Self-Development: The Secret Accelerator for Business Success - EP # 244

What if the biggest breakthroughs in your business had not much to do with tactics or strategy and everything to do with you?

In this episode, Maggie dives deep into the real, research-backed reason self-development isn’t just “nice to have,” but the secret accelerator for sustainable business success. She shares her own journey from burnout to fulfillment, the science behind self-awareness, and practical stories from clients who’ve transformed their results by working on themselves first.

You’ll discover:

• Why knowing yourself is the foundation for growth (and how most people skip this step)
• The triggers that push us out of our comfort zones—and how to use them for positive change
• How to align your business with your values for more energy, fulfillment, and results
• Real-life examples of habits, routines, and mindset shifts that fuel both personal and business breakthroughs
• Simple, actionable exercises to help you reflect, reset, and move forward—no matter what season you’re in

Whether you’re scaling up or just starting out, this episode will inspire you to look inward, take bold action, and unlock your next level of success.

Ready to accelerate your growth? Tune in now!

Connect with Maggie:

• Instagram: @maggieperotin_s2l
• LinkedIn: Maggie Perotin
• Book a free consultation via her Website: https://www.stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

Hello Diamond Effect podcast listeners. Welcome back to the next episode, and today I wanna dive into the topic that's really close to my heart and that's self-development. I consider myself self-development geek because I've seen firsthand how transformational this journey can be. Because I believe that true self-development starts with knowing yourself deeply and honestly without that, you can't really become a better version of yourself. So it's about knowing not what you should want, but what you actually want, not what others expect, but what lights you up? Moves you forward. Only when you start understanding and knowing yourself can you [00:01:00] become the better version of you, reach the next level and truly create the life and business you want.

And I want to share today with you a number of stories from my own life, but also share my client examples to hopefully inspire you. To create the life and business you want. And let's be real. Most of us don't just wake up and decide to reinvent ourselves one day just because.

Becoming a better version of yourself requires changes. And as human beings, naturally we don't like change. Our brain loves the comfort of predictability and knowing how we behave every day and what's happening every day in Swan and every time we. Push ourselves out of our comfort zones. We challenge ways we do things right in order to create better results.

[00:02:00] That means changing what you do, changing how you think, growing skillsets. So usually there is a trigger. Two reinvention, a pain that becomes impossible to ignore or a desire for more that finally outweighs your current comfort, your current life. And there's also a third part I've discovered, and that's intentional ongoing growth through coaching and self-reflection.

Now I discovered it. Only after I had my own trigger of burnout. And when you look into research, there's actually research that confirms that from Dr. Asha Urich from 2018, who found that self-awareness in the single greatest predictor of success and satisfaction in life in work. The better you know yourself, [00:03:00] the more success you create in life. And her study of thousands of leaders revealed that people who know themselves, they know their strengths, their weaknesses, their values, their triggers, they're more confident, they're more self secure, make better decisions, and build stronger relationships. But only 10 to 15% of US adults are actually self-aware.

Even though most of us think we are. It's actually a skillset you need to develop. It's part of emotional intelligence, leadership skillsets that you need to intentionally develop. So for me, this, the first step into interpersonal development was. Happened when I became a mom and I was a mom of two young kids, a toddler and a baby, and managing a demanding corporate career.

And what I've [00:04:00] noticed is with my husband, what we've noticed that by Thursday. Evening each week, especially my patients would really wear thin after almost a whole week of, dropping kids to daycare, of running, to the meetings, commuting, taking calls from the car, coming back, making sure I'm not late, preparing food for the kids that were already tired and hungry.

But Thursday I would often lose my cool with the kids and that I. And then I would feel bad and I would feel guilty about it. It wasn't the mom that I wanted to be. So that kind of discomfort and really feeling bad about myself became my first trigger to look for solutions and grow myself. So through that.

And a vacation at my sister's in Germany, I discovered meditation and I started just with [00:05:00] 10 minutes of meditation once a week because I was definitely the person who didn't believe in meditation, who is telling myself that my, my brain goes too fast. I can just think, switch off my thoughts and I can sit still, because then everything starts itching and so on.

But because my desire of becoming a better mom for my kids was so strong, I thought I had nothing to lose to give it a try and try once a week, and that once a week meditation was enough for me to see the changes in how I behaved throughout the week and how I felt throughout the week. So then I added some.

Deep breathing each morning. I didn't have a big morning routine. I just started with 30 seconds of not looking at my phone, not rushing to start the day, but a few big breaths. And that was another [00:06:00] step of me realizing that when I do that, I feel less stressed throughout the day, I feel more energized and I can also handle things that are happening that I couldn't predict with.

More with better decisions. Again, less overwhelming. So that was a big wake up call for me and how much influence we have over how we feel every day, how stressed or not stressed we feel, and how we manage our busy and demanding lives, right? So those two little changes didn't just make me a better mom, but.

Help me become a better leader at work and overall, a happier person, which was a benefit to everybody. And I will be citing some research as I go through this episode because I really want you to see that this is not just Maggie sharing her own story that [00:07:00] only worked for her. This has been proven with multiple studies and whatever I'm talking about can work for you too.

So in John Kaban zinn's work on mindfulness shows that even a few minutes daily of mindfulness practice can significantly reduce stress, improve emotional regulation, and increase wellbeing. And those are studies from like 1990s, right?

Mindfulness literally rewires our brain to slow down, not react to things that are happening around us, but more respond. And I've definitely seen that. With as minimal as one 10 minute meditation a week. And then what I always tell my clients when I coach them, it's if you don't like to meditate, you can pray, right?

If you are more of a religious person, you can pray. You can [00:08:00] also just sit in the morning with your cup of coffee and instead of. Dragging your coffee around everywhere, what you do? Just spend a couple of minutes enjoying your coffee, smelling the smell, and just sitting still. And that's also mindfulness, right?

So meditation is not the only way you can be mindful and set yourself up for success first thing in the morning. So then what happens? A couple of leads. So the next trigger for me to pursue most more self-development happened a few years later where, when I hit a wall in my corporate career and it burnt out, and I've talked about it multiple times on the podcast, but there was situational, thing where the company I worked for made some decisions that weren't the best decisions for my department.

And we had to [00:09:00] deliver things that we weren't ready to deliver without the resources that we needed to deliver. And I felt like I've been set up to fail at work that no matter, because I was working seven days a week, nonstop long, long hours where my kids were still little and needed me, I was tired. And no matter what I did, no matter how much.

Time, family time, I sacrifice no matter how much sleep I sacrifice, the results that were expected of me were impossible for me to deliver. And of course I also lived the consequences of that by the clients not being happy, the executives not being happy and swan. So I got to the breaking point when I got really mad because I was tired.

Paralyzed, scared and not available for my family. And that's not how I wanted to show up every day as a, as a mom, as a woman, as a professional. And that forced me [00:10:00] to ask, what do I really want? And from that question. It came up an idea to start my own coaching business,

so going back to research again, there's more research about that thing, and this is Dr. Christina Mala research. On burnout that often burnout is caused, not necessarily just by, longing, work hour long hours, but by misalignment between our values. In our work, and that was definitely my situation where my family values became compromised by the demands of work.

And I also, because I didn't see the results of my work, I didn't feel fulfilled. By that work because I felt like my efforts and my energy were going nowhere, and I didn't feel like my skills were [00:11:00] utilized properly.

I was just being criticized for everything I did. That was more of a trigger to cause my burnout and lack of energy and stress than the, just the sheer amount of hours I was putting in for that period of time. So research says that when it, when. What we do isn't meaningful or aligned with just our passions and what we love.

Stress skyrockets and then fulfillment climates. And I've also seen that even in other roles before that one where I, maybe I wasn't feeling burned out, I was feeling stress when I was doing things or asked to do things that I was really good at. Like project management or figuring out crisis situations, but those situations just stressed me out as opposed to when I was leading my team and coaching my team members and training them and helping them [00:12:00] be successful. I could do a lot of that for long hours, and that would make me feel even more energized. That's why I became a coach because even if on days when I coach long hours and sometimes into the evening. I have one of the diamond effect group calls happens during my evening to accommodate the clients who are maybe working or from different time zones.

I feel energized after that call and not necessarily tired or stressed.

Now what I always instinctively knew and what I bring my clients always to as a coach, is that you always want to focus on what you can control no matter what's happening. Because when we focus on what we can control, we take power.

We can feel that we have power over our circumstances, that we can [00:13:00] influence our circumstances in one way or another, right? If we focus only on the circumstances and other people that we cannot control, then it's very easy to feel powerless and like you don't have control over your life. So even during the burnout, when I knew that.

I wasn't calling all the shots, right? I didn't make the decisions and commitments to the clients that then we couldn't fulfill. I also couldn't control the demands of the clients and so on, but there were things I could control, and one of those was my habits in the way I handled the workflow, the workload that was given to me.

In a way, I managed my time, my priorities, and my boundaries. So during that time, I enrolled in High Performance Coaching Course. It was a 12 week course that. Taught me how to [00:14:00] plan my week better, how to prioritize better, how to, based on that prioritization, say no and sets set certain boundaries internally with people in my company, but also sometimes with the clients.

And then prioritize what mattered most in my role at the time and also in my personal life and very quickly. As I started implementing those habits, I became more effective. I became less stressed. The situation around me didn't change just yet, but how I handled it and how I felt about it change, and that was a big eye eyeopening.

Moments for me because I realized I have more power and control over my life than I thought before, right? These same habits then allowed me to start my business on the side to [00:15:00] enroll into the executive MBA, something that I always wanted to do for me. I love to learn. I love to always get better.

And do all that simultaneously while still having my full-time job. And at that time I was even promoted to help fix the issues that, we all left through few months before, so I had a more responsibility, a higher role in corporate, and I was still able to start my business on the side, do my MBA, and then help.

My children through COID and do all of that while feeling good, not stressed, calm and grounded. And I still implemented time for me time for volunteering. So like other things that were important to me in my personal life.

If you look at the research, there is Angela Duckworth work on grit from 2007, shows that like perseverance and [00:16:00] self-discipline and creating habits and going after what you want, not just talent drive achievement. And even older studies like the one from 1966 from Julian Rogers shows that there's a theory that focuses on locus of control.

So what we control, what we focus on. Expand, right? So it shows that people who believe that they can influence their outcomes are more resilient and successful, right? Because with belief comes specific action, and through that action you create results that you influence your outcomes and success.

So through that journey, I realized that. Productivity is about priorities, but not only that, it's also about knowing yourself. So once you know what are your priorities, then [00:17:00] it's about taking action during the week. Two, for you to achieve the goals, right? And focus on those priorities. And when you do that, you actually have to understand how you operate, right?

When do you work best? What routines fit your life? How long it takes you to complete certain tasks. Realistically, not how long you think it should take you, but how long it takes you. So when I was. Doing my MBA and growing my business and so on. I quickly realized that in order to fit that into my schedule, I couldn't learn at night.

By the time my. Job, like my nine hours or whatever in a corporate job ended and I picked my kids and we ate. I was just too tired. My brain wasn't open to learning. So I had to create a morning routine and shift my [00:18:00] schedule to the mornings where I could spend an hour and a half each morning either, doing assignments for my MBA or.

Doing work for my business, whether it was creating posts or social media or planning, the next coaching session. And I left afternoons to mom work, but also coaching my clients because that was energizing me, definitely didn't require as much. It was easier for me to do in the evening.

So the habits and frameworks that I learned during the, high performance coaching, program that I took, I applied them to my life in a way that worked for me. And then when my situation changed, when I was able to quit my job and I finished my MBA and I went with my. Business full time. I adjusted my routines again because my circumstances [00:19:00] changed and I was able to do it right.

So I always coach my clients that when you start learning, maybe time management frameworks or some frameworks, when you are working on you going to the next level, improving you, don't try. To fit your whole life and how you operate into the framework. I always say that it's like trying a Cinderella shoe and your foot is too big and you're cutting off your toe or cutting off your heel, right?

That doesn't work. Instead of trying to fit in the shoe, you need to adjust the shoe to fit. Your foot, whether en larger, it's smaller, or buy a whole new shoe, right? So if you're learning, let's say, some time blocking framework into how to be more effective with your time and for whatever reason it doesn't work for you, modify it.

Don't throw it away. It might be very effective, but [00:20:00] modify it. To so that it works for you, right? Or find frameworks and tools that work for you. I, when I coach my clients, especially on time management. I want them to achieve the result of I'm very effective with the time I have in my business. So when I decide to do certain actions to move my business forward, I complete 80% of those actions, 80% of the time because I'm very realistic and how I schedule them, I understand how I operate, how my schedule operates, so I can put that into my plan.

And work and complete that plan. Now, what tools they use to accomplish that goal can be different for every single person. That is not important. The important is the result you're trying to achieve, right?

So the example I give you is I teach my clients to. [00:21:00] Have, see your time every week, and usually we start with one hour. See a power hour that you can schedule at any time that works for you during the week. But for my, one of my clients, Dr. Ruiz, that wasn't really working in terms of like just scheduling one hour a week.

So what we did is. We turned her morning walks. So something she implemented for her morning routines, just to bring in more movement, fresh air into her day to day and a little bit of mindfulness. She also turned those morning walks into her CEO time where she was able, as she was getting.

Oxygenating and getting some movement and reducing her stress. She also had some thinking time to think through important things in her business that she didn't have time to think about during the day when [00:22:00] she's serving clients, going from meeting to meeting, maybe commuting and so on.

So we adapted. The concept of creating time to think as a CEO strategically into what worked for her. And the result was she does feel better. She accomplishes more during the week, right? And her business has grown.

Research shows that we all have our biological rhythm, right? Some of us are early birds, some of us are night owls. And when you align your schedule and your priorities to that, your natural energy. It makes you way more effective and happier as well.

Now, the one important thing that I don't want anybody to miss is that self-development means. Doing uncomfortable things, right? So implementing a habit or learning new skills, or shifting perspective facing [00:23:00] fear. So doing things that you haven't done before where your brain will want you to stop, especially in the beginning.

Or it will tell you that, oh, only because you tried once and the first time you didn't get the results you wanted, then you should stop because it doesn't work, that's not true. Self-development is a journey through a lot of discomfort in the beginning to then get to the point where you've upleveled, whether it's in the way you are, handling.

Day to day because now you're not as stressed, whether it's with your effectiveness with the time, or whether it's with the skillset and how, your marketing improved and so on, right? But it is a journey.

So I always say to my clients, if you want a successful business, if you want a successful life, you will need to overcome limiting billion beliefs. You will need to challenge yourself on those beliefs. You will need to overcome [00:24:00] fears of sales who are being visible or public speaking, and you'll need to become more effective and productive.

And that might mean. Putting certain structure into your weeks and becoming less of a, oh, I do things that I feel in the moment to do type of things, right? I used to think that sales was pushy, but that type of thinking wasn't helping me because it was keeping me. Scared of selling. It was keeping me scared of reaching out to the, to people and maybe offering my, making offers when it made sense.

So I reframed. My thinking about selling as helping, and I have a sales process that truly reflects that, where it's not me telling my clients how potential clients, how amazing I am, but me listening to my potential clients, asking [00:25:00] them very, deep questions that make them think about their business and their priorities and so on.

And only in the end if I feel like, I can help them. I tell them how, and very often clients who have consultations with me find them very valuable whether they end up working with me or not, they. Most of them always thank me of how it made them think and reflect on their goals, on their business of how they're running them and so on.

Another change, for example, in perspective that I've developed being a business owner is direct outreach. So I get pitched. Every day, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on my email, people trying to be guests on this podcast, or trying to sell me their services because I'm a business owner and I don't get upset by that at all.

If anything, I [00:26:00] respect people who are so committed to their business, who are so committed to helping their clients or you know that they're willing. To reach out to people they don't know and face rejection and deal with their own discomfort of doing the reach out, that I respect that. It doesn't mean that I reply to every cold reach out because I don't have time.

I would've spent all my day replying to the cold reach out, but I don't get upset. And the cold reach out bad. Is related to what I'm looking for, I might actually reply, or if it's very, if it's funny or it's unique and I appreciate the whole approach, I'll have a conversation. But only because I don't reply doesn't mean that I'm, for example, get upset.

So then when I do my own reach out, I also with that, have a different perspective and I'm able to do cold reach out because I [00:27:00] shifted my perspective and cognitive behavioral therapy shows and proves that changing our thoughts. About anything, about circumstances, about what we wanna do and so on, changes our feelings and actions. So if I'm thinking sales is pushy, people are gonna be upset and so on, I will probably feel upset.

But if I think about sales is me helping a client and for example, cold reach out is just me. Getting in front of my ideal client to find the one who wants my help. I'm not expecting everybody to want it, but I won't know who wants it unless I get in front of them and ask right then.

Often I talk to business owners or even potential clients where I can see they have so many limiting beliefs, stopping them from going after their [00:28:00] goals, that sometimes it breaks my heart. Now those who work with me, we change that and I coach them on it.

But those who don't. Probably stay stuck in their thinking, thinking that this is the only way to think and this is the truth of the world. And believing their thoughts, which then in turn keeps them stuck and they don't get the results that they want. So I always tell myself, do you wanna create your result?

Then through that you might need to change your thinking. You might need to change what you do. Or do you wanna stay the same with your same thinking and then be upset or be sad that you can't create the results you want. So going back. To my burnout and the moment when I started asking myself, what do I really want? This is the moment explaining why I became a business coach. I started digging deep into [00:29:00] myself and first figuring out what truly energizes me. What do I truly love to do?

I realized that over 15 plus years of being a corporate leader, the things that I loved was coaching and developing people, helping them grow not only in their roles, but also in their careers. So helping them move from the role that maybe they were working for me to the career that they wanted, and I ultimately didn't care if they stayed in my department or went, you know.

Or grew within the company or outside. I just wanted them to be happy and to be the best version of themselves. And I do have this. Superpower of understanding what people know to get there. This is my genius zone and every time I was helping an employee go to the next level, it was filling me up and it didn't drain me.

And then I realized that I also love business. I think business can be creative. [00:30:00] It is, he definitely can be fun. I realized I had a lot of experience throughout my career in business plus the MBA that I've, wanted to do, and I signed up for before I decided to start my coaching practice. So I decided to marry those two passions and loves coaching and business and become a business coach and.

I coach my clients every day I show up here in the podcast. I know I made the right decision because I do feel fulfilled on a regular basis now that I do what I love. I love seeing people succeed. I love using both my. Personal experience and professional experience to help my clients grow.

But this clarity only came from looking inward and pausing and asking myself those questions. And then I see [00:31:00] entrepreneurs sometimes stuck and not able to make decisions on. Where to take their business, what to do. And it's very often because they don't know themselves, they don't know their values, they don't know what they truly want, not what they should want, but what they truly want.

Sometimes they don't know what they don't want, right? So they're trying to find the perfect answers or the perfect roots, but almost like outside of themselves rather than from within.

And for me, I realized that the values that are for me, I was digging into my values. I realized that what was important to me was of course, family and spending quality time with my loved ones, but also freedom and not only. Time freedom, but. Also [00:32:00] freedom of making decisions, having creative agency and shaping the business in a way that I thought would be the best, even if, I knew I wouldn't be always right, but having that freedom of making decisions, implementing them, living the consequences of those decisions, and also financial freedom.

I knew that with entrepreneurship, I had way more potential. Of creating a greater income and being more resourced than I could ever earn in the corporate life.

So very often when, I work with clients, I start working with them

by leading them through the exercises of uncovering their own values, their own junior zones, and uncovering which one of those values they would wanna bring into their business by defining their mission and their vision, which is truly defining what they want. Because when you know [00:33:00] yourself, you can then.

Take frameworks that help you be more effective, more skilled, less stressed and so on. And then build habits that last, learn faster, create more momentum, make faster decisions, and move your business forward way more and in a way that you actually love. So before we finish this podcast, I have some practical exercises and challenge for you.

Number one, I invite you to take five minutes today to reflect on what do you truly want. In your business and in your life. So if you imagine yourself five years from now and everything went exactly the way you want it, how does your business look like? How does your life look like? Not what you should want, but what you truly want.

And it's okay to be [00:34:00] different than everybody else. It should be. Then ask yourself, what is one belief or habit right now that is preventing me from getting there? One belief or habit that I could shift, that I could change, that I could improve on to move closer to that vision. Okay. Journal about it

or go for a walk and voice memo, just like one of my clients, right? Whatever works for you. But spend some time thinking and putting your thoughts either on paper or on a voice memo. And if you're ready for support, reach out to me for complimentary consultation. I will put the links in the show notes. I would love to help you to get to the next level.

Because self-development doesn't start with just learning skills. It starts with self-awareness. Knowing [00:35:00] yourself deeply, knowing what you want, identifying what is stopping you from creating what you want, and then intentionally working through it. Whether you do it with a coach or a mentor, or through your own self-reflection, reading books, YouTube videos ultimately doesn't matter.

The journey's always worth it, and even if in the beginning. You don't like it as much. It's uncomfortable. You're scared of it. If you persevere and keep going, it's worth it. I promise you. I've done it so many times and not every time. The change that I implemented in my life was caused by a painful trigger.

I started doing strength training about a year ago, and the reason for change was just [00:36:00] my desire to be healthy, and I'm a person who have that self-identity of a healthy person. So it's not like a year ago I wasn't healthy. I was healthy, but I also wanted to stay healthy.

And because I realized that as a middle life woman where my perimenopause is kicked in order to stay fit, I needed to implement strength training. I just implemented it. And even though I hate working out, I hate gyms. I figured out ways that worked for me. I found a mentor. My husband, who is very, health conscious and is really good at working out and he knows some of those things to help me to start to help me go through the period when I didn't like it.

And my brain, was very resistant to the exercises to help me through that hard time until. I was accepting the exercises and I was fine with them [00:37:00] doing them alone, and I just needed his adjustment, his help with adjusting things or upleveling things, so on and so on, to the point where yesterday, probably for the first time, I actually loved and enjoyed doing in my workout.

So you can get from being uncomfortable and hating. The habit you're trying to implement or the skill you're trying to learn to really loving it. On that journey to creating the results you want. So I'm not saying it's easy and it's to walk in the park, but I'm also saying you can do it. And what will motivate you is knowing what you want, knowing why you want it.

Why is it important to you and keeping your eyes. On that and hopefully having support through that. This is how you create a life and business you truly love, and then become proud of your growth along the way. Have a fantastic week. Talk [00:38:00] to you next week. Bye.