In this episode...

Note: We use AI transcription so there may be some inaccuracies 

Laura Hargrave: Welcome everyone here at Boss It. We would love to hear from you. Join us in our Boss It community by heading over to our website, bossitclub.com, and join our mailing list. As we grow, we will be launching our community of fellow Boss It BFFs, and we want you to be a part of it.

Okay, Sophia Noreen, let's dig into this. I can't wait to tell them all about how we got here.

Sophia: Welcome to the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen and I took an Etsy startup and launched it in big-box retailers within 12 months. As a creative with an entrepreneurial drive, I left my full-time career in healthcare to find better harmony between career, family, and self-care. We believe you can have it all. Yes, you can launch and run a successful scalable business while maintaining harmony in all aspects of your life. We believe we can learn from each other and draw on many experiences to create the best life possible. During each episode, we will share proven life hacks that will keep you on top and striving every day.

There should be no hesitation. Make a plan. Take action. We are here for you!

Sophia: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another fantastic episode of the bosses podcast today. I am super excited to have Gina on the show. Hello, Gina, how are you doing good. I'm delighted to be here with you. I'm super excited. You are here Gina.  So before we get started with your story, can you tell us what your mantra is?  

Gina: I am enough. I have enough. I'm doing enough.  

Sophia: That's. I am enough. I have enough and I'm doing enough. We do need to say that to ourselves. More often, especially as women entrepreneurs or women leaders, we are always going for the next thing. 

Sophia: But if we can take a moment and just say these verses to ourselves, I am enough. I have enough and I'm doing enough. Yeah. I love it. Thank you for sharing that with us. Tell us everything. How did you get to where you're at? I know you're a leader in business. I know you started your own business. 

Gina:  I ended up here quite unexpectedly. This was not part of the plan. So I actually run not one, but two businesses. I can't stress enough that this was not part of the plan. So I'll start with the majority of the work that I do is I'm a co-founder at inside out incubator. And inside that incubator is an organization that works with women who want to learn to lead powerfully on their own terms. 

Gina: And we do that by bringing groups of women together, to learn from each other and essentially unfold a whole range of leadership flavors aside from like what we conventionally see, because we believe that the world needs more of that.  

Sophia: Yeah, definitely. When you say that you are helping women lead unconventionally, what does that mean?

Sophia: What does that look like? Like for me, I want to lead a team. How do I lead unconventionally? 

Gina: It's such a good question. So may I ask you a question? And we work with groups of women all the time. And a question we almost always ask is what comes to mind when you think of conventional leadership. So like Sofia, what comes from. 

Sophia: From my world of leadership being in the hospital setting, it was very much a top-down approach in the hospital. Decisions are made. This is how it is happening. Sorry. There's not much room for discussion. That is what I have seen again, the world I have come from is a healthcare setting and perhaps that was required for the situation that we were in, but it could be different for multiple environments. 

Gina: And that's the thing about leadership. There are no rules. We have been sort of conditioned to think that the conventional way in business best practices, like there's one way to lead in every single context, but we know that that's not true by your definition, Sophia, or how you think about conventional leadership, you know, top down. 

Gina: And when you think of how you would like to lead or the leaders you look up to, I imagine that their approach is perhaps different. So, whatever that is for you, and it can be a little bit different for each person. We help women develop their own leadership best practices that are in alignment with who they are and what they value and what they want to create.

Sophia: Beautiful. Okay. How did you get here then? So you're now part of the inside-out incubator. I was one of the co-founders. How long have you had that for? And how did you get to this point and open up this incubator? 

Gina: We have been an inside-out incubator for five years and we've brought together thousands of groups of women at this time, in various settings. 

Gina: We partnered with organizations to help them develop women's leadership programming. And we also offer programs to the public. Another part of the work that I do in the world is I'm an executive coach. So I've been doing executive coaching for about eight years. So I run my own business there, beautiful to get there. 

Gina: My career path really felt less like a path and more like a meandering highway, full speed ahead, going fast and hard. I had this success on paper, but a lot of the time I felt lost. My first career was actually as a performer. I pounded the Broadway pavement for almost a decade in my first career. So that was in pursuit of a dream. 

Gina: Right. And then I was surprised to find myself just totally burnt out. And so I came to the corporate world sort of later on in my career, I would say later than most people who are in the corporate. And I spent the next decade working primarily in tech. And in that time when I was with them through a hyper-growth stage, and in that period of time, I saw that so many of the people that I worked with were brilliant, creative, hardworking, and under-resourced and overworked.

Gina: And so I started to get curious about coaching and leadership and what it takes to develop high-performing teams. What it takes to feel good and nourished by the work that you're doing in the world. And in some ways I know this now in hindsight though, at the time, I didn't realize I've sort of always been driven by this question of what does it take to do work that you love? 

Gina: Right. And I went about finding that in a myriad of ways and ultimately where I am now, I can happily say that. Happier than I've ever been in my career. And the shift that I had to make to do that was to start asking myself a different set of questions. So in all the early iterations of my career, I was driven by what do I need to do? 

Gina: What's the recipe for my success out there. And I would ask mentors and look at different job postings I could fit into and maybe think about, well, what's the business I need to create. And the shifts that I made partly through my studying of leadership and becoming a coach is like, who do I want to be? 

Gina: What are my thoughts? What's my purpose. What's the impact I want to have on the world. So when I started looking in this direction to find the answers to what's next, the action steps became crystal clear. All right.

Sophia:  Looking inside and asking yourself rather than looking outside for the answer and the validation. 

Gina: The organization's called inside out incubator. That's basically where it came from. Instead of we're still conditioned to take our cues from out there about what we should do, a business, how we should lead, what success looks like. But the truth is it's personal success. Even professional success is very personal. 

Gina: And so if you don't take the time to start at least getting curious about what's happening in this direction, you're going to end up with more misses than you need .

Sophia: A hundred percent.

Gina: This direction is actually way more relaxed. 

Sophia: And I think more accurate sometimes as well. If you listen to your own instincts, you're generally going to hit the mark because I feel external validation or people who may be providing you unsolicited advice that we often get when we're starting something new, like. 

Sophia: It's someone else's fear being projected onto you. Yes. Because you wouldn't have started or even thought of starting or even looked into it or any of it, if you didn't have that deep calling or desire or instinct and somebody else externally may not have that. And so they just see a lot of red flags fear. 

Sophia: And so they'll try to knock it down maybe out of love, because when you're talking to your friends or family, they're not doing it because they are trying to harm you, but they are doing it.

Gina: They do it with the best of intentions, they do it because they love us and they believe they have our best interests in mind and their experience. 

Gina: And this is true of like mentors and advocates to mentors and advocates have their place and certainly provide value. And what I hear a lot of professional women doing often is when they start to hit a plateau or have a question about what's next to my career, they'll the first thing they do is I got to get a mentor. 

Gina: And the thing to watch for yourself is. Mentors can provide a lot of insight into their own path and experience. And what insights do your own questions are just as valuable as someone else's experience. Because whatever path that they walked doesn't look exactly like yours and you're right. That we all have agendas, like in terms of families, all the agendas for people we love, of course, we want them to be safe and happy and fulfilled and make a certain amount of money and to have our physical needs cared for. 

Gina: And so the importance of taking everything with a grain of. You wouldn't ask somebody to give you we're making soup and you're gonna eat it. You wouldn't ask somebody else to season your soup for you. You would do it to taste. Yeah. I feel that way about my career. I feel that way about businesses and about how anyone leads in the world. 

Gina: It's like your soup, your recipe. Yeah. 

Sophia: Who are cooking. You are the chef of your dish. So you don't need to ask John across the street, what they think necessarily, even if they come and provide you the. It doesn't mean it's actually should be followed or taken. I had a colleague a few years back and I started on the leadership path in the hospital and I was very green and I wasn't used to getting raw feedback. 

Sophia: And so not everybody came with the feedback with the best intention, some were there because for whatever reason it is what it is. But this colleague had said to him, You take the feedback and either file it and use it, flush it. And I was like, wow, that's the best piece of advice I've ever gotten. So now it's like, do you file or flush? 

Sophia: And a lot of the time you get to look and see, do they have the merit to give you feedback or any constructive criticism? In my opinion, if somebody hasn't actually done something, for example, in business, if they've never opened a business, I don't generally take their. Because they don't necessarily have the skillsets or the experience to provide any credible feedback. 

Sophia: And then if they have opened a business, there's a few other additional things you need to ask them. What kind of business was it? When was it? I think for many of the listeners here, they're used to getting unsolicited feedback from family. Just keep that in mind that if your mother has never opened a business before, thank you mom, but I might flush it. 

Sophia: Don't tell them that you're flushing it.   

Gina: Oh, values a lot in the work that we do. It's like we value different things. Does that mean something different? I imagined to you then perhaps to your mom. So feedback, usually, first of all, it's an opinion and not truth. And second, it actually reveals more about the person giving it than it does about the person who's on the receiving end. 

Gina: So I agree with you a hundred percent about the importance of the filter. Yeah.  

Sophia: Don't let everything hit you in the heart. Right. You had to put the full term. I do suggest that for money, especially if you still are on that path and require that external validation. Yeah. I think some of us have built that skin up an hour, like, okay. 

Sophia: Thank you. Your validation anymore. Yeah, I'm over it. Right? Exactly. So I'm extremely excited to check out a little bit more of the insight of incubator. That's fantastic. If you were starting your business today, what is one piece of advice you'd give yourself? 

Gina: I think it's in the form of a question. And that is what's the best case scenario in my early days of starting a business. 

Gina: And I think similar to you, Sophia, my journey with becoming an entrepreneur was I was straddling a full-time corporate job. And at that time blossoming coaching. At the same time. And the strategic road that I took was financially. I didn't have the client place based yet to go a hundred percent straight into entrepreneurship. 

Gina: And so I consciously made the choice to, I started with like an 80, 20 rule and that was okay. I'm going to put 80% of my energy toward my corporate job, 20% towards building. Dream of my coaching practice. And then ultimately inside out, ended up becoming a part of that. And then slowly I worked to shift the percentage of time. 

Gina: So it became from 80 to 70% here, 30% here, 75. And then ultimately it got to a point where I had enough business where in order to make this grow. I was going to have to start turning down clients in order to fulfill my obligations over here. And for me, that was really the fulcrum of, okay, it's time. I'm ready. 

Gina: And I have enough at least business viability to pursue this. The best case scenario part comes really from my strategic, the wisest program, sort of like. The reality is like I had so much self doubt about my credibility, whether I was smart enough. I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. I fell in love with the craft of coaching and that became a passion of mine. 

Gina: But when I worked at walked into my first coaching course, I didn't dare think I was capable of having people pay me big bucks for this. Funny thing is eight years later. I'm now on faculty at that organization, very full circle, but a big part of the entrepreneurial journey is you're going to have a lot of doubt. 

Gina: You're going to have a lot of, well, what if this happens? What if this happens? What if I grow broken? What if it doesn't succeed? And what if I fail and following those can be debilitating to the point where you stop making forward.  

Sophia: Nobody has ever made it a question thinking about my own situation. I would say something similar. 

Sophia: What is the worst case scenario is what I would say. So you're saying what is the best case scenario? And because my perspective was hospital, nothing's going to happen. Like you lose a couple of thousand or a hundred of whatever dollars you still have your life. Hopefully it's not a life or death. So my perspective was very. 

Sophia: But yours was what is the best thing that could happen. And that is so uplifting because geez, I guess it could be whatever you desired at that point. And did you have this thought when you started inside out incubator? Like, did you have this in the back of your mind? 

Gina: When I started inside out, inside out, started more as by that point, I was well on my way and fully self-employed. 

Gina: So inside out felt a bit more like an experiment and the key to unlocking inside out and the success of that business, which actually grew. Really fast is that I'm part of a partnership. Everything we do is in partnership with each other, myself and my co-founder. Oh, beautiful. And what that gave me was a greater set and we're very different. 

Gina: And the magic of that is we get things done a lot faster. We can sort of left-hand right-hand it where like, I can leverage my strengths, she can leverage her strengths and we move the ball. We're really efficient. We started out as we didn't know each other very well, first of all, but we shared a similar passion of wanting to support women in sort of when their careers get messy and give them access to some of the coaching tools and resources, the inner work that we had learned and afforded ourselves.

Gina: We wanted to offer that to them. And we were dead set on doing it in a group environment because when women get together and connect with each other, they learn more about themselves and about each other than they would in just a one-on-one conversation environment. So over and over again, what started as like a little workshop and my co-founder Alicia and I started like seeing if we liked this dance together.

Gina: Now we reached thousands of women every year and get to bring groups of women together to really unlock together what their own leadership recipe. 

Sophia: That's beautiful. I love that. And the value that you get from working in a group, you said it best, you learn more about yourself because I don't know if it's through conversation or you're hearing other people's stories, but using that as a tool and bringing it into the workshops and networking events, it sounds like it could only be a benefit to everybody involved. 

Gina: Will you become yours for each other? Right? Our style is we're very candid and a lot of what happens is the doubt that professional high achieving brilliant women experience, they start to hear like, oh my gosh, it's not just me. I have the same fears. It's like the suffering that's happening in our own minds and sort of the fear and failure and the cycles of proving and the ways in which we are hard on ourselves. 

Gina: It's really isolating. So when we do that in community, we're in the business of professional development, but it is truly. Yeah, 100%.

Sophia: We weren't meant to do it alone. And so the whole word of solopreneur, it's really sad because you really shouldn't be a solopreneur. 

Gina: You don't  have to do it alone and tasked to do it alone. 

Gina: No one of the leadership practices that we sort of, as part of our programming is we teach asking for help as a leadership. 

Sophia: Okay, let's go onto our next question. Can you give us some advice on how you are managing your time and your goals? 

Gina: Sometimes brilliantly and sometimes not well at all. I've learned to be okay with that. 

Gina: So in the early days of starting my business, it was not having structure was really hard for me. There were so many things to do. It was hard to know where to focus my time and what was really the highest priority. And so it was disorienting the first, that was probably the hardest part of the first six months of my being self-employed was just figuring out. 

Gina: How to prioritize my time. What I've learned is there's all kinds of brilliant methodologies out there, time boxing and then goals and calendaring and stuff like that. That stuff is wonderful time. And the rhythm of your day is another thing that I find to be quite personal. So for me, what helps me be at my most productive is actually tuning into the natural rhythm of when I work best. 

Gina: Yes, over-scheduling for me. Like I have no inspiration. I get mind blocked. I ended up procrastinating what I've learned about myself. I'm not a morning person. So my mornings, I go slow. And I think for many of the clients that I work with, it's the opposite, but I save a lot of my deep thinking tasks for the afternoon. 

Gina: I've found that settings really matter. So for strategic sort of longer tasks, I like to sit down and be at a coffee shop or be able to look outside for like tasks that are more box checking. Those I like to be in my office and like super focused where I can just drill, drill, drill. So I kind of tune into other cues, both in my own natural rhythm.

Gina: And then based on where I work best based on the activity for me, that is what I have found works best. 

Sophia: Yeah. And I haven't heard that tip before about the setting, about being in a specific setting that will help you complete that task faster. I like that idea where you're very focused. You're sitting in the office and you're checking off the boxes of those quick tasks. 

Sophia: But if there's something that you need to do where you need to put on that creative mind, or maybe a strategy or something that you're trying to develop, being in an environment that allowed for that creativity. So sitting in the coffee shop. So that's a great trick. I think that's something I'm going to have to adopt. 

Sophia: And also the whole thing about really going with your own circadian rhythms in a way, right? Cause if you're a morning Lark, then you would do most of your work in the morning. If you're going to be a mid day, think it's called midday, Lark. That's what I am. Then you wouldn't be getting up early in the morning.

Sophia: We won't be going by that late at night, but you'll be doing most of your work mid morning. And then for the night. Or a night owl, I should say. It sounds like you are a night owl. So do you stay up late at night and do creative work? I  

Gina: do sometimes. Yeah. And it depends on the task. The other thing that I've learned the hard way is to really only do two big things a day. 

Gina: Okay. In the early days, I way overestimated or underestimated, I guess how long things would take. And so I do my best to dedicate only two context switches a day for me to sort of switch my brain channels, to like my admin work and then my sales work and then my networking work. And then all the little checklist boxes to do is like, I would like to be able to do all four of those things in the course of an eight-hour period. 

Gina: But in reality, personally, I'm not that efficient. And I've found that rather than trying to like pile drive through. To actually just respect, like how about I just do two a day? And when I find is I'm actually more efficient if I just set more realistic expectations out of the gate. 

Sophia: Yeah. I think all of us are guilty of being time optimists and basically growing all the time. 

Sophia: Until the five minute window and thinking and can be accomplished and then being feeling defeated at the end of the day. Cause you're like, wait, I didn't complete all the 5,000 tasks that I had assigned myself today.

Gina:  I feel like chalk up today as like failure. 

Sophia: Gosh, that's great. I think a lot of us can definitely learn from that. 

Sophia: And we've talked about time blocking and such, but I always say three. You do need to think about yourself. If two is all that you can do and manage even just one. I think there's a lot of parents that listen to the show. And if you know, you have a toddler that needs your attention, you may not even want to schedule anything. 

Sophia: In my opinion, you may have to just go with the. Just had the task available and ready to go when you do have the opportunity, but don't even commit to finishing it that day.  

Gina: This is one of those old annoying hangovers of conventional leadership or conventional business practices, nine to five on checking boxes and whatever. 

Gina: But we know that that time block of nine to five was arbitrarily. We know that our minds are not equipped to stay engaged and productive for that long period of time. So he's yet another one of those kind of expired best practices that don't serve us most of the time. 

Sophia: Yeah, exactly. You have to listen to your own. 

Sophia: You have to look at your own experiences and your own family, and then craft the best time for you to sit down and work. And I know you have the colleagues that work with me in the product based business. They work at night. I actually have some that work at night and I have some that work early. And it's because they have family obligations in the middle of the day. 

Sophia: So they're not even working anytime between nine to five it's all the morning or the evening. 

Gina: And for some, I imagine it's a mix. I mean, some it's in many cases, it's by necessity, but one of the things we saw happen with COVID and a lot of businesses shutting down and people working who were able to work from. 

Gina: What happened in that period of time is I think what gives me a little hope is people started to experiment with what it is to have their work world as part of their life. They fit in the context of their lifestyle. And I really think that this is where the future of work is going, or at least I hope it is where our work life and our business life happens in a way that includes and honors and lead space for whatever our personal life includes.

Gina: And it may be kids that may be aging. It may just be like our own attention spans. Right? My high hope is that our future leaders and just the way that business is going, that we learn that this is more effective way  to work.

Sophia: Yeah. The hybrid work model is I think saying in many of the industries, healthcare is a bit of a different beast in that they may not be able to do that level of hybrid work for. 

Sophia: I've been in office this whole time, but for other employers, yes. There's resistance in the workspace, right? To get back to five days a week in office. And if big players like Google have said openly, that that's never going to happen again, it must mean that they have not seen a reduction in productivity.

Sophia: So if somebody wants to stay home three days of the week, I don't see why not to the standard that the employer expects. And it that's a bigger and deeper conversation because I actually think productivity increased during COVID because many people had nothing else to do. Like there was no socialization happening, but now with things opening back up, we're getting our socials calendars packed again. 

Sophia: So imagine having your social calendar packed, then you have all the demands of what you had started or you were doing during the pandemic, because there was a void of time or more time than now what it's like, you have the two worlds colliding. So I really have. Over the next 12 months, we don't see an additional burnout from people. 

Gina: Yeah. I think everyone's trying to figure it out and nobody knows the answer. And of course it's different industry by industry, I think. And my hope is that we continue to have the conversation about. How do we make this work? A lot of organizations and individuals are sort of making their best attempts and throwing spaghetti at the wall. 

Gina: And I hope that we can continue to experiment because I really do believe that business can be something that is sustaining and sustainable. And I think really asking ourselves, like, what do we want the future of work to look like? What do we want it to feel like? What is the best for our industry? What is the best for our team? 

Gina: How do we both stay connected and at our highest level of productivity, and just asking those questions, I think is a massive improvement from four years ago. When there weren't any questions to ask, we just were in this kind of autopilot mode. And so we'll see what we've been curious about it. 

Sophia: I agree. I think they will need to be, to retain their team members and leadership because there's choices and people won't stay with an organization that is not going to prioritize them as the member.

Sophia: So, okay. Let's move on to the next question. Mental health and your wellbeing. Give us some tips. How are you keeping yourself going in those two domains?  

Gina: So mental health so important. And I actually think of it more in terms of like whole body health. Oh, this is a big value of mine. And what I mean by that is like, want to take care of my mind and feeling like I'm in tip-top shape and rest and all of those sorts of like physiological needs. 

Gina: I think of it in terms of my mind, body and spirit, and what helps me is actually the idea of nourishment. So when I think about mental health and how I stay well, as someone who's in a service providing industry, it's really a sort of check-in question for myself of what do I need to feel nourished.

Gina: And that includes, I mean, there's so many ups and downs as a business owner. And so the other part of that equation is when I am in the downs or in low productivity is actually being okay with that and not beating myself up for it because it's a natural sort of ebb and flow. Um, any business that you run. 

Gina: So the expectation that you'll always be sort of a peer and operating, like with all cylinders is not realistic. And the part where we kind of shame ourselves for being not productive or not feeling inspired or not doing something at our 110%. Right. The degree to which we kind of beat up on ourselves for that is that's the unnecessary part. 

Gina: Yeah.  

Sophia: Yeah. Very well said. And specifically for people who are coming from being employed and they have that consistent revenue and sometimes different businesses have. Season. So they may have their busy season, their off season. I'm thinking of accounting. For example, they have tax season and usually at a running at like 90 hours a week. 

Sophia: And then the summer, they have some time off besides that one particular profession that comes to my mind. Most people who are in that employee mindset have consistent revenue, income, and they're being taken care of and they have their consistent. Right. When you go into entrepreneurship, I find that it is very much a feast or famine from either your income down to your work.

Sophia: If you're in a busy season, it's busy, they may be sleeping less hours, but then hopefully you'll have breaks or it will be less busy at certain points. So being okay with that, and I liked that whole-body nourishment. So it sounds like whatever you need that day, you'll give it to yourself mostly. 

Gina: And sometimes it's really small.

Gina: Actually. I need to go outside and take a walk with my. Yeah. Like it's, like, I noticed that I've been staring at a screen for five hours. My eyes are growing cross. I was like, hang on. What do I really need right now? The, a big reset is walking outside and just getting some fresh air. Yes. And sometimes something bigger, like taking the afternoon off other times, it's like having some chocolate, chocolate and coffee.

Sophia: Right? Why not? 

Gina: Some morning ritual for me, coffee as a beverage, I love having slow morning with my book. Sipping my coffee. Sometimes I'm like going straight into work with my coffee, but there's something about the morning ritual that for me is precious. And one of the ways in which I nourish myself, there you go.

Sophia: This has been such a delight to have you on the show. Thank you so much for giving us all your words of wisdom, sharing with us inside out incubator. Tell us where we can find you. And especially if any of our listeners want to avail your services, tell us how they can get ahold of. 

Gina: Please go to our [email protected]. 

Gina: We have a bunch of resources. To free resources for you. We have a seven rules that we find hold women back a guide on tips and tricks on how to spot conventional leadership practices. And to start to do things in a way that's more in line with what you want. You can download that on our website. And then the other thing we have is we have free monthly.

Gina: And how to handle it. And on those calls, we talk with brilliant women and myself and my co-founder, and it's all about how to handle the different things that come up, challenges that we encounter. We know that women are so resourceful and creative and have a bunch of knowledge and expertise. And as a business owner, as a professional woman, there's always new mysteries popping up. 

Gina: And so our dedicated to how to handle those things, I guess, out on inside-out incubator.com and you can find both of those.

Sophia: Yeah, thank you so much, Gina. It was a pleasure having you on the show. Do you have any other last words for our listeners? 

Gina: I am enough. I have enough and I'm doing enough.

Sophia: Yes, I am enough. I have enough and I'm doing enough. I love it. Okay, guys, remember, make a plan and take action and we'll see you guys again next week. Bye-bye.

Sophia Noreen: So my fellow Bosses, did you enjoy that episode? Now, it's time for you to make a solid plan and take action. But first, remember to subscribe and follow the Boss It Podcast so you receive a notification whenever we drop an episode. Remember to leave us a review on iTunes. Take a screenshot of your review and share it on Instagram as a post or a story, and tag us at Boss It Club. If Instagram is not your thing, no worries. Email your screenshot to [email protected]. As a massive thank you, we will be sending you our top 50 tips for starting and scaling a business. This list is exclusively for podcast reviewers so don't miss out. Now, remember Bosses, make a plan and take action in all aspects of your life. Yes, you can have it all.