That One Thing Bitesized: A big end of year review

This week it’s a solo episode of That One Thing (the final of the season!) -and you can call it a journal session in audio form. It’s been a year of real highs and sticky lows and I’m sharing it all with you. 

Expect total truth, light bulb moment learnings and I end with my mission statement for 2023. I hope some of you journal along with me! Let me know how you got on by dropping me an email: vanessa@thesocialally.co.uk or sliding into my DM's

Journal prompts:  What am I most proud of in 2022? 

                                          What felt like a struggle this year? 

                                          How do I want to feel in my business/in myself 12 months time? 

I wanted to take a minute to thank everyone for listening, to all my wonderful guests, I really do appreciate every single one of you. I spent lots a special moments this year reading your often hilarious and inspiring stories, they have really made this podcast a warm a fuzzy place to be! 

I’ll be back in the new year with more inspiring business stories from female founders AND more of my marketing insights. I really hope you continue to listen in.

Be the first to here about all my new workshops, podcast episodes and get exclusive discounts by joining my mailing list.

Transcript

[00:24] Speaker A: Intro. Now, before we start today's episode, I wanted to just quickly talk to you about my free Ads toolkit that is live on my website right now. My toolkit has everything you need to create a really super successful Facebook ad campaign from top to bottom. So you've got Create Creative in there, you've got copy in there, you've got all the jargon busting terms in there, you've got a free checklist that will tell you exactly what you should be doing from start to finish in your campaign. It's all in there. Go to my website, click on the link, pop your email in there, I will send it to you free of charge. With my love to all my lovely subscribers. They will also get £20 off their first empowerment session when they sign up. So it's a total no brainer. It's on there, click the link. I'll have it in the podcast. Notes and without further ado, let's get on with the show, shall we? Hello.

[01:49] Speaker B: Hello and welcome to The One Thing, a podcast where I talked to fabulous females about. The one thing that made them step out of their comfort zone and change their life for the better. Because it's only by taking brave steps that we truly grow as a person. I'm your host, mum, social media manager and general soul searcher, Vanessa Carlos. And every week I'll be introducing a small business owner, a blogger or a creative to discuss their One Thing.

[02:22] Speaker A: Hello, hello. Welcome back to that one thing. It's lovely to have you here. It is the last bite size episode and in fact the last episode of this year. And today I really wanted to reflect on the past year of my business and I'd like to call this like a journaling session in audio form and something that I think all businesses should do and I really highly recommend doing this for yourself. Just call it a CEO session, if you will, where you can reflect on the highs that your business has created over the last year, the lows that you can really reflect on. Some of these are going to feel really crunchy and are really going to stretch you and are really going to trigger some points in your self doubt. And while I was writing mine, which I'm going to share with you now, I really did feel stretchy and crunchy and it was quite hard and yeah, I'm going to feel quite vulnerable, so bear with me. And I'm also going to end on how I want to feel in twelve months time and how I want to feel in my business and how I want to feel in myself. So, yeah, we're going to do this little exercise. I really hope it helps you. If you want, you can grab a pen and pencil and just jot some stuff down that's coming up for you. So, without further ado, let's get cracking, shall we? So let's start with the good stuff, shall we? Let's start with the highs. And I journaled out this question, which I think you should probably do, too. And that is, what am I most proud of in 2022? Okay? So give yourself time to do that if you're journaling along with me. Number one, I have had my highest revenue months ever this year. I'm just saying that this wasn't for the entire year, but during just before the summer of this year. So around March, April, May, I had the best turnover in revenue I think I've ever had. And I've been self employed since 2015. So that was definitely a course for celebration. I felt like, yeah, things are working, things are flowing, I'm in flow. And I was creating some really great results. I have and this is onto number two, I have worked with some really amazing businesses, female founded businesses that have really, actually inspired me to kind of do things a certain way. Like, I've seen how they run certain stuff and it's really inspired me to kind of change things up in my own business. I think that's probably one of the best things about working with small businesses and female founded small businesses is that their business practices and ways of doing things start to rub off on you as well. So that's been amazing. Now onto the next thing. I did this exercise and I think I'm going to go back to it whenever I'm having a bad day or like I'm having a particularly bad month and I want to kind of feel good in my self worth. I added up how much revenue I had created for clients this year. So obviously I'm a Facebook Ads manager, so it's quite easy to go through all my reports and just add everything up. And it turns out I have made 42K all together for clients this year in revenue. And that made me feel really proud. I was really proud of that. And yeah, ads work. So, yeah, that was a really nice thing to do and I would definitely encourage you all to do that. Also, the last thing was that was really, really cool. I dipped into workshops this year and running my own workshops, I ran some for private groups. I also ran some workshops for a council in London. And I realized, actually, I really enjoy teaching. I never thought I would definitely when I first started out in my business, I was definitely the sort of person that just liked to squirrel things away behind the scenes and just get on with my work. And actually, I think the Pandemic has taught me that that need for connection is really, really important when you're working for yourself and doing things like workshops is a great way to meet some wonderful, wonderful people. And also another hire this year, I employed a brand photographer to take some shots of me. And that was an enormous coming out of myself. I would say, I don't know about you, but as a middle aged woman, it is very hard to find a decent picture of yourself just on your camera roll. You're going to get like 5000 pictures of your kids, 2000 pictures of your dog, probably 1000 pictures of your husband maybe doing silly stuff, but very rarely are you going to get a decent picture of you. And actually something that you can put on your social media, put on your website, just kind of up level and make everything look a bit more professional. And I had nothing, absolutely nothing to be able to do that with a brand photographer. It kind of elevated everything to the next level. I got my fashion chops in gear again, which was really, really fun because before I did the job I do now, I was a personal shopper and I worked in fashion retail and I always loved fashion and clothes. That was my degree and I was able to style my shoot. Yeah, pure joy. Absolute pure joy. I've been working with her all year. I now have a bank of wonderful photos that I can use in my socials and on my website and in my podcast. And yeah, everything kind of looks sparkly and wonderful and I look great and I felt great while I was doing it and I just look more professional and I think it really helped with me showing up in my business, which is so important when you're pretty much selling yourself and what you do. Right now we come on to the really crunchy, sticky bit. We're going to talk about the lows. And I started with this question, what felt like a struggle this year? So now I'm getting really into the nitty gritty of everything and I feel like this is a safe space though I feel super vulnerable talking about all of this stuff I have in the past and up till now really relied heavily on referrals for my business. They've worked so well in the past, they've worked really, really well in the past, but over the past year this has slowed right down for one reason or another. And what I found is that I have been so used to just having clients almost fall in my lap that I've kind of become a bit complacent and it was a really crunchy thing for me to do to start selling on my social media and all this kind of stuff. And also when I did start selling, because I had a kind of weird feeling about doing it, that I went for my low ticket offers first, and I sold quite a few of my low ticket offers, but I forgot to sell my high ticket offers and so I didn't have enough of those long term management clients coming last year. And there was a point when I was looking at my figures and thinking, oh my God, what the hell happened? And it was straight after I'd taken a break in the summer, I took most of August off, which in a way was really bad for business, but actually good for my own mental health. And I had a brilliant summer. But I think going back on it now, I would have done a bit of selling over that time I was off and probably focused on having some people waiting in the wings when I came back in September, rather than kind of feeling the need to kind of scrabble around and find everybody and say, I'm back. I'm back. I'm available. So I think next year I will make sure that I have a constant stream of stuff coming, either on email or in my social media, where I know I can build up a waitlist of people that are ready to start asking for my services. And I think if I would give you one piece of advice, if you want to take a break, have things in place before you leave. Yeah, that felt horrible and this is going to feel really horrible to write down as well, but, yeah, yes, you got to do it. Right? Okay. So I had that break in August, came back in September, and because I was in hustle mode and because I was feeling maybe a little bit like I was in a waiting place and I was forcing things, I started to focus on what others were doing and not really staying in my lane. And that was totally when the whole self doubt, ridiculous, ugly head in me. And what's really, really bizarre is that I actually worked with a self doubt coach this year. She was my client, so I was getting loads of insights about self doubt and it did creep up on me and, yeah, that kind of Instagram doom scroll, right, we've all done it where we're looking at other people in our niche and we're looking at them and yeah, fair enough, instagram is like the shop window. It's the best version of ourselves that we like to project, but you're looking at other people and you're going, oh, my God, they've made this much they're selling out workshops and it's all going well for them and I'm really on the struggle bus right now. So how I've managed to stop this, and I've just done this recently, I have unfollowed a whole lot of women in my niche, apart from a few women that I'd built up a relationship with. And we'd helped each other online. And that has really helped because I'm not seeing them in my feet anymore and I'm staying in my lane. So I would suggest having a nice old clear out, if you're feeling like that at the moment, and it will really help to kind of get you back on an evening keel. And then also, I had something that really kind of paid me off this year. I had to cancel a workshop and I literally had to cancel it maybe a few minutes before I actually started. And that is just completely I hated this. It was awful. And the reason being is that I had a flu bug. Well, no, I had a sickness bug, I think, and I was literally going to throw up before I was going to start this workshop. And I was sitting in bed with sweat dripping down my face thinking, can I cancel this or can I just suck it up and just do it? And it had literally kind of built up maybe in the half hour previous to me starting. And first of all, I thought it was just nerves, but then it actually became clear to me that I am actually sick, so I had to cancel. And it was awful because of course everybody was turning up and I just had to put up like a canva thing on there saying, I'm so sorry I've had to cancel this. And everyone was really, really cool about it and it was fine and I had to reschedule. But then when I rescheduled, I would say maybe 20% of the people actually turned up to the workshop when I'd say 90% of the people turned up to the workshop when I was sick. So I felt so disappointed in myself and I really, really had to think hard about how I had handled that situation. And yeah, it was a really horrible feeling. So the final question I'd like us to journal about is how do you want to feel in your business in twelve months time? And actually, how do you want to feel in yourself in twelve months time as well? I found this quite hard. I actually suck at this and I think if I was to do this again, I would make sure that I track my progress more efficiently than I have done already, rather than in 100 notebooks, which I have, which I was trying to troll through while I was trying to answer this question. And then I can refer back to that and would probably answer this question a lot better than I'm going to do now. But I think how I'd like to feel is more organized because I think for as long as I've been in business on my own, which is since 2015, I've kind of had lots and lots of different automated systems and so it's really difficult sometimes for me to kind of track what's going on with everything. I have a zoom subscription and a calendar subscription and a squarespace subscription and it's all all over the place and it's all in different things. And then I started a newsletter so that needed a subscription, and then I have the podcasting subscription stuff and it's all over the place. And how I'd like to feel is that everything is now more organized and more streamlined. It's the will virgo in me and I think I found something that's going to help. It's called paper bell. I've only just found it, so I can't tell you exactly whether it's any good or not. I will report back on that. But, yes, I would like to feel more organized and in terms of myself, I would like to feel how I look in the photos that I got taken this year. I would like to feel that glamorous calmness that I had in my photos, rather than that kind of constant pedaling underwater that we all do. And I think, yes, that is how I'd like to feel. I'd like to also feel in myself that the people that show up for me are my perfect people. And if they don't show up for me, then they're not my perfect people. And I don't need to push and push and hustle, and I need to realize that if they haven't shown up, then they're not my perfect people. And I think we could all learn something from that one. So I'm going to end with my mission statement for next year. I will show up as me with all my flaws, because that is perfect for my perfect people. How about that? So that's it, those three journal questions for you. Thank you. If you've journaled along with me, I would love to know what came up for you. You can email me Vanessa at the socialally co UK. You can step into my DMs and let's have a chat on Instagram about this. Yeah, it's been a really interesting and thought provoking session. It's so important that you do this at the end of the year and, yeah, I love that. I love that for all of us. So that's it. That's the end of this season, season four. I will be back in the new year with a whole load more of fascinating interviews with some amazing female founders. There's going to be a whole lot more bite size episodes as well for you. With all my marketing tips, I am going to be introducing some really exciting new stuff in my own business next year, which I can't wait to talk to you about, but it's all top secret for now. It's all kind of stuck in my head, so I need to get that out on paper and it'll be all ready for the new season. Thank you so much for sticking out with me this year. I've loved all your emails and comments and chats on Instagram. It's been really wonderful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. And. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Don't eat too much or do actually go for it. Feel free and I'll see you next year. Goodbye for now.

[26:24] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening to that one thing. And please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps to get my little podcast into the universe and I'll be forever grateful.