The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – It’s Your Story to Tell: Essays on Identity From a Messy Life Well Lived by Maryann Lombardi

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

It's Your Story to Tell: Essays on Identity From a Messy Life Well Lived by Maryann Lombardi https://amzn.to/45Cvsup “Our lives don’t unfold like a novel—they are episodic, and don’t always have a clean narrative. Our lives are a collection of essays.” When you identify yourself, where do you begin? Which labels do you use, where did they come from? Do you define yourself or are you living a narrative someone else created for you? Why do we need labels in the first place? Author Maryann Lombardi shares her experiences and insights answering these questions and more. In It’s Your Story to Tell: Essays on Identity from a Messy Life Well Lived, readers can witness how Lombardi learn to tells her story so they can explore how to tell their own. Lombardi’s essays cover Gender identity and what it means to be a women The power of the mother child bond How family history drives family dynamics The discombobulation marriage, divorce, and dating again has on your identity The hijinks of many wild trips across the world It’s Your Story to Tell: Essays on Identity from a Messy Life Well Lived by Maryann Lombardi is a guide for readers who are ready to rethink the narratives they tell themselves, who owns their stories, and how to take them back.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We really appreciate you being here. As always, thanks for coming to the big show.

And be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, relatives, all those folks that, you know, just walk up to strangers on the street. Just go up to strangers and say, have you heard about our Lord and Savior, the Chris Foss Show? No, don't do that. That sounds like a bad idea. It's probably not going to end well. But if you can, you know, just, I don't know, tell your waitress or something or waiter when you go out to eat.

We're just trying to do anything we can to slide the plugs in here in a funny sort of way. That's really the trick that we're up to because you guys are the most brilliant audience in the world. So why not share the wealth a little bit? Spread the love. Tell them to go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, linkedin.com forward slash Chris Voss and goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See all the crazy things we're always doing over there on the show. We have an amazing woman on the show today. She is going to be talking to us about all sorts of stuff that's going to expand your mind, make you more intelligent and help you lead a better life. Now there's probably people out

there right now going, but Chris Voss, I don't want to lead a better life. I love my misery, my unhappiness, my suffrage, the suffrage. I love the suffrage. And, uh, you know, I'm sitting here on my trailer, uh, you know, going, going, Oh, I love the, I love how everything is just horrible right now, but you know what, what if you could listen to a podcast and have people change your life? So that's what we did. We put that in the Google machine. And how can we get somebody in this show that can change people's lives, make them improve, and, you know, I mean,

maybe get a double wide instead of a single wide trailer. So there you go. But Marianne Lombardi is on the show with us today. She is the author of the newest book that came out February 2nd, 2022. It's your story to tell, essays on identity from a messy life well lived. We're going to be talking to her about work-life balance, some of the things she's learned as a coach and everything she does in her consulting business. She is an entrepreneur, a problem solver, and questioner of authority. Ooh, I like her already, questioning authority.

She's spent 20 years building the programs and resources that help small business owners thrive. She's also an author and the single parent of the coolest teenager on the planet. In the planet, on the planet, you got to watch these teenagers. They're always up to something nowadays. As a business launch coach, she helps turn business ideas into profit-ready businesses in 90 days. And she believes work-life balance is a lie. Oh my gosh, there's going to be controversy on the show.

We'll find out what that's about. And she works with her clients to build profit-ready businesses that aligns with the life they choose to lead so they don't sacrifice their lives to the altar of their work. Wow, there's a visual right there. You're sacrificing your life to the altar of their work. It's like a funeral pyre. You're just like, ah, throw myself on there. Don't do it. Put it out. So we're going to find out how she does that and she believes that tacos are their own food group i believe she is correct judges is she correct in that yes i've got a i need one of those family feud dings uh wine is best when it's spanish and shared and that is time for a power that is time for a power shift to business welcome to the show marianne how are you

i'm doing all right. How are you doing, Chris? Thanks for having me. I am doing awesome. I am doing awesome. I'm doing even better than you are that you're here because I've made a promise to my group that you're going to help upgrade everybody

from single-wide trailers to double-wide or at least end up living in high-rise penthouses. All right, I'm game. Let's see if we can make that happen. There you go. So welcome to the show. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebshouses. All right, I'm game. Let's see if we can make that happen. There you go. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, just my name.

Go to MarianneLombardi.com. So MarianneLombardi.com. There we go. So Marianne, give us kind of an overview, a 30-foot overview of who you are, what you do, and as a business launch coach. Yeah, so I help teachers turn their ideas into part-time businesses that can earn them a full-time income, really, so they can build confidence, they can build independence, they can leave a toxic workplace if that's what they want to do

and spend more time with the people that they love, right? Spend time with their families, do the things that they want to do and really build a life that is of their choosing. There you go. Building a life of your choosing, why would you want to choose that? Because most of us are not living lives that we chose, Chris. Yeah.

We all got raised to go get a job and go get a college college degree go get a job and then serve you know work for somebody all your life and maybe there'll be a gold watch at the end of it it doesn't pay out anymore that way it doesn't well no i mean we're all a product of like circumstance and expectations in many ways right you know and so it's very easy for us to to just follow that path that was set before us or that we were socially conditioned to want and to do and then turn around one day and go what the hell like what the hell where am i what am i doing and do i really want to be here or not and so i think it's a pretty good idea if we stop a little earlier and ask ourselves what the heck do i want there you go you know you bring up a really good point there's

a lot of social programming a lot of social pressures out there. You know, people ask you when you grow up, you know, when you're a kid, they go, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you're like, uh, uh, I don't know. I've firemen, you know, uh, astronaut, you know, different things like that. And you really don't know. And then a lot of people don't find their passions, do they? They, they just kind of go, well, uh, you just go get a job a job and you work to the bone for 40 years. And people, you know, sometimes they get down that pathway and they go, is this really what I want to do?

Like, I don't really have a passion for this. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. And we don't really provide a lot of opportunities for people to step off that path a minute and think. Because once you get on it, you're riding it. It's like this big old roller coaster and it keeps running pretty fast. So it's very hard to stop that roller coaster when it gets going. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of your book. It's your story to tell essays on identity from a messy life well lived. Yeah. Yeah. So it is a memoir, my life being the messy one that I like to say was well lived and is well lived. So when my child came out as non-binary, one of the things that I

had to reckon with was that they now did not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. And in doing so, it meant that I was now no longer the mother of a daughter. And it hadn't occurred to me at the time that that would be like a striking thing to think about. Right. Because I had a very strong identity as a mother of a daughter for whatever reason, you know, and I really loved that. But when I went and started to unpack that, I was like, well, I mean, I don't love my child any less because I'm a mother of this child. But why am I so tied to that identity, to that story that I'm telling myself? What is so powerful about that? And so I started to unpack that, right? And it wasn't really about my relationship with my kid. It was about my relationship with my mom and all this other crap, right? But in that, it started making me think about all the other stories that I tell myself, all the other narratives that I say and made me rethink them.

And it made me go like, well, why do I say I'm my father's daughter all the time? What the fuck does that mean? Right? Like, why do I say that? Why am I so proud of being a single parent? But I try not to say that because I know it makes people think I'm weird. Right? So like, I just went down these

rabbit holes and I wrote about it, right? And I wrote this book that really does unpack all of these different stories and these identities. And it's really an exercise in rethinking these stories, right? Like who created those stories that we tell ourselves? Are they ours or did somebody write them for us, right? So I was really looking at my life through a new lens to say, did I, did I choose that? There you go. And, and that fits into what we just talked about a second ago, where, where, you know, we, we have these social expectations, we have these social models that are given to us and we put them on and we go, okay, well, you're supposed to, you know, this is where you're supposed to do your career and stuff. And then the same way with life.

And I imagine gender identity and some of the things you talk about identity and, you know, thinking about why do we have these rules? And a lot of people don't wake up, wake up for the, a lot of these things. You know, you, I, one thing I noticed when I was young and this happened to me when I was in my 18s and 20s, I think it was Billy Joel's song. Um, it's my life or whatever it's called called, tipped me off to the midlife crisis. And I saw people going through midlife crises. And I was like, what are these people going through? What's this midlife crisis thing? And I understood very early that a lot of people, they'll go spend the first 20 years of their life in this social career job programming.

And then they kind of wake up one day and they go, is this all there is? And so it sounds like you went through that same sort of journey with gender identity, you know, what it means to be a mom, a woman, you know, different roles in your life, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, and I think that is exactly what happens, right? When we put people on these paths to just, you know, run that hamster wheel, you know, of course they're going to get tired and of course they're going to like fall off and be like, whoa, can we just stop this hamster wheel for a minute so I can think, you know, and I had the luxury

of being able to watch my own kid really choose for themselves what they wanted to identify, how they wanted to identify, how they think about things and believe things. And it's really a beautiful thing to watch this kid go through that. And it made me think, well, damn, I should probably look at myself. Let's turn the mirror around and make sure that the things I'm saying are the things that I actually believe. And that there's stories that come from myself and not something that somebody told me. There you go. One of the quotes from your book, our lives don't unfold like a novel. They're episodic and don't always have a clean narrative. Boy, that describes my life. Our lives are a collection of essays. And I really love that. We talk about that on the show

a lot. And that's one of the most important things I learned from Larry King and, uh, and, and other people in life is stories are basically how we learn through life. Cause we don't get an owner's manual. I don't know. You might've gotten one in the mail, but mine, mine went through the UPS, uh, U S postal service. So we know what happened there. Um, happened there um but uh stories the way we tell each other we share our history but also how we learn you know there used to be in in africa back in the days before you could you know write down your history there would be what they call griots and and they would be the historians of the tribe and so they would be the tellers of of all of the history and all that sort of stuff but i like also what you

say there in our lives don't unfold like a novel because we all kind of expect it you know there's a line and there's a line in fight club where they go you know we're a generation all raised to think we're all going to be millionaires and rock stars and tv stars movie stars and we're slowly waking up to the fact that we're not and we were lied to and and people think that they go oh my life is going to be perfect and uh it never is i mean i've never met anybody's life's perfect right yeah well and perfection is such a waste of time right you know it just it just is like no nobody who's perfect ever has any fun right because you know i'd much rather have a messy life and and you know do some stuff wrong and and and just jump out there and actually be living something than trying to be perfect.

Because, you know, the perfection sort of just guarantees you that you are going to be in some sort of pain, right? Because it's never going to be okay. It's never going to be right. You know, so it's much better to just go do and go be and go experience your life than to try to do it perfect or have the right time, the perfect time, the perfect way. Yeah. And we see that a lot with people's lives. I mean, you probably see this when you cancel people that maybe want to go start their own business and stuff. They go, I'm waiting for the perfect time. And the perfect time is now. You know, one of the things that I had conversation I had with my business partner when we started our first company that became successful. And it was my first big success as an entrepreneur, even though I started at 18. And I remember saying to

him, I go, Hey man, we can keep working for these companies till we're 40 or 50. But I see all these people parachuting out and trying to start companies at 40 and 50. And I really think that we need to do this now because we're 22 years old. We've got the energy we've got, you know, we can, we can put in the hours, the 18, 24 hours that we used to have to burn for business. Um, and I don't think I'm going to have the energy for that at 40 and 50 and I got, I'm 55 now. I don't have the energy for that at 40 and 50. And I'm 55 now. I don't have the energy for the crap anymore. Thank God I learned all this stuff so I can do it in my sleep. But you're right. And that perfection model that people have, I mean, you can strive for

perfection and it's great to do, but realizing you're never going to achieve it kind of helps you keep away from that madness. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think when people come in and they say, well, you know, it's just not the right time. Usually I will pivot those conversations and talk about, well, so what do you want, right? Like, how does your life look right now? You know, what do you want it to look like in the future? How much time are you willing to allow pass to pass for you to have that life that you want? And a lot of times for at least the community that I serve, teachers, they just are watching their kids grow up and they just don't have the energy, right? Like they come home, they're burnt

out from all the work that they're doing and all the toxicity that is happening within the school systems. And they get home and they just don't have the energy for their families. They don't have the energy for their kids and their partners. But the energy, you know, for their kids and their partners, but our kids are like, they just grow up in a minute. Right. And so when you look, when you think about time, you know, like you don't have time to waste, right? Like if what you want is to be able to spend more time with your kids and also make a living and help people, you know, if you're going to wait another year and wait another year, the next thing you're going to do is turn around and be like, damn, right? My kid's off to college. I mean, that happened to me this year. I don't feel 18 years older, but I got an 18-year-old who's staring at me and I'm like,

I just, what? Right? It know, it's just a weird thing. So, I mean, I think that if not now, when is the key. Definitely. Definitely. If not now, then when? There's another book. Let's tease that out before we get into the body of your work as a coach and helping people build businesses. Tell us the title of that book and let's tease that out a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Chris. So, I have a chapter in the Change book series. It's a personal development series and it's a book 18, which came out earlier this year. So I'm pretty excited about that. And it's a book all about the power of choice and how important it is to be the one who chooses what you do, as opposed to having the choice made for you. There you go. That, I mean, that's, the choice is so much important and, and I wish people would focus that, you know, it's, I think parents sometimes get lost and they just tell their children, I don't know, just go get a job, go get a career, go to, go to this, you know, there's

a, there's a line in fight club in the bathroom scene where, you know, the guy's like, my dad told me to go get a job. My dad told me to go, you know, go to college, go get married, you know, and it's like, my dad told me to go get a job. My dad told me to go, you know, go to college. He might go get married, you know? And it's like, and, and nowhere in there is like, Hey, find your purpose in life. Find what you want and find how you want it and stuff. You know, my, my mother was a teacher for most of her career for all of her life, pretty much 20, 25 years or so. She started a little bit late.

Um, the, uh, my sister was a mother or a teacher for a long time it's hard to be a teacher it really is yeah it's it's very hard to be a teacher and and i uh i've talked i talked to thousands of teachers and and just capturing the the kind of responses the kind of things that they say over and over and over again it really does choke you up right the environment that they're working in the right? The environment that they're working in, the lack of support that they're provided, the amount of overwork that happens. Yes, they're underpaid, but often that's not the first complaint that they have. They didn't get into teaching to be rich, right? That wasn't the point of doing it. But to want to help people

so much and to not have that support to do it and then to come home and but to want to help people so much and to not have that, that support to do it and then to come home and not be able to, to help yourself or your family. I mean, it's, it's really unfortunate. Yeah. And there's so many demands. Like I watched the arc of my mom's career over the years. I mean, she got in it to, to, to love, she loves kids. She loves helping people. I mean, they, they really, I think a lot of teachers, I can't speak for them, but, you know, it seems like a lot of them go into it for the love of sharing and teaching and raising better generations. My mom loves it when she meets her students in their lives and, you know, they tell her that she impacted their life. But, you know, there's over the years I watched, you know, the legislature's doubling our class sizes over the years. You know, they're doing more stuff.

And there kind of became this thing where teachers kind of expected to be the parents of these children now. Like, and they kind of went from being, I think, valued to where now if there's, you know, if there's especially this participant generation where it's like, Hey, if they get bad grades, it's the teacher's fault, you know? And the attacks on the teachers are just, are just humongous, especially nowadays where, um, they're like, you know, Hey, you gave my kid a bad grade. It's not my kid's fault. It's your fault. You know, they keep the, the, the, the participation trophy kids away from the thing. And so, you know, they keep the participation trophy kids away from the thing. And so, you know, it started being this real thing where it was just like, hey, I got to raise the kid now for these parents because they want me to raise them and teach them to be children. I mean, that's not my job. I'm here to learn stuff.

Yeah. Well, there's no doubt that there is an enormous amount of pressure on teachers to do things that are way out of bounds. Right. that there is an enormous amount of pressure on teachers to do things that are way out of bounds, right? And to behave in ways that just aren't appropriate. And to not have the support to navigate that from their administrators makes all of it that much more worse. So there's no doubt that the system needs an overhaul. And in the meantime, my hope is that teachers can figure out how to find other ways to be able to have the kind of life that they want to serve their families and to be with their families and to follow passion and help people without getting the crap kicked out of them. Without getting the crap kicked out of them. Yeah, I mean, you know, she started, I remember sometime in her career, she started having, you know, the parents would show up and be like, you know, you gave my kid, you know, my kid deserved an A. And you're like, your kid's a flunky. And so clearly I have some

home problems. You know, we found that these kids, you know, if they don't get breakfast in the morning at home and other things like this, it really started to be turning the school system into a surrogate parenting program. And I would, I remember calling my mom cause I'm a business person. I would call my mom and she'd be like yeah i just went to the craft store and bought 250 dollars worth of all these really cool things to teach the children i think she taught mostly fourth and fourth and fifth grade so you know they're they're still that craft thing and be like oh wow so you know they probably reimburse you for that right no they don't like no you're spending 250 bucks a month for the love of the job and these kids,

and you don't get reimbursed? I'm like, what the hell? Yeah, it's messed up. So talk to us about how you help teachers do this transition, some of the things you deal with in getting them to start a business, because that is a bit of a transition, going from working for someone giving you a paycheck to making your own yeah absolutely and a lot of uh so there's a huge

influx of teachers that are transitioning right that are transitioning out of education and trying to get either a job in corporate or trying to figure out what is next for them and there's a there's a handful of challenges in this transition into corporate. One, most of these teachers want, a lot of them want remote jobs. Remote jobs are ridiculously competitive, right? And so they're very hard to get. So these poor teachers are applying and they're like the 852 application on this thing. So they're having a really hard time taking like more than six months to find a job, right? Which is just not helpful, you know? And so what

we do is that we come in and help them really see how entrepreneurship can be a bridge for them. It doesn't mean that they can't also get a corporate job if they want one to get out of, but that they can create this part-time business that will help support them through whatever their journey is to find out what they want to do with their life. Often what happens is that folks start this part-time business and they grow that business and they see how they can earn a full-time income off of that part-time business. And then they're like, yeah, I'm not sure if I really want a corporate job now. Right. Because, you know, my time is my own. I'm feeling pretty confident because, you know,

the other thing that these corporate jobs are doing is they're, they're telling these teachers in a variety of ways that what they have to bring to the table is not enough, right? You know, and that's hard for teachers. They're having to retrain for everything. They're having to rewrite their resumes to downplay the fact that they've been teaching for 20 years, which is kind of heartbreaking. So we really want them to know that the skills they come in with, the experiences that they have are more than enough to create a profitable business that can still help people, right? So they can still serve people and feel good about the work that they're doing, but they can also just make a damn good living. Yeah. And so what do you find most teachers

like to transition? Do they stay in the education sphere or do they go, hey, I want to, I don't know, I want to start a car business or something? What's interesting is that a lot of them come in thinking that they're going to translate exactly what they were doing, like they're a math teacher or they worked with students with disabilities. And so they're going to translate that exactly into some sort of part-time business. But what's a blast is that we take them through this process of really just downloading everything that they know how to do, that they love to do, right? And all the skills that they have. And often we find things that they never thought were possible that they turn to do, right? And all the skills that they have. And often we find things

that they never thought were possible that they turn into businesses, right? Because the key to this is coming up with a business idea that actually has a market for. So just being a math teacher, tutoring, there's not a huge market for that, right? But the fun part is helping them see that maybe there's some experience in their life that they can turn into a business.

I have a teacher who was going to do some sort of tutoring kind of business, but she was explaining this whole experience that she had navigating her parents' illnesses and grief and all this kind of stuff. And what we ended up doing was creating this very successful program that's all about helping people navigate, people of that Gen X who are dealing with aging parents, navigate the kind of grief and challenge that goes around navigating your aging parents. And she's doing a bang up job with that. But of course, it had nothing to do with what she came in thinking she was going to do, but it's an experience that she has. And she's just doing a really great job with that. You talk in your book about life being episodic. And I think this is kind of the theme of what you're talking about, where, you know, sometimes you can spend 20 years, 10 years being a teacher, doing a career and you kind of go, Hey, I want to do something different. Do you find that's kind of what a lot of people do i mean maybe it's not so much feeling this you know this or unhappy with the business they're in but going into uh you know

going hey you know i want to do something else something i'm more passionate about yeah well and i think we put a way too much pressure on this idea of occupations being important right as opposed to our skills and our experiences being what's important and so when we're talking to our teachers we're talking about the fact that that that 20 years 15 10 whatever years you spent teaching there's an enormous amount of experiences that come out of that right and that's part of that episodic nature yes you are a teacher and that's an identity that you've grabbed onto but that's not just you're not just a teacher You are this amalgam of these experiences and skills and feelings and all of these things are the things that make you who you are, right? It's not the occupation that makes you who you

are, but we all like glob onto these occupations and say, well, I'm a doctor. Oh, okay. But what does that mean? Like, what do you do? What do you like? How do you feel? Right? Like, well, I'm a doctor. Oh, okay. But what does that mean? Like, what do you do? What do you like? How do you feel? Right? Like, what is it like to be you in the morning when you walk through the day? Right? I don't care that you're a doctor. Who are you? Right? We want people to think, who are you? There you go. And we talked earlier in the show in the green room about work-life balance. And that was one of the things we talked about in your bio. Tell us about what, what, what, what should people be looking for when it comes to work life balance? Or what do you feel about the topic of that? Well, they should just accept it's a lie and stop striving

for it. Right. I mean, like work life balance is a lie and especially for women, right? There's no, there's no way that you can balance the time you spend with your work and the time you spend on whatever this thing your life is, right? There's just no point in balancing that kind of stuff. And especially for women, because women are working a day shift, a paid shift, a night shift, the overnight shift, the shift for somebody else who didn't show up for their shift. So they're doing that shift too, right? Like women and caregivers are doing all of that work. So there's no way to balance that in relation to time. And your life is the only thing that actually matters because we got one of those, right? It's life. Yeah, that's true. The corporation isn't going to show up at your funeral.

They're not going to call you mom. In fact, if anything, and we're seeing that right now with corporations where they're offloading tons of people for an anticipated recession. And people are waking up and going, well, these guys don't care about me. What the fuck? Well, right. And your work's job is to support your life. That's its duty, right? There you go.

It shows up in order to support your life, right? It provides the financial contribution. Maybe it provides benefits. Maybe it provides some sort of social cohesion, whatever it is. But that job is to support your life, not the other way around, you know? And so we really want people to look more

in this like design perspective, right? Like how are you designing your life and then designing your work to fit around it? So if we have to have like some work-life title, we call it work-life design, right? Not so much this lie that is work-life balance. There you go. Now on your website, you've worked with over 300 clients and 20 plus years of experience and you can basically help people start earning money in just 90 days and build their business.

Talk to us a little about some of the ways you help achieve that and some of the different programs that you have to facilitate that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the pet peeves I have is that a lot of the language out there to help people start businesses is way more complicated than it needs to be. This idea of what does it take to start a business? You need like a business plan and you need like a fancy website and you need a big brand and you need like thousands of followers

or whatever, all of that kind of, that's crap. You don't need that. What you need is you need a service or a product that solves a problem for a specific set of people who are desperate for that solution, right? That's it. That's all you need. And when you are starting a business, the whole point is to prove that your product or service has a market. And so what we do

is we focus a hundred percent on this space where we really help people figure out that nut. We figure out like, what's that product? Who are those people? And, and how do we get them to buy, right? Like we want to make sure there's alignment between the service that you're offering the people that you're serving and the fat and there's a market for the thing that you have to offer. And then we also provide, you know, messaging support, like how do you talk about it, all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that we do that a lot of other coaches and programs don't do is that we then build you the system and automations underneath your business for you.

So you don't have to do that. You don't have to spend the time on the admin of your business because we build it for you. And so we have this program for teachers that helps them create their business opportunity, their offer, figure out the messaging of that, and then build the systems to support them in putting it out to the community and selling that. And then we also have wraparound

programming to help them with confidence, right? Like, then how do you sustain that, right? Like, how do you grow that? How do you get more confident when you're talking about that business, you know, as you're earning money? So it's really been a fantastic program to be able to see teachers who are coming through it really see how quickly they can get something out into the world and be testing it and having clients come into the mix. There you go. One of the things you talk about your website, and we've talked a lot on the show actually, is stop saying, I'll start a business someday. We've talked about that a lot on the show. People probably heard it a bit much on the show.

But I've heard that from so many people. They're like, I'll say to them, I'll be like, hey, how's that business? Chris, I'm going to start a business. Okay, I'm going to be just like you. I'm like, great. And then you'll be like a couple weeks later or a month, they're going to be like, yeah, you started the business? Oh, I'm waiting for the right time. Then you'll be like, you know, a couple weeks later, a month, they're going to be like, yeah, you started the business. Oh, I'm waiting for the right time.

Then you'll see them years later. And you're like, hey, did you start that business? I'm waiting for the right time. Just waiting for the perfect time. As we talked about before, there is no perfection. Yeah. There's just a striving towards it. And so it sounds like you help people get over that hump and start getting it done now.

Yeah, we do. And we really focus in the first part about the business is just a vehicle. I'm not out there to convert everybody into entrepreneurs. I'm out there to help you figure out what you want and see whether starting a business is the vehicle to get you what you want. What's important to me is that anybody who comes into our ecosystem is able to take a minute to breathe and think about what the heck do you want, right? Because we don't, especially with women, we do not spend nearly enough time sitting down and thinking about what do I actually want? We know what our kids want. We know what we want for our families. We know what our parents want. We know the neighbors

three doors down what they want, right? But we don't know what we want. We know what our parents want. We know the neighbors three doors down what they want, right? But we don't know what we want. We don't sit there and think, what do I want? So we really want those teachers who come in to figure that out, right? We help them go through that process of figuring that out. And then we build a business around that. So the business is just the vehicle. So when somebody says, oh, hey, I want to be just like you. I want to, you know, Chris, I want to start a business. And then they're not starting a business. It's like, why do they want to start a business? My question for the guy is like, you don't have to start a business. Are you saying that because you think it's cool to start a business because you want to be a rock star like Chris? Is that why you're saying it? You know, you don't have to start a business. You don't have to want to start a business, right? So I do think a lot of that kind of stuff is posturing for people, but I always counter when they say that instead of saying like, well, if not now, when, when I do that too. But it's just, well, what would that business allow your life to be, right? That's always the question I have for them. Why do you want to start a business? Yeah.

I mean, why is it important to you and how can it change your life? And yeah, a lot of people, as we mentioned before in the show, don't reflect on this and don't give it some pre-thought. It's only when they wake up at 40 and they go, I'm unhappy, I'm miserable. And it's time for a new episode, as you mentioned in your book. You do one-on-one coaching, group coaching. You also have some programs, Launch Sprint, Launch Year, and Launch Season. Expand on that, if you would, tease that out a little bit to us. Yeah, absolutely. So if you're a teacher, you can come into our Launch Sprint, Launch Year, and Launch Season. Expand on that, if you would. Tease that out a little bit to us. Yeah, absolutely.

So if you're a teacher, you can come into our Launch Sprint. So I really love sprints, which means they're three months, right? Like that we get working pretty fast. We don't waste any time. We get you up and running in your business in three months. You can also work with us for a season, which is six months. We still get your business up and running in three months. But then we spend

that next three months really refining and tweaking and helping to build out confidence. We call this the catapult to confidence. So you get more confident in your business. And then you can also come in for a year and work with us as well. Especially if you're working on a business as well as like either growing that business further or doing some other things as well. But usually we love people coming or doing some other things as well. But usually we love people coming in for those three or six months. There you go. Uh,

and, and so what's the best way for people to onboard with you? What's the best way for them to reach out to you, uh, and engage and, and, uh, find out more.

Yeah, absolutely. The best thing is to connect with me on LinkedIn, right? And send me, or you can connect with me on Instagram and send me a DM. That's usually, that's really the best way you can do it. So I'm on LinkedIn at just my name and I'm on Instagram at IamMarianne on Instagram as well. So please feel free to, to connect with me there and just send me a DM and let's get on a call. There you go. That's the best way to do it. Uh, you know, I see a lot of great stuff on your website where people can access, uh,

some of your different work and find out more about you. So that's a great way to, I think that they can, they can onboard with you and find out what you're doing. Um, what, you know, this,

we talked to the green room, this concept of trying to have it all. Do you, do you find that's a real problem with people getting out of that mindset and realizing that maybe they just worry about, you know, getting stuff for themselves and enjoying their own life as opposed to, I don't know, trying to get everything. I mean, when you want it all, you're like, I need to have a boat and I need to have five cars and the two picket fence and blah, blah, blah, blah. And maybe, do you really want that stuff? I don't know.

Yeah. maybe do you really want that stuff i don't know yeah well i think this concept of having it all especially when you're when you're talking to uh women who have not historically had access to a lot of things having it all is is really about having access to everything right it's about the ability to have everything right so that you have access to to those c-suite opportunities you have access to entrepreneurship you have access to and and-suite opportunities. You have access to entrepreneurship. You have access to... And when you think about it, right? Like my mother wouldn't have been able to get a business loan without the cosign of a man. So even back in 1974, there were still laws that kept women from accessing credit.

You know, or bank opportunities or loans or money, right? So it's a recent history. There have been exclusions for women participating in business and the ability to have access. So I think that idea of I want to have it all is about I want to have access to everything. But I think it's been morphed into this idea that you have to do it all, which I think is very different than having it all, right? Doing it all, why would you want to do it all? Like, that sounds horrible. I don't want to do it all. I want to do what I want, right?

Like, I want to have the freedom and the independence to do what I want, whatever that is. Whether you want to be a stay-at-home mom, whether you don't want to have children and you want to do corporate, whether you want to just travel. Whatever it is that you want to do, that's what you should be thinking about.

It's like, what do you want to do? Yeah. And that really nails down what we've been talking about during the show is being able to decide for yourself what's best for yourself and what you want to achieve so that you feel personally fulfilled. You know, I, you know, a lot of mothers, you know, there's, there's kind of that paradigm, you know, mothers always feed their kids first and the family and take care of everything and they always eat last.

And so it's important for people to find what they want, identify that and plan their lives out better. Because I mean, that's the real difference. When you work for yourself, the great thing is you control your life, you control your future. You have to have kind of a vision for your business and you map that out. And you're just not kind of doing the paycheck to paycheck robotic thing of like, I don't know, I just do whatever they tell me to do around here. And I don't really think about it much. And to me, being an entrepreneur, uh, means you have just so much more, uh, so much more, uh, power. And, uh, to me, I think being an entrepreneur is the most, when it comes to self-development, when it comes to being, to having, there's a word I'm looking for here, but being self-reliable,

to be self-accountable, that's the word we're looking for, for your life and the decision you make for it, the job you make for it makes all the difference. And some good comments coming in here from Matthew. Thanks, Matthew. I love that. Decide for yourself what's best for yourself. And it's okay to change your mind halfway through the journey. Maybe that's one thing, you know, he brings up a good point. Maybe that's something that's important that we need to, we need to say, hey, it's okay.

You don't have to, you don't have to, you bought the program, maybe being a teacher or whatever it is, but it's okay to change your mind and go hey i want a different episode as you mentioned in your book well yeah and just even the idea to think that that the thing we chose to do like like when we were in our 20s or 30s is actually the thing that's going to sustain us for the rest of our life is absurd right like we're all changing, adapting, growing human beings. And so there needs to be a space for us to be like, huh, how do I feel about this right now? Right? Like, I don't know. Like it served me well and I enjoyed doing it, but it's now time for a new episode. It's now time for me to take everything that I've learned there, the good and the bad and translate it into whatever

is next. And that's a risky thing to do because it's not something that we talk about a lot. It's not something that we say, wow, this is amazing or that we elevate and we put up there, right? But I think we all need to talk more about that and be like, you know what? I think I need to change right now. And let's talk about that and let's enjoy that. Yeah. And find our happiness and our fulfillment because when we do what we want, we take care of ourselves first.

Then we can better take care of the world, really, when it comes down to it. Yeah, absolutely. There you go. I think that's totally true. And Miriam, is there anything more you want to talk about or tease out before we go? Oh, the only thing I would say is that I would ask everybody who is listening to take a second and stop and ask themselves. Ask themselves what I want. There you go.

So, Marianne, this has been wonderful to go through and talk to you about this. And hopefully we've opened up some eyes, opened up some minds. And I imagine you work with people to start their businesses that aren't teachers as well, right? I do. Absolutely. I have a specific passion for teachers, but we are game to help anybody who wants to jump into this entrepreneurship space and build a life that is supported by their business. We're here for. There you go. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know you better absolutely you can find me at marianne lombardi.com you can find me on linkedin at marianne lombardi just my name and you can find me on instagram at i am marianne lombardi there you go uh thank you very much

for coming on the show marianne we really appreciate it absolutely thanks for having me there you go uh order up her book uh it's your story to tell essays on a denny from a messy life well lived i like that that's pretty much the description of my life but the episodic thing you know i i'll throw this in for fun here at the end because i like the episodic uh thought process of looking your life that way but years ago i dated a gal and she said to me my life is a film and I'm the lead actress in the film. And, uh, you just played a bit part in my life. And I thought, you know, that's a really interesting way to think about your life that, you know, what's your story, what's your film, what's your journey. You're the, you are

the main actor or actress in your life. Uh, you know, you're the lead in your film and, uh, you know, maybe you should think about how it goes. And maybe your film is like an Amazon episodic series where, you know, season one does one thing and season two does another and everything changes as you go from things to things. So something to ponder about, folks, when you do it. Be sure to reach out to Marianne at her website and get to know her better as well. Thanks, my honest, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss, youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss, and all

those places in between. We certainly appreciate you guys being there. You see the big LinkedIn newsletter, and we're trying to be cool on TikTok. It's slowly working, but not really, because we're not cool kids, but we're going to keep forcing it, and maybe they'll learn to like us. Thanks for tuning in, my audience. Be good to each

other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have...