EP # 180 - Breaking the High-Achiever's Curse' by Celebrating 2024 Wins

In this heartfelt end-of-year episode, Maggie Perotin shares her journey of learning to celebrate both small and big wins, breaking down her top 10 celebrations from 2024 - alternating between business and personal achievements.

🔑 Key Highlights:
• The importance of celebrating small wins, especially for high achievers
• Featured client success stories from 2024 (Episodes 155, 158, 177, and 179)
• Evolution of brand messaging focusing on building sellable assets
• Implementation of new technologies (Airtable and AI platforms)
• Consistency in content creation - 180 weeks of consecutive podcasting
• The value of strategic partnerships in business growth
• The power of loving and supportive partner

If you want to check out Maggie's husband music, here it is:
Jay RK (standing for the Rockin Krolik)
Spotify - GO HERE
YouTube - GO HERE

💡 Action Step for Listeners: Take time during the holiday season to reflect and celebrate your own wins from 2024, both big and small. Share your celebrations by emailing maggie@stairwaytoleadership.com

📣 Coming Up Next: Tune in next week for lessons learned from 2024 and goals for 2025!

Transcript

1:00

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Diamond Effect podcast, episode 180. We're almost at the end of 2024. So the next two episodes, I want to do them a little bit more personal and share with you some things. And today those things are going to be celebrations in business and personal as well. Here's why I wanted to record that episode. First of all, celebrating little things is definitely an area of personal growth for me. I don't celebrate enough. Especially the small wins, the small things, because my brain just expects them to be done or to happen and it wants them to be normal. That comes from my childhood. I am a gifted child. Very good at school. I was the best student in my primary school, which had 600 students, and one of the best in my high school that had, I don't know, 300 people. And especially my dad just expected of me to perform. I internalized that expectation. So I expect myself just to do great and perform, I'm highly motivated. I'm a high achiever, but also a downside of this is that I take small wins, especially for granted. And I think they're normal that should be happening. Therefore I don't celebrate enough. But the challenge with that is that if you only wait to celebrate big wins. They don't happen every day, they don't happen even every month, so it's very hard, especially when you're an entrepreneur, to keep going and not get demotivated when you only celebrate big wins, because then you're in that state of never enough, nothing is ever good enough. I know that about myself and I actively work on breaking that habit and celebrate small wins and be proud of small wins because, hey, as a high achiever, a lot of my clients, are high achievers and they struggle with the same thing. I love to lead by example. If I coach them on working on it, I am working on it. So here we go. This Episode is one of the ways i'm working on it to share small and bigger wins with you. The second reason why i'm doing it, is Another growth area for me is to share a little bit more Of my personal story and more about me overall. Not just as a coach, but as Maggie Perotin, a woman, a mom, a human being. I know I don't do it enough and a couple of reasons for that. I'm rather introverted. I've been very private most of my life. So getting into entrepreneurship and needing to show up on social media or create content has definitely be a growth area for me. Also my brain tends to say Hey, your life is boring. There's nothing special about it. You have routines in order for you to show up in your business. The kids have certain activities that create the routines or driving them through certain activities. So I don't live this laptop type of life when I'm traveling all the time and I'm on the beach one day and somewhere else on the other day. We have a house in the suburbs of Toronto. My kids go to school, the same school, every day. I have an office that I show up in every day except for the weekends. And I have certain routines. So my brain is hey, your life is boring. What are you going to be sharing about? However, I do think That this quote unquote boring life, when you have a certain structure, and it doesn't mean you do exactly the same thing every day, but you have a certain structure allows you to show up in your business consistently and allows you to. Grow it the way you want. It also helps with family and the kids. So here we go. I'm going to share with you ten celebrations. Five personal five business, but I'm gonna switch it up. So I'm gonna share one business one personal one business one personal and so on and so forth. The first celebration I have is really I want to celebrate my clients. All of my clients in 2024 who trusted me with their investments, with overall taking advice and coaching from me and trusted that I can help them. They're all amazing. I love them all. I'm always inspired by everyone. Every one of them, the resilience, their willingness to do things outside of the comfort zone, their ideas, their passion for their own businesses, for their clients, that inspires me. I take from my coaching sessions with them as much as they're taking from those sessions from me. And I love you all if you're listening. And I did want to refer You, my audience, to some of the episodes. I interviewed some of them only in 2024, so I'll refer you to four episodes. And also I'm going to interview more and more of my clients in 2025. So you'll get to hear their stories and get inspired by them the same way I get inspired by them. So here are some episodes. Episode 155 from June 2018. And that's an interview with one of my clients, Gabrielle Pizzale, who is running a very successful interior design business. And especially if you want to get into a head of a seven figure CEO of a creative business, great episode. Episode 158 with, my client Dan Woke, who is a mortgage broker. So maybe you're in a financial industry and you're like creative business, maybe that's not what I do, but I wanna learn from a successful mortgage broker or financial industry expert. This episode is great, it's from July 19th. The next episode is episode 177, where I talk to my client Jennifer Isley Hall, who is a professional organizer. From November 28th. We talk a lot, about a lot of things in this episode, but definitely Jennifer's story is very inspiring, how she discovered her gift. And passion and how she turned it into successful business. How she doubled the business this year, which is a big win. Great episode. And then the last one I wanted to refer you to is episode 179 from December 5th with Craig Colby, who is a TV executive and producer. A lot of experience. And his story is going from TV production, kind of corporate executive career, inter entrepreneurship, but in there also he shares how to be better with stories and use that in your business. So highly recommend. As I said, I celebrate my clients. They've been doing amazing this year and I'm honored that I could be part of that journey for them. The next celebration is personal, and this one is really for my daughter who has been through a big change this year, and actually a couple of changes at the same time. As her mom, I was apprehensive about those changes, and I'm so proud of how she went through it, but also so proud of me and my husband for supporting her gently on that journey. So in September, my daughter switched two schools. She was moving from her primary school where she was at from junior kindergarten all the way to grade six and also her dance school where she's been dancing since she was five. She's a competitive dancer. So she definitely spent a lot of time in dance and in the school, she had a bunch of friends in there. And for many different reasons, she decided, and we together decided we would switch schools this year as well. So all of that was happening in September, two different environments, leaving something she knew and some of the friends and going to new schools. I'm blown away by how well she handled it. Not only she made new friends, especially in her regular school, very fast, within three weeks. I could learn that because that's definitely not the way I make friends or how fast I make friends. But also the switching the way she dances. She went from full time to part time allowed her to get involved in other things and explore other passions of hers like improvisation and basketball. So I'm really proud of her. I'm really celebrating that for her and for us as well. The next celebration, it's a business one and I'm celebrating the shift where I'm going with my brand and not so much the shift but even more honed in messaging for my business, for my brand. And that honing wouldn't have come to me if I didn't encounter some challenges this year in my business. There was definitely a quarter that was quite hard and things stopped working that used to work. As much as I didn't like it and it felt hard in the moment, it forced me to rethink how I message my services and rethink who do I really want to work with and hone it even more and also got me to be even more creative and motivated to get things working again. It also allowed me to clarify my long term vision of my business. So what I realized is that really people who gravitate to me and the clients that I work with they're super passionate about what they do. They're mission driven. Therefore, they always want to make a positive impact in their community and they want their business to grow because they know that this way they can help more people. They want to create something bigger than themselves. And therefore, when you create a business like that, if you do it very strategically, you can create an asset that you can sell down the line. That it's sellable or transferable if it's to your, family or somebody you can pass it on. That business can live beyond you. And I find that even if my clients don't think about it in the moment, because sometimes they're not even aware that's possible, when they realize that this is possible for them, they're all excited about the idea. So when I started going that route, I realized my clients resonated with it so much. When I think about my current offers, the Diamond Effect Group that is really for entrepreneurs who are starting and they're in that startup phase of their business and they're really growing their business to let's say their first six figure of annual revenue. I want my clients to be able to grow that business and be ready to scale. So as they're growing, set up the foundation, the processes, build the skill sets that allow them to scale successfully and sustainably. And then for my one on one clients, once they're in that phase where they're in their first Six figures or almost there- scaling to six figures, going to multiple, seven, eight figures, and so on. Now we can think about how can we scale that business in a way that also allows them to build an asset that they could potentially sell down the line. And ultimately, it doesn't matter whether they want to sell that business in three years, five years, or ten years. But when you make certain strategic decisions long term through that prism, it directs your business in a different way. And I think it's a great way because think about it, you put a lot of time and effort and money in growing a business, right? You invest that. Why not do it in a way where down the line that investment will pay the dividend. Of course, it will pay you right now short term in terms of income and sales and Revenue for the business and personal income for you. But if you just At the same time think a little bit long term And make those strategic decision this way down the line. You have an asset that you can sell You can pass on to the family. And not just running a business to have a job pay for your current kind of lifestyle. And when I really honed into that messaging, I realized how much I love it. And I feel aligned and excited about talking about it. My clients already resonate. My audience resonates. I have fun strategy that I created for my marketing, for this podcast, for social media. So stay tuned. It's going to get really interesting and exciting in the new year. The next celebration that I have is personal. And that's me entering Fabulous Over 40 contest that really was a fundraiser for National Cancer Foundation that took place this fall. How they run this fundraising initiatives is they create a contest for women over 40 who, of course, are the demographic that potentially gets affected the most by breast cancer. And they create these amazing prizes for the winner. So whomever qualifies for the contest has a great motivation to win and raise funds because of those amazing prizes. And the premise was that you need to Ask your people around you, your network and want to vote for you. And everybody had one free vote per day, but truly to win this contest, you need to raise funds, which give each donor more votes. You can vote for free for a day, but then if you donate 10 that day, then Me as a contestant get 11 votes. And then sometimes there were days where you could get double votes for the money people Donated. Even though I didn't win, I went pretty far in the competition. And why I'm celebrating it because I Entered it to push myself out of the comfort zone again. I love supporting charities close to my heart whether they're a local in my community or not so local as National Breast Cancer Foundation. I usually do it quietly. I donate, I volunteer, and I barely talk about it. Even on my Facebook for my friends, unless you talk to me and we get on the subject, many people don't know how much I contribute to the community. So this contest forced me to be more public about it. Like I needed people's votes. So it pushed me to share things about me. To say that I support this cause and be public about it on a regular basis because I had to collect votes every day. It also pushed me to be vulnerable and rely on people's support. It's not like an exchange of services But what I thought I could give As value to then get people interested and voting for me was sharing some personal things from my life. A great experience of that was that The more I shared, the more I had to be creative and come up with ideas. So I ended up sometimes sharing things that at first my brain was like, this is trivial. This is such a small thing. Who do you think would resonate with it? One example that I have is creating a post about my hair. I have pretty thin hair. I have a lot of hair but it's pretty thin. It has a tendency to be wavy. It's not straight, it's not curly, it's something in between. And as I age I've noticed that the curls are getting more and more pronounced and in Toronto we have sometimes very humid air and humid weather. And in that weather, if I try to straighten my hair, that straightening lasts like five minutes. So I decided I'm not going to waste time trying to straighten my hair, let's say for half an hour. So it lasts five minutes. And I started embracing my curly hair, especially in that humid weather. I made a post about that. At first I thought it's trivial, nobody will care. And yet I get so much feedback about it with women resonating with their struggles with hair. And not only on that post, but also people local came to me during events saying, Hey, like I've seen your posts. I really resonated with it. Thank you for sharing. So that was a great experience and proof that sometimes we think what we share might be too small, too boring, not interesting enough. It's not true there will always be people who can resonate with it and will find value in it. That was a great lesson for me. Another thing in that contest was that I realized how many people were supporting me and cheering and rooting for me. They not only voted for me every day, but also donated money to the cause And wanting to support me. That's just proof that you are never alone. Sometimes we think in entrepreneurship that we're alone in growing the business and struggling but we don't even realize how many people we have who are rooting for us, who are watching our journey and who can support us if we only ask. I got really creative about what I would share about me; even though my brain thinks I have a boring life. I was able to every other day or so to create a post and share things and figure out other ways to maybe fundraise like creating free workshops or whatever that was. I want to celebrate that and celebrate myself to put myself in that situation. If you're listening to that and you've supported me in the journey, I want to thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I never took your votes for granted. And it's humbling to me to know how many people supported me. The fifth celebration is a business one. And I want to Celebrate implementing some technology in my business that's mostly Back end Or if you're my clients, you've already experienced it. I've implemented air table. It's a first for my clients coaching To improve my service delivery and the system will be able to help me in many ways, but couple of main ones are to digitalize data about the progress of my clients in a way that I can draw information from, that I can draw insights from and look at some patterns, some trends that will give me insights that I can't get if I don't track it a certain way. It will also help me communicate with my clients in a certain way, post check how they're doing outside of the coaching session. As I expand the system into my backend operations, my coaching, intellectual property, my marketing, it will be a great technology that will support my business as it grows. Then another thing technology wise, I'm pretty good with technology. I'm not scared of it. I'm curious about it. And that comes from my corporate world where I've been involved in many technology related projects and implementations. I've used technology for many, many years. So I'm pretty good end user of it, which then helps me support my clients, especially those who might not be as comfortable with technology as me. I've been testing, at least four different AI platforms for businesses. I'm very excited to bring that knowledge to my clients in the new year. So if you're my client and you're listening to it, stay tuned, ask me about it. I'm happy to share what I've discovered, how AI can support your business as well. The next celebration, personal, is about being more intentional in building a close group of girlfriends. that has been my goal this year. It's not like I didn't have friends before but it's so easy sometimes when we get busy with our professional life and family life, taking kids to their activities and me ensuring that I spend time with my husband to make Friendships an afterthought. And this year I wanted to put it as one of my goals and create time and space to intentionally meet with my best girlfriends even if some of them are not local to me. I have some in US, some in Europe, and then I have some local ones. And I've started that process with some of them already. We have monthly coffee chats, even if they're on zoom for now, because we're so far apart. But that's just strengthens their relationship. And I love doing that. deep real connections with people. I'm so excited about it. I still have some work to do with more local people. It's crazy how sometimes when we're close to each other, it's actually harder to me than when we're not. I also want in 2025 to take those friendship to the next level and figure out ways how I can meet in person with my more remote friends. I want to celebrate that. Because with that intentionality, I've seen the difference in the friendship and how I feel about it, and how much better I feel when I have regular meetups with my girlfriends. Very exciting. The seventh celebration is definitely something I tend to take for granted so I want to celebrate and that's my consistency and showing up in my business consistently, not giving up, even when things are not going the way I want them or they're going slower than I would like. I'm as impatient as my clients to do something and get results right away. My brain definitely goes there. But no matter what, if I believe in a strategy and something that I want I show up and I just keep figuring out how I can improve to get the results, to speed up the results and so on. Couple of things within that is this podcast, as you've noticed, I've been here every week for 180 weeks straight. Twice a week for you creating content that so many of you resonate and really appreciate because I get that feedback. On Mondays, you have Maggie's moments, so two to three minutes, sometimes five quick episodes to give you a challenge or inspire you or get you thinking about something important for the week. And then on Fridays, you get a full episode anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour that's meant to grow you, assist you of your business. That's meant to get you thinking about your business from a different perspective. Maybe give you a challenge, give you a project to do. And I have shown up here for you without a fail 180 weeks straight. Even though I sometimes look at my podcast downloads numbers, and my brain wants to tell me that it's not growing fast enough, not enough people listen, It's not true. Even if one person listens to it and you're benefiting from it, it's worth for me doing it. And as I said, I have some great ideas for 2025, so stay tuned. And if you're just discovering this podcast and you're liking this celebration episode. Subscribe and come back and listen to not only new episodes. But you can definitely go back and there's a lot of materials for you to benefit from. Consistency and showing up on social media. I do that because I truly believe in the power of it. Not only in the power of gaining Visibility in new markets for new people and attracting people that you would never meet any other way. But also a powerful part of social media that I always remind my clients about is nurturing people who already know you. Not everybody you meet in networking or in person who could be your potential client will be ready to buy from you right now. And social media, being consistent and Providing value through your profiles is like a touch point with those people on a regular basis without you having to have 10 coffee chats in a month with one person or sending them texts. So it's a very powerful tool. And even though there's been times when I've been frustrated and thinking that it's not working. My Instagram account this year, hasn't grown that much. Probably the net growth has been less than 10%. My LinkedIn has been better. I still show up because I also care about people who are already there, even though there's not a lot of new people seeing my stuff, there is enough and a lot of people who are already benefiting from it. And I'm grateful for that opportunity to share with them. So I keep showing up and I keep thinking how I can make things better, more interesting, more engaging. That's another project for 2025. I have some great strategies. So if you're not following me yet, or you're not connected with me yet, either on LinkedIn or Instagram; I'll put, links to my profiles in the comments, connect with me there. And we can interact more two ways than just one sided here on the podcast. Okay. Moving on to the ninth celebration. Business one. Here I'm celebrating my strategic partnerships or if you like to call it strategic alliance collaborations. I am big on creating relationships in your business that are more strategic where you're connected to some amazing people or organizations or institutions where giving value goes both ways. Meaning those individuals or organizations can send you business And in return you can give them value in one way or another. I teach that to my clients. For example, Jennifer, whom I mentioned before, has doubled her business and a big part of it was cultivating strategic partnerships. I teach that to my clients. I create a strategy for them. We figure out how to do it in their business and how to do it Without any fancy tech or systems, if your business is not ready for it yet, how to do it in a way that doesn't take up all your time. I think this is one of the things that the way I teach nobody else in the industry teaches, and I also practice it in my own business. And I have some amazing individuals, amazing organizations that I collaborate with. As my strategic partners and I want to celebrate those relationships deepening but also new ones being created for my business. This year I expanded definitely more locally that presence. But also I have some great relationships and I'm building some great relationships with individuals and organizations outside of my immediate local area, which is very, very exciting. Okay, last but not least, what I want to celebrate is My husband, who has been such a great support for me throughout our entire relationship. But I appreciate it so much more as a business owner, because being a business owner can feel hard. And as I said, it can feel lonely, even though I don't think you're ever lonely. You have so many people around you. People supporting you but having a partner Who is just there for you no matter what and supports you 100 percent no matter what, especially in the hard times. I know it's not everybody has that and I know that i'm super lucky To have his full support, his unconditional love, but also a lot of fun. We both work out from home and we have Offices, on the second floor of our house. Sometimes we don't see each other outside of our breaks and the lunch that we take together in our Daily walks. But it's just great to have somebody You love so much that you're close with Also physically close, so if you're having a bad moment, you can just go and get a hug if you need to. I wanted to celebrate him and celebrate our relationship. I think with the relationship we have, it's very special. And I don't share a lot about it. this relationship has given me so much strength. Even in my business. Some of you know my husband is a musician, singer, songwriter, and I want to celebrate the fact that this year he released the new EP, which is like an album, with six songs. Shedding Skin. I love them all. All six songs are so great. He's done 60 gigs, performances, private events, birthday parties, corporate events, he played in restaurants and breweries and pubs and things like that. 6 0. Even though he has a full time job, he's also an active dad and supportive partner. We share all the, Responsibilities of the household and with the kids pretty much equally. As an artist, he has a great voice, great sensibility. He's a great entertainer. Our daughter, Sophie, who dances and loves to perform on the stage has that after her dad. Our son, Jacob, who is 10, he's more of a quiet introverted force like me. That's funny how our kids take certain things after us. For those of you who are curious and would like to listen to his music, I'm going to share his profile, YouTube profile and Spotify profile, where you can find not only the newest album, but also some other previous album and singles that he released in the past. And this is also why I understand creatives and many of my clients are creatives because hey, I have one at home and married to one. So here we go, 10 celebrations. I have to say that in the beginning when I was teaching, I was just starting to work on this episode. I was like, Oh, am I going to find 10 things I'm going to celebrate? And not only did I find them, but also after I was in the shower thinking about the episode, I had more and more celebrations coming to my mind. Now, I didn't want this episode to be too long. So I stick with 10, but that's just tells you that when you direct your brain in an intentional way, it will start working for you. And instead of telling you, Oh, there's nothing there, or this is not interesting and boring. If you've force it to think certain way for a certain amount of time, it will start thinking that way even more. So that's why it's so important as a CEO of your business and entrepreneur to direct your brain and make it think for you and strategically and intentionally. And that's how you can create a lot of growth in your business. So my challenge for you today is, if you're a bit like me and you're shy to celebrate small, big wins or overall, I want to challenge you to do the same. Take time this week, next week over holidays and celebrate. And if you want to share it, I would love to hear some of your celebrations. Reach out to me via email, maggie at stairwaytoleadership. com. Share with me some of yours. And then tune in next week when I'll be talking about lessons from 2024 that I'm going to implement in 2025. And therefore also I will talk about 2025 goals, which is also an exciting episode. In the meantime, happy holidays, have a fantastic, restful and fulfilling time when you can fill your cup, celebrate small things as much as big things and talk to you next week.