[Susan Friedmann]
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.
Today. My special guest is Colleen Biggs. Colleen is an award-winning business coach who empowers women and entrepreneurs who are ready to lean into their peak performance and take action so that they can expand their influence, attract the right clients, and generate more money. With over 22 years of experience, she's launched over 340 businesses.
She's an international speaker, and author of five number-one international bestsellers, with the latest being "Step into the Spotlight to Expand Your Influence." And she's the podcast host of Lead Up for Women. Speak up. To Lead Up."
Colleen is dedicated to supporting, promoting, and fueling purpose-filled, powerful women's voices and giving them the tools to make it happen.
How absolutely incredible. Colleen, what a pleasure it is to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
[Colleen Biggs]
I'm humbled to be here, Susan. Thank you so much for inviting me.
[Susan Friedmann]
Colleen, we started off, you and I, talking before we went on to the recording studio here. We talked about authors and how they put their voice, their energy into their book.
And then the next step is stepping outside the covers of those books, and going into the spotlight to make an impact.
But that's a really scary move for many people to take that step and stand out from the crowd. And I know this is something that you really focus on and helping women do that.
Let's talk about the first steps. What do we need to know to get over that fear of feeling good about getting into the spotlight?
[Colleen Biggs]
I've experienced this myself, Susan, and the very first thing we need to understand is everyone just really cares about what's going on with them when they're making comments about you or judging you or having an approval or disapproval rating of your book or whatever it is. It really has nothing to do with the book itself.
It has everything to do where they have a lack of a certain area in their life and what they think is missing. They mirror that onto you.
So when I was 36 years old, I had finally gotten to the point in my life where I had failed relationships. I wasn't happy with my corporate job.
I had allowed people to label me, and I let the label stick. You know, when we were younger, I don't know if you were taught this, but my parents taught me this, saying, I'm rubber your glue.
Whatever you say, bounces off of me and sticks back on you. And I thought that was kind of a funny statement to say as a child to a bully, but really that's what it was intended for.
Like, if this bully is saying all these horrible things about you and trying to degrade you or belittle you. You're just rubber, right?
So everything they say just kind of bounces and sticks back on them. When we think of that as growing up, it still is true to today that the voices, and the words that people use are how they're feeling kind of short-ended about themselves.
It's their opinion of what they see you doing. So if a friend tells you, or in my case, family members don't leave corporate America, you'll never make it as an entrepreneur, they're telling themselves they don't feel that they would be able to make it as an entrepreneur.
So they don't know your skill sets and if you really are able to do it or not, because they're not inside you. They don't know that.
The first step is to understand that we need to believe in ourselves and who we are in our uniqueness and everything that God has handed us along the way. Many people say God won't ever hand you anything you can't handle.
And I say, Well, God wouldn't give you anything that isn't for a benefit, right? So there's benefits of what we've learned, skill sets, knowledge, and education that make us so dang unique.
And at 36, I decided that's it. I'm going to start believing in myself, and I'm going to start doing things my way.
And I guess I would ask your authors that are listening today or people that are thinking about writing a book. When you write a book, you want to do it your way.
You want to put your words in it. You want to write it the way that your voice is.
So if your voice matters, why do you hide behind this book now as if your voice doesn't matter after you've written the book and the book somehow stands on its own and with its own voice?
[Susan Friedmann]
Oh, I think that's so important. I mean, the idea of, yes, it is your voice. And in fact, funnily enough, I was just talking to an author this morning, and he was saying somebody had written an introductory chapter for him, and he said, It doesn't sound like me. He's like, yeah, I want it to be me. I want my story to come out. I just want to feel that this is me, it's your voice, and you have something to say. And you rightly.
Say, we've got these differences, and these differences make up who we are. And being able to embrace those differences and go out into the marketplace with them. I know that one of your favorite speeches or talks is master you, master your success. I just love that. Mastering yourself, mastering your success. Talk to us more about being able to do that and feeling confident with that. I think this is this idea of this confidence building and getting over that inner voice that criticizes you and judges you and spews out all the obscenities that you don't really want to believe, but you do somehow.
[Colleen Biggs]
I've experienced this myself, Susan, and the very first thing we need to understand is everyone just really cares about what's going on with them when they're making comments about you or judging you or having an approval or disapproval rating of your book or whatever it is. It really has nothing to do with the book itself. It has everything to do where they have a lack of a certain area in their life and what they think is missing. They mirror that onto you. So when I was 36 years old, I had finally gotten to the point in my life where I had failed relationships. I wasn't happy with my corporate job.
I had allowed people to label me, and I let the label stick. You know, when we were younger, I don't know if you were taught this, but my parents taught me this, saying, I'm rubber your glue. Whatever you say, bounces off of me and sticks back on you. And I thought that was kind of a funny statement to say as a child to a bully, but really that's what it was intended for. Like, if this bully is saying all these horrible things about you and trying to degrade you or belittle you. You're just rubber, right?
So everything they say just kind of bounces and sticks back on them. When we think of that as growing up, it still is true to today that the voices, and the words that people use are how they're feeling kind of short-ended about themselves. It's their opinion of what they see you doing. So if a friend tells you, or in my case, family members don't leave corporate America, you'll never make it as an entrepreneur, they're telling themselves they don't feel that they would be able to make it as an entrepreneur. So they don't know your skill sets and if you really are able to do it or not, because they're not inside you. They don't know that.
The first step is to understand that we need to believe in ourselves and who we are in our uniqueness and everything that God has handed us along the way. Many people say God won't ever hand you anything you can't handle. And I say, Well, God wouldn't give you anything that isn't for a benefit, right? So there's benefits of You know, when I set out to be a business consultant, it was business consulting. 22 years ago. It wasn't coaching.
Coaching wasn't really a thing 22 years ago, but everyone likes to call it coaching today. When I was a business consultant 22 years ago, my success came from bringing out the uniqueness, the individuality in the individual CEOs and business owners that I worked with. It was because of what they possessed, like I talked earlier about, it was what they had. I worked on them, mastering them. What is so unique about you? What is so great about you?
What is your experience? What is your knowledge? Bring that to the table and use that in your business. That is what is going to set you apart from the other businesses down the street. These were brick-and-mortar businesses that I was opening those days. And many people focus on their competition.
I don't ever focus on my competition, nor do I even think about them or know who they are. People want to tell me who they are, but I only focus on mastering myself. The more that I master myself and this is that whole put your mask on first thing. The more that I master myself, the more that I'm able to make a greater impact. We have to think about that. The more that we pour into ourselves, the more that that run is over, and then we can pour from the saucer.
So many women, especially Susan, tend to pour from an empty cup. They just pour from this dry, cracked. There's barely enough holding on. Because of all the identities of things we have. And we grip to these identities, and those become who we are. If we do not master who we individually are, who God created us to be, then our success will not follow.
It will not follow. I love the authors out there that have produced several series of books that are extremely popular and have made millions of dollars and movies have been made from them, because we all know who the authors are. If the author didn't step up and do interviews about the book, if they didn't become the driver of the book, those books never would have gotten to the height of the success that they reach. So if it's our voice in the book, then it needs to be our voice driving the cause. So whatever it is, whatever business that you're doing as a business coach, most people think I'm going to focus on their business. I'm just going to let the cat out of the bag because you know how transparent I am, Susan.
They want me to focus on their business nine times out of ten. Pretty much ten times out of ten. I'm just going to say that clearly, every time I start working with a new individual, I have to work on them first. Because it's what they're not doing, what they don't believe, what is holding them back, what their fears are, how they're self-sabotaging themselves, all the things that they've made up to be this reality of what they think they don't possess. Maybe it's because we were raised to think that if we focused on us, we were selfish. And I'm just going to say in my history of my family, from great grandma to grandma to mom to me, if you focused on yourself at all and not everybody else into your fingers bled, you were selfish.
I think there might be a piece of that on the era of when we were raised to believe that. But I also know that, like the airline says, if you don't put your mask on first, then you can't even get past row two. If you're trying to help people off a plane, you've got to take care of your life first. You have to take care of you first. So I stood behind my community when I first launched my women's organization back in 2018. I stood behind it, and everything I did was about my community.
I promoted my community everywhere I went. The only thing I did was promote memberships to my community. I never promoted my consulting or coaching. Well, what do you think happened? No one knew that I was even a business coach at all. They only knew that I ran this community.
So where I drove my energy in the community, my community grew because I hid behind it. And I went to a PR class 1 December. Susan, I remember it was the week after Christmas and before New Year's, and I went to this PR class to learn a little bit more about how to promote yourself. And she looked at me, blank stare in the eye, and she said, you have got to step out in front of your community and start promoting Colleen Bigs. People join your community because of call Lean Bigs.
And you're doing them a disservice by not stepping out in front of this community, promoting yourself, because you will impact more people if you do.
And I was like, wow, she's right.
[Susan Friedmann]
Very much so. Much so. And it's funny because I've had that been said to me too many times. It's like, people don't know that you do consulting. They don't know that you help authors market themselves and their book and make that impact and influence because they don't always tell them. It's like, how would they know? It's not this sort of guessing game because people, as you rightly said in the beginning, are more interested in themselves. You really have to toot your own horn, which sometimes is a little hard for Brits. Sometimes that's really hard because that's not part of the culture. Now, one of the things that you talk about too, and I think this piggybacks onto what you've been saying, but it's not operating from our zone of excellence. But rather from our zone of genius. And if we're not doing that, that we're leaving money on the table. Talk to us about the difference between excellence and your zone of excellence and the zone of genius.
[Colleen Biggs]
Yeah, your zone of excellence is something you can do day in and day out with your eyes closed, and you're probably really good at it. And it's your comfort zone. It really is your comfort zone.
You're like, I'm good at this. I'm efficient. I can do this day in and day out.
Podcasting and interviewing is probably my zone of excellence. It's easy. Doesn't take any effort or thought.
I don't get nervous when we're talking about zone of genius now. We're talking about the areas that you're making the biggest impact. So this is a leap that you have to take, which is the whole reason why I named my programs leap.
I named my community the leap community, because if we truly want change in our life, to reach our peak performance of what we're capable of doing, we must be pushed beyond what we're comforted in. This is why michael jordan hired a coach. This is why tiger woods had coaches.
This is why every elite athlete in tennis, in golf, in basketball, in football, they have coaches because they're naturally gifted in this specific area, and they can stay in that specific area as their zone of excellence forever and retire, and you probably would be really happy. That means you never pushed yourself beyond what was easy to what was possible, and that's where your peak performance and pushing yourself past. I'll use my black belt as an example.
I ran marathons. I did boot camps. I worked out and CrossFit.
I was very healthy and very active and was very strong. When I went to martial arts, it was a whole different type of training. Martial arts is more mental, I would say, than physical, because your mental capacity really has to push your body to what you don't think physically is possible.
Breaking boards, all these other things that we have to do. And it's a long haul to get your black belt, like three years.
That pushed me beyond what I thought physically was possible for my body and physically what I thought was possible for me to do to a whole other realm of performance that if I never would have joined a martial arts dojo, I never would have pushed myself beyond to a zone of genius.
And I always just would have stayed in my zone of excellence, which is like running, lifting weights, doing cardio, those types of things.
Martial arts whole different ballgame when it comes to perseverance, drive and what is possible in growth mentally.
And I think that I'm the business person I am today.
And my success has followed because of the mental capacity that I broke through during the time that I was in martial arts.
To become a black belt that takes guts.
[Susan Friedmann]
That takes courage to first of all, as you said, we can be naturally gifted. The zone of excellence, it's our comfort zone. But then transitioning to that zone of genius where you really have to step out and be comfortable with that because that's when and I know for myself, the voices start, the judgment starts, and it's like, well, is it really safe to go into that zone? The Imposter Syndrome how many times have I heard authors talk about, well, I feel like an imposter? Well you can only feel like an impostor if you are an expert in your area because people who aren't don't feel that. So that transition and that mental, what goes on mentally there? Can you give us some insights there and what might be some little, I don't know, mind games that you have to play with yourself to feel comfortable, to go into that zone of genius and acknowledge that for yourself?
[Colleen Biggs]
Yeah. I don't know if I was born with it, Susan, but I have this drive and perseverance about me. I remember a gentleman telling me when I became an entrepreneur, he said, it's going to take you a couple of months to get used to it, not having the schedule. And when I became an entrepreneur, I immediately scheduled myself and was very active. Right.
There was no downtime. I took everything I learned in corporate America and applied it, time management, everything that I needed to do to be productive, to be working on my goals. I used a lot of the tactics that I learned there. And the reason why I'm sharing that is that we get to choose every day that we wake up that we're either going to live our life by design the way we design it with our gifts that God has given us, or we are going to choose to live life by default. Either way, it's going to happen.
So it's either going to happen to you or for you. Your perspective has a lot to do with it. The things that I teach my clients and what we work on is number one, reading books. And this is we're talking to your authors here. Reading books is one of the number one ways that people learn how to do something or that they're able to be put in a specific state of mind.
I read every single morning at 510. My alarm goes off. I get up, I make a cup of coffee, I go into my office and I read books that lift me up, that teach me something. It might be the twelve-week year. It might be big potential.
It might be. Our book club right now is high five habit with Mel Robbins. I read books that empower me, that give me something to think about, that have areas that I can work on myself, think and grow. Rich was another book. I think I've read it seven times.
I also write Gratitudes writing gratitudes in the morning. Share with us the things that we're grateful for. The next step is I teach a class on your network is your net worth. If you don't think the people you're surrounding yourself with isn't a direct correlation in how much money you make, you're wrong. Your confidence level, your feeling about yourself is directly related to the people that you are hanging around with the most.
And if you are around people that lift you up, that cheer you on, that empower you to be the best version of yourself, that lets your light shine brighter than theirs, then you're hanging around with the wrong people. You have to surround yourself with people that believe in you, that fuel your fire of confidence and not feel like they have to dim your light. Because you guys both can't shine at the same time, right? So those small little things that you can start doing in your life, looking at things you're tolerating getting rid of the things that you're tolerating in your life, getting rid of the things that are out of your control. There are things in our lives we can't control yet we waste so much energy and time on them, but we can't control them.
I do exercises on that. You got to get rid of things that are out of your control and focus on the things that are in your control and then how do you break those down to the goals that you have set for yourself. But the number one thing is you must believe in yourself. And every single person is going to finally get to a point where they're tired of the labels that are sticking on them. They're tired of other people telling them who they are, who they're not, the judgment that's happening.
And they're going to say, enough is enough. I have to find my own voice and I have to speak. When you have this book, this is your baby, this is your life, this is your words, this is your experiences, your knowledge, your stories in this book, just like that gentleman said, he didn't like the way it was written and he won. It written from his voice. Why did he want it written from his voice?
Because he believes his voice matters. Every single one of our voices matter. To the point that if you do not embrace who you are and who you were put on this earth to be, then there are people out there that will never have the impact in their life changed because you decided to play too small and not get out there in front of that book, in front of that movie, in front of whatever it is and be the driver. Because it's you. It came from you.
It was birthed from you. I mean, JK. Rowlings, we all know her, right? She has some amazing books out there. She will tell you she went through imposter syndrome every single book.
Look at the lives that she's changed through the books that she has written. Maybe courage that she's given another child that read a book. Let's think of the lives that were changed from these books. I can tell you hundreds and thousands of lives that have already been changed by the books that I've just brought to my book club in my community, and the women that have said, My gosh, I never looked at it this way, and without this book, I never would have changed this habit in my life. And now it's changed the way that they're raising their children.
Books are changing generations.
You're either going to embrace that you're writing this book because you know that someone out there needs to hear this book, because you can help them, you can empower them to make a change, or you're not.
And if you don't believe in yourself, surround yourself with people that believe in you until you get to the point that you can believe in yourself.
[Susan Friedmann]
Yeah, I mean, that is such an important lesson, just as you rightly said, believing in yourself, believing that what you've written about, which obviously you feel strongly about, otherwise you wouldn't have written about it. And how do you bring that to the people who need what you have to offer? And I think there's that abyss, almost, that people have to get over and feeling that, yes, the book isn't going to sell itself somewhere. We started off with this. It's like standing in front of the book rather than behind the book, because the book is intangible. I mean, it's tangible, but rather, it's not going to sell itself. It's you who are going to sell the message. It's you who are going to sell the value that's encased between those two covers. And that's what's so critical. And I love what you're saying, oh, my goodness, this is inspirational. Listeners, you got to listen to this over and over again because, yes, you're so right in terms of how we are the driver of our messages. We're the driver of everything that is inside of this book. Colleen, if people want to find out more about you, how can they do that?
[Colleen Biggs]
It's very simple. You just go to Colleenbigs Net. That's how you can find all of my information. I'm calling biggs on Facebook and LinkedIn as well. You can find me out there as Colleen Biggs. So I would love to connect with any of your listeners that might want to have a conversation or be able to download some information that I have for them. If you want to be an author, you've got to get visibility and being visible, you get to attract the ideal person to that book, right. The ideal client to your business and what you have going on.
So I also have a free download on seven ways for them to be able to get visible and find their dream clients. Because in all the years of doing this, visibility is the number one thing that is going to drive your success. If you want to be the world's best kept secret, then stay the world's best kept secret. But I'll tell you that it's not going to pay off for you in the end. And if you're writing a book, I'm assuming you're writing it because you want a legacy to leave behind and you're looking to change people's lives.
[Susan Friedmann]
Yes. And that is when I ask people what do they want for the book to do for them? And it is it's to change people's lives. And the book alone can't do this. It's got to be your voice that stands out and allow yourself to be visible, because you're right, being invisible doesn't get you anywhere. That visibility, that gift. I'll make sure that that's in the show notes, Colleen, so people can get a copy, because I know that your words are words of wisdom. You've got so many wonderful things that you can share with our listeners. If you would leave our listeners with a golden nugget, what would that be?
[Colleen Biggs]
I think for today's conversation, what comes to my mind is just a reminder to your listeners that you're the only you that's ever been. You're the only you that will ever be. That's it. It's you. So how you pioneer your future, how you decide to believe in yourself every day, how you decide to surround yourself with people and make the choice that you're going to have life happen for you and design the life and the future that you want, it's up to you. That's it. Nobody's coming to give you permission. You're the only one that can do that. I hope and pray that your listeners will give themselves the permission today to live the life that they really desire to design.
[Susan Friedmann]
Yes. Giving yourself permission to live the life that you want and not wait for others to do it for you, because you may be waiting a very long time for that. So, yes, Colleen, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And, listeners, go listen to this a few more times so that you can really pick up all the gems that Colleen has been kind enough to share with us. And if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together and brainstorm ways in which you can ramp up those sales. You've invested a whole lot of time, money and energy, and it's time you got a return that you were hoping for. So go to brainstormwithsn.com to schedule your free call. In the meantime, I hope that this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. So, until next week, here's wishing you much. Book and author marketing success.
Here's how to find out more about Colleen's services.
Colleen's free gift: "7 ways to increase your visibility to attract your dream clients"
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