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Scout Sobel joins us to talk about her new book, creating a business to support entrepreneur women, and living and thriving with a bipoloar disorder diagnosis. Does following your passion mean you’re happy 24/7? How did Scout pivot when lack of money became a problem? Listen and support the show! Share with a friend and tag us on social! @joyandclaire_
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This is Joy & Claire Episode 88: Fearing Failure and Doing It Anyway
Episode Date: August 19, 2021
Transcription Completed: August 30, 2021
Audio Length: 46:51 minutes
Joy: Hey guys, this is Joy.
Claire: And this is Claire.
Joy: And this is Joy and Claire. Welcome to another weeks, everybody.
Claire: Welcome.
Joy: Made it to another week.
Claire: Why do we get weirder every week?
Joy: I know. I feel like after eight years, you just don’t know what else to do.
Claire: [singing] Welcome to the podcast, hello. And it is now time for our show.
Joy: [laughing] We should have a jingle, Claire, after all this time.
Claire: Now we do. I think I just made it. Oh no.
Joy: Okay. So we have a special guest this week.
Claire: Yeah, someone else is here guys.
Joy: Someone else is here.
Claire: Forced to listen to me do this in real time.
Joy: Forced to listen to our shenanigans. Scout Sobel is on the podcast this week. We have mentioned her a handful of times because we’ve had guests booked by Scout’s Agency. So she is the owner of Scout’s Agency. She has a book coming out. Scout, welcome to Joy and Claire.
Scout: Hi ladies. I’m just dying because my sister and I host a podcast, and this is very familiar to me to just come in so hot and silly. But eight years – can we cuss on this show?
Joy: Yep.
Scout: Eight fucking years. I mean, hot damn. I am like loopy three years in. Eight years, that’s a mission and a half. Good for you guys.
Joy: Thank you, thank you. Is this about us now? No, I’m just kidding. Really, it’s been a wild ride, and we still are doing it every single week. We like to say that the only time that we missed a week, I think it was the one week we missed –
Claire: It was the week I got married. In 2014.
Joy: That’s the only week we missed.
Claire: That’s the only week we missed. And I also like to say that if you had told us before we started that we were going to do this for eight years, we never would have started.
Joy: Yeah.
Scout: Yeah, that’s really how it goes. I also find – I don’t know if you guys feel this way too – but it feels like I’ve only been in – I’ve actually been in this space for four years, three years with Okay Sis. I feel like the landscape is changing so fast, and it feels like almost in the next few years podcasts are going to be kind of similar to YouTube with the vlogs or reality television. Podcasting I think is becoming a little bit more about the host these days, versus the guest.
Joy: Yeah, it’s interesting to watch. I promise we’ll get to your intro, but I don’t want to forget this either is that I was recently watching the Dr. Death series on Hulu. And then they also made Dirty John television show. So they’re starting to take content and real life stories and make TV shows out of people’s podcasts. I always find that really interesting.
Scout: Yeah, I think while it’s exploding and “saturated,” which take or leave that word if you will, I think we’re going to see a lot of people fall off because, as you ladies know, it’s a fucking commitment game. But then we’re going to see a lot of different types of content come through that we weren’t expecting out of podcasting.
Joy: Yeah. And I always like to see the trends and what’s really popular. Obviously true crime is really popular. I still don’t understand 100% why, even though I love consuming true crime, so maybe I’m the problem. But I also see a lot of male domination in the podcasting space, which really shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, but I also find that that keeps us going because that’s really the reason that we started in the first place is because there were too many male voices and not enough female voices, especially in the fitness space, which is kind of where we started. But enough about us. Let’s do a quick introduction and tell us about Scout’s Agency, the inspiration for starting Scout’s Agency because I know that you have two podcasts now, one with your sister and one with just you. The impetus for starting Scout’s Agency, and it sounds to me like it was like, oh, I didn’t see it being done well so I wanted to do it well.
Scout: Yeah. Scout’s Agency was really birthed and created out of the experience with Okay Sis podcast. I started Scout’s Agency six months after starting Okay Sis. It really started out because, two things. I forgot about this story. I always forget this story. We hired an agency to do a few things for the podcast. It didn’t work out, and I had to jump in. Long story short, I completed the job and then some within a couple of days, so I recognize that, oh I think I’m really good at this specific task. That coupled with the fact that I was recognizing that when we would have a guest on our podcast, our community, which we call the sisterhood, which mind you was then a lot smaller than it is today – I say that to show the power of what I was witnessing – was that they would follow our guest on Instagram, they would buy their products, they would join their services, their email newsletter, whatever it was. And so I recognize that being a guest on a podcast is powerful, and I kind of had the foresight to be kind of the new wave of PR. I liked it so much because not only was I in it, I recognize that you can get quoted in forums and that is going to be a huge career booster. It is going to give you credibility. It is going to give you a return with sales, and it’s on your website. There’s so many great things that you can do with something like that. But when you put a woman on a podcast, she’s talking for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour in a world where you have to capture someone’s attention in five seconds. It’s just not the case on podcasting. So I started Scout’s Agency truly because I was working for my mom at the time. My career trajectory is not super linear. I dropped out of college because I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. I was really still finding my way. I think I was 27 at the time. And I put together a media. One of the services was what the agency was supposed to do for me and my sister that I wanted to do better, which was booking guests on people’s podcasts. So if you have a podcast, we’ll book out your show with insane people like Brain Grazer, Colby Caillat, Sofia Amoroso, Jillian Michaels. Goes on and on. But I really was interested in the podcasts who are getting women and guests on podcasts as a form of PR. I started it with three services – booking guests on people’s podcasts, booking women as guests on podcasts, and then I just threw traditional PR in there because I thought no one would sign with me if I said that. Mind you, zero agency experience, zero PR experience. But fuck it, that’s how I try things out. I created a whole media kit. I had a list of a thousand women female podcasters that I wanted to rep as I really started niching down in that space since I was in the space. I emailed all of them the first day. They email blocked me. They said I was spam. But I kept emailing. Four months later, I quit my day job. Six months later, I opened up the roster to representing just female entrepreneurs, authors, business owners, not just podcasters. And that was 2.5 years ago. We had a six year revenue in our first year, multiple in our second, and now we are, including myself, a team of five and have represented dream women from Jessica Zweig to Rebecca Minkoff to Catt Sadler to Vanessa Rosetto, Damona Hoffman, Kelley Baker. It’s really cool. I look back on all of this, and I didn’t start with this business model. I didn’t start with any knowledge of anything, to be honest. I just had this energetic pull that I wanted it to be successful. So I kept following that energetic pull. I kept going through the hoops with every new challenge. That’s really what has given me not only my career but my network, as well as podcasting gave me my network. It has been awesome. I feel really, really lucky.
Joy: It’s interesting to see how a podcast with your sister opened up this different world. I’m curious to know why you started a podcast with your sister.
Scout: So I lived next to a whole sale produce store. Just stay with me here. And all of the restaurants in San Diego buy produce from this whole sale – it’s like a warehouse. Since I lived next door, I had a 20% discount. I got all my groceries from there. The girls at the cashier ended up knowing me. And all of the sudden, one day they put in a podcast studio because they wanted to get into media, which is very random. So I said, “Hey, can I hop in there?” They said, “Sure.” They produced my show for a year for free because they were just hopping into the space and wanted to see what it was like. So I had a show by myself. It was much more mental health and spirituality oriented, entrepreneurship oriented, very serious. Still only interviewed women. I just always have wanted to be around women’s stories. But a year into it, and I really believe this is why, I didn’t have to do everything myself for that podcast, and I really think that’s why I didn’t take it as seriously. I really think that’s why I didn’t have so much equity in the game. It was super impactful over my life. Because I wasn’t the one sitting there editing and figuring out how LibSyn works and all that stuff. I really think that’s why a year into it I was bored. I wasn’t treating it like a business. I was missing weeks. But there was something about podcasting that I loved. I was at the [UNCLEAR] in the [UNCLEAR] with my sister for her birthday. We had one too many rosés. We were at the pool, and I said, “I don’t have a podcast episode for next week.” So we went into the business center. I recorded it on my phone. We ate truffle chips the whole time because, you know, who cares about the listener when you’ve had a rosé or two, and talked about The Bachelor and pop culture. It was so different from the energy that I was living in in my space that there was something super magnetic and electric when you put my sister and I in a spot together, turn off all notifications, and just put us on a mic. So two weeks later, I texted her. I said, “We have to do something. There’s something between us that we have to do.” We decided on it being a podcast. Two weeks after that, we launched Okay Sis.
Joy: I’ve listened to your show and I really like the dynamic between you two. What’s the age difference?
Scout: Three years. I’m three years older.
Joy: Okay, yeah. So then, you took this podcast and that’s what let you to Scout’s Agency. What is your goal right now with Scout’s Agency? It sounds like you’ve evolved. What are you doing now with the business?
Scout: I started 2021 with pretty much one full-time employee. And now by the end of this month, we’ll have four full-time employees. It’s felt, for lack of a better term, very grown up, very much like I’m putting my big girl pants on, very much like I’m stepping into more of a CEO leadership versus just an entrepreneurship level. I suppose I’m thinking about company policies and paid time off and all of that kind of stuff. For me, the goal right now is to really elevate our services and the experience your clients have with our services. We’re currently doing an overhaul of our systems and processes to make sure that everything is super dialed in, that we have a really unified protocol of how we treat and interact and relate to our clients. So it’s really setting the foundation at this point for scaling. That includes investing in new things. That includes training, bringing on new team members, doing sales at higher retainers. It’s just a really big moment of expansion and really what I see for the agency in a year, let’s say, is that it’s running itself in the sense that I don’t necessarily have to be involved in every little thing. But rather, I have a team that really understands and owns their roles, can walk a client through our process and do their contract with beauty and grace and support and love and all of the things, and we can also add on different revenue streams. Right now, Scout’s Agency is one-on-one private client revenue stream, which I love and it will always be the base of the way we do business. But I’m also craving different revenue streams, which is not why I wrote a book but it’s one of the reasons I’m excited about my book. It provides another revenue stream. Just really branching out more into maybe education, some master classes around the podcast industry and fine tuning your messages and personal branding, getting yourself out there. So it’s definitely in a state of expansion and in that scaling we’re also creating a really great foundation so that as things progress and go up, we have a solid way of doing things that everyone’s super clear on and everyone can really succeed in their role.
Joy: So you mentioned the book. Talk a little bit about the book and the release as of this recording. It will be released the week that your book comes out.
Scout: Yay. I am so excited. My book’s called The Emotional Entrepreneur, and it really is the emotional guidebook for entrepreneurship. I wrote it because as I was running Scout’s Agency, well one, I found entrepreneurship when I was 22 years old. At that point in my life, I was a college dropout. I could barely hold a minimum wage job. And doctors and psychiatrists and therapists weren’t sure really how much I was going to be able to function in society. When I found entrepreneurship, the lightbulb switched in my head, and suddenly the high-highs and low-lows that my bipolar disorder gave me matched the high-highs and low-lows that entrepreneurship gave me. I could be a hostess and sign up with a psychiatrist whenever I wanted. But when the entire operation is on my shoulders, it forces me to show up in the best ways possible. So as I started growing Scout’s Agency and reaching “success,” I was talking to a lot of other female – I’m about to be 30 years old – in the 25-35 year old zone talking about wanting to do their own thing, but the emotional stuff was holding them back. The self-doubt, the self-worth, the inability to handle risk and the inability to handle uncertainty or the anxiety that comes with putting yourself out there. I recognized that people aren’t successful because of their PnL’s and because of their strategy and all of that. Yes, that is totally a part of it. For sure. But entrepreneurs at the end of the day are successful because they can emotionally handle the game. Through healing bipolar, I was given those tools, those tools of wisdom, to emotionally handle challenges. I recognize that why people weren’t getting into the game or why they couldn’t stay in the game was because their mental strength wasn’t on point for it. So I kind of combined the two things I loved the most, mental health and entrepreneurship, and wrote The Emotional Entrepreneur, to help guide people, make them feel less alone in their entrepreneurial struggles, give them the power to make them feel safe in their emotions, that they truly can handle the fires that they’re about to walk through, and to really hold onto their purpose and what they really want for themselves and their life when the going gets a little rough. There’s 25 lessons. We talk about our relationship to risk, to failure, to anxiety, to uncertainty, how to celebrate the small wins, what to do when you tell your family that you want to start something and they don’t understand why you would leave the job. There’s all these emotional loopholes you’ve got to get to to be an entrepreneur. So I wrote the book. I put it all in there. And it lights me up a lot. One, because writing a book has always been my number one career goal ever since I was 6 or 7. But it lights me up a lot because it’s a conversation when I was diagnosed ten years ago wasn’t happening, the emotional side of things. I’m not really talking about the lens of mental illness per se. I’m just talking about mental health in general. I’m really excited that I can produce a book like this and have it be perceived without people staring at me weird and thinking that it’s crazy.
Joy: I think it’s easy for people to look at this and be like, “You’re so successful, and that’s so great” without realizing that there’s a lot of struggle that comes with something like this. Your book obviously addresses that, in that so much of how we experience life is what we’re able to tolerate, the emotions that we’re able to tolerate. With entrepreneurship, being able to tolerate huge amounts of risk at times, I think that is something that you’re speaking to is how do you do that. And how did you deal with failures? Because it was surely not a smooth ride up until this point.
Scout: It was not a smooth ride up until this point. I had many different iterations in my career. Many, many, many. I started a blog. I started a magazine. So many different projects until I found the one. To be quite honest with you, I’ve always had a really strong solar plexus and personal power zone. I never understood why I should follow somebody else’s rule book. I remember being 17, 16 and ditching class because physics wasn’t really going to get me anywhere in life and I kind of knew that, so I just got the 80 because the UC system saw an 80 as a straight B. I did the same with statistics, etc. But the subjects that I really loved, I threw myself into and really applied myself. So I recognized really young that I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do this framework. And one, it doesn’t fucking make sense. My time is so much better utilized sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and writing in my journal than sitting in physics class that I will never use for the rest of my life. So I think at a really young age, I was able to assess what the outside world was telling me to do and say, yeah, this is what I’m actually going to do. And if you don’t get me, it’s chill. I didn’t get into any colleges. Any. Even my safety, even ones that I should have gotten into. And I really think it’s because, I looked at my mom and I said, “If they look at my GPA, they probably won’t accept me. But if they read my essay, they will.” I knew where my value lie. I knew what was more descriptive of me and what wasn’t. I think in that, part of it was my mental illness. I had my first depressive episode at 14. In not relating to many people through that experience, I had to find my own kind of path that worked for me. But I’ve always had something that refuses to not show up for exactly what I want. My dad’s an immigrant. He came over here and built a life for himself. There’s so many times where I’m sure he was like, why isn’t my daughter just going to college and being a doctor or a lawyer? I remember texting my dad. I said, “Dad, you know” – first I dropped out because I was bipolar. Then I went back, and I said, “Dad, if I get a career opportunity, you know I’m going to drop out, right? I’m just going to. This isn’t for me.” At that point, he had known me well enough to be like, “Yeah, I know that’s what you’re going to do.” I’m just getting emotional because I’m so grateful that I listened to that part of myself. I’m so grateful that I wasn’t afraid of failure or what my dad and parents would think or what the private school parents thought of me while all my friends were getting 4.5s. I lived in enough mental agony to subconsciously understand that the choices in my life matter and that I get to make them. And nobody else does. I’ve never seen any point of my career and my life as a failure. I just don’t. I see this beautiful trajectory of things that have rolled one into the other. When I decided to write this book, the woman that helped me formulate my book proposal and stuff, [UNCLEAR], she saw it. She said, “This is so crazy. You launched an agency to help other women launch their books through podcast tours, and now you get to hire your agency to do it for you.” This isn’t an accident. These things don’t just happen. If you allow your life to energetically flow based off where your energy is pulling you, what is most aligned with you, things make sense. And so, listen, be afraid of failure or not. It’s going to happen. I find that when you accept the things that make you the most uncomfortable, you have two choices, which is a chapter in the book. You either do it and fail, you do it and succeed – either way, are you going to propel your life forward or not?
Claire: I think it’s really interesting to hear you talk about living through those really tough moments and that it really is just all about how you choose to see it. I think that that says so much about what you’ve learned also about being bipolar. As I hear you talk about this, I’m also thinking about how when you have bipolar disorder, you are forced into these emotional situations – Joy, being a therapist, can probably speak a lot more eloquently to this – but that you kind of have to be along for the ride, and you have to do a lot of work of your own accord to come back out of that and to try to manage that and to try to make the best of a situation that really is a lot of times not in your control if you’re in a manic episode or depressive episode. I’m hearing a lot of parallels with having that similar mindset as you’re going through the entrepreneurship journey that I think scares a lot of people, in the same way that the idea of a manic episode or depressive episode would scare a lot of people. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m not in control. I’m going to avoid circumstances where that is likely for me. I know you already said that you recognized right away that the highs and lows of being bipolar were very congruent with the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur, but I also think it’s just interesting to hear about your perspective about the personal choice aspect of that as well.
Scout: Yeah. You really hit very specifically to what I realized in going through both those things. I do just want to say real quick, the talk around – and then I kind of forgot your question, so you’ll have to ask me again – the talk around not being in control of a depressive or manic episode, I want to acknowledge that and say it’s so true. It’s so true, and I wish the narrative that I was given to me was that there is so much in my control. Because I just sat there for years. “Well, it’s not in my control. I’m depressed. Sorry, guys. Can’t go to the meeting, can’t show up for work, can’t actually look myself in the mirror and do the healing and take the self-responsibility.” So while, yes, if anybody is listening to this that’s struggling, there is a lot out of your control, but there’s so much that is. So much. And that’s where the good stuff comes into play. I always like to highlight that because I think more of the psychiatric and the Western and therapy, which I’m a huge proponent of obviously. It saved my life many times over. I wish they focused a little more on the control I did have, versus the out of control narrative because I think that would have empowered me in so many more ways. What was your question?
Claire: What you just said I think dovetails off of what I said. It wasn’t really a question as much as just reflecting that I think – I’ve recently been listening to David Chang’s book, Eat a Peach. He reflects a lot – have you listened to this book? I think it’s somewhat recent. Joy, have you heard it?
Joy: I’ve heard of it, yep.
Claire: He also talks a lot about having bipolar and how that translated into a lot of his motivation to put himself out there. This sort of, “Well, I might as well go for it” kind of mindset. I think that in a way it’s so interesting to hear you talk about being in that place of you don’t really regret anything that you’ve been through, you don’t see anything you’ve done as a failure because it’s really pushed you to get that one step further and go that one step beyond. And listening to yourself and know this more traditional path wasn’t for you. I think that a lot of people who don’t have a lot of maybe emotional or mental hardship in their younger lives, that idea of going against the grain or really putting yourself out there is so scary because you don’t have any frame of reference for what it could feel like to do anything other than be in the little path that you’re supposed to be in.
Scout: Yeah. That’s very accurate. I suppose part of it was, well, I’m depressed anyways. Right? I have suicidal ideation anyways. I have paranoia anyways. If I’ve lived through that, if I’ve dealt with that, I might as well show up in other areas of my life that I can show up in. This was not also my mode. When I was diagnosed, this was not the way I approached my life. I quite everything I ever started. I hid in my room. I took zero emotional responsibility until my husband, then boyfriend, two months into dating said, “Listen, I don’t care if you’re depressed. If you’re depressed and hopeful, I will stay in this relationship. If you’re depressed and hopeless, I won’t be here.” And so him placing a parameter, a boundary around my mental illness was something that I was not used to. I was used to, “Dad, I’m not feeling well. Stop what you’re doing and come pick me up.” Or texting my husband saying, “You can’t go to work today, sorry. You have to stay home.” And they would because it was an emergency. I know so many people don’t want to hear this, but I like to offer this perspective. My depression gave me power. I sent a text, and everyone stopped their day for me. I didn’t have to go to work. I didn’t have to do any of the adult things that people have to do. Once I looked at somebody and said, “I’m not going to lose that.” Because I’d lost college, career, job opportunities, internships, friends. He was the last thing I was willing to lose. That’s when it started. It doesn’t matter if you have a mental illness. It doesn’t matter what pain or trauma you’ve suffered. We all have something, and it’s just a matter of if you want to look at that something and really extract the beauty and the strength that came out of it and apply it to your life moving forward. I think trauma and pain and suffering is so relative, and it happens to people in so many different ways. I stand here pretty confidently saying that bipolar disorder is the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s my biggest blessing. I would not redo any of it. I would not not have it. It really, really is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I think everyone has that thing that they can say that for.
Joy: It sounds to me too when you were talking about – and I work as a therapist as a profession and I see this all the time. It is really difficult that you go through a diagnosis like bipolar disorder. And I see patients and clients very… almost like they’re an old soul maturity because you’ve gone through so much that you’re so in tune with your emotions. Like if you’ve received the help to where you can be at that point where you know the diagnosis, you know when things might happen, you know yourself very well and that you’re very in tune with that. But you shouldn’t take that lightly of just how much, I don’t want to say “ahead of the game,” but really there’s a maturity that comes with it, of being able to recognize that within yourself.
Scout: Thank you. I appreciate that. For me personally, I try not to stay there too much because my ego told me that I was special and separate and felt deeper than other people, experienced life on a much more heightened way.
Joy: You can dip in and out of that. You don’t have to stay very long.
Scout: You’re right. There’s part of it that’s true in many ways, and then the other part of me knows that narrative never served me at all. But I receive and hear what you say, and I really appreciate it.
Joy: Yeah. Well I think too, it’s just emotional intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with that. Emotional intelligence is completely fine. It’s not to say that you’re just going to run and take advantage of it and use it as a Get Out of Jail Free card. You’re just very much emotionally intelligent. Which when people struggle with diagnosis of mental illness, that sometimes is – and not all people have that level of emotional intelligence. So I’m kind of speaking to everyone out there too who’s gone through something similar. And then it also just reminded me of… is it the Rebel from Gretchen Ruben’s Four Tendencies? You’re kind of like this kid that was just like, “I’m not feeling like I want to go with the grain here. I’m meant for a different path,” which I think is also really important for people to recognize within themselves. If college isn’t calling for your or a certain path or career path isn’t calling for you, that you really have to follow that gut. A lot of times, I think when you’re younger, you just kind of try to do the square peg, round hole and take the path that you “should take,” but you were really clear about that.
Scout: Yeah. Do you know about tapping? I’m sure you do.
Joy: Yeah.
Scout: Okay, so I was doing a tapping session last week.
Joy: So for everyone listening, it’s basically a time of treatment. It’s called the emotional freedom technique. EFT, if you want to Google it.
Scout: Yeah, and it’s weird. You literally just tap on these points and you say things out loud. I went back to 5-year-old, 6-year-old Scout who didn’t want to go to camp, didn’t want to go to school, got really violent with my mom when she would try to put me in carpool, called in sick every single day. I just wanted to be alone in my room. I didn’t want to be around groups of people. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I’m sure you’ve seen this so many times in therapy where someone has a breakthrough and they realize it. And it’s the craziest thing in their mind, but when they tell someone else, someone’s like, “Yeah, okay. That sounds good.” But I realized that when I was that young, I recognize that I wanted to do things a different way. I said, okay – this is also conscious – I’m not going to give that up. That, I’m not giving up. I’m not giving up my personal power and the way I want to do things. But I made a deal with society because I had to fit in somehow. So the way that I decided to fit in was being a people pleaser. So my whole life I’ve been on this insane personal power, “I don’t care what you think. This is what I’m doing and I know it.” And so in order for everyone to feel okay that I was doing it, I had to give something to society to show that I was still showing up in their agenda. And that was the people pleasing. So I made everyone else feel safe around me while I kind of rocked the foundation a little bit over here. And though tapping, I told myself that I don’t need to do that. I don’t need to make anyone feel safe at the expense of my suffering. I can take that personal power trajectory that I know is so strong in me, that is so rebellious, and I can go all in there. I don’t have to show up for the world in little ways so that they feel comfortable with me playing big on this end. So it was a really crazy realization that in order to protect myself from completely being ostracized – you know, having my parents mad at me or whatever it was. You know, the whole, our biggest fear is being ostracized from the group – was I said, “Okay, I’m going to keep going on this because that’s really important and I’m not going to give it up. But I’ll people please to keep the crowd calm over here.” So I’m trying to – it’s my biggest thing – break out of the people pleasing.
Claire: So let’s talk a little bit more about your business because I feel like being someone trying to break away from people pleasing while running a PR business would probably meet some friction.
Scout: You’re absolutely correct. You’re absolutely correct. I walked home one night six months into the business. All of the sudden, I stopped and I said, “Oh my God.” The biggest people pleaser in the world – I started a client-based business, and I stood there, and I laughed. I said, “I hear you, God. I get it. I get why I did this.” It is my next human universal assignment that people pleasing is something that I have to really learn. So of course I was led towards the fire. I was led directly to the healing lesson that I need to learn. Two and a half years later, have I learned it? I’m a lot better than I was. I let an entire trip to Italy be ruined because a client sent an unfavorable email when I landed. An entire trip. I was crying outside. I mean, I don’t like traveling anyways. I was saying that before. I was crying outside with so much anxiety. Now, a client’s upset – what are you going to do? Everyone’s upset. It’s like every day someone’s upset. So I’ve learned a lot, and I’m definitely getting there, and I’ve made really big improvements. But I really, truly do believe that I started this business because that’s my next lesson that I have to learn.
Joy: I like that you look at it that way. Life assignments. I think that often in my own life. I’m like, “Oh, this is a life assignment.” But it’s really hard to get to. It’s like the enlightening piece. I want you to convince me of something. We talked about this recently on our show maybe a few weeks ago about doing your passion and making money. I am not convinced that you can do that. The reason is I sometimes think that work, when something becomes a job, there’s some friction there of, well it’s a job, it’s still work. So the whole thing of doing your passion and you never work a day in your life, maybe we need to be asking a different question or framing it differently. Or do you truly feel like, “No, I’m in the zone. I’m loving every minute.”
Scout: This is so good. I love this question. I could talk about this shit for days. I think that why people don’t believe it’s true is because people assume that when they get to their passion it’s flow all the time. It’s totally abundant and you want to do it every second, and you can’t not do it, and it’s all rosy and amazing. When that is just not the case with anything. It’s not the case with your soul mate. It’s not the case with the guy that you ridiculously fell in love with in tenth grade. There’s always moments of friction where it feels like work, where it feels heavy, where it feels tough. That’s just where it goes in for all of life. I have a different philosophy in that I don’t really necessarily look at my life so significantly between work and play. Those lines are quite blurred for me. I don’t really say I’m doing my passion; I say I’m doing my purpose more. I think there is different types of passions that serve different purposes. For example, I really like – this is not true, so I’ll just make up a story. If I love pottery and I put the pressure to monetize my pottery, what pottery used to give me isn’t going to give that to me anymore. So we have multiple passions across the board. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them get to be monetized and be put into a business framework. And that also doesn’t mean that your business can’t be induced with passion and can’t be induced with purpose. Never work a day in your life? I work every day of my life. I work a lot. I work too much. I work too hard. Whatever it is, right. I don’t know what that saying means.
Joy: It’s almost like Instagram reality is not reality, where it’s like, “I’m making all this money and I’m doing my passion.” That’s what I think. I’m like, you’re full of shit. You’re not.
Scout: They’re doing their passion, but they’re definitely not happy 24/7.
Joy: Right, right.
Scout: I believe I am living my purpose. To the core of myself. Everything I do lights me up. Every decision I make in my business is exciting. I still want to be in my business more than I want to be anywhere, to be honest. Sometimes I’d rather be in my business than at happy hour with my friends, which is something I have to come to terms with myself. I’m very honest about the realities of what that means, which is really why I wrote the book. When you’re living your passion/your purpose, that does not exempt you from ridiculously challenging moments where it feels terrible. So this idea that “find something you love and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life,” have you ever found a partner that you’ve loved and have you ever been happy with them every single day of your life? No. Anything in life is like that. I like to really talk about the truths of what we’re doing here because I think when you have a passion, the passion isn’t there to just ignite relaxation and joy. It’s probably there to challenge you in some ways. I don’t agree with the sentiment that I think you’re saying, but I do believe that you can make a career out of your passion. You just have to be really realistic that it’s not going to be butterflies every day.
Joy: Yeah, it’s not going to be all roses.
Scout: Yeah. When I decided to launch this book and scale my agency out at the same time, we did it in a really concentrated timeline. I sat my husband down and I said, “Listen, the next 4-6 months, this is going to be my place. I’m choosing this. This is in alignment for me. This is what I want to do. This is my purpose. I’m going to come to you, probably a couple times, crying hysterically saying I’m in over my head, I can’t deal with it, I’m overwhelmed, what am I doing to myself. Da, da, da, da, da. In those moments, you just have to hold space and let it pass because it’s not the truth. It’s just a byproduct of the insane amount of growth that I’m going through.” So if you look at it like that, if you enter the arena knowing what you’re about to go through, I think it makes it a lot easier to move through those challenging moments.
Joy: Okay, last question.
Scout: Yeah.
Joy: What are your thoughts around money – I know you can talk a lot about this because I know you did a podcast episode about it – but money and the fallacy that money brings happiness. According to me, I think it’s a fallacy. But what do you think?
Scout: I… Do you see how my tempo just went down?
Joy: Totally.
Scout: I’m trying to be meek. No, I love money. I love making it. I love spending it. I love maybe saving it. Just kidding, I save it. I love figuring out how to make it work for me. I love figuring out what that energetic exchange really means when I maybe sign a retainer as a client somewhere, when someone signs a retainer with me. I hold money as a very, very sacred current of energy that is meant to be valued. I think that the pursuit of money is very intoxicating, alluring, exciting, etc. And when I say that I don’t mean in a power drunk way or a greedy way, I really think that money and obtaining money is a beautiful form of creation that I so love to exhibit at all times. I’m a business owner. I like growing revenue. I like figuring out how to make a sale, not to trick someone and steal from them, but to create a really beautiful equal value exchange. So I really love money. I have a glass of wine and I say it really loud at restaurants, and my husband gets uncomfortable. But I think if more women said that, I think we’d live in a way better place. The book We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers, she wants every woman to be a millionaire because it’s proven that when women hold more economic power, living standards, happiness levels, all the things are so much better. This narrative that money is dirty, that it’s bad, that it’s going to give you more problems, that it’s not going to give you the happiness, all that stuff, it’s just a really terrible narrative to keep you from making it. I really want you to make it. I really do. I want you to have a lot of it. That would be cool for everybody. Does it make you happy? Hell yeah, it makes you happy.
Joy: But do you know what I’m saying though when people are like, “I’ll be happy when.”
Scout: No, no, no. Don’t do that game.
Joy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Scout: If you say that, you’ll never be happy. Money brings you happiness because ordering oysters makes me happy. Does it bring me a foundational self-worth, healthy relationship –
Joy: Solve all your problems.
Scout: And freedom? No. Absolutely not. That has to come from within, but that idea of chasing, I’m a really big proponent. And I will say, I actually think I’ve mastered this in many ways. I’m super good with where I’m at right now. Super grateful. Super proud. I celebrate every win under the sun. I can’t believe where I’m at today. It’s awesome. And I have huge goals for six months. I can live really in both spaces and not feel a lack thereof in the present when you contrast it to my future dream. There’s a chapter in my book called “Celebrate the Small Wins.” I think that’s really important because I think that we don’t do that. It’s in the celebration of the small wins that we can get rid of that “when I get this, I’ll be happy” because that’s a recipe for disaster.
Joy: Yeah, it’s super clear that you’re very connected to law of attraction and being in alignment and attracting. When did you adopt that way of thinking, and how long did it take you to get into the groove with it?
Scout: I remember being super young and all of my friends’ moms would take the shopping bags through the garage door, “Shh, don’t tell your dad,” and hide all the shopping. And I had women telling me in high school, “Listen, always have a fund that your husband doesn’t know about.” I remember not feeling good about that. I remember not thinking that that was it. I wanted a husband who I could tell how much I spent, I could walk in with clothing and have him want me to try it all on and tell me I look great. I wanted to share financial openness and honesty with him. So when I was really young, I recognized that money – there’s something to it where people try to hide it, feel shameful about it, or they’re not honest about it. So at a young age, I really really wanted to have an open relationship with it with my husband, whoever that was to be, who now is my husband today. I would always tell my mom, “I just want a husband who wants to shop.” I just want a husband who wants to shop because I didn’t want a husband to control me financially, etc. Which I am the breadwinner, so that didn’t happen. But it was in my mind at a young age. I don’t want a secret fund. I don’t want him to not see the big shopping bags that come through the door, etc. And I don’t want it to be the other way around.
Joy: Or be like, “How much did you spend on that?” Yeah.
Scout: Yeah. We ask because we want to know for budgeting purposes, but that’s totally it. So I’ve always had money at the top of my mind, of I want a different relationship than I’m seeing other people have with it. Then I lost half my revenue seven months into starting my agency. I hired an employee. I signed a lease for an office. My contracts were month to month. I couldn’t predict revenue. So all of the sudden, I could pay my employee and the rent, but I could barely pay myself. I was dishonest with my husband about the realities of where my business was because I felt shame. I was entering into sales calls with desperation because I just had to get the revenue up. It was this need. I was controlling it. I was angry at it. So that’s really when I was forced to sit down. I was in a spiritual mastermind for women who were in their first year of business and was introduced to the concept of scarcity versus abundant mindset. It’s a consistent practice of coming back to abundant because money is really tied up with the root shocker, which is our survival. Which, when our survival is threatened, our nervous system goes off the wall. I always remind myself of this very, very simple thing. When you go to buy a car, you’re more likely to buy the car from the salesman who’s detached, who totally doesn’t care if you want to buy it, knows the value of the car, gives you your time, your space, respects you, isn’t trying to control your decision. You’re going to want to buy from him, versus the car salesman that is desperate to meet a quota, is racking up things to get more money, etc. Even if those two sound the same energetically and subconsciously, we know where the motivation’s coming from for each of those types of characters. So once I just said, “I am trying to control this and it’s not working. I need to take a step back, and I need to trust that there are a plethora of clients that will want to work with me. I need to go into sales calls not suffocating them, but rather saying, ‘This is a really great place to come into, but totally up to you. I’m good either way.’” That’s when my revenue doubled, and it’s been growing ever since.
Joy: Well congratulations on all of your success so far. We can’t wait to see where you go. Tell our listeners where they can find your book. And if they want to work with you, where can they find you?
Scout: Yay, you can find me on Instagram @scoutsobel. That’s the best place. In my bio, there’s links to Scout’s Agency. There’s also in my little link in bio link tree thing, you can apply to work with us at Scout’s Agency. You can find Okay Sis podcast and Scout Podcast. And then you can buy my book. Best place is on Amazon. Just type in “The Emotional Entrepreneur Scout Sobel.” I’m sure you ladies will have the link in your show notes, and the link will also be in my bio on Instagram. So come hang out, come DM, come email.
Joy: We will absolutely link it in our show notes. And listeners you can always contact us.
Claire: You can find us @joyandclaire_ on Instagram, joyandclaire.com, thisisjoyandclaire@gmail.com. Drop us a note. We love hearing from you. We love answering your questions. We would love to put you in touch with Scout directly if you’d rather just reach out to us. And we will talk to you next week. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining us, and thank you so much, Scout.
Scout: Thank you.
Joy: Thanks, everyone.