257: Design the Life You Want

Michele Williams: Hello, my name is Michele, and you're listening to Profit is a Choice. Nicole Comis is a life and mindset coach, and she's passionate about helping driven professionals achieve their career goals without sacrificing their personal lives. She's certified by the International Coaching Federation and she's also a neurolinguistics programming master coach. Nicole's goal is for those that she works with to recognize that success comes from living a happy, healthy, and balanced life, whatever that might look like for them. If you're feeling tired or overwhelmed or not sure what to do next, this is the podcast for you.

Every day, empowered entrepreneurs are taking ownership of their company financial health and enjoying the rewards of reduced stress and more creativity. With my background as a financial software developer, owner of multiple businesses in the interior design industry, educator, and speaker, I coach women in the interior design industry to increase their profits, regain ownership of their bottom line, and to have fun again in their business. Welcome to Profit is a Choice.

Michele Williams: Hi, Nicole. Welcome to the podcast.

Nicole Comis: Thanks, Michele. I'm so excited.

Michele Williams: Oh, good. I'm excited to have you. We're talking all over each other already, so I love it. We have been friends for, I want to say it's been almost a year since we met.

Nicole Comis: Yeah.

Michele Williams: I think it has been. We met a couple of, I think in the Chamber of Commerce and through another friend, Jennifer, who has a podcast, I'll have to link hers at the bottom. Hers was talking about how to create your board of directors. We were talking about in her podcast how to pull people together who were of like minds to support each other. She's a good connector in that and connected us about a year ago.

Nicole Comis: Yes, she is.

Michele Williams: And Nicole, you do a lot of work and coaching around mindset. Tell us a little bit about your journey. I'd love to hear, like, I don't even know if I know some of the journey that got you to where you are right now. Tell us about that.

Nicole Comis: So exciting. Well, my goodness. I met my first coach in my late twenties. It was two thousand and three, so don't do the math. But it was 2003 and I had a very successful career in the mortgage business, and a friend of mine who I also worked with literally was transforming in front of my eyes and I didn't know what the heck she was doing, all I knew is that I wanted that. And so fast forward, she introduced me to her coach. I had never heard of a life coach before. It was pretty new at that time, and I worked with this coach for two years and it completely changed my life. I used to be that girl that looked in the mirror, and all I saw was everything that was wrong with me. I picked myself apart. I was so unkind to myself. I was a closet negative Nancy, although, from the outside world, you couldn't tell. It changed me.

Fast forward to after the housing market crash happened and my happiness and my identity and everything else and my income crest right along with it, I reinvented myself and had to change how I was getting business in the mortgage business. I met another coach, and we became friends. I really tried for about five years to get my love and passion back for the mortgage business after the housing market crash and couldn't. I was miserable. Finally, I picked up the phone and I called my friend I met from the chamber, and I said, Diana, I have to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up. It was probably our second or third session. She started laughing. She goes, Nicole, you want to be a coach. Oh, yeah, you're right I do! It's really who I am. It's in my DNA. My mom says that ever since I was a kid, I was the person people called for when they were having a hard time or wanted advice. That's kind of what led me to coaching.

Michele Williams: In your life coaching that you do right now, I know I've worked through a couple of your online exercises, so I'd be excited when, some of the listeners go check those out, and some of them I've done before, but not in the same way that you have. So, it was nice. Yours were a bit more thorough than some of the others that I've done but tell us a little bit about what your philosophy is for life. I know that you mentioned it to me before we came on air, but I'd love for you to kind of set the stage for the philosophy, and then I'd love to talk through some of that.

Nicole Comis: Well, I think one thing that's really important to me is that you're a whole person, you're not just your career. It's so important to create goals in every area of life, even if it's a simple action that you're committed to taking every day, every week, or every month. So many people have tunnel vision. They're so focused on their career that they push living their life off to the side. Oh, my relationship is fine. I'm just going to focus on this, or my health is fine, and fast forward years down the road. It's not fine. So, I really want people to be intentional with creating and living a life that they really want to be living. That's a big piece of my philosophy, as well as our health and wellbeing is the foundation of everything we do and everything we don't do. So how do you treat your body, mind, and spirit? Thirdly, when you become the best version of you, happy, healthy, and confident, it's so much easier to achieve those big goals you have for your life.

Michele Williams: Okay. All that felt like a lot. It's a good thing, though. And you know why I was so excited? I don't know why I didn't ask you to come on here earlier. I guess I was just not even thinking. I was just trying to get through the day-to-day. Right. Everybody knows I had a really heavy year last year with my son getting married and then traveling and then renovations, and it was just a lot. But what you're saying is so true because everybody right now, you know how you were on the other side of the mortgage crisis and you were exhausted emotionally, mentally, all the things. Well, a lot of the design world is feeling that exhaustion on the other side of COVID. Because of what happened to us, just like a two-second about the industry, everybody's humming along in 2019, and 2020 hits and work stops for a season. But then it picked up in crazy pants form because everybody was sitting at home thinking, my house is not what I want. Then we got inundated with work. I'm talking, by and large, as an industry. We got calls. We couldn't keep up with the calls. People are hiring, trying to keep up with the work, we have offshore where we're buying some of our case goods, we've got things trying to get over. We've got shipping issues. Things are stuck in port. It's a logistics nightmare. We're trying to keep our clients happy. They're getting sick of looking at the same four walls. So, we are just working ourselves to the bone to try to take advantage of the hotness of the market and the timing of the market.

We've made that our new normal. Our cortisol levels are through the roof and shooting out our eyeballs and ears. Our bodies are now starting to revolt. People are getting sick two or three times. Now the conversations are, I can't keep working at that speed. I've talked about it for the last three years, and I kept saying, we've got to be careful not to stay on the Peloton. You get on the Peloton. You get off the Peloton. But our lives were not meant to be lived completely on the Peloton. And so where are the seasons of rest and the seasons of doing? I'm reading a book and doing a book club right now, called Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. I don't know if you've seen it, you'd probably really love it, but the idea behind it is there are necessary beginnings and necessary endings and that if we don't end something, we won't be able to grow to the next thing.

Nicole Comis: That's good.

Michele Williams: We're pruning our lives towards something. We're pruning towards. So, when I look at that and the information compared to what you just said, it is we cannot work ourselves to death. I'm seeing a lot of people who are coming up having all kinds of health issues. I've seen a couple that have gotten diabetes and prediabetes. Like, all the things just because of the work. I remember saying to my husband, I said, I feel like life is passing me by and I'm just working and getting these things done. I said, when do we ever live? Because if we wait till the end to live, that's when we're usually exhausted and we drop dead of a heart attack on the day of our retirement. We decide we're going to retire, and then we drop dead of a heart attack. This is the part where we're supposed to be living. And so, what does it look like to live? And then I saw this one last thing the other day on Instagram, and it said, what are you going to do with this one amazing life? And it just hit me. right. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, we love what we do. That's the thing. None of these people that are coming to me as we're working on their financials and their business and their strategies and how to reduce the stress and reduce the work and make more while working less, like, I'm working on that business aspect, you're working on the human aspect. Like, the person that's showing up is the key employee. All of these people love what they do. They don't hate what they do. They've just found themselves in this work mentality, and it's exhausting them.

Nicole Comis: It's exhausting. And I think that's part of how I ended up and why I help people with living a more balanced life and my definition of balance isn't how you allocate your time. It's about how fulfilled you are and that making your health and well-being your number one priority is because I did love my job in the mortgage business. I loved it. I worked 60-70 hours a week, nights and weekends. I was there before my boss was many, many mornings. It's not that I felt like I had to, it's just. I loved it. But I burnt out my adrenals.

Michele Williams: Yes.

Nicole Comis: When you're not taking care of you and you're not sleeping and you're not eating healthily and you're not moving your body, something eventually is going to give. When your stress level is high, and even though I loved what I did, my stress was through the roof.

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: Trying to get these people approved for their mortgage, not knowing what's going to happen with the interest rates, worried about where my next paycheck was going to come from. It was all of that caused adrenal fatigue. It's so important to take care of your body because you're not good to anybody, nor will you be able to achieve your career goals in the long run if you're burnt out and you have to sleep 12 hours a day like I did.

So really, it's so important. It's so important to take care of yourself and to really balance all of those things out. You can still love what you do and put your heart and soul into it without killing yourself.

Michele Williams: So where do we start? I think the first is probably acknowledging. I think I'd need to probably take a look at this to see how do I feel. Like even just checking in with my body, how do I feel? What does this feel like? I'm in physical therapy right now for my hip and lower back. I've had some challenges for years and it's finally gotten to the point because I sit a lot now, probably more than I need to on some days, and I don't always stop and raise my desk, and I'm not taking care of my body or I sit so long that I've let my core go and I'm not holding my abs in tight to support me while I'm sitting just because you get tired. I've got some imbalance on one side of my body to the other. I'm in physical therapy, trying to identify what needs to be strengthened, what needs to be loosened, whatever so that I don't hurt so bad. It made me think that I first had to take kind of stock in how I felt, because that's the first thing he asked, is, where is the pain? When does it hurt? How does this happen? And you think about it, it's the same thing I ask in the business. Where does it hurt? Where are you sending money? How does it happen? And my guess is that there is some form of that that you're also asking. There's got to be something that gives us enough of a push to change from what we're doing to doing something different, like reaching out to you, to reach out to me, to reach out to a doctor, or to ask for help. Something has to be like, I don't want to or can't do this, or don't want to live like this. There's something. Then do you go in and kind of start that? let's kind of take stock of where you are.

Nicole Comis: Yeah. Well, my goodness. My hope is that I can get the message out there, so people don't get to that desperate state where they're like, oh, I need help. I want to try and educate people so that they know now's the time. If I want to achieve big things in life, now's the time for me to hire a coach. Now's the time for me to get supported. Now is the time for me to build my foundation.

I think for anybody right now, my advice to you is to, and I have a free resource on my website called the life fulfillment exercise. Basically, it's called the wheel of life, and a lot of coaches have them, but it's assessing your life, and if you don't want to download it, you don't have to. But go through the areas of your life, health, career, your romantic relationship, your friendships, your relationship with your family, spirituality, and finances. Go through all of those areas that are important to you. Fun and play. Don't forget fun and play. That's one of the most important ones. We're meant to love this life, but really write down all of those areas of life and rate them from one to ten. How happy and fulfilled are you in that area of life? Be real with yourself. Be honest with yourself, because if you are a ten in your career, but you're

As I said earlier, it's not about where you spend your time as much as how fulfilled and satisfied are you in that area of life.

Michele Williams: But that goes back to the imbalance that I'm talking about, even on one side of my body to the other. I remember when I was trying to kind of figure out, how do I want my year to go to your point that it's not always about equal amounts of time. When I was writing down my goals, before I write down my business goals, I always write down what my personal goals are for the year.

Nicole Comis: Love that.

Michele Williams: Right. Like, where do I want to go on vacation? How much time do I need off? What appointments do I already know and can calendar? How can I go ahead and put that down so that I can create space? Because if I put work in first, it won't have space. I know me. It won't happen. So, I put myself in first, my family first, and then I put in work.

Nicole Comis: I love that so much.

Michele Williams: Well, it took me years to figure that one out. I've done the opposite. And that one didn't work so well for me. The second thing that I like to stop and really think about is one of mine was to have dinner with friends, which, again, is how I met you. Right. Dinner with friends. All right, so then the question is, how often do I need to have dinner with friends to feel like I met that goal? It's not every week, surprisingly. It's once a month or, maybe twice a month. But more than that almost feels like a burden. Like, I've got to plan to get up, to get ready, to get out. I've got to stop work on time to get somewhere. It feels almost too much. I had to stop and even think. Meeting with friends for a night out, how much is enough for me? I have a client right now who for years, every Wednesday night, has had a standing dinner with her girlfriends. And for her, that's enough. Like, that's her enough. My enough is very different. So it's just knowing for myself what that looks like. Another one for me, Nicole was I wanted to be able to have a good, healthy dinner made at home.

Nicole Comis: Love it.

Michele Williams: Now I'm going to back up. For the last two years, I've hardly cooked at home because we've been so busy. We would eat small things. I would go in there and get carrot sticks and call it a night, which is not good, either because I'm not fueling my body properly in some cases. Or we would just grab something very quick and easy. But we just renovated our kitchen. I want to be in there. I want to love it. So, then it was okay. I don't want to do that seven nights a week either. I don't want to cook that much. So how much? Two to three times a week and then have leftovers. That feels glorious to me. I want to be able to do it with turning on music and dancing around the house and making it an enjoyable time. But I had to sit and seriously think through these activities that in the past I could almost skirt by. I had to think about them and where they fit into my life and what joy they brought me to be able to do them.

Nicole Comis: Oh, I love that. Well, and it's true. So many of us live on autopilot.

Michele Williams: Yeah.

Nicole Comis: Right. We're reacting to life versus creating it. And so, one of the things I heard from you is that you've learned, okay, first I get to put me first. Right? So, 2024 is on its way and I am, scheduling my me time.

Michele Williams: Yeah.

Nicole Comis: Then I can fill it in with work.

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: Then on top of it, you're designing like. Well, okay, so relationships, what do I need to be fulfilled? Dinner once a month with my girlfriends. Now, if something special is coming up, I can add that in there, but at least once a month.

Michele Williams: A minimum of once a month. Yes.

Nicole Comis: It's perfect. You also know you, that if you were doing dinner every week, it would get overwhelming. It would feel like another job.

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: So that is exactly what we all get to do to create the life that lights us up. We shouldn't feel obligated to go out to dinner with our girlfriends every week.

Nor should we feel like you're depleted, and you don't have enough girlfriend time. So, figuring out what is the right balance for you and is it the same girlfriends? Is it different girlfriends? Does it matter? Right. It all is about really diving into what's in your heart.

Michele Williams: That's so good. Why is it, especially as owners of our own companies, why is it we have such a hard time doing that?

Nicole Comis: I don't think it's being owners of companies. I think it's just how we're programmed.

Michele Williams: Fair.

Nicole Comis: Think about it. Think about corporate America, people who burn themselves out.

Michele Williams: Just like us. Right?

Nicole Comis: Just like us, it's men and women and whatever. A lot of it is because from zero to seven, our little brains are like sponges, and we absorb all of this information from the media, our parents, school, TV, and all of the things. We don't have the ability to say, I believe that, that's not true, I don't know, or I have to think on that. We just absorb it, and eventually, those become our beliefs about ourselves, and other people in the world. The reason why we burn ourselves out and the reason why we work our butts off is because it's our programming. Whether it's a fear or a limiting belief or that's what dad did, that's what mom did. We are programmed to think that that's what we need to do, whether it's, I need to prove myself, I need to prove I'm worthy or not, that's just what is done, or you've got to work your butt off to make money.

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: So that's why we do the things that we do. And sometimes we love it, and so it doesn't feel like work. So, it really is about what's happening up here.

Michele Williams: Yeah. All right. So, you mentioned it early on about kind of knowing who you were after the whole mortgage piece, and that was gone. I remember when I came home from corporate and started running my own business doing custom window treatments, I didn't know who I was. I had somewhat defined myself. Well, in a large way defined myself. Wife, mom, and I worked in software development. Like, I had the degree, I had all the things. It was all lined up in a pretty little box, and that's who I was. And then that whole piece gets pulled out and then there's like, well, I can explain who part of me is. I'm still wife and mom, but there's this huge chunk of Michele, I don't know how to define her anymore.

Nicole Comis: Yeah.

Michele Williams: Then I started in custom window treatments. At the time, there was no degree program. So, then I had to make peace with the fact that I went from something that I had trained for years to do, had done it for ten years, and now started in a new career where there was still training to be done, but it was not at the same level of training from a degree program. You could certainly get certifications. It just wasn't out there. I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know how to prove that I knew what I knew. It caused me a bit of a challenge. Then as my business has morphed over the years, it starts to become, how do we define ourselves and our worth and our value? And what is it that we consider success? I know Ceil DiGuglielmo on her podcast, Sew Much More, asks all the time at the very end, how do you define success? How do you define success? How do you define success? Or maybe you know and can answer it that way, why is it that we use our work to define ourselves? And is there a better way to define ourselves separate from what we do?

Nicole Comis: I think that we're used to labeling ourselves. I am a mortgage planner. I am a mom. I am a wife. I am a husband. I am an executive. We put labels on ourselves.

Michele Williams: And boxes around it.

Nicole Comis: Exactly. I think it's just how we're programmed. So, whether it's I'm an executive in a law firm or I'm a mom, we almost feel like our identity is what we do. That thing, it takes work to unpack that. And that you're not what you do or how much money you make or how successful you are.

Michele Williams: That's right. That's just an aspect, you know, what's bubbling up in me that I'm feeling while you say that? What if people were to answer, I'm a lover of life, and then tell me how you love life? Well, I love being a mom. I love working in a business. I love donating my time. You know what I mean? What if it was about loving life or loving people? I mean, just imagine what that world would look like if we started, right? If we started by identifying that to be who we are and then we looked at other things. I know I was listening to, a Bible study last week, and Beth Moore was actually sharing about joy and about the loss of joy. When people come and they know I've lost my joy, I don't have joy for life. I don't have joy for this, which actually is kind of like an end result of what we're talking about, of all the burnout and everything else. One of the things that she said, and it's just two words I'd not put together quite the same way. She put joy with grace and she said, when we lose our joy, it's because we have lost the connection with the grace that has been bestowed upon us. I thought, okay, we always hear have a gratitude journal, write down what you're thankful for. I get that. But when she tied it back into grace, I went, oh, now, that hits me differently. That makes me think of what grace has been bestowed upon me and upon my life and upon those I love or those I'm watching. Seeing the grace that we get every day, that is what makes me joyful. Then how am I living a life to see the grace to execute, the grace to work with that grace? To have more joy, it just kind of turned me around a little bit. I'm driving in my car, and I'm like, oh, that one got me. Where have I lost my joy, and where am I not seeing this beautiful life, even this hard life? I've been through hard things. Everybody's been through hard things. It's not always easy, but even in that, if we look for it, we can find a place.

Nicole Comis: The same thing with gratitude.

Michele Williams: Yes.

Nicole Comis: If we take the time to really think about what we have from the mechanics of our body. Our heart is beating. How beautiful is that?

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: We can walk across the street. That we have this beautiful sunshine and air to breathe. If you really think about it, there is so much amazingness to be grateful for.

Michele Williams: That's right. I think that's what the grace does, is it leads you to gratitude and thankfulness. The gratitude and the thankfulness lead you back to joy.

Nicole Comis: Like a circle.

Michele Williams: It's a circle. I know I can speak for myself. I'll tell on myself instead of on other people.

Nicole Comis: I do the same.

Michele Williams: Always a good thing, but I know when I get overworked, over-tired, over-committed, or overstrained, I snap. I am not the kind of person that I want to be. I'm not the best version of myself showing up. It's because I don't have any bandwidth. I have no ability to reset. To kind of reset myself. One of the best things that I have done is create a white space in my calendar, and I'm not always as good at it as I would like to be. It's still a work in progress because then that one client calls, and I love my clients, and I want to put them in that one little space that I have because they've got a question, and I can answer it, whatever. So, it happens. But just giving yourself space to breathe in the day so that I'm not so exhausted at the end. The PT told me today, all right, every hour, the same thing that my friend Barbie tells me all the time. Every hour, I want you to stand up. I want you to stretch the opposite way of the way you've been sitting. Do an opposite move so that you can work on your body throughout the day so that it's not so jacked up by the end of the day that we got to do a lot more work to get it healed in the opposite direction. Right.

Nicole Comis: I love that. I want to circle back to something you said earlier about defining ourselves. There's this really powerful exercise that we did in my coach training program, and I have my clients still do. Basically, the exercise is to call, so you actually have one on one conversation. It's a connection with somebody who knows you. You say, I'm working with a coach and, they are having me do this exercise so that you're not coming out of nowhere asking deep questions.

Michele Williams: Right.

Nicole Comis: You say, what qualities and characteristics do I bring when I walk into a room? It is the most powerful exercise I have ever done in my life. The next step is you hand in the list to your coach and they come up with the pattern and they come up with five words that are used to describe you. Mine is love, connection, power, joy, and play. So, if somebody were to ask me who I am, that's who I am.

Michele Williams: Which kind of goes back to I love life. Let's talk about that. I love that. So, there is a meeting, I don't know if you're familiar with this, called the exchange. I'll have to take you some time. So, you would love this. It's coming up on February 15th here. So it will already happen by the time this podcast comes out. It used to be in Alpharetta and now it's in Forsyth, up in our area, but this is what they're talking about. You're not going to even believe this. I just got this at 1:54 just 30 minutes before our call. The topic this month is, what is it like to be on the other side of me? It says we all know how the atmosphere of the room changes when your mother-in-law walks in, or when that one friend shows up to the party, or your boss drops by the office. But have you ever given any thought about how the atmosphere in the room changes when you walk in? Have you ever thought about what it's like for others to be on the other side of you? What is it like for them to experience you as a friend, you as a coworker, you at the ballpark? In other words, what's it like to be on the other side of you?

Nicole Comis: Love it.

Michele Williams: I had just been giving that thought before we got on to record, and I think it is one of those things. It matters because it matters about how we even describe ourselves. There's one thing to be at a networking event and to say, I'm a life coach, I'm a business coach, or a financial consultant, or I'm an interior designer, or whatever it is that you do, that's one thing. But when somebody is really trying to get to know you, it's really different. I'm going to say that, I'm going to hamper a guess that the reason we don't introduce ourselves like that is because we don't even know ourselves like that.

Nicole Comis: Totally.

Michele Williams: How long is the process, or what have you seen? Is the process to actually get to know ourselves like that? Because it takes work. I mean, this is work.

Nicole Comis: It's a journey. If I think about it, I've been working on being the best version of me for 20 years. Would I say that I just discovered myself? No. I think that I've been a work in progress. I feel like it's like peeling layers of an onion. You might have heard this description 100 times, but you're literally just discovering more and more about who you are. The more that you can identify your fears and your limiting beliefs and understand where those come from, the more aligned you feel, and I do tell my clients, too, to really practice making decisions based on your vision and your values. Is this aligned with the life I want to build? Really give yourself the opportunity to pause and think about that decision. There's not a time clock on a lot of things, so we put that time clock on. Oh, I have to decide right away. I have to decide by the end of the day. Communicate that you need time and that it's something that you need to think about if there's a decision to make. It's so important to make those decisions aligned with the life that you want to live, not just with right now, because those choices you make right now will impact your future.

Michele Williams: I love the work that we do, Nicole because it feels so parallel. I work a lot with high-achieving business owners who are telling me, this is the business that I want. This is the business I want. Part of our exercise is for me to ask them what life they want because we want to build the business into the life. Not trying to cram your life into a business. And some have an understanding of what they want, some don't. I told a group the other day, and I told a second group this week, to turn off the podcast. I'm sitting there saying that while I'm putting out a podcast. But if you're getting so distracted and so overwhelmed by listening to five or ten podcasts a week, all telling you some version of how you could be or should be or what your business should or shouldn't look like, and it's becoming, like, this big on Monday, I'm doing great, but by Tuesday, I'm going in the wrong direction, and by Wednesday, that's not helpful. It's really not. It's actually hindering you instead of helping you. When other people's ideas and influence get like that, we have to turn it off, and then we've got to be intentional about the influences of the people that we let speak into us. But the number one person that should ever speak into us is us.

Nicole Comis: Yes.

Michele Williams: I think sometimes we diminish the US speaking so that we can hear everybody else pouring into us. I've been just as guilty of that. Because sometimes you don't know when you're trying to find your way. I love how you bring us back to as a person, Michele, what do you want? Who do you want to be? How do you want to show up? How do you want to live your life, describe your life, go through your life, and impact the lives of others? What does that personal you journey look like? Then that is what we bring into the business journey. Do you ever work with teams in a business setting, Nicole, where you're really trying to understand the life desires and you of the different team members and then how they all work together in the company?

Nicole Comis: Yeah, absolutely. Most of my work is one-on-one.

Michele Williams: Sure.

Nicole Comis: But I do absolutely work with teams. I've had several organizations that have brought me in to do workshops and/or coaching and that type of stuff. I'm actually talking with a client of mine right now. Same thing. He's like, my team needs you. We're not going to be able to grow unless they grow.

Michele Williams: That's right and that's what I'm thinking. I do, most of mine is one-to-one as well. I do have the opportunity that people hire me. I come in and facilitate a conversation among an entire team because they're all working together. So, what I've seen in any partnership, whether it's a business partnership or a life partnership when one partner is growing and the other partner is not, it creates a division. There's one thing about both growing and growing in opposite directions, but I'm talking about stagnation and growth. Fixed mindset. Growth mindset. It causes a problem. I've seen it with partners in the business. I've seen it with the leader in the business and a team, or even an individual on that team.

Nicole Comis: Absolutely.

Michele Williams: That's when we start to know. It starts to bring in dissonance and discord and all the other things, then we have to make an HR decision. It leads to a whole thing. So, I think it is really important, just like we talk about in business, if you know your company value, know your company, why, your mission, your vision, all those things, but then knowing your own personal one and inviting your team members to figure out who they are and what's important to them, then that they are at your business by choice. Because who they are and what they want aligns with who you are and what you want and you're pushing or pulling in the same direction.

Nicole Comis: Yes, and they're not only more aligned with your business, but they're also more aligned with you because you took the opportunity to invest in them. So, they're more connected and like, wow, this know invested in me. It's not just me collecting a paycheck.

Michele Williams: Exactly. Awesome. So, Nicole, where are you hanging out on social media and where can people find you if they want to connect?

Nicole Comis: Oh, my goodness. I'm on all the places. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, although I still don't really get TikTok as much.

Michele Williams: I hang out on TikTok to look at things sometimes, but I've not yet done anything with that.

Nicole Comis: Yeah, it's a lot.

Michele Williams: I'm a lurker. Awesome. And are you out on all of those channels as Nicole Comis?

Nicole Comis: I am.

Michele Williams: Perfect, and I will put all that in the show notes and tell us you have a couple of free downloads on your website. Tell us what's there if people want to try those out.

Nicole Comis: Yes. I have the life fulfillment exercise we talked about earlier. That is one of my favorite exercises. I personally do it every quarter to make sure that I'm on track and staying aligned. In addition to that, I have a well-being checklist, which is just a simple exercise. It was something I added because people in my community had asked for it. But our health and well-being aren't just about the food we eat or how much we exercise. It's about doing the things that make your heart smile. So, my invitation to all of you is to make that your priority, take time for you, and set guidelines for yourself. One of the best health and well-being practices I've incorporated is at 08:00 at night, my phone is off. That's my unplugged time. I may watch TV, I may read a book, whatever it is, that's my time. That gives me that white space that you talked about earlier so I can stop the noise.

Michele Williams: I like it, and how many of us have been guilty at times of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And then doing it all night and into the mornings?

Nicole Comis: Yeah.

Michele Williams: It's a good practice.

Nicole Comis: I used to be this guilty of this, I'm watching a TV show that I love and I'm on my phone, and then a half hour later, I'm like, well, what's happening? So really being intentional with your, it's, it's powerful.

Michele Williams: It really is. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for coming in and having the conversation. I love that you've shared with us that there's a way out. We don't have to stay stuck in that heightened place of exhaustion or tiredness and then catch it before we actually get into a position of dire need. Catching it early, that's always the goal. I printed it off, I think it was the life fulfillment exercise and I gave it to my husband. I said, I would love to have a date night so I'm going to do mine and you do yours and then let's go on a date night, and let's see what the life we're trying to build together is. But let's come at it with each of us doing it independently. As opposed to what do you want? What do you want? And then we have time to think about it and come together. So we haven't had our date night yet, so I'm excited to do that.

Nicole Comis: Keep me posted.

Michele Williams: I will, I will. Thank you for giving us such a great tool to use to do that.

Nicole Comis: My pleasure. Thank you.

Michele Williams: Take care.

Nicole Comis: Bye bye.

Michele Williams: Nicole, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It always amazes me how these conversations overlap with either a book that I'm reading or an email that I just got. I just want to encourage you and the work that you're doing to continue. For those of you listening, I'd love to encourage you to check out the Will of Life exercise on her website. It's really an amazing tool, and I think that getting to know ourselves will really help us grow intentionally.

As for your business, we would love to support your company's growth and get to know what the company wants and needs. We have programs for those of you who are just getting started out all the way to those of you making multimillions and having been in business for 30-plus years. To learn more about how we can assist you, you can check out the work with me page on scarletthreadconsulting.com, and don't forget, check out Metrique Solutions. It's always important to see your financials in a visual representation because that brings quick clarity and helps you know how to spend your time and your resources. You can find out more about Metrique Solutions at MetriqueSolutions.com and as always, choose to be profitable because profit doesn't happen by accident. Profit is a Choice is proud to be part of thedesignnetwork.org, where you can discover more design media reaching creative listeners. Thanks for listening and stay creative and business minded.