1169: Ascend EQ: Simplify Your Business and Amplify Your Success with Founder and CEO Natalyn Lewis

Robert Plank 0:00 Welcome back. We're here with Natalyn Lewis. And Natalyn is a true entrepreneur. She has started and sold seven companies, and currently she is the visionary behind Ascend EQ. They are a company that dives into human emotions and how you can use them to your advantage. Now, Natalyn knows all about human behavior. She's collaborated with athletes, business owners, professionals, so we're gonna get asked the hard questions. Dive deep. Maybe what will laugh? Maybe we'll cry. We'll find out how to avoid repeating some of these common entrepreneurial mistakes, get on the right path to success. So much more so Natalyn, glad to be speaking with you.

Natalyn Lewis 0:46 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Robert Plank 0:49 Glad to have you. And so I just started my my son, I had soccer a few weeks ago, and it's been quite an adventure. I understand you have some of that soccer mom, soccer coach energy,

Natalyn Lewis 0:59 Absolutely. I played soccer since I was four years old. I played soccer all the way through college and and then have coached soccer for over 20 years. So it's, it runs deep in the blood,

Robert Plank 1:11 Nice. It's just built in you eat, breathe and sleep. Is there like a secret to it? There's, as a parent should, is it all about just having fun? Or what should I know?

Natalyn Lewis 1:19 You know, it's funny. It depends on how old they are, but I think, I think with little kids between the ages of four and seven, it's about letting them explore the game with curiosity and not a lot of pressure, but just decide if it's something that they actually enjoy doing, and by the time they're seven or eight, giving them opportunity to explore improvement. So a lot of kids will stop doing an activity because emotionally, they feel unsafe because they're not very good at it, and maybe somebody next to them is better, and so that there feels like a piece of like, maybe I'm not good enough. And so by the time they're seven or eight, it's good to give them opportunity to improve, and if they find a joy for improvement in there, that's when you get to take it a little further. When they're about 11, that's what I found with soccer is kind of the key.

Robert Plank 2:02 I like it, and I can tell just from the exact ages you know what you're talking about. And I imagine that these sorts of skills carry on later in life to the age that I'm at, to the age that you're at, right once we become adults, we say, well, because we started with the these good habits early and kind of embrace that, that weird mix of, well, you want to struggle, right? You want to have the challenges that will you enjoy when you get to the other side. And you don't want to just always go the path of least resistance, right? You want to kind of achieve things, but then you also don't want to continue too far when it's just you're miserable and things aren't working. And unfortunately, some people get stuck in some of these traps, right? They're stuck as an employee, and they wish they could build a business, or, maybe even worse, they're an entrepreneur, and they've built themselves a new job, and you've accomplished something that we all want to do is to build these things and sell and repeat and make the deals happen. And so tell us about yourself. We kind of read your bio a little bit, but in your own words, what has you passionate? Excited, fired up?

Natalyn Lewis 3:04 Yeah, well, I think I found a competitive drive inside of of business and inside of creation. And what gets me excited is to be able to create something, to be able to put a picture in my mind, something I want to achieve, something I want to go after and then go create it and take that space and do something fulfilling with it. I wasn't always that way, though. Made plenty of mistakes early on, some ones that I wish I could I wish I would have known earlier, and a lot of it comes back to just what we just said about those young soccer players. I think people join entrepreneurialism. They start a business out of curiosity and fun like that looks fun, that looks engaging, that looks better than the grass I'm standing on in the green the grass is always greener. Approach takes them into starting a business, and then then they get into that place where they look left and they look right, and they start getting a little imposter syndrome, because they're like, well, so and so is better at that than I am or so. And so launched a product, and that product might be better than mine. And they dismiss the the sport, the business in this case, right? Too soon they didn't give themselves a chance to excel, because they let self doubt and self deprecation take over, and they let the emotions make the decision, and then they end up right back to where they were, wondering why the grass still looks equally bad

Robert Plank 4:18 and even worse than where they were, because they're back where they were. But maybe years have passed and they say, Oh no, now I have even less time to do it, and I'm even more discouraged. And that imposter syndrome thing you mentioned, I mean, it's no joke, is it? Like I saw someone post, I think, on LinkedIn the other day where he had a hot date, and he took her to goo headquarters to say, like, hey, I'll show her around. We'll see all the fancy blinking lights on the walls or whatever they have there. And his date wasn't impressed, and she said, You're the sixth guy who's taken me to Google headquarters. And so he was like, oh, like, here I was thinking. I was like, delivering this amazing experience, and I was just a dime a dozen. Everyone else had thought of this. And it can be discouraging, right, to see everyone else showing off their successes. Is. And so what's the answer to that? Is that to, like, build a better team of your own allies, or just get to work. Or how do we overcome this imposter syndrome?

Natalyn Lewis 5:09 Well, really, it dials into knowing who you are before you start your business, and really having a vision of what you want to create and knowing who you are in that creation. So many people start an entrepreneurialism, or they start a business, and they're, they're piece milling, what they're going to build based on what they've already seen that exists out there. Oh, I'm going to start a business, and it's going to look like this, because I saw this guy who was doing this, and I'm going to build that and and then I'm going to be able to do what he does. And then comparison comes in, because there was not actually creation of thought. That was what I really wanted. There was some part of that, some piece of that, that I wanted. Maybe I wanted the freedom, maybe I wanted the financial success, maybe I wanted to to do what they do, but I never actually defined it for myself. Now, this, this happened to me early on in my career. I want, I saw people on the stages, and I thought, oh my gosh, I want to do that. I want to be on the stages of the world I want to speak. And I saw. All I saw was the stage. But I didn't create my own vision. I just knew that's what I wanted. And so I went and got that and when I got there, I was in miserable success. And the reason I was miserable success is because I didn't account for is all of the travel and the time away from the family and the solidification of events, and when events don't go well, and the whole lifestyle behind just the constancy of that business model. I didn't create that on purpose. I just went after the shiny object. And what I encourage entrepreneurs to do, create on purpose. First, get out a piece of paper, take the time you don't want to do, and sit in the uncomfortable of idea creation and really create what you want, from the idea to the lifestyle to the character of the person building the company. Know what you're creating and know who's creating it. Because if you go build something truly unique, you can't compare yourself to somebody else. And if you show up truly as yourself. You also don't need to compare yourself against somebody else. It's not I am an entrepreneur, it's I am a creator of x, and then I don't have to get into that comparison. And that's where that imposter syndrome really gets the better of people. Wonderful.

Robert Plank 7:15 So in other words, make an actual strategy, right? Have a written plan. Don't just throw yourself into it and then wonder why you experience these random results, and so did I hear you correctly, where you said that we need to figure out who we are and then figure out the business, and then figure out who we are in the business. Is that like the right structure?

Natalyn Lewis 7:36 Yeah, or figure out what you figure out who you are, and then go figure out how what? What does that person build? What does that person do all day long as I as I got into the business as a female, there was a I had imposter syndrome, or I don't even call it imposter syndrome. I called it the Cruella devel syndrome. I called it The Devil Wears Prada syndrome, where I had this mental image of what a female in business has to look like. Because every movie, every TV show, everything I'd ever seen about female business leaders, they acted a certain way, dressed a certain way, showed up a certain way, and I started acting that way, and it wasn't me. I don't wear stilettos, I wear sneakers, I don't I don't show up in blazers, I wear baseball caps, and I showed up in a space that wasn't me because I was trying to be what I thought everybody needed me to be, and so then I built businesses that fit that profile, and I was miserably successful. If you want to build something that's real, where you're not comparing yourself to everyone else, then figure out who you are first. Once I figured out who I was, and then I showed up to go build a business my way that did things that I wanted to do, where I could show up as me, that is when I finally experienced the kind of success that created both financial success and fulfillment,

Robert Plank 8:49 wonderful. So you ticked all the right boxes, right? You did things the proper way. And so we talked a little bit so far about some of the mistakes, some of what not to do, but I would love if you could brag for me a little bit. So was there, so all these businesses that you built, was there one that you felt like you did it right, where you like you had the right plan, built the right team, people did the right things. You have a fun story like that, for sure? Yeah, absolutely.

Natalyn Lewis 9:10 We did have one where we did it right. I walked into it and I had it. I knew exactly what the vision was. I wanted to create a solution for a very specific problem. I wanted to create a solution that was going to remain niche. I didn't want the company to get overly large. I wanted to build it so that it could be self sustaining, generate residual and passive revenue. And I wanted to my my main vision at the front was I wanted to work 10 hours or less a month and make $40,000 or more a month, and that is what I wanted to build. I knew exactly how to do that. I knew exactly what my numbers were, and I set out, and I did it, and I created a company that provided a technological solution, and then I walked in the door, sold that solution, had a SAS model on the back end, and created exactly what I wanted. And it's really cool, because I'm not I didn't have a background in tech. I just knew. What solution I wanted to provide, and that gave me clarity on who I needed to bring on my team to build it. And I knew what I wanted the lifestyle task to be. So I knew what I wanted to be part of and what I didn't, what I wanted to be in charge of, and what I didn't, what parts I wanted to own and what parts I didn't. And I knew it right out of the gates, which allowed me to build a company that sustained itself and gave me the revenue and the freedom to do exactly what I wanted to do

Robert Plank 10:23 and what was the company. What was the solution?

Natalyn Lewis 10:27 The solution was actually a client management software system specifically designed for companies that have large sales organizations. So I had, I had had a career in sales, and recognized immediately that all of the out of the box solutions, the big ones that are out there, Salesforce, and some of the other ones were so big that they had to solve the problems for every company. And so what you needed, you needed four things, and that software provided 400 I wanted to walk in and provide four things. I didn't want to provide 400 I wanted it to be something that literal salespeople who don't like to sit at a computer and don't like to input data and don't like to give the variables that the sales team actually needs. I wanted to make that possible. So we made that very, very possible by utilizing, you know, a little bit of of AI before AI was really a popular thing, and letting that be something that salespeople could actually input data for created a little piece of tech, had a small license agreement for the companies to use that tech and then lever. And it was so simple that the upkeep and the maintenance was really, really simple. Very, very small team necessary to maintain it, very little overhead, very little time necessary solid revenue flow. And I knew it would be, because once the sales organization was integrated, it was not something they would want to leave. So I created the model to be designed for both the product, the outcome, and the lifestyle I wanted to have from my business.

Robert Plank 11:55 Very cool. And what I like a lot about the solution that you mentioned here is that I can relate to many times. Like I built software where all the competitors made things like, super complicated. And there's like, the tendency to say, oh my gosh, it's already taken over, or I need to one up them. But if everyone else is super crazy complicated, then, you know, make the iPhone that doesn't have the keyboard, right? Make the, make the the Roku, but the remote doesn't even have a an off button, right? Just make anything that even easier to use. And it's not necessarily about piling on the stuff, but where are the people frustrated, and how can I solve their problem? And so you know, when you when you talk about making these sorts of plans, right, which include, like, who's going to help me and how much do I want to make and how many hours do I want to work, something that kind of like disgusted me when I was younger, was I come across these, these, these men with the with the big egos. Are you talking about the the Lady Eagles? There's a many egos where they get lost in the plans, and they get lost endangering world, and they say, you know, I'm going to build this and do this and that. And they the the plans never ends, and they never actually take action. So how do we avoid that? Is there such a thing as like over planning or like, how do we answer the right questions in our plan, but without just kind of, like, always making it a dream that it will happen someday?

Natalyn Lewis 13:11 Yeah, absolutely. With every client that I, that I ever work with, or every executive management team we talk about, there's never a conclusion to a meeting of about vision that does not also include the right next step. So if we, if we're moving forward like there is never a day where I don't take the right next step, even in the planning stage, because if my planning stage is working and I'm creating vision for my company and where I want to go, even if my right next step is fact finding, even if my right next step is identifying competitors, even if my right next step is understanding, gathering information so that I can continue to create vision that actually is doable and attainable. I practice and train on create the picture, and actively engage in creating the picture. Right What do I want to go build? And I start today to build it, and I'm always starting today to build it. I always act on the right next step every single day, regardless of what that is, based on what that process looks like that day. And I think, I think people look at it business too much like I have to have a business plan, and I got to know everything A to Z, and then once that business plan is completely locked down, then I can act on it, and I don't. I don't believe in that model, because I've done it. And I planned a to z, and then I got from A to B to C, before the whole thing fell apart, because nothing is ever going to go exactly the way you think it is on paper. And what I realized was I was way better off creating like, Hey, this is the end destination of what I'm building now. What does a to b need to look like? And what's my right next step? And I don't lose sight of the end, this is what I'm always creating. But then I got to create a to b, and then B to C, and then C to D, and what's my right next step that always takes me to that final guiding star. So I want to know what I'm building. I don't need to know a, b, c, d, e. Actually, it's not going to go that way anyways. And so people paralyze themselves into inaction, which is like, we call it analysis paralysis, right? I'm analyzing everything and planning everything right, into paralysis of doing nothing, when, in reality, if I you know what you want to build and you can see it, just figure out how to go from A to B, what's the right next step and act

Robert Plank 15:21 that's huge. You think about these that the heroes that that are always talked about, that they pay lip service to, right? They talk about like Walt Disney saw the swamp and envision Disneyland and but then when they actually try to duplicate that in some way, they do it from, like, the starting point moving forward, not like you're saying the end goal in mind. It's like, if you were taking a road trip from Los Angeles to New York City, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go forward for you wouldn't go from like the start first you'd say, Hey, I don't want to get there. Let me get on the freeway. Let me get a little bit closer. Let me get one state over. And your way of planning here makes a lot of sense, right? You begin with the end in mind. And then he also mentioned in here this habit of momentum and constant action. And just like, kind of knowing that, well, I made my plan the best it could be, but it's not set in stone, versus this kind of self sabotage in disguise, of saying, If I get this, then I'll get this. And like setting up this whole chain, and just like, waiting for, like, the stars to align before doing anything. And so as far as you've had these repeated successes, right? It's no accident. You're doing a lot of these things. Right? Is there like a common thread when you build these companies and then sell them and exit, like, do you see something going wrong, or do you see, like, just a common success factor in what you're doing here.

Natalyn Lewis 16:43 I really think the common success factor is what you just talked about, because the two, the two or three, you know, every entrepreneur to have success, you had failure. My two or three failures started with a business plan from A to Z, and I was so committed to the outcome of those steps that I failed miserably, and I had, I had an experience in life where I had a mentor that probably changed everything, because she told me the how's none of my damn business. And she said, You're so fixated on the how that you are not identifying what you want, and then you're not doing anything about it. So she at the time, I wanted to write my own book and and she said, Why aren't you writing? And I said, Well, I haven't figured out how to publish it yet. She said, so you want to tell me that you can't write a book because you don't know how it's going to get published, and then how it's going to get sold, and then how it's going to do this. And she said, If a publisher showed up on your doorstep tomorrow and said, I'd like to publish your book, what do you got for him? She goes, you want to write a book, then write every day, and and, and I started engaging that I started writing every day, and I was giving a presentation, not probably six months later, on stage, and I had a publisher walk up to me after my presentation and say, Have you written a book? Because I would like to publish it, and you can't plan that. What business plan do you write that says I'm going to write for six months, I'm going to prepare this thing, and then a publisher, I wasn't sitting there waiting, I was writing every day. And in that process, determining my message, and in that process, identifying publishers that fit inside of that. And in that process, I I would every day, taking a step. And then that publisher, the exact publisher I wanted showed up on my doorstep like she just reminded me that if we get so fixated on the how, that we stop doing the what we will never succeed. And that was a game changer for me in every business I made forward, I fixed, I got I got really clear on what I was building, and I stopped worrying so darn much about the how, and just started focusing on taking the right next step.

Robert Plank 18:46 That's wonderful, and that's a great way to not let ourselves get held back and and I can definitely relate to letting the how like stop me. Like what flashed in my mind, as you're mentioning that was there was years ago when I saw a guy on social media and he would always put out like the reels when reels are brand new, or they haven't even been reels yet, but like, short videos, and he'd have the captions, and this is before there was a million tools. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what's the name of his one tool? And I was like, I would waste like, weeks just looking at what's the one tool. And then I finally asked him, like, Hey, What tool do you make to make these videos with the subtitles? And he told me, and I think I might have gotten, like, a trial account and like never made videos like that, whereas if I just had, like, the daily habit of making it and figuring it out later, or just finding some place to do it right, hiring a freelancer to make the videos for me, trying out whatever service, just going and way out there and making making small mistakes in a harmless way, where you're just experimenting, where you're putting things out, where you're making progress, that makes a lot more sense, versus maybe these, these problems that we create for ourselves and we don't even realize it. And so I want to make sure that we keep the time here short, but we also focus on you, and we just now met. For this podcast. So I don't know you all that well, but you know yourself very well. So is there a question that if I knew you better, I would know to ask you, what's the missing hidden question in our conversation that you wished I would ask you

Natalyn Lewis 20:13 uh, probably what I wish that I would have understood that would have saved me a lot of money, a lot of heartache and a lot of time and a lot of failure, and for that, for me is I wish that I would have understood how the brain works in terms of emotional response to stress and anxiety, because as an entrepreneur, we get in these situations, and we get right to the point I gotta quit my job, and I gotta, I gotta jump out of that airplane, and I'm really hoping the parachute opens, because, if not, I feel myself going plaque at the bottom, and we feel all the stress, and we feel all the anxiousness, and we don't understand what it's doing. And if we really understood what that does inside of our brain, we would understand that we're about to make some really stupid decisions. And we're going to make those stupid decisions because our prefrontal cortex, quite literally detaches from the brainstem when we're under high, intense stress and stimulus, and so I made some really poor choices from a place of fear and anxiety and stress that cost me, quite literally, a few million dollars in my career because the the anxiousness and the stress and the intensity of the world of entrepreneurialism, when you when you strike out on your own, and you think you have something really great, and you're open, the parachute opens, and the revenue starts flowing, and that things go as planned. That level of stress when not understood and not and we don't understand how to actually bring ourselves back and really dial in and make decisions with all with our whole brain in a calm and regulated fashion, we will make some poor choices, and often we will walk away from our biggest win right before it happens, because we aren't clear, and we're not clear because we're emotional and so learning how sorry about that learn

Robert Plank 22:04 emotional police saying, Get do better

Natalyn Lewis 22:06 Yet, learning how to understand what those were, what they were doing, how they work, how they treat me and my life, and how to get them under control and function from a really solid place, changed everything for me in my last couple of companies, and I wish you would have known it sooner.

Robert Plank 22:24 What do you suggest for someone who who wants to know it sooner? Like, do you recommend, like, a, like, a diet of self help, or look into emotional intelligence? Like, how do we get tapped into what's going on in our minds?

Natalyn Lewis 22:36 Yeah, well, emotional intelligence, I mean, is a huge deal. It's why I went into the space that I did, because after learning it, I realized there's a huge need in business. No one is talking about it. We we put out 100 books, and you can walk into any entrepreneur's office and they got 20 titles. They probably haven't read at least half of them, or maybe 70% of them, or they read the first two chapters, and then they got busy building. But we're not utilizing them from a standpoint of actual daily application in tools to understand emotion and so emotional intelligence massive. There's tools out there, there's resources, there's books and like, that's that's why we do what we do, is we teach and build emotional intelligence so that people understand how to make decisions in their business from a rational, logical place, and not allow the emotions, the stress, the anxiety, to impact choices that are going to make a big difference. I love this.

Robert Plank 23:29 And you know, you think of, what all this tells me is that you think about with entrepreneurship, there's more risk, there's more stress, and I'm sure there's a great deal of people being weeded out, right? You always hear the statistics of, like, only this percent of businesses last one year, this percent last five years. And so it's up to us to decide, Well, are we going to be another statistic? Are we going to be someone who's weeded out the same way, like a like a real estate recession weeds people out, right? The way a stock market drop weeds people out. And then the more, the tougher, more resilient, more creative people survive. So in that, that breakneck, rough and tumble world of entrepreneurship, we have to figure out, well, are we going to let our emotions control us, or are we going to kind of have a better strategy and think things through and And sure, there's times to think quickly and times to think slowly, but it's definitely not all the time, and definitely don't have this knee jerk reaction to stress. So it makes sense why someone would need the help of you and your company to think better and to act better. And so what does that lead us to here? Like, what's the next step? If someone said, Hey, Natalyn Lewis said a lot of things that made sense to me woke me up, and I want to find out more about her and her company. What's the offer? What's the company? Where should someone go? Yeah,

Natalyn Lewis 24:46 so they would go to ascend eq.com, so A, S, C, E, N, D, E, Q.com, and all the information is on that, or they can find me on Instagram at natty dot O dot Lewis, and. We work with and engage with business owners all day, every day. We do individual coaching, group coaching, or we even have an online course for those who like kind of that self study. They want to dig in. They want to learn it. They want to they want to do it at their own pace. We have a self course for people who do that. There's a freebie on my website, on ascend eq.com, go about halfway down that that homepage, there's a freebie there, and that freebie is going to give you an understanding of exactly how the brain works and why it is that we get sucked into these things. Because I want you to think about something George Lucas famously said, we're all living in cages with the doors wide open. And my question for you would be, Why do you stay in your cage because it's probably not physical, and it's probably not strategic, and it's probably not because you can't think of something to do. So what's the cage? And for 99.9% of people, that cage is the emotion, it's the fear of failure, it's the imposter syndrome, it's the fear of the of the unknown, the uncertainty, the doubt, the self deprecation, that cage is most of the time emotional. And if you could understand that and if you could control it, how much different would it be? And so that freebie video explains how the brain works and why these emotions get the better of us in a business setting, and can be just really valuable to just help you understand what we're talking about today.

Robert Plank 26:22 And I think this understanding is so important in order to live up to our full potential, right? Like you think about like when a squirrel is like, chasing through the forest or something, or chasing a snake or something, do you think the squirrel stops and says, Hey, you know, should I start a business? What are we doing with my life? No, we're the only species on Earth that can kind of think about our own thinking and can change your own destiny. And so it's kind of the responsibility is on us right to let the stress and the fear and the self doubt win. Or say, you know, my my thinking, my actions have gotten me this far. I could use some additional resources, tools, more help to think better and to get my my business on, my life on track. And so the place to do that, to take the next step is to go to Ascend EQ.com, that's A, S, C, E, N, D, E, Q.com, so that way you can say goodbye to what's holding you back, and check out this leading framework for emotional wellness. As Natalyn said, You scroll down about halfway through the page, grab the freebie. Check out that 10 minute solution to understand your emotions more in 10 minutes than you have in your entire lifetime. That sounds so good. After this call, I'm going to click on that and I'm going to run it for myself, because I'm so curious. I want to know more about myself. And so as we're going to ascend eq.com Miss Natalyn Lewis, it's time to stump you a little bit. Put you on the spot. I like to ask my guest near the end here about a fun quote or lesson that has helped them, that can help us. So what comes to mind to you as far as either a fun or helpful quote or lesson?

Natalyn Lewis 27:53 Yeah, I probably a lesson, and that is what I had a trip to South Africa. And I was at visiting some some friends there and outside of their house, which was incredibly small, like think of two porta potties put together with a thatched roof. So so small. They had a giant, full sized elephant literally parked outside of their house. And the only and it was literally had a rope around its right hoof, and it was attached to their house. It was blowing my mind, because elephants are the strongest creature on earth. And I was looking at them. I said, you know, if that elephant even thought about moving, your house is gone, it will wipe it right off the planet. And the lady looked at me, and she goes, she won't move. I said, why not? She goes, because she believes she can't I said, Your elephant believes she can't move. And she said, yeah. She said, when they're babies, we put them in the middle of the town. She goes, there's a nice concrete barrier there with a steel rod, and we tie that rope right around that same hoof, and they will pull against that and pull against it and pull against it and pull against it for about three to four weeks. She said, at some point they will just stop, because they will know they can't, and from that time on, all the way through till they're a full grown adult, strongest creature on earth. If that rope gets attached to that hoof, they will stand perfectly still. And I think it is so true of all of us. We are unbelievably powerful people with unbelievably, intensely powerful potential, and there is a rope that's holding us back, and it's not real. It just feels real, and it is learned and it is patterned, and it's time to break the pattern

Robert Plank 29:23 100% let's break that pattern. Let's change our habits. Let's rewrite that future by going to ascend eq.com thank you very much, Natalie for showing up. Very inspiring. I got super excited. I gotta go hang out with my family after taking your quiz and just thinking about some of these things that I love, the value delivered, and I'm sure audience loved it as well.

Natalyn Lewis 29:41 Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Robert is a pleasure.

Robert Plank 29:47 We really appreciate you being a listener of the marketer of the day podcast. The place to go right now, if you want to know more about running your own podcast is dfy podcast.com/free, go. There right now claim your free gift, dfy podcast.com/free, you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai