Today's Segments:
Part three from a compelling panel discussion at Concordia College, featuring former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp and former Governor Ed Schafer. The event, titled "With Malice Towards None," took place on April 3. Today, we’ll hear questions that were asked from the audience, and how the two politicians, one a democrat and one a republican responded.
There's high standards. And then there's perfectionism. We visit with Intuitive Business Coach Michelle Vasicek about shedding perfectionism and embracing "good enough."
Transcript from interview with Michelle Vasicek:
So a title like yours, pretty provocative, embrace good enough and get...
I don't know if the FCC will allow me to say your title, so I'll just say stuff. It's a different S word, get stuff done. What do you mean by that?
Michelle Vasicek
So this actually came up in the context of helping my friend, Melissa, with the FM Wellness Collective. And so I'm a business coach and I do sales and marketing strategy for small to business businesses, right?
So this is all under the context of that, but I will say that life is one arena, right? So this is applicable to all areas of life. So if you're not in sales and marketing or a business owner, just use this as a metaphor for other areas of your life, right?
So I was helping her and she's got an event coming up during the Fargo Marathon Week, FM Wellness Week. And she's like, okay, I've got my vendor proposal, my sponsorship proposal, what's next? And I was like, well, if you find somebody that wants to be a sponsor, a vendor, do you have a way to take their information and take their money?
No. Then that's our next step, right? So I asked her, I was like, what do we need to do to implement this?
And she went on this whole long tirade of, okay, I already purchased the domain fmwellnessweek.com and I need to get the payment processor set up and create a form and do this and do that. There was this whole long list that just made me feel overwhelmed just listening to it, right? I'm not even one that has to implement this.
And so I asked her, is there a way that you could streamline this or make it easier and make it good enough for right now? And she said, yeah, actually, I already have the domain and the form and the payment processor and bank account and everything set up for the FM Wellness Collective. So I could just do the forms and payment on that site.
And, you know, do you think anybody is going to care if the domain is different? I was like, no, of course not. And so it ended up sparking this whole conversation, right, at the collective that's, you know, especially those of us that are visionaries and we have big ideas and high standards and expectations of what's possible.
We feel like we need to jump from zero to perfection. And sometimes that holds us back.
Ashley Thornberg
Why are you pointing at me, Michelle?
Michelle Vasicek
And this is, yeah, very much from my own experiences too, right? And it'll, I'll get, especially get stuck in this procrastination loop, right? Where it's like, then I don't do anything because I can't do it perfectly.
And it's this black and white thinking, right? So sometimes, you know, we can do things good enough for now. And maybe we can do another iteration later and improve on it when we have more time or more capacity or somebody to help us or the money to hire somebody to help us in our businesses.
Right. But for now, sometimes we need to do things good enough, right? So it's like there's stages.
It's like, you know, stage one is there's, well, stage zero actually, right, is stuff that's either not set up yet, it doesn't exist, or it's broken and it doesn't work. And those are the things that we need to triage and take care of first, because they're completely stopping the flow of things.
Ashley Thornberg
In a hot second, I'm just going to ask you straight up what a business coach is and does. But before that, even in your capacity as a business coach, just listening to what you said, how much of your life is listening to other people's verbal diarrhea? And just picking up the one or two things that they need to focus on?
Michelle Vasicek
I mean, that's a lot of what I do. That's a lot of what I do, right? Is there's strategy, but there's also the, you know, I call it mindset work, where it's shifting our perspective on things.
Right. So we're still accomplishing the same thing, but we're looking at it from a different perspective. Right.
Ashley Thornberg
So what is a business coach and who needs one?
Michelle Vasicek
I mean, personally, I think everybody who owns a business or a self-employed could benefit from a business coach. And there's different seasons. Right.
So there's different business coaches that have different strengths and different things that they can offer. And so somebody that's in a startup stage and, you know, or versus somebody who's doing maybe e-comm versus some kind of services that they offer and are trying to book out their calendar. Right.
Like different coaches are going to have different areas of expertise that they're familiar with. But generally, it's doing things like this. It's like listening to the verbal diarrhea.
I love how you put it. And then, you know, being able to have that more objective perspective on things and call us out on our **** and give us the tough love if we need to or be able to help us see things from a different perspective because we get so caught up in our own minds and things. It's hard to see things from more objectively.
And I'm the same way.
Ashley Thornberg
Right.
Michelle Vasicek
I'm great at doing this for other people. I'm not great at doing it for myself. I need help.
Ashley Thornberg
Is it kind of like proofreading your own work? You cannot see your own blind spots? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. OK. We're visiting today with Michelle Vasecek.
She is an intuitive business coach. And OK, that brings us to the next word here. Intuitive.
Yes.
Michelle Vasicek
What does that mean in the coaching world? It seems like people really tend to lean towards intuition and emotions and the touchy feely people or they tend to lean towards the logic and the data and analytics and rationality. Right.
And really what we need is a combination of the two somewhere in the middle. But most of us have a tendency to lean towards one side or the other and are uncomfortable with or unfamiliar with or have a hard time seeing the other side of things.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah.
Michelle Vasicek
Right. So really what I do, I say I'm an intuitive business coach. But really what I do is I bring the intuition and I merge it with the strategy.
Right. Because a lot of us may think that marketing and sales stuff is witchcraft. It's not.
It's strategy. Lots of people that aren't familiar with it because it looks, you know, if you don't understand something, you know, whether it's technology or a skill set or things like that, like if you see, you know, an artist create something, it kind of looks like magic. I can see that.
Ashley Thornberg
Sure.
Michelle Vasicek
Right. But really, it's just that they have a skill set that they've built up over time and they have learned how to do that.
Ashley Thornberg
Right.
Michelle Vasicek
So same thing with marketing is it's it's strategy and it's a skill set that can be learned. Now, there's also a lot of not helpful strategy and offers out there, too. So that's part of it is being able to discern through the helpful advice and the relevant stuff and figuring out what works for your business and your company rather than, oh, this strategy worked for somebody else, so it should work for me, too.
Or this strategy worked for, you know, a big business or a corporation. It's going to work for my little solopreneur business, too. You're more than likely going to have a completely different strategy.
Ashley Thornberg
Is a word like intuitive in your title an effort to attract the kind of client that you want? Yes.
Michelle Vasicek
That is what we call polarization.
Ashley Thornberg
Because I can see a lot of people going intuitive business coach. I don't know. That's witchcraft or that sounds woo woo.
Or even I suspect more of your clients might be female. Generally speaking, yes. Yeah.
And that's, you know, the gut feeling. Women tend to be a little bit more OK with leaning into a gut feeling. And also so much of our own survival is kind of based on I have a good feeling about this or I have a bad feeling about this.
And so we are more practiced in that versus that has to be, you know, repeatable, demonstrable by certain specific numbers. Like I'm getting bored even saying it that way.
Michelle Vasicek
Yeah. So the interesting part is like generally the I work with men, too, but generally women and they are in touch with their intuition and they don't understand the strategy and the analytics and that side of things. So what I'm bringing is, you know, being able to acknowledge the intuitive side of things and bring in the strategy and the skill set and the rational thinking, but in a way that feels aligned and not yucky or feeling like manipulative or coercing in any way, because there is a lot of marketing tactics and strategy out there that is manipulative.
And I'm finding that a lot of women don't want to use that stuff in their businesses because it feels yucky. Can you give me an example? Good example is like high pressure sales, right?
And so, you know, using these I mean, people will do like NLP neuro linguistic programming to do sales and marketing and like try to manipulate people to buy things and do what they want. And all this can be used for good or evil, right? But like on a high pressure sales call, they're using manipulation tactics and trying to get people, oh, if you don't have the money, get a credit card.
Can you borrow it from your parents? Can you take out a loan? Here's a link to a funding company that you can apply for and trying to strong arm people and pressure them into doing something that maybe isn't the most aligned stuff for them in the moment.
And it's very forceful. And it seems that, you know, a lot of women don't even want to do, they're scared to even like ask for a $50 deposit or, you know, ask for like that's uncomfortable enough to like ask to get paid for the services that they're offering.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah. I wonder how much of your work is in a lot of ways, a kind of therapy to do the work of convincing in particular a woman, but not exclusively to get paid what they're worth. Factor in woman, factor in Midwest, girl, this is a Sisyphean task.
Michelle Vasicek
Yeah, because it's, you know, and we want to, especially, you know, what I'm seeing is like wellness practitioners and people that offer kind of more of those holistic services, like we want to help people, right? And at the same time, we live in this capitalistic society where we have bills that we need to pay, there's children's meals that need to be fed, we can't just go offer all of our services for free. You know, so that's another thing that, you know, there's a couple different people I've been talking to, and they're setting up scholarship funds and different ways that people can access these services.
And the practitioners still get reimbursed for it so that it's win-win.
Ashley Thornberg
I remember seeing a chart one time that took a wife and a mother and the tasks that she was doing every day and totaled out how much would you pay if you had to hire out each of these services independently. And I'll just say it was very close to triple my annual salary, and it's things that I would never think to charge for. And that's just life, not as a business person.
Michelle Vasicek
Yeah, that's just the stuff at home, let alone if you have a business and you're offering services to people. Yeah.
Ashley Thornberg
I want to go back to the speech that you were giving at the FM Wellness Collective meeting about embracing good enough in order to get stuff done. It does imply that there's something wrong with perfection. Is that a fair assessment?
Michelle Vasicek
No, and I, well, two things here is one is that, like, true perfection is completely unattainable, right? And even if you manage to get something in a perfect state for a moment, something's going to happen, right? So I think, like, if we take perfection in a literal sense, yes, that is unrealistic and unattainable.
That being said, going back to, like, those of us that have, you know, big visions and big goals and high standards for things is going back to the stages, right? So we talked about, like, stage zero is something that's broken or non-existent, and that just needs to get something that's functional, right? So then level one, I kind of call that the duct tape stage where it's like, let's say there's, you know, a Reiki practitioner that's just starting their business.
Ashley Thornberg
And this is a Japanese healing art.
Michelle Vasicek
Yeah, it's energy healing. Okay. Yep.
So let's say they want to start taking on clients because they just got their Reiki certification, their attunement, right? Okay, so maybe for now they can set up a PayPal account or Venmo so they can take payments, and then they'll set up a free Calendly account because, again, all of this is free, no cost. And then once somebody, they can send somebody the payment link to pay, and then they can send the free Calendly link to book, right?
And that's functional. It's good enough. There's some friction there, right?
And it's maybe not the most professional looking thing, but it works, right? And then, you know, maybe the next stage or the stage above that is having something like Acuity is a scheduling system that I'm familiar with where you can embed that into your website, and it'll collect the customer's payment. It'll automatically give them your calendar so they can schedule their session that's integrated with your Google Calendar so it knows your availability.
It has email and text message reminders. They can reschedule their appointment if something comes up, and then it also can take care of all of the intake paperwork all in one system. So it's a lot more automated and integrated and takes away a lot of that friction and a lot more of those manual tasks off of your plate, which you need when you're scaling up and getting busier.
But that also takes more money and time and skills to implement. Yeah.
Ashley Thornberg
Let's talk about the impact of that, though, on what they call mental energy or your creative energy. There are some people, you know, one of the things you see on those seven habits of highly effective people or that kind of thing is like, I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I wear the same thing.
And the argument there is they don't want to, quote unquote, waste their mental energy on a decision that maybe doesn't matter all that much. And then why do they say that? What happens if you start to mechanize certain routines and habits?
Michelle Vasicek
Yeah. So like when you start to set up systems and automations and be able to delegate things, that exactly you said, it frees up your time so that you can do what you intended to do. Again, most of these, like, let's take a service practitioner, the Reiki person.
They didn't sign up to like want to run a business or do marketing or like all of these systems, right? They want to go help people. So if you can spend more stuff, more of your time on things like that as a business owner, rather than doing the operations and logistical things, you can, you have more impact, which is what people want to do.
Ashley Thornberg
We're visiting today with Michelle Vasicek. She is an intuitive business coach. And I wasn't anticipating this conversation going in this direction, but I've kind of wondered about AI and some of the tools that you are talking about, even just like the Calendly, like send someone a link and then it books directly into each of their calendars instead of the back and forth.
Does this time work for you versus this and that? And I feel like it's, is it fair to say that it's kind of leveling the playing field for female business owners? Because so much of that work, when there have been male CEOs, they got to sub all that out to women.
Yes.
Michelle Vasicek
And now all of a sudden, oh, we can sub that out? Yeah. Yeah.
The executive assistant role or secretaries. Yep. And the thing too, is it makes it more accessible to more people because generally the AI solutions are more affordable than committing to hiring somebody for a certain number of periods.
And that being said, there's still virtual assistants that you can contract on a part-time basis. So that can be really accessible too. But again, if you're a business owner and you're bootstrapping it and just starting out, you've got a slim budget.
So you need to be really strategic about how you're spending that.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah. Well, can you give us, you mentioned Calendly and I don't want to lock you into this is the only one to use for that, but can you give us maybe five or 10 of, maybe you don't have to use brand name resources here, but a couple that are just like, you know, if you just need a graphic designed to get you the website and then you're going to work with a graphic designer, you know, like that kind of, what would, what are some of the resources out there?
Michelle Vasicek
Oh, that's a good question. I mean, it's really going to depend on what industry you're in and what kind of business you have, because there's going to be different things that are geared towards everybody. Right.
But if, you know, going for a service-based practitioners, which is mostly those smaller businesses I'm working with that are really, you know, it's one person.
Ashley Thornberg
Yeah.
Michelle Vasicek
They don't have an assistant. They don't have a whole team working behind them. They don't have a huge budget.
Yeah. Setting up something like Calendly for scheduling or, you know, Acuity or anything like that. And then having, I personally like WordPress for websites because it's really affordable and you can, if you get an SEO friendly theme.
Search engine optimization. Yes. Thank you.
It can be pretty straightforward to use if you, you know, put a little research and effort into it. But other people, you know, prefer websites like Wix or things like that. I feel like they're overpriced for what they're worth.
But, you know, if that's what you're familiar with and you like it, like whatever is going to get it done. You know, if something feels like it's not resonating or it's too hard or it just doesn't work, then it's not, it's not worth trying to force yourself into that box. How did you end up as a business coach?
That's a good question. So I actually started out doing nutrition coaching and tarot readings and Reiki and I paused that during COVID because I couldn't meet with people in person. And, but the whole time during that I've had a full-time career in sales marketing and client support.
And it was always that mindset of like, oh, this is just my day job. And like, really my passion is, you know, the woo-woo stuff. And one day I'll be able to take my business full time and quit my job.
And then I kind of had this revelation a couple years ago and from talking to friends and they have these businesses that they want to run and they need the sales and marketing strategy that I've been learning over the last, well, it's been more than a decade now in my career. And so I was like, I need to merge, you know, the intuitive woo-woo side of things with the sales and marketing strategy and make that accessible and say it in a way that's relatable and understandable for regular people.
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