Ep. 227 – Andrea Owen: “Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum! You have to ask for help, whether that is with a therapist, your best friend, or your partner.”

Andrea Owen is an author, global speaker, and professional certified life coach who helps high-achieving women maximize unshakeable confidence, and master resilience. She has taught hundreds of thousands of women tools and strategies to be able to empower themselves to live their most kick-ass life through speaking, her books, coaching, and her wildly popular podcast with over 3 million downloads.

Andrea is creating a global impact in women’s empowerment with her books being translated into 18 languages and available in 22 countries.

When she’s not juggling her full coaching practice or writing books, Andrea is busy riding her Peloton bike, chasing her two school-aged children or making out with her husband, Jason. She is also a retired roller derby player having skated under the name “Veronica Vain”.

 

Most passionate about

• After about 10 years as an entrepreneur, I am focused mostly on speaking on stages and writing books.

Andrea’s career and story

• I Have an interesting story that’s that involves my personal life ae well.
• I was previously in the fitness industry. I was in my late 20s and was in my first marriage, to someone different from whom I’m married to now.
• I had heard about life coaching. This was back in about 2002, 2003—very early in the infancy of life coaching as an industry. I was telling my then husband about it, and he was saying, “I think you would be great at this. ,However you need more life experience”.
• A couple of years later, my husband had a love affair with our neighbor and got her pregnant. So I got my life experience.
• My life experience got worse before it got better. I got into another terrible, abusive relationship. By the time I was 31, I’d had my rock bottom experience and decided to change my life. I took responsibility for my life.
• That’s how the life coaching portion started. A couple of years into that, I decided to write a book. The university opened the doors for me. I got a traditional book deal with a small publisher, which got my foot in the door. Now I’m on my third book. It has all just fallen into place from there.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• You have to ask for help, whether that is with a therapist, your best friend, or your partner. Success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There have to be people who come to support you. That’s what I would tell people to work on: Start there if they’re having problems with something.
• This is probably something you’ve talked about on your show: You have to get very clear on who it is whom you serve and what it is that you do in your work. Don’t be afraid to tweak and change this over time.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• There have been several of them and they’re all connected in my industry, in online life coaching.
• It’s very scalable to offer group coaching. It’s the one-to-many model versus one-to-one and it’s the best way to scale your business. So, I started doing that and had some success, but for the most part, it wasn’t that lucrative.
• I would say that facilitating group programs was probably my zone of competence. People would say that I was pretty great at it, but I really didn’t like it all that much. I didn’t look forward to it. It wasn’t where I could really shine. For years I tried, and again, it was profitable enough, but not worth the energy I was putting out there.
• A few years ago, I decided, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” It didn’t make any sense because, from a marketing standpoint, it’s kind of the only way to scale. I just decided, “You know what? I’m not going to do it anymore.”

Biggest success with customers

• My last book, which came out in 2018, was sold to Hachette Books, a division there. It’s a major publisher and the book ended up selling extremely well.
• It has been translated into 18 languages now and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Here’s why I think it was successful. First, because I wrote that book and insisted on the title, because that is how I talk to my customers.
• My biggest successes have been when my intuition taps me on the shoulder and says, “Go that way.”

Andrea’s recommendation of a tool

• Google
  • We use Google for everything. We use G Suite and I’m very much attached to my Google Calendar. I use Gmail. I use Google Drive. I use Google Tasks. I love that it connects everywhere. A lot of technology does that, but I can use it on any device.
• A great team
  • I am incredibly lucky that I have had a woman named Emily who started as my virtual assistant almost 10 years ago and whose position has grown into online business manager.
  • She’s excellent at implementing. She’s also excellent at following through, which I am not. It’s about finding people who can handle things that might be your weaknesses, so that you can keep things running smoothly.

Andrea’s one key success factor

• It’s probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t overwhelm myself by reading books on entrepreneurship or following people, especially on social media. I do listen to some podcasts on the topic, but I know some people who are constantly inundated with books and podcasts and social media.
• I focus on the one thing that I know will make me money. Right now, it’s speaking. That’s all I’m focused on.
• I’m not taking a class on how to grow my Instagram. I’m also not taking a class on, you know, how to grow my podcast. It’s too overwhelming for me to do too many things at once.

 

Andrea’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

• I love this question and I often use that same metaphor of climbing Mount Everest. You can’t do it in one day.
• I was dealt a heavy blow in my personal life. Everything that I knew to be true and safe was suddenly turned upside down. I had never been alone. I had been in a relationship since I was 15 years old.
• I was at the point where I very much wanted to start a family and settle down, and that got turned on its head as well. I didn’t know what the future was going to hold for me.
• There’s a particular part of the coastline in a place called Carlsbad, California, where there are cliffs and people who fly these … I guess they’re kind of like drones, but back then they were sort of like remote control airplanes. Small hang gliders. It was like a hobby thing that people were doing, and I stopped to watch them—and I rarely ever stopped on a run. I always just ran and ran and ran, but I stopped because it was interesting. Also, the view was incredible. I was overcome by a feeling of peace and serenity. I can’t explain it other than that.
• At that moment, I just knew everything was going to be okay. My circumstances told me otherwise—yeah, otherwise everything was a mess. Everything was upside down. I had so much drama in my life. I did not know what the next day was going to hold for me. But as I stood there on these cliffs, more or less at the top of this mountain, I was just overcome.
• You have to stop and take breaks, etc.

 

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