work?

Lisa: 42:46

You're going to lose your job just catastrophic, you know spirals. And these were the kinds of thoughts that would occupy me after a 2 AM feeding where you know it took a half hour for her to like get the right latch. It took 15 minutes to feed her, but now she's falling asleep because she's finally got enough. You know in her belly that she's like content. I got to wake her up and she's crying. She's crying and I get her down, and that whole feeding process took like an hour and a half maybe, and I'm like laying in bed next to her bassinet trying to make myself fall asleep, which is so difficult during that time, and my mind is just racing with well, if I lose my job, what am I going to do?

Lisa: 43:32

We have this much in savings, just like every night doing these calculations and I remember populations and I remember we had one of those little hatch night lights, um, with the, with the white noise, and my husband heard that the red light helps them sleep the most, but it's like such a war zone. It was like red light and like and the snoo going back and forth but like never really helping her and just very, very, very chaotic, very scary, very, very difficult time, one of the most difficult times in my life, and so much of that was around. Okay, my life is completely in chaos right now and I don't know, I can't predict the next moment, let alone the next year, but at least I have this job to go back to, at least it gives me benefits, at least this, at least that. And then I started getting the thought you know, just never ending anxiety of oh, what if? Because they were not doing well, when I went on maternity leave, we were already in budget cuts and all of that I had the thought of like oh, what if my job isn't as secure as I thought? And that's the only sort of solid ground that I feel like I have right now from a financial security perspective, and that's when the stuff really hit the fan.

Lisa: 45:14

And, um, I eventually reached out to a psychiatrist. Um, I eventually reached out to a psychiatrist. Luckily, I was speaking to my therapist twice a week, um, doing the therapy sessions in my car and stuff, and so it kind of helped me. And her track like oh, things are definitely going down, they're not going up, um, and I got on medication. But I think the thing that helped the most that I was talking about. What I was talking about before is when she finally got to a point that we could sleep train and when she was able to start sleeping through the night, my nervous system started letting me sleep through the night, cause it's that weird, like the umbilical cord is still attached and you did you put your baby in another room.

Lisa: 46:01

Yeah, yeah, earlier, earlier than they recommended, but I both of us couldn't sleep Like we were both, so you smell like they smell you, you smell them Like it is, it is a whole thing.

Camille: 46:13

And if you're not sleeping while your nervous system is on edge and it's hard to, and then any every little like or breath, you're like, oh, are they awake? And then you were like I guess I should just not fall back asleep yet, and then, which puts you in more of a vicious cycle, I feel like that's something where, especially for me when it was my first, I was the most on edge.

Camille: 46:35

I think after you have another, I don't know, at least that was my experiences that I realized, oh, they have the mechanism to breathe and I need to trust that I can put this baby, swaddle them tight and they can sleep and if they really need me I'll hear it. You know, especially almost to the point where I wanted them to sleep in the room next to me but I didn't even need the monitor because it was like loud enough, you know anyway.

Lisa: 47:04

So yeah, Well, and your nervous system is so attuned to them you know, like you were saying every, every little thing or that.

Lisa: 47:10

Like even when I would go to another place, like to go do some work, I would go to my parents and work in their office, like 90% of my psyche was my daughter and like I was so distracted Like it was I, you know, and that's really that um matrustence process of like figuring out where you fit now that your world has become so consumed, like welcomed or not by being a mom, and like where do you fit back into? You know now that 99% of your brain is just like baby, baby, baby. Yeah.

Camille: 47:49

So what advice would you give to someone now that you've been through I mean gosh, we went from where you started to how you made this amazing, successful business, and you had to figure it out and you broke it down. What would you say to that person who needs that pivot or is looking to change or might be in that postpartum phase?

Lisa: 48:10

Yeah, I would say if your thoughts are particularly gnarly, they're probably not true. And especially if you're and you know learning the skill of not everything that you think is true, especially when you're sleep deprived, especially when your hormones are all over the map and you're adjusting to something, as you know, traumatic like kind of in a good way as as much of an upheaval as being a new mom, um, and that, even if you can't imagine forming a sentence, performing as well as you did before, making more money than you did before, being even happier than you were before, having having your own identity and then some and that was my driving thought through this whole time I was like what if my life on the other side of this dark tunnel that I'm going through is not just what it was before, but way, way, way better? And I didn't believe it at the time. It was just a thought experiment that I had which turned out to be absolutely true, absolutely true. So you will sleep again and do what you have to to logistically make that happen. Therapist was saying like go sleep at your mom and dad's house for a night and let your husband take care of her, and I was like I can't do that. I can't leave my baby. People don't leave their babies like that and she was like trust me, lisa, they do which made me think that maybe she had done it and I actually didn't do that. We got to the sleep training phase better, but it did put a fire under me to hire someone to help us with the sleep training process. So it was that as like no tears as possible, yeah, but when everybody started sleeping, things got a lot better.

Lisa: 50:11

I had the bandwidth to actually start thinking about in a really focused, deliberate way, how to build this new life, what that would look like, deliberate way, how to build this new life, what that would look like.

Lisa: 50:25

And so you, as a new mom, have a superpower that, depending on where you are in your journey, you might not even have gotten a taste of yet, and it will bring you, basically, I think, anything you want.

Lisa: 50:44

Basically, I think anything you want, as long as you know where to focus it and how to pace yourself and how to keep moving forward with it. Because what I achieved over these last year and change in my entrepreneurial journey, I don't think I ever could have achieved free motherhood, because there was just a necessity, a level of focus, a level of non-negotiable aspect of it that I never had before, and just being so driven to provide for my daughter, to give her the best of everything, and that I knew I had to do my level best, best of everything, and that I knew I had to do my level best, and so it's it truly is. Becoming a mother has enriched my life, even outside of relationships, in ways that I never, ever, imagined, and I know that is not exclusive to me. So you'll sleep again, you'll feel better again, and then, in addition to that, you'll experience and realize a superpower that you probably never had before, and then you can really truly do anything with it.

Camille: 51:51

I love it. I hope everyone that listening to this can feel the same way about themselves. This has been such a powerful conversation and if you are in the middle of needing to sleep, train your baby. I used baby wise with all of my babies. I can link it in the description below, and it is helpful to have an outside perspective from someone. If you do need someone else to come in, I know some people, so reach out to me on that, but please tell our audience where they can find you online.

Lisa: 52:27

Yeah, so my website is lisafernandezagency. com. If you're an entrepreneur and you have marketing needs, go ahead and set up a free strategy session with me and I'll give you some free tips that you can implement immediately, along the lines of what you've heard today. And then you can find me on LinkedIn at Lisa Fernandez, and yeah.

Camille: 52:43

Awesome. Well, everyone, thank you for tuning in today and if you are feeling like you need some coaching with motherhood and balance, I am your girl. That is what I offer. I have one-on-one coaching available. I also have a free discovery call where we can chat about where you are in this season, but know that wherever you are, there are people who listen and that there are people who care and I and to ask for it and to put yourself out there in that vulnerability is a superpower. And thank you for tuning in today and I can't wait to see you next time. And thank you, lisa, for being here.

Lisa: 53:17

Thank you so much for having me.

Camille: 53:19

Hey CEOs, thank you so much for spending your time with me. If you found this episode inspiring or helpful, please let me know in a comment. In a five-star review, you could have the chance of being a featured review on an upcoming episode. Continue the conversation on Instagram at callmeCEOPodcast, and remember you are the boss.