Software as a Service or SaaS tools can improve your time management and productivity. More importantly, they can be low cost or free and scaled to support your business as it grows.

Former Google employee Soumya Rao Indurti founded Connect Labs to improve lives by empowering people to use the right technology better. Soumya says there’s no point using a SaaS tool if it doesn’t give you more time to focus on real relationships with people.

Over the last 3 years, Soumya’s worked with almost all of the productivity SaaS tools on the market and in this episode, she reveals which ones will fast track your happiness!

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Interviewing Public: I work in a basketball organization and we manage 250 people using sightly as a CRM management program that we use across, not so much for customer use, but more so for a management tool.

Interviewing Public: I think we’ve moved over to Office 365 and the integration of the different platforms has been quite useful for us.

Serpil Senelmis: And I reckon there’s something to be said for old school pen and paper, right?

Interviewing Public: Yes, definitely.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. And in the final Masters Series for this season, we’re putting on the SAS or maybe that’s pronounced SaaS Software as a Service is a business model way computer applications available to you online for low monthly subscription, for free. Best of all, you can save time and increase your productivity.

Soumya Rao Indurti: I’ll actually be my happiest self when everything is just smooth like technology does what it’s supposed to do, my calendars all sync up the emails, go into the white folders, and like life seems great again. But if that doesn’t happen, these small stupid things, these little moments that we have every day, just like changes how your day is gonna go, how the day for the people around you is gonna go and generally, generically, everything is gonna go.

Serpil Senelmis: Soumya Indurti works with Connect labs who specialize in putting SaaS in place for businesses. Soumya is passionate about people and believes technology is only as good as the positive impact it can have on people, their work, career and lives. When it comes to spending time and increasing productivity. Soumya says work shouldn’t be A battle, the right SaaS tools can make us happier at work.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So I think I started like my early career at Google, we sort of like we’re all into like paid search advertising and ads and stuff like that. And then I decided to sort of work at a startup after that, so I could start my own eventually. So while I was at the startup, we used a lot of sales, marketing, automation, lots of productivity tools to sort of do things better, sometimes cheaper, you know, why not? And basically try to get ahead with whatever we could and I think it was such a change from like a place like Google that had everything like if you sneeze and you say, Oh my god, I’m really cold. People would come with like a thermometer to check like the temperature around you and stuff. So I think it goes from like being really appealing to like finding resources that you need not want I think. So it completely changed my journey, gave me a lot of like legs to start my own. And now I think we’re proudly three years old, one of hub spots, platinum partners in Australia, which is amazing because we were the APAC partner day last week in Sydney. And there were like 30 partners once upon a time and like now there’s 247 in Australia alone. And I was like what? So it’s quite a journey and I think there’s a lot of learning that I’ve had because of all the stuff I put myself through voluntarily. So it’s kind of like a crazy story. If you start at Google and choose to pick the hard yards like it’s mad, like everyone thought I was crazy. My mom was like, why? But anyway, I think like, it’s great that I did. And now I’m like, super happy. Like, it’s the hardest life has ever been in the last three years, but it’s been the best time that I’ve ever had. So generally, I think there’s something really amazing about creating connections. So I think we sort of went after that and created this brand around like how we can connect people better how we can make people happier at work and what we can do to support that so it’s not just about telling you that some sort of software is really great or use this. So use that. But it’s more about figuring out people and how we can sort of really, really support the happiness quotient in everyone’s lives. Okay, so there’s a few things that I’m going to go through today. And I hope that it will sort of put some sort of insight into all the little bits and bobs that I’ve sort of picked up along the way. How many of you have ever had these moments like at work? Oh, no, I forgot damn this laptop. How do I do that? Not sure what I gonna do. I just can’t seem to make this work. Or can I find this damn thing? Like, there’s always been somebody saying something somewhere that has really annoyed them that has made them less efficient or happy at work, basically. So everything’s fallen apart and nothing makes sense. And, you know, they take that stuff with them home, right? Like I’ve done it so many times. I’ll actually be my happiest self when everything is just smooth like technology does what it’s supposed to do. My calendars all sync up the emails go into the right folders, and like life seems great again. But if that doesn’t happen, these small stupid things, these little moments that we have every day, just like changes how your day is gonna go, how the day for the people around you is gonna go and generally generically everything is gonna go. So I think what we kind of very recently because we’re such a big work in progress is sort of figured out that our vision is to make like millions of people work happy and have these work happy moments. Because it’s not like the big stuff. It’s not how do you get like more leads? How do you get like more website visitors? Or how do you get like, how do you basically be successful every day because you just had a smile on your face instead of you know, hating the next person, your laptop, whatever? Quite frankly, life is hard. So there will be moments that you hate things around you but if we could create those little moments, we’re not trying to change things radically. We’re not trying to like, I think override things. But if we were to sort of look at things differently, because we change something we used all day, every day, I think the time and productivity and the effectiveness factor are just like flows into your lives. And so Oh, no, I forgot can then change to something like, Oh my god, I love this task list. Things you couldn’t find before you can now because it’s in that sneaky folder that you actually, you know, have created because you are better organized at work.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So I have this theory about work and life. Everyone talks about work-life balance, and I actually quite frankly, don’t think it’s a balance at all. And I think life just is he’s got a lot of elements in it. And work just happens to be for some people, all of it. Some people are part of it. And some people Maybe you’ll make different kinds of choices with their lives. Take for example, Joe. Joe works 40 hours a week from the age of 20 to 65 and gets two weeks of vacation every year. In that time, he will have worked like something around 90,000 hours in his lifetime, right? So the concept of work where you work from has like, you know, it’s changed over time. We’ve had like, okay, we work from the office, you can work from home now you can work from anywhere. I have this like thought that if we change the tools we use every day, that we’d be happier at work and there’s something to do with like, knowing that things are just going to work. It’s like I don’t know how many girls in the room have to like use a straight now to get their hair looking straight. Like there’s so many things you have to go get a blow-dry then you have to like go get it straight and it’s like quite a lot of work involved to do it. You just want to wake up one day and feel like oh, you know, you just want straight hair and vice versa for people who want curly hair, nothing against that, but we use a lot of tools at work, mostly SaaS tools. But like lots of these tools at work, there’s a whole bunch of great tools out there. And the thing that actually I think pulls me towards a lot of these brands is because they’re great founders behind them are their great teams working there are these people who are actually providing value or doing things that you know, really align with yours. So I think what I’m gonna do, you know, tell you a little bit about how we sort of run our customer success teams, how we run our own lives to be happier. And I think when I look at the whole picture, there’s like literally few things that I think we can go back and like, change or think about. So the first thing to do is to color-code your calendars. It’s amazing, like life-changing. I was on this call with like somebody who started a business and it’s kind of become really big in Sydney and stuff like that. And he was like “Soumya, the first thing you need to kind of think about is how you’re going to change how your life is structured”. And I was like, how am I gonna do that? That sounds so complicated. I was like, I don’t even know where to start, like, and this was like, Yes, I worked at a startup. Yes, I worked at Google. But I was still learning about like tax and a whole lot of other stuff. I was really busy doing other things. So it was like, I don’t even know what to do, man. And then he said, it’s quite simple really, why don’t you look at your calendar every day? And I was like, what does that mean? I don’t even want to look at it. Like it’s packed. Like it’s crazy. It’s miserable. It makes me like cry. And then he was like, you know, just like figure out what part of it is like social stuff, what part of it are meetings, what part of it are workshops? What part of it are you like, actually creating time for yourself? And quite frankly, when I started my business, I thought, you know, headspace and all these apps, like really silly. I was like Who’s gonna listen to all that stuff like as if I have time? I thought meditations like really lame as well. And I was like who’s gonna tell you like which person tell you stop thinking like my heads full of like stuff all the time. So I was like this is really bizarre that they’re going down that path so I think though when you start a business like you just figure out okay, this is it. Life is you know better when you think about your health and well being so you start to go back and figure out all the little bits that you can add in that calendar in a certain color. I chose green because I think the well-being part is like super vital so I actually have like quiet moments. Like I live across the Albert Park Lake so I’m like, Okay, I’ll go there and and like pretend that’s my green moments or like color code that into my calendar and leave it there for every Friday night. Yes, I don’t do much on Friday nights, it’s very fun. I sit in front of the lake and like I have a quiet moment. So color coding, it’s actually bizarrely like life changing. If you have have like this beautiful vision of like how you can use each color on your calendar to change you know how you look at your life so you go back and look at the month or the week if you have a lot of reds and red some meetings just pulling out the I don’t know sucking the life out of you because you go in there you talk about a bunch of things and nothing ever happens. I quite frankly think a little conversation over the desk or like over a coffee just to like actually say what you mean without being distracted with things on a slide or a sheet in front of you, whatever says a lot and you can go do something with the information that’s being shared. So we will create a giant that’s the beauty of I think being, you know, startup to scale up kind of, I think because you don’t really have a lot of time to go and chill somewhere. When we do we really chill but it’s very rare. But when we do that, like we’re actually completely there because we’re present, we put like, okay, I did get an Apple Watch. So I like ignore this stuff that I don’t have to see. But nobody knows that I would like quickly glance at things and like make sure that I, you know, I don’t have any files to put off and stuff like that. But there are things about like having a color-coded calendar to sort out your life.

Serpil Senelmis: So the takeaway so far from Soumya, color-code your calendar, red for meeting, green for time by the lake just to chill. In just a moment, Soumya will reveal how a CRM that’s a customer relationship management tool can change your life.

Soumya Rao Indurti: Over the next few weeks, the Masters Series team will be finalizing preparations for the next season of inspiring business champions. Meanwhile, the classes at WeTeachMe continue to grow and expand mines all over Australia. WeTeachMe connects you with the classes that you want in your neighborhood. Learn what makes your heartbeat at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. With a journalistic approach to sound and words written and recorded can help you tell your story effectively. To find out more about sound as a service, head to writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Ed Guy, why don’t you just take a break for the next few weeks. Soumya Indurti is the founder and CEO of Connect Labs where they help businesses create, connect, and convert for marketing and sales success. And she’s about to share her favorite software as a service to help you save time and increase productivity.

Soumya Rao Indurti: The other thing is to create lists and I had a lovely picture of the list that I created. It’s literally called like have to have to do and I divide these list in before I used to think nothing of them because I still have like five lists that I haven’t gone through like which weren’t like tomorrow or the next week or whatever. So I think the shorter the term, like the quicker it is for you to action it so don’t put stuff for like 20 days away like nobody cares, you’ll forget it. You know, we are aging every day like every second actually. So there’s no point leaving, you know, list in list to follow up just put like tangible things for tomorrow, or this week, but nothing more because the weekly stuff your calendar will deal for you. But the lists for everyday stuff to like check off is great. And this is going back to the life and work thing as well. It’s a mix of everything. You can create lists for work, you can create lists for your life. The other thing that I really find amazing about these tools that you can sort of change you know, every day is to have a lovely way to like communicate like we have some bots as well that just add a little bit of happiness every day. Do they make you bit more productive? It’s bizarre but like, I think communicating you know, even with inanimate objects when you’re really bogged with the day is hilarious. Like I asked growth bot HubSpot has this slack one for free if anyone want to get it, we have this growth bot, for example. I said, tell me a joke just for the purpose of this presentation, by the way. So growth bot was like, really lame. And give me that duplicate content. Why does search engineers not like twins? Because it’s duplicate content. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s what growth what can throw at you I suppose I didn’t know what’s gonna come of it. But you know, why not? Right, like, I think so. We’ve got clients that are really big, and we’ve got clients that are really small. But when we get really large projects, like everyone just gets down to like, getting stuff done, and I swear some of them don’t blink when I’m watching them and it’s scary. Me, so I like to look at them and I’m like, dude, I’m gonna like really die if you don’t blink right now or get up and walk. So some of them hate me for getting them to move. So, you know, there’s small things like this, it can just stare. No, it’s dumb, but it puts a smile on your face, you’ve had a bit of a break, they go back. And when they whatever tasks that tackling, which could be quite mundane at work, it’s sort of like just breaks it up, you can, you know, yell at a bot without like, taking out your angst about a project on a person next to you that potentially most likely doesn’t deserve it. But well, you know, we use a lot of Trello. Trello for life, Trello for work, Trello for a lot of things. We have inspiration boards on it, it’s only because it’s very visually like, appealing to a lot of us, but I think the other reason we’ve used it is we found different ways to make it scale as we’ve grown. We do our social media scheduling and stuff from HubSpot, but we do all the planning on Trello. So it’s like a really cool place to see everything visually and like. So we use it like large scale and we’re a massively growing agency. Lots of people tell us it’s a shit idea. But we kind of are doing really well with it. I feel like the more agial you are and the quicker you can get things done, it’s actually good for you, I think there will come a time when all this profitability stuff to the tee is going to matter. But I think systems and you know, tools and whatever you get only give you what you put in. So, you know, if you excuse my, you know, great use of language, it’s always shit in, shit out like. So, if you kind of think about what you put into systems or things every day, you’re only gonna get back what you put into it. It’s not magic, it’s not going to do everything for you. You’ve got to do a lot of hard work just like color-coding your calendar, but once you’ve done it, life squared. So we find that a CRM can like really organize everything for your revenue, tasks, your everyday life, like all the little pain points, you know. And I think you can get a free CRM. I highly recommend checking out the HubSpot one. Obviously, disclaimer, again, we are partners. But there is a lot to do with that phrase here. I mean, imagine not paying for it too, that’s really good to use and like organizing pipelines revenue, seeing the structure of like your business in and out. There’s a lot of value in it. But more than anything, I think the ability like we put stuff into a Slack channel that comes straight into our HubSpot CRM, like it’s like a native integration, right. So I think when you put all the tools in one place, it just makes sense. And you can map like every small piece of like your life like quicker and easier, and hate systems tools and smash your keyboard lesser.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So use a free CRM, or you can pay for all its features. We’ve tried everything in my little short span of, you know, three years in like this space. We’ve thought about how we can do stuff quickly every day, how we can annoy each other and our clients a lot lesser every day. And also, I think, like, how can we just put a little bit of happiness back in our life every day. So one of the big things that I really want to share is that the tools you use every day can like, keep you happy, or like really destroy it. So I think don’t settle for less. And don’t settle for something that does not work for you. Because it’s most likely something that just doesn’t simply work. Because none of us you know, want to make things work and fix things that keep breaking all the time. And that’s where, like, you can make small adjustments and change things like so many people who work with us, they’re like, Oh, my God, like it’s not about the tool, is it? I was like, no, it’s actually about what makes you successful at work and how can we sort of use tools to help you get there and it becomes easier because the person sees value in it and we emphasize the fact that we just want you to work happy, really. So how can we sort of help in that space and the tools once you get rid of like the pain that the tools are causing you, you can actually spend more time actually connecting with other people around you. Because I think nobody really loves the iPad generation and the mobile generation and, you know, lack of connection. Like I think every time I go to a restaurant, it’s so funny, everyone’s taking pictures of their food for Instagram, and I’m like, I really, it’s so weird that I’m in the digital space. And I still like, want to eat my food and not take a picture of it. But sometimes it’s like, pretty beautiful. And I think now, you kind of like just think about the person making this food and stuff and that little blip like when I put stuff up and I actually take a picture of a lovely granola bowl like my friends will be like, Oh my god, where do you have it and a little bit of, you know, happiness is sent to the person who actually made it somewhere behind and like a really hot environment. And I don’t know it’s kind of like lovely that we share but everything in moderation and everything only to bring someone joy, I think. But we do need to like spend more time connecting with people. And that’s why what we do we really love because we focus a lot on the people, whether it’s in businesses around us, whether we connect with, you know, random on a website, anything is about the person. And we do like this person-centric or human-centric like view of sales, marketing and customer relationship management. So it’s like something for you to just take away that, you know, tools can increase productivity, but it’s increasing productivity so you can spend time with others around you. Thank you.

Serpil Senelmis: So going from the opulence of Google to the frugality of a startup. Soumya has learned that it’s a small things that will change the way that your day goes. So utilize the tools people, and that will make your workday happy. Thanks, Soumya. Next time on Masters Series, we’ll have a bright shiny new season for you. Will kick-off at the end of July with how to leave the nine to five and start your own business. We’ll have some inspiring speakers, and plenty of great tips to help you and your startup no matter where you are in your journey. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. And for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Marketing is about building relationships – to retain good customers and reach new ones in a way that encourages them to become repeat customers. This podcast outlines the key steps to building a community.

Sarah Meredith is the Australian Country Director for Global Citizen, the movement that aims to end extreme poverty by 2030. Global Citizen has set itself a goal of building a community of 100 million and with 8 million working with them already, they are well on their way.

Martina Hughes is the founder of Tantric Blossoming, the largest Tantric Community in Australia. Martina says community is all about relationships and it is strengthened by shared risk. She outlines 3 essential elements of community building.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Interviewing Public: When you aim at being the best in what you do, you can get some references. And I must say that was very helpful to grow my business. Yeah.

Interviewing Public: Yeah. So when I think of my community, I think of the 1500 people I’ve got on my Meetup group. I’ve had one contact today, from when I put up a discussion topic. On the holiday. My only feedback I get is from those that actually attend my meetups.

Interviewing Public: They like that personalization, not a generic advice up to a point you can do personalization for that tend to just follow templates to make it look the same but the content I just write per person.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. An old adage in business is that it costs more to attract new customers than it does to keep existing customers. These days engaged customers become communities through social media groups, email newsletters, and customer relationship management software. Martina Hughes is an expert in building communities. She created Tantric Blossoming, Australia’s largest tantric community where she has supported thousands of people with workshops, retreats, and training.

Martina Hughes: Community is all about relationships. Having any satisfying fulfilling meaningful experience in life involves our relationships. And so I have three visions of what I say is necessary for creating community.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Martina shortly, but first, we’re going global. Can you imagine how powerful We could be if we all work together. That’s the mission of Global Citizen with a goal to build a community of 100 million and end extreme poverty by 2030. Sarah Meredith is the global citizens Australian country director. She says partnerships are everything when it comes to building a community.

Sarah Meredith: Really want to take you on a journey today about who we are, why we exist, how we operate, how we build a community around our work. And really what’s next, what’s the vision for us over the coming two years, where movement more than 8 million people worldwide founded by three young Australians here in Melbourne, one of those is for Men Young Australian of the Year, Hugh Evans. Our mission is to build a movement of more than 100 million global citizens worldwide. These actions will help achieve this vision of a world without extreme poverty. essentially how we do it is we have a platform where we provide opportunities for global citizens to learn about the world’s biggest challenges. And if you go to globalcitizen.org, you’ll see that we have a policy areas where you can follow various issues that you’re passionate about girls and women, water and sanitation, finance and innovation, education, ending hunger, these are really critical issues. And then we invite global citizens in those areas to take action. And each action ends your award point, and that reward point. If you get five of them, you can use them to redeem rewards tickets. Now many in the world have the lucky opportunity to attend one of our major festivals. But we also offer tickets to concerts thanks to the partnerships with artists and promoters and here in Australia we’re very lucky that at the moment, we have tickets available for Taylor Swift, Shania Twain, Pink, the presets which is had Missy Higgins. And that’s thanks to the generosity of those artists giving us two tickets per show for global citizens to win here in Australia. Right now, we know that we need 260 billion a year to end extreme poverty. At present 150 billion is funded through what we call Overseas Development Assistance. And 100 and 10 billion gap in that financing. We know that the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on every nation to commit a point 7% of gross national income. So when you think about that, that’s 70 cents and every hundred dollars of Australia’s budget would go towards helping others overseas. And right now Australia in the commits point 19% of gross national income, about $4 billion, which is an incredible help and we are very happy that that money continues. But over recent years that has dropped. And we’ve been campaigning quite hard to have that increase because we know that the challenge is at the pinnacle of the moment in extreme poverty. Over the last decade, 1 billion people are being lifted out of extreme poverty. And we have 1 billion left that we want to get to in the next decade as we head to 2030.

Sarah Meredith: So we know that if you want to influence governments and you want to influence policy, you need a movement of people, a constituency of people that say to that government, this is a priority, we need to invest in at. So we’ve been working hard to build a movement across the globe have active citizens who will reach out to governments, they’ll reach out to corporates, they’ll reach out to their friends and peers and say, we want to end extreme poverty and the time is now. This is why we’ve created our model of building a community, which is based around four key areas, one, individuals signing up, it’s all free. And we have 8 million at the moment and we’re building to 100 million as is our mission. We also gather an army of the biggest artists and talent on earth. And when we mean by that is that we host music festivals, but we also ask those artists to make commitments through their social media and through the networks. And at the moment, we’re very excited that we have Chris Martin as one of our Global ambassadors, he’s signed on with us to 2030. And he curates our festivals. You may have seen Rihanna as one of our ambassadors, but we also have a number of artists that have appeared over the years at our festivals. We also work very hard behind the scenes to work with governments and policy experts, partnerships are everything for our community, we cannot achieve any of the actions receive any of the commitments without the partnerships we have. They may be with other NGOs, they may be with business, or they may be with governments and some governments really want to champion these issues such as Norway if you’re really passionate about water and sanitation, and they came on board in a partnership with us to make large scale commitments. We also partner with unexpected brands and really try to influence the work they do, but also in trying to get them to leverage their reach to increase the number of global citizens we have. We partnered with Gucci’s time for change around gender equality. We’ve partnered with Johnson and Johnson around health campaigning in vaccines, we partnered with Procter and Gamble about water and sanitation. So I was talking about our audience and that’s really important for us because we need to understand our community to continue to build that community, work with them and ensure that we’re meeting the campaign issues of interest, as we know that our audience is 63% female, which is why we do a lot of gender equality campaign. Girls are very passionate about that and as you will see from recent movements, we’ve been on this issue for a couple of years, but it’s really shine that now is the time to really talk about gender equality, and 50% of millennials, which would be unsurprising to many of you, we use technology as our platform. But we also have some of the coolest artists in the world and people want to get on board that our impact is the most important way that we communicate back to the community because we could have this entire movement, they get a ticket, they get five points and then I move on. But we remind our global citizens well those five actions that you took to get a ticket actually resulted in these wonderful outcomes. 30 million actions have been taken on our platform, which is an incredible number. We track those numbers around the different themes and make sure that we continue to drive them up. those actions resulted in $35 billion in commitments made on our stage, which is pretty incredible. Those commitments will actually affect the lives of more than 1 billion people. We have a partnership with PWC, we independently audit all of our commitments to prove that because of the actions of global citizens, that commitment was made. And we’re also releasing regular reports to say, this government came on stage, got a big announcement and got a little publicity and they made this commitment. We’re actually been tracking their delivery of that. And we do a traffic light system, about the delivery of those commitments, constantly reminding people that the impact of the work we do and the commitments we make are critical in the efforts to end extreme poverty. So how does our community engage with us? We’re pretty clear. We want your voice, we don’t want your money. Your voice is the most powerful thing you have. Many people feel disempowered with the political system. As someone who’s worked in a very long time, I can tell you that your voice is actually pretty powerful if you use it in the right way. And we try to amplify your voice. So say, we asked you to send a tweet to the Prime Minister asked him to increase Australia’s Overseas Development Assistance budget. That’s pretty important because if he says 100,000 tweets about that from constituents, it’s going to impact his view about whether that’s a priority in the budget. We also ask people to sign petitions, we present those petitions and every opportunity we can and we just had an event in Brussels, launching our sheet as equal campaign, where we presented petitions of hundreds of thousands of global citizens to take an action around gender equality.

Sarah Meredith: We also ask everyone to download the app. So you regularly get engagement. And if you haven’t, please download the app. It’s really cool. You get a constant feed of what’s happening in the world around development. But in general, it really talks about a lot of the issues facing the world, not just about the Sustainable Development Goals. And it also gives you lots of actions that you can take quite easily. We also really try and engage with that community by driving really creative, cool content, and really challenging what is quite a complex issue in breaking it down so people can have a bit of fun and share it with their friends. We actually had a video that went viral where our team in New York rewrote the words to Adele’s Hello. And then we sent it out about calling your member of parliament because that’s a perfect example of how we can engage our community and really start to grow it to an even bigger community. I just like to wrap up with what’s next for us this year is the hundredth anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, which is a pretty unique moment, he really had the greatest call to action end extreme poverty. We launched it in London, and we’ll be taking it to our festival in September this year. And there may be announcements about other opportunities throughout the globe about events are doing and it’s the generation to end extreme poverty, and we just have a little inspirational clip to get you excited. Hopefully, you sign up to Global Citizen, you start taking action and you join the movement.

Nelson Mandela (Recording): Not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings..

Sarah Meredith: Thank you very much.

Serpil Senelmis: How impressive growing a global community from just three young Australians with a vision to active citizens worldwide and 13 million actions. It just shows how powerful a community voice can be. Next up on the Masters Series we’ll explore the tantric way of building community.

Ad Guy: The Masters Series is presented by We Teach Me, Australia’s biggest school. WeTeachMe connects you with face to face classes in your neighborhood. Learn what makes your heartbeat at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. Journalists for hire, Written and Recorded, record podcasts, and write blogs that tell your story. Have a read and listen at writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to community building.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy. Martina Hughes experienced a deep inner awakening with Tantra and wanted to share that with the world. So she created Tantric Blossoming and it’s become the largest tantric community in Australia. Martina says community is about sharing risks. It’s also about sharing challenges and having a sense of collective achievement.

Martina Hughes: Community is all about relationships. Having any satisfying fulfilling, meaningful experience in life involves our relationships. What led me to start Tantric Blossoming? Actually, there are a few things that led me to start Tantric Blossoming. But one of the key factors was my desire to make a difference in the world. From when I was very young, I had this internal burning desire to make a difference. I didn’t know how I was going to make a difference but there was this coal that was drawing me to stand up in the world to stand up for something and to support people to experience transformation. In actual fact, when I started Tantric Blossoming, I had no idea that I was starting a community, I just wanted to help people feel better. I wanted to help people have better relationships feel more connected to their bodies. And so I started off with some very short events, sacred sexuality for women, and some private sessions, helping people to unravel their conditioning, helping them to get more in touch with their body to be able to have more effective communication. And all of that was going well for a few years. And then I felt a call for something more. And this sense of people had been to my workshops, wanting to come back and experience regular connection with others who’ve been to the workshops. And so for me, I went, okay, they don’t want to keep coming back and doing the same introductory workshops. What can I do that gives them a space for connection, a space that feels like community. And fortunately, I had a dream around that time, and in this dream I saw people coming along to an event with me where they would do tantric practices, simple things like massage and touch and eye gazing and communication practices. And in that dream, I saw how that could be a way for people to come together regularly and grow through using these practices. So I started Tantric Nights in 2008 and for me, that was the beginning of community around the work that I offer, because with Tantric Nights, all of a sudden people who were longing for more connection in their life, people who were longing for the feeling of community had a space that they felt safe, had a space where they could connect to others. So in some ways, my entry into community was a little bit of a happy accident, you could say. And so I have three visions of what I see is necessary for creating community. And so these three keys are to have a shared vision. So for me when I created Tantric Nights, the vision was to create a space for people to connect for people to feel for people to be able to share experiences with others. And it turns out that a lot of other people had a similar vision of wanting to have that experience. I’m used to being somebody who does a lot of things alone and being an entrepreneur. There’s that sense of Oh yeah, I know how to do this, and I’ll do it solo. Tantric Nights grew really quickly, like my very first event, I had 12 people there, and within six months I had 80 people there. And so pretty soon I was going I need Help for this event. It’s no longer a one person event. So very quickly, I realized that I needed a team around me to support me. And that building of a team around the work, gave other people a sense of being able to step in, because people felt what it was that I was offering. And people wanted to be part of that. If your vision is strong, other people will come to you and go, yes, I have a similar vision. And I would love to be part of what you’re creating. Now, I’ve had a lot of people coming towards me over the years with similar visions. Not all of them share my values. So I have values around responsibility, integrity, growth, expansion, being of service, and another of the values we have at Tantric Blossoming is why to be that sense of the joy of life, that joy that comes from serving others. So for me to say yes to collaborating with somebody to say yes to somebody being part of our team, they also need to share our values.

Martina Hughes: And then, of course, we live in this world where technology is changing things really, really fast. Online communities are popping up all the time. Social media is changing the flavor of the world. So it’s very important as an entrepreneur, creating a community to stay tuned in to make sure the vision stays current. Because when I started tantric knights, the vision was very much around creating space for connection. But also I was in a period of growth then, within a few years, people started asking me for retreats, people started asking me for training programs, and so part of having an effective community is listening to the people who are part of your community, listening to what they want, what they need, what they’re expecting. And having that sense of there being dialogue that’s not just from leader to participants and team members, but actually conversations that are between participants, between team members, but also coming back to facilitators and leaders. So the conversation needs to be able to go in all directions. And it’s been really, really effective for me to listen to the participants in our groups to have that sense of what they’re looking for what they need from us. And so then that led to me creating retreats, creating training programs, which have helped me to develop both as a woman as a facilitator and as a person. I remember a business mentor I had a few years ago. questioning me on my vision. And I was going through a period of time where my vision was a little bit wobbly, and kind of going, ah, I’ll go with the flow kind of going through one of those spiritual phases where it’s like, I’m just going with the flow, and I’ll see what happens next. And I remember my business mentor saying to me, would you get in a plane with a pilot who didn’t have a clear vision of where he was going to take you and I went, okay, good point, good point. And so at that stage, I went back and revisited my vision. And in revisiting my vision, getting really clear that I want to empower men and women to live the most authentic life possible. Because for most of us, we’ve been on the receiving end of conditioning. We’ve been on the receiving end of contraction since we were children. And a lot of people are leaving and feeling quiet, shot down quite painful. One of the common things I noticed when I talk to people is that most people live with this sense that something is missing in their lives, but they don’t actually know what is missing. Another big part of having a community that feels connected is shared risk, shared experiences, shared challenge. Our retreats are limited to 20 people. But in that way people have the sense of knowing that they can journey deeply in this retreat container, they can journey deeply with each other. Also on the element of risk with keeping our numbers limited, people feel safe. They’re taking a risk, they open their hearts, they share some of their painful stories. They share some of their joys, breakthroughs. They share about things that affect them deeply. So there’s an element of risk taking in the way people show up in our spaces. There’s certain advanced retreats where we asked people to get naked and dance so people to get naked and gaze into each other’s eyes. Most people say to me beforehand, there’s no way I’ll ever do that. I’m not getting naked in front of a group of people. But when they do it, it changes their world. Because what we’re most afraid of is being emotionally naked. Our clothes are really just the mask for hiding how we feel by hiding our fears, our anxiety, our joy. And so I can see a few interesting faces in the audience go, I would never do that.

Martina Hughes: But what I’ve seen is that after people have been naked together, And recognizing that it’s not actually a sexual experience. It’s not about getting naked, to have sex, to do things to each other but it’s taking a risk, it’s leaning into challenge together. It’s discovering new edges. And generally there’ll be at some point at which every newcomer looks around and goes, wow, this is really beautiful. And so much easier than I thought in my mind beforehand. It takes down a lot of our walls that takes down a lot of our barriers. Not saying that that has to be your recipe for your community to go and get people naked. But what risks and challenges might you build in? Like there’s personal development seminars where people walk across hot coals, and the sense of achievement of walking across hot coals gives people both the risk and the achievement of going somewhere. Also in our space, ritual is really important. I went to a seminar in the us a couple of years ago, which has a really strong community and they have a number of ritualized parts of the conference, where have an opening party and a closing party and certain other regular parts of it. So, ritual gives people that sense of our I come to the space and this is what I feel, this is what happens for me. So, ritual and those shared experiences take people deeper into themselves. And then what I see as the third key is a sense of belonging. The number one cause of depression is people not having a sense of belonging, not having a sense of belonging to family, to tribe, to community. And so the way we live nowadays, with people living individually rather than in extended family or not living in extended community space, it impacts people greatly. And so, at Tantric Blossoming, there’s an element in everything we do of showing people that we care whether it’s a private session, whether it’s a workshop or over trade or an online course, letting people know that we truly care and who they are as a person is valued by us. So that way, I have clients and community members who have been with me for say, 10 or 11 years. I might not see them for two or three years. But then all of a sudden, though, kind of hit a crisis point in their life, and they come back and they come back because they know that Tantric Blossoming provides that space of caring, that space where they can open they can grow. They can experience challenge, and new ways of being. Even in our online interactions though, if I’m running a zoom webinar, I’ll take time to check in with people, take time to see how people are feeling because that’s part of what’s missing in our online world today is people’s feelings are not being included. People’s feelings are not being allowed to take up space. So that element of caring is very much part of what we’re offering and it’s part of what has people feel like Tantric Blossoming is home for them. And it’s something that a lot of my regular clients and community members will say that when they come into the spaces with us, they feel like they’re home again. And on some level, all of us are longing for that feeling of home in our bodies, the feeling of what’s it like to be so comfortable that I feel at home in my own skin that I feel really happy and confident with who I am. And so I encourage all of you, as you’re working on your businesses and developing your community to have a look at what is the shared vision that you’re putting out there? Is that a vision that other people can easily step into and become part of? Are you creating opportunities for others to make a difference with you? Also, what are the experiences you’re creating for people? Do those experiences touch their hearts? Do those experiences challenge them? Do those experiences inspire them? In some way experiences what will make the difference in their life.? And are you cultivating a sense of belonging? Your community so that they know they have a tribe, they have a network, they have a support system behind them. If you work with those three keys, you’ll find a lot of fulfillment for yourself as well as for your community members. Thank you.

Serpil Senelmis: So a key takeaway therefrom Martina for startups and businesses is to know what your shared vision is, and whether you’re cultivating a sense of belonging. Thanks, Martina. Next time on Masters Series, work, life, balance does it really exist? For startups and entrepreneurs, the boundaries around work and life tend to blur. So we’ll explore some different approaches to getting the balance right. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and the WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

For many startups, stress is just one of the energies that keep things moving along. But the high intensity and high pressure can take their toll on the health of founders and employees. This episode is an opportunity to take time out for yourself and to pick up a few healthy habits to incorporate into your day.

Omar de Silva founded the business school The Plato Project to foster entrepreneurship with some good philosophies. He recommends mindfulness in the short term and over longer periods to spot damaging trends.

Debra Longin had a traumatic experience that highlighted the dissatisfaction in her stressful career. Finding the same traits in founders, she established MAW Creative to encourage more mindfulness, art, and wellbeing.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Interviewing Public: Most stressful thing probably is the level of uncertainty in the business while it’s, it’s not sustainable, it’s face down uncertainty.

Interviewing Public: The elevator pitch, putting everything into 30 words or less is very stressful to actually come up and to actually execute it.

Interviewing Public: To me is marketing and just practicing my pitch with the local markets, you know sticking to the plan and just trying to do your best to execute your ideas.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and a hunk of stress. Working in a startup is easy to forget lunch breaks, start early,finish late work right through the weekend, and then it starts all over again. And if you’re responsible for investors, money, and employees, paypax, there’s constant pressure to perform and grow. Let’s face it, startups are hard work, and a little bit stressful. Debra Longin is the founder of MAW Creative. That stands for mindfulness, art and well being.

Debra Longin: This is going to turn into a cautionary tale, however, about that high intensity, because as you move on in your career, in corporate, I guess, I started working in larger and larger company. I became more and more involved in corporate clients. And what started off is a very genuine interest in design and creativity, sort of really, because actually a lot about stress. I was stressed my clients were stressed. High intensity became high pressure, and it was, you know, quite a challenge.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Debra shortly but first, Omar de Silva. Omar has made several attempts at business with a couple of successes. Now his focus is on education in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And he runs a business school called The Plato Project. After pulling himself up from the brink of bankruptcy, I discovered there’s more to life than just chasing dollars. Omar, who’s named after the famous actor, Omar Sharif says it’s a critical skill to recognize stress. And you need to be self aware about both micro-moments and continual trends.

Omar de Silva: So that’s me there in the middle in fine form, and the day that I realized I was in financial ruin. That was the first point for me where I realized that chasing dollars was not the answer to anything really. I had made too much money early in my life, I did not know how to handle that money, deal with that money and I was doing stupid things, not paying attention to the bigger picture and got myself into some really substantial trouble and found myself very, very close to declaring bankruptcy. And in fact, I’d been recommended that that’s what I do. And that’s what I was gearing myself up to do. But before that, we had a trip to Sri Lanka planned with my family. And one of the things about going bankrupt is that travel becomes quite difficult. So I didn’t do anything before the trip and we went on the trip. Long story short, my dad who grew up there, he told me all these stories about how difficult it was growing up in Sri Lanka in that type of environment and how lucky I was in Australia to have everything that I did have. And I just thought that they were the standard father stories you got given as a child but I went there and I saw it all to be true. And it was it was a really big, important shift in my mindset. And so that made me come back to Australia and choose not to go bankrupt and not to quit. So I got back to work and I started chasing the dollar again to pay off my debts and to get out the other side and accelerate through a number of years, the second time I realized that chasing dollars wasn’t the answer was when there was a situation in my family where one of my family members had a psychotic episode and a bit of a breakdown, which was the sort of catalyst if you like, for me learning that the men in my family had a nasty predisposition to mental health challenges and that I had depression and anxiety and really opened up my eyes to the fact that again, there was more to life than simply working in chasing dollars. So what I really wanted to focus on is some of the practical things that I’ve do still, to this day every day as best I can to try and stay on top of the stress that is inevitable with startups and business and life more generally. And hopefully, there’s some practical things that you can take away with you. When it comes to dealing with stress, your health, your well being, we often hear about your physical and your mental health and well being. But one thing that gets left out of that conversation a lot, in my perspective is your professional well-being. And what I mean by that, when I realize that I was dealing with some mental health challenges, and I started to reflect on the six months leading up to that point, when I thought that I was struggling with the business and work side of things, the answer for me was work harder. So then when I got to the point of realizing that I was actually not in a very good spot, and I was quite unhealthy, a lot of people said, you’ve got to start working. The interesting thing for me in that situation, somebody that was doing something he was passionate about and believed in, is the idea of not working was actually more stressful than the idea of working. I suppose the first thing that I want to share and just challenge you to think about is when you’re trying to get that health and well being balance right, don’t eliminate any element. It’s about getting the right mixture of elements across those three, physical, mental and professional factors that become really important. The way that we talk about this in the courses that we run as part of our business is this idea of personal leadership. And personal leadership to us is this idea that the only way that you can expect to get the most out of other people around you from a leadership perspective is by first getting the most out of yourself on a daily basis. And that’s what we mean by personal leadership. So I just want to share with you some of the practical things that we talked about the practical things that I do, to again, deal with that stress and try and hit peak performance on a sustained daily basis. First of all, is the idea of your current state awareness. It’s really, really important, as frequently as you possibly can to check in with how you are doing in any given moment. And that’s not only from a getting shit done perspective, in your Upon your job or in your life or in your relationship, getting shit done in your relationships for another pairing of phrases, but I think you know what I mean?

Omar de Silva: Understanding how you’re doing in the short term is the easiest and most important step to your self-awareness. It can articulate itself in a few different ways, though your mindset, what’s the mindset that you’ve taken into a particular situation? What’s the body language that you’re giving off? And how is that affecting your mindset? And then ultimately, what is your behavior like? Unfortunately, though, when people start to focus on that they lose track of this idea of the prolonged state awareness. And this is something that I realized that I was falling into the trap of when I ended up with the depression and anxiety where you keep checking in on a micro-moment. I’m a bit stressed at the moment, but I’ll be okay in the afternoon and then the afternoon come, I’m okay. Next, I am stressed now, stressed now I’m stressed out the afternoon, afternoon, okay. That happens day after day, after day,after day, after day. Unless we give ourselves that chance to check in on how we’ve been going over the prolonged period of time, it can be really difficult to notice the trends. So when you go into this piece of self-awareness, it needs to be both short term and long term that you’re constantly checking in on. When you build up your self awareness and you start to join a few of the other dots. If you can start to put the opportunity lens onto all of the things that you have in front of you. It becomes instantly a positive frame in your mind by framing things up with the opportunity and the positive lens. It gives you a better chance at being good at staying self-aware and ensuring that you’re making the most out of each situation. So that’s the first bit around self-awareness. Authenticity. This is another thing that gets thrown around a lot but to me is probably been the single most important thing I’ve recognized in unlocking my professional success. What is your definition of success? And I know this verges on Tony Robbins soft and fluffy stuff, don’t want to be that, don’t like Tony Robbins. What I’m getting at, it’s so easy, particularly in the world of social media, particularly in the world of influences, particularly in the world of fast free information that we see other people. And we try to use their definition of success for our own definition of success. The moment you give yourself that chance to figure out what success means to you, and you give yourself the opportunity to chase that pursuit of success is the moment that you have the chance to get your peak performance on a regular basis. So the way that I’ve looked at this over a little while is number one asking the question, is it worth it? It’s a really simple question. A really profound question, really powerful question and important question to ask yourself, is it worth it? Whatever it is, just check-in. Is this actually worth it? And closely follow to that is, is this me? We’ve all found ourselves in situations where we’re committing to doing something, that if we actually had the chance to really reflect and check it, we’re like, you know what, I don’t actually care about this. This isn’t me, this isn’t worth it to me. And one of the things that made me realize that was when my son was born, and I was trying to do all things at once. And me is somebody that would like to think I’m fairly self-aware and fairly and shoot with these types of things. I’d get home after a day of work. I pick my son up, I’d have him in one arm, and then I’d pull my phone out to you know, catch up on emails, and I got my son looking at me and I’m looking at my phone.

Omar de Silva: Luckily enough, I’ve got a wife that’s not afraid to tell me what I need to hear. And it became very clear to me very quickly that hey, it just wasn’t worth it. Sounds simple, it’s a lot easier said than done, though. Building the discipline the habit, the chance to constantly check in with yourself on these simple questions become really important. When it comes to a successful startup, in my opinion when it comes to a successful life, we must be proactive, we must make decisions, which give us the best chance to see the future we would like to eventuate. You need to give yourself the chance to buy in and believe in the fact that you absolutely have control over your next step. Don’t control the hand that you’re dealt, but you can control the way you play the cards. And it’s a really, really important thing that you need to do whatever you possibly can to believe in and buy into. Because until you do that, then you’re not going to be able to build the business you would like to live the life that you would like to in my opinion. So the way that I go about doing that is reflection. And I don’t do it hourly anymore, but I absolutely do it daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually. And I check in on things on a daily basis. I check in on things that I was grateful for, I check in on things I did really well that day, I check in on things that I want to improve the next day. And that’s what I do every morning because if I don’t, my brain goes bananas and I end up in a not a very healthy place. So that becomes really important to me. And by doing that, by getting a really good understanding of where I am, it gives me the frame of mind that I need to make proactive positive steps to go where I want to go. And that’s really important when it comes to your health and well being and your business success. You need to have a proactive mindset. You can’t fall into the trap of thinking or wait for it to happen. your health, your well being your business success is only ever the result of what you do first, things don’t come to you, unfortunately. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and sometimes things fall in your lap. But you’ve got to be taking the first step, you’ve got to be the one that’s initiating things to happen when it comes to building a successful business and looking after yourself. Lastly, there’s this idea of the productive struggle. This is the idea that as soon as you stop moving forwards then by virtue of everybody else, moving forward your relatives moving backward. That’s the idea of every goal you achieve, set yourself a new one. That doesn’t mean you don’t stop and appreciate what you have done or celebrate your successes, but it’s about always moving forward and using that momentum in a positive way. Be ambitious on things that are meaningful and important to you. And that are also pragmatic and realistic, not saying don’t have big dreams, but make it meaningful first. It’s not about unrealistic ambition. Second thing is that idea of continuous learning. Our businesses called Plato Project, we’ve got a really strong focus on philosophy and self reflection, and there’s some convoluted quote, which if I had to go, I’ll butcher it, but it’s basically the one that as soon as you think you know, everybody, everything, you’re actually an idiot, you know, very clever, right? We’ve got the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. You’ve all heard that before. We’ve all got unknown unknowns. And the moment you forget that you don’t know what you don’t know, is the moment that you stop. having the chance to move forward, it’s the moment you stop having the chance to look after yourself. It’s the moment you stop having a chance to build a bigger and better business, embrace continuous learning.

Omar de Silva: Triggers, we’ve all got these things called stresses. Stresses are things that build up over time under the surface. Not liking a job, having financial worries, having relationship worries, having health issues, etc., those are the stresses. And then we’ve got our triggers. And the triggers are the little things that happen which bring about bad behavior, so to speak. Road rage, running late for a meeting, getting a last-minute request, burning your mouth on a toasted sandwich, and knowing that your whole weeks ruined. Same with bad coffee, whatever. We’ve all got these triggers as somebody that’s been, I think I’m through the worst of my anxiety, I think and I think it’s as a result of doing things like that. And the way that my anxiety would kick-off is I’d be running late for a meeting. And then from there, my brain will go shit, you’re running late for a meeting, you’re going to lose this client, you’re going to lose your business, you’re gonna lose a dog, you’re gonna lose your house, you’re gonna die, right? That’ll happen in like five seconds. So for me recognizing what those triggers were was the first most important thing I could do to being proactive in dealing with my anxiety. Once I listed all of those triggers off for me, is coming up with the circuit breakers. So when I get an email, which I read, and I take personal offense to because I’m a bit of a hypersensitive sook, like, I cried so much at my wedding, the video went viral and people like it looks like he’s at a funeral. Like, that’s how much of a sook I am, right? When I take emails a bit too personally, the circuit breaker for me is I just need to go close my emails, go back to my eq guy, go back to my vision and reset and realize I hate and so that. When I have a really bad day, if I’ve got a panic attack, something like that, I’ve got to go to the gym, and then there’s sort of everything in between. So recap figure out what your triggers are. Figure out some circuit breakers that you can put in place the moment your triggers get there. So you can stay self-aware, you can stay authentic use, you can stay proactive, and you can embrace that productive struggle which is in front of you at the moment. I think that’s it for me. Thanks, guys.

Serpil Senelmis: So framing things with a positive lens, being authentic, and being proactive in the habits and rituals that work for you are just some of the ways to manage stress in a startup. Thanks, Omar. I’m going to try that. In just a moment on Masters Series, we’re going to dial up the mindfulness and well-being with Debra Longin.

Ad Guy: As Omar de Silva says one of the keys to reducing stress in business is lifelong learning. WeTeachMe is Australia’s biggest school, connecting you with classes that will feel the gaps in your knowledge. With classes in your area WeTeachMe is also a great way to learn more about mindfulness and wellbeing. Invest in yourself at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is a stress-free production of Written and Recorded. As journalist for hire, Written and Recorded specialize in identifying the angle in your story that will connect with your audience. Then they crafted into an engaging podcast for internal and external communications. Hear more at writtenandrecorded.com. And now it’s back to you, Serpil.

Serpil Senelmis: Hey, thanks for that Ad guy. Now it’s time to get mindful. Debra Longin founded MAW Creative to incorporate mindfulness in well being into the spaces we occupy every day. The former corporate interior designer had a wake up call that things needed to change in her work life on the tragic day that six people were killed in front of her office.

Debra Longin: Hello, everyone. I felt that I should give back and I guess this is my story. So it is, I guess a story of my journey, I guess as a kind of a reforming corporate person into small business. So I think hopefully we will relate and I’ll explain some of the stresses that have I’ve certainly experienced and I guess also some of the stresses that have really, actually helped propel me through my career. I’m gonna start at the beginning and tell you a little bit out of myself. So my background, I grew up in Adelaide in the Adelaide Hills. I was the youngest in my family, and in my extended family, I was also the youngest. So interestingly, despite how I ended up I was considered the small one, the quiet one. It was a very noisy European family. So I actually found it very difficult to get a word in. So I found otherwise, I guess so my talent and my interest and I guess my passion was creativity, making things and problem-solving. So that’s how I would sort of find my way and my voice and my expression. So ultimately, I found myself drawn toward interior architecture, sort of made sense. It was something that I really enjoyed. It was something that I was good at. I got my first job in a home office with a woman called Mary Harvin. Who was an amazing inspiration and it was a very high-energy environment like it was creative, it was making it was you know, everything I wanted in a job. I loved it, to be honest. It certainly propelled me in the industry and gave me a lot. This is going to turn into a call cautionary tale, however, about that high intensity, because as you move on in your career, in corporate, I guess I started working in larger and larger companies. I became more and more involved in corporate clients. And what started off is a very genuine interest in design and creativity. So there really became actually a lot about stress. I was stressed my clients were stressed. High intensity became high pressure, and it was, you know, quite a challenge. Everyone has a wake-up call, and I guess mine was kind of late in life, but I guess never too late. So I’ve kind of plodding along stressed working stressed with people, etc. And I hope I don’t offend anybody but my wake up call was the 20th of January when obviously someone drove up, back street and killed six people. And that happened outside of my office. And what happened to me then was, I thought, for the first time, you know, I could have been anything, you know, my family raised me, you could be anything that you want to be, you know, it’s a great ambition. But I got to the point where I had this moment in time, and I thought, you know, I could be anything I want to be an actual fact I’m in a job I’m not very happy with. I’m not excited. I’ve had all these choices and so really, I had a responsibility to do more. Unfortunately, I had got myself into such a position that I was so tired and drained and so corporate that I couldn’t find a way out. So I really had no choice, but to quit my job. So my first message is there’s a lot of opportunities for you to sort of have that weight on moment and think, hang on, how did I get here? How do I feel is this really what I signed up for and I missed a lot of those messages that my body was telling me. But I would suggest that maybe you could take the opportunity today to have a bit of a thing. So I went from quitting my job with no plan, some savings, and really no intention to it whatsoever, just needing that break, which is great. And it gave me an opportunity to do some things. But it was also very, very stressful for me initially, and I don’t know if others maybe have been in that same situation where you’ve had a job and you sort of really associate yourself with that profession, and that organization and to sort of not be from such and such and such and such, actually really freaked me out. And that was so initially I felt good when I quit, and it was quite euphoric. But then I had this quite serious panic attack about what am I, so I thought, okay, I’ve come this far, I’ve upset myself. So I’m just going down this far. So I did what everybody does and turned to Google, of course, and you just start looking stuff up and thinking, you know, what am I going to be now? What am I going to do? And I started going to talks, I started coming to exhibitions, I sort of went to anything and everything. And somehow, I actually found myself at one of these. I came along and I heard Sheree Rubinstein, amazing talk, and she talked about her aha moment how she decided she wanted to set up her business. She was in a meeting, and she was a lawyer and someone was sort of disrespectful and asked her to take notes. Just assume that she was the secretary and I thought to myself, I’ve had so much worse said to me in my career and so many more times. What have I been doing? This is crazy, here’s this young woman who you know, it’s just like, no, that’s not good enough and, you know, started our business, I thought, well, there is something else that I had never really considered. You know, I always associated startups with Mark Zuckerberg, the sort of really techie type of things. And he was, you know, maybe an opportunity to make a job, you know, I don’t have to look for a job, I just have to make a job and I just have to think of one. And that was the first time I really realized that that would be something that I could do.

Debra Longin: So my second advice would be mix it up, I would go along to lectures, and people would sort of say, oh, you know, why are you here? And I’ll be like, I don’t know? You know, but it paid off, and it started getting my brain working in the right direction. From here, I thought, okay, I can have my own career, I can make my own job, which is great. But because I had been in corporate for so long, I actually wasn’t really sure what my passion was anymore. I had lost touch with all of the things that were important to me. So I found that by spending more time with entrepreneurs who talk a lot about their purpose and their passion and all of those aspects, that there was a lot to be gained from talking to other people, hearing their purpose. And it helped me sort of articulate some of my purpose. And so I started doing mindfulness classes, I started doing meditation, I started doing crazy drawing art classes, you name it, I had times where I started doing it and I had fun and I could feel my creativity coming back to me, I was talking to entrepreneurs, I was making new connections with people. And I found that my way of thinking actually was quite helpful to people because I was a design thinker. Wasn’t a designer, my brain was able to contribute in different ways. And so I started to form these ideas about where my business could go. So my recommendation would be when it comes to you, go the feed me menu, take the digger station, do the whole lot, you know, don’t skimp on yourself, you’re complicated. You’re not just a single person, you’re not just interested in one thing, you need to feed all the aspects of yourself, otherwise, they’ll slowly die off and they won’t work anymore. So the more you do, the more you’ll get out of it. So I started seeing some comparisons in the startup group that were very similar to what I saw in corporate, which is high energy, verging on high pressure, verging on unhealthy habits. And I started to see that there were people who understood well being yeah, that’s great. You know, we need to, you know, take time off, or we need to do all these things or whatever. But how are we supposed to do this? We don’t have time, we don’t have opportunity. We’ve got these goals that we’re trying to, you know, hit. And I guess because of my experience doing design work. As an interior designer, I’m used to looking at how people work and creating design solutions for how people work for environments and I started to realize that actually, these things skill was really helpful in the startup community because they don’t need an environment. What they need is a workday. They need all these opportunities to bring mindfulness in. But they don’t have time to organize them. So that began I guess, my new career path in that mindfulness our and well being with my creative thinking sort of come together, and that’s my business. So I had been doing some really interesting things with art making and painting. And I thought, you know what, I get a lot out of it, I get a lot of relaxation. It’s really enjoyable for me. And I would share that with people and they would say, Well, yeah, that’s great, but I don’t have time or, you know, I don’t want to commit or don’t have the materials. So I thought you know, what would be really interesting is, if you could do like instead of 45-minute yoga, you could do 45 minutes worth of art making, you know, not making art pieces but just self-expression and fun. So I set up a what I call the make break, which was terrific an opportunity for me to just let go of my concerns and just do something. One person booked that first class, which was enough to keep me going, which is great. And from there, it’s sort of built up and now it’s a few months on, and I’m doing some really exciting things. And I guess that’s where my business is. So my last little motto would be bringing some mindfulness into the way you appreciate your career. I’m not prepared to spend another 10 or 20 years waiting for something interesting to happen or to get awards, it something now that I assess every day. So, that’s it.

Serpil Senelmis: I really like the way Debra suggests the feed me menu when it comes to nurturing all aspects of ourselves. Thanks, Debra. I’m sorry so we’re gonna go with the whole degustation menu option. Next time on the Masters Series, how to build a community around your business? It costs more to acquire new customers than it does to maintain existing customers. So when you’ve got them, do whatever you can to keep them or explore the best way to convert customers to community in ways that work for you, and then. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

About Masters Series by WeTeachMe

Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.