6 Lessons I Wish I Knew 5 Years Ago

Sam Vander Wielen: So you’re in that season where you keep thinking, okay, when does this thing finally get easier? When does the stress chill out? The money feels steadier and you actually get to enjoy what you’re building. Here’s the sneaky part that someday version of your life. Isn’t where the joy starts. The rise is actually the fun part.

The becoming is the point, and if you’re always bracing for what’s next, you’ll miss what’s actually happening now.

In this episode, I’m sharing the six things I’d tell myself from five years ago, if I could sit down with 2021 Sam for one hour. And fair warning, one of them completely changes how you experience the whole journey.

Welcome to On Your Terms® if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. I’m so happy that you’re here, and if you’re new, welcome to  On Your Terms® . This is a podcast for online entrepreneurs who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses, and one of the only ways you’re going to be present in your life is if you actually recognize that where we are right here, right now is all part of it. And that’s also how your business is going to become more profitable in the long run because your business becomes profitable with, honestly, a lot of the boring, repetitive work, not necessarily all of the shiny objects.

So I’ve been doing this fun little segment on,  On Your Terms® before we get into today’s episode where I pull a card, a random card, I’ve not seen this card before from this deck that I won at a conference last year called Tell Me More, A game of questions to Deepen Connection. So I’m gonna go ahead and pull today’s card.

First, we gotta shuffle the deck. Okay, here we go. All right. I’m gonna just pull whatever one’s on the top. If you could make a wish come true for someone else, what would it be? Oh, that’s a good one. I mean. I honestly, I have a, I have a friend right now who not to like go super deep or sad or anything, but like I have a friend right now whose child is having a really scary, serious medical situation.

So the first thing that honestly just comes to mind is like, I would make this go away for her and you know, whatever she’s wishing for is whether to make it go away and never have to deal with this, or for just like great healing and health. So that’s my answer today.

All right, so before we dive into what I would tell myself from five years ago, we kinda have to set the stage so that you understand who I guess Sam was and what my life was like from five years ago. So five years ago, which I cannot believe it was 2021. I just, yeah, I couldn’t believe it. When I had to sit down and think about this, I was like, wait, five years ago was 2021.

That doesn’t feel right. Um, so 2021 fun times. We were still living through COVID, uh, which is so crazy to think it was like still pretty, you know, the thick of it, uh, in the Philadelphia area where I was living. So I was living in Philly where I was born and raised. Uh, had never moved out of Philly, so I was still living there.

My dad was sick with leukemia, but he honestly was doing pretty good, so he had to get chemo every three weeks and we were just like, I don’t know. We had hit this point where we were kind of in a nice rhythm in terms of taking care of him, and we knew what we needed to do and I think in 2021 is probably when it started picking up a lot, he needed a lot, uh, more blood transfusion.

So I’m only saying that because that meant a lot of daily trips to the hospital where he would get these like hours, hours, hours long transfusions. And then the transfusions sometimes came with some issues like. He got a staph infection in his heart one time from a bag of blood. So it just was like a lot of, uh, a lot of blood.

That’s honestly like what comes to mind. My life was just like kind of ruled by my dad’s blood and my dad’s blood numbers, and I like went around knowing what my dad’s white count was and his hemoglobin and his red and is like the neutrophils and the whole thing all the time. So it was just really ruling my life at that point, and it was, my life was just sort of ruled by caretaking, and when I wasn’t caretaking, I was taking care of my business.

My mom on the other hand, was totally fine. You would’ve had no idea that anything was coming. She was a thriving doctor, running her own private practice as she had since I was like eight or nine years old, she was ocean kayaking. Uh, which if you’ve never been ocean kayaking, it’s insanely hard. You literally drive the front of the kayak into the wave it is, and you come crashing down the other side. And I can like still hear her screaming and laughing every time she would come down off the wave.

But it’s really intense. It’s really hard on the arms. She was taking her ballroom dancing lessons. She was competing in ballroom. Like my mom was just a force. Um, and so she, yeah, she was fine. We had just gotten Hudson, which I cannot believe, uh, ’cause I feel like I’ve, I’ve had him forever, but I also can’t believe he’s five now.

And his little razor sharp shark teeth were destroying the shit outta my forearms. My forearms looked like I got slashed every day. , And he was biting little holes in my sweaters, but I thought he was really cute and I let him get away with it. I hadn’t moved to New York yet. And hadn’t even actually known that we were moving to New York, which is kind of crazy to like reflect back ’cause that for me is a huge shift in my life.

Ryan and I had been married for six years at this point. We were living in our first house, which was like a really cute, very old house, a colonial house in a historic town that had a really cute downtown, so we were walkable to the town which was cool ’cause that just like, also my life was just very different in that respect.

I was like always walking and like could do most of what I needed to do in a day by walking, which was really cool. We were also piled on top of each other in terms of the houses and had zero space. My yard, there was like one 100th of what I have now. I think like one of the tiles in my deck might be like the size of the yard I used to have, but I didn’t know any better and I loved it and I thought it was really cool. We backed up to a firehouse. And like a lawyer’s office. It was just very, very different.

And funny enough, my business was very much the same. I sold two things, which I still only sell. I sold the Ultimate Bundle®® and I sold my a la carte legal templates, that same Ultimate Bundle® that’s on sale this week, by the way, only until Friday.

But I really had everything kind of set up the same way. My funnel essentially my evergreen funnel ran my business and my funnel itself was probably at its height back then making well, well over a hundred thousand, if not more a month with no launches. I still had never done a live launch, so I guess my business was a little shifted in the sense that because I didn’t do any live launches, my evergreen funnel was much bigger month to month.

Whereas now we kind of borrow from my evergreen funnel to run these like really big like two live launches, like the one that I’m in this week where the bundle is on sale that we run these two per year, and that borrows a little bit from the Evergreen funnel. So that was essentially, you know, what was going on in my business.

I honestly was just kinda like hanging on and still working really hard because of my dad. I, I always knew that something was coming with my dad. I mean, I, he had terminal cancer. I knew he wasn’t going to last. I was also at this really sticky point though, where my dad had lasted, at this point, like three or four times longer than they had already said he would last.

So it had put me in a really confusing position where I was like, is he gonna die? Or like, okay, one day I’d be like, I’m preparing for him to die and me having to take time off or just not feeling as much energy or whatever. And then the next day I’d be like, I think he might be here forever. So like, maybe I don’t need to do this. And I, it was just a very, very confusing time for me and that left me in a weird place as to how to kind of plan for my business and plan for the future.

I was definitely still riding high off. The COVID spike in sales. We had a huge burst, huge influx of people come in in 2020, especially 2019 had already been a big year for me. So I would just say if we were visualizing this as a rollercoaster, like to me this year was probably around that peak.

So we were to fast forward to five years later to today, well, I now live in New York, which at least for me personally, is like a crazy huge shift. Like if I could told five years ago me that I lived in New York, now I would just think that’s crazy because first of all, if you’re a Philadelphian, any of my Philly people here understand you are raised to believe two things, the Cowboys suck, and New York is terrible. And so like I was brainwashed since I was a child, but my father being like, New York is a terrible, terrible city. It is a terrible place that no one should ever go. Philadelphia is an incredible utopia where everything is amazing, and it really was drilled into me from such an early age that like if you would’ve told 12-year-old me that I was living in New York, I’d be like, Ugh, gross.

I would never live in New York. I don’t live in New York City. I love New York City, by the way. New York City is amazing and I was lied to, but I don’t live in New York City. I live on Long Island and it’s absolutely beautiful and I cannot believe that I live here and I never saw this coming.

Also, I mean, the obvious, biggest shifts for me since 2021 is that my dad died. My mom died, uh, pretty much everyone’s dad, as I say all the time. I went around over Christmas telling people who ask me, are you going to see family over Christmas? And I would be like, no, everyone’s dead. Um, because I’ve just started telling people that because it just, that’s what it feels like to me because that’s pretty much what happened.

My yard is a lot bigger. I’m very happy to report that now me has a much bigger yarn. And there are more deer and more foxes in my neighborhood than squirrels, and that’s because all the red-tailed hawks and the bald eagles eat them. I don’t live the little island that I live on most of the days, which is not something to write home about, but I am trying, um, I’m trying to get out more and I have to be really conscientious, like it’s such a big shift to where I was telling you where I used to live and I was always around people and I was so annoyed about being on top of people all the time.

To being so isolated that I’m like, oh yeah, I have to work at this to socialize, to be in my community, to get out, to leave my house. Like it’s very easy to just stay here and walk around here.

Ryan and I have been married for almost 11 years, which I cannot believe, I don’t feel old enough to be married for 11 years, but that’s, that’s the truth. Hudson luckily is not biting or scratching my arms anymore, but he is scared by his own farts.

I published my first book last year, which I was, I can’t believe. And five years ago, me wouldn’t believe that. Um, but my book came out last year called When I Start My Business I’ll Be Happy. And I spoke on the stage that I said I’d retire after I got to speak on last year, which was at Kit’s Craft and Commerce Conference.

I’d been going to that conference for years. Had gone to that conference in 2021, by the way, and sat there in the audience and was like, if I ever spoke on that stage, I’m like, I’m outta here. I’m done. And spoke on that stage and here I am. I’ve been invited onto some of the biggest podcasts in the industry that I never thought that I would be invited onto just in the past year.

I also continue to get rejected by others that I have tried so hard for so many years to get on and can’t, I feel so unclear and uncertain about what I want to do next. Like what else I want both in life and in business. Which is so funny ’cause that’s such a juxtaposition to 2021 where I was so laser focused on, on business at least that I was very clear on.

Like my big, my big next step or my big focus all the time was just growth. And I think now that I’m in five years later, I’m like, my focus is in growth all the time. I’m glad. I think that’s a healthier place to be. It’s also a little bit more like. Floating around. A little confusing. Right. So it’s just different.

I’ve reached, I guess technically speaking like the proverbial mountain top right in my business. Like in the sense that my, I, I guess I’m well aware of the fact that people have much bigger businesses and are, are a lot better at many things than me, i’m not saying that it’s just that like my business is much bigger than I ever intended to.

I wasn’t even working towards like this size of a business or size of an audience, or an email list or any of the like, vanity metrics. Like they were not, not even on my radar. I didn’t even think that was possible for me. So I’m there yet. It sort of feels like, eh, you know, like that’s kinda how I would describe it.

I, I described this to a friend the other day as like. If you were being told that you were going on this like incredible hike, and the whole time you’re on this hike, you’re told that when you get to the top, you’re gonna have this insane view. Like you’re gonna see mountains and glaciers and lakes and rivers and streams.

Like basically what I saw in Patagonia around every corner. But if you were told this the whole time that you were hiking and then you got to the top and it was just like a McDonald’s in a parking lot, that’s kinda how it feels. It’s like you get up here and you’re just like, wait, that’s it. It’s not, because you know, it’s not great to get to have some of the experiences that I’ve had and to generate the revenue in my business that I’ve done.

It’s because of the weight and the meaning that we put in like that proverbial mountaintop moment, right? Of like once I’m there, that’s it. Once I’m there, then everything’s good. Like once I’m there, I’ll be happy. I will have less stress. Everything will be fine, right? And to me, in my experience, whatever you see, whatever you think is at the end, it’s just not. It’s just not it. People’s problems just don’t magically go away. The money doesn’t bring people the happiness that they think. I don’t think people consider the fact that the money or the size of the business in this case, right? Brings with it its own set of issues. Like in order for you to have that, you also have to deal with a lot of stuff that you’re like, oh, I never really thought about that. I never anticipated that.

And if you think it’s just me and that like, you know, I’ve had a rough couple of years and you think I’m depressed and just giving this like sad statement of the the mountaintop. I am here to say that this sentiment is echoed by so many people that I talk to, who I’m in groups with, who I’m friends with, who I’ve met at conferences, who even have businesses and audiences way bigger than mine, and they’re like, eh, you know, just yesterday my director of operations sent me to a bunch of stuff on social media that was all from these like huge creators that are like stepping down, stopping their podcasts, stopping their main programs, completely changing their like direction, their life, their messaging, whatever.

And I’m like, yeah, I know why. Like now I see that stuff and I’m like, I get it. I get why? Because the thing you think you’re building towards, it’s just not it. It’s just in my experience. So then what the heck is it? What would I tell myself? If I could go back five years and talk to Sam of 2021 with her tiny little yard and her little shark tooth dog, what would I say?

Well, I would tell her at least six things. The first of which is that the rise is the fun part. So me and two of my friends, we caught up on a Zoom coffee chat call over Christmas, and one of my friends on the call, she’s building a brand new business from scratch that is totally different than her current business.

She’s essentially going from a coaching business to building a physical product, right? Totally different. And she has no experience by the way in, you know, up until now in the product space. So she’s talking to us about all of these things that she’s having to learn about, like packaging and three PL and logistics and manufacturers and the cost of glass and how that’s gonna impact the cost of shipping, for example, like stuff we just don’t have to think about when we sell coaching services or digital products.

Me and the third friend, the one that’s not building a new business and who’s in the coaching space. Her and I were just like salivating listening to our friend talking about this, because for me, like my marketing brain was just like bing, bang, boom, boom. I was so excited about all of the things my friend was mentioning. And like the opportunity to get to market that and play with it and be like, oh, that’s like a totally different style of content than I normally do. And like, oh, I have so many ideas and you can play with customers using your product, which is different than what we typically do, you know? And just like so much newness and so much exciting stuff.

My other friend was salivating at the idea of getting to figure out how to make this product in the most cost effective way because she actually has experience with physical products and like she’s really good at that. And she was like so excited all these different opportunities and ways that she would get this product out there.

Now? Yes. On the one hand I fully admit it’s super easy for me and my friend who’s not starting the new business to be excited about it ’cause we’re also not the ones having to do any of this stuff. So it’s super easy to sit there and be like, you should do this and you should do that. And it’s very easy to confuse what I’m talking about or like getting excited about things with shiny squirrel syndrome and just liking things because they’re new and different like I think one of the things that, you know, I haven’t talked about enough, and I, I don’t, I definitely don’t hear other people talk about enough.

When you have a business for a long time and you keep it simple and you just like, like, I don’t know, run a smart business, like what I think we do, right, where it’s just like two products stay super focused. We’re super profitable. We stay on task. How that does get a little bit boring, and I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing, right? I think that there is something to be said in this industry for like accepting a little bit more boring in your life because when you start to feel like the boredom is a problem. You run out and you, you play into the shiny squirrel thing and you add on a ton of new things. New offers, a new app that you go and, and start posting on social media or something like this and you start to get really distracted. And that ends up being the reason why a lot of people’s businesses don’t grow, right running around.

So there’s something to this boredom that like, it’s okay on the one hand, on the other. It’s really fun to think about doing something different. So it’s like I can sit there and say like, I don’t know, like you don’t wanna get too, like caught up in all the newness. But it also is really fun and exciting.

I shared with my friend who’s building this new business, the product business that. I wanted her to remember that building the new venture, that there is time to savor the rise. Like for example, she was just saying like, she doesn’t know how to do this, that, or the other thing. And she wants to start sharing the journey, the build out on social media, but she doesn’t even know how to start or how to share about it.

Or she feels like she actually doesn’t know enough to share on social media. And I was like, I actually think that’s what you share, right? You share along the way saying like here’s what I’m doing. I have no idea how this is done. This is how we’re gonna do it. And like I’m just showing you, it’s like showing your stumbles along the way, showing you building the thing as you’re building it.

The point is that, you know, running this kind of business now, five years later, like past the rise, I would say it doesn’t feel fun all the time. But I think that what I’ve learned now and what I would tell myself back then is that, you know, enjoy every stage of the rise because you’re going to want to keep shaking things up so that you keep, I don’t know, tapping into that rise feeling.

Because getting to this place where you just kind of plateau and you’re like, is this it? Is this all I am? It’s not so fun. So you’re going to wanna keep developing yourself, keep evolving, and keep adding on things so that you can keep it interesting for yourself.

I think the mistake here is just thinking that where you’re headed is not only the final destination, but that it’s going to be smooth and free from stress and worry once you get there. Or that happiness exists on the other side of wherever you are now and like that, there’s nothing really you can tap into now while you’re building it.

And I think if I could impart any wisdom to you or to old me, is that like, I wish I just would’ve said to myself like, actually this is the fun part. Like it’s, it’s not as fun and easy and stress-free as you think on the other side. And we can always choose happy, really, that’s the truth of it. We can see the rise as part of the whole opportunity and we can. Even stop doing things that we don’t really like to do now, of course, I know we always have to do things that we don’t want to do.

I’m not just saying that like we all have to clean the toilets, right? And like it just has to get done. I don’t know anybody who thinks it’s super fun, but I’m talking more about the stuff that you might have a story around. The idea that you have to do that thing in your business, right? Like you have to be on TikTok ’cause it’s like the hot app or something like this or you have to post all face to camera reels. Like there are many, many ways to do things that don’t include being everywhere or doing everything the way everybody else is doing it.

The second thing I would tell myself is kind of related to number one, which is that the carrot will always keep moving. And so I think that very similar to number one is just like one of the things that comes from this is that you think that you’re working through the hard part now so that you get to the easy part. But really, I would tell five years ago me that things keep moving and changing. And evolving and hardly anything is actually the same as when I started my business in 2016.

Like so many things have shifted. We’re gonna talk about that more in a second. But like so many things have shifted that it keeps me learning, right? It keeps me on my toes and I actually see that as an opportunity. Now I always tell people like, I think the biggest perk of my job beyond like setting my own schedule and getting to meet cool people and all of that, is that stuff is not stagnant and stale. It it’s always fun and exciting if you let it, right? And I’ve had a lot of stale jobs. If I had stayed as a corporate lawyer, I mean the laws and changed for like hundreds of years. I mean literally I was reading Kay’s Law from the 1800s at times. Like it’s insane how stale things can be and so don’t lose sight of the fact that getting to do your own thing is an incredible opportunity.

And the fact that our industry is always changing, that your, maybe even like your area of expertise is always changing, like. If you’re in like the health and wellness field or in the financial field or technology fields, like they’re always changing. That is a good thing. That is very, very cool, and it’s such a cool opportunity to keep learning.

The third thing I would tell myself five years ago is that you need to know what you really love about your business or about what you do, and you’ve got to get in touch with your deeper why, because things are always changing.

For example, I always hear people talking nowadays, like they have so much resistance to all of the changes like you’ll hear people talk about how like webinars are dead or like social media is not working like it used to. Instagram doesn’t work anymore. Like no one’s seeing my stuff. And we always talk about like the ways things used to be, which is very funny ’cause it makes us sound like we’ve been doing this for a hundred years.

But like things change so quickly that even talking about like Instagram in 2017, and I, I do this, I, I do this all the time where I’ll be like, ugh. Like before stories, you know, that’s so easy. Like, remember when we used to post grainy photos with like, funny filters? Like, so easy, so fun, you know. But the truth is, first of all, it’s just the reality is that things will keep changing and they have changed.

They will keep changing. The version that we’re in right now is in the process of changing beneath our feet. And I also think that we can make, however, it is now fun, right? And so like, sure, maybe we miss the days where we could post grainy photos. Although, you know, I always think it’s funny when people say that, they’ll be like, oh, I miss it when I used to be able to post grainy photos or like whatever.

I’m like, why can’t we do that now? Who said that we can’t do this now? Like if you, I, I’ll, I’ll sign up for your Instagram if you have that, like, I would love that. I would be fine seeing only carousels, like I, I actually love carousels. I prefer them and I can like, consume them in my own time. I, I’m fine with it. So like, I don’t know. I think it is funny, you have to call yourself out sometimes as to some of the stories that you buy into of like, I liked the way things used to be. In that case, what you’re doing is saying. There’s a new trend, like there’s something that’s more popular and I’m choosing to go with the more popular thing and abandon the way I used to do this in the hopes that the more popular thing will get me further. I mean, that’s a choice. Like it’s okay to choose if that’s what you wanna do, but I do think it’s important that we recognize it’s a choice.

The fourth thing I would tell myself five years ago is that you don’t need to be one of them to be successful or accepted. So, okay when I started back in 2016, especially, I mean there were so many fewer people in like the online business space, but even as people were coming in, there was kind of already like a little clique situation happening where there was a group of people who had experienced a lot of success building online businesses already, and, you know, props to them. They, they were super early to the market. They started early, they worked their tush off and they built really big businesses, big audiences, all of these things. Amazing. Right. Great. And I thought of them as the standard, right? I thought this is the ultimate to be achieved. This is the mountaintop, right? This is the goal that I’m working towards is like being one of them, or even being in their clique, right? Maybe they’ll accept me in if I build a business that’s big enough like theirs.

But the more I grew my business, the more I realized that those in the clique were just. I don’t know, just in that clique, like they, honestly, I, I think if we’re just honest about it, it’s like they started early, there was so much less competition. They were really smart about what they built and, and they capitalized on a rising industry before other people did, and they were able at that point to like gobble up big, big portions of the market.

Five years later. I we’re, first of all, we’re seeing that be dismantled left and right, but second of all, I just think because there’s so many. People now, like there’s just so much more distribution of that wealth, both literally and figuratively.

I also realized that like once I got closer and closer to it, or started meeting those people or met people who knew those people, I was just kind of like, oh, they’re just people.

And also it’s just not as shiny as it seems. I think that I wish I could do, I wish I could do a podcast episode about all of the people in all of the like scenarios I’ve seen that I’ve gone into that I had such a preconceived notion about, and then I got to actually meet these people and like “talk turkey” as my grandpa would say, and let me just say, the Turkey was more like tofurkey. It was not the same thing. It was not the same, not not what I expected at all. And so you just realize like not only are they people, but you’re like, oh, they’re actually struggling with the same thing I am. Or like, oh, it’s not as great as it seems like there’s someone I can think of in particular who I know I, I aspired to be more similar to when I started that, when I got closer to her inner circle and learned a little bit more about her world. She works like a hundred times more than me, and I don’t want to do that. And that is not consistent with my values. And so it was like, it’s not that I buy into the story that in order to have a business of that size, I have to work the way that she does. But it’s interesting as you grow your business that you start realizing. That maybe people who you’re like on the surface jealous of or envious of, you actually aren’t willing or wanting to do the things that they have had to do in order to get there.

Like, I’m not willing to give up my life. I don’t want to be on social media all the time. I’m like moving in the opposite direct. I’m like trying to get off, uh, social media, like be off my phone. Work less. And yeah, you just get like more and more comfortable with your enough number as I call it, and finding really like what do you need to not just live but to thrive according to your own values and so I guess if I could talk to five years ago me, it would just be like, you don’t need to be one of them, not only to be successful or accepted, but also just get clear on what you really want out of this, because if you’re not clear about what you really want as you’re building your business, you’re gonna be building somebody else’s dream and that’s why there feels like there’s such a disconnect for you all the time because you’re actually working towards somebody else’s ideal scenario and not your own.

The fifth thing I would tell myself is to stay confident in my be a leader, not a follower mantra. So this comes from my father, Norm. He told me this since I was like three years old, and he really just drilled this into me to be a leader and not a follower. And I think about this a lot when it comes to business because five years ago me, my gut was telling me. I don’t want to, like, I know that new app is like really popular and everyone’s talking about it and I’m, I guess I’m supposed to do that and like I’m supposed to post more and like post in this way and do this thing and do that thing and be everywhere.

And I just don’t want to, right? It’s really hard to stick to that, to like stick to your gut when not only you’re seeing everybody else do it, but when you’re still in the rise part and you’re trying to grow your business, like I get, I get the practical application of this that you’re like, well, I’m still, I’d still need to make more money.

Right? Like, let’s just be real about it. You need to make more money in your business. So it’s very tempting and natural then to just be like, well, I guess I do need to be on that app and to do that thing and to add on this feature and do all that stuff. Right?

But if I could go back and tell five years ago me like keep being confident in the Be a leader, not a follower thing. Like you were right about not needing to be on all those platforms and like PS you were right about clubhouse.

That would be my greatest I five years ago, me would feel real vindicated about that one because everybody was running left and right and if you don’t know what clubhouse is, boy did you miss a time.

It was a time to be alive in the online business space. Everybody left and right fricking sending all these audio. I was like, get outta here with this. I am not sitting here on this stupid app all day long listening to people yap and to the ether. How does any of this grow my business? It doesn’t grow my business at all.

Do you see how there are so many things that come up as you’re growing your business that are just like major distractions? Have you ever seen that show American Ninja Warrior where like the people are like running on those like giant platforms and there’s shit swinging out of the ether, coming to knock them off of this stuff.

Running a business feels a lot to me like that. It feels like you’re running on a very unstable platform and you’re being bopped all over the place and then there’s like stuff swinging through the air trying to knock you off course. Clubhouse. Is that, you know, different, different like apps and whatever I call it, the app de jour, like whatever the thing is that that’s what that really is.

And it’s like it takes a very strong person and a very strong mindset that you admittedly need to keep working on. And strengthening, just like strengthening the muscle at the gym is very hard to do that. It’s so easy to be tempted by all those clubhouses of the world that come in and try to knock you off course.

So, five years ago, me. Keep doing what you’re doing.

All right. Last but not least, I would pass myself a note and here’s what it would say. The other day I was on one of my walks. I’m doing this 100 day Peloton challenge, which I’ll be like more, I’ll be like almost halfway through I’ll when we have this episode, and it better be, better be sticking to it. But I, I’m doing this a hundred day Peloton challenge where you just have to do something on the Peloton app, once per day. And it can be anything. It can be meditation, it can be stretching, yoga, running, walking, the bike, whatever.

So I, I do these mindful walks. They have this great mindful walk series with, um, Kirsten Ferguson and I was doing this Peloton Mindful Walk, and she said to envision the version of yourself at the end of your life, passing a note to yourself now.

Okay. And like at first bl like blush, that could be like, oh, that’s dark, right? But she has, you visualize it, your yourself at the end. I like to vision like the Disney version of me at the end, like a princess going to sleep. That’s what I’ll, we can make it lighter.

And so you pass yourself a note and you open the note and when you open the note it says, it all went great and I wish I could pass myself that note five to five years ago. Me, like from now. Not because it literally all went great, like everyone’s dead see the top of the episode, right? I’ve had a lot of bumps, I’ve had a lot of stress. I’ve had, you know, even little stupid things not go well. I’ve had pipes burst in the basement. I had major construction at my house that was so, so stressful.

I won’t even like replace a light bulb ever again. And yeah, there’s just been a lot of stuff right. But the truth is that it all turned out great in the end, right? Like, even though these bumps come and these things, I mean, even the worst thing that I personally could have imagined, which was like I was one of those kids, one of those people that just like, like gripped the, to death, the idea of my parents, uh, dying.

Like I, I, when I was three, I remember crying myself to sleep thinking, oh my God, one day my parents are gonna die. Like I, I was so terrified and it happened. Like it happened, and not only did it happen, but it happened to both pretty quickly and in pretty terrible circumstances and so like, not that my parents dying turned out great, but like overall, when you zoom out, things still turned out okay. Even with that.

My business is fine. My business actually grew this past year and. We had to take so much time to focus on the book, you know, and you’re like, we obviously didn’t get the revenue from the book. The, the publisher gets that. And so it’s like, that’s not where the money came from. So we, we still did great. Like everything turned out great in the end. I know it’s so cliche, but like we spend so much time sweating the small stuff. And I in particular, I’m somebody, I have a lot of anxiety. I want to know exactly what’s happening and when, uh, and I just, yeah, I just wanna know like, how’s this, how’s everything gonna go?

If you could just tell me ahead of time, I would feel much better. And I think if I could just pass that note to myself, like when, when Kirsten Ferguson said this on my Peloton walk, I literally stopped in the middle of the street and like, like it took my breath away because I was like, this idea that if you could act now, like you know that it’s all gonna turn out fine.

Imagine what you would do differently, what you would do differently with your life, your day, your business, your ideas, your relationships, right? It just felt like such a huge like release or relief or something. I don’t know, like if I could personally let go of that idea of just like gripping to death, needing to know what’s gonna happen and how’s it gonna go, and I think this year more than anything.

This is important for me, and we’re gonna talk about this next week a lot because we’re gonna check in on our New Year’s resolutions and we’re gonna talk about, you know, why even is January 1st, the, the start of the year and like the, the start of even like the new year, new you mentality and how that doesn’t even align with the way that like our lives work or the universe works.

And if I could think about just letting some of this go, letting this year be what it’s gonna be, it’s okay to feel a little uncertain. It’s okay to feel like it’s time to surrender and maybe just integrate and like go inwards a little bit that that’s okay. So I’m gonna adopt this mindset this year and just keep visualizing myself in the future, passing myself now a note and when I open it, it says, it all went great.

All right. Well, that’s it for this week’s episode. I can’t wait to chat with you next week. If you liked this episode, if you have feedback, if something came up for you, I want you to send me a DM on Instagram at samvanderwielen. Let me know you listened to the podcast.

Whether you enjoyed this episode and my emails are always open. You can reply to any of my emails. I would love to hear from you and hear how you’re liking the show.

Don’t forget, by the way, before we go that the Ultimate Bundle® is on sale and a whole bunch of brand new bonuses for you are available. So I’ll leave the link down below to get this exclusive deal until this Friday, February 13th.

And if you have any questions, of course, about the bundle or the bundle sale, again, my dms are open, my inbox is open, and I’m happy to help. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll chat with you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.