Finding Your Priorities and Avoiding Self-Sabotage: After the Show

Crystal Vilkaitis: Hello, and welcome to After the Show. I am Crystal Vilkaitis, your Rooted in Retail host, and I am thrilled to be back because we missed last week, but we are here this week, and I am so excited to talk about this week’s episode. With retailer, Heidi Hardman of Polka Dotz. We had such a great conversation and we’re going to talk about that in a second.

Did you notice the new show intro? The story behind it.

Crystal Vilkaitis: But if you had the chance to listen to this week’s episode, did you notice a new song? There was a new song playing in the intro and outro, which I hand-selected. We were redoing our intro. I wanted to make it a little bit shorter and the original song we had was selected by my old podcast team. It was a fine song.

It was like, just get the podcast up, get it going. I didn’t have that much time to spend on selecting the song and all the things. So they picked a song. We got up and running done is better than perfect, like I always say.

As we were filming a new intro, I was like, I just want this to feel a little bit more connected to who I am and what I think about this show. And so for me, my grandpa played the harmonica growing up and I’ve always wanted to play the harmonica. This is a bucket list for me.

I actually have a few of his old harmonicas and one day I will play and maybe I’ll play on the EVOLVE stage. Wouldn’t that be so fun? Actually, I have this dream of playing the harmonica during a seminar. That becomes part of my keynote. So this song starts out with harmonica and it’s got really great harmonica and it’s a little more grassroots.

It’s a little more country. It’s a little like Toe tapping, like knee slapping kind of music, which is so me and I love live music. I love that kind of music. I grew up in Colorado. And I also, when I think of like retail in our main street and hometown, like I think of that a good old, like live band concert, with the strip light and everybody’s together in the community dancing and having fun.

And that song represented that sort of for me. Also the name of the song, which I don’t have in front of me. I forgot to grab it, but it has the word rooted in it. So I’m like, okay, I love this song. It has the word. So there’s a little hidden, am I like Taylor Swift now with these hidden messages and Easter eggs?

I don’t know. If you are here live with me, go ahead and say hello. And if you’re not, and you’re watching the replay, then go out and chat in. I am watching the replay. We do this every Tuesday night at 5 p. m. Mountain. However, we are changing the time for next week, and next week it’s actually going to be 7 p.m. Mountain. It’ll be 6 p.m. Pacific, and we’re going to be live streaming with Steph and Pauline who are on my team live from Palm Springs. So that’ll be fun. I hope you can tune in with us. It’ll be a little later than regular scheduled programming due to an event that we’re doing, but we’re still going to do after the show. So we can’t wait to see you there.

Now, the final thing that I want to share before we dive into dissecting this episode, again, these after the shows are not recaps. It’s just going deeper on certain things and giving you additional context and resources for what was covered in the episode.

Did you know you can read the transcripts for the shows on each show’s webpage?

Crystal Vilkaitis: And so I want to just point out that as I was prepping for this episode, my guest, Heidi mentioned the POS that she uses. And I know that for retailers, POS is such a big. Pain point. Everybody seems to be on a different one. It’s such a hassle. It never does everything that you want. She really likes hers. And so I was like, shoot, what was the name of her POS? So I went to the website, which Dustin on the team and my fiance who bought me these lovely roses.

If you’re watching this live, I’ve got roses in the back for Valentine’s day. He just put the link in for that episode. And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the episode pages, there is an area that says transcription. Click on the transcription and boom, my team, my podcast team, Sarah and her team do such a good job with the transcription.

It is the whole episode. You could read it. So if you like reading versus watching or listening, that option is available for you. And I want you to know about that option. It’s at the very bottom of the show notes page for each episode, but also if there was something that you need to reference back to, like I did for the POS, I’m not kidding.

It took me under a minute to find that. It was so quick. I found it. The transcriptions are titled like the questions and who’s saying what it’s done so well. So props to the team. They do such a great job with that. And I just want you to know that resource is available if you ever need it for you.

If you ever need it for you, if you ever need it to find information, I am getting worked up over here. So we’re just going to take this sweater off and dive right in to this episode where Heidi and I talked about so much, but. Some of those key points, one area I want to go a little bit deeper on today with after the show is priorities.

Are you setting your priorities? What is holding you back from accomplishing your priorities?

Crystal Vilkaitis: And it’s so funny because I listened to the show back the day of after the show every Tuesday and I listened to it in the morning when I do my workout and I’m getting ready. And this morning when I was journaling. I had a whole journal session about priorities and what I am making a priority and what I’m not making a priority.

And, I’ve been like, so in and out of my own social media, like my personal brand. And I really want to build that. And I want to build being a thought leader. And I want to connect with our retailers more and connect with our partners. And that means I need to show up more. And so I was journaling about like, why am I resisting it?

Do I have fear what’s holding me back? All these things that I teach from stage to our retailers about social media marketing and not putting ourself out there. And Heidi and I had a really good conversation about it. And I came to the conclusion of, I’m just not making it a priority. It’s not that I don’t have time because I absolutely can find a minute or less in my day every day to post and connect.

So can you, Heidi finds it. You can find it. We can all find it. It’s just, it’s not a priority. And Heidi said on the show, I was overwhelmed, but then I went to EVOLVE, which I love that. She said that because she got just so much out of EVOLVE. A lot of our attendees did. There’s so much great contents relevant to your business and the key here is that what happened for Heidi is she went to EVOLVE into two of her employees with her. Somebody who helps her with her social media and her marketing person, Roberta, who you hear about in the show, Molly and Roberta. And if you’re ever wondering like, how do I work with my marketing person or how do we communicate or what metrics should we track?

Listen to Heidi’s episode. If you haven’t already, cause she covers it all in that episode, but Heidi invested in herself, her team, they show up to EVOLVE and they made it a priority. Like they went all in on the conference. They were taking extensive notes. They were connecting with each other. They go back to their store.

They have regular weekly meetings talking about what they learned at EVOLVE, going back to those notes, using their social media planner. Getting really clear and making it a priority. So she was overwhelmed, but then she went to EVOLVE. And initially what that means is that she made her marketing a priority.

And when we make things a priority, it feels less overwhelming. And here’s the deal. We can’t have everything be a priority, but to be very strategic with our time and how we’re putting our energy and what we’re putting our efforts into. And so I really encourage you to take a look at, if you haven’t done this in a while, looking at your own marketing and what’s working.

Where are you seeing the results like Heidi in this episode talks about how people are coming into the store saying, we see you on your lives. They know Roberta. They see her walking down the street. They know her from the social media. Like they’re build from the social media. They’re building their reputation because they’re getting out there.

They’re showing up. They’re connecting. That’s a brand awareness. That’s top of the funnel. We’ve got to connect. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can be connected. Connecting social is one of those ways. So how are you connecting? Where are you seeing it work? What are you hearing from your audience?

It’s working. It’s bringing them in. That’s getting them to buy. Do more of that. That should be a priority. You might’ve done a Facebook live a few months ago and you sold from that, but then you haven’t done one since. And then everything feels so overwhelming because we haven’t identified what our priorities are and those priorities really need to be aligned with your goals and what is working.

Especially when you’re looking at your marketing. Sometimes we’re building new initiatives or we’re trying out new things. So you don’t know yet what’s working. That’s why we got to track it. We got to pay attention to see what, how our audience is responding, what kind of interests we’re seeing from them.

So we’ve got to make it a priority. And I really just encourage you. Like I had to have real talk with myself today. Like I really had to be like, you’re not making a priority. Like we need to just Be honest with ourselves here, because we want to make excuses. We want to be like, Oh, but I’m so busy. Oh, but I’m doing all these other things.

Oh, call a spade a spade. Is that the saying? You don’t just say it like it is. Be honest with yourself. If you’re feeling that overwhelm or that resistance or any kind of fear, where is that coming from? And is it because it’s not a priority and I really encourage you to dig a little deeper that can maybe unlock a few things for you there.

What is the Daily Five?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Okay. Now the next thing is Heidi mentioned a tool on this episode. That’s where your daily five, I think she says your five tips are your five things to do each day. It have really helped us. And I forgot to mention that on the episode. So this is where after the show is so great because I can mention it now.

So on what Heidi is referencing is I’ve got a training very short about the daily five. And I often talk about this from stage. So I talked about it at EVOLVE where you can post to your social media and engage with your fans in five minutes or less every single day, the daily five. And so you can get this.

It’s crystalmediaco.com/daily5. And it’s the number five. We’ll also post this into the Facebook group in the comments where you’ll see all sorts of links to anything I’m referencing as we talk. So if you’re driving, if you’re listening to the replay, you can always go into the rooted Facebook group.

Search for this after the show episode and see all those links that are right there. It’s really easy for you. Plus, it’s probably over on the show notes page too on rootedinretail. com. But the daily five is a great tool for you. And it’s free. You could just go, it’s a quick video. It’s under 10 minutes.

You don’t have to give an email or anything. It’s just a video available for you to help you get your social media done in five minutes or less. Retailers love it. So go check that out.

Let’s talk about putting ourselves out there and not sabotaging our efforts. Ask yourselves, what’s the worst that can happen and can I handle it?

Crystal Vilkaitis: We also talk about putting yourself out there. And Heidi has such great words of encouragement to help people who maybe are feeling resistance with putting themselves out there and and if that’s you and you’re having that fear, like I’m actually going through something right now that I have a lot of fear around.

I’m up leveling. I’m pushing myself further. I’m venturing into new spaces. I’m making Different decisions and hard decisions. And there’s some unknowns and I’m taking some risks. All of this I’ll share with you when it’s ready. Cause it’s business related and I’m very excited about it. But it creates fear.

There’s fear. There’s head trash that comes up for me. Who am I? Who do you think you are? How could you do that? I’m human. We all go through this and the brain tries to keep us safe. And I mentioned this book a lot. The big leap is a great book. It talks about how we self sabotage, how we will keep ourselves at a certain level where we feel comfortable in our careers or in our relationships or, if the relationships getting too good.

We’ll go in and self sabotage it because, Oh, I’m not worthy of that. Or I’m not, that’s not my comfort level of this, all this goodness. It’s amazing how weird us humans are. And so with success, what has been proven is that as we grow and we get more successful, we can self sabotage to bring ourselves back down to that other, the lower level of success where it still might be successful, but it’s not where we could be to keep ourselves safe.

And that book, the big leap talks about that and and how to, I think awareness of it in the first place is so powerful because for me, I start asking those questions like, Oh, you’re trying to mess this up or your brain’s trying to talk you out of this. Why am I trying to keep myself safe? What am I sabotaging something?

And sometimes you just have to, it’s just not the right thing for you, right? But asking those questions, am I self sabotaging? Am I not feeling safe? But this is the path. What, where’s this fear coming from? I think that it’s really important for us to understand those things, ask those questions, and then like my grandma says, do it afraid.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to grow and EVOLVE as a human, as a business owner, and I want to do more with my business and be more and show up more and just grow. Like you, there’s a saying, I think there’s a quote out there like grow or die. Right. And EVOLVE or die.

And I don’t have any interested that, you know, I would like to do a lot more here. And so we have to push through that fear. And one thing that helps me a lot, and I journaled on this a few times over the past couple of days asking the question, what’s the worst that can happen. So if you’re thinking about doing a weekly live stream, like I was in New York City last week speaking at NY now had an awesome audience.

If you were in the audience, oh my gosh, you guys were engaged. I just, it was packed. People were sitting on the floor. People were standing. It was packed. It was awesome. And and I asked everybody, how many of you do live streams for your store? One person. Raise their hand, just one. So I was like, okay, we’ve got a lot of opportunity in this audience.

So let’s say that you’re the same. You haven’t been doing live stream and so you’re going to commit to it. So you’re going to do a weekly live stream like I do here with after the show, you’re going to do it once a week. Same time, same place. And you’re going to put yourself out there and maybe you give it a name and you’re going to highlight like your 10 favorite products, or you’re just going to be like the trend setter and talk about the trends and what’s hot and what’s popular.

And you’re going to show some of those items and you’re going to connect with your audience and you feel terrified because you don’t want to be on camera because majority of people don’t. So if you feel that way, you’re not alone. And, but you do not want to do it. You don’t want to show up. You’re resisting it.

You have so much fear. I want you to ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen because the worst that can happen. I have a feeling. You’re going to be able to handle it. What’s the worst you go, you tell all these people and hundreds of people are lined up to watch your life. That’s probably not going to happen first of all, but let’s say you have such an engaged audience and you send an email and you say, I’m going live.

We’re going to do this thing. Join me. And hundreds of people are waiting on Facebook to show up with you and do the live and your account. You can’t figure it out. The tech’s not working. Okay. If that happens, then you’re doing an apology. And you’re going to figure out the tech or have somebody help you and you’re going to do it again.

And majority of your people are going to forgive you and be like, that’s okay. That’s fine. We get it. You’re human. Majority of the people and the people who don’t, who are mad about that, let them they’re not a part. They’re not going to be fun on this live anyways. We don’t want them on the live.

They’re probably gonna be a bully on the live. Another thing that could happen. You could have a bully. So then here’s the deal. We’re going to ignore their comments. We’re going to be talking to the other people who are amazing on the call and they may be defending you with the bully. There’s chances that this is not going to happen, but we’re just talking about what’s the worst that can happen.

Can you handle the fact that maybe you can’t figure out the live button and people are waiting? I think you can. Can you handle the fact that maybe there is a bully and later you can delete those comments or ban that person? I rarely see those things happen. By the way, it’s often your customers who are like, Oh, it’s so good to see you.

They’re loving it. They’re buying things like put that on hold. They’re coming into your store and they’re like, I love that live. Or you were so good on video or girl, you did great. You said you were nervous, but you were great. Like typically that’s what you’re going to see, but go there. What’s the worst that can happen?

Because what you’ll often find, as you probably know, is you can handle the worst thing that can happen. And so then you’re going to do it. You’re going to make it a priority. We’re not going to feel overwhelmed by it. We’re saying, no, this is what I’m doing. I’m committing. I’m committing to myself and we should take our commitments very seriously, especially the ones we make to ourselves.

So you’re going to show up, you’re going to do it, you’re going to commit, you’re going to make it a priority. You’re going to do it afraid. And then you know what? That show might take off and you might try to self sabotage it. And so ask that question, am I sabotaging this? Because we sabotage and we’ll stop doing the show.

Oh, it’s working so well. I’m making money from this. Oh, but I have so many other things to do. I’m going to skip this week. Or uh, I don’t know if I’m really liking this. I don’t, I’m just going to stop doing this. I’m going to do something else. We forget about, we do so many different things, right?

So ask those questions. They’ve been really valuable for me. I know they’ve been valuable for retailers that I’ve talked to in person and clients that we work with.

What POS are you using in your store?

Crystal Vilkaitis: And then I am out of pure curiosity. I am wondering if you, what POS you use. And so if you can go over into our Facebook group. For the Rooted in Retail Facebook group, and you could either just share your own post, or you could share it in a comment on this post and tell me, or maybe you’re watching this video in the group, what POS system do you use?

Purely out of curiosity, the one that Heidi mentioned, she uses Artisan POS by Certek. And I’ve never heard of that one. And I know there’s a million out there and I’m not necessarily saying to switch or any of the things I know a lot of people are on Shopify, which seems to be really great. I’m just purely curious to know like of our listeners, what’s everybody using? And then if you want to share your feedback, that’d be really great too.

And then that is the, my roundup here for the episode was so good. I love this conversation with Heidi. I love all the things her and her team are implementing. It’s really inspiring. And it’s always so nice to hear from a fellow retailer.

Don’t miss the Resilience Round at the end of each episode – there is gold in there!

Crystal Vilkaitis: So be sure to make time for that episode if you haven’t listened to it yet. Also at the very end of our episodes, we have what’s called the resilience round. Do you listen? If you’re watching this live, tell me, yes. Like I love the resilience rounder. Yes. I listen. That’s part of that part of the show for me is my favorite part.

There is gold. At the end of the show on what people are saying, and it’s rapid fire. It’s quick Q and a. So you get those answers quick. And it’s really fun to hear all the guests answers because you start seeing some similarities and you start connecting some things together. And then you also get brand new, fresh resources. It’s amazing. So yes, Pauline the resilience round at the end, be sure you wait for those listen through and listen to those parts of the episode. Cause there’s just so much gold. We’re actually thinking about taking some of those and repurposing them as their own episodes. Cause there that’s how much value is in the end of those.

Next week we are talking. The guest is yours. Truly. Let’s go. Mimi. We’re going to do a solo episode and we’re going to talk about marketing and social media in 2024. What you need to know, where you need to focus. It’s a very important episode.

You’re going to probably want to take some notes. So maybe it’s a, you listen to it a couple of times or you get the opportunity to sit down and listen to it or watch it on YouTube and take your notes. And then of course we’ll do the, after the show.

Last thing I want to say is join our Facebook group. I am in there every day. I am commenting on people’s introduction posts. I’m commenting on people’s weekly wins. I’m commenting when people are sharing their stores, challenges, things they’re loving. I really want to create this amazing community of retailers where we have this engagement and support and connection. And and this is the place where it’s at. And if we can have more conversations around the topics and the guests, and I want to hear from you what do you need to learn? What’s a challenge in your store right now?

I’ll go find the guests. I’ll go give you solutions. Like I got you. So participate in that group and it’s all free. You could go to facebook. com search for Rooted in Retail and join our group and then be sure to introduce yourself.

All right. Thank you so much for being here and listening and being a part of our rooted and retail family. The name for the listeners is yet to be determined, but hopefully we’ll have a name here shortly. And I’m looking forward to seeing you next week live with my team in Palm Springs. Remember that I am rooting for your success. Have a great week ahead. Bye.