Actor Turned Entrepreneur w/ Kat Elizabeth

In 2013, Kat Elizabeth decided to quit working in musical theatre and start rebuilding from scratch. Fast forward 8 years and she’s now living her dream life and is on a mission to help other humans build profitable personal brands of their own so they can ditch their soul-sucking 9 to 5s. Tune in to this exciting episode to hear Kat’s story, as an actor turned copywriter and personal branding coach.

Kat’s Website: https://personalbrandingproject.co

Jessmyn:

Hi, guys, and welcome back to Interact’s Creator Stories Podcast. So excited to be with you all here, per usual. I’m your host, Jessmyn Solana. And with me today, I have Kat Elizabeth. Kat, thank you so much for being on the show with us today, I’m really excited.

Kat:

Always such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Jessmyn:

Of course. Of course. And Kat is the owner of personalbrandingproject.co. And just to give you a little bit of a background of who she is, I’m of course going to let her give her own schpiel, but Kat is an actor turned copywriter and personal branding coach who believes branding is an inside job; I agree with that. In 2013, she decided to quit working in musical theater and start rebuilding from scratch. So fast forward seven years, she’s now living her dream life and is on a mission to help other humans build profitable personal brands of their own so they can ditch their soul-sucking nine-to-fives.

Got to laugh at that one because some are really soul-sucking. Which occasionally happens to be their own businesses. That’s very interesting. So, get paid to do what they love while making a positive impact on the world. So between her coaching and online courses, she teaches her clients how to increase their visibility, become known as the experts in their niche and attract an audience of clients prepared to pay for their expertise. Kat’s also the host of the Personal Branding Project Podcast and a self-titled YouTube channel. So this is going to be a breeze because you have your own podcast.

Kat:

I talk for a living. Yeah.

Jessmyn:

It is a very different… I don’t know. It’s so different. I’ve done a little bit of both where it’s like, behind the scenes, very project based. But now that I’m doing these, where it’s shows where you have to be on and talk for a really long time, it is a very, very different experience.

Kat:

Totally, yeah. It’s a science and an art, I think, and a stamina that you build up too. 

Jessmyn:

Yeah. Some people are like, “Oh, how do you do it for so long? How do you just come up with questions to ask?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. For me, it’s just a conversation, but it does feel a little like work, if anyone’s wondering. But Kat, tell us a little bit more about your business, who you are. We talked a little bit about branding in your bio, so give us all that. 

Kat:

Yeah, sure. So, my business has been through a lot of evolutions and it’s still evolving, which I think is really common, especially if you’re a solopreneur and it’s in those earlier stages where it’s just you, it’s very lean. So you can just keep listening to nudges from your audience or the universe and make changes. But as it stands, today, while we’re talking, I have a signature program which is called, Seen, Heard, Paid Academy, which I guess it’s the go-to training that I offer because it’s all about my framework for really helping those earlier stage service-based entrepreneurs get known as go-to experts.

But my business evolved from more of a service-based offering. So I’ve been a full-time copywriter for about, I think it’s five years now. I lose track of time, it feels like 10. I also work hands-on doing projects for other people. It used to be more like websites. Today, I actually help people build quizzes, which is really fun, which is how, obviously, me and Interact got brought together. And one-on-one coaching is very close to my heart as well. That was such a natural evolution from what I was doing so I found that everyone would hire me to write the words for their website and for their brand. And in the process, realized that they had so many unanswered questions and they were really hoping I could just give them the magical words that are going to make everything fall into place.

And I was like, “Actually, this needs to come from within, you really do need to figure some of this stuff out for yourself.” And so I was becoming I guess their coach and their brand strategist, but I wasn’t officially giving myself that title or charging for this service. So it reached that point where I realized I need to help people at that before stage, before they start writing copy for themselves, because if they don’t really know what they stand for, what makes them different, the people that they really want to serve, then it’s going to be really difficult to write a copy for them. So now it’s really this hybrid business, which a lot of people say it’s a bad idea.

It’s so funny, there’s a lot of multiple offer shaming at the moment, I’ve noticed, in online space where it’s like, just have one offer and scale to a million dollars. But I really think it comes down to your personality type and your energy type. I’m a little bit obsessed with human design at the moment. And I’ve realized that I love helping people in so many different ways. It’s what makes life so exciting, it’s why I wanted to become self-employed in the first place. It’s why, funnily enough, being an actor was boring me to tears because I was doing the exact same thing eight times a week, literally just repeating the exact same performance, which drives me crazy.

So I love that my business now, it’s a little bit of everything and it’s going to probably keep changing, and that’s okay. But I guess the reason that I help people and the way I help them, it always still is very connected, that’s never really changed.

Jessmyn:

I love that. And I think it is so funny I’ve been seeing that a lot too, the one offer, have one offer, but even in my own experience, there is this little bit of, you have to know who you are and what your brand is before you can do everything else. So I do think that is a really important thing. And I think it’s good that you actually do a little bit of both because, how can you actually work with people if they don’t know that part yet?

Kat:

Yeah, exactly. And for yourself, and I think for everyone, there is this sense of urgency to need all the answers and to have everything perfectly in place, like, “I need the plan and then I’m just going to follow the plan.” And what I’ve learned from personal experience and I’ve seen through my clients is that by experimenting, by putting things out there and working with clients, it gives you the direction, it gives you the answers and you’re going to pivot along the way and that’s okay, because until you’ve worked with people in real life, everything is theory, which is why we shouldn’t be creating courses before we’ve actually been a service-based offering because, how are you going to know the best way to serve people and the way that you help them best?

I just think, yeah, experience counts for a lot and you’re allowed to make mistakes and you’re allowed to make changes and people aren’t going to shame you for that. I think we’re so terrified of the public pivot, but I’ve done it multiple times in a really big way and it hasn’t destroyed my business or my reputation, I’m happy to say.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. And I love that earlier you mentioned that it was more of an evolution. And I’m noticing that as a theme, as I’m doing more episodes is people are so scared of change, but if you look at it in a more positive light, you look at it as more of, “I’m evolving, I’m not changing for the bad, I’m changing for the good,” it’s totally different perspective. Take us back to the beginning. How did you get started in all of this? I know you mentioned that you were an actor. How did you go from that to own your own business online?

Kat:

Very good question. I guess. Yeah. So it probably officially started… I talk a little bit about how my life fell apart about, I think it was eight years ago now, yeah, eight years, when I had been doing musical theater for a couple of years. And honestly, that was me achieving my dream. I had that on a pedestal. My thing when I was growing up was, “I’m going to be a Broadway actor.” And then I got into this Broadway show in Australia. Obviously, we don’t have actual Broadway, but it was the Broadway team that put on the the musical in Australia. And when I landed this job, it was oh my goodness, I’ve done it. In my early twenties, I have achieved my ultimate dream. This is amazing.”

And that is when the reality kicked in and you go, “Oh, okay. I thought it was going to look this, turns out that’s only a small part of it. The reality is, it’s a job now and I’m getting paid to do this thing, which means there’s all these expectations on me. It’s no longer just about the joy of acting, it’s about showing up and feeling my responsibility as the person that they chose to play this role.” And it sent me spiraling. It was such a wake up call. I was so naïve going into this experience because it was also my first real job, in that I’d had all of the the casual, I don’t know if it’s the same in the States and in Canada, casual positions where you don’t have any contract or anything.

From when I was 14, I was working, but at a retail, making coffee, doing this, doing that. And then I got a job as an actor at a theme park in Australia. And that was like a taste of getting paid to act, but I’d never had a career job before. So my first career job was literally as an actor. And I thought that because I’m an actor, it’s going to be all glamorous and exciting and sexy, and it was really just a career job. Honestly, it changed everything. I had this three-year journey. It was an immediate crash of the reality around me, and seeing that, “Okay, it’s not as exciting as I thought,” even though it was really cool. I never want to downplay that. It was an amazing opportunity.

But I started to really struggle with anxiety and depression, and I was starting to question, “Okay, is it just me? Am I being really ungrateful? Is there something wrong with me? Is it that this job isn’t right for me? Is it something with my personal life? I don’t even know.” So I ended up moving away to New Zealand of all places for a while and thought, “Okay, I’m just going to try and do film and television instead of theater, maybe that’s the issue.” Turns out it wasn’t. And when I moved back to Australia, everything collapsed down around me. At the time, I was married, the marriage broke up.

I ended up getting really sick, nearly dying in hospital. I was on in the ICU. My body just was like, “Nope, no more. I’m not happy.” And then following that, I wasn’t able to work for months. And I’ve been just building up this credit card debt over these few years because I was so unhappy that my whole thing was like, “Okay, I’m just going to work and I’m going to shop.” And that was it. Well, it caught up with me when I couldn’t work anymore. And also, I was working a casual job back on the Gold Coast where I grew up. It wasn’t a career job anymore. I couldn’t keep up with the credit card payments. And I ended up having to file for bankruptcy, which was the lowest moment of my entire life.

At the time, it was my deepest shame. I told nobody. The only people who knew where my immediate family. So even my best friend, I didn’t tell because I was so worried about the judgment, because I was like, “I failed. I failed at everything in life. I had the dream job.” Everyone was like, “Wow, Kat’s made it.” And then fast forward a few years and it felt I had nothing. So that was a scary time. But obviously, I’m able to talk about these 20/20 hindsight. That helped me clear out everything and then figure out, what do you actually want? Because up until that point, it was all based on the dream I’d had as a kid and what I knew was going to impress everyone else. I knew that being a paid performer, everyone’s going to be like, “Oh wow, that’s so cool.”

But there was something inside that was saying, “You could probably do more than this.” But it was terrifying me to say that because a lot of people around me were like, “Well, if you want to be an actor, that’s all you should do. You should never have any other interests, you should eat, sleep, breathe acting. Don’t have a backup plan, that means you’re planning to fail.” All of these stories. And so I just had built up this thing in my head that I have to do this or, what else am I going to do with my life? But with everything gone, it gave me this opportunity to… Well, I had nothing to lose at that point.

And so I went back to basics, which is actually what I do with my clients now, is like, sometimes we actually need to just get back to the absolute foundations of like, what lights you up? What excites you? What do you actually want your life to look and feel like? What’s the vision that you have, the change that you want to make?” And that, funnily enough, led me back to performing for a while. I actually wrote and produced a show that sparked… Let’s just say, it’s a whole extra story trying to do that myself, probably it took years of my life, but it was one of the best training grounds to become an entrepreneur.

So I did the show and it was in the process of producing it that I was doing the marketing and the branding of it. And I was like, “Ooh, this part’s really fun. Why am I enjoying this more than the performing at this point? This is not what I thought would happen.” And that led me down a little bit of a path of, I ended up getting a job in real estate because of my mom. And that turned into more of a marketing role. And I met my partner today who was working in an agency and doing web and graphic design. And we started to see how my ability to write really complimented what he was doing.

And he was like, “I think you probably could do this for real.” So I decided to go for a job in an advertising agency, even though I had no actual training. I didn’t really know what a copywriter was at that point in time. I’d heard the word, I was like, “Yeah, I think that’s what I do.” And I talked myself into this job with a killer cover letter, which proved to me I knew how to write because they were saying, “Oh, you have to be a marketing grad.” And I was like, “Well, I’ve never been to university. I’m very under-qualified, let’s be honest. I was I’m going to work harder than anyone. I’m going to prove to you that I can do this. You’re not going to regret this.” And they’re “Okay, here we go.”

So I got the job and I did it for six months, and yes, I was really good at it, but I hated the environment. It was that classic ad agency with radio and newspaper and these crazy deadlines and they want you to work all hours, and just super stressful. It triggered my anxiety terribly. I was putting on all this weight and I go, “I can’t do this.” But in the process, I landed a freelance client, thanks to my mom again, bless her heart. She’s one of those people who knows everyone-

Jessmyn:

Yeah, mom.

Kat:

… and she connects you. So I got a freelance client and that was the thing that made me see that I could make the money for myself. And it was just enough money that I thought, “Okay, if I quit the job right now and just have this one client, at least then I’ll have time to land more clients.” That client, that was the beginning, that was the catalyst that then led me to doing the copywriting thing, which then became this journey to where I am today. But you can see there was no obvious plan from the beginning, which is why I’m always telling people, “You don’t have to know where you’re going, you just have to keep reconnecting with what is exciting you, and eventually, through lots of messy mistakes, you’ll probably figure it out. But it’s not always very linear.”

Jessmyn:

Yeah. I love that. I think it’s so funny when you look at your bio, and it says actor now, entrepreneur. Like I asked, how do you go from that to that? And it is really cool to see just each step of how that happened because yeah, nothing ever goes to plan. And you also, if you just, I don’t know. I just love the stories where it happens, where you fall into something pretty much. I guess my question from there is really just, what was that like just saying yes to marketing and then going… I know we’re both going… If you’re watching the video, you’ll see us both kind of laughing, but if you’re listening, yeah just…

You’re in production and you said you really love doing it, but what was that point where you were like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do this. This is actually really cool.” Rather than just sometimes when things happen, you’re like, “Ah, this is really fun, but I’m going to keep doing what I know and what I’ve always been doing.”

Kat:

Yeah. I think it comes down to the fact that I was desperate to do something different and to reconnect with, I guess tap into all of my skills and potential and be challenged again. I think getting into acting, there was that thrill of the chase, there was like, “Okay, I need to master this skill.” I was dancing since I was three, so I’d very much done my 10,000 hours. And so even though it was a big deal I got that job, I was like, “Well, yeah, I’ve done the work.” I loved the idea of, oh, I’ve got raw talent, but I’m going to have to work really hard, and this was a new thing that I have to figure out. And because I’m obsessed with learning, I love education, I just started binging all of the courses and I got more and more excited about all the things that there were to learn.

So that was one of it, one part of it. I think the other part was, I had no other options at this point. I still had no money and I had such a terrible relationship to money because of… I mean, it was always bad, but then the bankruptcy thing really solidified the fact that I was oh, “I’m bad with money. I’m a disaster. I’m going to be broke. I’m going to be living on the streets.” And I saw that there was this thing right in front of me that could potentially turn everything around. I don’t even know if there was a moment of me even sitting down to consider this, I just jumped, and I just kept following every single little nudge.

Once I figured out it was copywriting that I really enjoyed the most, I found this, she didn’t know it at the time, but I decided she was going to be my mentor, I found a really well-known copywriter in Australia who had a community, a paid community that was very small at the time. It’s now huge. And I joined it because I was like, “Okay, she obviously knows what she’s doing. It seems this community is going to provide me with some answers because I have no idea what I’m doing.” I know I can write, beyond that, what am I writing? How do I write it? How do I run a business? I don’t know. And so I was right. I put myself in this community and there’s probably 30 other copywriters at the time.

So I was surrounded by people who had varying levels of experience. Some of them very experienced, and you are able to just ask questions and nothing was too small, too silly. So I just started asking questions. And in the group, they were putting referrals as well to jobs because the person who ran the group couldn’t take on work anymore, she was too busy, so she would send it into the group and you would pitch yourself. So again, I love the thrill of the chase. I was “Okay, I can do this.” And so I said yes to everything before I actually knew what I was doing. I don’t know if I would do that now. You know how the more we know the more we want to play it safe? I’m like, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I don’t have the skills.”

But at the time, “I’ll figure it out. I will figure it out as I go.” So every time I got a new job, I’d sign up to a new, I think it’s LinkedIn Learning now, it was Lynda.com at the time. I’d sign up for new marketing strategy or copywriting course, then I’d just take it one job at a time. I’d make the client happy, get a testimonial, add to my portfolio. I started beating out all these way more experienced copywriters for the jobs because I was just so enthusiastic and I was prepared to just dive straight in. So the second I would get sent the referral email and they’d be mentioning two or three copywriters in that, I’d reply straight away being like, “I’m going to give you a call. Let’s just connect.”

I’d get on the phone, chat to them. It just snowballed where I just wasn’t thinking that much. I had to make this work because there was that feeling of, “Well, you already tanked your other career,” which I hadn’t, I could’ve gone back to it if I wanted, but it just felt like I’d burnt it to the ground. So it was just this thing of, just keep moving forward, just keep moving forward. I wasn’t thinking into the future. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m building an empire now,” or anything like that. I was very much in freelancer mode, which I talk a bit about now. I regret how long I stayed in desperate freelance mode, not planning for the future, not aiming higher, not building systems, but I was earning money to do this thing. I was working from home.

And I think my second year in copywriting, I earned more that year than I earned in a professional musical, which just shows… I was like, “Oh, okay.” I thought being an actor was the only way to start creating this life that I wanted to live, but it showed me what was possible. So yeah, I guess that was a very long-winded way of saying, I didn’t think about it, I did it because it was working at the time and it just felt like, “Okay, this is meant to be. Let’s just see where this goes.”

Jessmyn:

Wow. Yeah. That’s awesome. I guess, was there any point where you did say yes to something and you were like, “Oh shoot. Maybe this is one thing I could have gone without doing”?

Kat:

Yeah. I remember, I don’t know if it was in my first year, I think it was in the year, the big earning year. It was definitely my year of yes, which you reach that point. You have to say yes to a point to get that momentum, but then you there’s that point where you’ve probably said it one too many times and you overdo it. So I was already working six days a week, long hours. That’s how I was earning so much, was that I was just taking on everything and overbooking myself. And I took on this one project, and I couldn’t have known at the time though. There was no like, “Oh, why did I do this?” It’s like, “No, it looked amazing. I was attracted because it was a big agency who needed a copywriter to contract out, to write this well-known brands website.”

And it ended up being the most stressful nightmarish experience. I was like, “I can’t be a copywriter anymore. I can’t do this. I never want to do this again. This is horrible.” It was one of those comedy of error type things where there was one miscommunication early on and it just sent the entire project spiraling. They ended up paying me 1.5 times the original quote, so it was the biggest, at that time, the most I’d ever been paid for a project, but I was working 14 hours a day, having anxiety attacks, just sitting there drinking coffee and trying to write this copy. In the end, they didn’t use a word that I wrote, they rewrote the whole thing, a sentence per page,

They’d told me that they wanted this optimized website with all of this. They gave me examples, the SEO company loved what I did. And then they were just, “Nah, we just want something this.” And they just chucked in sentence on per page. I was like, “Oh my God. Firstly, you pay me so much to write these words that you’re not using. Secondly, what you’ve put up there now is not at all what you’d said that you wanted.” But it’s just one of those things, in the end I had to just get through it. There was no way out except through, but it was a month of my life that felt a year. And honestly, it does feel that also shaved years off my life.

So after that, I was like, “Maybe not working with big agencies ever again,” because that brought me back to that whole advertising agency panic with the deadlines and all of the fingers in the pie. And I was like, “Nah, I just want to chill. I don’t want to feel this.”

Jessmyn:

Yeah. Did you maybe relate that back to your time as an actor where it was no longer fun, it was just, this is a job and it’s too crazy, it’s too much?

Kat:

Oh, for sure. And you try and do all the mindset exercises like, “Just be grateful. Just be grateful. It’s so much money.” But nothing would bring the joy back to it because it was just so much pressure on me. I was so terrified about doing a bad job. And you’re also thinking, “Oh, someone referred this job to me, I don’t want them to look bad.” It was just a very negative experience, but I learned so much from that like you always do. I’ve had so many disastrous experiences since becoming self-employed and those are the ones that you learn from, and then you can use to improve your processes or improve your clarity and your messaging.

So we have to just accept that they’re going to come and you’re going to get through them, but just try and go, “Okay, so what can I learn from this?” Because otherwise, it was actually for nothing except maybe a few dollars.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. What are some of the boundaries, I guess, you had come up with after that experience in thinking about, “Okay, after this happened, here’s how I want all my future clients to be like, or this is how I want to run each client that I actually work with”?

Kat:

Yeah. I was a little bit scared of working with huge teams because I just saw the dangers of the lack of communication or miscommunication, so that became a red flag for me. But also, realizing that if it’s a huge project, because I wrote the entire website and then I had to rewrite the entire website, so that’s a lot. So that showed me that, okay, we need to be really sure in the early stages with that first page of copy that we’re on the right track. Funnily enough, we did. I got approval from so many people, but apparently the one person who was meant to do the final sign off, her email went missing. So it wasn’t even something that I did wrong. I just didn’t get sent her communication. Anyways.

I also just really saw that, “Okay, I want to work with people that genuinely care, that are really connected to the things that we’re creating and that they’re doing this because they actually want to make world a better place.” It’s not a super commercial money-making enterprise, there are copywriters out there perfect for that kind of work. But I could see that I wasn’t cut out for that. That’s not the way I think. I want to connect with the people I’m working with, I want to be able to somehow put my self in the shoes of the the reader of the copy.

Whereas with that experience, the whole thing was so cold and just like, “Here’s the brief, just check these boxes, just get it out there. Just be on brand.” And it just felt horrible. So I never worked with that size agency again. And I learnt that you get really excited about the idea of getting a certain logo on your website, that was the shiny object thing that so many copywriters are like, “Oh my gosh, big brand writing.” And I saw what then the experience copywriters were saying where it comes at a price with that big brand, that logo, you’re going to have a whole different expectation, like you were saying with the performing, the second year in a commercial musical, there are expectations of you that don’t exist when you’re doing it just for fun.

So yeah, I just learned my own limits for how much I can put up with and knew that yeah, I’m a really sensitive person and the work that I do, I really put my heart and soul into it. So I need to make sure I’m working with people who understand that and value that, who aren’t going to take advantage of it and just chew me up and spit me out, basically.

Jessmyn:

No, I love that though, because, for anyone that’s listening as well, I’ve talked to so many people. My whole job at Interact has been connecting with other people who own their own businesses online, coaches and consultants and all that good stuff. And I’ve heard a lot of horror stories like that, very similar. And so I think it is super important especially, whether you’re already growing your business or you’re thinking about it or you just started to remember that you should have boundaries in working with clients. And even if it seems, like you said, like a shiny new object, like, “Oh, this is really going to make me take off.”

Even if it seems that way, it does come with a price and you are allowed to say no to things, you are allowed to ask for specific, I guess, conditions or boundaries within your work.

Kat:

Oh, absolutely. And I would say the sooner you figure out what those boundaries are, what your processes are, how you work best, put them down in writing and just make it a thing from the very beginning of the project. People will, you give an inch and they take a mile, that’s the thing. So you need to set those expectations from the very beginning. And anytime where I’ve just been like, “Oh, why is this client taking advantage of me?” And I’ve even had it. I had a wake up call recently. I have a project that has completely blown out. It was meant to be a 10-week thing, it’s going to end being six months that I’ve had some sort of involvement with them.

And I’m just like, “Why did this happen?” And realizing that, “Oh I set the boundaries at the beginning and this client is acting this way because I made it okay from the beginning.” It’s really difficult to change that. Once they’re used to it, they’re going to freak out if you say, “Oh no, actually, these are my boundaries.” So you just need to do it from the beginning and you don’t even have to make it an awkward conversation, like a welcome pack that you send to someone being like, “I’m so excited to work with you. By the way, here’s some of the fine print, blown out really big in case you didn’t read it in the contract, just to let you know how things run.”

And explaining that this is so that you get the best of me, this isn’t to limit your experience, but I work best when I have all of these things in place and I have these boundaries up. That’s how I’m going to give you the most amazing work that I can give you. And if they can see that it’s for their benefit not that you’re just trying to cut them off and rip them off or something, then it’s all good from the beginning. So that’s one of those lessons where I’m like, “Okay, I don’t tend to have regrets, but if there was one thing I would’ve done differently, it would have been putting those processes in place from the very beginning of my business just so that I didn’t have all of that resentment and overwhelm and overwork that came from me just being too scared to speak up and ask for what I need.”

Jessmyn:

Yeah. And I love the way you put it too, it’s not meant to limit, it’s meant to get the best out of you. I think a lot of people are afraid of setting boundaries because they think it puts off this, what’s the word I’m thinking of? It puts off this, I guess, mindset or perspective that you don’t want to do the work or something, but that’s not it at all. You actually want to do the work, you just want to do it right and within your own means. So I think that’s super important. Earlier, you had mentioned that you were freelancing for longer than you wanted to or probably should have, correct me if I’m wrong. Walk me through that.

When I first started at Interact, working with people who were online entrepreneurs, freelance was actually the word I think a lot of people used and threw around a lot and called themselves, but I did notice a shift in the last couple of years where people don’t want to call themselves freelancers or they just no longer do it that way. I guess, what is the difference and why make that switch?

Kat:

Yeah, sure. And look, I think it’s a little bit different for everyone. For me, freelance was so much about a mindset and the way I approach my work and my boundaries and all of those kinds of things versus… I wasn’t as concerned about how people perceived me, it was more about what I was doing behind the scenes, but I think there was a little bit of both. So for me, freelance is really like, you’re a gun for hire. Job to job, you’re always just like, “Okay, I need to land the next one. Need to land the next one.” And you get really stuck in this hamster wheel of survival mode of just like, “I have to just get the next job to make them happy, but then I’m looking for the next one.” You don’t have your systems in place, you don’t have a marketing process, you don’t know where the leads are necessarily coming from.

You’re really relying on you, like word of mouth and just hitting the ground and door knocking or whatever it takes to get those jobs. And for me also, it was reflected in, I was doing budgets for myself, which you have to as a freelancer. So I would do quarterly, but I would project for the next three months ago, to go, “What are my expenses for the next three months? How much do I need to survive? Okay. So I need this many jobs?” But what I realized in hindsight is that I was only ever aiming to survive, so I was never thinking about profit, I was never thinking about saving anything or leaving white space for emergencies. It was just like, “Okay, I need to pay the bills therefore I need to land this many jobs.” I was quoting, my rights were based on that as opposed to, based on being able to scale and give myself a little bit of leverage.

And I didn’t feel like I had a business even though I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m self-employed, I’m my own boss.” I was like, “Yeah, but this isn’t a business.” And it wasn’t. It’s not a business until you actually have some structure in place that supports you. If all it is you just get exchange time for money and then if you stop working, you stop making money, it’s probably not a business. It’s not a sustainable business anyway. And I can say this, I know it sounds like tough love, but also I’m speaking to myself, I was doing this for years before I started to think of doing anything different.

So when you have a business, you’re really starting to think, “Okay, like, is there anything that I don’t need to be doing anymore that could be either automated, or systematized, or outsourced. How am I going to make sure that if I do need to take time off everything just doesn’t just fall apart? Am I actually aiming for proper targets, exciting targets for revenue or am I just aiming to survive? Where do I want to take this? Do I want to be known as just a personal brand or maybe do I want to be able to eventually bring people on?” So you’re thinking about the future, you’re planning for the future, you’re taking things seriously.

If I was taking things seriously and thinking about growing, yeah, I probably would have invested more time in building those like welcome packs and improving my processes because I knew that in the long run they would have saved me time. But freelancing is like, “No, just slap it together.” Every time it’s just manual labor because I wasn’t thinking about next year or three years down the track. So ultimately, I think that’s what the difference is, but it also, it can affect how people… I think people bring freelances in to help them grow their business, whereas when you’re a business owner obviously, you’re probably bringing in freelancers to help grow yours. So you stop seeing…

And yes, you can contract to other people. You might help people, but you’ve got rates that reflect the fact that you take yourself really seriously. And this is not just about what you should be charging per hour, you’re taking everything into consideration with the rates you’re charging. So I hope that answers the question.

Jessmyn:

It does, because I was really curious, I haven’t had somebody make that a distinct difference. It’s either one or the other, they just make that switch and I’ve never heard it in that context. So that was really cool. I guess, was there a point while you were freelancing that you just felt overrun and that’s why you decided to make that change and become a business like you said?

Kat:

I think I was feeling it for quite a long time before I did anything different because I didn’t know what else there was. I didn’t grow up in an entrepreneurial family, so the education I had was more traditional, even I was homeschooled, you’re not learning about how to start a business, so I was feeling all this resentment and burnout and overwhelm probably for two years. I feel like from my second year as a copywriter, I was already feeling it, but it was just like, “Okay, but I’m stuck now.” It really did feel like I was stuck. And it was actually when, I ended up working with a life coach, well, he was more of like a holistic coach, these days he’s more business coach, but he covers everything.

And I had this opportunity to work with him. He was a client very briefly and then offered me this opportunity, he has a pro bono client that he takes on every quarter. This was this incredible opportunity and I was like, “Hell, yes.” Because I just had this feeling that I needed to do something, something had to change. I couldn’t stay on the hamster wheel, but I actually just did it. I didn’t know where to look next. So once we started, that’s when we started to uncover all sorts of things because you go inside first and started to see that, “Oh, there’s all these stories in my head and there’s issues that I’ve got with relationships, with family that are probably keeping these stark. The boundaries issues I have with my mom showing up in the way I run my business.” All of these things.

So we started to unpack it, and then we actually started to set some real goals, I started to get excited about, “Oh, maybe I could start saving some money. Maybe I could do more with my life.” So it was the catalyst, it didn’t all happen in that moment, which is again, just know that you don’t have to get all the answers from that one coach, from that one program, it’s going to give you just enough to get you in that right direction, to get you unstuck and then just know the rest starts to land in your lap. Around that time I read Crushing It by Gary Vaynerchuk. And I’m not some like Gary Vee obsessed person, but that book in particular, he was talking about personal branding and how to get leverage to do whatever you want in your life, you want to build a personal brand, build a platform for yourself.

That sparked another idea which then led to something else. And so I decided while I was reading that I was going to launch a YouTube channel because that was what he did. It just seemed natural. I was like, “Oh, well I like being on camera. I’m going to give this a go.” And so I launched my YouTube channel, and this is like three and a half years ago at this point. And it was actually just talking about acting. I decided to start with what I knew because I had no idea, I didn’t connect it to the copywriting because in my head I was like, “Oh, this is probably not long term, I don’t know where I’m going with my life, but I don’t think it’s copywriting, so let’s not talk about copywriting. Also, I don’t know enough.”

There was a lot of imposter syndrome. So I thought I would launch this channel, helping other actors with the business side of acting because that’s not what I was taught, most actors just get taught how to act and they don’t get taught about the realities of trying to build a career as an actor. It’s quite brutal obviously. So that was why I launched the channel and I made this commitment to publish 100 videos before giving up on it. My partner made me do that because he knew I’d get sad and frustrated not seeing enough views in the early stages. He was like, “What are you going to commit to so that you see this through?” I was like, “100 videos,” which it sounded big, but I didn’t realize how much work that was at the time.

I’m happy to report, I surpassed the 100 video mark and it did its job of building that momentum. But I guess that was the thing that then while I’m creating these videos and I’m starting to help people, it started to open my eyes to the other ways that I could potentially be serving my audience and the things that I could be getting known for. So first of all, I decided to create an online course, and this is one of my big embarrassing, but not pivot, was I decided with the help of this coach, because I was like, “I want to create an online course, but I don’t want it to be about marketing because there’s already too many marketing courses out there, so what should I do?” He’s like, “Well, what about makeup?” Because I was actually a trained makeup artist.

So I decided to launch this makeup course, because again, it’s just the thing I know, I always started with the thing that I knew. So I launched this whole brand, this online course, and the launch was a disaster because I went from nothing. I’d been talking about acting and helping people with copywriting over here and then suddenly I have this makeup course and I hadn’t built an audience to that. So that’s a whole other story, but that taught me how to create online courses. I signed up for a digital course academy, I did the whole launch process, I learned so much from the failed launch of like, “oh, okay. There was this hundred things that I need to do differently next time.”

And then I finally started to see that, “Wait, I’m obsessed with personal branding, people keep coming to me for advice about building a brand. I was so impressed about the branding that I did for this course launch that it seemed “Okay, it’s just getting to this point, why don’t I just finally give in and start actually talking about the thing that excites me the most, which is branding and in particular, personal branding.” And so I pivoted the YouTube channel to just start talking about personal branding, and then decided to create a course on creating videos, which made a lot more sense. And then that last two years has been just refining and recreating courses and just finding my niche and coaching people one-on-one, and getting clear on all of this.

Again, not a clear, I did not figure it out overnight and I’m still figuring it out as I go, but listening to those nudges and going, “Oh, okay, personal branding, maybe I should launch a channel.” All of those things got me to today. So glad I did all of those things, but holy Dooly, it’s been thousands of hours of work and people do not expect that. I’ll have a lot of people signing up for my programs just thinking that, “Okay, so you’re going to just teach me everything, and in the next few months I’m just going to have everything sorted.” I should probably not, there’ll be a lot of things sorted, but success, it’s a slow burn, you have to play the long game.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. I love that. You emphasized on that, how long it actually takes and talking about how, you needed to commit to 100 videos to actually see something, because I’ve seen it so many times where people come up with an idea, they’re so into it, it doesn’t give them the results they thought it would in the first, I don’t know, week, month or what have you. And they’re like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m over it.” But you do have to give it actual time and see it through so that then you can make a decision like, “Okay, is this actually going anywhere? Is this doing what I thought it would? If it’s not, what’s next?”

The reality is it’s just so funny because I think a lot of people are doing everyone else a disservice these days by telling their story in a way that sounds like that they were an overnight success, like all it took was this one light bulb moment and suddenly everything fell into place. And it’s yeah, they suddenly had clarity because of the five or 10 years of work they’d been doing until that moment. They had the systems in place and it was one messaging tweak that they had to make. But if you’re building from scratch, you’ve got to do your time, you have to earn your stripes. So I think it’s really important that we talk about, and it’s not to say you can’t get quick wins, like you saw with my copywriting, I was full-time copywriting earning a full-time income in my first year.

So you can absolutely, you can make some huge changes, but if we’re talking big picture impact, having one of those businesses where you do have passive or asynchronous income, the kind of business that really changes your life, and you’re speaking on TEDx stages, and amazing people are in your inbox asking you to interview you on podcasts, that kind of stuff that takes time, do not expect it to happen quick. And I always say my big piece of advice for anyone, whether it’s about YouTube or just building a business in general, set goals that you can control the outcome.

You cannot control how many people are going to invite you onto a podcast, you can’t control how many people are going to subscribe to you by the end of the year, but you can control choosing how many videos that you’re going to publish within a certain period of time, which is surely going to get you way closer to that big picture goal of having those like 100,000 subscribers. And that will keep you sane, because you can track your own progress, you can celebrate, “Oh my gosh, I’m up to 10 videos. I’m up to 20 videos. Whereas if you’re counting subscribers, trust me, it is miserable. It’s really sad.

Kat:

Oh yeah. I like, I don’t know if you remember all of that, I don’t know if you’d call it controversy or what, but when Instagram was testing out, removing likes and the world blew up after that happened. It really is, I think, they had a point in those kinds of metrics are real, I guess you could say. They’re not the best metrics for you to use, you want to use the actual things like engagement and you want to look at actually what kind of conversations are you having with people that you do get to talk to you and what are they saying about the content that you’re putting out and what not? And how many of them are actually paying to work with you after you create that content?

Because there’s some people that are barely even active on Instagram who are making so much money, but they’re too busy looking after their clients running their business to be talking about it on Instagram. So our whole perspective has been really skewed because of these Instagram people who are like, “Oh, you just have to show up every day, and your engagement needs to be high or you’re failing.” And so we just get caught up in this panic about, “I’ll have to be online, I have to be on all the time. Oh no, my engagement’s dropping.” I’ve had the worst week of engagement and part of me started to spiral and I was like, “Screw that, I have got a strategy for SEO, I’ve got a strategy for YouTube. I’ve got an email list. I am not going to let Instagram derail me because it’s getting more competitive and more crowded and tougher to get seen. It’s just not worth it.”

But if you put all your eggs in one basket, maybe like the social media basket, then you’re not in for a fun ride.

Jessmyn:

Do you also feel like looking at stuff like numbers and whatnot, they’re important, but if you’re looking at subscribers or you’re looking at how many followers you have or likes you have it, all of a sudden it does not become fun anymore, at least for me. I had a moment where I thought I wanted to become this massive influencer online and I was like, “I’m going to do travel, I just travel just for fun, but why don’t I take pictures and post it on there? And then I saw what people are actually doing to get to some of the numbers that they do and I’m like, “whoa, this no longer as exciting anymore. I’m just also now taking pictures of nothing to put something online.”

Kat:

Ruining your own trips because you’re so obsessed about needing to create the right content instead of being present.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. Rather than like, “No, it’s okay, I can take a nice picture and then move on with my day and then post it for friends and family.” And I do like to play around still with, what can I do just off of having fun. And that is probably just the marketing side of me and that’ll never go away, but other than that, it’s like, what is actually enjoyable in this experience that I’m having right now?

Kat:

That’s it. And as soon as you’re focusing on the numbers, you’re taking the attention off your audience and the way that you should be showing up and serving them and that, which already breaks the whole system for you because I know that when I get that way, when I start worrying about engagement, it drops, my content changes because I’m trying to create content for the algorithm and for engagement instead of just showing up and sharing what I think I need to share. And the times that I get the best success when I’m not worrying about what anyone else is sharing, I just create the content I believe I need to create.

And it’s something about it, I’m sure it’s to do with like energetics and all of that kind of stuff, it just unlocks opportunities and people land on my lap and I’m getting messages from around the world, “Oh, that was so meaningful.” Well, I created that content just because I felt like I should not because I thought, “Oh, this is going to get me another 1,000 subscribers or something like that.” But it’s a constant battle, honestly, the whole platform is designed to mess with your head and to get you desperate and hanging out there all the time. So don’t beat yourself up if you do get caught up in that, because trust me, I’ve been doing it a long time now and I still have those days, I’m like, “Why does Instagram hate me?”

Jessmyn:

I totally get what you’re saying, you’re like what… Yeah, I totally get that. Your whole business is all about personal branding, what are some of the ways that you actually can work through… You heard said something about it coming from within, how do you work through that to really figure out like, “Okay, this is who I am, so this is what I want my brand to be”?

Kat:

This is like the deep work that it does not happen… I have work sheets and I walk people through things and I’m like, just know that this is going to keep developing in time, you’re going to keep revisiting these things. And so I think ultimately, the question you’re trying to answer is, “Okay, well, what is the change that I want to make in the world?” Which is a huge question, it can be very overwhelming, but I think that vision for me is what always helps me get back on course when I am getting off track. And then once we have that, then we go, okay, how are you going to get there?” So we really need to understand, what are your skills? What are your strengths? What makes you different?

Ask questions like, what are people always coming to me for help with? I was trying to ignore that and create makeup course. Because it just was logical because I had training. Yet everyone was in my inbox saying, “Oh my gosh, I love these pose, I love the brand that you’re creating. How do you do it?” I had this obvious thing right in front of me telling me, “You should actually maybe head in this direction,” but we tend to ignore it. So sometimes it’s about ignoring a little bit of that logic and going, “But what actually excites me, what makes me the most magnetic to other people? What gives me the most satisfaction? What is the highest compliment that someone could give me? Okay. How can we make sure that is actually ingrained in your brand your business and that you’re not ignoring some of this? 

Because sometimes we think, “Oh yeah. But the things that people compliment me on and that I help people with, no one would pay for that, or it’s not valuable enough. I’m not going to make enough money, so I should just teach people how to make more money.” Then everyone just becomes a business coach and everyone’s promising six figure years. And it just becomes ridiculous because you’ve got this really unique, incredible skill set deeper than that, a blueprint in you where you could do something really special, but if you just look at what everyone else is doing around you, when you try and fit that mold and do what’s obvious and paint by numbers strategies, then you’re missing out on all of that magic. So you’ve got to start with within about what excites you about helping other people? And what are the things you’ve always naturally been drawn to? And then you can start looking at the strategy of, okay, well, how does it make sense to actually package this up?

And then the next step is really tapping into your audience and understanding where they’re struggling, what part of the journey they’re in and creating the content and the messaging that’s going to resonate with them so that they actually understand that you are the right person to help, that you’ve got the skills, you’ve got the experience, but you also have that understanding, that personal connection with them so they’re going to trust you. So it’s a big process and this is always step one, and that’s where everyone gets stuck for a really long time because like, “I don’t have the answers.” So it’s like, okay, pencil something in, let’s just start with something and let’s put it out there. And then as you create that content, as you work with people, you can just let it evolve. And that is okay. 

Jessmyn:

And is that something that you have to revisit once in a while or is that setting the foundation and you don’t really have to look at it again? How would you know it?

Kat:

I would say that, well, you want to revisit your vision constantly because it is going to be your compass. But it may not change, but you want to make sure that it’s at the forefront of everything that you’re doing. But literally in my framework, the final step is called repeat because I make people go back to the beginning again and make sure that all of those questions that you answered are still accurate because then if they’ve shifted, then suddenly your content needs to shift, your messaging needs to shift, your offering needs to shift, your pricing needs to shift.

So it is going to be a bit of a cycle where every so often, and you might do it, you may plan for it if you’re that kind of person, or you may just be getting that funny feeling like, “Ooh, something’s off. Something’s not working anymore.” So that’s when we have to go back to the beginning and make sure that everything is in place because there’s always a reason, if you’re not getting the results or your work is not lighting you up anymore, there is an answer, it’s hiding somewhere in that framework, but we have to start with the most obvious things at the beginning of, are you still doing what you’re supposed to be doing? Are you still working with the people that you want to be working with? And then we can move on.

So, it is not it’s not rigid, you don’t just have to lock it into place and have it figured out. I’m revisiting all of that stuff every single year in my business. And sometimes faster than that, because the quicker I put new offers out there and work with different kinds of people, the quicker I get those answers and indicators that I need to make a shift.

Jessmyn:

Wow. Kat, would you say that after knowing what you know, going through all these crazy experiences with that agency, doing freelancing for longer than you should have, would you say that now you feel like your business is in a place that is comfortable, you’re working with the right amount of clients or is that something that you would have to constantly reassess and figure out?

Kat:

I think that shifts as… I do find that my goals shift for how I want to run my business. And as my offering shift, I then need to make these adjustments. So I used to be able to work with clients full-time on copywriting projects, and then as I was starting to really build up the course and coaching side, I started to realize, “Oh no, I’m getting burnt out again.” I took on a couple of copywriting projects because I thought I could, but then on a day when I’m coaching that just depletes me, by the end of the day, I’m exhausted, I’m also trying to build out new content for my course. And it was like, “Ooh, this doesn’t work anymore. So what needs to shift?” And so for me, it might be looking at, “What if the delivery of my copywriting was different?”

And so I’ve decided to go away from those end-to-end big projects, and I’m doing day rate type copywriting work where people come and just we co-create something together and then they walk away and they’ve got what they need, but then I know that at least then it’s just that one day, and then I keep moving forward and focusing on all the other things. So I think you will probably find that as you get inspired to launch a new offer, then maybe another author needs to shift. You need to change the ratio of hours that you’re spending and also adjusting, yeah, great, you got really busy with clients, but are you marketing yourself now? Are you running out of time? So then we need to go, well, do you need systems in place?

Do you need to start outsourcing some things so that you can make sure you’re still marketing your business while serving your clients? So it’s a constant adjustment. I think most people entrepreneurs get bored if it stays exactly the same for too long anyways. So it’s part of the beauty of it. So as long as you can embrace that and celebrate those needs for change rather than like, “Oh no, it has to change again,” because that’s how it can feel sometimes, then I think you’ll be fine.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. It’s so interesting. I feel like the one day rate type offer is really common now, I see it all the time. I’ve actually done it a couple of times with people, you get that one day and then once it’s over, that’s it and that’s the product that you get. And I think that’s so interesting because I started interacting 2017 and at that time, it was that very long project doing one-on-one coaching, book your call to do my one-on-one strategy with me now, but now that I think back to it, that must have taken so much time and you don’t get to work on some of the smaller projects or other projects that you have, or even on your own business. And this allows you to actually, again, set up those boundaries and be like, “Okay, this is exactly what it’s going to be.” And allotting this much time for it and it’s not going to take up too much of it.

Kat:

Yeah, exactly. And look, everyone is different, some people love those ongoing projects and also you can get some really meaningful results with people when you work with them over a longer period of time. So I think it’s just important to… A lot of people just want to jump on the bandwagon like, “Oh, VIP days were things and now I need a VIP day.” But it’s really question, but why? What is the reason behind needing to do this? What is the transformation? Is it going to be different to if you’re working with someone for 12 weeks? Is it going to be a different client that you’re serving? Are your energy levels going to suit this? Can you go for a whole day or are you going to be depleted?

And you actually should be spacing it out over a week, which I know some people do. So I think the more you can question those things and go, “Okay, is this right for me? How can I make it right for me? Then you’re going to be sad, but if it’s just shiny object like, “Oh, I need a course now. Oh, I need a 12 week this, I need a six month this,” you’re just going to exhaust yourself and you’re not going to be creating offers that actually make sense for you and your clients.

Jessmyn:

I love that. Yeah. It’s so important. What are, I guess, you mentioned a little bit about how sometimes you do too much work, this still happens that you might start to experience a little bit of a burnout? How do you pull yourself out of that before it gets too bad?

Kat:

I’m one of those people that I’m a little bit too reactive when it comes to that. I love to work myself to the bone because I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just push through and then I’ll have a break.” But I am learning that if I start to feel resentful or I’m actually struggling to do the work, I sit down and there’s this feeling of dread, it’s like, “What can we shift?” And so I’ve gotten a lot better now at starting to realize that there’s only so many things I can do in a day, so I need to stop over-scheduling my day. So that’s a bit more proactive, and knowing that if I need to finish early today, what is important? What actually has to get done this week?

And so we’re getting way clearer on my priorities. And I think this really comes down to as well, 90 day plan creation of knowing what am I trying to get out of this 90 days? Because we often try and pack a year’s worth of work into three months, but going, if there was one thing that I could achieve at the end of this 90 days, what’s that going to be? Therefore, those tasks, those projects have to come first, and you need to be okay to let some of them slide. You need to be okay to put them to the next 90 days or to push back a launch date. And I’ve been doing that lately because I have just been feeling just a bit flat and I’m just not lit up creatively.

And a lot of the work that’s coming up for me, I need to be injecting all of my best energy into it. I’m creating some new products and things and I don’t want to be creating it from an empty tank. So I decided to push a launch back and just focus on “Okay, I know these many products I’m creating are really important. They’re a missing piece in a business and they’re going to help the launch. So therefore, let’s just go all in, do them properly. And then knowing that the launch will come when it needs to come.” Just that takes experience and that sometimes I need to do a bit of meditation around it. I do a bit of journaling because you get into this panic of, “I have to do it all. I have to do it now. I set that date for myself.”

But if you set the date, that means you can change the date, why are you holding yourself to… Why are you knuckling your way through?

Jessmyn:

Yeah. That’s so funny. I think I was talking to someone else on another episode, I don’t remember anymore, but pretty much they had mentioned, no one else knows what your plans are, so if you do change and you decide to put it off, they’re not going to know. And it’s okay.

Kat:

Exactly. And I’ve made that mistake, maybe be careful announcing dates before you’re absolutely sure that thing is set in stone. You can tease things, but as soon as you announce the date, you put this crazy pressure on yourself that you just actually can live without. People don’t need to know the launch date until it is set in stone and everything is moving ahead. Hot tip from someone who’s made that mistake too many times.

Jessmyn:

Yeah, for sure. Even working in tech, you learn that because, I don’t work on actual product, but in marketing, we have to obviously announce things. On the product side though, things can change like that, so quickly it could be put off for months, so you never really say an ETA because you don’t want to over promise and then it will happen, it’s just something happened along the way that caused it to delay. So, that was something that I myself learned early on because I had also done that once, where I was telling people on calls, “We are coming out with this update and it’s going to do this and that.” And then a couple months later they are like, “Actually, we decided not to do that anymore.”

Now it’s like, “Oh no, I just told 100 people that they were going to get this feature.” Sorry. If you’re listening to this. And I have done that to you before. I’m very, very sorry. And here’s my very late apology for it.

Kat:

You’re too funny.

Jessmyn:

I know, it’s so sad. That was really all that I had questions on. Thank you so much Kat for being on here with us today.

Kat:

Oh, it’s an honor, honestly. Thank you so much.

Jessmyn:

Of course. I do have two last second questions that I like to close every episode out with, if you’re up for it.

Kat:

Let’s do it.

Jessmyn:

What are three things that most people wouldn’t know about you?

Kat:

Wouldn’t know. I used to be in a 10-pin bowling league [crosstalk 01:03:41] full nerd, like full nerd. This is from the same period of time, this is really embarrassing, but I was also obsessed with Pokémon. I had [crosstalk 01:04:01], I had the cards, I had all the memorabilia because my mom went to Japan and brought back all this cool stuff. I thought I was cool, and I was very happy. So let’s just leave it at that.

Jessmyn:

I think it’s pretty cool.

Kat:

Thank you. I wish I could sell some of that stuff.

Jessmyn:

That’s also quite probably worth a lot of money too.

Kat:

I was going to say if I just kept it, it’s back in again. Anyways, we’re not going to live in the past. And then I guess the other thing is that I was definitely shy, I would not say boo to anyone. And it was only when I started doing dance classes when I was probably around 10 or 11, I had a teacher that was like, “You need to get some personality, start smiling.” She forced the personality out of me. And it was obviously, I was terrified for my life at that point, she was a very scary teacher, but it was the beginnings of me learning how to actually be outgoing, even though I’m an introvert, which is good.

I’m still true introvert, I’ll go being by myself over being at a party any day, but I also know how to turn on the personality, thanks to my dad’s background.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. Because I was like, I would never tell, I would definitely be like, “Extrovert right there.” 

Kat:

You’re not even close.

Jessmyn:

No, that’s awesome. My parents tried to put me in ballet when I was, I don’t know, three or four, and I guess I had my first recital day, I just froze. So they took me out and never wanted to put me in anything after that again. And I was like, “What in the world?”

Kat:

Give me the chance.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. What’s that? What’s going on, mom and dad?

Kat:

Oh, I’m so sorry.

Jessmyn:

Yeah. I know. If they listen to this-

Kat:

Are you really that bad?

Jessmyn:

I know, I like, “Ding.” I don’t remember, but I like to think I was awesome at three years old.

Kat:

I’m sure you were adorable even if you froze.

Jessmyn:

Oh, thank you. My last question is, what is a single piece of advice you would give to yourself at the start of it all?

Kat:

Dream bigger. Really believe that you’re actually capable of doing something really cool with this. I think I would have made very different decisions if I actually let myself dream rather than just being in survival mode all the time.

Jessmyn:

Oh, I love that. That’s awesome. I love that. Nice. Well, thank you again. Before I do forget, where can people find you online?

Kat:

Come and find me probably on Instagram is the easiest @iamkatelizabeth, Kat with a K, and personalbrandingproject.co as well, just for my bits and pieces. And you can find my podcast and my YouTube channel by there as well.

Jessmyn:

Awesome. Well, thanks to everyone who’s listening or watching, and we will see you next time. Bye.

Kat:

Bye.

Jessmyn Solana

Jessmyn Solana is the Partner Program Manager of Interact, a place for creating beautiful and engaging quizzes that generate email leads. Outside of Interact Jessmyn loves binge watching thriller and sci-fi shows, cuddling with her fluffy dog, and traveling to places she's never been before.

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