Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #523 When to Push, When to Pivot, and When to Ask for Help with Heather

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

I’m doing something different this week! I’m bringing back the most powerful mic drop moments from three of my favorite solo episodes. In this episode, I talk about how I dealt with a massive challenge that cost me thousands, what happened when I realized I was being blocked from a seat at the table, and the lesson I learned at 5 AM when I finally asked for help. This is your reminder that you’re allowed to start messy, invest in yourself, get uncomfortable, and ask for support.  In This Episode, You Will Learn What to do when you’re being blocked. The question I asked myself when everything felt overwhelming. Why asking for help isn’t weakness. The exact moment I stopped waiting for permission and pitched myself. The mindset shift that helped me stop doing it all alone. Resources + Links Join the Elite Mastermind HERE Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/monahan Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/MONAHAN. Want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic? Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com/MONAHAN. Get 10% off your first Mitopure order at timeline.com/CONFIDENCE. Get 15% off your first order when you use code CONFIDENCE15 at checkout at jennikayne.com. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553!  Visit heathermonahan.com Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/  Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Follow Heather on Instagram & LinkedIn

Hey, welcome back. I'm so excited to share this special episode with you, bringing back mic drop moments from three of your favorite solo episodes I've done. It's time to dream bigger, take bold action, and trust that life is rigged in your favor. You'll learn how faith forms the unshakeable foundation for success, why going big and investing in yourself

opens doors to new opportunities, and how embracing uncertainty is a powerful catalyst for your growth. Plus, you'll learn the direct connection between who you surround yourself with and what manifests in your life. I know this episode is gonna get you pumped to take action and put in the reps to unlock your next level,

especially if you're afraid. Now let's dive in. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up.

One of the things that I like to do on my birthday, I just mentioned I just turned 47 years old, and anytime I have a birthday, I want to reflect on the past year, you know, what I'm proud of, what went well, potentially what could have gone differently, and then forecast and look out, okay, over that next year, what are the goals that I have, you know, what am I looking forward to, and what things can I do better differently or do more of that worked great. One of the things that I realized for me, and I don't know if you feel this way, is that I've noticed I am not a patient person. And the older I get, the more I notice it, right? So I stopped myself and started thinking back

to what I first got into the radio business when I was 22 years old, right? And I left the radio business when I was 43. So over 20 years in one industry. Obviously after 20 years in an industry, you're gonna be an expert, you're gonna be incredibly well known, you're gonna have tremendous contacts.

Well, when I got fired, I started over as a first time author and then new to the speaking business and then new to the podcasting world. I was a rookie in everything, right? But I was so used to being the expert because I had been in media for so long that I never stopped to say to myself, wait a minute, you need to compare yourself to your 22 year old version of yourself getting into radio. So I don't know if you fall into that same

category as someone who puts tremendous pressure on yourself, has no patience and really doesn't give yourself that runway that you may need to find success. So I know that for me, the past few years since I got fired, I just have this tremendous, I have very high expectations for myself because I've achieved massive success in another industry. However, I found I need to be, you know, good things take time, great things take even longer. And I'm starting to really see that firsthand.

I wanna explain to you how that is. So when I first got fired, the first thing I did was I wrote and self-published my first book, Confidence Creator. I had no idea what I was doing. None. Zero. Right? Now fast forward a couple of years, I've done it once. So I have some experience to lean on as well as this time I'm doing it with HarperCollins leadership. So I have a team of people who are experts, which is incredibly different, right? So it's a very, in just a short window of time, a couple of years, I'm in a very different situation. And it's helping me to gain insight into

experience takes time and experience really helps you access more success and do it more seamlessly, right? So for me, I look back on that first book and I didn't even know to pre-promote or do pre-orders. I really didn't have that base of knowledge. And now here we are, it was three months to the day that the launch will be. It was August 9th, the book comes out November 9th,

and the book hit number one new release on Amazon on that day. And I was so excited and so proud. And it took me back to my first book and thinking, wow, I didn't even promote my book three months out because I probably didn't even have it done yet or I didn't know how to do it. Or it's just, it's so interesting what you can learn

in just a couple of years or just going through one cycle of creating something and publishing it or building something. Just even one time, it teaches you so much that you're better positioned for more success that next time. Whatever situation you're in, that you're doubting, that you're not moving fast enough, that maybe you're just not being patient enough with yourself,

give yourself some grace because I'll tell you, I really am trying to find that for myself right now. As things move forward with my new book, overcome your villains and Harper Collins leadership, I'm learning so much more, which will not only set me up for more success this time, but for the next time moving forward. And I'm trying to liken it back to my career in media that I didn't start at 43 as a chief revenue officer. I started at 22 as an account executive, a sales rep, and it took years to build myself

up to that level of success and knowledge and expertise. It didn't happen overnight. So please be patient with yourself. I hope that you see that I'm really, I'm trying so hard. I'm trying to live it. It's not always easy because I would like things to happen faster. Wouldn't we all, right? We want success to happen overnight. But the reality is if success was easy, everyone would have it. And I'm constantly reminding myself of that. And I want you to remind yourself of that too. Success isn't always easy. You don't just fall into it.

It takes a lot of trial and error. And over time, you'll develop experience and then you'll develop expertise. And then you'll start to have the contacts and know the hacks and know who to call. And you can start seeing and getting ahead of challenges before they happen. So I've just had this really interesting week

to reflect because of my birthday, because of going to Naples again and being with the board and reflecting on how I wasn't on the board and I had pitched myself for so long and I couldn't get on the board for that company. And now, again, looking back, you can see how the dots connect looking back, but I can tell you for sure those days when I used to sit back in that media company pitching myself and getting the run around, I had no idea what was going on other than to look at myself and think something might be wrong with me.

And if you're in that situation, I challenge you to question that because I needed to question it for myself because I was enough, I was the right fit. That company, that board, they were not the right fit for me. And I was being blocked. And just in case you are, pick your head up,

start talking to people outside of your company, your opportunity, your industry, case you are, pick your head up, start talking to people outside of your company, your opportunity, your industry, wherever you are, and realize it might not be you, it really might be them. And that's why we all need to work on overcoming our villains, whether that villain is inside your own head or sitting across from you at the table at work or even at home. When you think about businesses growing their sales beyond forecasts like Feastables by Mr. Beast or even a legacy business like Mattel, sure you think about a product with demand, a focused brand, and influence-driven marketing, but an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business, making selling and for shoppers buying simple.

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I mean, finally winning thanks to Skims. Shop Skims' Fits Everybody Collection at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop-down menu that follows. It's skimsfitseverybodycollection at skims.com and when you place your order check out the Creating Confidence and let them know we sent you and that we are looking out for you. You are welcome. This was interesting. I received an email to my website this week that I I asked you to try to find your passion. This was interesting.

I received an email to my website this week that I, it's kind of big, but we're going to have to get into it. Okay. Hey, I've never reached out to someone like this before. I love the Q and A section of your podcast. Thank you. And I'd like some advice. I have been listening to your podcast and your book is next on my list. Thank you. You're going gonna love Confidence Creator.

Okay, I resonate with your story, especially some of the events that have occurred while you were in corporate America. I'm a mom with three little kids and okay, here's the situation. It looks like she was getting fired or let go or furloughed or whatever and they offered her the same type of deal that I was offered.

And what this is is it's essentially a non-disclosure. So in corporate America, when you're laid off or fired or whatever, parting ways with a company, the company always wants to protect their rights, their entity, their team members, their leadership team, their board members, whatever. They wanna protect the information that's gone on while you're there, the information that you have

that's relevant to the company're there, the information that you have that's relevant to the company, the employees, or whoever. So they ask you to sign a non-disclosure, a non-disparaging, which means you will never speak badly about the company, you will disclose no information about any experience you had with the company or any of its partners or anyone that worked there for the entire duration of your time at the company.

And in lieu of that, you receive a check. So they pay you. However, I had seen that movie play out badly so many times as I had been an executive at that company for 14 years. And one of the themes I saw is someone would get a check. And these aren't like million dollar checks, right? These are oftentimes different for everybody. But maybe for some, it's 20,000, maybe for some, it's a lot less. It's not something that you're going to retire off

of. If mine had been retire worthy, I probably would have taken it. But I, in that moment for me, I had to say, am I going to take some B rate check right now to basically force me to put a muzzle on about what I've gone through, or am I gonna roll the dice on me and just go for it? And I, as you know, chose option B. Well, this woman, and everyone has to choose what's right for them in the moment, right? So at the time I chose not to take the check and not to sign, I was 43 years old,

I was pretty confident in myself, and I was pissed that they had treated me so poorly and that kind of fueled me as well. I don't know this woman's situation, but it's different because she decided to take the check, which by the way 95 or 99 percent of people do in my experience anyways. Okay, early on my time in the company they had made me a shareholder and thanked me for my extra efforts. At the time I didn't realize there was no outlaws and it was really just a way to prevent me from leaving. Major life lesson learned,

declining to leave was a legal battle. They did pay out my shares. I did sign the NDA as a breadwinner for my family. The buyout was, you know, the bridge play. And I totally get it. You felt you had to do it. I understand that bridge play gave her the ability to start her own business. Here's the complication. They're you had to do it. I understand that bridge play gave her the ability to start her own business.

Here's the complication. They're paying me out over time. Yeah, that makes it way harder. And she has to play nice because of certain people who work at the company who are still in her circle. Here's my ask, I feel stuck with my NDA. That sucks. I'm just gonna say it right now. That sucks. There's certain decisions we make in life that we look back on and we say, oh, I would have done it differently. I will tell you this. For me, that day when I got fired, I thought to myself, this sucks. I wish I had quit five or 10 years ago. I really feel like that.

Had I known what the future held, I would have left years ago and taken that time and effort instead of building that woman's company, I would have been building my own company. But these are the moments you have to say, I'm going to learn from this in this moment and apply this knowledge to the future version of me because I can't do anything about the past one. So it sucks. I feel you on that. And we are with the NDA, but you are now on your own and you are building your company,

which is super exciting. I feel like they still have the power over me. And I totally get that. That's why I didn't sign it. I totally get it because they will not allow you to tell your story to speak about what's happened. How do I navigate building a successful business and showing up authentically while honoring my NDA? That's confusing to me. You absolutely can show up as a real version of you. You just can't tell the story of that business. That's fine. You have other stories in your life that wasn't your whole entire life. I tell a lot the story of that business. That's fine. You have other stories in your life. That wasn't your whole entire life.

I tell a lot of stories of my business today and lessons I'm learning today and less about what happened when I was at that company. So the further you distance yourself from that time, the more time that lapses, the more stories you have. So you don't have to just focus on that one window of working at that company. And also during that time, you have other stories you can share and tell that happened outside of work that aren't part of your NDA. So I wouldn't get so laser focused on that.

I challenge yourself to see what's outside of that in your life. And it's a full life. You have three kids, right? You totally have other stories outside of just that when you worked at that company. Without some of the context and backstory, I feel my experience is less credible. I completely disagree with that. Your experience is only less credible if you say it is. You can come to market and you can go to social media

and position yourself on your website or podcast or whatever it is you do that you are exceptionally credible. And here's why. And here's what my clients say about me. Testimonials and experiences working with someone are so incredibly powerful. I would leverage those. That's not you telling your story.

That's somebody else speaking up and telling it. And that's a really powerful credibility point for you. And you don't, again, need to be talking about the other company. You just need to get creative in how you do it. And you need to believe in yourself that you are credible, whether you can speak about something or not, and you absolutely are. So she doesn't feel like she's gonna be taken seriously, and I totally disagree.

And I challenge you, if you're listening right now, to see that differently and to have that conversation with yourself. Tell yourself a different story first. Tell yourself, I signed an NDA. It gave me the bridge play to start my own company. For that, I'm super grateful. Now I'm challenged to find a way to tell my story

without being disparaging to the company that I work for and I'm going to make that happen and it's gonna work better than anything else. Get really clear and intentional about what you're gonna do and challenge yourself to do it. Just remember, I was so upset a week ago when I saw all these charges from Amazon and thinking yet again, a complete debacle and something I

can't figure out. And now that seems just a week later that it could potentially be opening up some very major partnerships for me, opportunities for me, and things that would have never occurred had I not been faced with that challenge. Stay focused on the solution. challenge yourself to find the solution and the obstacles will not stop you. Meet a different guest each week. What is on the agenda? Competence query.

Competence query. I ask you to try to find your passion. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, rates will rise or fall, inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform.

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I use this and you should too. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash monohan. All caps. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. As you know, I'm a rookie author with HarperCollins leadership. My new book, Overcome Your Villains is available for pre-order now, but I have no idea what I'm doing, of course, as this is the first time I've done a book with a publishing house.

And so we have, every two weeks we have a team meeting with HarperCollins to go over a variety of different things. This week we were talking about our pre-order campaign and pre-launch and hitting the goals to sell 7,000 books before the book launches. And so, as you know, if you want someone to do something, you need to give them more value than you're asking for. So right now, Amazon's running a sale on my book. It's $24.99. What I decided to do was put together a bonus bundle of offerings. My $299 confidence video course, my 30 day email accountability program to help you achieve your goals, the new Overcome Your Villains workbook that I created,

the first chapter of the book. And for people who wanna join the launch team, they get Zoom meetings with me where I'm going to read chapters of the book and answer questions. And so I'm coming with all these offerings to get people to take action to buy the 2499 book. And so I'm on the call with HarperCons

and it was crazy and very unexpected. My point of contact said, Heather, I just want to let you know your website, overcomeyourvillains.com looks amazing. Your workbook's amazing. Your bonus bundle is worth $500 that you're offering people for free just for buying the book.

It's amazing. She said, I have to tell you, it's so nice to work with someone that gets things done so quickly and follows directions so well. She said, this is not the way it usually works. Usually it's not this seamless. I felt super proud, first of all, because I've been working so incredibly hard at this and it's not easy, right? The amount of time going into this stuff is obscene. However, I'm super proud of what I'm creating. And I'm so grateful to all the people who are preordering.

If you have not preordered yet, please go to overcome your villains dot com. You can buy the book from the links there and then download your five hundred dollar bonus bundle. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so I was really shocked and surprised about that call and did not expect it at all. However, every time I have a call with them, the list of things that I have to do grows and grows and grows. However, I know if you don't put the hard work in, you will not get the results. And that is the bottom line.

Everybody wants success, but people don't want to put the work in. And the darkest days are the ones that you need to grind through to see that breakthrough on the other side. And I am so committed to this. And definitely the last year has been so incredibly challenging, but I will tell you that I see light at the end of the tunnel. I don't think it's a train.

I think it's gonna be great. And I'm pushing through these tough times now so we can have better times tomorrow and I want you to do the same because you're worth it. Okay, so this is surreal and I just noticed it that four years ago today, the announcement went out in the media industry that I had just been fired four years ago And I put myself back in that day and remembering what it was like and how scared I was and how much anxiety I had about the unknown

and just the fear of what would I do. And fast forward to now, you know, I didn't know I'd self publish and write my book, Confidence Creator. I didn't know that book would trump Donald Trump for the number one on the business biography list, right? I didn't know I book would trump Donald Trump for the number one on the business biography list, right? I didn't know I'd launch a speaking business. I didn't know I'd be named top 40 keynote speaker in 2020 by real leaders.

I didn't know I'd give a TEDx talk that will get promoted to TED and translated into six languages. I didn't know Harvard would call in January and ask me to teach a professional sales and sales leadership course for them. I didn't know I'd be appointed to the board of directors of HealthLink. I didn't know I'd sign with HarperCollins leadership and write a book with them. I didn't know I'd launch this podcast. I didn't know any of those things. And the key to remember is this, you can only connect the dots after the fact. You can't connect them on the front end. No one has that vision or that master or that

master plan that just drops down on their lap. It's something that you have to take messy and aggressive action, repeated action and repeated action to continue to find your way. And today, four years later, I can look back and I see how the dots connect and I see why they connected. But four years ago today, I had no flipping idea and I was petrified. And by the way, I'm still scared so many days because I constantly put myself into new arenas. I start over as a new first time published author. I start over, right? I'm constantly challenging myself to go into new unknown environments, which is scary.

But the more that you do it, the better you get at it. And the more normal it seems. So step into fear, choose to see fear as a green light that means go and grow and go now. And the more that you do it, the easier it will be next time. So until next week, please, if you could subscribe, rate and review the show, it would mean the world to me. If you tag me, I'm always reposting you on social media. And if you haven't yet, please pre-order the book, Overcome Your Villains. You can go to overcomeyourvillains.com or

anywhere books are sold. That book is everywhere. It is so crazy. It has more websites up than my first book ever did. And I'll tell you in sales, distribution is key. And I'm thinking this is gonna be a game changer. Until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will too. I decided to change that dynamic. I could have been more excited for what you're gonna hear.

Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.